What are universities for?

Three years ago, as concern about the budget cuts and end to the tuition freeze ramped up, Premier Andrew Furey quipped that Memorial University needs to “figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.” MUNL, he said, must decide “whether it wants to be a university for everybody every day or if it wants … to take a different route.”

Furey’s implication seemed to be that comprehensiveness and inclusion would take a back seat in this journey down a new path, that “growing up” must mean becoming more business-like—more focused on revenue streams and market performance, and, as appointments to the Board of Regents revealed, governed by logics and values of the corporate world rather than the world of public institutions. Perhaps our former premier was asking whether Memorial should be a research-based or teaching-based institution—but that is a false dichotomy.

In response to Memorial’s funding crisis, our university is shifting to a performance-based funding model, which links funding to desired outputs, usually things like program enrollments, graduation rates, research income, and postdegree earnings. Programs deemed ‘inefficient,’ ‘undersubscribed,’ or ‘irrelevant’ to the labour market and economic imperatives often struggle in such a model—even though liberal arts graduates regularly find work in media, senior levels of government, education, and the not-for-profit sector.

At first glance, performance-based budgeting makes sense. Why would anyone argue against financial accountability, measurable results, and preparing students for their careers? But at its heart, performance-based funding is not only a budgetary tool—it’s a statement of belief about what public institutions should be and how they should operate.  

The impacts of neoliberalism

In his 1944 book The Great Transformation, Karl Polyani detailed how the industrial revolution transformed society from one with markets to a ‘market society.’ The economic anthropologist warned the result would be profound social disruption, ecological degradation, and a growing tension between democratic life and market logic—a tension that remains unresolved.

About 40 years ago, with the rise of neoliberalism, universities across North America increasingly became subject to the demands of economic and market rationalities. This decades-long attack on the traditional mission of higher education is now nearing completion, and it is difficult to see how the tide might be turned.

The modern European version of advanced learning was the teaching and research university, born in Germany and greatly influenced by Alexander von Humboldt’s ideas. He envisioned the university as a space for scholars and students to pursue truth and cultivate autonomy, free from intrusion by the church and state. Humboldt’s notion of Bildung—education as self-formation for the sake of society—was a quietly radical civic ideal. He imagined education as a thread laid out, along which a person would learn to ‘inquire and create.’ And, like the fifth estate, the university was to be a site that provided a check on power; education was deemed central not to the economy but to the emerging social democracy and the ideal of personal growth. 

The location of that power has now shifted away from the church and state to the transnational corporation; the university, along with other public institutions and organs of civic society—national media, hospitals, unions, the arts—finds itself hollowed out, repurposed, or co-opted to serve market logics rather than intellectual, aesthetic, and democratic ends. At MUNL, we’ve recently eroded connections to the community with the impending closures of the Harris Centre and Office of Public Engagement. 

We need places in our society that resist the logic of cost, efficiency, and returns. Real life is not a spreadsheet. Community, friendship, art, and civics do not make sense in a ledger. Public institutions—libraries, courts, and schools—exist to sustain non-market values: justice, beauty, curiosity, and truth. The university belongs to this tradition. A strong publicly-funded university, as plenty of research has shown, is also a contributor to the economy: education is good economics. 

Performance-based budget models do not merely measure, calculate, and channel money, they reshape the meaning and purpose of the university—they discipline institutions to avoid risk, favour students likely to graduate, game metrics, shrink or do away with subjects unlikely to promise immediate returns, and align teaching and research with labour and market imperatives.

Conflicting ideologies

This shift is ideological rather than empirical. Despite mounting evidence that performance models do not enhance equity or learning outcomes, they continue to spread. Despite evidence that humanities and social science graduates are as employable as those graduating from professional faculties, STEM fields are privileged. Why? Because market logics reflect and reinforce ways of thinking in which value is measured in dollar signs and metrics, not in citizens shaped for autonomy and public life.

We cannot turn back time. Policies and ideologies have already redefined higher education. The ship has sailed. But it can be called back to port. The work to retain a public, comprehensive teaching and research university is vital to the province and the ship’s course can be corrected. 

We must first call this out, naming what is happening and what has already been lost. We must insist that education remains a public good and not a private service. Moreover, we must live and model the values we claim to defend: curiosity, civics, shared inquiry, reason, and moral imagination. These are not buzzwords. They are the lifelines of democratic citizenship.

Democracy needs universities, not credential factories or degree mills. It needs places where disagreement is taught, not denied; where complexity is invited, not simplified or avoided; and where reasoning is cultivated, not squeezed; where one is broadly and comprehensively educated. If we lose that, we do not just lose a university. We lose part of what it means to live in a democratic society. This loss is irreparable. 

The strategic planning documents produced at Memorial in recent years are filled with market language: “expanding revenue,” “strengthening ties to industry and employers,” investing in “innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem,” “engaging new markets” through “online learning innovation,” and so on. Such language undergirds the marketization and privatization of universities. I find such language alienating; I do not recognize it as central to my teaching and research, and neither do many of my colleagues. 

I commend one of our strategic plans for acknowledging that “we are entrenched in systems that dominate and continue to uphold colonial values, policies, and practices.” But privatization, whether through colonial, neocolonial, or neoliberal policies, is part of that system. Cultivating democratic habits and institutions, improving social, civil, and criminal justice, and understanding and combating racism are not improved but rather degraded through privatization. The ‘different route’ the current government has set Memorial on will not improve but worsen efforts to problem-solve.

Martha Nussbaum, one of America’s leading philosophers, argues that education for profit and the market and education for democracy are largely incompatible visions of what a university should be. In her 2011 book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Nussbaum writes that our “systems of education are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive,” and that “[i]f this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance.” 

I search in vain in Memorial University’s guiding vision statements these past years for any mention whatsoever of ‘democracy,’ to say nothing of ‘love of learning,’ the ‘moral imagination,’ ‘critique,’ ‘beauty,’ or ‘the pursuit of truth.’ What one finds is over-saturated jargon in keeping with the language of market rationality.

Time for tenured faculty to stand up

It is easy to see university professors as privileged—in many ways, we are. Tenured faculty (unlike our exploited contractual colleagues) are among those who are well paid to do what we love. This privilege, I believe, has made us hesitant to speak out, even as the foundations of higher education are quietly and quickly being dismantled. Moreover, many of us—not all—tend not to be politically minded, but bookworms and nerds deeply engaged with what often seems narrow and even arcane concerns. 

Politics is messy. I’d rather not be attempting to sound a clarion call about the state of our university — but it’s time to wake up. Across North America, the U.K. and parts of Asia, public universities are being reshaped to serve market goals: performance-based funding, corporate partnerships, and a narrow focus on job training are the ingredients in the soup du jour. Simultaneously, we are witnessing a rise in political extremism, polarization, disinformation, inequality, and authoritarian rhetoric. 

These trends are not distinct. The Trump administration and other authoritarian regimes have shown how funding can be used to punish universities that support diversity, equity, and inclusion, or that question dominant narratives about race, gender, history, or the economy. What is being demanded is not education, but obedience—to nativism and nationalism, to corporate desires, to war profits. 

If universities do not stand up for truth, critical thinking, reason, and the public good, they risk becoming quiet tools of a loud and dangerous agenda.

State of the University is a multi-author series examining Memorial University’s ‘special obligation’ to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. To pitch an article for the series, contact an editor here.