<i>Higher Education and the Market</i> ed. by Roger Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Higher Education and the Market ed. by Roger Brown Simon Marginson Higher Education and the Market. Roger Brown (Ed.). 2011. New York: Routledge. 235 pp. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-99168-1 ($135.00). Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-99169-8 ($44.95). In summer 2002, a posse of distinguished American social scientists gathered in Tampa, Florida, to discuss “the market” in higher education. The meeting, funded by the Ford Foundation and held at a five-and-a-half-star resort painted in pink that made it look like a pre-Pixar Disney idea of a medieval Austrian castle, was convened by Berkeley political scientist David Kirp. Kirp was preparing Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, an engaging book that was published by Harvard University Press the following year. It was an energetic discussion among people mostly convinced that the university market was one of the next big things in social research. Whether the focus would be on the market as a new business frontier or the market as a threat to the university we know and love was unclear. What was clear was that the scholars at Tampa were trying to feel their way into the issue, sussing out its nuances and traps. They were positioning themselves adroitly somewhere in the middle of the coming new conversation—hunting for a way to say, more cleverly than anyone else, exactly what everyone else was going to think. Unconscious of the irony (for most saw themselves as active critics of markets), these scholars imagined the discussion about the higher education market as itself another competitive market in which each scholar was pitching for market share and, above all, prestige. In other words, it was standard academic behavior, installed by the long career lesson in the way competition works in higher education and drummed in by the technologies of selection for academic positions, journals, and grants. The way to play the market is to imitate everyone else but do it better. It was a sign of how the market as a “social imaginary” (to borrow Charles Taylor’s term) is deeply entrenched in American higher education, among critical social scientists along with the rest. The idea of American higher education as a market is dominant despite the fact that the sector has little in common with a textbook economic market. For example, it includes extensive public research funding and elite institutions that maintain long-term market dominance and are forever protected from challenges from below, and many of its decision makers seem to be more motivated by factors like politics and cultural prestige than by supply and demand signals. When Kirp’s book was published, it was apparent that like most others he could see no alternative to the social imaginary of higher education as a market, despite his own belief that this had placed the life of the mind in jeopardy. The discussion is different in Europe, where the nation-state is an overt presence in higher education and the neo-liberal agenda is often contested. Roger Brown’s chapters in Higher Education and the Market are animated by the belief that market reform can be reformed, “rebalanced” to head off the pathologies of competition while utilizing its strengths. As the back of the book says: [End Page 297] Contributors propose how market forces, government intervention and academic self-regulation can be combined to harness the benefits of increased competition and efficiency without losing the public good. Wouldn’t that be grand—if we could have our public good cake and let the market eat it too? But rather than reading intellectual fashions, Brown is focused on policy. He writes from the UK higher education system in which, at the beginning of 2012, the cost of tuition tripled, public subsidies in the humanities and social sciences were stopped, and the state created two quasi-market competitions at the top and bottom of the higher education hierarchy: a competition for prestige and a competition for student numbers. His edited book sets out to reassert rational economics and social values inside mainstream government. The argument goes like this: The advocates of markets say competition provides incentives...