Viewpoint

'Privatization plagues univ. autonomy'

This is the first part of a two-part viewpoint which first appeared in the November 2004 CAUT Bulletin. The second part will appear in the Jan. 21, 2005 On Campus News.

By Howard Woodhouse

Prof. Howard Woodhouse

This article tells a story – one based on 30 years’ experience teaching and conducting research at various Canadian universities, as well as one in Nigeria, and another 10 years as a student in England, Canada and France. My experience has been strengthened by the study of philosophy and its relationship to culture, education, science and international relations.

Given this experiential and theoretical base, the question I want to ask is why do I feel so uncomfortable when reading policy documents like the World Bank’s Financing and Management of Higher Education (1998), or the federal government and Conference Board of Canada’s Innovation and Learning (2003)? Do such reports reflect the needs of human beings engaged in the search for knowledge both for its own sake and for the ways in which it can support the public good?

These and other reports represent the dominant narrative of the day, one which is proclaimed and adopted as though it were true a priori. However, I wish to propose a counter-narrative, one which provides an alternative picture of what universities are, and might still become, were they to embody ideals, or values, consistent with the pursuit of knowledge as a public rather than a private good.

This counter-narrative may be utopian in the sense it imagines universities qualitatively different from how they look today, but it is at least consistent with their history. Since their inception in the Middle Ages, universities in the West have had to withstand strong external forces in order to maintain relative autonomy – first from the church, and then the state -– in order to secure their distinctive function of pursuing knowledge.

What is novel about the situation today is that governments and private corporations are united in their belief that the goal of university education and research is to increase corporate profit margins. There is a kind of pincer movement at work in which these two powerful external sources of funding have combined in order to change universities into instruments to enhance private wealth. And universities have done little to resist this move.

Advocates of the dominant narrative deny that institutional autonomy is threatened today any more than in the past. Bruce Waygood, coordinator for health research at the University of Saskatchewan, was recently quoted as saying, “When a researcher develops, for example, a treatment for cancer or improves the efficiency of a small business, there is both a public and private benefit.” What exactly is the public benefit? Could it also be a public detriment?

Consider the fact the public pay twice for expensive drug therapies. First, multinational pharmaceutical corporations in Canada regularly use publicly-funded university laboratories to develop their products, such as the Canadian Light Source synchrotron which officially opened in October. The largest scientific installation in Canada in a generation is owned by the University of Saskatchewan and paid for by the public purse for mostly private corporate benefit. That is why two drug company beneficiaries have made a total contribution of $1 million – Boehringer Ingelheim in partially funding a beamline and GlaxoSmithKlein, a research chair. Research in protein crystallography will benefit these and other multinationals in the design of new “blockbuster drugs,” giving an added boost to stockholder value. In 2002, pharmaceutical companies had worldwide sales in excess of $638 billion US, making them the second largest industry after armaments.

Canadians, meanwhile, pay higher and higher prices for the very drugs that are making more profits for big pharma, and which will be developed in the synchrotron at a cost of more than $100 million over the next few years. The Canadian Institute for Health Information estimates that per capita costs for prescription drugs across Canada have grown by 15.4 per cent – from $537 in 2001 to $620 in 2003. Bear in mind who is footing the bill for research and development facilities via higher education dollars. These labs now constitute the highest costs in health care and are increasing at a rate far above the rate of inflation. In British Columbia, pharmacare costs have jumped by 147 per cent in the past decade, and are projected to grow by almost 500 per cent over the next 20 years.

To assert, then, there is “both a public and private benefit” to university research conducted for pharmaceutical companies fudges the evidence of exploitation and leverage of public facilities for increasing private profits of pharmaceutical multinationals.

As David Noble wrote in his 2002 book, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, what is needed is the kind of “sober, serious, and sustained scrutiny and evaluation,” enabling the “wise use” of science and technology in the public interest.

- Part 2 in the Jan. 21 OCN -

Howard Woodhouse is a professor in the department of educational foundations at the University of Saskatchewan and co-director of the university's process philosophy research unit.