Liberty on a leash

“The moment universities stop even pretending to respect and obey central government is the moment a huge weight will be lifted off them. Everyone will feel better for dropping the pretence.”

This suggestion, offered on Twitter, probably isn’t an advisable strategy for university leaders, but some will no doubt have sympathy with the sentiment.

The relationship between government and universities has never been straightforward.

In most cases, universities are neither wholly public nor private, but operate somewhere between the two.

Autonomous in principle, but beholden to the state for funding, it is inevitable that this independence – of inquiry as well as of governance – can lead to tension.

But in some contexts it can also lead to a much more serious breakdown in the relationship, and even a deliberate running down of universities.

I recall a lecture by former South African president Thabo Mbeki at a Times Higher Education event some years ago, at which he warned of the “perception among the African ruling elite that universities are serving as centres of political opposition”.

The result, he said, was that “many African countries’ governments came to consider expenditure on universities and therefore higher education as a burdensome cost rather than an absolutely necessary and beneficial investment”.

Has something similar happened in more developed university systems in recent years?

A case can be made, and the news stories we cover this week in THE demonstrate that the pressures between politics and higher education are far from limited to one region or one type of system.

Most often, the conflict is in the form of who and what should be educated and researched, and in particular the extent to which those choices are made with explicit economic returns in mind.

In Denmark, for example, academics have been left “shocked and rattled” by a government diktat forcing universities to cut enrolments as part of a push to level up the country’s economy.

At one institution, Aalborg University, this has led to the planned closure of 18 courses to allow the institution to hit its target – a forced cut that “no matter how it is solved, significantly affects our university”, according to Aalborg’s rector.

In Australia, a monumental row continues over the latest ministerial intervention in research priorities, in which a number of research grants were cancelled on the basis that they “do not demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money nor contribute to the national interest”.

While academia has become used to government signposting certain priorities when funding calls are made, such post hoc interference has been seen as an invidious additional incursion into academic freedom.

Indeed, John Shine, president of the Australian Academy of Science, warned that such political control of “what gets done, where and by whom is antithetical to the spirit of a democracy that is built on free and open critical enquiry”.

Meanwhile, in very different circumstances, we report on the uncertainty that now stalks university hallways in Hong Kong, where higher education institutions and academics continue to come to terms with their new operating environment following the implementation of the National Security Law.

One scholar, who has left Hong Kong to work in the US, tells us that fear of “sedition” meant that discussing controversial issues now “requires effort and risk – a minority taste”.

In light of such challenges, the ongoing disquiet that exists in systems such as England’s – concern over the independence of the regulator, for example – may seem tame by comparison.

But the underlying question is the same: are universities free, autonomous, and in control of who and what to teach and research – or are they not?

Perhaps the only institutions that could answer yes to all of these questions are the very small handful of elite institutions with billions of pounds (or, more often, dollars) in endowment funds.

But then again, private donations come with strings of their own, and there isn’t a university that could cut the ties to public research funding altogether and maintain its status.

For most of the world, this link between universities and government as two actors with enormous power to influence the societies they serve is, taken in the round, a good and necessary symbiosis.

But for it to be a productive relationship, trust, transparency and respect are needed on both sides – and in too many countries, those qualities seem to be on the slide.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com