International Higher Education, Summer 2003

African Universities, International Donors, and the Public Good

For African universities, more than is the case elsewhere, depend for their survival on the scope and focus of external support. Current documents on university reform, and there are many, inevitably urge greater support from international donors. The heavy reliance on donor funds has been true since independence. As donors shifted from one model of university support to another, universities adapted accordingly. In the immediate postindependence period, the high-prestige national elite university was the accepted model. The university was to do nation-building by looking and feeling like the universities of the colonial powers. This period was followed by the development university phase with its emphasis on economic growth. When disillusionment with that model set in, it gave way to what can best be described as damage control, especially as rate-of-return considerations dislodged the university from its privileged place in donor priorities.

In nations facing too many demands with too few resources, where the public sector is weak and market mechanisms are immature, international donors have sought to save higher education by working to correct its internal inefficiencies, immunize against brain drain, compensate for the research weaknesses by creating research networks, help institutions catch up with the technological revolution, and shield teaching and research from the excesses of political interference. At present most of these efforts fall under the broad perspective that African universities needed reforming.

But reform to what end? In pursuit of what purpose? According to what model of university education? International conferences, task force reports, and white papers have struggled to describe the role of the African university, asking how much commercialization is tolerable, where globalization is taking us, if the brick university will be replaced by the click university, and on and on.

There is, or should be, one constant in this search for a mission. Universities--though not tertiary education more generally--will continue to anchor the public good historically represented in and through advanced education. Many pressures, familiar to readers, have thinned out this public-good responsibility in Africa. A major contributor is the expansion of tertiary institutions constructed as sites for personal advancement and private benefit. While not new and not unwelcome, to present private reward as the primary purpose of postsecondary education leads to the neglect of a very long tradition of public support because universities advance the public good.

Some of the new arguments about the role of universities might, however, provide the opportunity to strengthen public-good rationales. Successfully competing in the international global economy is replacing older "nation-building" tasks as the criteria against which the contribution of the university is measured. We are familiar with the indicators: market-sensitive curricular reform, rewards to entrepreneurialship, fee-based financing, subcontracting educational services to the private sector, management of universities according to standards of the private sector, blurring the boundaries between the university and the for-profit sector through new partnerships, etc.

The notion that universities should position the national economy in a globally competitive market place offers an interesting but truncated view of the public good. It is not happenstance that documents about university reform now frequently include the public goods traditionally associated with universities, a sign that these purposes are, in fact, no longer taken for granted but need to be reasserted. But the traditional rationale will need to be updated as universities reposition themselves to advance international economic competitiveness. For the foreseeable future, the only way in which Africa can participate in the international knowledge revolution will be by protecting the public-good dimension of knowledge production.

There is a worldwide system of basic knowledge production, widely published in both print and electronic media. This follows from the simple fact that the results of publicly funded basic research cannot be held for the benefit only of the nation that has invested in it. Science does not work that way--and efforts to limit the science to its sponsoring nation inevitably weaken the science and harm the nation, as the closed economies discovered.

Given internationally available knowledge, it greatly benefits each individual nation to create knowledge links to other countries of the world. These links help a country to guard against isolationism and parochialism; they also open the society to broader economic, intellectual, technical, and social possibilities. A strong public case can be made for reducing any import or export constraints on the flow of new knowledge. Research universities are a country's best-equipped institution to facilitate this flow. They generate, import, and disseminate nonproprietary knowledge, making it available to all the institutions of society--government, commerce, media, military, and civil society organizations.

The international intellectual commons based on nonproprietary and nonexclusive research allows the world to address a number of widely recognized challenges--such as, emergent diseases, invasive species, and climate fluctuations. It is not in the interest of any single nation to invest heavily in research that could address these problems, because then the other nations of the world would have a free ride. Knowledge about these global challenges is, then, an international public good. It is in the public interest of every nation that this knowledge be created; but it will not be created in the absence of a public investment. International networks of research universities and institutes are a mechanism to advance the required research agenda.

For a number of reasons, then, it is in the interest of each nation to enhance those features of its universities that are able to participate in globally significant research and development and international expert systems focused on global challenges. This works to the benefit of African universities in an environment in which they reposition themselves to advance national competitiveness in the international knowledge economy. Only by continuing to assert and reflect a public good responsibility can they function as a link between their national economies and nonproprietary knowledge.

Current pressures, however, are pulling African universities toward market-derived definitions of higher education and away from public-good definitions. Obviously, universities offer a mixture of private and public benefits. It is a misuse of public funds to pay for those elements that offer private benefits, because prospective beneficiaries will pay on their own. But the same logic underscores that it is a serious mistake to presume that private investment will secure the public benefits of universities. Such a presumption defies economic theory. Public returns depend on public investment. In the rush to adopt funding strategies that shift the cost burden from the public sector to the individual beneficiary, the ancient justification of advanced learning as a public obligation recedes from view.

The international donor community provides a corrective. Its funds are in the spirit of public support for public goods. In particular, these funds can support Africa's connection to the global economy by helping African universities to assert a new, internationally defined role constructed around the values of nonproprietary research, support for the most talented irrespective of ability to pay, free movement of intellectuals, and related features that anchor universities in a long and honored public-good tradition.