[At the recent World Conference on Higher Education] ... The original
UNESCO agenda, developed over many years at a variety of conferences
throughout the world, and the work of its impressive Director-General,
Federico Mayor, had been relegated to the background by the World Bank and
its allies. The problems to be dealt with were finance, access, equity,
quality and relevance, lifelong learning, employability of graduates,
technology, involvement of business and industry, staff development,
academic freedom and autonomy, and world peace.
But for some years now, the World Bank has been developing an agenda on
higher education which they refer to as the "reform agenda". The key
concepts of the agenda are: privatization, deregulation, and market
orientation. Standing in the way of implementing this reform agenda to
address the problems are, they make clear, the traditional university in
general,and its faculty members in particular. .....
[Despite efforts by higher education delegates and Education
International] ..the World Bank's reform agenda still emerged from the
conference alive and raring to go. Their The Financing and Management of
Higher Education: A Status Report on Worldwide Reforms, written for the
conference, explains that the reform agenda "is oriented to the market
rather than to public ownership or to governmental planning and
regulation. Underlying the market orientation to tertiary education is
the ascendance, almost worldwide, of market capitalism and the principles
of neo-liberal economics."
Higher education, the World Bank argues, is a private -- not a public --
good whose problems are amenable to market solutions. That is, it is in
limited supply, not demanded by all, and is available for a price. Also,
the consumers (business and industry) are "reasonably well informed" while
the providers (administrators and faculty) are "often ill informed --
conditions which are ideal for market forces to operate." ...
The World Bank believes that the public sector is hopelessly inefficient
and unresponsive and unwilling, or unable, to undertake reform of higher
education. Institutional mangers must be forced to account for their
market position, cash flow, product diversification, and progress to
creating corporate partnerships. They must also be forced to do a better
job of personnel management and control. ...
The World Bank believes that faculty have too much power in higher
education and administrators have too little incentive to control them.
Faculty power has its sources in control of the curriculum (unrelated to
the needs of the global economy) shared or collegial governance, unionism
and, of course, academic freedom and tenure."
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Clearly not a disinterested appraisal of the debate, but interesting,
nevertheless, in its summary of the World Bank's agena for reform of
higher education in the interests of market capitalism.
Gordon Wells,
OISE/University of Toronto