The struggle to save & remake public higher education

Laura Czerniewicz, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Public higher education is at serious risk. Universities premised on knowledge creation and dissemination for the public good are on shakier terrain than before. The higher education sector globally was already in a fragile condition – some would say a crisis – before the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated campus shutdowns began.

Higher education across and within countries as well as within institutions has been characterised by profound inequalities which have been shaped and exacerbated by the austerity and marketisation that has deeply troubled the sector. These are now a threat that has the potential to undermine the entire endeavour.

At the same time there have been strikes and protests by those employed or enrolled in higher education in many countries to protest numerous failings in the system, including exclusion (practical, cultural, epistemological), increasingly onerous conditions of service and the rapid casualisation of academic labour.

These strikes have been overshadowed by the pandemic – indeed, notwithstanding some exceptions in the ...numerous failings United States and the United Kingdom, they themselves have been locked down.

Since the lockdowns, I have been observing the trends in higher education: unsurprisingly the most prevalent is the ‘pivot online’ to remote learning with all its manifestations and associated concerns especially regarding access and vulnerability. This is closely followed by increasingly dominant narratives of austerity and marketisation – it is these on which I will focus here.

I am using the term ‘austerity’ as an umbrella word for underfunding and financial cuts which drive up the risks of sectoral fragmentation and breakdown. Also an umbrella term, ‘marketisation’ speaks to the increasingly unfettered infiltration of big corporate forces substantially reshaping higher education.

Along with others (which include the increase in metrics and datafication of the sector), these factors increasingly drive the practices of individual institutions which have themselves become more corporate in character.

My observations are drawn from various sources: panels in which I have recently participated including at the World Bank and Africa-based; the Twitterverse where the power of loose ties in my professional networks shows the emergent trends and on-the-ground anxieties. This has been augmented by ongoing virtual conversations with colleagues, funders and others and, of course, reports and talks, as well as rapid research publications.

Austerity

There is an avalanche of activity and concern being expressed both formally and informally about the financial implications of the COVID-19 shutdown and the projected impacts of the associated economic downturn for institutions, for educators and for students.

Internationally these are to be seen in the following ways:

• There have been cuts to university budgets, some with immediate effect.

• Students are indicating that they are not planning to start the next university year.

• Universities are losing money from current budgets – for example, some are returning fees to current students. And students are demanding fee rebates for studies taken online instead of face to face.

• Universities are offering students free tuition for the forthcoming term.

• Contract and casual staff are losing jobs in several locations so far.

• Job conditions are changing for all staff, often in the form of unpaid furloughs.

• Financial scenarios are being calculated for the sector for the medium term. In both England and Australia where these have been made available, the outlook is bleak.

Funders have warned that the economic downturn will reduce the size of their endowments and therefore their grants. Some have prioritised their local communities when providing immediate relief.

Anxiety is realistically high: this response, from personal communication with a teaching and learning director, is typical: ‘I am very, very worried. My college has been around for well over a hundred years and I honestly think we have a good chance of closing in the next 3-5 years. Very scary and sad.’

Governments are generally failing to bail out universities and where they do offer support, the sector is having to explain why these funds will not be enough.

In South Africa, higher education scholars are warning that COVID-19 poses a serious threat to higher education. Universities South Africa has been working with universities to develop financial scenarios for the medium term. These have not yet been shared with the sector at large; and many universities’ executives have voluntarily taken salary cuts.

While there is little yet articulated regarding austerity in the South African context, aside from murmurings, it is assumed that global economic echoes will resonate here and that our deep national economic crisis will exacerbate the financial challenges facing universities.

Marketisation

Digitally mediated forms of teaching and learning provision have been on the agenda for a while now and the private sector has recognised this as an opportunity. Recent years have seen the rise of Online Programme Managers (OPMs), private companies whose business model offers ‘partnerships’ to move university programmes online, usually taking half the profits.

Public universities have been coming to grips with the complexities of these very new relationships. But suddenly, private education firms say they have been ‘inundated with requests from universities to help them deliver online education next year’.

This sector is now worth an estimated US$7 billion, growing apace, and it is projected that COVID-19 will substantially ‘accelerate this trend’. These relationships are described as ones where ‘the private party bears risk and management responsibility, and where remuneration is linked to performance’.

Clearly, private company interests are in relationships that will assure them of profits. Higher education is also seeing a growing relationship between private education companies and governments. Coursera currently has formal relationships with 16 governments around the world (Australia, Brunei, Columbia, Egypt, France, India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan , Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, UAE, USA, Uruguay). Since the outbreak of the pandemic I am told that Amazon has contacted heads of government worldwide to offer educational assistance.

A new ecosystem shaped by big corporates

Overall, what is being consolidated during this period is a new ecosystem where the templates for the contractual relationships, governance and delivery frameworks are increasingly being provided and shaped by big corporates. Coursera, for example, now has partnerships with Amazon, Alibaba and Facebook, with universities contributing the content and the brand. The message from the World Bank has been clear: these companies are regarded as the ones who can ‘deliver to scale’.

Coursera is an excellent case exemplifying the enactment of both alternate forms of accreditation as well as pathways into the formal systems of accreditation which universities use. These alternative forms of accreditation are likely to gain increased legitimacy through this pandemic.

Coursera has seen enrolments up by 644% since last year and enrolments from Africa are up by 51%. (This is the second highest increase: India is up 60%). The latter is an enormous escalation and will also mean that cash-strapped students in an economically difficult environment are likely to find these alternative online options more viable and affordable than continued traditional university enrolment.

A last point (for now) about marketisation. Numerous private companies have been offering free access to educational materials and resources as a temporary offering during institutional closures.

As the University of Cape Town’s SARChI Research Chair in Intellectual Property, Professor Caroline Ncube, points out in a recent podcast, these are offerings of goodwill which do not address the regulatory frameworks of intellectual property for the public interest. These offerings are loss-leaders which risk locking students into using resources which they will then have to pay for on the date that the temporary offerings cease.

This is a bleak description of the state of public higher education and its mission of developing and sharing knowledge for the public good. And it is made more bleak given that the South African economy is in a formal recession. With the Government prioritising direct redistributive financial measures as a result of the lockdown, it seems unlikely that South African universities will be bailed out by the state.

On high alert

The point, though, is not to be alarmist or apocalyptic. The point is that all who care about the premiseof education for the good of society as a whole need to be on high alert. There is no hiding from reality; it is essential to recognise and acknowledge the size of the crisis as well as the threat.

What is needed right now is unity of purpose in order to make decisions that will save public higher education and enable it to be reshaped for the unknown future. Higher education scholars often comment how hard it is to change higher education. For decades nothing changes in higher education and now in a few weeks everything is changing.

As many, including Yuval Noah Harari have observed, the decisions being made now will shape the future: ‘This is the most important thing people need to realise ... that we have a lot of choices. And very important decisions are going to be taken in the next month or two. It’s a short window of opportunity when history is moving into ... fast forward. It’s accelerating. Governments are willing to experiment to try ideas which previously would have sounded crazy. And once this is over, the order will solidify again.’

Universities, academics, students and the state right now need to work together to make decisions in the short term that will serve the greater goals of the future of higher education and will reassert the key principles of public higher education for the public good.

The alternatives – the collapse of the sector, or one designed to serve unregulated profiteering interests of global elites – are far worse. While recent history in South Africa has understandably focused on state capture, there is a less visible global threat to higher education in the form of corporate capture.

This is a time to set aside differences of opinion within higher education communities. This is not the moment to argue about which form of open education is the most appropriate nor which strategy to achieve social equity is the most ideal. It is the time for unity of purpose.

This is a time to develop a more nuanced understanding of the actors in the private sector. There is a big difference between barely regulated big corporations creating systems that monetise student data, and an ecosystem that includes regulated private sector providers where the terms of the relationships are determined by public universities, and where regulatory frameworks are premised on the public interest.

It is extremely important not to conflate the affordances of the technology with the business models which are currently dominant. It is more necessary than ever to distinguish between what the technology makes possible and the purposes for which they are presently being used.

The affordances of current technology are astonishing: in the pandemic they can save lives; in higher education they can support at-risk students and they can save educators from much drudgery allowing them to focus on what humans are really good at – teaching.

Just because most current business models are exploiting these technologies by profiting from student experiences and violating their privacy does not mean that there aren’t ethical options. These exist, and with time, investment and commitment, many more are possible.

No one has the luxury of the real deal

There is an understandable aversion right now to technology being used as the primary medium for teaching and learning in the crisis. The way it is being used is uneven and partial – of that there is no question. Levels of preparation and readiness for the pivot online vary hugely.

The current use of technology for teaching and learning is not the real deal; it is an emergency response to enable teaching in a crisis. No one has the luxury of the real deal right now. That involves careful planning and considered expertise, and the development of an infrastructure which few universities have had the foresight to put in place.

As one of the participants from an African university argued in a recent webinar, remote teaching right now is the lesser of two evils. The prime evil would be the complete collapse of the public higher education system and all that it stands for, followed by its replacement with a profitdriven system that serves only those who can pay.

Across the education landscape there are huge numbers of examples of outstanding teaching, premised on critical pedagogy, shaped by equity goals, and many of these are already digitally mediated. Academics and students are presently showing extraordinary resilience and imagination to develop adaptable, creative and varied solutions to meet changing teaching and learning needs. Through structured collaboration it is possible for these to be aggregated, gain traction and be shared on an ongoing basis.

There is much to be done, including ensuring that hurried contracts being signed between universities and online education providers at present contain clear processes for future review, that internal online capacity is strengthened, that digital regulatory frameworks that are currently out of sync with the public interest are revisited and that open education opportunities are leveraged. Active collaboration will expand this agenda.

The pandemic has forced a terrible disruption. In order to save the principles on which public higher education is founded, COVID-19 can and must be an opportunity for an additional pivot – one that helps to consolidate coalitions, which, working closely with the state, will enable us first to salvage and then reshape public higher education for a more equitable future.

Professor Laura Czerniewicz is the director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She has worked in education in a number of roles with a continuous focus on digital inequality. She has recently been the South African lead on an ESRC-NRF (Economic and Social Research Council- National Research Foundation) funded project on the ‘Unbundled University’, researching emerging models of teaching and learning provision.

This article was originally published by University World News, Africe Edition, 30 April 2020. Subscribe to UWN at www.universityworldnews.com