Education, ‘three Es’ and McUniversities: Some Heretical Thoughts

Keynote Address delivered by Panduka Karunanayake Senior Lecturer in the Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo, at 16th Annual Higher Education Conference in Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Association for Improving Higher Education Effectiveness on July 24, 2020: Colombo.

In this Keynote Address, let me share with you some heretical thoughts on higher education’s ‘three E’s’: Equity, Effectiveness, Efficiency. I will also visit the concept of McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer 2006), and its incarnation in the universities, the McUniversities. My main argument is that external pressures and transformations have changed the nature of higher education, and that it is time we recognised this and took corrective steps. A crucial step in this response is having our own definition of higher education, no matter how difficult this is. I will also try to connect up with the current ‘new normal’ that has arisen with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic – with its own threat of further, externally-imposed change. For the sake of sticking to my time I will considerably abbreviate my talk, but the full text will be circulated by your Association.

“Define, or be defined”

Your Association is dedicated to improving the effectiveness of higher education. To start this onerous task, we should first define, or at least describe, higher education. The iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz warned us that if we didn’t define ourselves, others would go on to define us: “Define, or be defined.” We will then be relegated to a life of living that definition or endlessly contesting it. I would ask you to dwell on this and to ask yourself, Has this happenned to us already?

This is even more important in the immediate aftermath of a major event like the COVID-19 pandemic, after which we can expect a lot of change (which has been called the ‘new normal’). At such times, it is our definition that will allow us to safely navigate ourselves through the turbulent sea of change, and preserve higher education and seek its effectiveness.

Defining higher education is, however, a very difficult task. A few academics have nevertheless tried to grapple with it, and my own favourite is Ronald Barnett (1990; 1996). Barnett asked many of the right questions, even if he could not conclusively answer them. He might not have given the final, clinching definition or even a description of higher education. Indeed, we perhaps don’t even know what higher education is not! But thanks to academics like him, we at least know that we don’t know – and that, as Socrates said, is the first step to wisdom and, as Bloom’s revised taxonomy puts it, is in the highest knowledge category, known as metacognition.

And it was also Barnett’s writings that convinced me that we must engage with these problems, not as a hobby or an afterthought, but as a priority. Some academics are happy to live their lives in accordance with a definition given to them. When they see other academics like me who think about these issues, they would accuse us of wasteful self-indulgence, because we do not seem to contribute to the knowledge production that the externally given definitions demand. But Barnett disagreed, and pointed out that, on the contrary, not to think about these issues is high hypocrisy. He asked, How can we not self-examine ourselves when we make it our business to examine everything around us?

Higher education in
a changing world

Higher education worldwide has changed drastically over the last six or seven decades, due to external pressure. For instance, in the 1960s the emergence of the knowledge industries created an increased demand for knowledge workers, who had to be educated to the tertiary level, leading to what is known as the massification of universities – the universities changed from elite organisations that served a small number of educationally-gifted students to large-scale organisations serving students with a wider range of abilities.

In the 1970s there was a clear, watertight demarcation between higher education and further education, both of which were forms of tertiary education. Further education spread across a wide spectrum and included various types of technical and vocational education. Some of these were subsequently incorporated to universities, due to a constellation of factors. It was then no longer quite clear whether university education was synonymous with higher education. It certainly seemed like a marriage of convenience, where both partners chose to ignore their incompatibilities so that they can enjoy the considerable benefits of being nominally paired, if not conjugated. And the term further education is no longer in much use.

Some of the features that were believed to belong with higher education rather than further education, such as critical thinking, were then identified, dissected, listed and added to curricula, as if higher education was no longer the mystery. But in time, the vacuousness of this approach has come to light. For instance, critical thinking has been separated from critical thinking skills and other elusive aspects of criticality, variously called critical being, critical self-reflection and so on (Barnett 1996: 11-22). And there are other aspects of higher education too that are similarly elusive and are hovering around us and teasing us for our impetuosity.

The 1970s witnessed economic woes for the world, even the West, with the so-called slow economic depression. State funding for universities was reduced, even while the demand for graduates from the new knowledge industries was increasing. In that context, by the 1990s, economics and its new methods became increasingly important in government policies and strategies worldwide, pushed especially by the World Bank, leading to the talk of the three E’s of education: Equity, Effectiveness, Efficiency (Lockheed and Hanushek 1994).

Another change came in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet bloc, when capitalist industries quickly gained control over all forms of life – human, animal, plant – and even the inanimate environment, and all roads led to Washington. In this new unipolar world, knowledge production underwent a marked, cataclysmic transformation too, in the space of a few decades (Gibbons et al 1994). Since funding sources for research in universities also shifted hands from unrestricted governmental grants to granting agencies that laid down restrictive criteria of prioritisation and selection, it was only a matter of time before research in universities itself changed its nature (see Table 1).

This was soon followed by globalisation and the free flow of financial capital and human resources throughout the globe, leading to a vastly increased entry of private capital into higher education and the emergence of the internationalisation of higher education, cross-border higher education and the birth of franchised degrees. My favourite author for this period and its issues is Philip Altbach (Altbach and Peterson1999; Altbach and Umakoshi 2004; Altbach 2006).

Today, academics like Angus Kennedy (2017) has had to point out that universities have lost their way (emphases in the original):

“Rather than being relevant to society, instead the role of the university is a model of how society should be. Its foundation showed that society believed there were higher things, things more important than the material and mundane, and that they were the rightful objects of study by those who had a higher calling, a more noble profession than soldiery, or buying and selling in the marketplace.”

Perhaps, the universities had not been ready for these decades with a definition of higher education of its own, or perhaps its own idea of higher education could not stand its ground. Imperceptibly, the three E’s became the new strategies for the universities. Academics didn’t have their own definition or had to ignore it – and the universities underwent change.

If universities were by now having difficulty identifying their exact role in research, almost a century before that, they had had difficulty identifying their role in teaching. This was in the era before the emergence of the research university, when the university’s role in society was limited to teaching and service. Our own Ananda Coomaraswamy, who pioneered the struggle for a national university for Ceylon at the turn of the twentieth century, had written thus:

“Modern education is designed to fit us to take our place in the counting-house and at the chain-belt; a real culture breeds a race of men able to ask, What kind of work is worth doing?”

Another problem that was thrown in, some time between Coomaraswamy and Barnett, was the challenge posed by post-modernism. Post-modernism has an intense mistrust of all univeralisms. So naturally, an idea of the university or higher education that stretched across all localities, disciplines and specialisations and claimed to cover them all had to first confront post-modernism. And that confrontation too hasn’t gone smoothly.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not trying to overwhelm you or discourage you from doing all your good work. I am only begging you to face this history and these difficulties, and to define yourself, or at least describe yourself, or at the very least state what you are clearly not. In a way, I am asking you to ask Coomaraswamy’s question in relation to our own work in higher education: What kind of work is worth doing? Otherwise one day you will wake up and realise that others have defined you exactly as what you were not planning to be, and you will have to choose between either contesting this definition or living your life in accordance with it.

In fact, that might already be the case, except that we haven’t yet woken up to it. For instance, every morning when I wake up I have to behold, right in front of my house, a well-known private international school offering primary and secondary education that calls itself “International School of Higher Education”!

The task of maintaining our identity, or at least renegotiating it, in the face of changing societal, intellectual and institutional pressures is certainly challenging – and my plea for all of us is to face it, instead of ignoring it. This has become even more important in the COVID-19 world, when more externally-imposed change is on the way.

(To be continued)

Email: panduka@clinmed.cmb.ac.lk