European higher education has traditionally been grounded in the notion that it serves a public good; colleges and universities are agents of national and regional development (Juceviciene, 2007). However, in recent decades, the Bologna imperatives and economic conditions have led institutions to transform themselves to act more as market agents than agents of development (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). The move to a market model has been associated with shifts from public to private financing for institutions (Heller and Rogers, 2006; Johnstone, 2004), program reallocations (Gumport, 2005), and quality assurance initiatives (Rhoades and Sporn, 2002). Public discourse surrounding these reforms is typically framed as good vs. bad, public vs. private, or equalizing vs. stratifying (Lynch, 2006). Although there is evidence to suggest that the public good and market-oriented models may co-exist in the educational sphere (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2005), the framework consistently engages Western conceptions of development.
These Western conceptions of development increasingly have been imposed on developing nations. Global agents in development include international financial institutions (IFIs) (e.g., the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) and multilateral agencies (e.g., the United Nations, the World Trade Organization) whose policies and interventions are highly influential in developing countries. For example, neoliberal polices of IFIs have altered the historic approach to higher education in Africa (free to all) through the introduction of alternative financing, such as user fees (Tikly, 2001), and have heavily influenced governmental approaches to public sector activities leading to decreased funding for higher education (Okolie, 2003). The interventions of these organizations have led to the increased marketization of universities around the world. Yet the ways in which the market model has played out at public universities in developing countries, those typically considered at the periphery, has been consistently neglected in the literature.
In response to Mamdani’s (2007) call for more widespread debate on marketization at public research institutions in Africa, we conducted a study of how faculty and staff at state-financed institutions in Kenya perceive the intersection of marketization and development. We analyzed the data to explore the impact of marketization on the traditional missions of teaching, research, and service. Upon analysis, an analytical framework emerged, that of academic capitalism, the notion that higher education has evolved, in response to economic, policy and constituent pressures, to serve the private good (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). However, our findings demonstrate that academic capitalism is being reshaped and contextualized by the needs of the universities employing the market model. We have discovered a new way to interpret the public and private roles of higher education, one that might translate readily from Kenya to tertiary institutions in Europe, the U.S., and other Western nations. Our ECER paper will describe those findings and expand upon the lessons about institutional mission that universities at the periphery can teach to their Western counterparts.
