ex Africa semper aliquid novi

Science fiction stories often ask their readers to willingly suspend disbelief and imagine a parallel universe, one just like the one which readers inhabit, except for one or two minor details. Imagine, the story goes that a human develops an ability to know what others are thinking.

As the story develops it usually transpires that these details are not so minor but have dramatic consequences. Those consequences in turn, if the story displays any insight into the human condition, illuminate ironically, tragically or humorously an incongruity in the reader’s universe, such as discovering that its better not to know what other’s are thinking about oneself.

We could call these parallel universe stories.

What would we call stories in which the difference between universes is not a minor one but major one, in which an important feature is the exact opposite of the one with which readers are familiar. I think the term inverted universe would do nicely.

And it is an inverted universe story that we find, not in science fiction but in the strange history of universities and economics over the last 30 years. A little more than 30 years ago saw the imposition of a new role on universities, this imposition was part of a far bigger story, the story known as Reagonomics in the United States, and Thatcherite economics in the United Kingdom and its (former) colonies. The new role was to serve not as centres for learning, innovation and life saving discoveries such as the polio vaccine, which had been their role previously but as out-sourcing companies for corporate research and development.
The rationale advanced for this change was that universities should be entrepreneurial by which was meant not that universities should transform the societies in which they are situated, which is Peter Drucker’s idea of innovation, but that the social capital represented by universities would no longer be matched by investment capital from a state intent on reducing corporate taxation.
Universities would henceforth have to pay their own way. That the state had quite deliberately made universities dependent on it for funding in order use the universities to serve its ends in homogenising the ruling class, or for military technology was conveniently forgotten. Society could not afford to subsidise learning. Universities would have to compete as firms in the market (despite having public interest mandates). That role is still being thrust on universities, especially resource poor universities in the global South, which are under pressure to obtain “3rd stream income”.

Over the last six months governments, especially in the global North, have spent extraordinary amounts of money subsidising banks and investment companies, entities which by their very definition are market players, able to extract a premium for their re-allocations of capital (and risk). By their nature banks are profit making institutions, just as by their nature universities are not.

And so we realise with a start that we inhabit an inverse universe to the one inhabited by our grandparents; one in which banks are subsidised, heavily subsidised by the state, while universities are meant to fend for themselves.

I’ll admit of course that many universities still grudgingly receive some State funding, although less and less for core functions, and more and more for rendering services, such as bolstering a state patent portfolio. I’ll also admit that the state funding for banks is touted as a desperate measure for a desperate situation, ostensibly a unique situation. Its the scale that is revealing though, the bail out will burden tax payers for a generation, while directors continue to take home bonuses. A mere 10% of that amount of the bail outs thus far would have given universities a massive capital injection, making them free of reliance on state funding for the foreseeable future.

Does the story of the inverse universe illuminate our present? Unfortunately it is our present, one in which public institutions like universities must seek private funding to survive while market players are subsidised with taxpayer money. If we can learn anything it must be that the social capital represented by universities is well worth state investment, and that the claims that value lies only, or indeed primarily in market mechanisms is profoundly mistaken.