Scholars in the Marketplace. The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005: The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005

Preface and Acknowledgements

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is a case study of market-based reform at a single university— Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. But the study also illuminates larger issues raised by neo-liberal reform of higher education. Because neo-liberal reform at Makerere has been held up by the World Bank as the model for the transformation of higher education on the African continent, these issues have a particular resonance for the African context. At a general level, the Makerere case epitomises the fate of public universities globally in a market-oriented and capital-friendly era. When the reforms unfolded in the early 1990s, they were guided by the World Bank’s then held conviction that higher education is more of a private than a public good. Unfortunately for Makerere, the Museveni government in Uganda embraced the World Bank’s perspective with the uncritical enthusiasm of a convert, so much so that even when the Bank began to re-think its romance with the market, Uganda’s political leadership held on to the dogma with the tenacity of an ideologue. My main objective in this book is to question this dogma by shifting the terms of the debate on the public and the private: rather than pit the public against the private, and the state against the market, I seek to explore different relations between the two. Based S C H O L A R S I N T H E M A R K E T P L A C E viii on who sets the terms of the relationship and who defines its objectives , I outline two different kinds of relationships between the public and the private in the organisation of higher education. In the soft version, the one I call a limited ‘privatisation’, the priorities are set by the public sphere. In the hard version of the relationship, the one I term ‘commercialisation’, it is the market which defines priorities in the functioning of a public university. If limited privatisation sums up a relationship in which the public (including the state) leads the private (including the market), commercialisation reverses the terms in an arrangement where the private leads the public. The difference is this: limited privatisation is the critical appropriation of the market for public ends, whereas commercialisation is the subversion of a public institution for private purposes. The case study is a warning against commercialisation—the rule of the market—and an invitation to explore softer ways by which to harness the forces of the market in the public interest. In the process, I question two foundational assumptions of the Makerere reform that still continue to be held with different degrees of conviction. As is characteristic of the formulation of a dogma, both assumptions present alternatives as absolutes: in one case, the public vs. the private; in the other, disciplinary expertise vs. inter-disciplinary relevance. The first erroneous assumption sustaining the Makerere reforms is that publicly-funded students are a net liability for the university, but privately-sponsored students are a net asset. The university’s own figures for 2003–2004 showed the opposite: whereas the public treasury paid the university a uniform figure of shs 3 million per government-sponsored student, private sponsors paid an average fee that was less than half—about shs 1.2 million per student. In spite of this, most members of the Makerere community—the academic staff, students, and even administrators—believe that PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix private students are a money-minting machine and publicly sponsored students a financial liability. How can this be? I argue that the illusion is sustained by how the Makerere budget is structured. The treasury transfers public monies for publiclysponsored students exclusively to the central administration which spends these monies for centrally-administered activities, including basic salaries and wages of permanent staff of the university. In contrast, the revenue of teaching units comes mainly from private student fees, and is used mainly to pay a top-up to their staff. Thus the conclusion drawn by all teaching units, whether or not they are revenue-earning, that the way to increase their income is to maximise the number of privately-sponsored students they teach. The Makerere reform joined an infatuation with privatelysponsored students to an extreme decentralisation that in turn fed it. Different constituencies pushed decentralisation for their own reasons. The World Bank believed that the most effective way to promote market forces in...