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Reviewed by:
  • Governance and the Public Good
  • Tatiana Suspitsyna
Governance and the Public Good edited by William G. Tierney. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 217 pp. $68.50 (cloth), ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6875-3. $22.95 (paper), ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6876-0.

That colleges and universities serve the good of society is hardly a novel or contested idea. As long ago as 1701, the charter of what would soon become Yale University purported to instruct the youth to "be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State." Seventy five years later, post-revolutionary colleges and universities patriotically charged themselves with the task of educating citizens for the new republic (Geiger, 1999). A century after, the Morrill Act of 1862 gave rise to a new social expectation: state universities were now held responsible for improving the local industry and agriculture. History is replete with examples of higher education institutions advancing civic and scientific causes for the common good. What remains little known and understood, however, is how the capacity of colleges and universities to serve the needs of society has changed under the influence of political and market forces. Governance and the Public Good, a new collection of works edited by William Tierney, begins to fill in this gap by offering a comprehensive discussion of governance issues that support and constrain the research university's commitment to the public good today.

Unlike other volumes that have sought to establish the centrality of the common good to the raison-d'être of postsecondary education (e.g., Kezar, Chambers, & Burkhardt, 2005) and document the benefits of college education beyond democratic participation and economic development (e.g., Lewis & Hearn, 2003), Tierney's book examines the public good as a function of university engagement in competing public, political, economic, and institutional agendas. These agendas are reflective of five trends summarized by the editor in the introduction: privatization, politicization, restructuring, autonomy, and accountability. Privatization manifests itself in the decreased state support and growing diversification of universities' funding bases. Politicization is rooted in the desire of boards and state legislators to control vital aspects of university operations. Restructuring occurs in response to external pressures and internal bureaucratization and leads to fewer opportunities for faculty involvement in decision making. The long-cherished legacy of institutional autonomy comes in conflict with the present day public demands for greater accountability. As the contributors to the volume unfailingly demonstrate, privatization, politicization, [End Page 591] and restructuring along with the mutually cancelling calls for autonomy and accountability define institutional priorities and may privilege universities' production of private benefits over their service to society.

In the opening chapter of the book Brian Pusser argues for a Habermasian re-conceptualization of the university as a public sphere, a space for open contestation and exchange of ideas. This theoretical move is intentionally directed against what he sees as an excessive emphasis on the economic benefits of higher education in the debates over the public good. Citizenship training, he contends, is a key contribution of the university to society. In Pusser's vision, the university is a workshop of democracy where students are apprentice citizens learning to govern their land. The forging and testing of new ideas about society require a public sphere that is unencumbered by state concerns and private interests. If the university is to continue performing as a public sphere and training citizens, he asserts, boards and administrators will have to protect their institutions from the encroachments of the private sector and state politics and preserve the autonomy of their faculty.

Like Pusser, Judith Ramaley attempts to conceptualize a space where universities can contribute to the public good of their communities. Her intellectual query leads her to Donald Stokes's idea of quadrants that depict the connection between science and technology by plotting it along the axes of theory and practice. Among the four quadrants, she is especially intrigued with the one that combines high quality theory with high practical utility, and that is best exemplified by Louis Pasteur whose discovery of microbes was both scientifically ground breaking and immensely important for practice. It is in Pasteur's quadrant that Ramaley puts the "engaged...

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