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  • Privatization and the Public Good: Public Universities in the Balance by Matthew T. Lambert
  • Caroline Wekullo
Matthew T. Lambert. Privatization and the Public Good: Public Universities in the Balance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2014. 332 pp. Hardcover: $61.95. ISBN-13: 978–1–61250–732–3.

With declines in state appropriations despite the growing enrollment, many institutions of higher learning have turned to other sources of revenue or cost cutting, including privatization to support their operations. The shift towards privatization as a means to achieve the public good has spurred dialogues among legislators, policymakers, education leaders, and faculty on whether higher education is chiefly a public good or a private good. The concern is less about funding and autonomy and more about the place of public institutions in the nation's interest amidst the changing financial model. Matthew Lambert wrote the book Privatization and the Public Good: Public Universities in the Balance, with the desire to clearly understand and to share how public institutions are balancing their interests despite diminishing public support.

In Privatization and the Public Good: Public Universities in the Balance, Lambert approaches privatization from a broader perspective. He provides a comprehensive examination of privatization and its implication in the future missions and functions of public colleges and universities. Specifically, Lambert provides a deeper understanding to several questions. That is, whether the features of public higher education have changed in response to the privatized funding model, whether the purpose of public colleges and universities in a democratic society is still significant, or whether public institutions still enhance the core public mission, the society depends especially on in this privatized environment with powerful incentives to follow money.

To address this broad agenda, Lambert sets the stage by sharing his experiences as an undergraduate and as a practitioner on college campuses. To him, public higher education is experiencing a "'new normal' driven by the forces of globalization, economic turmoil, and changing demographics… around the world" (p. 3). Lambert uses a metaphor of a frog boiling in water to exemplify the problems facing higher education today. He asserts that these problems are a "result of a generational neglect by the states and citizens, a reluctance to change and a dearth of creativity within institutions, and a gradual shift in the perception of higher education from public good to private benefit" (p. 7). These problems conflict with the historic public mission of public universities. [End Page 487]

Privatization and the Public Good is organized into nine chapters. In the first four chapters, Lambert discusses whether higher education is a public good or a private good. He states that in this era of privatization, a clear distinction must be made between the public missions and public funding. The sources of funding alone cannot determine whether an institution and the benefits associated with it are public or private. In addition, public colleges and universities and their states must find a balance, where both "institutions' interests and the public good are served equally" (p. 26).

Lambert notes that privatization is deep and more complex than just autonomy, finance, and regulation, and the only way to understand it is first to understand the state context—the basis upon which institutions' leaders or legislatures envision elements of privatization. This is the thesis of Lambert's book Privatization and the Public Good: Public Universities in the Balance.

To support his argument, Lambert proposes a new model - foundations of privatization - with six levels (state context, vision and focus, autonomy, finance, enrollment and access, and leadership), for understanding privatization and examining an institution. Similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, each layer of the foundation of privatization is built upon one another in a way that the previous foundation influences and helps in interpreting additional foundations. Lambert also presents how the model for privatization can be used to identify institutions based on the public and private focus. For instance, funding for institutions with a public focus can be identified by higher per-capita public funding, lower tuition set at the state or system level, lower philanthropy and alternative revenues, and lower federal research. On the other hand, institutions with a private focus can be identified by lower...

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