Contribution description:

With references to Chile and Argentina, this paper discusses some of the differences in resistance to neoliberalisation in UK HE, why it matters to anthropological scholarship that education must be public, and offers lessons to be learned from the Global South.

Paper long abstract:

This is not the first time over the past twenty odd years that I am writing about – and against - neoliberalisation in Higher Education in the UK and its impacts on the reproduction of critical scholarship. Thus it feels like covering old grounds but with conditions, predictably, having generally and comprehensively worsened. This paper asks about the extent to which UK HE can still be described as a public education system or whether back-door privatisation has conquered the sector so far that, like the melting of the world´s ice sheets, it has crossed a tipping point? What does public education mean beyond the question of cost-free access, yet what is the role of current funding and employment structures and policies, and how do they impact on the intellectual life of HE institutions? Why is the public university so crucial to the discipline of anthropology? To discuss the British experience, I will reference two other cases, each exemplary in their own right. The first one is Argentina, perhaps a unique case, where privatisation and neoliberalisation of HE have been quite effectively and almost comprehensively resisted since the late 1980s. The second is Chile, where an impressive student movement this century embarked upon doing the unthinkable: to turn back the tide of privatisation in education that was initiated by a brutal Pinochet military regime which took direct command of the country´s public universities.

In both cases, the struggle for public university education acted as a catalyst for wider social and political movements and shifts in society. That is itself suggestive about the difference between public and private education. Hence, it is through these examples and the role and insertion of the public university in the wider social struggles where we can explore the significance of Public Education and its potential for genuine intellectual and societal development, much needed in today´s world plagued by crises, state bankruptcies, depression, austerity, corruption and wars, among many other items on a growing list of ills.

‘Public’ and ‘private’ spaces, structures, institutions and configurations are bread-and-butter analytical and theoretical areas of concern for anthropologists to which an extensive array of publications, current and past, testifies. But they rarely reflect on their own institutional background and conditions despite our discipline taking pride in its reflexive method.

Moreover, I contend that global academic hierarchies hamper knowledge flow from the South to the North in social and political fields, and it is for this same hierarchical reason, I fear, that the fate of the survival of Public Education in the Global South unfortunately also rests with the development of how the conflict between private and public education in dominant countries such as the UK plays out. But if academics and students in Chile and Argentina can reclaim the university as a public good despite the history of bloodstained repression, then why not in Britain? In this contribution I will examine some of the contributing factors in creating these differences as well as some lessons that could, urgently, be learned.