New politics of higher education: Hidden and complex

Public universities in the United States are in a changed political environment, resulting from past enrollment growth and increased budget needs, centralization, the routinization of state-university relations, government budget uncertainty, and the emergence of strong competing claims on state or federal monies. The author argues that centralized government intervention is carried through technocratic approaches that mask the political forces at work. The article discusses characteristics of government intervention such as: buffer groups, formulas and data monopoly. It suggests these technocratic approaches hide the political weakness of the public universities. These, in turn, have been weakened. In conclusion, three new trends are suggested: (1) public universities will seek to do with less government support - that is, the privatization of some American public university services; (2) they will seek to increase government's or society's dependency on what it is the public universities do - that is, making universities more immediately useful to government and society; and (3) they will increasingly organize political coalitions both inside and outside the universities. This last strategy implies greater collaboration between faculty, students and university administrators and between higher education, the public schools and other potential allies.