Part of the problem with the unclear use of the different concepts that interest us here stems from their application across the different dimensions of higher education reality, often conflated or mixed. Despite the fact that, at least since the work of Burton Clark (1986), the structure of the higher education system has been abstracted and presented in more general forms, the advent of globalization made apparent the inattention in the field to the interrelation between the local, the national and the global (Marginson and Rhoades 2002). It formed evident problems—and indeed some propositions were—rightly—accused of the reification of nation and state-centered methodologies (Dale 2005). To avoid replicating such errors, before I proceed to the presentation of the substantial differences between the concepts in question I will attempt a brief systematization of the layers of higher education that will be used in the ensuing analysis. The main aim of this procedure is to lay out the ground for an efficient and convincing differentiation between the particular set of concepts rather than offer a comprehensive and original systematization of higher education reality per se.
For this reason and building on earlier studies attempting a similar systematization within the analysis of the public/private axis in higher education (Calhoun 2006; Enders and Jongbloed 2007; Filippakou 2015), in the remaining part of this section, I propose to consider higher education in relation to (a) ontology, (b) politics, (c) ownership, (d) governance, (e) benefits, and (f) finance. Importantly, however, since they are intended to grasp and describe a reality that overflows national borders, the concepts associated with the order of the common find no easy fit within the modern dualisms of public and private and the nation-state and the market. In deploying these concepts, I will, therefore, be paying particular attention to their consequences for thinking across the local, national, and global levels of higher education—that is, for understanding their constant interaction.
Ontology
Overall, the ontological dimension provides the answers to questions such as: what exists and how it exists? What could be seen as existing in higher education through the prism of specific ideas? To make a clear distinction between the three common-related concepts in question, we should start with the most fundamental ontological assumptions that they assume by inspecting what elements are emphasized and how they relate to each other.
The concept of the common good that comes from political philosophy (Deneulin and Townsend 2007) places the ontological emphasis on organic wholeness, an original relationship in which the actions regulated by specific normative ideals (solidarity, global cooperation, equality) are capable of stabilizing the harmonious relationship within the whole (e.g., given community, nation or humanity) and between its parts (e.g., particular actors). Higher education and science seen through this prism come under the efforts to articulate and secure a shared interest of humanity (Tian and Liu 2018). At national and global levels, the common good in higher education may serve as a signpost to direct the sector towards cooperation (against competition), solidarity (against selfishness), and equality (against hierarchy) (Marginson 2016) contributing to formation of a different set of standards for teaching students as citizens (also global citizens) or globally and nationally responsible participants of the given professions.
The economic concept of the commons (Ostrom 1990) moves us further towards a more materially understood reality of self-regulated relations between the subjects of given practices. It encompasses the organization of relations within a fragment of the reality of production of goods or resources (material, such as drinking water; or immaterial, such as knowledge) undertaken at different scales (local, national or global) and organized and managed by the producers themselves (in a direct or representative form). Seen from this perspective, distributed but network-connected resources are administered by communities (indicatively, a global movement for open science) can be of assistance to the state (or transnational entities) and serve as a partner in the joint management, at different levels, of the sector of higher education (Eve 2015).
Finally, the ontological focus of the political-economic concept of the common is what we share and what influences the further potential for this sharing: the level of relations. Thus, it implies unmediated, immanent (direct), and self-determined (democratically organized) material associations among the subjects of practices (Hardt and Negri 2009). Those practices are not necessarily solely sector-limited. The ontological assumptions present here broaden the scope provided by the concept of the commons and gird a large set of productive horizontal practices. The common traverses reality. It is a material dimension that binds socio-economic actors together. Higher education, seen from this angle, flows beyond its institutional or system-wide form to embrace different grassroots educational and knowledge-production activities that take place beyond the market and the state (Kamola and Meyerhoff 2009; Roggero 2011; Pusey 2017).
Politics
Ontological horizons implied by the three concepts relating to common dictate the shape of the sphere of politics within higher education, that is: Who determines what counts? What are the sides of conflicts around values in higher education? Who dominates these conflicts? A politics of higher education (present and future) as seen from the angle of each of the concepts is done on a differently structured arena.
In this context, the common good can be seen to presuppose the existence of an ethical community of people who come together to realize a common cause (Boni and Walker 2013), like for example, the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge of humanity based on the ethos of science (Merton 1973). It is assumed that such ethos, when shared, allows the relationships within the field to become less competitive and more consensual. Shared principles (including academic freedom, ideas of collegiality) and ethical stances enable people on a national and global scale to realize common goals in higher education (Finkin and Post 2009). Contributions to the global common good (volume of knowledge, global citizenship) based on trust, and horizontal cooperation can be observed in the case of World Class Universities that collaborate productively across borders and centre/periphery divisions (Marginson 2018).
The concept of the commons implies first and foremost the politics of—and specifically, against—knowledge enclosures (Hess and Ostrom 2007). Enclosures serve as an essential reference for the analysis of the changing landscape of global science and higher education (Bollier 2002; Peters 2009; Peekhaus 2012). As in eighteenth-century England, where the beginnings of capitalist production were bound with the deprivation of the masses’ basic means of reproduction (access to land held in common), so, today, the competitive market relations installed within university walls contribute to the enclosure of the resource of knowledge, both in research and teaching-related contexts. The intellectual commons are permanently threatened by today’s market-oriented higher education setting, with its promotion of intellectual property, knowledge transfers, and oligopolistic academic publishers. The commons (in their liberal interpretation presented here) are an equal partner with state/public authorities in managing the higher education reality, while market entities are forces that drive enclosures (Peters 2009) and must be resisted or regulated.
The view of politics that is drawn by higher education researchers who refer to the concept of the common (Roggero 2011; Neary and Winn 2012; Pusey 2017) is rooted in its antagonistic relation to both the private and the public, the market (or capital) and the state, pictured as institutions that continuously transcend the realm of the social. Adopting this perspective gives a chance to conceptualize and outline an alternative to the university trapped in a vicious cycle between the order of public scrutiny and marketization, as well as to capitalism itself (Kamola and Meyerhoff 2009; Berardi and Ghelfi 2010; Roggero 2011; Pusey 2017).
Ownership
Such an understanding of the ontological–political sphere of higher education provokes further, more concrete questions on the organization of the property relations within the common-based sector (existing or projected): Who owns what? Who controls higher education institutions? Who owns the products? How products circulate?
The political ontology implied by the concept of the common good suggests the assumption of a possible return to clear-cut ownership boundaries within the public and the private sectors (UNESCO 2015). Simultaneously, it allows us to project the redirection of the public sector towards the realization of the outputs that are owned by all, manifested in, inter alia, the production of knowledge as a global common good (Marginson 2016, 2018). From this point of view, like in the Chinese case study analyzed by Tian and Liu (2018), the public systems of higher education in the dominant countries are supposed to assume global (or even planetary) responsibilities for “the shared future for mankind” (2018: 20). That is, contributing to the development of publicly accessible results of frontier research and to an expansion of the global, public provision of higher education.
This ethical imperative recedes to the background in the context of the commons, which, in their liberal interpretation, forms merely a complementary model for (private and public) property relations in higher education (Peters 2009: 221). It is assumed that the free and open production of knowledge based on the commons could reinforce the existing order and improve the situation of higher education and science systems. The academic commons (Bollier 2002; Madison et al. 2009), owned and controlled by their producers and consumers, can—among other things—take the form of open-science movement (Eve 2015), the introduction of accessible infrastructural format for open-access journals such as Open Journal System, or, like in the case studied by Roxa and Martensoon (2014), an organized way to manage and control the critical but intangible resource of academic prestige within institutions.
In contrast, the common in higher education is not a new kind of property (Hardt and Negri 2017: 97); it is instead viewed as a drive towards the conversion or dissolution of both public and private property relations within higher education—or the creation of more common relations beyond it (Neary and Winn 2012). This conversion movement is organized through democratically run and owned autonomous educational initiatives (Kamola and Meyerhoff 2009; Pusey 2017) or networks of teaching and learning cooperatives (Cook 2013; Jossa 2014; Neary and Winn 2017). Examples include different grassroots initiatives that have emerged from the waves of students’ and academics’ protests, like the University of Organized Optimism (Hall and Winn 2017), diffused and networked research structures such as Italian UniNomade (Berardi and Ghelfi 2010) or the Japanese student-run SHURE university (Li 2017).
Governance
Governance is a significant dimension of higher education reality. The key questions that arise are as follows: Who and how one governs? Who and how one regulates the system/institutions?
The common good perspective on governance presupposes a vision of higher education systems driven by collegial authorities. The autonomy, academic freedom, and democratic self-regulation of the academic community of scholars and students within the public and the private higher education institutions are realized for the common good of society at large (Finkin and Post 2009). The cosmopolitan academic community, regardless of its institutional affiliation, is expected to democratically manage the production of knowledge and education, in harmony with the common good. This perspective assumes a continuity between the realm of the public and that of the common (Locatelli 2018), seeing in the modern state a guarantor and supporter of the self-ruling community of scholars and students.
The self-governed networks of the commons are respected or supported by the state and the system of public universities (Peters 2009). Educational and knowledge production practices in the form of the commons can co-exist with the regular public initiatives. Like in the case of international initiatives for pooling the teaching materials or research (like e-preprints repository—arxiv.org) as the commons, the contributions or control exceed national borders. The commons can also be formed within the higher education institutions themselves. They are their daily reality (Marginson 2004a)—as non-institutionalized practices of sharing and learning together (Roxa and Martensoon 2014). At this level, the commons operate by “collegial” principles, thereby escaping direct “state,” “bureaucratic,” “market,” or “managerial” coordination.
Higher education cooperatives and autonomous educational initiatives are usually democratically self-governed by their participants, creators and users (like SHURE University in Japan or Mondragon University in Spain) and either formed outside the existing higher education institutions or based on conversion or dissolution of public or private institutions (Winn 2015). All these initiatives contribute to the development and consolidation of conditions for the social and fully democratic management of the wealth of knowledge and learning processes within and beyond their institutions.
Benefits
Proceeding to the issue of benefits from higher education that can be investigated through the set of concepts discussed in this paper, we need to look for the answers to the following questions: Who benefits? Moreover, who gets what?
The common good perspective emphasizes general collective (Tian and Liu 2018), societal (Finkin and Post 2009), relational and environmental (Barnett 2017) benefits related to the contribution/s made by higher education. As recently indicated by Simon Marginson (2016), the benefits drawn from the common good have both a global and a national dimension. On the one hand, the common good perspective fosters commonality between researchers and students across national borders: for example, through the globalization of research and the resulting scientific discussion on a global scale (Marginson 2018). On the other hand, at the national level, it favors “creating common relationships and collective benefits in the context of solidarity social relationships within a given country” (Marginson 2016: 16–17). Moreover, from the side of higher education institutions, the orientation towards the common good enables the stabilization of a coherent set of collegial values (Finkin and Post 2009).
In the context of the liberal interpretation of the commons, the commons-based open science and open education benefit societies at large (both at national and global level), while providing accessible resources for business and firms. Furthermore, at the institutional level (for example, within a single department or institution), the commons as an organizational form could prove useful in stimulating internal cooperation that may foster external competitive advantages. Examples of this were shown recently by Roxa and Martensoon (2014), in their study that focused on mechanisms for securing high-quality research and education within an institution striving for academic excellence. It has been proven that small academic groups can manage a resource that is both non-excludable and rivalrous, like academic prestige, as academic commons and in way that is beneficial and prospective for the institution itself (its students and academic employees) by both controlling the inclusion of new participants (producers and consumers of prestige) and regulation of their daily work to foster the reproduction of such commons.
When it comes to the common, the main benefits that accrue from higher education practices organized along these lines are the potential for growing social autonomy and expanded social reproduction (Roggero 2011). Institutions, like higher education cooperatives (Neary and Winn 2017) or universities of the common (Pusey 2017), stimulate internal and external (local/national/global) cooperation, secure and stabilize working relations within the organization by submitting them under democratic control (Azzellini 2016), and overcome academic hierarchies that are detrimental for the progress of knowledge production and dissemination.
Finance
The final aspect that needs to be discussed is the sphere of higher education funding: what gets funded and by whom? Who finances the institutions and how? Who pays for higher education/research?
When the common good is considered the burden of financing of higher education (or at least the public part of this sector) is supposed to be shouldered by the state. On a general level, this vision differs little from the classic social-democratic proposals as it emphasizes the responsibility attached to the state, the importance of the extended tax system that would support the delivery of the supra-individual benefits of higher education, the cooperation required at the global scale, and the contribution to the spread of equality and social justice (Marginson 2016).
In the liberal interpretation of the commons infrastructure for sharing and reproducing them (such as different platforms for knowledge sharing, academic repositories, and so on) is supposed to be financed either through public funds or by producers and users (Peters 2009). In the case of MOOCs, for instance, public and private higher education institutions fund the production of the educational content and pool it as a common resource openly available online (Hall 2015). This vision assumes the productive coexistence of the state and the market while allowing for the possibility of the existence of a space that does not fall entirely within one of two poles (public/private). In this conception, however, there is an intrinsic tension that hinders the establishment of a boundary around the eligible (and paid-for, for example, through fair taxes) use of the common property by private entities, which would not become another round of enclosures and appropriation.
From the perspective of the higher education activities organized according to the logic of the common, the educational and research processes are self-sustained and self-financed by the producers and users on a democratic and voluntary basis, as they are connected with the broader social movement that aims to organize socio-economic reality around values of cooperation and mutuality. Several successful recent projects could be pointed in this context, such as the long-term experiment of the Basque cooperative University of Mondragon in Spain (Wright et al. 2011; Boden et al. 2012), the cooperatively run UK-based Social Science Center in Lincoln (Neary and Winn 2017). Or alternatively, the network of Academies of Solidarity, self-funded academic organization of support that organize teaching and research practices outside the public higher education system, that emerged in 2016 in Turkey after a series of political purges of academics protesting against the Turkish government actions (Bakırezer et al. 2018).
A systematization of the six dimensions of higher education discussed above is provided in Table 1.
Table 1 Six higher education dimensions and the modes of their organization in line with the concepts of the common good/the commons/the common. Source: The author. *Liberal version