The Funding of Higher Education: Lessons from Europe’s Past

Abstract

Impassioned contemporary critiques of the alleged ‘marketisation’ of the concept of the institution of the university – now supposedly subject to the inexorable performative logic of neoliberal governmentality – routinely imply a preceding period when university education functioned innocent of commercial and financial imperatives. Yet acquaintance with the fiscal history of the European university, from its medieval ecclesial origins to its modern embrace by sophisticated state educational bureaucracies, reveals this impression of innocence to be a myth. From their foundation in the Middle Ages, through the convulsions of Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and Industrialisation, European universities have by necessity been deeply entangled with the operations of money and corporate power. Commonly struggling to maintain a viable resource base, and endemically prey to corruption and misappropriation, universities have been subject to the instrumental patronage of Church, Crown, city and state over many centuries. Stamped by both successes and failures, the pursuit of financial sustainability has produced imaginative collaborations and questionable compacts, the best and worst of which offer valuable lessons for future funding models of European Higher Education.