A former New Zealand vice-chancellor has cautioned that universities must be more than mere instruments
of economic growth and development. Bryan Gould, former vice-chancellor of the University of Waikato and current chair of
the board of the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, issued his warning in opening the University of Auckland's
winter lecture series, "Challenges for research in modern academia", earlier this week.
Calling on
universities to be vigilant not just in defending themselves against familiar threats, Mr Gould said, "They must also
be alert to new challenges, which sometimes come in unfamiliar guises." Expanding on the theme, he added that the danger
today is not so much that universities are threatened by direct, hostile, and deliberate assaults by governments or the private
sector, though it also must not be assumed that these were things of the past.
"The threat arises from the
growing importance that universities are increasingly invited to assume in promoting economic growth and development,"
said Mr Gould, adding that commentators from across the political spectrum and from all parts of the economy have agreed that
universities are essential agents of economic change.
"Our economic future is increasingly said to depend
on the research effort undertaken by our universities and by their role in producing graduates with the skills needed to promote
economic growth," he said. "This view is naturally congenial to the universities, since it affirms their value to
society and appears to guarantee at least an approximation of adequate funding. But the argument comes with an unstated but
potentially damaging downside, that this role is what universities are essentially about and that it is only to the extent
that they fulfil that expectation that they will be supported and funded," he said.
Pointing to the dangers
of the approach, he continued, "If it is asserted by political or business leaders that the universities have failed
to come up with the required outcomes - that the economy is, for example, short of particular kinds of graduates or is handicapped
by the failure to undertake particular kinds of research projects - then continued support and funding for the universities
will be placed at risk."
He said that the problem, then, is that universities would be tempted, so as to
maintain continued public support and funding, to go along with the inviting but dangerous assumption that their only true
value is as instruments of economic change. "In doing so, they would accept a barely recognised but increasingly damaging
constraint on their freedom to pursue knowledge - and we would have significantly misread our own intellectual history,"
he concluded.