Ungrateful Son: In spite of the German taxpayers funding his entire education - from primary school to university - Dr Oliver Hartwich chose to devote his life to fighting against the principle of universal social entitlement. Labour's re-commitment to that principle prompted an immediate response from the Chief Executive of the New Zealand Initiative - successor to the Business Roundtable.
WHEN DR OLIVER HARTWICH departed his native Germany for the
Anglo-Saxon lands it was in high dudgeon. In spite of the fact that German
taxpayers had paid for his entire education – from primary school to university
– there wasn’t much evidence of gratitude. Meeting the cost of young Germans’
education out of the public purse was, in the newly-minted economist’s opinion,
a dangerous policy relic of Germany’s social-democratic past. The British and
the Americans had long since dispensed with the notion of publicly-provided tertiary education. It was,
therefore, to the English-speaking world that this eager young neoliberal
foot-soldier took his publicly-funded doctorate.
New Zealand is, of course, very much a part of that world.
Hartwich arrived here via England and Australia, where he was a major force at
the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies (an extreme right-wing think
tank). When the notorious Business Roundtable joined forces with the NZ
Institute in 2012, Hartwich was the corporate bosses’ pick for Executive
Director.
Moved to contribute an opinion piece to Interest.co.nz on
Labour’s re-commitment to the principle of universal social entitlement in
tertiary education, Hartwich has usefully rehearsed all the familiar neoliberal
excuses for making young people pay for their education.
“The first thing I would say about free education is that it
suffers from a basic flaw:” writes Hartwich, “If something does not cost
anything, it is not valued much either.”
This observation, Hartwich tells us, is born of his
“personal reflections of free tertiary education”, and is not to be confused
with rigorous policy analysis.
That being the case, let me respond in kind by declaring
that my own experience of free tertiary education threw up not one case of a
recipient who did not value their opportunity to explore the life of the mind
in their late teens and early twenties. Quite the reverse, actually.
University was a magical place, insulated from the charges
of the workaday world, and collectively dedicated to the expansion,
communication and acquisition of knowledge. If a vocation was one’s sole
purpose for attending, then those skills were available. But of infinitely
greater value to students than a mere “meal ticket” was the access that
university afforded to the signal achievements of their culture. Young people
emerged from tertiary study as both engaged and enlarged human beings.
Hartwich deplores this aspect of tertiary life:
“What it means in practice is that when university courses
are free, students will think about them differently. Some students may begin
their studies without much commitment because, well, it does not cost anything.
They might also then take a more relaxed approach to studying since, again, it
does not cost them anything (other than opportunity costs which are harder to
notice). With this attitude, these students may not even bring their studies to
a conclusion.”
It is clearly Hartwich’s view that the pieces of paper doled
out at the end of its courses are the be-all and end-all of university life.
This instrumental view of tertiary education lends itself to the notion that:
“as the recipient of something free, you are not in the best position to demand
better service. As a paying customer, suppliers need to treat you better if they
do not want to lose you. If customers are not paying, they may well be regarded
as a nuisance.”
It gets worse. “For a university to be run like any good
service provider,” says Hartwich, “it should think about its students as
clients. And for students to take their studies seriously, they should be
paying for them. Of course, for students who cannot afford to pay the fees,
there need to be financing options. But university education as such should not
be free.”
Nothing here about the pernicious consequences for both
academic rigor and student achievement of turning tertiary education into a
commodity. Fully enmeshed in the market economy, university “providers” cannot
afford to risk alienating their fee-paying “clients” by holding them to the
sort of rigorous academic standards that characterised my tertiary education.
If it comes to a choice between jettisoning standards or jettisoning students,
the commercially-driven university will sacrifice its standards every time.
Of course no neoliberal paean to user-pays tertiary
education would be complete without the ritual condemnation of
publicly-provided tertiary education’s allegedly socially regressive character.
“Finally, as someone who has successfully completed a
master’s and a doctorate, of course I have a much greater ability to generate
income than someone without such qualifications. So the question is, why would
I expect that other person to subsidise me? What right do I have to demand
people with poor skills in low-wage jobs to pay for my university education
that would yield me a much higher income than they would ever have? Isn’t this
grossly unfair for them?”
I am always astounded at the neoliberal’s confidence that
the above argument should be regarded as the clincher – against which no rational
or ethical response is possible. It is only possible to make this case,
however, if the concepts of citizenship and social reciprocity are first
eliminated from the equation.
Access to tertiary education is every citizen’s right, and
so it is also every citizen’s responsibility. The low-wage worker contributes
to the cost of a wealthy person’s children’s university degrees because the
wealthy person contributes to the cost of the worker’s kids’ post-school
education. For the low-wage worker, this is a huge step forward, comparable in
its life-enhancing effects to the provision of universal health care.
But the very notion of “middle-class welfare”, or, as
Hartwich puts it, “the reverse of income redistribution” only makes sense in a
neoliberal society which no longer subjects its wealthier citizens to the
rigors of progressive taxation.
Of course the graduates of Law and Medical School will earn
more than workers “with poor skills in a low-wage job”, but in a decent,
social-democratic society, the lawyer and the doctor will also pay much higher
taxes. It’s all about your fellow citizens paying you forward, and you then paying
them back.
This was the socio-political environment from which Dr
Oliver Hartwich fled and is ideologically committed to destroying. It is also
the socio-political environment in which I was raised, and which allowed me to
attend university without incurring massive debt. That Labour is pledged to
restoring this environment is extremely heartening. Not only because it will
make this a more just and equal country to live in, but also because any such
restoration of social-democratic values in New Zealand will, almost certainly,
see Dr Hartwich high-tail it for more congenial jurisdictions.
This essay was posted
on The Daily Blog and Bowalley
Road on Saturday, 13 February 2016.
