When a well-bred Yale alumnus like William F. Buckley, Jr., sardonically suggests that his alma mater donate itself to the state of Connecticut (“To tell the truth, I don’t know that anything much would happen.”), some conventional assumptions require reexamination. Chief among these is the much ballyhooed distinction between “private” and “public.” Analysis reveals serious ambiguities. We lack an agreed-upon notion of what defines our types. Different observers define the private-public split by different criteria. In fact, criteria are usually implicit and fuzzy, but even when they are explicit and clear, they vary. What defines a private institution for one observer does not do so for another. And the problem goes beyond this definitional conflict. As will be shown at least for higher education, no behavioral criterion or set of criteria consistently distinguishes institutions legally designated private from institutions legally designated public. Surely this volume’s chapters, on both schools and universities, arrive at no such criteria; instead, as discussed below, several provide evidence of increasing private-public blurring. In a desperate attempt to reassert its distinctiveness, the U.S. private higher-education sector has recently rebaptized itself “the independent sector.” The new nomenclature, while it brings private higher education under a terminological umbrella widely used by the U.S. nonprofit world, contributes nothing to definitional clarity. It is simultaneously intended to legitimize the private sector’s claim to the public dollar (by downplaying privateness) and yet to distinguish that sector from the public sector by emphasizing its autonomy from government. The first aim, of course, undermines the second. Looking abroad seems to frustrate yearnings for clear definitional usage. England, for example, long noted for its paradoxical labeling of private and public secondary education, offers an ambiguous picture at higher levels as well. All the universities, even those financed over 90% by the government, form what is still frequently called the autonomous or private sector, distinct not from public universities but from the technical sector of higher education (which is consensually considered public). Increasingly, however, one hears England’s universities identified as public.
Alma mater, ¡Talithá kum!