PUTTING ‘PUBLIC’ BACK INTO THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY Simon Marginson ABSTRACT The American public university is losing status vis-à-vis the Ivy League private sector. In mass education it is challenged by for-profit insti- tutions such as the University of Phoenix. Declining state financing is symptom- atic of the evacuation of public values inside and outside the university. This has proceeded furthest in the USA. Other university systems are affected by national/local as well as global/American factors. Nevertheless, most public universities are on the defensive. Intensified status competition, locking neatly into neo-liberal government, is reconstituting the field of higher education (Bourdieu, 1988) as a competitive market in private status goods. This, not a structural transformation consequent on changes in scale, is decisive. Universities have a capacity for bounded diversity and an underutilized potential in public discourse that enables them to combine openness with research and academic excellence, but not with high student selectivity and social exclusivity. The article comments on the implications of Craig Calhoun’s essay for reinventing the public university, focusing on two theorizations that provide resources for this: Samuelson (1954) on public and private goods, and Habermas (1989) on the public sphere. However, neither fully encompasses the university’s role in learning, scholarship, identity formation and self-alteration. KEYWORDS education markets • public good • status • universities • USA A growing literature suggests the ‘publicness’ of American public universities is out of step with the times. A highly effective institutional form that bundled together a great range of functions, providing access to an expanding proportion of young people while underpinned by community consensus and public finance, is under pressure from two other models. The first is the private research university, the Ivy League establishments at the Thesis Eleven, Number 84, February 2006: 44–59 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606060519