"Privatisation of the Universities"

It’s not long since we have witnessed the increase of university tuition fee from £3000 to £9000. It was good setback for most of the prospective and current university students, who want to get higher education before settling down for a career. As a consequence, we have seen protests in the streets of the country against increasing tuition fee; but nothing worked at the end as the policy of £9000 tuition fee has been implemented by the government irrespective of demonstrations by the students which reduced the number of students joining the universities eventually. Now, they are trying to privatise our top universities in the country.

 When we are approaching to a ‘market society’, where everything is for sale, there treating education as a product, that can be bought and sold, may not echo much appalling to some of us, who can picture education as a product. This concept of market is spreading faster than ever after the financial recession. It is not difficult to depict the rational for privatisation is financial. There is a great expectation that privatisation will help reducing government cost for education by creating a competitive market. While it is important to save money in this financial crisis, I would like to, without sounding reluctance to commercialisation, give some reasons why government should not privatise the universities.

Once privatised, education will become a product to the universities, and more or less, students will become consumers. Their traditional status as learners or researchers may disappear soon. It would not require any practical example how we consumers are treated by the companies in our daily life. Just think!! They are always up for their profit regardless our expectations from them, and it would be wrong to expect otherwise from private universities. When the main goal will be cutting cost and increasing profit, the quality of education is likely to be jeopardised. We have seen in recent years many companies, even the government departments, were reducing their staffs for saving money. (the implication being- same tutors might be teaching at several universities at the same time or some less qualified persons from other professions would be hired to do their job.) When there are not enough qualified staffs to do the job, the result will be substandard education.

Every year government spends millions of pound for university research facilities. It helped the universities of the country to get fame all around the world for inventing new technologies and ideas. Currently, there are five UK universities within the top ten universities of the world and thanks to the research facilities in our universities for that. However, it has been reported the UK is gradually falling behind in research comparing some other countries in recent years. In this situation, privatisation of the universities may badly affect the researching facilities of the universities and their fame in the world. It will become a trading place rather than a place of ideas and innovations.

Another significant point is that the privatisation will create a division for the university students. Some universities will be running under the current supervision of the government and some will be governed by other authorities ( with a regulatory body: see next para). So, the students from public universities may start thinking they are better than private university students or vice-versa. This division might not sound that dreadful, but it will bring along another division, the division for job opportunities. The employers may set different terms for different university students and would give preference one over another. This is quite evident in Bangladesh where a student graduating from a public university is more likely to get a job compared to his counterparts.

Though it can be argued that regulatory authorities may keep the situation alike by making sure the private institutions are maintaining their standards. If, it sounds persuasive or convincing for privatisation nonetheless it may not be so straightforward. The statistics from different countries especially countries with inequality tend to show- when a public function has been delegated to private companies with a regulatory body to monitor their activities and standard, there were corruptions, because the fierce competition of the market tempts some companies to bribe the authority to get their way. Are we ready to give away all of these?!

"Employment as Property"

 

Every day to day activity, we say things like- this is my house, my car, my land, my book etc. When we say this we usually tend show that we got possession on those things, meaning we are the owner of them and they are our property. To understand whether Employment of a person should be considered as property, we have to compare its characteristics with the characteristics of the items I have already mentioned, because they are already recognised as property. Lets find out the notions of property and compare them with Employment.

Historically, property is designated to those items which are confined and governed by the rules of property institutions and attributes rights and liabilities on the owner of it. Later courts used to define property as something that can be restored to the dispossessed owner rather than simply giving compensation for loss. With this notion we can easily accommodate house, land and cars which are governed by property institutions and they can be restored. Then it used to be the case that property is something that is tangible and has physical existence. Though, house, land and car can easily be accommodated with this notion, but it immediately raises questions about the things that we nowadays consider as property, like- shares in company and intellectual properties. They have no physical existence apart from a worthless piece of paper (certificate of share and intellectual property). So this definition can to be ruled out as it can't encompass all the properties.

Property in modern sense encompasses two basic elements besides their use and allocation as social wealth- (1) ownership and (2) right to exclude others from the item. In a broader sense these requirements mean- property is something that concerns with the ownership of object(s) which can be bought and sold and giving the owner of it exclusive right to exclude other from making any interference with it. If there is any interference with property then the owner will have right to bring action in the court and entitled to get monetary compensation. Alternatively, something can be property when the owner has sufficient control over the use of it. Again, the owner would have power to transfer his property during life time and upon death or may licence to someone allowing use of it for time being. In addition, an important aspect of property is taxability.

Now undoubtedly employment plays a vital rule in everyone's life but to classify it as property it has to match with the criteria I have mentioned above. First question to answer- are we the owner of our employment? As I mentioned ownership is something that can be transferred during life time and upon death, but for employment we can't not transfer it automatically to the successors. It is the company or institution who employs someone else to replace the position you are holding. You can't by yourself employ someone else at your position though recommendation is possible. From this point of view it may appear employment is not property. On the other hand, we have right to exclude others from interfering and give us the right to bring claim for dispossessing unfairly. Unfair dismissal and discrimination claims can be good example where a person can get monetary compensation as well. But it can be argued, we still have no exclusive right on it as we cannot do whatever we want to do at workplace. However, this is just an inconvenience because we can see can be restrictions on use of land as well (like- using for only residential purpose or can't exceed certain height). Moreover, we pay taxes for our employment as we do for any real property.

Climate change by 'global warming' and confusions!!

Global warming is a phenomenon, with which more or less we all are familiar, and thanks to our extensive scientific experiments and publications for that. It was familiarised for the very first time by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1890s showing that man made carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere causing global warming. Its popularity has spread even more when the scientists started to publish their predictions on the basis of the results they were getting from their experiments. These kinds of experiments on global warming and so do the predictions are going on for last two centuries, if not more, because of their significance in different sectors (like- climate change, government policies, power company strategy, human health, conflicts, biodiversity, agriculture and importantly insurance!).

When we see any heading in the newspaper saying ‘Antarctic ice melting is highest in 1000 years’ we immediately, almost intuitively, start thinking about global warming. Recently published survey report from Australian National University and British Antarctic Survey found the rate of Antarctic ice melting is much faster than most of the scientists predicted. The report compared the melting rate with the rate in 50 years ago, and the result is- it is currently melting ten times faster! This certainly concerns all of us. However, their conducted experiment shows something else as well that the global temperature has gradually increased 1.6 degrees Celsius or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 600 years. It may immediately question the issue of global warming if not melting of ice as it has a melting point (zero degree or above). Though the temperature was increasing it did not reach up to the melting point and it is still the case today. But the most fundamental question to ask is that what was causing the temperature to rise 600 years ago in such a rate. In asking this question I am not saying there was not any human activity that could have been influencing global warming but there definitely was not same amount of activities which are considered responsible for global warming as we are having today. So what made the rate of temperature rise pretty much similar? It trends to prove that the recent global warming and climate change are natural and there is nothing to do with the human activities.

Our global greenhouse gas emission has increased in many folds over the years since we started to use fossil fuel. Today’s emission of CO2 is 75 per cent higher than 1970s. But the recent statistics shows that the impact on climate change has slowed down ruffling all the scientists and the people who predicted the changes. It eventually forced IPCC to alter their exaggerated prediction about the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers by 2035. Now, they have developed another theory that the increase of industrial pollution in Asia or deep-ocean is taking more heat that the surface or clouds are blocking the sun from heating the planet or greenhouse gas traps less heat than it was predicted are contributing to less impact on global climate change. However, none of these theories has any scientific proof.

Although these questions are not answered yet, the consensus among the scientists is in the line with IPCC. It has been shown that more 90% of us think that human activities are the main reasons for global warming and climate change and there could be huge price to pay if we don’t take precautions now. If it is true then there would not be anything to account to our future generations for our inaction to reduce the impact on the environment. But there can be another arguments- can we held people responsible for something that is not conclusively proved? We all agree the global temperature is rising but what is causing this temperature to rise is still to be proved beyond reasonable doubt to justify the actions halting the activities thought to be responsible for the climate change.