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New Public Management
By Mayra Besosa
Since the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, a dominant trend in public policy has advocated application of private-sector management models to the public sector. The “new public management” model, part of this managerial trend, focuses on increased cost-efficiency and organizational flexibility. For public higher education, its implementation has meant less reliance on state and federal funding and more dependence on private gifts. It favors well-paid “expert” entrepreneurial bureaucrats as university administrators instead of career civil servants, as Wolfgang Drechsler, professor of public administration and government at the University of Tartu, writes in “The Rise and Demise of the New Public Management,” published in the September 14, 2005, issue of the Post-Autistic Economics Review. According to Anthony O’Halloran of University of College Cork, whom I interviewed in spring 2006, when he was a visiting professor at California State University, San Marcos, the new public management model is hostile to the notion and ethos of public service despite its widespread application in the public sector:
The New Public Management Model (NPM) is the ideological bedfellow of neoclassical liberalism. Its central goal is the application of private-sector principles to the public sector. The buzz words of NPM are efficiency, effectiveness, delivery, flexibility, measurement, and outputs. Noticeably absent from this list are the normative ideals of equality, common good, and justice. The fundamental question to be posed is as follows: what are the implications of transferring private-sector norms and practices to the public sector? The answer is clear: if there is a conflict between egalitarian concerns and efficiency, the latter prevails. The model is utilitarian and instrumental in its orientation. Outcomes and ends are paramount. In the academy, the model is hostile to Cardinal Newman’s celebrated quote of “learning for learning’s sake.” Small academic departments (ancient classics, minority languages, women’s studies) which do not exist to supply the labor market struggle in an NPM culture.
In contrast to the new public management, the values and practices of labor unions such as the California Faculty Association approximate the social democratic political ideology more closely than they do the ethos of the undiluted free market. Collectively, it is important for faculty to understand the larger implications of supporting a new public management approach to public-sector governance. The new public management model is most definitely not ideologically or politically neutral.
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