Private Goods, from Florence Nightingale to Wendy Brown
Yesterday, Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown gave a once-in-a-lifetime talk at the Graduate Center—the kind that reminds you what it means to be a political theorist—about the way in which financialization—not just privatization or corporatization—had transformed the academy. Through a deft re-reading of Max Weber’s two vocation lectures, Brown showed how much the contemporary university’s frenzied quest for rankings and ratings has come to mirror Wall Street’s obsession with shareholder value.
In the course of her talk, Brown briefly dilated on the suspicion of public goods in today’s academy. She referenced one university leader saying, with no apparent irony, that the problem with state funding is that it comes with strings attached. The unsaid implication, of course, is that private funding is somehow free of those constraints, a comment that Brown used to open a window onto our contemporary infatuation, even in the academy, with the world of private money and private funding.
So it was with a weird sense of dissonance that, after I got home from Brown’s talk, I stumbled upon this passage from Lytton Strachey’s infamous essay on Florence Nightingale in his Eminent Victorians. Strachey is talking about Nightingale’s expedition to the Crimean War in 1854, where she takes over the nursing care in a hospital for Britain’s wounded in the outskirts of Istanbul. The conditions in the hospital are atrocious, but Nightingale takes to remedying that with a sense of Napoleonic purpose. So skilled and effective is she that a Mr. Macdonald, the administrator of a private charity for the wounded funded by the London Times, makes sure that all of his fund’s monies go directly under her control.
Most observers are ecstatic. The response of the British government, Strachey notes archly, “was different.”
What! Was the public service to admit, by accepting outside charity, that it was unable to discharge its own duties without the assistance of private and irregular benevolence? Never! And accordingly when Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, our Ambassador at Constantinople, was asked by Mr. Macdonald to indicate how the Times Fund could best be employed, he answered that there was indeed one object to which it might very well be devoted—the building of an English Protestant Church at Pera.
Autres temps, autres mœurs.