When the University of Buckingham was founded more than 20 years ago, many wondered how long it would last. Others hoped that more private universities would follow to challenge the idea that all universities should be funded by the state. In Australia, Bond University started with similar expectations. Unlike in England, where Buckingham remains the only one that is private, Bond was followed by the foundation of a small private Catholic university. But it does seem unlikely that either country is about to open up to private universities as in the United States and parts of Asia.

The coalition government in Australia has just announced cuts and changes to the funding of higher education. There will be serious ramifications for some universities over the next three years and beyond if the policy continues. What struck me most, however, was the noticeably larger number of references to the need for privates sources of funding, to full fees, to "generating financial returns" and words like "privatising" and "corporatising". This is familiar to universities in the British and Commonwealth tradition: in short, almost everything that would raise private monies short of setting up private universities.

The Australian loyalty to this tradition moved me to look around at developments in Asia among non-Commonwealth universities. How do they divide between the state and the private? Also, do private universities enjoy the autonomy which the Commonwealth ideal promises?

The earliest debate about the state running its own education system came during the 11th century (the Song dynasty) in China. It led to nothing. Only the Imperial University was funded from the public purse. Beyond that, the court conducted public examinations to select officials for the empire, and this remained true until the 19th century. Private academies were set up locally, which concentrated on producing candidates for those examinations.

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Although none of these academies were able to sustain themselves for long, the idea of private higher education was widely accepted. Thus it was not surprising that, when East Asian countries like Japan, Korea and China established modern universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they permitted private ones to be set up, following the model of the United States. In the Philippines, too, under US tutelage, the mix of public and private universities was the norm. After the Pacific war, a new division occurred. The People's Republic of China closed its private universities, and other socialist regimes such as those of Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia also favoured public funding of higher education. Taiwan, however, followed the earlier Chinese policy of allowing private organisations to found universities, and South Korea encouraged many such institutions. Thailand and Indonesia, too, looked increasingly to the US and private institutions were permitted under closely supervised conditions.

Most recently, since the success of its economic reforms, China has modified its position. There has been a considerable decentralisation of higher education. The idea of "generating financial returns", of seeking private donations for national, provincial and local universities, and of charging students higher fees, has met with varying degrees of approval. It would seem that, before long, Vietnam and other countries may also go along this route.

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In Malaysia and Singapore, the Commonwealth model has been retained. The private colleges in Malaysia are business enterprises created to meet unsatisfied demand. They improved access for students and have contributed much to meet manpower needs. But they really arose from specific bottlenecks created by government policies and they depend on the support of their foreign partners for survival. The Malaysian government has been reviewing these policies and changes are being made which might alter the mix between public and private institutions. For 30 years large numbers of students had studied abroad, including those outside the Commonwealth framework. By recognising some of their degrees on their return, those who were sent to foreign private universities could be seen as a form of expatriate privatisation. The disadvantage there is that the policy as a whole led to a sizeable outflow of the country's resources.

It has long been assumed that both the US mixed pattern of public and private universities and the Commonwealth forms of public institutions could deliver what most countries want. Neither can demonstrate that it is more successful in serving national interests. The British restructuring of the past two decades has been based on the hope that the refashioned universities, learning selectively from the best practices of both US and Continental European examples, would bring forth something stronger and better. Australian and other Commonwealth universities are taking heart from those painful experiences and expect to learn enough to stay with that tradition.

From the educational point of view, which is the better approach? No one has successfully argued the toss from first principles. It is not even clear whether private universities in tandem, or in competition, with public institutions will improve educational quality.

The modern university in the West had grown up in the tradition of academic autonomy even when publicly funded. This concept has been strongly upheld in the Commonwealth university, at least in theory. In the US model, it has been taken for granted that privately funded institutions would enjoy greater academic autonomy, certainly from national or state governments, than those which depended on public funds. The principle is that legal, intellectual and political autonomy of higher education is essential for the health of these institutions.

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How does such an idea sit among the universities in Asia? There does not seem to have been any indigenous law that upheld the concept of educational autonomy in Asia. In China, for example, there had been the idea that the Imperial University might have an independent budget. This was again in the 11th century, but the experiment was quickly abandoned. As for private academies, they were not directly controlled by the court, but if they did not use the approved texts or produce enough successful candidates for the examinations which the court did control, they could not survive.

Elsewhere, there were examples of privately funded seminaries and what we might call professional schools and trade guilds, which were given the right to train the young in specific skills. Religious and spiritual education was treated with respect, but there were strict rules about orthodoxy, and heretical teachings were forbidden. Implicit was the idea that institutions were left alone provided they did what they said they were doing and observed the limits of what the court, the bureaucracy, and the religious leaders and guild chiefs would tolerate.

The tradition was that the sources of funding, whether the institution was public or private, were never important. What distinguishes modern higher education today is the explicit commitment to the idea that academic autonomy would give us the better product. Does this mean that the question of public or private funding should now matter less? From the variety of experiences in and outside Asia in recent years, I am inclined to agree. What should be demonstrated more often than has been done of late is that freedom for academe will contribute more all round. It is an asset that is worth paying for.

Wang Gungwu is chairman of the Institute of East Asian Political Economy at the National University of Singapore.

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