Redefining Public and Private in Asia Pacific Higher Education

Abstract

Higher education institutions throughout the world are engaging the challenges they face within a context of competing public and private spheres. As we have indicated in other chapters, the core concepts of “public” and “private” carry a set of critical meanings concerning the conduct of life within the state and the ways authority is constituted in a society and given issue through the rule of law. These concepts also have a reality in social life—a way of being in practice—that is far more complex and ambiguous than suggested by their formal and legal constructions. This often has been the case in most societies, as the needs for institutional flexibility at a given historical moment cannot be readily resolved at the interface between formal public or private institutions as constituted.