DAVID HARVEY HONORED IZMIR UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS

While the 2008 global crisis continues to affect the economies of rich countries, some of the most influential political economists got together in Izmir to discuss about its causes.  A four day workshop held in the Izmir University of Economics brought together 15 researchers some of which are the most renowned political economists such as David Harvey, Ben Fine, John Weeks, Anwar Shaikh, Simon Mohun, David Kotz, Alan Freeman, Al Campbell and Riccardo Bellofiore.

Professor Turan Subaşat from economics depart of Izmir University of Economics, as the organizer of the workshop has stated that the results of the discussions will be edited in a volume which will be published by the Edward Elgar.

“The workshop has been very helpful for me”
Assistant Prof. Altug Akin from Faculty of Communication at IUE had a chance to interview Prof. David Harvey, one of the most influential social scientist of the world, who was at Izmir University of Economics for the workshop.

Assistant Prof. Altug Akin: Let’s begin our talk with the workshop that you attended in our university. How did you like the workshop?

David Harvey: It’s been hard to digest all the contribution so far. People come to this type of events with diverse opinions and very different intellectual backgrounds. You try and find a fusion of ideas. So it has been very helpful for me to see what the other have to say and try to put it into your sense.

Altug Akin: All of the people who attended the workshop are academics. I would like to know more about your personal experiences of being in the academia more than half a century. What are the major transformations you have witness in the higher education realm?

David Harvey: There have been some radical transformations about how the academics work and how they live. For instance communication is much easier now. In 1960s to cross the Atlantic, it took five days on a boat. So visits abroad were very infrequent.  We did not travel much and we basically stayed at home. This, by the way, had some virtues: we were more active in the governance of our own institutions and localities. So being confined in a base meant that we were really active in that base in various ways.

Mobility, communication and academia
In 1970s, the movement was much frequent, and now we came to a point that I travel so much that I sometimes wonder if I have a base at all.

Altug Akin: Indeed you move around a lot: Last week you were in Amsterdam, now you are in Izmir and you will be in Chile soon. Thanks to this you are in touch with students from all around the world.

David Harvey: Yes, that’s true, there is a very communicated network. I have a web site (www.davidharvey.org) which is frequently visited. And this is a part of the transformation. So on the one hand, it means that knowledge is much more diffused around the world. It’s possible to go place, but of course you should watch what kind of places you go to. There is a Hilton-hotel-conference circuit where you could circulate the world without realizing what kind of world you are in. I always have contacts in the places that I go where they take to around the city to make me see local events, tastes and lives. For me this is a fantastic learning experience.  I could spend a day or two in a Brazilian favela or in a protest movement in Diyarbakır. I value that possibility a lot. But my academic colleagues sometimes do not concern themselves with that. But then you feel like a globalized commodity.

Distant education and satellite campuses
Altug Akin: Two of the most recent trends we observe in higher education are related to space, your field of expertise: Distant or internet based learning, MOOCs and birth of satellite campuses of reputable universities in places like Dubai or Hong Kong.  How do you see these trends?

David Harvey: Of course, education has become a commodity. In many parts of the world, there are actors who are busy with selling educational services, which can mean establishing campuses in Dubai or Singapore etc.  as well as opening up campuses in New York, London or Sydney for educating people from abroad via masters class and like. Like all of these things, it is a double edged sword. I am not convinced that distant learning or MOOC classes are going to take over; rather they will play a subsidiary role to face-to-face education. There is evidence right now that a quarter of a million people can enrol in an online class, and you would be lucky if five thousand people complete it.

What really worries me, however, is that the big institutions are going to use their reputation to dominate those MOOC markets. And we are going to see significant financial pressure on many higher education institutions in the second rank. This worries me in the sense that, MOOC seems to be a decentralizing platform which may centralize what the message is. If the only courses you can get are from Yale, Princeton and Harvard, you are going to get an orthodoxy which is going to bring the monopolization of knowledge. So it should be decentralized and it should be free. Only then, we can talk about a positive potential of these techniques. But it should not be forgotten that the big capital seeks ways to commodity and monopolize the nature of the knowledge that is available to the people.

Teaching Marx from distance

Altug Akin: Actually, you are a part of distance learning realm with your online course “Reading Karl Marx’s Capital with David Harvey” (https://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/).  You have lots of followers on this page.

David Harvey: Yes, it is true. My course is, of course, free. I do not make final exams or give home works. And people who watch the videos do not get any sort of accreditation. But still quite a lot of people follow the video. I hope that some of them learn more about Marx and the Capital. But of course I do not have a tool t measure how much they learn. Time will tell the outcomes.

Finally, let’s talk about the institution you work for: City University of New York (CUNY).
Our university has a tradition of public service. It’s a state university and it was tuition-free until crisis of 1970s forced us to charge tuition. It is a public university with a public mission and it is largely mass education for an immigrant population, a very diverse immigrant population.

During the 1930s for instance, CUNY had an incredible reputation as a place where immigrants right of the boat coming and going to college. During this period, CUNY educated more Nobel Prize winners than Harvard, Yale and those places. Since 1945, there has been a defunding of the public university and with an emphasis of supporting education in Columbia and NYU. So we have been the poor. But we still have the same public mission. And it has a good record of creating opportunities for the people who otherwise could not have it.  

“The results of the discussions will be edited in a volume”

The organizer of the workshop, Professor Turan Subaşat from economics department of Izmir University of Economics, on the workshop:

“While the 2008 global crisis continues to affect the economies of rich countries, some of the most influential political economists got together in Izmir to discuss about its causes. While there is no agreement amongst economists regarding the causes of crisis, a striking difference exists between the mainstream economists who focuses on policy mistakes and human nature (such as greed) and political economists who focus on the systemic (such as declining profit rates), conjunctural (such as oil price increases) and policy-created (deregulation of markets) causes.

A four day workshop held in the Izmir University of Economics brought together 15 researchers some of which are the most renowned political economists such as David Harvey, Ben Fine, John Weeks, Anwar Shaikh, Simon Mohun, David Kotz, Alan Freeman, Al Campbell and Riccardo Bellofiore. The results of the discussions will be edited in a volume which will be published by the Edward Elgar.“