What university makes a public good?

Relations between China and the United States will invariably influence the future of the human and natural world. New theory [Marginson, Simon, and Lili Yang. 2021. "Individual and Collective Outcomes of Higher Education; A Comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese Approaches." Globalisation, Societies and Education.] opened a space for more work on how higher education might support something like the second sort of future by generating collective or public goods. This response essay holds two assumptions: (1) Universities in both the Anglo-American and Sinic spheres are universities; (2) universities in the Anglo-American sphere are comparable to universities in the Sinic sphere, even when the point of comparison is to contrast. Empirical scholarship that investigates public good outcomes in different cultural and political formations will need some concept of the university to guide research. Operationalised concepts need to be manageable abstractions of real objects or processes. In this essay, I consider what each conception of the public good suggests about the usefulness of several of about the university. The university ideas considered here are the transactional university, the global research university, and the third university.