Honestly, I have no idea. Scientifically speaking, that is. Defining what does or does not constitute a public value is a field in its own right, one that lies well beyond my expertise.
After some digging through the literature, I think I may conclude that there is broad consensus among scholars that knowledge has intrinsic value. Fortunately, then, we are doing something that matters. Scientific knowledge also has all the properties of a public good as described by the sociologist Robert K. Merton in his essay The Normative Structure of Science (1942). As a university, we therefore rightly (but insufficiently…) receive public funding.
You would think: value and public good, so public value. But in the public administration literature the bar is set higher. Something is only called public value when it concerns societal ideals that the government must actively protect on behalf of its citizens, such as justice, democracy or privacy. In the standard lists, such as the one in the overview Public Values: An Inventory by Torben Beck Jørgensen and Barry Bozeman (2007), you will not find ‘knowledge’.
And from here on the ice gets more slippery. Because if, as a science researcher, you set out to argue that knowledge is in fact public value, you quickly run the risk of marking your own homework. Even so, I think there are at least two arguments for regarding knowledge, according to the stricter definition, as a public value after all.
The first argument comes from Bozeman. In his theory of Public Value Failure (2002), he writes that certain matters are so fundamental to the functioning of society that they simply cannot be left to the market. As soon as knowledge forms the basis for medical decisions, climate policy or our digital infrastructure, it must be a public value, because citizens have the right to access independent facts. From that perspective, Open Science is not a nice-to-have luxury but a hard societal obligation.
The second argument runs along the same lines and touches on our institutional reason for existence: independence. The public value lies not only in knowledge as a product, but in the existence of an institution that can generate and test that knowledge independently. Just as the justice system safeguards justice, so the university safeguards independent truth-finding, without profit motive or political colour.
So why does ‘knowledge’ not appear in the standard lists? Perhaps because it never seemed necessary. In the past, the intellectual front line lay self-evidently with the public universities. No longer. We share that front line with parties that command enormous computing power and capital — see also the DeepMind Nobel Prize. That strikes at the very core of our sovereignty: we cannot afford to become dependent on the market interests of Big Tech for our acquisition of knowledge.
So yes, it sometimes feels like marking your own homework. If we do not defend the importance of independent knowledge, who will? We will have to get a good grade to preserve that independence.
