Universities are among the UK's most successful
institutions. Collectively, they enjoy a global reputation that few British
institutions can match. Their research produces innovations of the highest
order. Their teaching attracts a hugely disproportionate share of the world's
international students.
Yet their future is being gambled on an unprecedented
programme of radical reforms. Nothing similar has been tried elsewhere. No
democratic mandate has been sought. These changes are grounded in wishful
ideological assumptions. Evidence suggests they will do more harm than good.
Such is the frantic pace of this revolution that few outside
universities are aware of its gigantic scope. Its financial dimension is
familiar in outline to the general public. Domestic tuition fees, unheard of
only 15 years ago, have been trebled this academic year, while 80% of direct
public funding has been withdrawn from undergraduate teaching. Even before
these changes, public spending on higher education was lower in the UK than
almost any other developed country, while business spending on research and
development was equally low and falling. Now, tuition fees in England are, on
average, the highest in the world.
Yet as public and corporate money is withdrawn, the
priorities and preconceptions of politics and business are being imposed on
universities more forcefully than ever. Research funding in the sciences is
diverted to meet the demands of industry; funding for the humanities is
explicitly tied to party-political slogans. Universities, once regarded as
self-governing communities of students and teachers seeking deeper
understanding, are now line-managed like private corporations, devoted to
maximising performance metrics which do not remotely capture what universities
aspire to achieve.
These management models impoverish teaching, undermine
creativity, trivialise research, and alienate teachers. Worse still, this
market system transforms students from active apprentices in the craft of
higher learning to passive consumers attempting to leverage their purchasing
power into high lifetime earnings. Despite public homage to the knowledge
economy, this new regime seems designed to make the careers of the next
generation of academics as precarious and unrewarding as possible.
The culmination of this policy is the introduction into
Britain of the for-profit university model which has proved so catastrophic to
students and taxpayers in the US. Commercial firms are lobbying for the legal
redefinition of what it means to be a "university" in England. Why?
Because their future profits depend on debasing the very institution they
pretend to emulate.
No organisation exists to defend academic values and the
institutional arrangements best suited to fostering them. The numerous
"mission groups" – the Russell Group, Universities UK, University
Alliance, and the rest – do not represent universities as such. They represent
senior university administrators, whose primary task is to advance financial
interests. Academic unions defend the working conditions of academics, not the
values that make their work worthwhile. Learned societies promote individual
disciplines, not learning as such. In such conditions, proposals which subvert
fundamental academic principles meet no effective opposition.
Many of Britain's most eminent academics and public
intellectuals have watched these developments with mounting alarm. Scores have
come together to consider how best to resist these changes before the damage
they cause is beyond repair. Among their number are past and current presidents
of Britain's academies of arts and sciences, Nobel prize winners, and a former
poet laureate.
The inaugural meeting of the Council for the Defence of
British Universities takes place on Tuesday. The question it confronts is of
vital national importance. Will the UK continue to enjoy one of its most
outstanding assets? Many of those most able to judge have concluded that it
will not, unless strenuous efforts are made to reverse the radical reform of a
fundamentally sound system.
Source: 11 November 2012,
The Guardian by Howard Hotson
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