For many years I have worked at one of the 40 or so
universities that describe themselves as a top-20 university. And when I
entered the profession, universities – though largely independent of government
– were part of the education sector.
We are now, in the eyes of government, nationalised
businesses that exist to serve the economy. The Universities Minister now reports
to the Business Secretary, not his counterpart in the Department for Education.
In that time, life has changed utterly for academics and
students alike. The value of teaching has been downgraded without mercy,
because it attracts no differential funding. When I arrived at my university,
we taught our undergraduates in groups of two; the numbers have gradually
increased, and now we teach them in groups of 13. This is an efficiency gain.
But despite these larger classes, which are typical of the
sector, standards have risen steadily: when I started we gave a first every
other year, and now we give a substantial number of firsts every year. As at
other universities, we are urged to give still more firsts in order to be
competitive.
We also receive weekly injunctions to apply for grants that
those of us in the humanities do not need – grants that will buy us out of
teaching, which can be done by an increasingly casualised workforce. Our
ability to procure grants is central to our survival as academics. In other
words, the value of our research is assessed by the amount of taxpayers' money
it has cost.
So how has this happened? The inappropriate notion that we
are businesses was first mooted in the Jarratt Report of 1985, in which we
learned that our universities were enterprises analogous to factories and that
academics were charged with 'delivering' education, and in that capacity
subject to key performance indicators. Students were deemed to be the products
of this manufacturing process, and these products were marketed to employers.
At a later stage, when fees were introduced, students ceased
to be products and became customers. As enterprises, our universities were
expected to compete against each other.
They were also expected to be properly
led, and so Vice-Chancellors and Principals acquired executive powers, senates
and councils were purged of troublesome academics, and large numbers of
managers were hired.
University councils were reformed to resemble boards of
directors, mostly populated by people from a business background; they are
people of good will who work pro bono, but apart from the chair and treasurer,
the complexities of the modern university are beyond the understanding of most
members, and they share a tendency to see universities as Mr Romney viewed the
US – as a business in need of downsizing.
And the hand of government has become gradually heavier.
Funding agencies, quality agencies and more recently the Office of Fair Access
have been introduced to monitor all aspects of universities' activities.
What, as Chernyshevsky and Lenin said, is to be done? It is
not enough to cry shame on governments that tax knowledge and heap bureaucracy
on academics, or indeed on Vice-Chancellors and Principals who describe
themselves as CEOs, pack our universities with managers, and devote their
energy to manipulating league tables and chasing brightly-coloured baubles.
We need, in the first instance, to articulate what has gone
wrong, to understand how one of the world's greatest systems of universities
has come to be threatened by managerialism and oppressive layers of
bureaucracy, a plight that puzzles and disconcerts our academic colleagues all
over Europe and the Anglophone world.
Then we will need policies to commend to this government and
its successors, policies based on careful consideration and wide consultation,
policies that will return the universities to academics and students, affirm
the value of education for citizenship and proclaim the primacy of teaching and
research. That is why this Council has been created.
Source: 14 November 2012, The Telegraph by Gordon Campbell,
Council for the Defence of British Universities.
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