09.06.2010

Universities or business?

Farzad Houshyar looks at the destructive role of the market in higher education

In the mid-1990s at a departmental meeting at a Russell Group^[1] British university, the head of department told his staff that the time for “snob research” was over and that, in line with guidance from the ministry of education, staff should concentrate on bringing funding from contracts and industrial collaboration.

What he meant by “snob research” was research on theoretical issues and, in this particular case, science and mathematics. His assertion that industrial funding would safeguard the department’s future was in line with government policy at the time - a policy that has evolved on campuses throughout the country since then: staff should seek deals with industrial companies to carry out testing and minor development - originally to subsidise their salaries, but nowadays to pay their entire salary and research costs. As far as science and engineering were concerned, for most universities (with the exception of a few elite institutions in the UK) this marked the beginning of the end for publicly funded innovative and theoretical research: the Science and Engineering Research Council reduced its funding year by year to such an extent that currently no-one but established professors has any chance of obtaining SERC grants.

At the end of that departmental meeting a research-active professor joked that if finance was the primary concern the department might earn more money if it bought flats in the areas neighbouring the campus and rented them out to staff and students, adding that it would certainly be a more reliable form of securing income than trying to get funding from industrial companies.

Throughout the last 15 years (13 of them under a Labour government) we have seen a constant worsening of the situation. University funding for theoretical research in science and engineering, as well as social sciences and humanities, has dropped constantly, while researchers have been forced to seek funding from industrial collaborators - financial institutions, banks and the defence industry. The financial crisis has now dried up many of these resources and, of course, with massive cuts in public spending, universities are facing a major crisis.

Corporations and clients

As a result of this commodification of higher education, the extent to which universities can be considered academic institutions - places to discover, educate and transmit - has been constantly diminished. Instead they are ‘corporations’, where highly paid managers and bureaucrats produce ‘strategic plans’ and seek short-term ‘business solutions’ - at the expense of the ‘academic workers’: lecturers, professors and researchers.

As for students, they are ‘customers’, while degree subjects are constantly modified to accommodate the latest trend that will attract more ‘clients’. Some of these trends last less than six months but with this volatile, short-termist attitude to higher education, who cares? New, ‘fashionable’ degree titles are created, only to be abandoned the next academic year. This year’s ‘computing network and entrepreneurship’ is replaced by next year’s ‘sociology and medical ethics’. University managers have created a whole vocabulary - ‘educational policy new speak’ - all for the purpose of explaining cuts: staff are constantly reminded of the need for ‘flexibility and adaptability’, for increased ‘efficiency, diversity and effectiveness’. Faculties and offices responsible for academic standards are replaced by ‘corporate communications’. Image is everything and content hardly matters.

The policies of the Labour government throughout the late 1990s and in the first decade of this century encouraged this model through the squeeze on student funding, the desire to expand and the introduction of a ‘market’ in fees and bursaries. The new Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition will do the same. Students, and to a certain extent parents as fee-payers, are forced to take their role as consumers seriously. This is inevitable, as they are in a direct cash relationship with universities and like all customers demand results in exchange for their money.

The labelling of students as customers has other serious consequences. There is inevitably a level of pressure on academics to make sure that their universities are ‘marketable’ to current and potential customers. League tables put universities under pressure to mark leniently and to overlook all but the most flagrant plagiarism. Extortionate fees for international students force many academics to be even more lenient towards this category, whilst many believe institutions are awarding degrees to overseas students who lack basic language skills because of the higher fees such students pay. In any case no-one can doubt the lucrative nature of the foreign student market as a major source of income for many universities.

University league tables and the National Student Survey work like school performance tables and customer surveys. They encourage students and parents to shop around. However, student survey questionnaires have their own critics, with some comparing them to John Major’s traffic-cone hot line (they were both started at the same time and perhaps for similar reasons). Some consider it ironic that so far the front runners for these ‘questionnaires’ have been the Open University and the University of Buckingham (Britain’s only private university). Does this imply that in order to be popular universities should avoid recruiting school-leavers?

According to professor Jonathan Wolf (head of philosophy at University College London), “The National Student Survey’s entire point is publicity, to guide future applicants in their choices. Who knows whether it has any effect? But still, some think, better safe than sorry. This year, several departments have been accused of trying to manipulate their scores by means of adopting the universal slogan of mediocre restaurants: ‘If you have a complaint, tell us; if you have a compliment, tell others.’ Given that the survey is a comparative marketing exercise, the only surprise is that it took so long for alleged interference to surface. But I wouldn’t dream of telling students what to write. As if they would listen. Obviously, a more subtle approach is required. I know, I’ll order some pens. They’ll have the message: ‘Philosophy at UCL: I couldn’t be more satisfied’.”^[2]

Other universities are using less ‘subtle’ messages to move up in the National Student Survey league. Posters throughout one campus had a single message: “I love this university.”

When it comes to research, we are dealing with a similar commodification, but with more dangerous consequences. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) submission, ‘research income’ played a role as important as the number of journal papers submitted by academics - with the current state of manufacturing in the UK, it would have been almost impossible to obtain large grants or research contracts from moribund industries for science and engineering departments. The obvious place to seek funding was the arms industry and that is the route taken by most research-active departments. Medical faculties have to rely on drug companies and trusts, while pure science subjects face an uncertain future.

Arms industry

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been contributing factors to the increase in military research, as the arms industry recovers from the fall in income after the end of the cold war. Funding by research councils has fallen considerably and departments often consider military research as the only means of surviving. There are alternative areas still available to engineers and scientists. However, university income brought in by such projects often does not match that from the military.

The next RAE (about to be replaced by the Research Excellence Framework as the “new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions”^[3]) is driven by so-called ‘scientometrics’ (science measurement), where ‘research contracts and funding’ will play an even more important role in the ‘research rating’ of a given university department.

This will lead to more pressure on university departments in addition to the need to attract more fee-paying overseas postgraduate ‘clients’. Government funding of universities is directly proportional to their RAE research rating, so departments with less than ‘grade 4 RAE’ in the older universities will most probably face closure or merging with other departments.

In many science and engineering departments the kind of research involved in military contracts is of a low level. The air industry, for example, is relatively conservative in its approach to new ideas and therefore most of the current contracts it gives out involve the minor development or redesign of existing equipment rather than anything innovative or ground-breaking. As a result the research involved in these projects is of poor quality, often using underpaid research assistants in what would more accurately be called retesting of existing aircraft - perhaps introducing new material (lighter steel, stronger plastic, etc) for cost-cutting purposes.

The arms industry is certainly not interested in “snob research”. Who needs the enhancement of theoretical understanding? Who needs mathematical input? Current planes have separate control systems for each section: electrical, hydraulic and fuel. Designing a single system would be more reliable and more efficient. However, ‘complex systems research’ would rely heavily on mathematical theory and would require a different type of funding - beyond the intelligence and capabilities of those involved in current aircraft research, which is funded by British Aerospace or ministry of defence budgets.

Many academics (for example, members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) have in the past refused to be involved in military or nuclear research. Since the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq the number of academic engineers and scientists who have withdrawn from projects that involve military funding has increased. Often they are amongst the most able theoretical researchers in science and engineering, yet they are penalised for refusing to accept military funding.

‘Business solutions’

In social science faculties, the few remaining philosophy departments provide an obvious target for university managers (people joke of introducing ‘philosophy and business’ degree courses). Departments that should be playing a central role in any higher education establishment are being closed down one after the other. Public funding priorities encourage the establishment of centres of ‘global security’ at the expense of social theory.

The management of Kings College London, recently in the news for plans to close down its philosophy department, explains redundancies in a memorandum to staff as necessary to “create financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment”.^[4] Yet the same institution has, according to novelist and art historian Iain Pears, assembled in recent years an “executive team with all the managerial bling of a fully-fledged multinational, complete with two executive officers and a chief information officer”.^[5] Kings spent £33.5 million on administrative costs in 2009, but could not afford to employ world-class philosophy professors. Similarly Glasgow University can afford a corporate communications group with 26 employees, but it cannot afford expert immunologists and parasitologists in its faculty of biomedical and life sciences (FBLS).

The ‘business solution’ at Sussex was to close down a unique research centre, the Warburg Institute, ending its tradition of expert teaching and research since before 1900. As one Sussex academic pointed out, “The result will be that students get a negligently reductive, dangerously simplistic view of history. You don’t have to go to university for that - just turn on the telly.”^[6]

In February, with the threat of compulsory redundancies at Leeds University, professors and lecturers attended impassioned union meetings and the University and College Union increased its membership by 400 in less than a month. As elsewhere, complaints about attacks on academic freedom coincided with claims that highly gifted academics were being forced to reapply for their jobs. In a letter to staff Leeds vice-chancellor Michael Arthur explained: “new strategies to make [biological sciences] academically and financially sustainable necessitates reductions in staffing”.

Cumbria and Wolverhampton ­universities are shelving entire ­campuses, while others, such as Worcester and Hertfordshire, have put building plans on hold. Wolverhampton has also stopped recruiting students for its German courses in September and is “reviewing its other European languages”.^[7]

In Glasgow, senior management’s new strategy, its ‘business plan’, came under the title of ‘restructuring’. In October 2009 the university’s principal assured staff that this ‘strategic plan’ was not going to lead to job cuts. Yet by April 2010, 80 academic staff had received letters informing them they were in compulsory ‘redundancy pools’ facing the threat of dismissal. Staff and students have opposed these proposals.

A motion to the local UCU annual general meeting states: “Morale amongst staff at Glasgow University is at an all-time low and the university faces a ‘crisis of the mind and spirit’. Staff in FBLS, education and elsewhere are facing compulsory redundancies with drastic consequences for university teaching and research, while managers and bureaucrats are changing the very foundations of academic life, converting the university from an educational institution to a business corporation. We are convinced the current policies will damage the university’s academic reputation.”

Of course, no-one should be under any illusion that universities were providing equal and fair education for all in the 1960s and 70s, or that research during this period was solely for the common benefit and the profit of none. However, one can say with a level of confidence that the current situation marks a serious deterioration of the purpose for which universities came into existence, a deterioration that will have far more serious consequences than the current job losses on various campuses.

It is no surprise that at a time of economic crisis capitalism cannot be trusted to safeguard anything of academic value. The current problems facing higher education are only a small example of the destruction imposed by market forces. That is why fighting this process cannot be limited to ‘anti-cuts’ campaigns, which at best might save a few jobs here and there. We must challenge the concept of universities as business corporations and expose the role of the market in higher education. We must defend not just jobs, but academic freedom.

Notes

1. The Russell Group describes itself as “representing the 20 leading UK universities, which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector” (www.russellgroup.ac.uk/our-universities).
2. The Guardian May 6.
3. www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref
4. Times Higher Education May 6.
5. leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/03/the-paleographers-and-the-managers-a-tale-of-modern-times.html
6. Times Higher Education January 21.
7. Ibid.