In recent weeks the collapse of this policy has been demonstrated by the wave of redundancies engulfing British universities. Looking for mainstream media coverage where I would expect to find it, it's hard even to locate the education coverage at all on the BBC or Guardian sites these days, but the story has been well covered on social media.
And the pithiest comment on it is to be found there too:
This anecdote neatly encapsulates a lengthier observation by Stefan Colini in the London Review of Books in 2013:
Future historians, pondering changes in British society from the 1980s onwards, will struggle to account for the following curious fact.
And because this is Britain, these new business-like universities turned out to feature indifferent senior managers on grossly inflated salaries.Although British business enterprises have an extremely mixed record (frequently posting gigantic losses, mostly failing to match overseas competitors, scarcely benefiting the weaker groups in society), and although such arm’s length public institutions as museums and galleries, the BBC and the universities have by and large a very good record (universally acknowledged creativity, streets ahead of most of their international peers, positive forces for human development and social cohesion), nonetheless over the past three decades politicians have repeatedly attempted to force the second set of institutions to change so that they more closely resemble the first.
Some of those historians may even wonder why at the time there was so little concerted protest at this deeply implausible programme. But they will at least record that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies. If you still think the time for criticism is over, perhaps you’d better think again.
I agree with the thrust of this post, and certainly don't want to defend the Coalition's higher education policy, but I don't think you've got the chronology right. You write "But from 2010 the Coalition was determined they [universities] should be run more like businesses." I think the key period was the Blair government (although with movement already before that). This began with the introduction of tuition fees in 1998, which profoundly reconfigured 'students' as 'customers', and ended with Peter Mandelson commissioning the Browne Review in 2009. It reported in 2010, and its recommendations were the basis for Coalition policy. Significantly, Browne was an oil executive, and the Commission's members included more businesspeople than vice-chancellors. In between were all sorts of changes making universities more 'business-like', for instance the massive growth of financialised private student accommodation, and increased outsourcing.
ReplyDeleteSorry, the above comment is from Anselm Anon
ReplyDeleteThank you, Anselm. You are right, of course.
DeleteThe failings of British universities really go back a long way. One can think of the immediate post-war period when there was a massive university expansion, but far from concentrating that expansion in science and engineering (remember Wilson's "white-hot heat of the technological revolution") the arts and humanities were expanded too at the behest of the vice-chancellors. Then there was the Open University a bright new star in the firmament, offering unequalled capability for scaling to provide country-wide higher education at a far lower cost than conventional universities, that was not used to its full extent. Or London University, that not only validated the degrees of its constituent colleges, but also offered London External degrees that could be taken at many technical colleges. Or CNAA degrees that provided the same standards for Polytechnics. All thrown away in the rush to create more degree-awarding institutions (I think 143 at the last count). How employers can judge the quality of candidates from different institutions is beyond me. And this is just universities doing the job they were set up to do, not trying to turn themselves into businesses.
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