Running British universities as if they were businesses

Our universities used to be among the few British institutions that the rest of the world really did envy. But from 2010 the Coalition was determined they should be run more like businesses.

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:

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

[image or embed]

— Ross Carroll (@rosscarroll.bsky.social) 25 February 2025 at 22:24

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. 

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.

And because this is Britain, these new business-like universities turned out to feature indifferent senior managers on grossly inflated salaries.