Universities Under Fire: Hostile Discourses and Integrity Deficits in Higher Education (Palgrave Critical University Studies) 3030961060, 9783030961060

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STEVEN JONES

UNIVERSITIES UNDER FIRE HOSTILE DISCOURSES AND INTEGRIT Y DEFICITS IN HIGHER EDUC ATION

Palgrave Critical University Studies

Series Editor John Smyth, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK

Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed. The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores these changes across a number of domains including: the deleterious effects on academic work, the impact on student learning, the distortion of academic leadership and institutional politics, and the perversion of institutional politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate, where this is being expunged or closed down in universities.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14707

Steven Jones

Universities Under Fire Hostile Discourses and Integrity Deficits in Higher Education

Steven Jones Manchester Institute of Education University of Manchester Manchester, UK

ISSN 2662-7329 ISSN 2662-7337 (electronic) Palgrave Critical University Studies ISBN 978-3-030-96106-0 ISBN 978-3-030-96107-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Eithne, Sean and Dessie

Acknowledgements

To write a book of this nature is to be sufficiently secure in one’s employment to pass judgement on one’s sector in public, and criticality is not a luxury afforded equally to university staff. I am grateful to the University of Manchester for the requisite academic and professional freedoms. I also acknowledge that throughout my career, I have benefited from unfair racial and gender orders within higher education. I am fortunate to learn from interactions with multiple academic communities. Staff at the Manchester Institute of Education are a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. I am also grateful to colleagues who have participated in my institution’s PGCert in Higher Education. The idea for this book emerged from my teaching a course called The Changing Landscape of Higher Education and from my many exchanges with its participants. Some of the work presented here draws on research projects undertaken collaboratively. For funding and partnership, I am particularly grateful to the Sutton Trust, Education and Employment, the Society for Research in Higher Education and Causeway Education. For co-authorship and co-production of ideas, I would like to thank Jo Bragg, Duygu

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Candarli, Steven Courtney, Dave Hall, Diane Harris, Nick Hillman, Rita Hordósy, Helen Gunter, Elnaz Kashefpakdel, Anthony Mann, Tee McCaldin, Jenna Mittelmeier, Joanne Moore, Anna Mountford Zimdars, Michael O’Donoghue, Maria Pampaka, Aunum Quyoum, Rebecca Rock, Julian Skyrme, Dan Swain and Katy Vigurs. I am also indebted to the thousands of students that I have taught in the last 25 years, and particularly to my doctoral students Martyn Edwards, Tom Fryer and Halina Harvey for thoughtful comments on draft chapters. Thank you also to four anonymous reviewers for feedback on my proposal for this book and to staff at Palgrave Macmillan for editorial help and advice. I am fundamentally indebted to Liverpool City Council’s Local Education Authority for awarding me a full maintenance grant when I enrolled at university in the early 1990s, in addition to paying my undergraduate student fees in full. Finally, thanks to Eithne Quinn, the best all-round scholar I know, for her patient and generous feedback on my manuscript. This book is dedicated to you and to our children, Sean and Dessie.

Preamble

Covid-19 and the English University The outbreak of a global pandemic in early 2020 offers an instructive illustration of the English higher education sector’s complex and inconsistent status within its host society. Covid-19 hit universities hard: teaching was halted mid-semester; most lab-based research ground to a standstill and campuses lost their staff and students at what would normally be among the busiest times of the year. Paradoxes immediately emerged. Universities were positioned both as part of the solution and part of the problem. On the one hand, they were the likeliest place for a vaccine to emerge and sources of vital knowledge in a time of crisis. The expertise drawn upon included not only antidote-seeking virologists and epidemiologists but professionals in public health, mathematical modelling and behavioural science. Universities fast-tracked medical and healthcare students into their professions so that newly qualified graduates could join a national effort. Politicians assured an anxious public that they were following the science, and 71 per cent of the

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UK population were confident that universities would play an important role in supporting the nation’s economic and social recovery.1 On the other hand, higher education institutions were mass employers in need of government subsidy. Education was identified by the Office for Budget Responsibility as the sector most negatively affected by the crisis.2 The pandemic caught institutions and their risk registers by surprise. Many had borrowed heavily to fund capital expenditure projects on the assumption that fees from overseas students would pay the interest. Sympathy was limited. Universities were public institutions without substantial public support, ill-fitting to prevailing key worker rhetoric. A sector that had indebted future generations while hiking the pay of its senior managers was not regarded as a national priority. Opportunities for universities to restore their damaged public profile were not always taken. In the early days of Covid-19, when herd immunity was considered a credible solution by many right-leaning politicians, an academically informed counter-narrative, or at least a robust critique, would have been well received. There is no such thing as the best science available, as social theorist Jana Bacevic and others pointed out3 ; academics can provide evidence, but how that evidence is acted upon remains a political choice. Some scholars, such as Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the medical journal The Lancet, accused the government’s supposedly independent medical advisors of ‘manifest untruths’.4 He would later describe the UK’s response to coronavirus as ‘the greatest science policy failure for a generation’, pointing to policy-makers’ poor

1 Universities will play important role in UK recovery from Covid-19, say public, Oxford Brookes University, 10.06.20: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/news/universities-willplay-important-role-in-uk-recovery-from-covid-19--say-public/. 2 Education hit hardest as coronavirus batters UK economy, Richard Partington, The Guardian, 15.04.20: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/15/watchdog-identifiessectors-hit-hardest-by-covid-19-in-britain. 3 There’s no such thing as just ‘following the science’—coronavirus advice is political , Jana Bacevic, The Guardian, 28.04.20: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/28/theres-nosuch-thing-just-following-the-science-coronavirus-advice-political. 4 @richardhorton1: https://twitter.com/richardhorton1/status/1251951746605355008.

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grasp of academic knowledge and how it is shared.5 Another prominent scholar, John Ashton, suggested that politicians did not understand classic public health.6 But these were individual interventions. Sector leaders and institutional managers mostly remained quiet and compliant. This was partly because English universities had become incomedependent market players like any others, functioning as individual operators within a commercial setting. With many institutions in financial difficulties and some fearing insolvency, it was imperative that no one displeased an easily threatened government. According to historian Mike Finn, the sector’s response was one of ‘learned helplessness’.7 For all their rhetoric about autonomy from the state, universities mostly followed the lead of an expertise-distrusting government rather than amplifying and acting upon their own researchers’ evidence. By the time that English universities shut down their campuses in March 2020, Hong Kong’s sector had been closed for several weeks,8 and US Ivy League colleges had moved all of their teaching on-line, asking students not to return after Spring Break.9 Educationalist Simon Marginson noted that the closure and reopening of campuses in East Asia were determined by public health principles rather than by decentralised market forces.10 5

The Lancet’s editor: ‘The UK response to coronavirus is the greatest science policy failure for a generation’ , Andrew Anthony, The Guardian, 14.06.20: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ 2020/jun/14/the-lancets-editor-the-uk-response-to-coronavirus-is-the-greatest-science-policy-fai lure-for-a-generation. 6 Health expert brands UK’s coronavirus response ‘pathetic’, Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, 12.03.20: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/12/health-expert-brands-uks-corona virus-response-pathetic?fbclid=IwAR2Z9AFXMw1KK8lBHSrgLyYbzvETqaOaoEJtryZsr3f3ud z3ER0F4ik7mGc. 7 Universities and the coronavirus: questions of leadership, Mike Finn, PunkAcademic, 13.03.20: https://punkacademic.net/2020/03/12/universities-and-the-coronavirus-questions-of-leadership/. 8 Reputation over responsibility: UK HE and the Covid-19 crisis, Warren Pearce, Felicity Callard, Gail Davies, Andrew Chitty and Phil Garnett, #USSbriefs number 92, 12.03.20: https://med ium.com/ussbriefs/reputation-over-responsibility-uk-he-and-the-covid-19-crisis-dc0b5745e429. 9 Harvard tells students not to return after spring break as colleges across U.S. take action on coronavirus, Chevas Clarke, CBS News, 10.03.20: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-uni versity-coronavirus-students-dont-return-after-spring-break-colleges-action/. 10 Covid-19 and the market model of higher education: Something has to give, and it won’t be the pandemic, Simon Marginson, CBDU , 17.07.20: http://cdbu.org.uk/covid-19-and-the-mar ket-model-of-higher-education-something-has-to-give-and-it-wont-be-the-pandemic/.

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When the time came to request financial help, the way in which the sector was framed by its representative organisation, Universities UK , was largely indistinguishable from that of private companies. A proposal was submitted that sought £2b to ‘maximise universities’ contribution to the economy, communities and the post virus recovery’; in return, the sector pre-emptively vowed to reduce costs, increase efficiency and ‘moderate certain behaviours to increase stability and sustainability’.11 Presumably, the moderation of behaviours referred to activities of which the government had previously expressed disapproval, such as universities’ issuing of unconditional offers to applicants (see Chapter 4) or their alleged no-platforming of speakers (see Chapter 5). But these are complex and contentious issues, not bad behaviours to be abruptly reined in. So normalised had the macho and corporate rhetoric of universities become—penetrating international markets, erecting new-builds, outranking rivals—that the sector seemed unable to craft a narrative of public good . Pleas for assistance were interpreted by policy-makers and media commentators through the lens of emergency bail-out rather than strategic investment. The sector did not step back to question why any horse-trading with the state was necessary given its central role as educators of future generations. Nor did it reflect on whether the move towards a market-based system had been an appropriate one, given the compromised position in which it now found itself. By contrast, in nations where universities had remained part of a public provision, both structurally and discursively, cap-in-hand tactics were not necessary. Staff at Dutch universities were reportedly handed a pay rise,12 while 200,000 students in the Republic of Ireland received compensation in recognition of the financial challenges caused by the shift to on-line learning.13 In Northern

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Achieving stability in the higher education sector following COVID-19, Universities UK , 10.04.20: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-08/uuk_ach ieving-stability-higher-education-april-2020.pdf. 12 European universities spared coronavirus cuts—for now, David Matthews, Times Higher Education, 20.05.20: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/european-universities-spared-corona virus-cuts-fornow. 13 Third-level students to get once-off e250 Covid payment before Christmas, Ceimin Burke, The Journal , https://www.thejournal.ie/student-covid-payment-e250-5272567-Nov2020/.

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Ireland, similar ‘disruption’ grants were awarded.14 Canada went further, freely announcing a package of student-facing support worth over ₤5b.15 ‘As young people, what you’re going through matters’, said the Canadian prime minister, ‘we want to make sure that you’ll be OK’. The reassuringly human tone of the language was as striking as the policy difference. The details of Universities UK ’s proposal for compensation captured a series of underlying problems. By barely mentioning students, the sector’s most important role—and therefore its most powerful point of leverage—was under-played. The support package envisaged a doubling of quality-related (QR) funding to mitigate the anticipated loss of the cross-subsidy provided by fee income from overseas students. Because QR funding depends on universities’ performance in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), as I discuss in Chapter 3, the proposal spoke to the needs of higher prestige institutions at a time when a co-operative tone would have been more suitable. Pam Tatlow, the former chief executive of university grouping MillionPlus, pointed out that even supermarkets were responding more collaboratively than universities, prioritising partnership over inter-brand rivalry.16 The vice-chancellor of one teaching-focussed university, David Green, worried that the proposed package would result in a ‘bonanza’ for elite institutions.17 Fears of a bonanza in any part of the sector were unfounded. From the government’s perspective, higher education emerged as just another needy sector, demanding its slice of the bail-out cake. Ministers were unimpressed by what they regarded as ‘special pleading’.18 14

Coronavirus: NI students to receive £500 disruption payment, Jayne McCormack and Robbie Meredith, BBC News NI , 04.02.21: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland55932443. 15 Something absolutely huge has happened in Canada for students, Alex Usher, WonkHE , 23.04.20: https://wonkhe.com/blogs-sus/something-absolutely-huge-has-happened-in-canada-for-students/. 16 Reboot request, Pam Tatlow, Research Professional News, 17.05.20: https://researchprofession alnews.com/rr-he-views-2020-5-reboot-request/. 17 Coronavirus bailouts ‘should go to health courses’ , Nicola Woolcock, The Times, 16.04.20: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-bailouts-should-go-to-health-courses-csv mtrk67. 18 Ministers split over bailout package for universities, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 23.04.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/23/ministers-split-over-bailout-pac kage-for-universities.

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What made the sector think it was an urgent case? Students were at best an afterthought, mostly absent from the meetings and taskforces assembled by ministers, as sector analyst Andy Westwood noted.19 The standard furloughing offer was reiterated, with one Conservative peer pointedly suggesting that universities show ‘humility on the part of those vice-chancellors who take very large salaries’.20 At the same time, media commentators took the opportunity to renew attacks on university expertise more generally. The Wall Street Journal published a piece that argued ‘the coronavirus pandemic has dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modelling to predict the future’.21 This disparagement was consistent with broader anti-science trends. Indeed, its authors were senior members of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, set up in 2009 to challenge academic research around climate change and to lobby against evidence-based policy.22 In the UK, newspaper columnist Peter Hitchens railed against ‘the mass house arrest under which we are all now confined’, naming and shaming individual academics he regarded as responsible for the ‘panic’.23 Other media commentators relished the idea that the sector’s anticipated financial crisis would weed out low-quality degree courses.24 Some resurrected The Blob, a metaphor coined in 2014 to characterise an indistinguishable mass of like-minded academics, and extended it to groups 19

The student voice at the heart of the system (but only when they’re thinking what we’re thinking), Andy Westwood, Higher Education Policy Institute, 18.08.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/ 08/18/the-student-voice-at-the-heart-of-the-system-but-only-when-theyre-thinking-what-werethinking/. 20 Hansard, 28.04.20: https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2020-04-28/debates/1CDC16A76D78-46D7-AFAC-44B4DB647980/EconomyUpdate. 21 Coronavirus Lessons From the Asteroid That Didn’t Hit Earth, Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford, Wall Street Journal, 01.04.20: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-lessons-fromthe-asteroid-that-didnt-hit-earth-11585780465. 22 It’s not just Neil Ferguson—scientists are being attacked for telling the truth, Bob Ward, The Guardian, 06.05.20: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/06/neil-fergusonscientists-media-government-adviser-social-distancing. 23 There’s powerful evidence this Great Panic is foolish, yet our freedom is still broken and our economy crippled, Peter Hitchens, MailOnline, 28.03.20: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ article-8163587/PETER-HITCHENS-Great-Panic-foolish-freedom-broken-economy-crippled. html. 24 On not wasting a good crisis, Rob Cuthbert, Society for Research in Higher Education, 24.07.20: https://srheblog.com/2020/07/24/on-not-wasting-a-good-crisis/.

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‘colluding to sabotage the reopening of schools’.25 In such ways, hostility moved through education levels. Universities declined the opportunity presented by Covid-19 to position themselves as the natural allies of schools, united in defence of public education principles. The government continued to place its faith in big data, but rarely in the scholarly proficiency need to contextualise and interpret it. Within the sector, conflicts also arose. Student number controls were a particular source of tension. Higher prestige universities sought to increase their home (i.e. UK domiciled) student numbers to mitigate projected shortfalls in international income. Other universities felt that now was not the time for entrepreneurial and divisive over-recruitment. From the outside, this no doubt looked like an inconsequential scuffle in the midst of a global disaster. However, the discursive tension cut to the heart of what kind of higher education sector England wants. Those advocating a temporary reintroduction of number controls felt it only fair that the nation’s universities share the pain; those advocating for market freedom wondered why measures designed to increase competition would be revoked at the very moment they could have the greatest impact. Rhetoric laid bare underlying snobberies. In one piece imagining the post-Covid higher education landscape, former minister of state for universities26 Jo Johnson casually distinguished between ‘excellent providers’ and those ‘further down the reputational, quality and outcomes pecking order’.27 The government reintroduced recruitment caps, albeit at levels that could not be regarded as unduly interventionist. That any anti-poaching measures were considered necessary spoke volumes about the levels of distrust and opportunism now rampant within the sector. Those universities attracting the most well-off students were facilitated in other 25

Ministers fear that ‘The Blob’—made up of political opponents, union barons and local government administrations—is colluding to sabotage the reopening of schools, Harry Cole, MailOnline, 09.05.20: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8303927/Ministers-fear-Blob-politicalopponents-sabotage-reopening-schools.html. 26 In this book, I use the Minister of State for Universities to cover all recent titles, including Minister of State for Universities, Science and Cities (2010–2015) and Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation (2015–2020). 27 What will higher education look like after coronavirus? Jo Johnson, KCL News Centre, 14.04.20: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/what-will-higher-education-look-like-after-coronavirus.

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ways,28 with an extra 5000 places made available for higher prestige institutions, instrumentally coded as those with favourable continuation rates and high rates of skilled graduate employment. However, students were growing resentful at being expected to continue propping up a broken funding system. The National Union of Students urged its members to join a mass action ‘complaint chain’.29 Policy-makers enjoyed seeing home undergraduates play the role of angry consumers at last. Even leftleaning journalists argued that refunds were ‘deserved’, with Sonia Sodha noting that students seemed to have fewer protections than package holiday customers.30 Institutional managers were apparently surprised that dissatisfied buyers of their product would seek compensation, having failed to foresee that a market in higher education might leave them exposed to their student-consumers as well as financially sustained by them. Where sector leaders could have positioned themselves on the side of students, and petitioned government accordingly, they elected not to rock a funding boat that was keeping them afloat. Complaints and refund requests would be considered on a case-by-case basis. No systemic problem was thus acknowledged. Attempts at positive spin were mostly clumsy and poorly received. In the summer of 2020, Universities UK launched a feel-good hashtag: #2020MadeUs.31 Young people quickly recognised the forced positivity and mocked it on social media. One Twitter user retorted that ‘2020 made students anxious, unemployed, angry, isolated, broke’; another criticised what they regarded as ‘positive mental attitude nonsense’.32 Though students’ well-being featured conspicuously in institutional rhetoric, it

28 Why can’t Million Plus have any additional student numbers? David Kernohan, WonkHE , 03.06.20: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/why-cant-million-plus-have-any-additional-stu dent-numbers/. 29 NUS calls on students to share how coronavirus has impacted their education, Rhian Daly, NME , 28.06.20: https://www.nme.com/news/nus-students-share-coronavirus-impactededucation-2697310. 30 The government has failed thousands of students in England. They deserve a refund , Sonia Sodha, The Guardian, 14.01.21: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/14/stu dents-consumers-coronavirus-universities-refund. 31 @UniversitiesUK: https://twitter.com/UniversitiesUK/status/1291669109013389312. 32 https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1291669109013389312.

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invariably came second to institutional finances. One vice-chancellor illadvisedly suggested that where students were forced into self-isolation it might engender a ‘Dunkirk spirit’ and help them to build ‘good bonds’ with their peers.33 Meanwhile, students were bombarded with messages of support that many regarded as inauthentic: ‘Who needs a boyfriend when my university emails me daily to express how deeply it cares about me & supports me during these trying times? ’ mused one doctoral student in the US.34 When A-level results emerged in the UK, the government’s standardisation algorithm was exposed as biased, favouring privately educated applicants over their state-educated peers. As free market players with full autonomy over their admissions processes, selective universities could have stepped in to redress the balance, pre-emptively accepting teacherassessed grading. A more self-assured sector might even have pointed out that, as I show in Chapter 4, A-levels are so heavily predicted by socio-economic status, school type and social background that they have always been a poor proxy for academic potential. But by waiting for a government U-turn, universities missed a rare opportunity to use their market independence for the common good. Instead, the higher education sector ended up bailing out the government, accepting those applicants who had been disadvantaged by what prime minister Boris Johnson would later renounce as a ‘mutant’ algorithm.35 Covid-19 did little to advertise relations between university managers and their staff. Academics initially acted in good faith to move their teaching on-line. Support for students was maintained, largely through the munificence of frontline workers, including IT specialists and departmental administrators. For some managers, this was undermining; for decades they had widened pay gaps between senior and junior colleagues

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Universities braced for spike in number of students with mental health problems after Covid disruption, Will Hazell, iNews, 02.10.20: https://inews.co.uk/news/education/universities-ukcovid-students-mental-health-problems-675963. 34 @mellissameisels: https://twitter.com/mellissameisels/status/1281239958288846848. 35 A-levels and GCSEs: Boris Johnson blames ‘mutant algorithm’ for exam fiasco, Sean Coughlan, BBC News, 26.07.20: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-53923279.

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on the assumption that the institution’s most important work was undertaken by its executive. With expensive buildings standing empty, questions arose about whether investment in people, not property, might have been more judicious. Staff on fixed-term contracts were the first to suffer, with many institutions seemingly oblivious to the ways in which precariously employed colleagues had become the face of their universities to students across many disciplines. In private, some managers quipped about having wanted their obstinate academics to embrace distance learning for years. Staff criticism of institutional policy was framed as a personal attack, with emphasis placed on just how hard managers were working on behalf of the university. Other distraction tropes positioned academics as incapable of understanding the severity of the potential revenue loss. Cost-saving measures were left to boards of governors and finance subcommittees, despite their fundamental ramifications for teaching and for students. In August 2020, the University and College Union released a statement entitled Universities must not become the care homes of a Covid second wave. At the time, the daily average of coronavirus deaths had fallen to ten.36 The statement warned that the migration of over a million students risked damaging public health. Institutions might have put safety first by dissuading students from returning to campus and focussing instead on supporting their learning needs and mental health from a distance. Instead, the sector became complicit in the mass relocation of young people, both nationally and internationally, to help preserve a funding model perceived to be reliant on traditional modes of on-campus engagement. Institutional staff, like the wider public, struggled to follow the logic, especially where management strategies attempted to weave efficiency savings, including redundancies, into a business-as-usual narrative. Around the same time, the government’s return-to-work strategy was being delivered in such a way as to ensure that any second wave of the virus could be blamed squarely on non-compliant individuals. Universities followed suit, signalling that campus outbreaks would be the fault 36 University students feel bullied, tricked and imprisoned. They’re right to protest, Owen Jones, The Guardian, 16.10.20: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/16/universitystudents-bullied-public-health-mental.

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of specific rule-breaking students. Spot-fines were introduced, and some institutions reserved the right to expel repeat offenders.37 The approach was more about shaming the transgressor than educating a body of young people, many of whom were away from home for the first time under the most stressful of circumstances. A survey by the Office for National Statistics would later show that students were actually better at observing some lockdown rules than the general population.38 Meanwhile, press coverage of the sector’s strategy was unforgiving. One opinion piece in the Guardian characterised universities’ behaviour as a ‘trick’, claiming that ‘students were promised face-to-face teaching, but as soon as their fees and rents were secured, institutions turned their backs on them’.39 As Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, Nick Hillman pointed out, demands for financial recompense from students were bound to be louder in fee-based systems than elsewhere, and French students were also frustrated by the cancellation of their in-person learning.40 However, the English system seemed uniquely insensitive to the needs of its student population. At one university, 92 per cent of students reported that their mental health was suffering as a result of the pandemic.41 The University and College Union sought a judicial review of the government’s decision to ignore advice from its own committee of experts.42 However, in a market system, with no significant financial support from government, students were assumed to be needed on 37

Students IGNORE Rule of Six in nightclub queue despite university saying it will expel youngsters who break social distancing guideline, Bhvishya Patel, Daily Mail , 16.09.20: https://www.dailym ail.co.uk/news/article-8738493/Students-IGNORE-Rule-Six-nightclub-queue.html. 38 Coronavirus and the impact on students in higher education in England: September to December 2020, Office for National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/ educationandchildcare/articles/coronavirusandtheimpactonstudentsinhighereducationinenglands eptembertodecember2020/2020-12-21. 39 How universities tricked students into returning to campus, Lorna Finlayson, The Guardian, 02.10.2020: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/02/universities-students-cam pus-teaching-fees. 40 UK universities have passed the challenge of Brexit and Covid , Nick Hillman, The New European, 23.09.21: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/uk-universities-brexit-covid/. 41 92 per cent of Notts students say their mental health has suffered as a result of the pandemic, Summer Goodkind, The Tab, 15.01.21: https://thetab.com/uk/nottingham/2021/01/20/92-percent-of-notts-students-say-their-mental-health-has-suffered-as-a-result-of-the-pandemic-52695. 42 UK academics: opening of universities was illegal , Donna Ferguson, The Guardian, 24.10.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/oct/24/uk-academics-opening-of-universities-was.

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campus: not only was fee income potentially at risk, so was revenue from accommodation, catering and other services. No institution dared moved first because a unilateral switch to fully on-line teaching could push offer holders—and their cash—elsewhere. Instead, universities did all they could to make their teaching environments secure and introduced ‘safety net’ policies like No Detriment to reassure students that their academic efforts would continue to be recognised in full.43 Staff anxiety reached a crescendo. Many felt ambivalent towards the on-campus teaching that was being expected from them, concerned not only for their students’ well-being but also for their own safety. Communications faltered. Where senior managers did consent to zoom directly with staff, questions were pre-screened and chat functions disabled to minimise opportunity for dissent. Lessons might have been learnt from the US, where an additional 3000 Covid-19 cases per day were attributed to colleges’ reopening.44 However, managers at English universities stubbornly denied any equivalence and instead re-emphasised good intention. ‘Everyone is trying to do the right thing, aiming to be honest and open with our staff and our applicants and returning students’, said university registrar Paul Greatrix.45 But universities did indeed become the care homes of the second wave of the pandemic,46 with infection rates up to seven times higher than those in surrounding areas.47 When a new national lockdown for England was announced in November 2020, many young people

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No detriment seems to have helped disadvantaged students attain their potential , David Kernohan, WonkHE , 11.03.21: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/no-detriment-seems-to-have-helpeddisadvantaged-students-attain-their-potential/. 44 Colleges’ Opening Fueled 3,000 COVID Cases a Day, Researchers Say, Michael McAuliff, KHN , 23.09.20: https://khn.org/news/colleges-opening-fueled-3000-covid-cases-a-day-researchers-say/. 45 Safety first: universities doing the right thing for the start of session, Paul Greatrix, WonkHE , 04.09.20: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/safety-first-universities-doing-the-right-thing-forthe-start-of-session/. 46 The government pretended UK universities were immune to Covid. The fallout is exhausting. Jonathan Wolff, The Guardian, 03.11.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/nov/ 03/the-government-pretended-uk-universities-were-immune-to-covid-the-fallout-is-exhausting. 47 Fears grow student Covid infections will spread into local areas in England and Wales, Niamh McIntyre, David Batty and Pamela Duncan, The Guardian, 12.10.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/oct/12/fears-grow-student-covid-infect ions-england-wales-will-spread-into-local-communities.

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found themselves quarantined in halls of residence while Westminster politicians debated whether or not they could be allowed home for Christmas.48 ‘Students are money in the bank, and as long as we’re on campus they’ll worry about the consequences later’, one undergraduate told the New York Times.49 The author of the piece, journalist Benjamin Mueller, captured how the English sector was viewed from afar: ‘outbreaks have shone a harsh light on Britain’s decade-long campaign to turn higher education into a ruthless market’. In early 2021, with cases spiking as a result of the second wave but a vaccine on the way, headteachers of schools struggled to interpret muddled and variable advice from the government. Direction from a confident higher education sector would have been appreciated, but universities remained unsure about what to do with their own students, let alone with those at other education levels. Higher prestige institutions collectively moved away from semester one’s No Detriment promises, apparently fearful of being attacked for slipping academics standards.50 Many students reacted angrily,51 and outsiders wondered why universities were bickering over assessment technicalities. At the same time, one survey found that university students had collectively spent around £1b on empty accommodation.52 A reasonable position for institutions to take might have involved defending tuition fees (because learning was displaced, not annulled) while taking students’ side on rent charges (for vacant or under-used rooms). But the tone remained under-empathetic. When the government announced a £50m package of 48

University students to go home for Christmas as soon as lockdown ends, Rob Merrick, Independent, 11.11.20: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/students-lockdown-chr istmas-home-b1720627.html. 49 ‘It Really Was Abandonment’: Virus Crisis Grips British Universities, Benjamin Mueller, New York Times, 06.10.20: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/world/europe/virus-UK-universit ies.html. 50 No need for ‘no detriment’ assessment policy, says Russell Group, Chris Havergal, Times Higher Education, 08.01.21: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/no-need-nodetrimentassessment-policy-says-russellgroup. 51 This student has created a campaign for a nationwide no detriment policy, Greg Barradale, The Tab, 01.05.21: https://thetab.com/uk/2021/01/05/this-student-has-created-a-campaign-for-a-nat ionwide-no-detriment-policy-188137. 52 National Student Accommodation Survey, Laura Brown, Save The Student, 16.02.21: https:// www.savethestudent.org/accommodation/national-student-accommodation-survey-2021.html.

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support in February 2021,53 sector representatives responded genially,54 leaving it to mental health charities like Student Minds to point out that this amounted to barely £25 per head.55 A few months later, the Department for Education announced that students would be able to resume in-person learning from mid-May 2021, by which time the academic year had ended for most. A group of Students’ Unions jointly proposed a 30 per cent tuition fee rebate, paid for by increasing interest rates to 6.2 per cent.56 The suggestion was progressive because only the highest earning graduates would be charged the additional interest, but it found little backing from sector leaders or government. Individual institutions preferred more direct approaches to securing their income. At the start of the 2021–22 academic year, with mainland China having cancelled all direct flights to the UK and £1.3b in fees apparently at risk, over fifty universities reportedly chartered planes to fly students to Heathrow Airport via Hong Kong.57 Around the same time, education secretary Gavin Williamson told delegates at a Universities UK conference to ditch zoom and return to in-person teaching, apparently forgetting that he was addressing his audience via video link.58

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Additional £50m to support university students impacted by Covid-19, UK Department for Education, 02.02.21: https://dfemedia.blog.gov.uk/2021/02/02/additional-50-million-to-sup port-university-students-impacted-by-covid-19-your-questions-answered/. 54 Student hardship funds for England topped up by £50m, Fiona McIntyre, Research Professional News, 02.02.21: https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-he-government-education2021-2-student-hardship-funds-for-england-topped-up-by-50-million/. 55 “A start, but not nearly enough”: Student Minds responds to £50m student hardship funding announcement, Student Minds, 05.02.21: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/latestnews/astart-but-not-nearly-enough-student-minds-responds-to-50m-student-hardship-funding-announ cement. 56 Students in England call for 30% Covid discount on tuition fees, Rachel Hall, The Guardian, 31.05.21: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/may/31/students-in-englandcall-for-30-covid-discount-on-tuition-fees. 57 Bristol and Exeter among Britain’s top universities chartering planes to fly in 1,200 students from China to claw back £1.3b in overseas fees, Charlotte Mitchell, Daily Mail, 29.08.21: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9937219/UK-universities-chartering-planesfly-students-China-claw-1-3billion-fees.html. 58 Gavin Williamson tells universities to get back to in-person teaching… while on videolink, Emily Ferguson, iNews, 09.09.21: https://inews.co.uk/news/gavin-williamson-education-secret ary-universities-zoom-1190805.

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The response to Covid-19 thus paints a depressing picture of a sector confused about its purpose in society, compromised and fractured by marketisation and lacking in poise. However, English universities were in difficulty before the pandemic struck. The 2019–20 academic year had already been twice disrupted by strike action, as some employees withdrew their labour to protest about pay gaps and precarity, as well as salaries and pensions. Brexit was threatening to devastate many institutions’ research and teaching income. For Ronald Barnett, Covid-19 brought nothing new, only reminding us of problems that a differently managed sector would have already been addressing in the wake of global warming and growing inequality.59 As economists Jefferson Frank and Norman Gowar put it, the virus simply gave universities an extra twist of the tourniquet.60 Discursively, Covid-19 exposed the English higher education sector as fluent in the language of the market but mostly unable to articulate wider narratives around its underlying value to society. Policy had for so long demanded that institutions prioritise competition over collaboration, and private gains over public service, that few alternatives apparently remained thinkable. Boris Johnson claimed that the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines was ‘because of capitalism, because of greed’,61 though it later emerged that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine research was 97 per cent publicly funded.62

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Will the future ever come? Ronald Barnett, Higher Education Policy Institute, 21.10.20: https:// www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/10/21/ron-barnett-will-the-future-ever-come/. 60 Universities in Crisis … only more so, Jefferson Frank and Norman Gowar, Higher Education Policy Institute, 04.05.20: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/05/04/english-universities-in-crisis-onlymore-so/. 61 Covid: ‘greed’ and capitalism behind vaccine success, Johnson tells MPs, Aubrey Allegretti and Jessica Elgot, The Guardian, 24.03.21: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/23/ greed-and-capitalism-behind-jab-success-boris-johnson-tells-mps. 62 Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine research ‘was 97% publicly funded’ , Michael Safi, The Guardian, 15.04.21: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastrazeneca-covidvaccine-research-was-97-publicly-funded.

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There may never be a better time to imagine what higher education could be for, and to demand a funding model fit for that purpose. This would require English universities to see themselves differently— less individually and more collaboratively—and find ways to assert their common value, even within a political and media context that seeks to divide them. Many metrics and excellence frameworks, if jettisoned, would be missed by nobody. Universities could become more community-minded, regenerating left-behind regions and working hand in hand with other educational and public services. Disaffected staff could be won back by forms of management that more openly and generously valued their contribution. Academic knowledge could be communicated more freely and more clearly, with political misappropriations swiftly corrected. The sector could operate with greater integrity, and begin speaking with a unified voice on behalf of society’s most marginalised groups. Those at the helm might belatedly recognise that universities differ from other organisations because they occupy privileged public spaces in which creativity can flourish free from the pressure of profit. The danger is that Covid-19 triggers none of the above. One large survey found that the vaccine success was making the English sector more attractive to overseas students, despite a widespread perception that the UK government mishandled its response to the pandemic.63 The temptation will be for higher prestige universities to double down on a business model that prizes individual successes and neglects sector-wide responsibility. Those institutions with lesser cash reserves and market lustre will grow more vulnerable, even if vital to their local economies and proficient at supporting less well-off students. Indeed, the pandemic could prove rhetorically expedient for sector leaders wanting to deflect from evidence of previous failings. English universities were doing just

63

Student Survey 2021 UK edition—Supporting recovery and driving growth in global higher education, QS Rankings, https://www.qs.com/portfolio-items/international-student-survey-2021uk-edition/.

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fine, the revisionist management narrative will go, until the most unforeseeable of pandemics. Difficult decisions then had to be taken, efficiency savings had to be introduced and staff agility had to take precedence. Governors and regulators will nod in agreement, and policy-makers will see no reason to fund a Covid-surviving sector differently. Questions about how some institutions came to be so financially reliant on income from overseas students will be dismissed. Hindsight, managers will say, is a wonderful thing.

Contents

1

Higher Education: A Sector Unloved 1.1 The Case Study: English Higher Education 1.2 Paradoxes of the Quasi-Market 1.3 Universities in the Public Eye 1.4 Notes on Methods, Terms and Structure 1.5 ‘Integrity Deficits’ in Higher Education 1.6 Reclaiming the Narrative?

1 3 12 21 28 33 38

2

How University Staff Are Talked About 2.1 The New ‘Tribes’ and ‘Territories’ of Higher Education 2.2 Precarity and Over-Work 2.3 The Measured Academic 2.4 Senior Remuneration 2.5 Governance in English Higher Education 2.6 The Marginalisation of Academics and Academic Expertise 2.7 Separations of Teaching and Research 2.8 Escaping the Marketised University?

43 45 48 57 62 68 73 77 79

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3

4

Contents

How University Funding Is Talked About 3.1 Funding History and Principles 3.2 The Graduate Premium and Employability Agenda 3.3 Recruiting Without Caps 3.4 Market Logic and the Research Excellence Framework 3.5 Metaphors of the Market 3.6 The Loan That Isn’t a Loan? How University Students Are Talked About 4.1 Markets at the Heart of the Discourse 4.2 University Admissions 4.3 The Problem with Widening Participation 4.4 The Problem with Social Mobility 4.5 Students’ Variable Experiences of Higher Education 4.6 Market Logic and the Teaching Excellence Framework 4.7 Pedagogy and Platform 4.8 Racism and Decolonisation 4.9 Students as Allies?

85 86 97 103 111 116 121 127 128 134 143 149 153 157 162 168 175

5 How Free Speech Is Talked About 5.1 Culture Wars on Campus 5.2 Wokeness 5.3 Academic Freedoms and University Platforms 5.4 Expertise Under Fire 5.5 Viewpoint Diversity 5.6 Rising Above the Moral Panics?

179 180 187 193 200 205 209

6

215 216 221 225 230 235 238 243

New Stories for an Old Sector 6.1 Safeguarding Public Trust 6.2 Escaping Market Language and Logic 6.3 The Non-Establishment University 6.4 The Anti-Racist University 6.5 Healing a Fractured Sector 6.6 Integrity in University Leadership 6.7 Conclusion: Universities Firing Back?

Contents

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References

249

Index

261

1 Higher Education: A Sector Unloved

Universities traditionally held a trusted position in society. They stimulated ideas, brought fresh understandings, and promoted a betterinformed, more civilised way of life. They offered sanctuary from the market; an environment built on professionalism and shared values, not individual self-interest. Though their ivory tower elitism was rightly contested, universities mostly remained principled and respected institutions, elevating their host nations with new discoveries and cultivating future generations. Higher education was understood to be primarily about the pursuit of truth. To criticise a university was to criticise wisdom itself. But higher education sectors no longer sit serenely above the fray, held in polite esteem by communities and left alone by governments. Now, universities find themselves under fire. Media attention can be relentless, and few news stories are good news stories. Soft targets abound: snowflake students; mickey mouse degree courses; fat-cat vice-chancellors; over-politicised and over-protected lecturers. For politicians, the sector is ripe for populist anti-intellectual rhetoric, with taxpayers and studentborrowers invited to resent institutions’ perceived extravagances. Hostile discourses soften universities for structural change, and the case study © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Jones, Universities Under Fire, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7_1

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for this book—the English higher education sector—is one that has undergone particularly swift regulatory overhaul in recent decades as part of a national political shift towards marketisation and commercialisation. Within this context, contradictions arise: institutions are freed from government control, yet become newly accountable across multiple fronts; the sector is presented as a global success story, yet fundamental reform is deemed essential; scholarly activity is measured ever more intrusively, yet what is valued becomes less clear. In this book, I peel back some of the layers of discourse to examine what is being said, by whom and to what ideological end. I argue that education sectors are inherently unsuited to, and therefore fundamentally damaged by, the market forces that have been unleashed upon them. The contradictions above, I suggest, leave a trail of distrust: governments distrust institutions they perceive to demand autonomy but shun the economy’s needs; staff distrust employers they perceive to demand worldleading excellence but repay them with contractual precarity; students distrust a system they perceive to be mandatory but which indebts them as never before. Universities now talk about themselves differently, their corporate vocabulary of engagement, outcomes and employability encapsulating the very soullessness of which they stand accused. They are also talked about differently, their value to society no longer always selfevident. Glassy new-builds, slick self-promotion and aggressively pursued global ambitions only increase suspicions of disingenuousness and raise questions of integrity: is this really what universities are for? This chapter introduces the case study and outlines my approach. The next four chapters then each explore one site in which policies and discourses interact, often creating what I refer to as an ‘integrity deficit’: how staff are framed; how funding is discussed; how students are positioned; how free speech is negotiated. Universities tend to defend themselves feebly, historically unaccustomed to antagonism and lacking in counter-narratives. By decoding the language used by politicians, media commentators, sector leaders, university managers, staff and students, this book attempts to offer informed, critical defences of English universities and fresh narratives for a more confident sector.

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3

The Case Study: English Higher Education

I begin this section by explaining why I examine English universities when they have already been covered in the literature more than those of almost any other nation. I then explain why I examine higher education rather than any other education level, when it has also been the focus of disproportionate research attention. Along the way, I explain why universities have become so central to the enactment of political ideology, and how control over sectors is now exercised discursively as much as through direct policy measures. I suggest that in England the move towards the market was made easier by the splintered internal configuration of the sector and by a willingly co-opted managerial class. The first reason for using English universities as a case study is that the sector has recently grown more politicised. For several hundred years, England had only two universities, and it was only as recently as the nineteenth century that large provincial institutions began to appear. State interference was relatively uncommon, with the sector mostly able to enjoy its autonomy untroubled. The reason that universities have become a greater focus of policy attention in recent decades is that they have been drawn into a wider political project to impose markets in areas that were previously part of a public provision. Sector leaders and institutional managers tend to resist terms like consumerisation and commodification, perhaps because they feel the language is loaded, and only ever used against them. Indeed, some commentators have taken to referring to the ‘so-called’ marketisation of the sector.1 However, it is difficult to describe recent changes without referring to the fundamental repositioning of university degrees as a saleable goods, and the associated embrace of instrumental outcomes, league table rankings and the metrics that enable both.

1

Why the pandemic is likely to produce a shift in academics’ pension arrangements, Nick Hillman, Higher Education Policy Institute, 24.11.20: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/11/24/why-the-pan demic-is-likely-to-produce-a-shift-in-academics-pension-arrangements/.

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For right-leaning politicians, the market offers the opportunity to gain greater sway over a site that lends itself to alternative and counterhegemonic forms of thinking. The process of education ‘leads us to discover that things need not be as they currently are’, as Thomas Docherty (2018, 58) put it, and this can represent a threat to those in power. Policy is therefore now attended by discourses that repackage education as primarily a gateway to wealth. In a 2020 speech for the Social Market Foundation, secretary of state for education Gavin Williamson insisted ‘we must never forget that the purpose of education is to give people the skills they need to get a good and meaningful job’.2 Blogs published on right-wing websites like ConservativeHome can be even starker. Alex Morton from the Centre for Policy Studies argued in 2018 that ‘in terms of education for its own sake, the evidence is fairly clear … most people do not enjoy education’. Morton went on to argue that ‘we simply require that children coming out of our education system are proud of being British’.3 The extent to which current political discourses of higher education differ from those of previous generations is particularly striking if the language of Williamson and Morton is compared to that of landmark public reports published in the middle of the last century. For example, the Anderson committee, which was formed in 1958 and reported in 1960, recommended that it become the duty of every local education authority to provide financial support to individuals with the requisite academic credentials to enter higher education. Shortly afterwards, the Robbins report (1963) endorsed this approach, establishing the principle that university places ‘should be available to all who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so’ (1963, 8). Lord Robbins may have been a free market economist by trade, but he demonstrated a keen awareness of the non-financial gains of university, characterising the essence of higher education as that which ‘introduces 2 Gavin Williamson’s speech on FE reform: the full text, FE Week, 09.07.20: https://feweek.co.uk/ 2020/07/09/gavin-williamsons-speech-on-fe-reform-the-full-text/. 3 The purpose of education is to give people skills for life. And we have lost sight of it, Alex Morton, ConservativeHome, 05.09.18: https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2018/ 09/alex-morton-the-purpose-of-education-is-to-give-people-skills-for-life-and-we-have-lost-sightof-it.html.

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students to a world of intellectual responsibility and intellectual discovery in which they are to play their part’ (1963, 170). Though one would expect policy dialect to evolve naturally over half a century, the lens through which Anderson and Robbins viewed higher education was very different from that of today’s policy authors and commentators: students were framed as open-minded and curious citizens; universities were places for academic discovery and intellectual indulgence; and, crucially, societies were acknowledged to be in need of graduates with imagination and fervour. Robbins’ committee (1963) specified four aims: to increase instruction in skills; to promote general powers of the mind; to advance learning; to promote common culture and a common standard of citizenship. In contemporary political discourses, the first of these four aims, with its focus on the ‘skills’ agenda, remains familiar. However, it is difficult to envisage any of the other three aims being articulated in the same way: ‘general powers of the mind’ are not something that would be invoked, primarily because they are inconsistent with the kind of useful knowledge with which modern politicians tend to be most comfortable; ‘advancement of learning’ is more thinkable, but the concept would probably now be framed in terms of teaching excellence, thus transferring responsibility to staff; and the promotion of common cultures and common standards of citizenship, though conceivably re-frameable in the language of social responsibility, does not resonate in an environment where commonality has been freely traded for individuation. In contemporary policy language, university is rarely framed as a rite of passage—whether personal or collective, social or cultural—even though for many students this proves one of its most memorable aspects. Higher education mostly continued to be framed in policy discourse as a public good until the 1985 Jarratt Report. This report was commissioned not by government but by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom. It began to position students more as customers, questioned whether scholars were best placed to lead institutions, and characterised universities as ‘first and foremost corporate enterprises’ (1985, 22). The Jarratt Report was

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described by historian Geoffrey Alderman as a ‘betrayal from within’.4 Sir Ron Dearing’s 1997 reports of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education also sought to frame students in consumeristic terms. Once English higher education became open to a larger chunk of the population, only the market was deemed fit to have control. As policy thinking evolved, so too did regulatory oversight of English higher education. Following the Reform Act of 1988, the University Funding Council 5 (UFC) was replaced by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and in 2018 the Office for Students replaced HEFCE. With each change came a shift in representation. Whereas the UFC distributed Treasury grants via a committee composed entirely of academics, university staff were reduced to a minority at HEFCE, and then almost eliminated entirely in the configuration of the Office for Students. Unlike its precursors, the primary role of the Office for Students is that of a regulator, as Peter Scott (2021, 60) explained. It does not act as a buffer between state and sector and does not always seem to have the sector’s best interests at heart. For example, the attention given to ‘market exit’ by the Office for Students 6 goes beyond offering responsible precautions to safeguard students in the event of their institution closing. As philosopher Gillian R. Evans pointed out, some aspects of the regulation seem to deliberately precipitate provider failure.7 The politicisation of the sector’s regulator is a key reason for using English universities as a case study. In early 2018, the Office for Students appointed journalist Toby Young to its board. Young, an advocate of ‘progressive eugenics’, was notorious for posting misogynistic and

4 Higher Education in the United Kingdom since 1945, Geoffrey Alderman, Times Higher Education, 30.07.09: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/higher-education-in-the-uni ted-kingdom-since-1945/407560.article?storycode=407560. 5 The UFC itself replaced the University Grants Committee, which had emerged following World War One. 6 Office for Students key performance measure 14: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/about/ measures-of-our-success/experience-performance-measures/the-impact-on-students-of-marketexit/. 7 Speedy entrances and sharp exits: letting in more alternative providers, G. R. Evans, Council for the Defence of British Universities, 05.08.16: http://cdbu.org.uk/speedy-entrances-and-sharpexits-letting-in-more-alternative-providers/.

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homophobic comments on social media.8 He would later publish a Covid-related piece in the Telegraph that the press watchdog would describe as ‘significantly misleading’.9 Following an inquiry by Peter Riddell, the Commissioner for Public Appointments, the Office for Students admitted that ‘avoidable mistakes were made in the appointment process’.10 However, in 2021, the same mistakes were made again by the Office for Students. This time, Riddell condemned the makeup of a five-strong panel that interviewed for the role of a new head, which he described as being packed with political allies.11 The successful candidate was James Wharton, a former Tory MP with no experience in higher education. However, Wharton did boast a CV that included helping to run Boris Johnson’s successful campaign for leadership of the Conservative Party.12 Among the rejected candidates was Sir Ivor Crewe, the former vice-chancellor and head of Universities UK . While sector leaders and institution managers must be privately dismayed about the co-optation of a supposedly neutral regulator, pushback against unsuitable appointments (and appointment processes) at the Office for Students was mostly left to individual academics. Another reason for looking at the English sector is its fractured administration. Management teams obsess about which institutions are performing better or worse than others, seemingly unable to grasp that each plays its part within a larger eco-system, and oblivious to the known flaws of the league tables that determine whether their institution 8

Toby Young quotes on breasts, eugenics and working-class people, Martin Belam, The Guardian, 03.01.18: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/03/toby-young-quotes-onbreasts-eugenics-and-working-class-people. 9 Daily Telegraph rebuked over Toby Young’s Covid column, Archie Bland, The Guardian, 15.01.21: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jan/14/daily-telegraph-rebuked-over-tobyyoungs-herd-immunity-covid-column. 10 ‘Avoidable mistakes’ were made in Toby Young appointment to Office for Students board, says Government watchdog, Eleanor Busby, Independent, 27.02.18: https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/education/education-news/toby-young-twitter-department-education-office-students-freeschools-a8231026.html. 11 How expert was rejected for education role given to PM’s ally, Sonia Sodha and James Tapper, The Guardian, 14.02.21: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/feb/14/how-expert-wasrejected-for-education-role-given-to-pms-ally. 12 Row as Boris Johnson ally lined up for top job at Office for Students, Ben Quinn, The Guardian, 18.12.20: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/18/row-as-boris-johnsonally-lined-up-for-top-job-at-office-for-students.

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is among today’s winners or losers. Multiple ‘mission groups’ (cliques of universities that claim to share similar roots or vocational pursuits) emerge, and some institutions form temporary strategic alliances or regional partnerships. As a consequence, English universities find it almost impossible to speak with a unified voice. The closest that the sector has to a representative body is Universities UK , a meta-grouping of 140 institution in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The history of Universities UK is telling: since 1918, it operated as the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom, rebranding its name and logo as recently as 2000. This sheds light on its currently favoured approaches. While there is no reason why vice-chancellors and senior managers should not be members of an advocacy organisation, it is unfortunate Universities UK ’s name suggests a wider and more inclusive representation of the sector’s workforce. A recent symptom is the troubling propensity that Universities UK has for adopting the language of the Conservative Party. After the 2019 UK general election, the group took to borrowing the government’s ‘levelling up’ mantra,13 and in 2021 one of its media releases included a pledge to help ‘build back better’.14 More substantively, when universities were threatened with large fines for mickey mouse courses in 2020, the response of Universities UK was not to refute the offensive and baseless assumptions on which the attack was made, but rather to promise a ‘charter’ for enhancing portfolio review processes to tackle low-value or low-quality courses.15 The sector would benefit from leadership that stands apart from, and where necessary stands up to, policy-makers. However, it instead finds itself represented by a biddable organisation that parrots the language of government and favours behind closed doors diplomacy to more open pushback.

13

Recovery, skills, knowledge and opportunity: a vision for universities, Universities UK , 2020: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2020/uuk-he-vis ion.pdf. 14 University partnerships will help UK build back better faster, Universities UK , 11.08.21: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/creating-voice-our-members/media-releases/univer sity-partnerships-will-help-uk. 15 Reviewing and proving the value of degrees, Julia Buckingham, WonkHE , 16.11.20: https:// wonkhe.com/blogs/reviewing-and-proving-the-value-of-degrees/.

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A further reason for using English universities as a case study is that their size and breadth are substantial, making them a multifaceted source of analysis. Higher education data analyst Mark Corver noted that full-time UK undergraduate market revenue from the 2019 to 2020 academic year reached £20b for the first time, adding that if universities were part of the FTSE, higher education would be the largest industrial sector and that around twenty institutions would be substantial enough in terms of competitive revenue to displace existing FTSE 350 members.16 In the UK, almost 27 per cent of research happens in universities, compared to only 17 per cent in Germany and under 15 per cent in the US.17 Within this sprawling context, the term ‘university’ itself becomes imprecise. Stefan Collini rightly pointed out that no definition could possibly accommodate institutions in eleventh-century Bologna, twenty-first-century Beijing University and all points in between (2017, 33). Indeed, even within a single system, it is difficult to find an inclusive description. Does Oxford’s Balliol College, established in 1263 to teach an initial cohort of sixteen students, have anything in common with the modern Open University, and its 174,000 on-roll students? Can medieval universities teaching mostly six-year degrees in theology, law and medicine be compared with UA92, a Manchester-based provider operated by former footballers to train young people in media, sport, business and psychology? But the unusually disparate nature of the English sector, with its complex and various interior groupings, offers a further motivation for the case study. With different mission groups lobbying for different causes in different ways, often at the expense of one another, discursive strategies matter greatly. In this book I suggest that the breadth and variety of the sector is a gift for those who wish to divide it, and who may prefer that only the higher prestige institutions were allowed to call themselves universities anyway. The question of why this book focusses on higher education is trickier to answer and requires attention to be given to what university-level learning is actually for. Seldom are questions asked about what makes 16

Higher education is big business, Mark Corver, WonkHE , 11.11.19: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/ higher-education-is-big-business/. 17 International comparative performance of the UK research base, Elsevier, 2016: https://www.els evier.com/research-intelligence?a=507321.

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higher education higher, or what it is actually higher than, even though like all comparative adjectives, higher needs a point of contrast to be meaningful. The terminology is mostly used unthinkingly, as though it is self-evident that what universities offer is more elevated and of greater stature than other kinds of education. Nothing, after all, is ever characterised as lower education. Former minister of state for universities David Willetts suggested that ‘for education to be higher it must be at the frontiers of knowledge’ (2017, 37), but where are those frontiers? Can knowledge really be neatly circumscribed in this way? And what prevents further education or secondary education operating at the same boundaries? In England, further education—with its ‘more of the same’ implications—is distinct from higher education in terms of policy and governance, even though many further education colleges deliver higher education. The borders become more porous still if we accept that a core purpose of higher education is to further society: taking ideas further, pushing students further, exploring possibilities further. In his 2007 book, A Will to Learn, Ronald Barnett refers on nineteen occasions to the notion of a genuine higher education. The distinction made is that between university-based learning which truly involves raising the students to new levels of thinking and that which is more concerned with satisfying and credentialising its customers. The higherness of higher education, according to Barnett (2007, 63), emerges from a ‘stubborn will-to-learn’, with universities framed as environments in which students are challenged, facilitated and nurtured. It is not the transmittable content that matters, but the questions that universities encourage students to ask of themselves and their society, and which a genuine higher education helps them to answer. This characterisation corresponds with my attention to integrity in the following chapters. It should be acknowledged at the outset of this book that, for all of its shortfalls, the English higher education system remains benign compared to many others. Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler chronicles more radical curtailments of academic freedoms elsewhere: two decades of legal persecution against a feminist Turkish sociologist because of her research into Kurdish issues; an Iranian academic whose support of teacher unionisation landed him in prison; three academics

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in Brazil threatened with their lives for working on gendered division of labour in the workplace.18 Across European Union nations, pressures are also growing. In 2019, a regional branch of Italy’s most popular political party demanded the removal of books from the reading list of a course taught at one of its major universities.19 In reporting the difficulties faced by one sector, this book does not mean to downplay the graver threats within others. England has no claim to be the birthplace of higher education,20 but its universities boast an unusually rich heritage. The nation’s current market-based model, imposed hastily and without the consent of its workforce, offers an ideal case study for how discourses can be mobilised to justify and normalise fundamental overhaul. The arguments that I make in this book are not restricted to universities; they apply across all educational levels and types. Nor are they restricted to England’s system; the process of marketisation can be enacted anywhere. Because higher education is attempting to do something distinct from other forms of schooling, it must be able to spell out and evidence the value of its contribution. My discursive analyses aim to show how this challenge becomes greater in a market-based system, and how the English sector has found it difficult to articulate a clear and persuasive defence of its place within society since higher fees were introduced. Underpinning my analysis is the principle that education is not a tradeable product to be bought and sold, but a public good and a human right.

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The Criminalization of Knowledge, Judith Butler, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27.05.18: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Criminalization-of/243501. 19 Academic Freedom at Risk in Italy, David Matthews, Inside Higher Ed , 13.05.19: https://www. insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/30/scholars-fear-future-academic-freedom-italy. 20 Italy’s University of Bologna was founded some years before the University of Oxford, and Morocco’s University of al-Qarawiyyin—the oldest, continually operating degree-issuing institution of higher education in the world—was founded two centuries before either. Prototypes of the university can be traced back to Greece and China some 1500 years earlier (Palfreyman & Temple, 2017).

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Paradoxes of the Quasi-Market

By almost any fair comparison, English universities ‘punch above their weight’, as global league table compilers like to say.21 In 2015, the director general of the Confederation of British Industry lobbied for higher education institutions be protected and nurtured: not only do they educate people to the highest levels, Carolyn Fairbairn said, but they are ‘some of our biggest regional employers, supporters of new businesses and incomparable vehicles of soft power, a precious national asset’.22 The foreword to a 2016 white paper from the UK government, penned by the incumbent minister of state for universities, struck a similarly triumphant tone when describing universities: ‘powerhouses of intellectual and social capital’, Jo Johnson said, ‘they create the knowledge, capability and expertise that drive competitiveness and nurture the values that sustain our open democracy’.23 However, what followed the minister’s boastful foreword was a joyless and disparaging pitch for structural reconfiguration, involving changes to governance and rafts of invasive and methodologically dubious metrics. Around the same time as the white paper emerged, Johnson was elsewhere valorising free market thinking (‘competition empowers students and creates a strong incentive for providers to innovate’),24 advocating growing watchdog interference (‘a regulator with teeth’)25 and rubbishing many of the sector’s dayto-day activities (‘lamentable teaching’).26 This duplicity captures how 21 UK universities ‘punch above weight’ globally, Judith Burns, BBC News, 11.03.15: https://www. bbc.co.uk/news/education-31803998. 22 Are universities too big to fail? Keri Beckingham, University Business, 23.04.19: https://univer sitybusiness.co.uk/Article/are-universities-too-big-to-fail/. 23 Success as a knowledge economy, UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 16.05.16: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/higher-education-success-as-a-kno wledge-economy-white-paper. 24 Higher education: fulfilling our potential , speech by Jo Johnson, Minister for Universities and Science, 09.11.15: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/higher-education-fulfilling-our-pot ential. 25 Universities could now face fines of £500,000 as regulator given more powers, Eleanor Busby, The Independent, 02.08.19: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/uni versity-fines-students-higher-education-regulator-jo-johnson-ofs-a9032991.html. 26 Universities minister criticises ‘lamentable teaching’ in UK higher education, Jack Higgins, Varsity, 11.09.15: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/8846.

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English universities are positioned within dominant political discourses: on one hand, higher education is ‘the jewel in the crown of the UK economy’, as secretary of state for education Gavin Williamson put it in 202027 ; on the other hand (but simultaneously), it is a dysfunctional and untrustworthy sector in need of urgent intervention. To justify their interventions, politicians typically invoke discourses of widening participation and social mobility, as I show in chapter four. This allows them to champion the underdog applicant, as part of an avowed mission to ensure that higher education better reflects society’s diversity. The claim is made that only through a funding model that rewards quality, and allows successful universities to expand freely in response to market demand, can this be achieved. To deliver in ways that represent value-for-money for taxpayers, the narrative continues, universities must vie with one another for income, led by business-savvy managers and steered by governors with private sector know-how. A politicised media intensifies this intimidating policy environment, with universities variously accused of limiting freedom of speech, dumbing down curricula, misleading applicants and taking absurd measures to avoid upsetting students. New vernacular has emerged through which the sector can be taunted: wokeism, cancel culture, no-platforming , trigger warnings, safe spaces. Universities instinctively recoil from censure. According to literary critic Stefan Collini, ‘never before have they suffered such a disabling lack of confidence and loss of identity’ (2012, 3). Sector leaders have grown timid, focussed on what higher education analyst John Smyth (2017) characterises as the synthetic values of docility, conformity and image management. In 2018, the chief operating officer of one higher prestige university candidly confessed that ‘when it comes to comms, we suck’.28 The piece went on to note that the general public find themselves ‘bewildered by a series of narratives which point up our

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Education Secretary: “Universities need our help—we must maintain education’s jewel in the crown” , Gavin Williamson, FE News, 04.05.20: https://www.fenews.co.uk/press-releases/46829education-secretary-universities-need-our-help-we-must-maintain-educations-jewel-in-the-crown. 28 Are Universities Doomed to Repeat the Same Mistakes? David Duncan, Association of Heads of University Administration, 13.09.18: https://ahua.ac.uk/doomed-to-repeat/.

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supposed failings, the venality of senior university officers, the worthlessness of our products and the bad experience offered to students’. To cope with relentless negative attention, universities need more than chirpier comms. Despite the wealth of positive press statements churned out by institutions, publics29 see universities that preserve pecking orders, steer clear of politically sensitive questions, engage in spurious competition with one another and rarely demonstrate moral leadership on the issues that matter most to local communities. In England, institutions are suspected of being shielded from—or, worse, indifferent to—the austerity that gripped other sectors after the 2007 financial crisis. While hospitals and schools were systematically defunded, universities allegedly basked in lavish capital expenditure programmes and boosted the salaries of management staff. Even before Covid-19 struck, as Peter Scott pointed out, the sector risked ending up on the wrong side of history.30 A persistent underlying burden for universities in recent decades—and one which this book addresses directly—has been the pressure to accommodate free market ideologies. When maximum fees were almost trebled to £9000 in 2012, English universities became among the most expensive in the world for home students to attend.31 Policy upon policy has pushed the sector in the direction of marketplace behaviours, ostensibly by placing its fee-payers at the heart of the system. ‘Putting financial power into the hands of learners makes student choice meaningful’ asserted one 2011 government white paper.32 But the market is a slippery and ill-defined term, giving the unhelpful impression of a single entity rather than a complex interaction of philosophies, practices and cultures. Policy language implies a misleading level of coherence and planning: the move to the market in English higher education has, in fact, been 29 Following Michael Warner (2021) and others, I refer to publics rather than to the public, reflecting the multiple and changing groupings of citizens that exist within any society. 30 The end of tuition fees is on the horizon—universities must get ready, Peter Scott, The Guardian, 04.07.17: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jul/04/end-tuition-fees-universities-getready. 31 Are English tuition fees really the highest in the world? Janet Ilieva, WonkHE , 10.11.21: https:// wonkhe.com/blogs/are-english-tuition-fees-really-the-highest-in-the-world-2/. 32 Students at the Heart of the System, UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/higher-education-white-paper-students-atthe-heart-of-the-system.

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piecemeal and makeshift, a process punctuated by contradictory regulations and unintended consequence. Following higher education scholars such as Colin McCaig (2018), I regard marketisation as the process through which the principles of the private sector come to pervade a non-private sector.33 At stake in debates about how the sector is funded are fundamental issues about the ways in which research is undertaken and disseminated, and the value that society places on knowledge and knowers. In this book, I argue that sector leaders and institutional managers made a mistake by taking higher education reforms at face value, as a plausible blueprint for the modern university rather than as an attempt to divide a politically troublesome sector. As I explain in chapter five, the sector poses a fundamental threat to dominant orthodoxies because it offers space for non-conventional thinking and troubles free market logic. While the state is discursively framed as a vanishing presence in policy, it becomes ever more visible in terms of controlling its ‘measured market’. This is because the funding regime not only indebts the studentborrower to the government-lender but it also indebts universities to the state. This may seem counter-intuitive in a policy context that prizes market liberalism: how can institutions become further beholden to the government during periods of deregulation? But one need only look at the answerability measures that have attended the market freedoms to see that institutional autonomy has been ceded, not won. Just as students find themselves largely powerless in the undergraduate market, artificially positioned as consumers while impotent other than through survey completion, so too are universities subject to new forms of state subordination in what Simon Marginson (2011) refers to as the ‘quasi-market’ in English universities. Accompanying market logic in higher education are familiar strands of what fellow higher education scholar Rosemary Deem (2001) and others refer to as ‘managerialism’. This term captures the way in which organisational control becomes tightly guarded, with institutions serving

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Five stages of marketisation in English higher education policymaking, Colin McCaig, Society for Research in Higher Education, 29.03.19: https://srheblog.com/2019/03/29/five-stages-of-mar ketisation-in-english-higher-education-policymaking/.

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a public good operated as though they were discrete, for-profit organisations. For independent scholar and activist Liz Morrish, the aim of the managerial project in universities is to restructure the values, perceptions and behaviours of academics.34 The approach is difficult to combat because institutional decision-making powers are accumulated by those with access to privileged kinds of data and know-how. Local managerialist practices obfuscate a baser ideological objective: opening up new markets. The unbundled university, one which offers not a holistic teaching and research portfolio but which embraces specialist contributions from profit-motivated outside organisations, offers rich pickings for capitalism. The unstated policy goal has been to make English higher education more like the nation’s independent (fee-paying) schooling system, a market perceived to function successfully, and in which comparisons can be easily made according to indicators like quality and value-for-money. It is no coincidence that many of the architects and advocates of the current funding model in England were themselves raised on private education.35 Similar faux-empowerment rhetoric was believed to have worked well in the schools sector. One national newspaper was running an annual league table of high-performing independent schools called Parent Power. Yet at the same time that those metrics and discourses were explicitly emboldening fee-paying parents, policy was seeking to marginalise all parents in more structural ways. For example, the requirement for elected parent governors on school boards was abolished in 2016, ending a democratic form of governance that had been in place for several decades.36 This offered the ideal blueprint for higher education: lots of empowering language without the inconvenience of actually empowering anyone. 34

‘Don’t frighten the students’: the crisis of academic freedom in the managed university, Liz Morrish, Council for the Defence of British Universities, 20.04.20: http://cdbu.org.uk/dont-fri ghten-the-students-the-crisis-of-academic-freedom-in-the-managed-university/. 35 According to the Sutton Trust, Members of Parliament are four times more likely than the general public to have been schooled independently (though in the 1980s, they were seven times more likely), and Conservative MPs are three times more likely to have attended Oxbridge than all post-92 unis combined: https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/parliamentary-privil ege-2019/. 36 Why it is a huge mistake to get rid of parent governors on school boards, Jacqueline Baxter, OpenLearn, 25.05.16: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/people-politics-law/why-it-huge-mistakeget-rid-parent-governors-on-school-boards.

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Change in higher education could not be achieved through naked centralisation and regulatory muscle; it had to be enacted in ways more ideologically compatible with the market liberalisation mood of the age. And so, the sector entered an era of competition, data and league tables, with students discursively championed as its new powerbrokers. The Office for Students was handed an explicit legal duty to encourage competition in the interests of both students and employers. This should have raised urgent questions about what happens when these two drivers are in opposition to one another, an inevitability given that the market does not favour students and employers equally, or even in similar ways, and often favours one group at the expense of the other. But such fundamental regulatory contradictions were mostly overlooked. The English higher education sector was thus steered towards a new era through a mix of market-friendly homilies and insistent, though sometimes self-contradictory, policies. But the move was to the longterm benefit of few staff and few students, as I explain in chapters two and four. Managers soon realised that expensive researchers need not be exposed to students at all were their teaching duties outsourced to post-doctoral researchers, graduate teaching assistants and other precariously employed staff. At some institutions, resources were ploughed into research, its separation from teaching breaking historical bonds between the two activities. Lower prestige universities were punished disproportionately by the market, even though they usually attracted the most diverse pools of applicants. And though the language of social mobility echoed around the sector, less well-off students graduated into the highest levels of debt and earned least in the job market. Neoliberalism is based on the premise that human potential is unleashed by entrepreneurialism and free trade. According to economic geographer David Harvey (2007), it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. Many of the key characteristics of neoliberalism are familiar in the current landscape of English higher education: competition is assumed to reward superiority and discipline inefficiency; governments pretend to liberalise while actually imposing more bellicose forms of centralisation; the market is positioned as preferable to planning because it is said to be natural and socially fair. Sociologist Justin

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Cruickshank (2019) sees neoliberalism as the prioritisation of corporations’ economic freedoms; within higher education, it is specifically the requirement that students and academics submit to the whims of a ‘knowledge economy’. As educationalists Mark Olssen and Michael A. Peters pointed out, neoliberalism ‘systematically deconstructs the space in which professional autonomy is exercised’ (2005, 325). Within such an environment, journalist George Monbiot’s description of neoliberalism as a ‘stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers’ resonates loudly.37 When the market (or an illusory proxy thereof ) is unleashed, managers at higher ranking universities deny structural advantage and kid themselves that their success is down to merit and hard work. Meanwhile, colleagues elsewhere are made to feel that they have only themselves to blame for lacking entrepreneurialism, dynamism and innate cleverness. Reforms to the sector were pitched as an attempt to loosen universities’ supposed stranglehold on higher education.38 Prior to market restructurings, the English higher education was perceived to sit in an over-comfortable position, several years on from the conflation of polytechnics and universities, with fee income from home students guaranteed and that from overseas students rising. Reforms would mean that a moribund sector would emerge from its competition-free bubble; challenger providers would shake up a centuries-old, protectionist racket and student-consumers would be empowered as agents of change, their newly acquired freedoms and choices determining which institutions would thrive and which would fail. However, a rigged quasi-market came to be dominated by an elite whose members sought to persuade governments—comprised mostly of their own alumni—that they were the nation’s only ‘true’ universities. Sector leaders and institutional managers grew more comfortable with a business model that emphasised league table success and international renown than with a commitment to 37

Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems, George Monbiot, The Guardian, 15.04.16: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-geo rge-monbiot. 38 Do UK universities collude in ways that inhibit genuine competition? Helena Vieira, LSE blog, 18.10.17: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/10/18/do-uk-universities-collude-inways-that-inhibit-genuine-competition/.

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work alongside those economically side-lined groups that more urgently needed the sector’s attention and allegiance. Marketplace wins brought sparkly awards, top-end pay hikes and global travel; emancipating the left-behind was messy, tough and harder to celebrate. Relations between brand-aware management personnel and values-driven frontline staff deteriorated. Shameful ethnicity gaps persisted, both in terms of degree awards for students and representation among staff. Institutional bankruptcy was presented as natural, almost as a positive indicator of a high-functioning market, even though many universities are vital regional employers and local economies would be devastated by their closure. This mindset was an inversion of politicians’ previous reluctance to entertain the idea that a university might shut its doors39 ; suddenly, provider exit became an exciting prospect. In such a brutal context, universities quickly become isolated. As digital humanities scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2021) noted, institutions function best when they retain strong, trust-based relationships with their populations. ‘The university has been undermined by the withdrawal of public support for its functions’, Fitzpatrick wrote of the US system, ‘but that public support has been undermined by the university’s own betrayals of the public trust’ (2021, xi). Writing about English universities, Thomas Docherty also deployed the language of ‘betrayal’ (2018, 21), pointing the finger at marketeers who seized control and demand ceaseless reconfiguration and reform. Docherty was scathing about the banal and clichéd language of the betrayers: ‘they do not know what they are saying’ (2018, 23). The view that universities are losing the nation’s trust is not restricted to academic critiques. Right-wing think tanks also point out that the sector allows itself too readily to be positioned negatively in public debate. But where universities are analysed from the outside, and especially by politically motivated and murkily funded free marketeers, deliberate misdiagnosis is inevitable. One 2020 Policy Exchange report 39

In 2020, Mike Ratcliffe shared a 1986 press release written by the then secretary of state for education and science Kenneth Baker which stated: ‘I have read articles about the possible closure of a university. I want to make it absolutely clear that I will not even consider any such proposal. That does not mean to say that there will not have to be change, but closure—no.’ https://twitter.com/mike_rat/status/1254337853007499264?s=20.

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claimed that universities were now seen as ‘actively and irredeemably opposed to conservative and British values’.40 The cure then advocated— self-characterised as ‘radical’ and ‘bold’, as such reports are wont to do—doubled down on the kind of corporate governance41 and management42 that have arguably been so noxious. Unless universities take ownership of their role in society, and actively seek to reset their relationship with staff, students and the communities they serve, the danger is that they will be changed irrevocably by external forces and by those whose language masks more radical agendas. In the last decade, England has witnessed rising inequality. At the same time, its universities have been drawn into a wider political project to marketise public institutions. The cost to the government of funding universities remains significant because few student loans are repaid in full. Policy has transferred the financial burden from society as a whole to the individual graduate, as I discuss in chapter three, transforming the contract between the state and universities. Meanwhile, those institutions that fare well in international markets charge ever-higher fees to bankroll other activities. That overseas students bring different perspectives and enhance the culture of the campus soon becomes secondary to their financial contribution. The business model is unethical as well as unsustainable. Higher education may not be a sector unloved, but its paradoxes are viewed through increasingly inauspicious lenses. In this book, I propose that political and media scrutiny presents an opportunity for universities to rearticulate their core value. The higher education sector remains better placed than most to recognise society’s problems and, where evidence demands, to offer informed resistance to prevailing market orthodoxies. A more assured sector would embrace all attention, however antagonistic, and offer full-bodied counter-narratives about its vital role in sharing expertise, exposing injustices and bringing 40

Universities at the Crossroads, Lucian J. Hudson and Iain Mansfield, Policy Exchange, 2020: https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Universities-at-the-Crossroads.pdf. 41 I use governance in this book to refer to Board-led or Council-led oversight of universities. Practices vary across sectors, but most institutions have a group of individuals charged with bringing challenge to senior managers and holding leadership teams to account. 42 I use management in this book to refer to senior figures within the institution—in academic, administrative or hybrid roles—charged with overseeing day-to-day operational matters and with longer term strategic planning.

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research-based solutions. But universities first need to decide whether their role is to challenge the status quo, or whether they are contented with the direction of political travel and willing to continue symbolising elitism and reproducing hierarchy so long as the market signals its approval.

1.3

Universities in the Public Eye

During the period of marketisation described in the previous sections, politicians took to characterising universities in deficit terms. This characterisation was discursively enabled by a media narrative that positioned the English higher education sector as a problem and the market as the only solution. Such was the forcefulness and omnipresence of this narrative that alternative solutions were mostly swept aside (as were questions about why exactly the sector was such a problem in the first place). Hostile media stories typically positioned universities as avaricious, disconnected from the real-world , or excessively politically correct. The immediate aim may have been to mock the sector’s perceived follies and ridicule its students, but the more pernicious objective was to break the bonds of trust between universities and their societies so that an ideologically driven marketisation agenda could be enacted with minimal friction. There is nothing special about the example I offer in this section, a 2018 article43 from the Daily Mail . The article was prompted by a story circulating at the time which claimed that students had been ordered to replace applause with ‘jazz hands’, a practice that involves waving palms in the air to express approval. The piece claimed that clapping and cheering had been deemed ‘discriminatory and non-inclusive’ by a student culture that was ‘deranged and censorious’. Columnist Charlotte Gill began by noting that almost every media story about universities was either depressing or bonkers—‘but mostly bonkers’. The article then 43

As one orders students to replace clapping with ‘jazz hands’ and another offers tips on prostitution … Our universities are turning into religious cults which damage students and threaten society, Charlotte Gill, Daily Mail , 07.10.18: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6248335/Cha rlotte-Gill-one-orders-students-replace-clapping-jazz-hands.html.

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ran through a checklist of familiar anti-university tropes, wondering why so many students go in the first place, accusing women of being ‘the worst offenders’ for selecting subjects that lead to lower graduate salaries, blaming students’ mental health problems on their degree courses, characterising universities as an ‘expensive creche’ and ‘incubators for a profoundly illiberal form of zealotry’ and (bizarrely) chiding students for being unable to wash their underwear. Clichés around ‘social engineering’, ‘consent lessons’ and ‘snowflake culture’ featured prominently, as the author respectively sought to mock leftist educational policy, the perceived need for instruction on sexual relations and students’ supposed emotional fragility. Ph.D. topics were mocked—including one allegedly about gender, class and social stratification on golf courses—and the author claimed that some undergraduates were now penalised if any of their essays exceeded one thousand words. Gill then drew on populist academic and self-styled Professor Against Political Correctness, Jordan Peterson, to explain that ‘the post-modern ideology rife in Western universities is responsible for much of the current global disharmony’ and that ‘students are taught that there is no objective reality and to view the world with suspicion’. Towards the end of the piece, and in predictably divisive fashion, the reader was reassured that not all of England’s universities behaved in such ways, exempting three of the sector’s wealthiest and most elite institutions from all charges. The majority of the piece’s 1,508 below-the-line comments offered full-throated backing for the author’s position. In her influential book, We Need New Stories, Nesrine Malik (2019) set out the three-stage lifecycle of the ‘PC myth’ to which stories like the Daily Mail piece belong. Stage one is grievance, an imaged injustice or purge (in this case, society being forced to accommodate the unreasonable needs of delicate but over-empowered students). Stage two is fabrication, the emergence of exaggerated or fake stories that align with the grievance (in this case, Students’ Unions voting to ban clapping). Stage three is diversion (as captured by the relative inattention given to more substantive problems at English universities, such as staff precarity, financial unsustainability, student mental health or racism). In the higher

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education sector, this lifecycle serves to mainstream untruths and overstatements, and universities become seen as incubators for the kind of wokeness that damages society at large. However, Gill’s piece unwittingly offered evidence in support of the author’s own hypothesis that most media stories about universities are, indeed, bonkers. The mundane truth is that one university’s local Students’ Union voted in favour of a motion that allowed elements of British Sign Language (BSL) to be used during some internal meetings. Clapping was never banned, or even discouraged, and the ‘jazz hands’ alternative was no more than a way to signal inclusiveness. Feedback from disabled, deaf and autistic students was positive,44 and it later emerged that the National Union of Students had been using BSL clapping for several years.45 But despite the lack of newsworthiness, the story went viral. Among those to pass comment on Twitter were broadcaster Piers Morgan (‘Britain losing its mind ’)46 and former Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush (‘Not cool, University of Manchester. Not cool ’).47 The ‘jazz hands’ episode was sarcastically described by WonkHE ’s Mark Leach as ‘one of the biggest HE-related news events of the year’.48 The danger of dismissing such pieces as merely bonkers, as many in the higher education sector are disposed to do, is that their discursive force is overlooked: these pieces draw universities into the culture wars that I examine more closely in chapter five, positioning the sector alongside other soft targets of right-wing ire. Stories often recycle the same theme. For instance, suggesting that students are afraid of text or punctuation is regarded as a fruitful line of attack. In 2018, several newspapers ran stories under headlines like ‘Lecturers asked to stop using capital letters to

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Opening up student debate on campus, Sara Khan, WonkHE , 04.10.18: https://wonkhe.com/ blogs/opening-up-student-debate-on-campus/. 45 No, the Manchester University student union hasn’t banned clapping in favour of ‘jazz hands’ , Ruchira Sharma, iNews, 01.10.18: https://inews.co.uk/news/clapping-ban-manchester-universitystudents-union-jazz-hands/. 46 @PiersMorgan: https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/1046996934496530432. 47 @JebBush: https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/1047234246916677633. 48 Monday Morning HE Briefing, Mark Leach, WonkHE , 08.10.18: https://wonkhe.cmail19. com/t/ViewEmail/d/D13648548FB58DF62540EF23F30FEDED/278D56F0E5BFCC0A1A 21C02EB51F5606.

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avoid upsetting students’.49 Then, in 2021, many of the same newspapers ran almost identical stories under headlines like ‘Uni academic sacked for using too many “aggressive” question marks in his texts’.50 Non-story by non-story, groundless accusation by groundless accusation, this discursive onslaught nudges mainstream thinking further towards anti-university sentiment. Though counter-discourses occasionally gain traction, usually about the value of science communicators or academic research feeding into local economies, the trend is mostly one-directional. The media thus does the dirty work of policy, sustaining a common sense deficit narrative and implying or insisting that intervention is needed. That intervention, when it arrives, is inevitably market-based. In recent years, a meta-narrative has begun to emerge which blames the higher education sector itself for the waves of bad press that engulf it. ‘Universities have been incapable of keeping themselves out of headlines this year’, lamented Connor Tomlinson, policy director for the British Conservation Alliance, in a 2021 piece on ConservativeHome, as though the sector has any control over the media stories that emerge, or would actively court such negative attention. But Tomlinson’s accusation raised an important question: who gets to speak on behalf of English universities? In other words, whose responsibility is it to formulate the counter-narrative? There is no clear answer to this question, partly because the sector’s organisation is so baffling. Two dozen institutions currently belong to a self-selecting club known as the Russell Group, taking its name from the hotel in which the founding vice-chancellors met in 1994. Though 80 per cent of UK students do not attend a Russell Group university, the organisation tends to wield disproportionate influence in public discourses. Other institutions, as higher education researcher Richard Budd noted, are classified according to their architectural features (red brick, plate glass, etc.), with publics assumed to

49 Lecturers asked to stop using capital letters to avoid upsetting students, Tanveer Mann, Metro, 19.11.18: https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/19/lecturers-banned-from-using-capital-letters-toavoid-upsetting-students-8154365/. 50 Lecturer sues after being sacked for ‘aggressive’ use of question marks in texts, Tom Williams, Metro, 19.03.21: https://metro.co.uk/2021/03/19/lecturer-sues-after-being-sacked-for-aggressiveuse-of-question-marks-in-texts-14273171/.

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somehow recognise what the different materials signify.51 Meanwhile, a mostly irrelevant binary continues to be imposed according to institutional longevity, with pre-92 and post-92 drawn upon to encode various stereotypes. Sector analysts David Palfreyman and Paul Temple noted that academics have never organised themselves as a powerful professional group, in the way that doctors have through the British Medical Association, or become members of a truly independent professional body (2017, 99). Within this vacuum, multiple parties jostle to be the voice of the sector; politicians, media commentators, think tanks and on-line platforms all seek to frame debates on their own ideological terms. In recent years, new players have emerged in the higher education arena, including an on-line commentariat facilitated by websites like The Conversation and the Higher Education Policy Institute. In particular, WonkHE has changed the ways in which the sector is viewed, offering informed takes on university policy and practices in double quick time.52 WonkHE describes itself as ‘the home of higher education policy, bringing the sector together through expert analysis’, and its staff claim to ‘do things differently, offer the unexpected and challenge the status quo … because [they] love higher education and want to make it better for everyone’. During Covid-19, WonkHE captured and amplified students’ perspectives when the focus of mainstream media attention often lay elsewhere. Funding comes in part from universities, who pay subscription fees, and sometimes use the site to advertise senior posts. An annual WonkFest is held, at which prizes are awarded. Academics are not the target market for WonkHE , and sizeable fees mean that their conferences and events are populated predominantly by senior administrative staff. Wonks are rarely shy about advertising their own influence and importance. ‘The existence of WonkHE won’t save us’, wrote the website’s editor, Debbie McVitty (2019, 13), ‘but it could be a good place to start’. This is the kind of statement that is likely to sound alarms among any critical readers. Who are us? From whom or what do we need saving? 51

Protected by their shields? Why are UK universities increasingly adopting coats of arms as their logos? Richard Budd, Echer Blog, 17.12.18: https://echer.org/protected-by-their-shields/. 52 Pronounced wonky, with wonks being individuals that take a nerdy or excessive interest in the details of a particular area of political policy.

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Why is a website a good place to start? McVitty’s hyperbole mirrors the formula for many an individual WonkHE piece, where a sector problem is identified, little in the way of academic research evidence is offered, then a celebration of what has been achieved within the author’s own institution follows. In such ways, self-promotion trumps in-depth analysis, and the site encapsulates the kind of market thinking that makes it so difficult for universities to present themselves as public educators rather than commercial providers. For example, under the headline ‘Higher Education is Big Business’, one 2019 WonkHE piece noted that the government had ‘succeeded on a gigantic scale’ in introducing a market into full-time undergraduate higher education. The only source of evidence cited was increased revenue, a market inevitability when fees are increased; there would be similar ‘success’, were the National Health Service (NHS) privatised. The author—also the founder and owner of a for-profit, higher education data-crunching company—went on to claim that being successful in big business needed a different set of corporate capabilities than those that had served universities well in the past. Predictably, his own company was offered as ‘a good example of that’.53 Historian Mike Finn suggested that the wonk revolution means that university-based expertise is supressed by pseudo-technocrats who masquerade as disruptors and innovators.54 A familiar, broader discourse tactic of reformer think tanks and commentators is to predict imminent catastrophic change and then position the sector as being unprepared or complacent. Reports with titles such as The Avalanche is Coming make mostly unsubstantiated claims about looming calamities.55 Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) were briefly assumed to signal the end of universities in their traditional form, and right-leaning commentators continue to foresee chaos. In

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Higher education is big business, Mark Corver, WonkHE , 11.11.19: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/ higher-education-is-big-business/. 54 Universities and the coronavirus: questions of leadership, Mike Finn, PunkAcademic, 12.03.20: https://punkacademic.net/2020/03/12/universities-and-the-coronavirus-questions-of-leadership/. 55 An Avalanche is Coming, Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizvi, Institute for Public Policy Research, 15.03.13: https://www.ippr.org/files/images/media/files/publication/2013/ 04/avalanche-is-coming_Mar2013_10432.pdf.

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2018, former headteacher Anthony Seldon warned that Artificial Intelligence will ‘totally transform British schools and universities within a decade’, with robots replacing teachers and lecturers.56 One might ask how such inflated rhetoric serves any purpose. But embedded within ruinous predictions is once again the presupposition that universities are in need of market-based interventions, from private consultancy to expensive techno-solutions, so that the impending blow can be cushioned. The currency is fear, and because change is notoriously difficult to effect within the higher education sector, institutional budget-holders are wont to divert their resources to external solutions, often provided by the same for-profit educational outfits that are sowing the seeds of anxiety. Amid the confected disorder, some questions tend not to be asked. What is the evidence to suggest disaster is impending? Have previous predictions been accurate? Who wins and who loses from the proposed solution? The purpose of outlets like WonkHE is not to compete against academic research. It is to get information and commentary into the public domain as quickly as possible. Policy cannot wait months, if not years, for a journal editor and a team of reviewers to approve a tenthousand-word paper. However, questions persist about whether these platforms are politically neutral, or whether the debate is too narrowly situated within restrictive, market-based assumptions. Policy Exchange’s prophesied avalanche never arrived, and the much-hyped MOOC revolution soon fizzled. But the point of forecasting disaster and upheaval is not to be proved right. It is to construct discourses so powerful that sector leaders and institutional managers cannot help but be swept in. Ownership of higher education discourses is thus more contested than ever before. On-line platforms and think tanks create narratives that reflect the commercial opportunism of their edu-capitalist contributors and the political predispositions of their funders more than the day-today experiences of university staff and students. Because their content reaches so many inboxes every morning, promoting any alternative vision

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Let teachers sack heads … and other ideas for a National Education Service, Liz Lightfoot, The Guardian, 04.09.18: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/sep/04/teachers-national-edu cation-service.

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of the university grows more difficult.57 Meanwhile, as journalist Rosemary Bennett noted, senior university figures rarely step forward to say what they think about the bigger issues facing their sector.58 Vicechancellors are comfortable with good news stories about their own institution, but less confident about defending the value of their sector to a wider population. And the voices of academic staff—once so central to the sector’s identity, values and direction of travel—grow quieter still. Universities are in the public eye more than ever before, but with no joined-up and outward-facing narrative, the extent to which they can defend themselves against the discursive offensive is limited.

1.4

Notes on Methods, Terms and Structure

This book uses language as a gateway into higher education policy and culture because, as Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson put it in their ground-breaking 2019 book, Academic Irregularities: Language and Neoliberalism in Higher Education, ‘managerialism is largely achieved and sustained through discourse’ (2019, 42). Morrish and Sauntson brought the tools of Critical Applied Linguistics (CAL) to the discourses of the marketised, managerial academy. Like Critical Discourse Analysis, as pioneered by linguist Norman Fairclough (2013), CAL turns to the context in which texts are created to decode their meaning, thus providing the tools through which underlying power structures can be identified and critiqued. Building essentially on the work of philosopher Michel Foucault (2019), I explore the connection between knowledge and power, particularly in relation to societal institutions, and the discourses that sustain this connection. I use the term ‘discourse’ 57

Since 2012, the Campaign for the Defence of British Universities (CBDU) has sought to reassert the independence of universities in the face of increasing government interference and the rise of managerialism and metrics in university administration. Similarly, since 2018, USS Briefs has succeeded in bringing together a range of academic analyses around the pension dispute and other issues faced by the sector. But neither group has the reach or financial backing of the websites that tend to saturate these debates. 58 Mixed Media: what universities need to know about journalists so they can get a better press, Rosemary Bennett, Higher Education Policy Institute, 18.02.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-con tent/uploads/2021/02/Embargoed-till-18-February-2021-Mixed-Media.pdf.

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to capture the systems of thinking and communicating that construct our experiences. Discourses can appear descriptive and neutral, benignly reproducing self-evident and common sense truths, while actually being ideologically loaded. Like higher education researcher Paul Trowler, I see language and discourse through the lens of ‘social practice conditioned by social structures’ (2001, 4). Trowler’s characterisation incorporates the ideologies that underpin how things are talked about: the encoded standpoints; the taken-for-granted knowledge. The discourses circulating within higher education, their contestation or acceptance, are vital to understanding not only how the sector is viewed but also to shaping its future. In relation to higher education policy, together with critical sociologists of educational leadership Steven Courtney and Ruth McGinity, I have previously argued that ‘to own the discourse is to the win the argument’.59 Any focus on language rightly invites the question: why look at what people say when it is what they do that really matters? A technical answer to the question is that even a single verb phrase can change perceptions, as linguists and psychologists have long known. Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer (1974) showed people a video recording of a collision between two cars. Those asked how fast the cars were going when they hit one another answered with an average speed of 34mph; those asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into one another answered with an average speed of 41 mph. Our perceptions of events are influenced by how they are talked about. Within higher education, recent swings in terminology mean that what you are reading is not a book that I have written, but an output that I have produced . As a researcher, I no longer receive funding; I grant-capture. My employer is not a university, but a provider. Even my teaching, probably the most fundamental contribution that I make, is reduced to a series of prescribed learning outcomes. Vocabulary matters because it changes the way in which the sector is conceptualised, both by those on the inside and on the outside. The scope of analysis in 59

Could universities learn from the TEF’s advocates how better to influence public discourses? Steven Jones, Steven Courtney and Ruth McGinity, The Sociological Review, 19.07.21: https://thesociologicalreview.org/collections/teaching-excellence-framework/could-uni versities-learn-from-the-tefs-advocates-how-better-to-influence-public-discourses/.

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this book is deliberately wide, offering examples of the ways in which discourses emerge, gain purchase and combine to form a meta-narrative. I am interested in the interaction between the day-to-day operations of the university and the national policies that regulate it, and in the discourses that mediate this relationship. I capture different perspectives, but do not claim to be exhaustive when writing about issues that are picked apart in detail by multiple academics, bloggers, wonks, report authors and other commentators. The work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is drawn upon by many higher education researchers, including Diane Reay (2004), AnnMarie Bathmaker (2015) and Ciaran Burke (2015), because, like the French schooling system about which Bourdieu often wrote (1987, 1998), universities can solidify social stratifications through exclusionary behaviours and cultures. English higher education sits within a societal context of rampant inequality. It is infected by this inequality and, to some extent, reinforces it. For universities to address underlying social problems directly would require radical prescriptions and far more agency than society currently allows. But the sector itself can be blind to its own culpability, especially when incentivised by government to focus its attention elsewhere. Chapter four of this book borrows Bourdieu’s use of symbolic capitals (2018) to show how universities misrecognise certain kinds of dispositions and habitus among applicants and students. Based on work by sociologist George Ritzer on the ‘McDonaldisation’ of society (2011), higher education researcher Sarah Hayes coined the term ‘McPolicy’ (2019) to capture the repetitive, formulaic and agent-obscuring statements that are produced at the sector and institution level. Hayes’s examples include ‘world-class research and engaging teaching approaches provide an excellent learning experience’ (2019, 80). Such garble is mocked by Stefan Collini (2012, 2017), who complains that universities have succumbed to trite, business language. His policy examples include students being characterised as ‘customers of an increasingly diverse provision’ whose choices ‘will increasingly work to drive up quality’ (2012, 159). Joe Moran calls it ‘managerial blah’, suggesting that institutional authors ‘use prepositions to staple-gun nouns together

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without worrying too much about verbal action’.60 Moran adds that no actual argument is ever developed, and that no one ever says who did what to whom, or takes ownership or blame. Further evidence of banality comes from now pervasive university mission statements and institutional visions. The pronouns might be plural (‘our values’, ‘our people’ and ‘our mission’) but the creation of the texts is singularly top-down, and ideals can be claimed that institutional actions do not embody. Alienated staff grow more withdrawn, and semi-engaged staff resent their goodwill being exploited and their consent assumed. Collini worries that without new articulations, ‘what makes [universities] so valuable to humanity in its search for fuller and deeper understandings will be lost’ (2017, 35). Tensions between managerial and academic values are not new, but they matter greatly to the professional identity and personal wellbeing of those who work in the sector, as I discuss in chapter two. Nobody wants their contribution shaped and framed in ways that do not align with their values. However, to stop at linguistic critique is to let policymakers, sector leaders and institution managers off the hook. This is because alongside the business-speak has come a colder, more commercial approach to running universities. Vice-chancellors and their senior administrative staff (sometimes rebranded as presidents and their executive team) are differently empowered. Senates are sidestepped, their role reduced to wrangling about process rather than co-producing institutional strategy, and fundamental questions about whether the sector’s business model is fit-for-purpose are rarely engaged with. This raises important questions about what kind of academics are really wanted. Do managers aspire to have staff who are literate about university finances and operations? Or would they prefer an uninformed, atomised and therefore more compliant workforce? Trowler (2001) suggested that academics are ‘captured’ by discourses in ways that prevent them from fashioning and voicing alternatives to managerialism.

60 The scourge of managerial blah, Joe Moran, Times Higher Education, 19.08.21: https://www. timeshighereducation.com/features/scourge-managerial-blah.

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My intent in this book is to be as inclusive as possible when talking about staff in higher education. This is based on the premise that university employees are united by more than separates them. When I refer to staff, I am including all personnel, both administrative and academic. This approach owes much to the work of higher education researcher Celia Whitchurch (2006, 2008) in breaking down barriers between different role types. Similarly, when I refer to disciplines, my focus is on both humanities and sciences, despite the many attempts to drive wedges between the two. The experiences of the university’s unseen workforce—porters, catering staff, security guards and other personnel—is not addressed directly, though the outsourcing and undervaluing of such roles is consistent with the broader trend towards prioritising the market over the campus community. At its heart, my approach draws upon philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (2010) idea that language and action are not separate entities, but rather interwoven threads of the same fabric. Words influence how people think. The metaphors we live by, as cognitive linguist George Lakoff (2008) explained, chip away at our subconscious until we see the world how those who use the metaphors want us to see the world. Discourses are particularly important within universities because tertiary education is unlike primary and secondary education. Policy directives tend to collide with the perceived autonomy of staff, and academics in particular regard themselves by both precedent and contract as having agency to resist. Much has been written about the rise of market-based practices in the contemporary university; my goal is to understand better how language oils the wheels, or applies the handbrake, on the implementation of policy at all levels. My contribution therefore sits broadly within the emerging field of Critical University Studies, as pioneered by literary and cultural studies scholar Jeffrey J. Williams61 and extended by John Smyth (2017) through the series to which this book belongs. Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2021) reflected on the frustrations inherent to researching higher education, and on her personal attempt to avoid writing ‘a fundamentally angry or despairing book, while nonetheless 61 Deconstructing Academe: The birth of critical university studies, Jeffrey J. Williams, Chronicle of Higher Education, 19.02.12: https://www.chronicle.com/article/deconstructing-academe/.

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allowing its anger and despair space in amongst its general emotional swirl’ (2019, xii). Most critical university scholars encounter similar feelings, exasperated by the disconnect between the findings of their scholarship and their sector’s eagerness to ignore them. Fitzpatrick finds hope in the idea of ‘generous thinking’ that prioritises listening over speaking, community over individualism and collaboration over competition (2021, 4). As the next section explains, my book draws on the notion of integrity to imagine the kind of university sector in which these principles might become normalised, and the new stories that might bring us closer.

1.5

‘Integrity Deficits’ in Higher Education

Where activities and cultures in higher education are driven by the selfinterest of individual stakeholders rather than by the collective good of the sector, and where what is said does not align with what is done, ‘integrity deficits’ can be said to arise. In this book, I posit that deficits are more common in marketised higher education systems because competition encourages universities to prioritise short-term, superficial ‘wins’ over longer term, shared gains. Integrity is, of course, a contested and slippery term that means different things to different people, not least in the context of higher education. For some, integrity requires the university to return to its roots, shun the market and embed itself in the core purpose of education for its own sake. For others, integrity involves the university serving a municipal role, meeting its community’s needs and advocating for society’s least powerful. And it must be acknowledged that for others, integrity means high levels of economic instrumentalism and regulatory oversight, with universities’ legitimacy resting on their ability to service the national economy and perform well against metrics and rankings.62 However, though integrity is a concept loaded with intricacies and subjectivities, its absence usually speaks to a shared sense that something is awry with modern higher 62

When sector reformer David Willetts opens his tome on English higher education with ‘I love universities’ (2017, 1), there is no reason to doubt his sincerity.

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education. Whether this manifests as an inappropriate enchantment with the market’s games and rewards (Smyth, 2017), a profound loss of confidence and identity (Collini, 2012), or a slow capitulation to managerialism (Morrish & Sauntson, 2019), the outcome is the same: universities lose their authority as trusted public institutions and become drawn into unwinnable culture wars. Integrity deficits arise at all levels, but there is a tendency for those wielding the most power to be furthest adrift from society’s expectations. At the policy level, deficits arise when a market-based funding model is talked about as the only possible funding model, even though other nations fund higher education not through fees but through general taxation. At the sector level, deficits arise when university groupings privilege their own interests and seek to distort allocations of resources. At the institutional level, deficits arise when market-conscious universities invoke self-aggrandising rhetoric at the expense of neighbouring institutions, or crassly support campaigns around racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination without first considering whether their own practices may be part of the problem. Within the institution, deficits arise when line managers normalise precarity and exploitation, or promote workload models that they know render invisible key aspects of academic labour. And at the individual level, deficits arise when academic staff compromise collegiality because they feel professional pressure to maintain a competitive edge over their peers. At all levels, discourses of blame gaslight the game’s losers: under-recruitment becomes the fault of universities that lack innovation; under-representation becomes the fault of applicants that lack aspiration; well-being problems become the fault of students that lack resilience; pay gaps become the fault of female and ethnic minority staff that lack ambition. Policy-makers, sector leaders and institutional managers are generally untroubled by pushback from staff. Reform is never likely to be popular, their narrative goes, but modernisation remains essential to the formation of a dynamic, globally competitive brand. Academics, as I discuss in the next chapter, can be positioned as predisposed to complaint and detached from real-world concerns, part of a sector uniquely wedded to its past. David Willetts characterised some books about universities as an ‘agonised complaint that something precious is being lost’, as though

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higher education has been betrayed by ‘an unholy trinity of managers, markets and ministers’ (2017, 6). Staff were accused of disliking any form of ‘consumerism’ or ‘marketisation’, terms that Willetts placed in scare quotes, presumably to signal that they may not exist outside suspicious campus minds. Nick Hillman dismissed it as the woe is us culture of higher education: ‘I wonder if academics have been whingeing about this since the dawn of time?’.63 A quick glance through the titles of recent books about higher education may seem to lend credence to Willetts’s and Hillman’s charges. Examples include Thomas Docherty’s Universities at War (2014), Sinead Murphy’s Zombie University (2017), John Smyth’s Toxic University (2017) and Richard Hall’s The Alienated Academic (2018) and The Hopeless University (2021). In the US, a parallel literature has emerged, from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987)64 to Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1996) to Henry Giroux’s Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (2014). There is also a depressing circularity to the book titles: in 1949, Sir Walter Moberly published The Crisis in the University; in 1971, Immanuel Wallerstein published an edited collection called The University Crisis Reader and in 2019, Jefferson Frank, Norman Gowar and Michael Naef published English Universities in Crisis.65 But the above-mentioned books do much more than whinge; they offer balanced analyses and critical reflection. It is not marketisation or consumerism in the abstract that their authors find problematic, but a first-hand awareness of their limits in practice: the wastefulness of staff and institutions competing against arbitrary metrics for relative success; the crass monetisation of students’ learning until higher education becomes nothing more than a shrewd investment.

63 The war against humanities at Britain’s universities, Alex Preston, The Guardian, 29.03.15: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/29/war-against-humanities-at-bri tains-universities. 64 Subtitled How Higher Education has failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, for the avoidance of doubt. 65 A smaller number of counter-examples exist, such as Nicholas Maxwell’s How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World (2014) or Paul Gibbs’s Why Universities Should Seek Happiness and Contentment (2017).

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That is not to imply that staff are never guilty of yearning for times in which they were better treated, enjoyed greater professional freedoms and were held in higher esteem. Richard Budd suggested that the era of ‘tweed-jacketed dons in lifelong jobs, with iron-plated pensions, spending lots of time with happy, engaged students, teaching with passion, with space for slow, thoughtful scholarship’ is probably apocryphal.66 But the difference is that where academic romanticisation of the past times is rightly called out, the more insidious nostalgia that informs discourses of university reform tends to escape critical scrutiny. As I show in chapters three and four, many right-leaning commentators take for granted a rounded higher education for society’s most affluent young people while stridently advocating vocational routes for others. Calls for social mobility and widening participation are deafening across the political spectrum, but do little to dismantle the structural hierarchies and class snobberies baked into the English system. Indeed, when it comes to nostalgia in higher education, outsiders are often more guilty of sentimentalism than those on campus, as reflected by the discursive concentration on two universities which between them account for fewer than 1.5 per cent of students in England.67 Newspaper columnists seem uniformly to believe that their own degree course was more exclusive and more intellectually demanding than any of today’s courses.68 Integrity deficits cannot be closed by looking backwards. The history of higher education is littered with discriminatory and hierarchical cultures, a return to which would benefit no society.69 Though an illusion of meritocracy was maintained by charitably allowing a few interlopers on to the college lawns, participation was primarily driven by 66

Why is higher education SO bad? Richard Budd, ECHER blog, 23.11.20: https://echer.org/ why-is-higher-education-so-bad/. 67 The centrality of these two institutions in the national psyche is reinforced by their cultural prominence as much as their academic exceptionalism, from the ubiquity of Oxbridge colleges on TV quiz show University Challenge to an annual televised boat race that is restricted to two teams of student rowers. 68 Education: Is it too easy to get into university? Ben Russell, The Independent, 23.10.11: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-is-ittoo-easy-to-get-into-university-1181223.html. 69 According to Edward Gibbon, the seventeenth century monks of the English sector were ‘steeped in port and prejudice’ (1837, 49).

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background. In 1950, only 3.4 per cent of the UK population entered higher education, and very few were working class.70 England’s first female vice-chancellor was not appointed until 1948,71 and in 2011 there was still only one ethnic minority university leader.72 Going back further, one reason that no new universities emerged during the 820year period until 1829 is that England’s only two institutions at the time enforced a very effective duopoly, vigorously opposing the creation of any rival establishments. Those that tried—such as universities in thirteenth century Northampton and fourteenth century Stamford—were soon shut down. At the same time, other European nations, most notably Germany, significantly expanded their higher education sectors. Life for university staff may have been less pressured, but England’s higher education sector was historically a place of social segregation, chiefly benefiting rich white men. Many modern deficits emerge from this segregation. While some policy measures have enhanced social inclusion and increased accountability, progress tends to be exaggerated and enduring problems are often ignored. Deficits arise when sector leaders and institutional managers talk the talk, but fail to take commensurate action. Unlike in previous centuries, this insincerity passes neither unnoticed nor unremarked upon. Social media exposes hypocrisies and misrepresentations in ways for which universities seem permanently unprepared. Integrity deficits are increasingly democratic deficits, as institutional managers consolidate and exploit decision-making powers. A gauchely imposed market compels even the most principled of academics to begin self-promoting and gaming the system’s metrics. Politicians and newspaper commentators weigh-in, no longer cowed by the sector’s standing. The cumulative cost of the deficits is a higher education sector distrusted and remote.

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Education: Historical statistics, Paul Bolton, Standard Note: SN/SG/4252: https://researchbrie fings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04252/SN04252.pdf. 71 How far have women come in Higher Education? Advance HE , 08.03.18: https://www.ecu.ac. uk/blogs/far-women-come-higher-education/. 72 Why is there still only one minority vice-chancellor? Harinder Bahra, The Guardian, 17.10.11: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/oct/17/higher-education-barriers-black-academics.

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Reclaiming the Narrative?

In this chapter, I have argued that the relationship between policy and media commentary is central to understanding the predicament of higher education in England, and the scale of the challenge if new narratives are to be fashioned. The two sets of discourses that feed off each other, one framing the sector as a cosy cartel in need of free market solutions, the other framing it as a laughable relic for which reality checks are long overdue. Ronald Barnett characterises this as the ‘double undermining’ (2017, 3) of higher education: the attacks are both epistemological (as claims to truth are questioned) and social (as the university’s status as a trusted public institution is challenged). Both discourses are underpinned by anti-intellectualism, as I discuss further in chapter five. Universities remain foreboding places for right-leaning politicians and other individuals that benefit from the status quo, differing from schools because their curricula cannot be prescribed. The sector’s detractors have their job made easier by the availability of multiple tropes. The continuing ivory tower metaphor, for example, simultaneously captures a perception of material wealth and social exclusivity. University dons look down as the rest of society looks up. Integrity deficits may plague the sector, but universities can be the most efficient cultural levellers that any society has, opening students up to new ways of thinking, nourishing them intellectually and altering their relationship with society. This is particularly true in educational settings such as England’s, where childhood testing is relentless. For those young people that manage to stay the distance, university is an opportunity to benefit from a very different education environment, one in which they can engage with research directly, fine tune their expertise in a loved subject, and mature within a less pressurised scholarly environment. Barnett (1997) explained the distinction in terms of the impacts of education on the receiver: where school teaching is about socialisation, higher education teaching is about self-actualisation. Furthermore, universities operate in many ways that are entirely consistent with external perceptions of integrity. Access has never been wider: since 1970 the world’s population has doubled, but university

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participation has increased sixfold.73 The proportion of female students is rising in most sectors, and women both outnumber and outperform men at English universities. Participation rates among young people from the lowest socio-economic quartile have doubled in the last two decades, and the move in the English system towards having graduates contribute to the cost of their degree has not, so far, resulted in fewer applicants from poorer backgrounds, nor in a mass exodus of young people to nations charging lower fees. University-based research has driven major advances in technology. The groundwork for the modern internet was laid in 1969 when two computers at different universities connected for the first time via satellite communication.74 Social media followed, with The Facebook created and launched in 2004 for students at elite US colleges.75 Medical breakthroughs, such as the discovery of penicillin in 1928,76 are invariably made in partnerships with campus labs. Though some of these boasts should be treated with caution, for reasons that I develop in the following chapters, they do raise a legitimate question: when so many positive framings are possible, why do universities receive and tolerate such a hostile press? Policy language has also been unfriendly at times. In 2016, higher education commentator Andrew McGettigan noted that one government white paper expressed ‘an astonishing level of resentment’ towards the sector’.77 However, political discourses of higher education usually now strike a tone that is more banal, focussing on raising quality and expanding student choice, then leaving it to the media to frame the message more pugnaciously. Because of universities’ implied profligacy, 73 Other countries are proud of their universities. The UK must be too, Chris Husbands, The Guardian, 19.09.18: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/sep/19/other-countriesare-proud-of-their-universities-the-uk-must-be-too. 74 The History of the Internet and the Colleges That Built It, Brandon Engel, EdTech, 05.11.13: https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2013/11/history-internet-and-colleges-built-it. 75 Before It Conquered the World, Facebook Conquered Harvard , Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, 04.02.19: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/and-thenthere-was-thefacebookcom/582004/. 76 Alexander Fleming was a Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary’s Hospital in London and his findings were initially published in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology. 77 Lecturers are striking against low-paid, casual work, which hurts students too, Nina Power, The Guardian, 25.05.16: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/25/lecturersstriking-low-pay-casual-work-students-university.

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taxpayers emerge as the primary victims. In 2019, British newspaper columnist and editor Simon Jenkins likened spending on higher education to spending on defence: ‘you suspect half of it is wasted, but you cannot tell which half ’.78 In 2020, Conservative MP Neil O’Brien noted that ‘with lots of public subsidy sloshing around, universities’ incentives are to put on lots of cheap arts courses, charge full fees and use the money to cross-subsidise other things’. O’Brien’s conclusion was that ministers need to step in to protect taxpayers.79 In such ways, universities are becoming familiar sites for so-called culture wars to be played out. The discourses are often rehearsed in right-wing political websites before trickling into mainstream media. Universities are ‘expensive purveyors of second-rate academic nonsense’, according to former MP Sir Julian Brazier on ConservativeHome in 2020.80 ‘Why are young people to spend three or four of their formative years in hard left/liberal-leaning institutions?’ parliamentary candidate Anna Firth had asked on the same site earlier in the year.81 In 2019, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton lobbied ‘to get rid of universities altogether’, dismissing them as ‘essentially state-sponsored institutions’.82 These positions may seem too extreme to sway majority opinion, but they bear the hallmarks of a systemic and organised attack: the rejection of academic knowledge; the aversion to taxpayer subsidy; the tropes 78

What are our universities for? Taxpayers have a right to know, Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, 31.05.19: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/31/what-are-univer sities-for-taxpayers-right-know. 79 Higher and technical education. The universities should reform themselves. Or have reform forced on them, Neil O’Brien, ConservativeHome, 01.06.20: https://www.conservativehome.com/thecol umnists/2020/06/neil-obrien-rebalancing-higher-and-technical-eduation-the-universities-shouldreform-themselves-or-have-reform-forced-on-them.html. 80 Universities in the bottom half of the sector would howl. But here are the reforms we should make to the system, Julian Brazier, ConservativeHome, 12.02.20: https://www.conservativehome. com/platform/2020/02/julian-brazier-universities-in-the-bottom-half-of-the-sector-would-howlbut-here-are-the-reforms-we-should-make-to-the-system.html. 81 We need a plan to regain the university seats, and win over the students who flocked to Corbyn, Anna Firth, ConservativeHome, 23.01.20: https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2020/ 01/anna-firth-we-won-the-election-but-lost-the-university-seats-we-must-not-lose-these-votersfor-a-generation.html. 82 Sir Roger Scruton: ‘Get rid of universities altogether’, Human Events, 13.05.19: https://hum anevents.com/2019/05/13/roger-scruton-get-rid-of-universities-altogether/?fbclid=IwAR22Dob eJbivPxMoPx6BBS-FOHwRKLWVBZhHQsLvnkCGS2E4VZkDp6VFe94.

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about political radicalism. Anti-intellectualism leaves societies reluctant to trust reputable expertise, and vulnerable in times of crisis. During Covid-19, it became clear that policy based on science could soon become policy blamed on science, as Ian McNay pointed out.83 As the market tightened its grip on English universities, new identities were imposed. The modern student became a value-conscious, outcomefocussed consumer; the modern staff member became a metric-driven, knowledge economy worker. Those who resisted could be dismissed as mawkish, politicised or obdurate. Government ministers positioned themselves as saviours of the sector, steering universities through troubled waters while maximising all-important international competitiveness and protecting the brand’s global value. In many respects, the reformers had an easy ride. Sector leaders and institutional managers were either openly on-board, or else deployed a strategy of so-called soft power: behind-thescenes lobbying of policy-makers intended to make the sector’s transition to the market slightly less jarring. Policy-makers understood the importance of labelling: referring to institutions as providers stripped them of their heritage, legitimacy and social status; referring to students as customers denied that their education may differ from other saleable products. This book attempts to disrupt and dislodge some of the damaging narratives that took hold by unpicking the relationship between integrity deficits and the sector’s apparent inability to defend itself. So long as universities doggedly pursue performance outcomes, I argue, they will be limited in their capacity to fend off attacks from conservative culture warriors. I use what people say and write as an entry point to explore how this abusive relationship has emerged, but I also outline ways in which non-market educational ways of thinking and speaking might be reclaimed.84 One fundamental problem is that universities cannot 83 Some reflections on learning during lockdown… Ian McNay, Society for Research in Higher Education News Blog, 29.07.20: https://srheblog.com/2020/07/29/some-reflections-on-learningduring-lockdown/. 84 The question of how universities should be talked about is one that Morrish and Sauntson (2019) tackled head on. They suggest that plant metaphors may be more appropriate, with learning as nourishment, teaching as nurturing and students blossoming as part of a larger eco-system. Universities could be branches of a tree, the roots of which lie in primary and secondary education. The reason that plant metaphors sound naïve is because the sector’s

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refute market logic while themselves mired in market discourses. The language of competition is currently so entrenched in higher education that it is difficult to imagine alternative vocabulary, let alone to operationalise different approaches. For new narratives to ring true, especially in a field with as many critical thinkers as higher education, words must become more consistent with actions. That would not simply involve brand managers getting better at creating stories to sustain a defective model of higher education in an ever more unequal society; new stories are only as useful as the new collaborative cultures, the new trust-based professional practices and the new social contract with government that they may help to engender. Each of the next four chapters focusses on one aspect of English higher education which has been affected by the move towards the market. I begin by exploring the impact on university staff, describing how their role and identity has been changed by policy that positions them primarily as vendors of knowledge-based credentials. I do this mostly through critical discourse analysis of institutional language. I then explore the language in which university funding is discussed, showing how some of the most fundamental changes ever imposed on a higher education sector were packaged in ways that made resistance look naïve or futile. I then examine the framing of students within dominant narratives, noting inconsistencies between their media positioning as hyper-sensitive and woke, and their policy positioning as empowered agents of consumer choice. Finally, I focus on discourses around free speech to show how the purpose of the sector is increasingly contested within the wider culture wars into which universities are drawn. In the concluding chapter, I present new stories that might help fill these integrity gaps, arguing that new language is needed as a first step towards creating more fit-for-purpose universities.

currently favoured metaphors have become so embedded. The popularity of military language is particularly troubling. Morrish and Sauntson drew on examples from a corpus of higher education texts that included advice to ‘conduct horizon scanning and intelligence gathering ’ (2020, 131) and to build ‘an intelligence base [that can] act as an early warning mechanism to understand whether and how students are being protected ’ (2020, 174). For a sector committed to wisdom, plant metaphors make much more sense than military metaphors. However, the choice of language reflects the ideologies that now dominate.

2 How University Staff Are Talked About

As the previous chapter outlined, English higher education has undergone fundamental regulatory change in recent decades. These changes have typically been attended by discursive moves that position university staff in pejorative terms. One recurring trope involves dismissing academics as recalcitrant and set in their ways. For example, a 2020 blog on WonkHE opens with the following joke: ‘How many academics does it take to change a lightbulb?’ ‘CHANGE???!!!’

The piece, penned by the WonkHE editor in partnership with the ‘consulting lead for education’ at accountancy firm KPMG, goes on to acknowledge that university staff are actually unlikely to be any more change averse than staff in other sectors.1 However, the gag has served 1 Wicked problems: how could universities be better at change? Debbie McVitty, WonkHE , 30.01.20: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/wicked-problems-how-could-universities-be-bet ter-at-change/.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Jones, Universities Under Fire, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7_2

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its purpose. Readers have been drawn into an insider discourse that positions them, alongside the blog’s authors, in opposition to self-absorbed and impractical academics. The projected in-group is part of the real world , with common sense and wit; the projected out-group is part of an over-protected elite, obstinate and humourless. With a problem now established, and two ‘sides’ neatly demarcated, the authors can proceed to propose solutions. The truth is that, for some time now, higher education staff have been required to deal with relentless restructuring at the impulse of incoming senior managers keen to make their mark on an institution. Expensive but inapt techno-solutions are regularly imposed, often as part of backdoor surveillance tactics or misguided cost-saving initiatives. To cope with this this, staff have demonstrated remarkable agility and teamwork. But defamatory clichés are allowed to pass unchallenged by sector leaders, as in the case of the wisecrack above. Their repetition convinces publics that universities do indeed have a problem with their unreconstructed workforce. The discourses can also be internally divisive: administrative staff suspect the stereotypes apply more to academics than to them; scientists suspect they apply more to colleagues in the humanities. And as university employees became busier, in no small part because of the market’s demands, so less time was available to counter the ways in which their public image was being stealthily redefined. English universities have the potential to be, and often are, inspiring and fulfilling environments in which to work. Staff typically retain greater autonomy over their professional contribution than in other sectors and getting paid to be curious about the world is a rare privilege. However, discourses used in the media and by policy-makers about academics—or, more often, against academics—conspire to create the impression of a dysfunctional labour force. This chapter explores how the market has transformed the professional context in which academics operate. It looks at how institutional managers and governors also come under fire for their perceived (and actual) shortcomings and argues that the market model ultimately leaves all university personnel worse off.

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The New ‘Tribes’ and ‘Territories’ of Higher Education

The impact of marketisation has been felt by university staff across roles and grades: administrators, librarians and other campus personnel have seen their professional identities dismantled and remoulded. However, it is probably academic staff who have felt the market’s imposition most keenly, professional trust and autonomy often being traded for dashboards that alert line managers to apparent underperformance against whichever metrics are in vogue at the time. Researchers such as Tony Becher (1989) and Malcolm Tight (2008) have long noted that university staff identify within closely knit in-groups, membership of which is strictly, though imperceptibly, controlled. These ‘tribes’ and ‘territories’, and their associated discourses, capture how affiliations develop and loyalties grow in academia, perhaps more so than in other professions. For academics, membership is mostly encoded in positive ways, through disciplinary language and culture. But sometimes, identities emerge in opposition to rival tribes, and entrenched in-groupings can sustain sexism, racism, class-based elitism and other forms of structural exclusion. Tribal ‘codes’ can be difficult for outsiders and newcomers to decipher, and tribal leaders—often different from institutionally designated leaders in terms of their academic identity and outlook—can wield undue influence as disciplinary gatekeepers. The relevance of academia’s tribes and territories has diminished over time. Early career academics are now more likely to resist the cultural pull of an individual department to embrace more inter-disciplinary opportunities, and identities are more likely to be forged on-line than in senior common rooms. Social media, in particular, allows ideas and views to be shared instantly among diverse audiences, and the ‘democratisation’ of scholarly knowledge is a way of opening up cross-territorial spaces and reaching new audiences. But the rise of social media tribes presents a challenge for institutional managers and their comms teams. Once, staff could be kept on a relatively tight leash. Aside from the odd belligerent missive in the letters page of a national newspaper, adverse opinions were mostly contained on campus. Now, the ‘eruption of alienation’ that Richard Hall (2018, 2) observes often takes place in public. Some

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institutions have responded to criticism from within by policing the online presence of their staff more stringently, but social media policies themselves can soon be pilloried on the very forums they seek to cleanse. Meanwhile, social media channels are flooded with ‘good news’ stories from institutional accounts. The managerialist urge is to self-promote, then to track and measure the on-line attention that their content receives. Opportunities for universities to open up new forms of dialogue with the public are rarely embraced, and the danger is that this reduces social media to a broadcasting service and another metric. Research by Charles Knight and Linda Kaye suggested that some university staff are also more concerned with using social media to enhance their own reputation than focusing on how it could transform key practices, such as students’ learning (2016, 152). This is consistent with versions of the ‘enterprising’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ academic, but perhaps overlooks the ways in which social media is enabling the formation of new communities of scholarship. While it is possible for digital tribes to be as exclusionary as those of previous generations that Becher (1989) identified, interactions now tend to be more open and membership more inclusive. Leadership experts Agnes Bäker and Amanda Goodall found that the happiest academics were those whose line manager was also a researcher.2 They argued that such managers tended to be more sympathetic to the nature of scholarly work, and therefore more likely to create and endorse optimal working conditions for colleagues. Previously, Goodall (2009) had demonstrated that research universities led by academics outperformed those with managers who either came from non-academic backgrounds or who went into administrative roles early in their careers. Whereas institutional bosses might have previously looked and sounded much like the academics under their care, albeit even more male and white, now the identity of those who run the university often bears little resemblance to those who do the work. This disjunction tends also to be ideological: academics can no longer assume their professional and personal values are shared by their line managers. That academics no 2 The best academics make the best heads of department, Agnes Bäker and Amanda Goodall, Times Higher Education, 04.05.17: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/what-makesa-good-head-of-department.

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longer form a comfortable majority at most universities3 can exacerbate a sense of separation, triggering fears that universities are being ‘overrun’. But more professionalised administration—usually now referred to as ‘professional support services’, or some variation thereof—can free up academic time for better teaching and research. The problem for universities is not a ‘takeover’ by senior administrators so much as a persistent misunderstanding of what academic work involves and how it is best supported. This misunderstanding can be sustained by staff employed on all types of contracts. In many ways, the new tribes of academia still resemble the old ones. English universities have long had a problem with staff diversity and attempts to fix it have been faltering and sometimes insincere. Considering women in the UK now make up 56.5 per cent of the student body and 53.8 per cent of the higher education workforce, the percentage of female academic staff is low at 45.3 per cent. Their representation also declines dramatically at more senior levels, where only 27.5 per cent of managers are women.4 In 2017, just 36 of the world’s 200 ‘top’ universities were led by women.5 Ethnic disparities are even starker, as I discuss in Chapters 4 and 6. The language of tribes and territories is not usually applied to senior leadership teams. However, as academics have migrated to the interdisciplinary and the digital, university managers have emerged as the most tribal and territorial of all clusters. More powerful roles now tend to be held by groups who are uniformly compliant and comfortable with the market-based policy. That members of this tribe tend to look similar is not a coincidence, but the underlying problem emerges through their like-mindedness, coded through the discourses that they reproduce and the leadership philosophies to which they subscribe. Affiliation with the managerial tribe may be strategically extended to individuals from other 3 Academics in the minority at more than two-thirds of UK universities, Paul Jump, Times Higher Education: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/academics-minority-more-twothirds-uk-universities. 4 How far have women come in Higher Education? AdvanceHE, 08/03/2018: https://www.ecu.ac. uk/blogs/far-women-come-higher-education/. 5 Female leadership advances slowly in world’s top universities, Ellie Bothwell, Times Higher Education, 16.07.17: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/female-leadership-advances-slowlyin-worlds-top-universities.

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backgrounds—and often celebrated crassly, much to everyone’s embarrassment—but only if those individuals renounce any non-approved views and performatively embrace dominant ideologies. The modern sector is arguably damaged by this narrowly configured and inwardlooking tribe much more than it is damaged by any residual grouping of academic or disciplinary identities. This is particularly true in relation to growing levels of employment uncertainty and workload expectation faced by university staff, as the next section explains.

2.2

Precarity and Over-Work

This section is about the paradox faced by university staff who are, as higher education scholar Elaine Martin presciently put it in 1999, both more in demand and, simultaneously, less essential. I use the term ‘precarity’ to refer to job insecurity, often resulting from programmes of workforce casualisation in higher education. However, I also note that the same market forces generating precarity for individual staff can generate precarity at the disciplinary and institutional level. The main way in which precarity affects the higher education sector is in relation to the growing number of staff employed on fixed-term contracts. Judith Butler (2009) describes this as ‘politically induced precariousness’, alluding to its tendency to be driven by ideology more than necessity. The extent of casualisation was captured in a 2020 report by Nick Megoran and Olivia Mason which found that, in 2017–18, 67 per cent of research staff and 49 per cent of teaching-focused staff in UK higher education were employed on fixed-term contracts, with over 6500 individual academics employed on zero-hours contracts. The report concluded that the extensive use of casualised academic labour was ‘dehumanising’, leaving some colleagues vulnerable to exploitative practices, curtailing their academic freedoms, and raising barriers to career progression (2020, 6). The myth that flexible contracts allow recipients welcome agility in their work-life balance is immediately busted by survey evidence: 97 per cent of university staff on a fixed-term contract

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said that they would rather be on a permanent contract.6 Barbara Read and Carole Leathwood (2018) argued that precarity also infuses and distorts conceptualisations of success. For both the early and late career researchers interviewed by Read and Leathwood, the financial sustainability of their institution was felt to take priority over the emotional sustainability of their colleagues (2018, 347). Many scholars allow themselves to be exploited because of deep-rooted understandings of their job as a convergence of work and leisure, such that academic labour is regarded as some kind of ‘calling’ or personal passion. As sociologists David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker (2013) showed across creative industries, oversupply of qualified workers leads to self-exploitation. Richard Hall pointed out that this allows the creation of knowledge to be framed as a ‘labour of love’ (2018, 101) rather than an arduous intellectual process, and Kate Bowles suggested that ‘this con persists because we have all been trained to accept that the price of working in universities is one we should feel privileged to pay’.7 These ways of thinking are eagerly embraced by local managers, as any organisation would delight in having staff willing not only to accept unpaid overtime, but to wear it as a badge of honour. Once the principle is accepted that over-work and uncertainty are good for productivity, or at least a tolerable discomfort, then the academic workforce becomes an easily subjugated workforce. At senior levels, the discourse manifests as plaudits for going the extra mile, behaviours incentivised by promotions criteria that demand applicants already work at the higher level before they can be formally considered for upgrade. The exhortation to do what you love is a natural extension of this discursive logic, offering a benignsounding way for senior managers to devolve blame for over-work to staff while at the same time reminding them what an honour it is to work at their institution. As a historian of science Kira Lussier noted, the encouragement casts particularly dark shadows at a time when many

6

Counting the costs of casualization in higher education, University and College Union, 15.06.19: https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10336/Counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-inhigher-education-Jun-19/pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_HE_survey_report_Jun19.pdf. 7 Just refusal , Kate Bowles, Music for Deckchairs, 18.05.20: http://musicfordeckchairs.com/blog/ 2020/05/18/just-refusal/.

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of the sector’s employees face high levels of employment uncertainty.8 Doing what one loves—rather than what one needs to do in return for the income necessary to maintain an acceptable standard of living—is a class-based luxury. The roots of the discourse partly lie in the apocryphal ‘golden age’ of universities discussed in the previous chapter, where formal demands on staff time were purportedly minimal, and long, teaching-free summers stretched before scholars at the end of every academic year. The stereotype is misleading in manifold ways, not least because any reference to a ‘summer break’ assumes a very traditional teaching model that involves no out-of-semester postgraduate supervision, distance learning, student recruitment or teacher training. It is also perverse to think that academics still have their non-teaching time to themselves given the pressures to write, publish, disseminate, win funding, create impact and self-promote. Nonetheless, the typecast persists. Take this 2017 tweet by former academic and Labour MP Andrew Adonis: ‘Why do unis regard 3 mth summer holiday as sacrosanct? No other walk of life where this is true. Pure vested interest ’. All kinds of reforms and interventions can be justified on the back of this myth, including truncated degree courses (surely those long summers could be better spent ushering students into the workplace more quickly?), reduced funding (surely those empty campus facilities could generate income?) and lower pay (surely no-one needs twelve months’ income to do a ten-month job?). All interpretations lead to the same conclusion: that universities drain the public purse and their staff have it easy. Meanwhile, academics are left disorientated, caught between a local expectation of over-work and a public perception of under-work. As one joked on Twitter in 2021: ‘in academia you sometimes have to work 7 days a week, but the freedom to choose which 7 days is unparalleled ’.9 One excuse historically offered by the sector is that short-term contracts and poor pay are justifiable because they provide a route to tenured or permanent posts. They are the helping hand needed to lift the 8 The dark shadow in the injunction to ‘do what you love’, Kira Lussier, Aeon, 07.02.20: https:// aeon.co/ideas/the-dark-shadow-in-the-injunction-to-do-what-you-love. 9 @GragBodwin: https://twitter.com/GregBodwin/status/1408576508634009603.

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apprentice scholar into the academy. While there is no doubt that many academics learnt from their early experiences and made themselves better qualified for posts that did arise, with greater numbers of doctoral and post-doctoral students now in the system, and fewer substantive posts for them to aim at, the chances of a short-term contract leading to secure employment are much less favourable. When it comes to exploiting junior labour, some universities make use of practices that would make gig economy employers blush, with graduate teaching assistants used to cover core contact time and ‘research’ posts advertised that involve no discernible academic enquiry. The inevitable damage to morale is ignored, partly because it cannot be easily measured. Rather than a community of scholars working collegially towards the best teaching and research possible, precarity pitches individual employees against one another in an undignified tussle for limited resources. Divisive variance in pay grade and contract type corrode what should be shared goals. The scale of the challenge for junior staff was captured in 2017 by the vicechancellor of one higher prestige university who reportedly told a group of early career researchers: ‘We have no security to offer you. It is so easy for us to replace you’.10 Health scientist Paul Gorczynski found that 43 per cent of academic staff have exhibited symptoms of at least a mild mental disorder, double the rate of mental disorders in the general population.11 Only 6 per cent said that their workload does not impair their mental health at all. Most work at least one half-day at weekends, with 18 per cent working a whole day, and few taking their annual leave allowance in full.12 Managerial tactics tend to bounce responsibility straight back to staff, but burn-out is a very real syndrome that manifests as exhaustion, feelings of scepticism and alienation. With positive feedback rationed, academics can feel tormented by a sense of ineptitude and lack of accomplishment. 10

Stress fractures: one year on, Liz Morrish, Academic Irregularities, 14.03.17: https://academici rregularities.wordpress.com/category/universities/page/4/. 11 More academics and students have mental health problems than ever before, Paul Gorczynski, The Conversation, 22.02.18: https://theconversation.com/more-academics-and-students-have-mentalhealth-problems-than-ever-before-90339. 12 Data from NTU Branch University and College Union workload survey, 2018: https:// www.ucu.org.uk/media/10195/NTU-branch-workload-survey-2018/pdf/NTU-UCU-workloadsurvey_mar19.pdf.

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The language of resilience trivialises the problem and implicitly blames the victim. While self-care, mindfulness and yoga can all doubtlessly help, few staff will be able to meditate themselves free from structures of over-work. In managerialist discourses, agility is often the only response imaginable to a tightened budget. The language is appealing to senior leaders, many of whom feel professionally unnerved by the attachment that some staff feel towards their subject area, colleagues and students. The modern knowledge worker is thus reimagined as intellectually lithe and ideologically entrepreneurial, committed not to any particular way of thinking, or even to any particular discipline, but rather able to flutter lightly between roles, environments and spaces. For Martin Nickson, agility renders obsolete the idea of education as a human right and academic enquiry as a worthwhile pursuit. He argued that through such language the higher education workforce is remade, ‘not just in terms of changing contractual arrangements but psychologically as well, so that the workforce accepts, and embraces, “correct” view’.13 Nickson cites a blog from one university registrar which states: ‘We need to address behaviour and mindset. We need training that will help people become more agile’.14 The tone here is menacing. However, agility is far from the panacea that managerial discourses insist. It can be divisive and undermining for colleagues who feel that their accumulated experience and expertise in one area is being cynically under-recognised. It can also bruise collegiality within the workforce, and leave students having to navigate a maze of resources, often accessible only through a generic institutional e-mail address, instead of engaging with human beings who know them. While the cause of precarity and over-work is primarily institutional policy, as mediated through institutional managers, questions must also be asked about whether more securely employed university staff perpetuate the insecurity of newer staff by legitimating a model that 13

All change: The rise of ‘agility’ in university management, Martin Nickson, USS Briefs 85, 22.11.19: https://medium.com/ussbriefs/all-change-the-rise-of-agility-in-university-managementf601b78828f4. 14 The Role of Training and Development in Supporting Effective Change, Mike Shore-Nye, Association of Heads of University Administration, 06.03.19: https://www.ahua.ac.uk/the-role-of-tra ining-and-development-in-supporting-effective-change/.

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is structurally inequitable. Take academic conferences: while keynote speakers have their fees, accommodation and travel costs covered, more junior colleagues must often attempt to ‘win’ funding from limited institutional pots or else dip into their own pockets. Linguistic anthropologist Jan Blommaert likened mega-conferences to pop festivals in which rockstar headliners play their greatest hits to audiences of poorly paid and careworn academics.15 He suggested that little truly valuable intellectual work goes on, and that the carbon footprint of the conferences is shameful. Alpha scholars generate more material for their bloated CVs, while alienation intensifies further down the academic food chain. Do conference organisers not realise that the final night ‘dinner’ is beyond the financial reach of many delegates, or that the kind of social capital needed to ‘work the room’ is not evenly distributed? A more subtle way in which senior colleagues may be unconsciously complicit in sustaining precarity is through the ways in which the academic profession inducts and socialises new generations of workers. Doctoral students now spend time on publishing and CV-building that would have been previously spent on reading and thinking; post-doc opportunities, especially in the humanities, are sporadic and sometimes exploitative; many early career posts are temporary, with research something employees are expected to undertake in their own time, as though scholarship is a pet hobby. The Ph.D. qualification itself is archaic. With assessment end-loaded and high stakes, and intense supervisory relationships essential, it is difficult to imagine a qualification more likely to leave its mark on the graduate’s long-term mental health. 67 per cent of Ph.D. students want a career in academic research but only 30 per cent remain in academia three years after graduation.16 Regardless, university promotion criteria and committees continue to reward academics that boast a long list of completions. A further complication is that what counts as academic labour is increasingly determined not by staff, or even in discussion with staff, 15 Looking back: What was important? Jan Blommaert, Ctrl + Alt + Dem, 20.04.20: https://alt ernative-democracy-research.org/2020/04/20/what-was-important/. 16 PhD students and their careers, Bethan Cornell, Higher Education Policy Institute: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/HEPI-Policy-Note-25_PhD-studentscareers_FINAL.pdf.

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but rather at the level of institutional management. As Morrish and Sauntson (2019, 213) put it, if your workload model has no column for mentoring a colleague, supporting a student with mental health problems, or writing a reference, then who says it is work at all? Other scholarly labour that tends to pass beneath the radar of departmental workload models includes: attending research seminar events (even those outside one’s research area, in the spirit of collegiality); editing academic journals and peer reviewing articles (to maintain academic standards); writing grant applications (the majority of which will be rejected); and examining doctoral theses (to share knowledge and support junior researchers). One idiosyncrasy of the higher education profession is that newly appointed lecturers are expected to compete for the conditions and tools that are essential for them to execute their duties. Funding is the obvious example, for without external income it is very difficult for academics to meet publishing expectations, but junior academics are sometimes also required to bid for travel expenses and computer equipment. Cynics have likened it to expecting newly trained firefighters to compete for their ladders and hose. Furthermore, academic over-work disproportionately affects female and ethnic minority staff. Research by higher education scholars Bruce Macfarlane and Damon Burg (2019) show that tacit expectations of supplementary labour slow the career progression of female colleagues, who are more likely to fall into the ‘academic housework trap’, undertaking fewer stimulating activities and internalising greater responsibility for the well-being of their students than their male peers. Female staff are also expected to take primary responsibility for advancing gender equality, much as ethnic minority staff tend to bear the brunt of university work on race equality.17 Yet despite a dog-eat-dog environment and the low chances of success, academia remains a profession that continues to lure throngs of ambitious newcomers. Even temporary and part-time posts can attract hundreds of qualified applicants and, at some times of year, Ph.D. proposals reach would-be supervisors by the dozen. It is possible that

17

Black academics ‘can’t fight race inequality alone ’, Harriet Swain, The Guardian, 05.07.19: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/02/black-academics-bear-brunt-ofuniversity-work-on-race-equality.

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the profession is not quite as unwelcoming as those on the inside sometimes make out. However, greater demand may also arise because of naivety. Many academic hopefuls imagine they will have time to reflect and ruminate, ultimately becoming celebrated thinkers in their field. Bright-eyed graduate students remain under-aware that entry to their profession is likely to be punctuated by multiple rejections, unattainable targets, and expectations of voluntary labour. This is a structural problem for the sector because today’s frazzled, burnt out and bitter early career staff are unlikely to make tomorrow’s intellectual heavyweights. It also keeps the academic profession out of reach for those without familial resources on which to draw. Science journalist Cathleen O’Grady noted that those who do make it through are disproportionately likely to have academic parents, going as far as to describe academia as a ‘family business’.18 O’Grady cited evidence showing that tenure-track academics in the US were 25 times more likely than the wider population to have a Ph.D.-holding mother or father, and nearly twice as likely as academics in general. Precarity now extends to other areas of university activity. Degree courses are in a perilous position if they are perceived to be too expensive, or require too much cross-subsidy, regardless of their importance to society (as in the case of modern languages). Securely employed staff and established academic departments encounter precarity because institutional data can be turned against them. For example, as I discuss in the next chapter, academic publications can be internally mis-graded by non-expert, disgruntled, or unconsciously biased colleagues. Teaching satisfaction scores can be similarly untrustworthy, as I show in Chapter 4, (dis)favouring groups of staff with certain personal and background characteristics. Underpinning the practice of contractual precarity is the principle of intellectual precarity. Analysis of 120 million publications over time shows that academics are publishing at a 2.5 times faster rate than in

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Academia is often a family business. That’s a barrier for increasing diversity, Cathleen O’Grady, Science, 01.04.21: https://www.science.org/content/article/academia-often-family-business-s-bar rier-increasing-diversity.

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the 1950s.19 This is unlikely to be because societies need 2.5 times more outputs than they did in the 1950s, or that today’s academics are 2.5 times more productive. Rather, the increase in supply is likely to be driven by academics needing to prove themselves in an ever more competitive environment. To publish is vital, whether scholars have something new to say or not, because livelihoods depend on it. The alternative—to perish—is not one about which 1950s academics needed to worry so much. Tenure, best defined as lifelong job security, was abolished at English universities as part of the 1988 Education Reform Act.20 Since then, hiring practices have become more varied and integrity deficits more common. A self-aware sector would now take a step back and ask whether it wants to emulate the least ethical aspects of the private sector or be the exemplar to which other kinds of employer turn. In recent years, the University and College Union has moved towards taking action not only over pay rises and pensions—issues that affect more senior colleagues disproportionately—but over equal pay and precarity. This is vital because it safeguards the profession’s future, allowing early career colleagues to be inducted without exploitation. But it is also symbolically important, creating new discourses around issues of social justice and basic employment security, and foregrounding causes that institutional managers and sector leaders find more difficult to dismiss as individual self-interest. Tragically, two recent suicides were linked to conditions of work at UK universities. Professor of toxicology Stefan Grimm’s 2014 death was reportedly triggered by pressure to secure research funding. He had previously received an e-mail warning him that he was not meeting income targets.21 In 2018, accountancy lecturer Malcolm Anderson fell to his death from a window of his campus building. He had previously raised 19

Hypercompetition reshapes research and academic publishing, Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education, 20.06.19: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/hypercompetition-reshapesresearch-and-academic-publishing. 20 The bill applied to academic staff appointed after 20 November 1987. 21 Imperial College professor Stefan Grimm ‘was given grant income target’ , Chris Parr, Times Higher Education, 03.12.14: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/imperial-college-professor-ste fan-grimm-was-given-grant-income-target/2017369.article.

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concerns that he was unable to take annual leave because of an excessive workload. At the time he took his life, he was in the middle of marking over 400 exam papers and preparing for a day of lectures.22 The human cost of not addressing problems of precarity and over-work are grave.

2.3

The Measured Academic

For university staff, performance measurement and review can be nonstop. Though nearly all professions require employees to compare favourably against set indicators as part of managerial oversight, processes tend to be met with more sustained resistance in higher education. This is partly because of historically afforded autonomies, but it is also because university activity does not lend itself to the kind of instantaneous judgments that audit cultures favour. Frontline staff are more aware than backroom managers of the limits of short-term performance metrics, relative to the greater importance of establishing collegiality and professional trust: the effects of even the most stimulating teaching are rarely immediate, and paradigm-shifting scholarship can pass unnoticed when first published. But time is not something that the market can typically afford, so instead, crass proxies capture lecturers’ passing popularity with students, and peers’ often inexpert grading is used to approximate the value of academic research. One irony is that while university staff is now assessed repeatedly by students, as Chapter 4 shows, university managers are seldom assessed by staff, or indeed by students. Those internal surveys that do take place often point to alarmingly high levels of discontent. For example, a 2020 poll of 5888 UK academics by social scientists Mark Erickson, Paul Hanna and Carl Walker (2020) generated a mean satisfaction score of just 10.5 per cent. The sample was self-selecting, and thus more likely to include individuals who hold stronger views, but it is unlikely that such low satisfaction scores would be tolerated on any taught university course. Instead, managers exploit their position within a hierarchical 22

Lecturer’s widow hits out at Cardiff University workload , Catrin Haf Jones, BBC News, 20.02.19: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-47296631.

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system to dismiss the discontent of academics as predictable, and consent to be judged only against the most generic of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), typically by institutional governors. Meanwhile, within a performative context, Stephen Ball (2012) talks about the need for academics to self-promote not only in terms of ‘making the most of ourselves’ but also in terms of ‘making a spectacle of ourselves’ (2012, 19). Quiet competence is no longer enough. Performing professionalism means continually demonstrating excellence: teaching scores need to be high; research needs to be impactful; leadership needs to be dynamic. An academic career—once attractive to society’s introverts and misfits—has become one that demands narcissism. This has led to an emerging trend of ‘stardom’ among a small number of academic ‘celebrities’, as noted by, among others, Jana Bacevic.23 While scholars who can communicate research findings clearly are an asset to any higher education sector, and their renown could be regarded as a natural extension of the impact agenda, one danger is that the pressure to self-promote in a competitive environment can compromise academic integrity. Critical higher education scholar John Smyth intimates that a sales-minded publishing industry might turn a blind eye to ‘sloppy’ scholarship and plagiarism (2017, 139) where authors have luminary appeal. Another worrying sector trend involves the appointment of ‘star’ researchers on protected contracts that shield them from teaching and administration. This represents the more systematic separation of ‘popular’ research from ‘ordinary’ research, and potentially creates further incentives for scholars who might be drawn to external recognition more than methodological rigour. One extreme manifestation of celebrity discourse is self-employed by university managers to justify their role and their salary. Docherty (2018) calls out the vice-chancellors who insist on being addressed as president, supposedly on the grounds that it is the only title understandable to peers in the US. Some English institutions now also have a Chief of Staff . The cult of celebrity extends to state honours, with some academics accepting OBEs, CBEs or MBEs despite being reproachful towards 23

Do we need academic celebrities? Jana Bacevic, 31.08.16: https://janabacevic.net/2016/08/31/ do-we-need-academic-celebrities/.

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Britain’s imperial history in their writing. Notable exceptions includes critical criminologist Phil Scraton, who in 2016 said: ‘I could not accept an honour tied in name to the British Empire. In my scholarship and teaching I remain a strong critic of the historical, cultural and political contexts of imperialism and their international legacy’.24 In 2017, Paul Gilroy similarly declined an invitation to be put forward for a CBE in services to cultural and literary studies, describing the idea as ‘absurd’.25 Thomas Docherty (2018, 218) suggested that all vice-chancellors be banned from knighthoods and damehoods, while Priyamvada Gopal joked about scholars instead being incentivised by the possibility of an SBE: Scourge of the British Empire.26 Higher education researcher Miguel Lim coined the phrase ‘the bibliometric self ’ (2021) to capture how the modern academic’s identity is mediated through websites, portals and other on-line databases that superficially act as a digital repository for journal articles and other academic publications, thereby broadening access to knowledge, but that also publish statistical profiles of how many downloads, reads and citation each author receives. These figures should be treated with extreme caution—because weak papers are sometimes cited frequently by researchers keen to make known their flaws—and the harm to academics’ welfare can be long-lasting. Indeed, the strongest counter-argument to the creeping culture of ‘surveillance capitalism’ in universities is that it makes it more difficult for scholars to retain their integrity and to remember that the true value of their research, and of themselves, does not lie in bibliometric data. However, universities continue to embrace big data as a means to monitor staff activity and approximate their productivity. The sector’s selective, and sometimes unethical, use of such information is epitomised by its Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) processes. The 24 Hillsborough campaigner Professor Phil Scraton turns down OBE , Neil Docking, Liverpool Echo, 29.12.16: https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/hillsborough-campaignerprofessor-phil-scraton-12383133. 25 The last humanist: how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide to our age of crisis, Yohann Koshy, The Guardian, 05.08.21: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/aug/05/paul-gilroy-bri tain-scholar-race-humanism-vital-guide-age-of-crisis. 26 @PriyamvadaGopal: https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/1314823229094146049.

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purpose of TRAC is to reveal the full economic cost of academic work, and to inform government and institutional allocations of resources.27 The process works by asking university staff to complete timesheets that capture their different contributions. One problem is that activities undertaken without external backing can then be framed as indulgent or wasteful, usually through deficit language around unfunded personal research. Mentioned less often is that TRAC data almost always shows that academics work more hours than they are paid to do (or, rather, more hours than those suggested by a deliberately imprecise contract), and take less annual leave than that to which they are entitled. Probono work by university staff across the UK was reported to be worth £3.2b a year to the sector in 2018.28 TRAC data could be used to help achieve healthier work-life balances, and to reduce gender and ethnicity gaps in workload allocation. However, they are is more often used against university staff than in support of them. Those seeking to modernise higher education argue that performance metrics help to bring transparency and answerability to a sector that has historically lacked both, and it is hard to deny that privileges of gender, race and class have shaped workforces more than those of other professions. University employees do not always frame their pushback in the most strategic terms, sometimes sounding defensive, exceptionalist or even self-important. A more effective approach would be to accept and embrace principles of public accountability, while demonstrating that many of the metrics currently imposed on the sector are methodologically flawed, and geared more towards surveillance than meaningful assessment of quality. In 2020, developmental psychologist Uta Frith offered preliminary suggestions about how academics might transition to a healthier and more sustainable research culture. The idea that drew the most attention was ‘less, but better’. Noting the corrupting effect of ‘publish or 27

TRAC—A guide for Senior Managers, HEFCE , 02.06.15: https://webarchive.nationalarchives. gov.uk/ukgwa/20180405131546/http:/www.hefce.ac.uk/funding/finsustain/pubs/TRAC„A,gui de,for,senior,managers,and,governing,body,members/. 28 Pro-bono work by UK university staff ‘worth £3.2 billion a year’ , Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education, 12.03.18: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pro-bono-work-uk-universitystaff-worth-ps32-billion-year.

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perish’ cultures in higher education, and the risk that ‘fast science’ led to cutting corners, Frith (2020) suggested restricting both the number of grants that any scholar could hold at any one time, and the number of papers that could be published annually (‘personally, I would aim for just one’, she said). Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber (2018) put forward a similar alternative in the form of ‘slow scholarship’. Paralleling the slow food movement, which posits that we tend to rush cooking and eating so much that we forget its pleasures, they argued that higher education was one sector of society that should value the cultivation of deep thought. To maintain current rates of scholarship, they argued, was to play into a corporate model of higher education (Berg & Seeber, 2016). The idea doubtlessly held appeal to many a stressed academic, and if all staff showed collective restraint and all institution types were similarly supportive, it is likely that the long-term benefits to the well-being of the profession would be substantial. But the problem is that in the current environment it is almost impossible to become successful while practising slower scholarship. The system has multiple mechanisms in place to weed out the under-productive, the sluggish or the unorthodox. As sociologist Heather Mendick (2014) pointed out, slowing down is a luxury that not all academics can afford. She argued that models of slow scholarship are both classed and gendered, reproducing wider patterns of inclusion and exclusion.29 ‘To be a slow scholar is an aspirational identity to which many will not have access because of the brute realities of causal labour’, added digital sociologist Mark Carrigan.30 The requirement for research income to be awarded competitively results in hundreds of academic work hours being spent on preparing viable and fully costed research projects that are never backed. The process is neither efficient nor equitable. Many funding calls have notoriously low success rates, sometimes 20 per cent or lower in the humanities and social sciences. Shahar Avin, whose Ph.D. focused on the allocation of public funds to research projects, also noted that women and ethnic

29 Is #slow academia conservative? Heather Mendick, Allegra Lab, 30.06.16: https://allegralabor atory.net/is-slow-academia-conservative/. 30 Against slow scholarship, Mark Carrigan, 17.05.18: https://markcarrigan.net/2018/05/17/aga inst-slow-scholarship/.

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minorities have lower chances of being awarded grants.31 However, to opt out, even based on rational calculations of time commitment relative to likelihood of success, would be to self-sabotage one’s research career. Applicants often liken the grant application process to playing roulette. However, this metaphor fails to capture the bias built into the system: being from the right kind of institution and being endorsed by the right kind of referee can significantly change the odds of success. The roulette wheel is much fairer. Markets love metrics. They enable comparison and, in the neoliberal imagination at least, they drive up quality by appealing to everyone’s competitive spirit. However, the most lasting legacy of ubiquitous measurement in higher education may be a hierarchical and performance-orientated culture that disproportionately rewards individual exceptionalism at the expense of communal competence. Such are the expectations to excel on all fronts—publish faster, impact harder, teach better—that one of Joelle Fanghanel’s anonymous academic interviewees likened the culture to ‘a superman or superwoman model’ (2011, 20). Only those with superpowers are able to exceed all of the market’s benchmarks; everyone else must deal with the status anxiety and imposter syndrome that under-achievement inevitably brings. The next section looks closely at one of the more visible symptoms of the market in higher education: high levels of pay for institutional managers.

2.4

Senior Remuneration

In 2018, entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan was commissioned by Advance HE to advise institutional managers on how to create healthy working cultures. She concluded that universities are run according to ‘very old-fashioned management theory’.32 A widespread but erroneous 31 Research funding is a gamble so let’s give out money by lottery, Shahar Avin, LSE , 28.03.17: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/03/28/research-funding-is-agamble-so-lets-give-out-money-by-lottery/. 32 Margaret Heffernan: ‘The more academics compete, the fewer ideas they share’, Anthea Lipsett, The Guardian, 29.11.18: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/29/margaret-heffer nan-the-more-academics-compete-the-fewer-ideas-they-share.

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assumption, Heffernan concluded, was that managers simply needed the right mix of targets, KPIs, metrics and incentives to operate successfully. Many commercial organisations had long since realised that this approach maximised obedience and conformity of thought, but did little to promote creativity and originality. Yet within the managerial university, private business practices continue to be fetishised. This section asks why, in a context of out-of-date and often ineffective leadership, senior pay has risen at such speed. When the regulator published its first annual analysis of senior staff pay,33 total annual remuneration packages for university bosses ranged from £90,000 to £718,000, with an average of £299,000. Sixteen vicechancellors were paid in excess of £400,000 in 2017–18. The Office for Students framed the report as ‘helping universities to reduce senior pay where necessary’, and welcomed signs of restraint.34 It had no legal remit to go any further. The approach mirrored that taken by the government towards schools, based on the premise that managers could be shamed into accepting pay cuts. In 2019, the DfE wrote to 94 academy trusts asking them to justify the high salaries awarded to executives and headteachers.35 It is unclear how many even bothered to reply. Policy-makers’ reluctance to meddle with market forces gives public-facing sectors free rein to continue with questionable remuneration practices. Vice-chancellors come under sustained media attack for their salaries, expense claims and other perceived perks. Discourses have proliferated and mainstreamed, such that even BBC headlines now casually refer to ‘fat-cat university bosses’.36 Left-leaning politicians draw connections between vice-chancellors’ rising income, on one hand, and staff cuts and student indebtedness, on the other hand. Speaking in 2018, shadow 33 Senior staff remuneration: Analysis of the 2017–18 disclosures, Office for Students, 12.02.19: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-and-media/office-forstudents-publishes-first-annual-analysis-of-senior-staff-pay/. 34 Senior staff pay, Office for Students, 2019: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-gui dance/regulation/senior-staff-pay/. 35 Government orders non-compliant trusts to reduce excessive salaries, UK Department for Education, 10.05.19: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-orders-non-compliant-truststo-reduce-excessive-salaries. 36 Is this the end of the ‘fat-cat’ university bosses? Sean Coughlan, BBC News, 29.11.17: https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-42166590.

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secretary of state for education Angela Rayner claimed that increased tuition fees were ‘subsidising fat-cat pay packets at the top, while hardworking staff face the prospect of losing up to 40 per cent of their pension, and students are saddled with up to £57,000 in debt’.37 In the same year, a television documentary programme issued Freedom of Information requests across UK universities and found that vice-chancellors and their executive teams were claiming expenses for items as trivial as scented candles and alcoholic cocktails.38 One university paid £1600 for its incoming vice-chancellor’s pet dog to be relocated from Australia; another vice-chancellor reportedly claimed £2 worth of biscuits on top of a £20,000 expenses bill.39 More serious double standards were exposed where one university declared a ‘climate emergency’ while reimbursing senior staff for multiple first-class international flights. Compensation for loss of office is a particular source of sensitivity. In 2019, one vicechancellor resigning in advance of an investigation that would identify ‘significant and systemic’ failings in governance was handed a pay-off worth £270,000.40 The response of most highly paid managers when their gluttony or folly is exposed is to keep a low profile. Indeed, as Peter Scott (2021, 96) noted, wiser vice-chancellors minimise exposure by insisting that their remuneration committees recommend only the most modest of pay rises. But it is interesting to look at the rhetoric deployed by those senior managers who do publicly defend their income. Vice-chancellor George Holmes, who boasts of owning two classic cars and a yacht, said that he hoped his students would also ‘use their education to get a good job and then they can have a Bentley’. Holmes then posed the 37

Vice-Chancellor benefit package increased by 227% since 2010, Labour analysis reveals, Angela Rayner, Labour, 01.03.18: https://labour.org.uk/press/vice-chancellor-benefit-package-increased227-since-2010-labour-analysis-reveals/. 38 Revealed: British university vice-chancellors’ five-star expenses, Jamie Doward, The Guardian, 24.02.18: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/feb/24/vice-chancellors-expenses-scandalchannel-4-dispatches-universities. 39 I exposed the Bath vice-chancellor’s pay in a local paper—regional reporting matters, Sam Petherick, The Guardian, 29.12.17: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/29/bathvice-chancellor-pay-local-newspapers-vital-work. 40 University vice-chancellor given £270k payoff after resigning, Sally Weale, The Guardian, 01.07.19: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/01/university-vice-chance llor-dominic-shellard-payoff-resigning-de-montfort.

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question: ‘do you want to be taught by someone who is successful or a failure?’41 Such provocations might sound crass, but they force critics to articulate exactly why high remuneration packages are unacceptable. Media discourses can be ambiguous: some imply that the problem is that the money comes from government-underwritten student loans; others suggest that universities are simply no place for high earners. But the most compelling argument may be that the pay of vice-chancellors has risen much faster (up to four times faster, according to some research)42 than that of academic staff, such that when the Office for Students report helpfully included a column for head of providers’ total remuneration divided by median total remuneration, the Gini-type co-efficient ranged from 2.9 to 12.8. Apologists for high senior pay point out that some English universities now have a turnover exceeding £1b, and that remuneration in the sector remains lower than that elsewhere. The highest-paid US college presidents receive executive compensation packages that run into several million dollars per year,43 and Australian universities also pay their vice-chancellors sums which overshadow those in the English sector, with average salaries topping A$1m. Given the potential for senior pay at English universities to rise further, those who would prefer to see managers motivated more by public duty may elect to focus more on process than outcome. Like most senior staff, the salary of the yacht-owning vice-chancellor was determined by a remuneration committee—a subcommittee of his institution’s board of governors— following a performance assessment interpreted in light of the code published by the Committee of University Chairs. The problem here is that even well-meaning and cautious remuneration committees use benchmarking data from elsewhere in the sector to gauge what other 41

University of Bolton’s bentley-driving vice chancellor pockets £66k pay rise, Eleanor Busby, Independent, 06.06.18: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/universitybolton-vice-chancellor-pay-rise-george-holmes-pay-a8386146.html. 42 ‘Eye-watering’ salary rises for university chiefs cannot be justified, says report, Julie Henry, The Guardian, 15.03.15: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/15/rises-for-univer sity-chiefs-cannot-be-justified. 43 Executive Compensation at Public and Private Colleges, Dan Bauman, Julia Piper, and Brian O’Leary, Chronicle of Higher Education, 25.03.21: https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/execut ive-compensation#id=table_private_2017.

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leaders are being paid. This creates a positive feedback loop, as academic registrar and sector commentator Mike Ratcliffe called it: most universities aspire to be top quartile providers so they link their vice-chancellor’s pay to others in this band.44 When those universities increase senior pay, they increase theirs, thus raising the overall level for that quartile, and in turn causing other universities to follow suit. Processes are largely hidden from wider scrutiny, and failure against KPIs is rarely acknowledged in a sector so wedded to institutional prestige. More alarming is that a 2019 University and College Union report found that 81 per cent of vicechancellors retained the right to attend their remuneration committee in 2017–18.45 Surely the explanation cannot be that their expertise is so great that it overrides the potential conflict of interest and the associated loss of public confidence? One vice-chancellor was reportedly a member of the committee that awarded her nearly £200,000 worth of pay hikes in five years.46 The disproportionate focus on vice-chancellors’ salaries (and typically those of female vice-chancellors more than their male counterparts) can distract from equally sharp pay rises among senior managers more generally. When universities, or organisations like Universities and Colleges Employers Association, talk about rising staff costs in the higher education sector, the implication is usually that it is academics who are draining institutional resources. However, many senior non-academic staff are now able to negotiate salaries far beyond any academic pay scale. Some are employed in roles that emerged partly as a response to increased regulation, as universities became expected to comply with demands to submit multiple data returns. Some academics are alarmed by the rise of highly remunerated senior administrators, conscious that income invested in managerial roles take away from student-facing resources. 44 Universities—take back control of your vice-chancellors’ spiralling salaries, Mike Ratcliffe, The Guardian, 11.01.18: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/jan/11/ universities-take-back-control-of-your-vice-chancellors-spiralling-salaries. 45 Vice-chancellors still attend pay meetings despite outcry, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 20.06.19: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jun/20/vice-chancellors-still-attendpay-meetings-despite-outcry. 46 Bath University vice-chancellor quits after outcry over £468k pay, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 28.11.17: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/nov/28/bath-university-vice-chancellorquits-after-outcry-over-468k-pay.

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Higher education researchers Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell (2018) talk of the university’s ‘administrative-managerial proliferation’ (p. 435), and it is a contributing factor to what John Smyth (2017) refers to as a growing separation between those who do the work, and those who lay claim to its outcomes or products. The claim that high senior pay is needed to attract and retain the brightest and best individuals is predictable within prevailing market logic, but perhaps even more dubious in the higher education sector than elsewhere. Business acumen is rarely enough; universities require senior managers with sensitivity to the conditions in which meaningful teaching and research takes place. It takes a special set of skills to inspire a workforce whose primary motivation is unlikely to be financial. Indeed, it is possible that high salaries sometimes result in the wrong sort of candidates being attracted to senior roles in the profession. Individuals wanting to maximise their own income are usually unsuited to jobs that require humility and collegiality. The strongest leaders show an awareness of the university’s public role and have the nerve to rise above short-term market-based priorities, where appropriate. Rob Cuthbert pointed out that with high pay comes an expectation ‘to pursue the best interests of the institution and the people in it, not to be silenced just because the problems are very difficult, nor out of fear or self-interest’.47 Governing bodies and remuneration committees could help by conceptualising success beyond narrow objectives. This might include setting KPIs that require staff pay gaps to close, student outcomes to be less predicted by ethnicity, or carbon footprints to be reduced substantially. Environments might then emerge that are more equal, and in which all colleagues can flourish. It may also help build a new breed of managers with the courage to speak out against damaging policy and resist public mischaracterisations of the sector. Inevitably, a hostile media seizes gleefully on the perceived hypocrisy of managers at publicly funded institutions lining their pockets at taxpayers’ and students’ expense. The fat-cat vice-chancellor has become as familiar a university discourse cliché as the absent-minded professor. 47

Cronyism, academic values and the degradation of debate, Rob Cuthbert, Society for Research in Higher Education, 20.04.21: https://srheblog.com/2021/04/20/cronyism-academic-values-andthe-degradation-of-debate/.

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English higher education is given a torrid time by the media, but some of the behaviours outlined in this section are an open invitation for those seeking to undermine the sector. Nobody working in a university needs an annual salary exceeding half a million pounds, nor for the cost of their scented candles to be claimed back on expenses. If universities wish to be perceived as on side with the public good, their managers cannot indulge in the kind of excesses associated with private sector CEOs. Furthermore, it is worryingly unclear from where future generations of leaders in higher education will emerge. Few early career academics aspire to institutional management in the current climate, and those in control tend not to want scholars and their bothersome research evidence to disrupt managerial thinking anyway. This is just the kind of structural challenge that should be the focus of attention for institutional governing bodies. However, as the next section shows, university governance is another area that has proved problematic in the age of market sovereignty.

2.5

Governance in English Higher Education

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, WonkHE’s Jim Dickinson asked an important question: had anyone seen the governing body?48 While management teams were being vilified in political discourses for questionable decision-making, academics were under fire for allegedly refusing face-to-face teaching, and students were being framed by the media as Covid-19 super-spreaders, those exercising the most power in the university seemed to be escaping scrutiny. However, it is not only in times of emergency that governing bodies manage to stay in the shadows. Despite the increasing authority invested in them by the government and the regulator, they remain a mostly ethereal presence within the modern institution. The governing body takes different names at different institutions, sometimes called the council, court, or board of directors. Governors’ contribution to the institution is usually focused on strategic oversight 48

Big decisions about January need to be taken by governors now, Jim Dickinson, WonkHE , 19.10.20: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/time-for-the-governing-body-to-govern-over-covid/.

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and direction. They act as guardians of the university’s principles, reputation and financial sustainability. Governors are not usually regarded as members of university staff because they tend not to be on the payroll. However, in the English sector’s market era, the chair and the board are increasingly empowered when it comes to institutional policy and staffing. Former registrar Michael Shattock outlines four ages of UK university governance.49 The first, till the mid-1950s, was a time when governing bodies were a controlling force within the institution. The second, from the mid-1950s to 1980, was the most enabling for staff, as university senates enabled much higher levels of academic self-rule. The third, from 1980 to 2000, involved a shift away from staff sovereignty, as vice-chancellors wrestled back power. And the fourth, since 2000, has involved the further concentration of decision-making authority.50 The corporate board culture is now presented as the gold standard, and most governing bodies operate on the basis of a ‘lay majority’, subscribing to the idea that individuals with no specific knowledge of the sector are best placed to oversee operations. Little thought is given to how education might differ from the products and services exchanged in the private sphere. Writing about US colleges in the early twentieth century, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s (1918) characterised university governance as prone to unnecessary interference, and likely to enforce orthodoxy on staff. Since then, campus discourses have continued regarding governors with suspicion. But does this reflect a problem in university governance? Or simply an age-old academic instinct to push back against even rudimentary forms of oversight? Lay governors are mostly selfless in their motivations. Most will readily acknowledge that they are not 49

University governance in flux. The impact of external and internal pressures on the distribution of authority within British universities: a synoptic view, Michael Shattock, CGHE , 2017: https:// www.researchcghe.org/publications/working-paper/university-governance-in-flux-the-impact-ofexternal-and-internal-pressures-on-the-distribution-of-authority-within-british-universities-a-syn optic-view/. 50 Even within the current model, there are different sub-types of governance structure in the English sector: Oxford and Cambridge form a group in their own right, based on a model favoured in many continental European universities, with maximal academic influence retained; the pre-92 civic universities tend to operate a bicameral system, in which an academic senate sits alongside (but remains advisory to) a board of governors; and the post-92 universities form a third distinct group with even less influence in the hands of academic staff.

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experts in higher education, and arcane statutes and ordinances offer no practical help for individuals more accustomed to shareholders’ straightforward demands for a bigger return on their investment. One reason for suspicion among academics is that lay governors are often appointed through circular and clandestine internal processes, nominated by the subcommittee of the main board that is itself composed of existing governors. Appointments usually have the approval of senior management, who are themselves sometimes selected through recruitment processes overseen by governors. Given the incestuous nature of the system, it is not surprising that governing bodies often find it difficult to offer institutional management teams the kind of robust, objective ‘challenge’ that is legally required. Norman Gowar suggests that, in such ways, higher education governance has become ‘over-influenced by the views of a small cadre talking amongst themselves with their own group dynamic’.51 PreCovid, estates grew bigger and shinier because they represented a lowrisk form of investment, unlike those pesky human ‘resources’ with their pay demands, expectations of career progression and insistence on a fair pension. Discussions around pension schemes now consume board discussions, and comparisons are invariably made between academics’ ostensibly generous and unaffordable pension deal, and the less favourable deals available to private sector employees. Lay governors reflect on the tough choices that needed taking in their industries, and suggest that, regrettably, universities cannot expect to remain immune from real world financial compromises. The discourse works on multiple levels, flattering those willing to take unpopular but necessary steps, downplaying the legitimate rights of the pension scheme’s members, and implicitly framing the private sector model as the right and proper one. Institutional managers tend to pursue a parallel approach involving strategic compartmentalisation. Students may be occupying a building to lobby for divestment, but elsewhere on campus a finance committee may be meeting to double down on fossil fuel holdings. The protest can be easily managed (with conciliatory discourses around the importance 51

‘A small cadre talking amongst themselves’: the problem with university governance, Norman Gowar, Council for the Defence of British Universities, 26.02.19: http://cdbu.org.uk/a-small-cadretalking-amongst-themselves-the-problem-with-university-governance/.

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of free speech) and the regressive investment policy can be justified (with conciliatory discourses around the importance of maximising institutional income). The job of management thus becomes one of presenting different agenda to different parties in different ways. As such, the kind of meaningful, intense, open dialogue that one might traditionally associate with higher education—with arguments being expressed directly, and counter-arguments considered carefully, all in the pursuit of truth—is minimised or eliminated. Board discussion tends to be coded as confidential, with the noble-sounding principle of ‘collective responsibility’ enabling the relative anonymity that allows difficult decisions to be more readily taken. Governing bodies thus grow further removed from day-to-day, campus activity. For students and staff, representation is a source of irritation, particularly when governing bodies rubber-stamp decisions that undermine them or misconstrue their identity. Sometimes, behind closed boardroom doors, institutional managers bond with governors by othering students (over-politicised and naïve) or academic staff (intractable and over-entitled). There can be little doubt that the role of academic staff in particular has been consciously restricted in recent decades, as university governance expert Julie Rowlands (2017) and other analysts have noted. Discourses often revolve around the ‘professionalisation’ of governance, and academics have typically been first to lose their seats first when chairs decide to ‘streamline’. Those who remain are tolerated rather than embraced, and often kept at a safe distance from the subcommittees at which key decisions are made. Michael Shattock and Aniko Horvath charted the parallel rise of the executive, expressing concern that the language and structure of university now borrow ‘too facilely’ from business (2019, 87). They noted that many chairs see themselves and their lay colleagues as non-execs. Shattock and Horvath also pointed out that senior manager could reject this top-down model if they so wished, and position themselves more as a bridge to academic communities (2019, 87). However, their evidence, collected from interviews with academic governors, did not suggest that this approach is favoured. One interviewee protested that academic representation on the board of their university had descended into ‘a form of tokenism’ (2019, 163).

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How universities are run (and by whom) has been the subject of much discussion since the Jarratt Report (1985) recommended a reduction in the power of senates (and therefore staff ), and the designation of vicechancellors as chief executives. This is partly because, as Rowlands (2017) pointed out, governance is symbolic as the site in which struggles for control over the sector play out at an institutional level. As governance has become less participatory, more top-down and more distant, so too have relations between academics and managers grown more strained. Academic staff do not have the right to self-govern and more than bank cashiers have the right to determine their company’s global investment strategy, and the traditional scholarly skill-set (in-depth knowledge of a narrow field) does not necessarily map on to the management needs of a large organisation. But it is reasonable for academics to expect some say in the running of their institution. If the expertise and first-hand experience of a mass workforce is systematically overlooked then that is surely a failure of management. Universities work best when run through consensus. The Office for Students explicitly warns governing bodies to avoid group-think,52 but their regulatory advice often betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the entity being overseen. Universities need lay governors with expertise and experience that go beyond the higher education sector, but they also need members who have sensitivity to the very particular requirements of institutions that serve to enrich their host society in complex and non-economic ways. Instead, what many universities have amassed is a well-intentioned but narrowly comprised board and council, disengaged from academic activity and not representative of local communities or wider society. The hierarchical, finance-driven model of governance so dominant in the higher education sector is no longer valued even within private sector boardrooms. Yet the current trend, as Peter Scott (2021) wearily reports, is towards smaller, more closed and (supposedly) more expert board composition, with minutes made available to staff only once carefully ‘sanitised’ (2021, 183–184).

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Governing Bodies, Office for Students, 27.07.20: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/adviceand-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/effective-practice/governing-bodies/.

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Among the changes to governance currently mooted within the higher education sector is that of formalising payments to governors.53 However, rather than creating yet another market in the sector, a more progressive approach may be to consider afresh which kind of individuals are best placed to offer informed and balanced oversight. Who speaks up for local communities? How are schools and colleges represented? What about the charity sector, and local civic institutions? Clearly, boards need members that understand finance, accountancy and business, but they also need members with a keen awareness of universities’ core contributions to society, and the vision to steer management teams away from commercial KPIs where necessary. More collegial models need not be anything to fear, potentially challenging some of the corporate assumptions on which governance principles currently rest and offering a way for custodians of the institution to work more constructively with an academic workforce whose expertise is increasingly under-used, as the next section explains.

2.6

The Marginalisation of Academics and Academic Expertise

Historian Richard Hofstadter (1963) described anti-intellectualism as antipathy towards higher learning and those assumed to represent it, and Eric Merkley (2020) more recently showed how modern antiintellectualism correlates with populist misgivings about the science behind issues like climate change and water fluoridation. Discursive attacks on academic expertise have become commonplace. For example, in 2016, MP Glyn Davies tapped into a familiar binary between universities and the communities in which they operate when tweeting that he ‘personally never thought of academics as experts’ because they have ‘no experience of the real world ’.54 As Thomas Docherty (2018, 36) noted, 53 It could be time to start paying university governors, Alison Wheaton, Public Finance, 22.06.19: https://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/2019/07/it-could-be-time-start-pay ing-university-governors. 54 @GlynDavies: https://twitter.com/glyndavies/status/792386609396191233?lang=en.

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discourses of realism are adored by the right, allowing universities to be positioned as outside the realms that ordinary people occupy. On a wider stage, US president Donald Trump frequently railed against academic knowledge, dismissing climate change science as a ‘hoax’55 and suggested that Covid-19 might be curable by injecting or ingesting disinfectant.56 One way in which these political slights operate is to create and maintain the illusion of academics holding more power than they actually do. Richard Hall (2018, 102) drew a helpful distinction between ‘power to explain the world’ and ‘power over the world’. Academics have the former, Hall suggested, but they sit within societies run by individuals who have the latter. Findings are increasingly dismissed as biased because academics lack viewpoint diversity, and hostile discourses can ridicule apparent contradictions in the literature, as though any disagreement between scholars is evidence of research failure. Beneath the rhetoric often lies a more sinister and politically motivated distrust of any kind of expertise, a theme to which I return in Chapter 5. Political attacks are often fuelled by sensitivities around lecturers’ perceived influence over students. In the build-up to the 2019 UK general election, seemingly innocent attempts to encourage young people to vote came under steady attack. One member of university staff who tweeted to students: ‘don’t forget that you can register at both your home and your uni addresses’57 was reported to the police and the Electoral Commission, and her vice-chancellor was urged to discipline her. Another academic faced public censure for trying to boost students’ democratic literacy. She explained that ‘I’ve been accused of patronising my students by telling them how to vote, which is ridiculous because for most of them it’s the first time they’ve done it’.58 The irony here is that the Office for Students plainly recommends that institutions collaborate 55

Trump on climate change report: ’‘ don’t believe it’, BBC News, 26.11.18: https://www.bbc.co. uk/news/world-us-canada-46351940. 56 Coronavirus: medical experts denounce Trump’s theory of ’disinfectant injection’ , David Smith, The Guardian, 24.04.20: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/trump-coronavirustreatment-disinfectant. 57 @CarriePaechter: https://twitter.com/CarriePaechter/status/1189682718617034754?s=20. 58 UK academics face furious backlash for encouraging students to vote, Anna Fazackerley, The Guardian, 12.11.19: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/nov/12/academics-facing-fur ious-backlash-advising-students-vote.

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with student union representatives ‘as an important step in explaining the history of democracy, importance of registering to vote and voting’.59 Registration drives are explicitly cited as good practice. But academics that enact the guidance run the gauntlet of media abuse and seem unable to rely on backing from their institutional managers. The marginalisation of academic knowledge begins at a local level, even when workforce expertise is directly relevant to the very management processes that side-line them. Guy Cook offers an example of his own discipline, Applied Linguistics, complaining that external consultants are hired to change the ways in which staff write and communicate, and accusing the modern university of ‘forcing its own vacuous PR way of using language onto academics’ (2012, 36). Institutional cultures are rarely premised on the idea that academic resources and knowledge could help managers to manage better. And with every institution commissioning the same consultants to advise on the same issues (for fear of missing out), marginal gains become vanishingly thin. If academics are disregarded in their own places of employment, it is not too surprising that their input is sometimes unwanted beyond the campus, and their expertise mocked in broader public discourses. Impact and public engagement agenda, now a key part of the new modernised academic identity, reward those able to achieve certain kinds of cut-through. However, this usually relies on research being sufficiently non-threatening to influence mainstream policy. The new brief comes naturally to some academics, and others try to repurpose their sense of professional self to remain relevant. But for many, the motivation to enter the profession was an instinct towards activism and a desire to change the world for the better. The problem for them is that scepticism and radicalism are not what policy-makers want from the sector, nor what senior staff want from their workforce. Indeed, institutional managers have not only become adept at ignoring staff, they have learnt to style out accusations of hypocrisy. One who issued injunctions to ‘slay the neoliberal beast’ while a jobbing academic warmly embraced the same beast when his career moved on to

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the vice-chancellor level.60 Jana Bacevic (2019) wondered why we should expect critical knowledge of an issue to correspond with political action against it, rightly pointing out that screaming ‘fuck neoliberalism’ into the safe confines of journal articles and social media do little to unpick multiple infrastructural, political and other inequalities, including those reproduced through the same venues (2019, 389). Those that push back against dominant cultures can quickly be labelled intransigent, with discourses creating the kind of false binaries that Morrish and Sauntson characterise as ‘compliance or exit, entrepreneur or whiner’ (2019, 199). More critical researchers even run the risk of their area being targeted for closure by institutional managers keen to protect their narratives from being undermined by unruly staff. At one English university in 2019, scholars of critical management studies were targeted for redundancy based on the titles of the journal articles in which they published. Morrish described this as the ‘most egregious example of ideological cleansing’ within the sector yet.61 The good news is that publics do not always share negative perceptions of academics and seem less threatened by their research. According to the 2018 Veracity Index,62 86 per cent of respondents to a survey believed that professors tell the truth, a proportion lower than that for nurses (96 per cent) and teachers (89 per cent), but higher than that for judges (83 per cent), bankers (41 per cent) and politicians (19 per cent). One of the most memorable Twitter hashtags during the 2018 industrial action was #WeAreTheUniversity, as striking academic staff sought to reclaim an identity that they felt had been hijacked by brand managers and senior institutional administrators. The statement is problematic in some ways because it could be interpreted as excluding other groups, such as administrative colleagues, librarians and students. But #WeAreTheUniversity was intended to remind senior management teams that universities 60 The intellectual adventure of slaying the neoliberal beast, Mark Carrigan, 09.03.18: https://mar kcarrigan.net/2018/03/09/the-intellectual-adventure-of-slaying-the-neoliberal-beast/. 61 Space for academic freedom, Liz Morrish, Academic Irregularities, 28.08.21: https://academici rregularities.wordpress.com/2021/08/28/space-for-academic-freedom/. 62 Advertising execs rank below politicians as Britain’s least-trusted profession, Ipsos Mori, 18.10.18: https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/advertising-execs-rank-below-politicians-bri tains-least-trusted-profession.

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are nothing without the staff who undertake the teaching and research. The hashtag emphasised that the marginalisation of academics (generally a trusted brand) by institutional managers (generally a less trusted brand) was neither wise nor sustainable.

2.7

Separations of Teaching and Research

Within universities that do both, teaching and research often appear to be in competition with one another. This may be inevitable because the two activities vie for the same budget, but it is rarely to the benefit of students, who can find themselves lured to a research-intensive university for teaching ambiguously branded as research-led or research-driven, only to find that the staff they were promised are on leave and they will instead be taught by lecturers employed on a variety of precarious contracts, and in ways that seem suspiciously similar to pedagogies favoured elsewhere in the sector. While the Von Humboldt ideal63 that teaching and research co-exist and complement one another continues to be regarded as the gold standard in the English sector, the market changes the dynamics between the two. In many universities, teaching has become a more profitable activity, especially where its recipients are overseas students paying inflated fees. Research-intensive universities imply that outstanding teaching requires outstanding research, but this is partly to reinforce a market edge over teaching-focused universities. Sceptics might suggest that students’ preference for research-intensive universities is based not on pedagogy but on the prestige that a strong research profile confers upon the institution. Either way, research has become the beneficiary of teaching’s generous subsidy. Research and teaching are perhaps most usefully seen as two sides of the same coin: research is the skill of understanding increasingly complex social, economic, political, cultural, medical, legal and other environments; teaching is the skill of explaining these understandings to others in ways that are accessible and enjoyable. Research is of little value 63 The ideal takes its name from Prussian philosopher, linguist and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt.

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unless shared through teaching; teaching is of little value unless drawing on research conducted by somebody at some point. However, not all academic evidence points to an inextricable link between teaching and research. An influential 1996 meta-study by educationalists John Hattie and H.W. March concluded that the common belief that the two are intimately entwined is a myth, despite many academics wishing it to be true. For Hattie and Marsh, teaching and research are no more than ‘loosely coupled’ (1996, 529). Where does this leave staff? Many academics would prefer to dedicate more time to research or scholarship, and regard their current teaching load as a barrier to this, especially given the pressure to embrace digital pedagogies during and since Covid-19. The rewards of outstanding research, for the principal investigator at least, can be substantial: prominence on university websites and newsfeeds; centrality to research audits; opportunities to hire co-investigators and benefit from co-authorship. By contrast, the reward for outstanding teaching is typically more teaching. At higher prestige universities, institutional language often reinforces a deficit conceptualisation: teaching loads are there to be bought out, while strategic investment tends to find its way to research. Meanwhile, institutional sabbaticals protect high-flying researchers from the burden of standing before students, regardless of the message it may send to more teaching-focused colleagues. The problem is well evidenced in the literature. Interviews with vicepresidents for teaching and learning conducted by former chief executive of the Higher Education Academy Stephanie Marshall find evidence of a constant struggle for internal recognition (2016, 4). ‘You have to battle with the attitude that it’s learning and teaching so it doesn’t count ’, says one interviewee. From the lecturer’s perspective, Joelle Fanghanel reports a similar culture. Fanghanel spoke to one academic at a research-intensive university who characterised teaching as ‘low, demeaning and it is a pain to have to do’ (2011, 90). Another recalled being warned by a senior colleague that ‘if you do too much teaching, we might need to look at your contract’ (2011, 91), a thinly disguised, publish-or-perish threat that anything less than full commitment to research could result in the privilege being withdrawn. In a market system, pressure grows to

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‘uncouple’ research from teaching. Granted, it is possible for an institution to function only as a knowledge creator, leaving other providers to specialise in pedagogy. But to reduce universities to think tanks is to miss out on opportunities to influence lives and minds, and to raise consciousness about important societal issues. There are also questions about what a model that separates teaching and research actually achieves. The risk is that, in the long term, it impoverishes both. While publics understand the value of research, not least in times of national difficulty such as Covid-19, they also expect that even the most research-intensive institutions pay close attention to students’ learning. That teaching is often at the back of the queue for internal resources, and typically assigned to staff on precarious contracts, dismays many students and parents, and erodes trust in the sector. Institutional managers and sectors leaders have recognised this in recent decades, and practices are evolving. But the underlying funding model—teach to generate income; research to generate prestige—is one for which universities will continue to come under fire so long as the two must compete for finite resources. In the current model, the game’s winners are those institutions that enjoy a high enough standing to marginalise teaching without underrecruiting, and the managers of those institutions who can then claim success in international league tables skewed heavily towards research. The game’s losers are those institutions that offer stimulating teaching to diverse groups of students without proportionate recognition, those students who never get to meet their department’s big-name researchers, and those university teachers whose stellar contributions tend to pass unnoticed.

2.8

Escaping the Marketised University?

An emerging genre within higher education is that of quit lit, in which academics record their reasons for leaving the profession, often while taking a parting shot at a sector that let them down. Examples are numerous, but historian Malcolm Gaskill’s reflections on being jobless aged 53 were particularly poignant: ‘there’s guilt there: a sense of loss,

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of potential squandered and maybe even betrayed’.64 For linguist Liz Morrish, a major problem was an audit culture that threatened academic freedoms and required staff ‘to be productive within the tightly delimited notions invoked by management, and to be visibly competitive while never being quite sure what the competition involves’.65 For earlier career academics, navigating a brutal job market following doctoral completion created barriers both practical and emotional. Ellen Kirkpatrick talked about feeling cast adrift: ‘How could I continue to work independently if I could not keep up to date with advances in my fields because I could not afford journal subscriptions? And how could I support myself—respect myself—if I was not fairly remunerated for my time and labour?’.66 The specific contexts differ, but underpinning each resignation story is deep disaffection with the way in which universities are run. In this chapter, I have explored some of the challenges faced by staff in the marketised university. I have also acknowledged that many university employees remain resistant to the very idea of being managed, despite retaining more agency than professionals across other sectors. Academics in particular tend to want decision-making processes to be as local as possible, with their disciplines maximally empowered. Some managers interpret this as a sense of over-entitlement, a hangover from times when university departments could be run according to the whims of their most senior don. But it is more likely that managerialism does not sit well with the critical instincts of academics who feel that a culture of performance monitoring does little to kindle creativity, collaboration or collegiality. Within a market-based environment, fundamental contradictions emerge: on one hand, scholars are framed in mission statements and other ‘visions’ as the quality people without whom the institution would be nothing; on the other hand, they are increasingly bypassed in 64

On Quitting Academia, Malcolm Gaskill, London Review of Books, 24.09.20: https://www.lrb. co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/malcolm-gaskill/diary. 65 Why the audit culture made me quit, Liz Morrish, Times Higher Education, 02.03.17: https:// www.timeshighereducation.com/features/why-audit-culture-made-me-quit. 66 The academy I dreamed of for 20 years no longer exists, and I am waking up, Ellen Kirkpatrick, Times Higher Education, 23.05.19: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/author/ellenkirkpatrick.

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governance processes, and judged ruthlessly against metrics with known flaws. Even allowing for academic tendencies to romanticise campuses of old, the main change in culture over the last few decades has been the corrosion of confidence that institutions place in their staff to undertake appropriate activity without excessive surveillance. The modern scholar is under-trusted and over-evaluated. Many quip about leaving the job to spend more time on research and teaching. Universities did not always find it necessary to micro-manage and micro-measure the activities of their employees. Instead, their professionalism was taken for granted, and senior colleagues would focus their efforts on finding the right setting for them to flourish. Many English universities are now operated by managers perceived to have very different professional identities, and often personal values, from the majority of their employees. This can give rise to fearful staff discourses around the ‘takeover’ of universities. Power dynamics have shifted, such that university staff feel less shielded by their institution’s protective shell, more exposed to contractual precarity, and administered as though they belong to just another revenue-driven private enterprise. Academics can be quick to outsource responsibility for the damaging changes to the profession, and slow to acknowledge their own complicity. Some are blissfully unreflexive, as Lisa Lucas (2006) pointed out. Senior staff can underestimate the stress caused to junior colleagues by internal research audits, sometimes blinded to the structural flaws of a system that flatters them personally. Sinéad Murphy noted ‘the strangely affectionate tone with which we refer to the bureaucracy that binds us’ (2017, 64) and particularly the way in which we acronymise excellence frameworks (REF, TEF, KEF) as though they were pets. Over decades, academics delegated authority to others within the institution, particular in areas of admissions, marketing, compliance and finance. Strong leadership from the centre of a university can, in principle, bring greater equity and transparency. The problem is that, when given the opportunity to use centralisation for good, institutional managers have tended to use it for efficiency savings and self-serving concentrations of power. In parallel, universities have delegated their political influence to sector lobby groups. When policy is made in Whitehall or Westminster, institutions now speak through Universities UK or one of the mission groups

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to which they belong. As a result, universities no longer set the terms of the debate; rather, they are courteously invited to respond to tokenistic consultations. Universities’ internal (and internalised) grading system, from the humble lecturer through to the esteemed chair, reflects a weddedness both to pecking order and to antiquity. Attempts to define what it means to be a professor, such as that by Linda Evans (2018), are useful in unpicking the complex relationship between academic rank and decision-making power within the institution. However, most universities’ promotions criteria now rightly recognise contributions across multiple areas of activity, and professors no longer form a discrete and homogenous grouping within the sector. Whether collegiality is enhanced by the focus on academic labels, grades and titles is open to question. Administrative colleagues make use of numeric scales that adequately capture seniority and responsibility without bestowing honorifics. Academic attention might more productively be focused on a less divisive and hierarchical alternative, and one that seeks to reduce precarity at the lower end rather than to further deify success at the higher end. The ‘professoriate’ is essentially a club, membership of which has been historically hoarded by the most dominant groups in society. The trappings of a market-based system can distort academic identities and contributions. Some scholars continue to associate incomprehensibility with intellect—on the grounds that, as political scientist Nick Turnbull (2021) put it, ‘in obscurity lies virtue’—and opportunities to keynote prestigious international conferences are favoured over sustained interaction with local, non-expert audiences. But social epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (2010) clearly show that hierarchies and competition bring status anxiety, and mental and physical health problems. Discord and distrust between colleagues grow, and a lack of self-awareness can contribute to the way academics are viewed from outside: aloof and inward-looking. The culture triggers imposter syndrome in many colleagues, a debilitating but irrational sense of incompetence. According to expert in the field Theresa Simpkin, imposter syndrome is not a condition of the individual but rather a

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socially learned response to a structural disease,67 part of a management culture that insists that the job is never finished and which carefully rations positive feedback. The surfeit of measurement and competition in higher education ensures there is always at least one metric to be failing against. Intrusive technologies now compound a sense of professional under-achievement. Ian McKay recalled how an IT upgrade resulted in daily reminders that asked whether he had responded to various e-mail (despite, as McKay noted, the software presumably knowing full well whether he had responded or not). The avatar then proceeded to offer guidance on how he might more efficiently organise his time, menacingly noting how many of his hours remained ‘spare’.68 Welcome to the real world , some observers would say. What makes university staff any different from those in the private sector, subject to weekly timesheets and vulnerable to being disciplined for any dip in productivity? Why do academics think they are something special? This is where new narratives are needed, and integrity is required on the part of university employees as well as managers. For example, the perks of the academic job—which can include conferences in exotic places, personal office space, and a better-than-most pension scheme— need be to acknowledged, albeit that it must also be stressed that their availability is increasingly constrained and unevenly distributed. University staff need to show restraint where necessary. How justifiable are those international trips (and the empty, heated offices left behind) as the climate crisis materialises? By taking ownership of such questions, academics can frame the argument in less polarised terms, and avoid being positioned as driven by self-interest. This chapter has acknowledged that university staff are sometimes guilty of colluding with a market-based policy agenda. Without some degree of acquiescence, those systems and structures could not have reached into academic cultures so profoundly or so quickly. The quit lit genre emerged because some staff took a principled stand, no longer able 67 ‘Impostor syndrome’ trivialises the serious issue of feeling phoney in HE , Theresa Simpkin, Times Higher Education, 20.01.20: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/impostor-syn drome-trivialises-serious-issue-feeling-phoney-he. 68 Ian McNay writes… Ian McNay, Society for Research in Higher Education, 22.04.21: https:// srheblog.com/2021/04/22/ian-mcnay-writes-5/.

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to endure the levels of competitiveness needed to survive. Potential new recruits remain locked out of a system that requires unsustainable levels of personal commitment. Precarity and over-work have been normalised for frontline staff in much the same way that large salaries and corporate language have been normalised for senior managers. Academics grow more distant from decision-making processes, and governing bodies are counter-productively and blithely reimagined in the shape of their commercial equivalents. In no area of activity is the move to the market more evident than in the imposition of a funding model that placed students in hitherto unknown levels of debt, as the next chapter explores.

3 How University Funding Is Talked About

In English higher education, the central policy issue in recent decades has been that of funding. The main changes have involved universities being freed to recruit as many home undergraduates as they are able and willing to, unencumbered by government limits, and the burden of payment shifting away from the state, such that most graduates now exit university with substantial debts and face deductions from their income until their loans are fully repaid or written off. Whether these changes leave the sector more or less secure is a matter of opinion. At one extreme are free market advocates for whom student number controls symbolised gratuitous state interference, and for whom customer choice was constrained by a sector effectively operating as a cartel to keep out new providers. They point out that recent changes have led to greater numbers of 18-year-olds, especially those from less well-off backgrounds, progressing to university than ever before, and believe it only fair that universities are funded by those in society who gain most directly—graduates. Theirs is the language of even-handedness: so long as costs are not upfront, repayment terms not punitive, and poorer applicants not deterred, why should higher earning graduates not contribute © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Jones, Universities Under Fire, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7_3

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to the costs incurred by universities that so beneficially credentialise them in the job market? At the other extreme are proponents of a publicly funded higher education model. Graduates are over-represented in the wealthiest brackets of society, they point out, so progressive taxation offers a more equitable way to fund universities. A better educated society profits everyone, they argue, not just those holding a degree certificate. For them, marketisation has accelerated inter-generational gaps, and a fear of indebtedness has prevented some young people from fulfilling their potential, particularly those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, for whom participation rates remain the lowest despite some recent gains. Concerns are also expressed about the sector being flooded with fly-bynight, for-profit providers. Theirs is the language of shared values and common good: why reduce something as potentially transformative as higher education to a saleable commodity? In this chapter, I specifically explore how the view that state-sponsored higher education is unaffordable became discursively legitimated, and describe how one of the most celebrated higher education systems in the world remained well-mannered and compliant as a funding model was imposed that forcibly redrew its contract with society. I also consider the corollaries of marketisation, such as the intense focus on graduate employability and inter-university rivalry, arguing that reformers were given an easy ride because institutional managers uncritically bought into the idea that a retreating state would afford them new freedoms.

3.1

Funding History and Principles

State involvement in English higher education did not begin until the nineteenth century. Prior to this, two universities dominated the sector, and both were independently wealthy. The first government grants were made to English universities in 1889. The University Grants Committee was established in 1919 when, as David Willetts pointed out, total public spending on higher education was less than the nation’s subsidy for eggs

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(2017, 40). During the next 80 years, most students at English universities were able to attend university at taxpayer expense. Many also received maintenance grants. In 1998, following recommendations from the Dearing Report (1997), means-tested up-front annual fees of £1000 were introduced for undergraduate students. These fees did not have a substantive impact on university finances, but they were symbolically important. For the first time since higher education became available to more than a small minority of the population, most students in England were being required to contribute towards the cost of their university education. Between 1998 and 2005 inclusive, fees at university in England remained at £1000 per annum. In 2006, fees for new students were increased to £3000 per annum, and income-based loan repayments were levied on earnings over a threshold of £15,000, with both the fee level and threshold rising with inflation. In 2010, John Browne, the former Chief Executive of BP, was commissioned to lead a review of higher education funding. The panel was supposed to be independent, but as then President of the National Union of Students Aaron Porter later reflected, ‘most review members were strong advocates of a prominent role for markets in the delivery of education and a stronger emphasis on metrics to judge performance’.1 The National Union of Students itself was not part of Browne’s group. In 2012, tuition fees for new students rose to a maximum £9000 per annum, despite Browne’s preference for the cap to be done away with entirely.2 The assumption was that lower prestige institutions would levy lower fees, but few were willing to risk being seen as a discount university offering budget degree courses. This was a rational market response, but not one that policy-makers had apparently anticipated. As journalist Chris Cook noted, though direct subsidies from the government to universities were cut, the average unit of resource per 1

TEN YEARS ON: The politics behind the 2010 tuition fee reforms, Aaron Porter, Higher Education Policy Institute, 09.12.20: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/12/09/ten-years-on-the-politics-beh ind-the-2010-tuition-fee-reforms/. 2 Browne review: Universities must set their own tuition fees, Jeevan Vasagar and Jessica Shepherd, The Guardian, 12.10.10: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/oct/12/browne-reviewuniversities-set-fees.

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student increased immediately after 2012.3 Data from the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirm this,4 suggesting that universities enjoyed a 28 per cent uplift in average per-undergraduate funding. The higher education sector was thus able to escape many of the swingeing austerity cuts that followed the financial crash. Indeed, writing from the perspective of economists and mathematicians, Jefferson Frank, Norman Gower and Michael Naef (2019) likened the sector’s ‘substantially increased’ (2019, 2) funding to that of a lottery windfall. Under such circumstances, they contended, ‘even a completely hapless management would run a surplus’ (2019, 3). Even in 2019, after several years of fee levels not rising with inflation, the Augar Review implied that the sector could still tolerate a fee cut for some lower cost courses.5 The 2012 increase in fees marked the beginning of a period that saw students financially squeezed from all sides. The interest charged on student loans was set at the retail price index (RPI), plus up to 3 per cent. RPI lost its status as a national statistic in 2013 and the Office for National Statistics explicitly advised against its use.6 However, at one point in time, total interest rate charges were 6.3 per cent when Bank of England rates were virtually zero, as MoneySavingExpert.com founder and member of the Independent Taskforce on Student Finance Martin Lewis noted.7 From 2012, students also began paying interest on their debt before graduating, unlike under the previous funding model, even though a university degree is of limited use in the job market until it is finished. In 2016, students doing a first degree in nursing were stripped of a bursary worth up to £16,454; applications dropped by one quarter 3 Off campus, Chris Cook, Tortoise, 26.05.20: https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/05/26/ universities-in-crisis-main-piece-off-campus-cc/content.html?sig=xAfpreMWakvbOYUSEN11D kT7cUJMJGvDG-_bopA1zrI. 4 Estimating the public cost of student loans, Claire Crawford, Rowena Crawford, Wenchao Jin, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 24.04.14: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/7175. 5 Post-18 review of education and funding, Philip Augar, UK Department for Education, 30.05.19: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/post-18-review-of-education-andfunding-independent-panel-report. 6 Shortcomings of the Retail Prices Index as a measure of inflation, Office for National Statistics, 08.03.18: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/shortcomingsofther etailpricesindexasameasureofinflation/2018-03-08. 7 Student loan interest is now 5.6%—Should I panic or pay it off? Martin Lewis, MoneySavingExpert, 18.05.21: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/repay-post-2012-student-loan/.

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over the following three years.8 Finally, the removal of maintenance grant in 2016 led to the remarkable situation of students from the least well-off backgrounds graduating into the greatest debt.9 In 2018, prime minister Theresa May acknowledged that ‘making university truly accessible to young people from every background is not made easier by a funding system which leaves students from the lowest-income households bearing the highest levels of debt’.10 David Willetts took a similar view, referring to the situation as a ‘policy error’11 and arguing for maintenance grants to be reinstated.12 Many undergraduates remain unable to access the parental contribution on which the loan scheme implicitly relies (because maintenance loans fail to cover real living costs). A 2021 National Union of Students survey of 5832 students found that one in three had cut back on food for lack of money, and one in ten students had turned to food banks.13 Minister of state for universities Jo Johnson had previously acknowledged the problem, but suggested that students could tackle the financial shortfall by ‘choosing to live frugally’.14 This statement captured the incoherence of political discourses in this area: students are positioned

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Why is Matt Hancock bringing bursaries back for student nurses? Denis Campbell, The Guardian, 18.12.19: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/18/why-is-matt-hancock-bringing-bur saries-back-for-student-nurses. 9 Fairer Fees? Carl Cullinane and Rebecca Montacute, Sutton Trust, 15.12.17: https://www.sut tontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Fairer-Fees-Final.pdf. 10 The right education for everyone, Theresa May, 19.02.18: https://www.gov.uk/government/spe eches/pm-the-right-education-for-everyone. 11 Support for lifelong learning should not impoverish the wider system, David Willetts, WonkHE , 04.06.19: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/support-for-lifelong-learning-should-not-impove rish-the-wider-system/. 12 Boosting higher education while cutting public spending, David Willetts, Higher Education Policy Institute report 142, 30.09.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Boo sting-higher-education-while-cutting-public-spending.pdf. 13 NUS calls for a student support package as one in three students cut back on food to make ends meet, National Union of Students, 17.05.21: https://www.nus.org.uk/articles/nus-calls-for-a-stu dent-support-package. 14 Jo Johnson says students can tackle living costs by ‘choosing to live frugally’ , John Ashmore, PoliticsHome, 03.10.17: https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/education/universities/news/89522/ jo-johnson-says-students-can-tackle-living-costs-choosing.

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as super-empowered consumers within a freshly deregulated policy landscape while simultaneously being denied basic resources and shamed for their alleged profligacy. England’s loan system brought other problems. The commercial misrepresentation of undergraduate degrees became an issue for debate, with the National Audit Office (NAO) expressing concern in 2017 that applicants were being deceived.15 Their report concluded that universities had lower levels of consumer protection than other products, such as financial services. If higher education were a regulated financial market, the NAO concluded, then investigations of possible mis-selling would be necessary. In 2019, social geographer Danny Dorling described the university funding system as one that provided free higher education to the children of the richest tenth of adults (whose fees are paid by their parents upfront), while the other 90 per cent are saddled with loans that hang around their necks for most of their lives.16 He then connected this to income gaps, noting that the highest-paid 10 per cent of people in the UK take home two-fifths of total salaries, leaving three-fifths for the other 90 per cent. ‘The lure of UK universities became the lure of having a chance to make it into that top 10’, Dorling says. ‘Nowhere else in Europe does higher education behave in this way’. When participation figures are cited by sympathetic media, they tended to be based on 18 and 19-year-old full-time students. However, the main casualties of higher fees at English universities have been part-time students and mature students. Enrolment numbers fell by about 30 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.17 In fact, the total number of students in UK higher education was lower in every year from 2011–12 to 2018–19 inclusive than it was at its high point in 2010–11,18 a trend often overlooked by

15 The higher education market, National Audit Office, 08.12.17: https://www.nao.org.uk/report/ the-higher-education-market/. 16 Day of reckoning, Danny Dorling, *Research, 14.04.19: https://www.researchresearch.com/ news/article/?articleId=1380763. 17 ‘Wasted potential’ of mature students, Sean Coughlan, BBC News, 14.03.18: https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/education-43388911. 18 Student numbers before, during and after the crisis, Nick Hillman, Higher Education Policy Institute, 13.04.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/04/13/student-numbers-before-duringand-after-the-crisis/.

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those seeking to maintain a positive narrative around participation in the higher fees era. Stefan Collini likened the English funding model to a canary in the mine,19 with other nations watching closely to see if any higher education system could survive such a speedy move from mostly free to expensive. The canary lived. The 2012 near-trebling of tuition fees drew protests from students, as I discuss in the next chapter, but resistance was generally contained. Faced with the choice between foregoing additional income and accepting a morally uncomfortable settlement, universities opted for the latter. Institutional managers then began reproducing the language and thinking of policy-makers, visualising themselves as shrewd market players and compensating themselves accordingly. As fees rose, most academics were complicit in their silence, swallowing their principles and forgetting the ways in which their generation may have benefited from taxpayers’ largesse. Whether too crushed by individual workloads or too pragmatic to think it would make any difference, the higher education workforce mostly declined opportunities to stand shoulder to shoulder with aggrieved students. With the shifts in funding, institutional cultures changed. A new breed of managers emerged, attended by accountants, marketing specialists and a tranche of external consultants. Ties with academics were loosened. Political discourses around funding implicitly began distinguished between ‘deserving’ universities (selective, exclusive, intellectual hard) and ‘undeserving’ universities (indiscriminate, inclusive, intellectually soft). Such discourses, though deeply divisive and damaging to the sector, were often based on little more than dinner party anecdotes and entrenched snobberies within the political classes. Students’ identities and expectations were inevitably affected: though many undergraduates resisted their positioning as consumers in the market, others began to see themselves more as the discourse insisted. The underlying principle on which market models of university funding are based is that individual applicants, like all well-informed consumers, make rational choices. If funding follows student numbers, 19

Sold Out, Stefan Collini, London Review of Books, 24.12.13: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/ v35/n20/stefan-collini/sold-out.

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those institutions with provisions best aligned to their customers’ needs would be enriched, while those offering less well-aligned provisions would be punished. In such a context, every university would raise its game: a rising tide lifts all boats, as David Willetts was fond of saying.20 The need for well-informed applicants triggered a tide of metrics because it was assumed that fully informed consumer decisions be reached only when universities were graded and ranked in every way imaginable. The value of academic labour was also assessed through myriad league tables. Given that research and teaching are core activities, they were the initial twin targets of excellence frameworks. Research came first because it is easier to measure, and a framework was already in place. But the problem with ranking universities according to their research success is that many applicants care little about what their prospective lecturers do beyond the classroom. A few Nobel prize winners may give an institution an added air of prestige, but what most students want is more practical: staff with time to forge professional relationships with them, and to prepare classes that are challenging and enlightening; smaller learning groups and appropriate spaces, both physical and digital; clear communication from administrators, and course materials available on-line. So, a framework for capturing teaching excellence followed. The information provided said almost nothing about the value of universities’ pedagogy, as I will explain in the next chapter. However, the awards mattered more than the methods behind them. Institutions and academics were forced into zero-sum games: one player’s rise in a domestic ranking came at the expense of a fellow player’s fall. International league tables were no more meaningful, with Western universities disproportionately advantaged by many indicators, especially those for whom English was the primary language of instruction. Some global ranking outfits ran a side hustle offering consultancy services for universities, despite the blatant conflict of interest.21

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The legacy of David Willetts, Andy Westwood, GuildHE , 24.06.14: https://guildhe.ac.uk/thelegacy-of-david-willetts/. 21 Buying Progress in Rankings? Scott Jaschik, Inside HigherEd , 27.04.21: https://www.inside highered.com/admissions/article/2021/04/27/study-charges-qs-conflicts-interest-international-ran kings.

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Despite the embarrassment of metrics and league tables, applicants’ behaviour remained much the same. As David Kernohan pointed out, there has never been any indication that prospective students find any of this information useful.22 Even if what economists call ‘perfect information’ were possible, other factors would continue to trump league table performance. Decisions about university are based not on cold statistical data, but personal contact with the institution and advice from trusted sources. Plus, middle-class applicants and their parents tend to understand that the signalling value of an elite institution is worth more than a cupboard full of teaching prizes at a lower prestige university. Higher education is a positional good, and applicants base their choices not on the nature of the product but on where they believe it will situate them afterwards, both professionally and socially. Were the policy aimed to shake up the sector and its ingrained stratification by exposing poor teaching, as commentators like Times Higher Education editor Phil Baty suggested,23 success was also limited. This aim would have been better achieved by allocating funding to close purported performance gaps, not by naming and shaming (and potentially de-funding) market losers. The reason that lower prestige universities do not emulate the intensive smallgroup tutoring associated with elite colleges is not because their own research suggests it is pedagogically sub-optimal; it is because they cannot afford it. The market-based changes went ahead despite most contemporary English universities’ legal status as charities that receive public funding.24 While independent schools take flak for their charitable status, and the

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The nine worst policy debacles of the last decade, David Kernohan, WonkHE , 08.01.20: https:// wonkhe.com/blogs/the-9-worst-policy-debacles-of-the-last-decade/. 23 Mock TEF results revealed: A new hierarchy emerges, Chris Havergal, Times Higher Education, 23.06.16: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/mock-teaching-excellence-frameworktef-results-revealed-a-new-hierarchy-emerges. 24 English universities are held back by haziness around their status. Educationalist David Watson is reported to have once answered the question ‘are British universities public or private? ’ with ‘yes’ (quoted in Palfreyman and Temple, 2017, 51). Today, a fuller response would probably acknowledge that universities are private in terms of their fee structures and income generation models, but remain public in that they still receive state subsidy for home undergraduate students through the write-off of unpaid student loans.

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tax advantages that it brings,25 universities tend to avoid criticism.26 This is partly because universities are viewed as public sector institutions with public sector workers. David Willetts gives over a good deal of space in his 2017 book to explain that this is not, and never has been, the case. Staff at English universities were never public sector workers paid directly by the state, and the Universities Superannuation Scheme pension scheme (to which over 400,000 active and retired academics belong) is private. Yet this is a mix-up that continues to create an obstructive paradox: English universities are held answerable to the taxpayer without the direct employment model associated with genuinely public sectors. As discussed in the previous chapter, this can lead to societal anger towards private aspects of universities’ operations, such as senior staff remuneration, even when it is consistent with that of the corporate world. Resentment also grows towards the perceived fleecing of students. Jim Dickinson noted that university-run halls of residence generated a pre-Covid annual surplus of £400m per year, and speculated that profit was created by tactics that would not be out of place in the private sector, such as carefully managing and promoting scarcity: ‘just enough to create FOMO (fear of missing out), not enough to miss out on any surplus’.27 Governments continue to discursively align themselves with taxpayers, quick to note the extent to which higher education remains subsidised through the public purse, mostly via the underwriting of student loans. Universities have been correspondingly slow to point out the extent to which governments benefit from their activities through increased tax take. Even in England’s not particularly progressive taxation system, graduates still pay substantially more tax than non-graduates, on average. In 2020, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that the expected lifetime gain to the exchequer is £110k per male graduate and £30k per female graduate.28 This means that, even when viewed through a narrow 25

Voters support abolishing private schools, Basit Mahmood, Left Foot Forward , 26.08.21: https:// leftfootforward.org/2021/08/exclusive-voters-support-abolishing-private-schools/. 26 University governance and the Charity Commission, Dermot Feenan, #USSbriefs98, 26.07.20: https://medium.com/ussbriefs/university-governance-and-the-charity-commission-d69 8c145604e. 27 @jim_dickinson: https://twitter.com/jim_dickinson/status/1312312389006749696. 28 This gender difference is shocking, even accounting for women taking longer breaks from employment.

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economic framing, higher education remains an excellent long-term bet for the taxpayer.29 On top of accelerated tax returns from home students, society benefits enormously from international students, who in 2021 were estimated to be worth over £28.8b to the UK economy.30 The problem with looking at higher education through an economic lens is not that the sector is exposed as horribly inefficient; it is that the lens distorts the potential that higher education also has to change the way people think, live, and engage with society. As experts in international higher education Jenna Mittelmeier and Sylvie Lomer put it, education is neither a ‘good’ nor an ‘export’.31 The fiscal narrative is a deficit narrative, particularly untimely when many international students are socially segregated and some encounter racism and stigmatisation on campus. If the role of universities is primarily to credentialise students, such that the discipline is no more than what Joelle Fanghanel refers to as a ‘producer of symbolic capital, a vehicle for status enhancement’ (2011, 77), then what is non-threateningly referred to as a graduate contribution model offers a legitimate way to cover the costs of higher education. The market allows those who benefit most to subsidise most, and defers all charges until minimum income thresholds are reached. But if universities are for something more important than individualised financial gain, then the current funding model not only sends out the wrong message, it unnecessarily indebts entire generations of learners. The passage for moving towards a graduate repayment model was smoothed by public discourses that dismissed free universal higher education as the unsustainable legacy of a bygone age: ‘The brief historical period, when learning about literature or, yes, Lacan, was a gift from the state, accessible to all regardless of background, is firmly over’ read

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The impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings, Jack Britton, Lorraine Dearden, Laura van der Erve and Ben Waltmann, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 29.02.20: https://www.ifs.org.uk/ publications/14729. 30 International students are worth £28.8b to the UK , Nick Hillman, Higher Education Policy Institute, 09.09.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/09/09/international-students-are-worth28-8-billion-to-the-uk/. 31 The problem of positioning international students as cash cows, Jenna Mittelmeier and Sylvie Lomer, Higher Education Policy Institute, 04.11.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/11/04/the-pro blem-of-positioning-international-students-as-cash-cows/.

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a Guardian editorial in 2020.32 Such statements capture a real-world pragmatism which many commentators enjoy striking, but overlook the fact that many rival nations enable and encourage young people of all backgrounds to study any subject they wish (even literary theory). At the time of writing, the English sector is not in a financially stable position. In real terms, income from home undergraduate students has fallen since 2012, and the business model upon which many universities now rely is vulnerable because it relies on revenue from overseas students to countersign other institutional costs. Fundamental social questions are raised (or should be raised) about whether it is ethical to charge some students more than others to access the same learning opportunity, and the extent to which charging any student more than the cost of their tuition can be morally justified. Given the fragility of the business model, the most fundamental question of all is: what happens if overseas students stop coming to English universities? But the government’s instinct is to tweak loan repayment terms at graduates’ expense rather than consider more equitable and progressive alternative funding models. Where universities are seen as a national asset, they benefit from a sense of collective ownership and responsibility, even if they are not technically part of the public sector. The separation of state and higher education is usually regarded as positive, allowing universities to make advancements free from political interference. But the English model now differs from those elsewhere because it places more of the funding burden on its graduates. The sector would do well to remember the goodwill that many professionals received during Covid-19 because their employees were seen as key workers. Universities may never be held as dear as NHS hospitals, but they continue to enjoy a more favourable positioning within society than most private enterprises. Other nations succeed in embracing some elements of public identity while maintaining independence from the state. But English universities are what 32 How the humanities became the new enemy within, William Davies, The Guardian, 28.02.20: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/28/humanities-british-govern ment-culture.

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Peter Scott refers to as ‘semi-detached public institutions, half-inside and half-outside the public domain’ (2021, 11). Within this no-man’s land, they are denied the status of trusted public assets, and positioned instead as individual free market players. However, they are simultaneously kept them under the thumb of an often-hostile state, as the rest of this chapter will attempt to show.

3.2

The Graduate Premium and Employability Agenda

In 1992, the UK’s polytechnics and universities were merged. Ever since, some politicians and media commentators have yearned for separation, keen to ensure vocational training opportunities for future generations of other people’s children, while shielding prestigious educational routes into the professions for their own offspring. This has led to the introduction of more instrumental, outcome-based indicators and agendas. This section focuses on two: the graduate premium, a proxy of success intended to show that some courses ‘pay’ more than others; and the employability agenda, a mechanism through which culpability is assigned to universities for a graduate job market beyond their control. Both discursively position students not as current learners, but as what Rachel Brooks (2018) characterises as ‘future workers’. I show how the emergence of both agenda have allowed for stratification to remain in the English sector despite the official conflation of institution types. The graduate premium can be defined as the difference in lifetime earnings between people who complete an undergraduate degree course and people who do not, once the cost of attending (and the opportunity cost, in terms of foregone earnings) is factored in. In 2018, median graduate salaries were about £10,000 higher in England than non-graduate salaries.33 Though straightforward in principle, estimating the future premium of today’s students requires assumptions to be made

33 Higher education in facts and figures 2019, Universities UK, 2019: https://www.universitiesuk. ac.uk/topics/international/international-facts-and-figures-2019.

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about the loan repayment system, the labour market and, most importantly, the future growth of a nation’s economy. The main determinant of any graduate’s premium is the kind of subject studied at university: for law, economics, medicine and veterinary science, estimates of lifetime gains often run into several hundred thousand pounds34 ; for subjects like creative arts, the premium can be zero or even marginally negative.35 Gender is also a significant predictor, as noted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.36 A degree accelerates the average earnings of female graduates more than male graduates, mainly because female non-graduates tend to be so poorly paid. Policy tends to misunderstand employment outcomes, sometimes deliberately, and simplifies their implications. National variations in pay are disregarded, as is sector-negotiated pay in professions like nursing. This can result in young people being deterred from entering socially important occupations. Besides, if all students opted for areas yielding the highest premium, salary levels would soon collapse under the weight of degree-holders in that subject. Many anti-university discourses draw on the language of graduate outcomes, and the data that underpin it, to argue that not all undergraduate degrees are worthy of state support. The case can be made, for example, that as male graduates of a creative arts degree are likely to derive no economic benefit from going to university (on average), their degree should not be subsidised by the government. With loans unlikely to be repaid, it is not only a waste of the student’s time but a waste of taxpayers’ investment. Such rhetoric is unapologetically instrumental, implying that higher education is good for nothing beyond individual financial advantage. However, it can resonate with publics conditioned into believing that ‘education for its own sake is a bit dodgy’, as Charles

34 Economics and medicine graduates earn most, finds report, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 07.16.18: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/07/economics-and-med icine-graduates-are-top-earners-finds-report. 35 Ministers could limit student numbers on lower-earning arts degrees in England , Anna Fazackerley, The Guardian, 23.10.21: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/oct/23/ministerscould-limit-student-numbers-lower-earning-art-degrees. 36 Graduate ‘premium’ more significant for women, Jack Britton, Neil Shephard, and Anna Vignoles, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 24.09.15: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/7998.

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Clarke said in 2003 when secretary of state for education and skills.37 In his foreword to a white paper on the Future of Higher Education,38 Clarke demanded progress in ‘harnessing knowledge to wealth creation’. Even for some left-of-centre policy-makers, the association between learning and earning is so powerful that alternative, or even complementary, conceptualisations of education seem beyond reach. Where discourses of instrumentalism meet policies that indebt students, resistance becomes very difficult. How does a student push back against learning-as-currency metaphors when their higher education literally comes at a price to them? Many politicians would argue that it is not the job of the government to dwell on the non-financial gains of higher education; rather, it is to distinguish between outcomes that are worthy of public funding and those that are not. Where governments position themselves as responsible custodians of the public purse, academic critiques of instrumentalism can be easily dismissed as naïve or self-indulgent. In 2020, minister of state for universities Michelle Donelan complained that ‘for decades we have been recruiting too many young people on to courses that do nothing to improve their life chances or help with their career goals’.39 Discursive slippage between low-value courses (those which do not lead to well-paid jobs) and low-quality courses (those which are pedagogically substandard) is frequent, even though there is no established correlation between the two categories, and the latter category has no agreed definition. Discourses of employability work hand in hand with those of the graduate premium. Almost all academics want their students to enjoy the most fruitful careers they possibly can, and staff spend many an unworkloaded hour writing references and sharing personal experiences of the job market so that their students do not graduate with an employability deficit. But the biggest determinant of job market success is not university teaching, or anything else that happens on campus; it is the graduate

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Students confront Clarke over classics comments, Helen Ward, Times Education Supplement, 13.06.03: https://www.tes.com/news/students-confront-clarke-over-classics-comments. 38 Future of Higher Education White Paper, UK Department for Education, 2003: http://www. educationengland.org.uk/documents/pdfs/2003-white-paper-higher-ed.pdf. 39 Universities Minister calls for true social mobility, Michelle Donelan, 01.07.20: https://www. gov.uk/government/speeches/universities-minister-calls-for-true-social-mobility.

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job market itself. As Phil Pilkington noted,40 to have employability is not necessarily to have a job, and even the most stubborn of meritocrats would acknowledge that employment is influenced by manifold classdriven factors, both cultural (how one speaks, how one dresses) and social (who one knows, where one lives). Graduate outcomes thus favour more traditional students from better off backgrounds. This is also because graduate employers, despite embracing discourses of inclusion and diversity, tend to have a narrow view of how the ideal graduate should look and act. Sociologists Nicola Ingram and Kim Allen (2019) exposed how corporate recruitment professionals ‘talk the talk’ around diversity (to improve their brand image and to please policy-makers) while continuing to privilege graduates from elite universities. Variation in graduate outcomes arises because of historical inequity, racial and gender discrimination, and a grossly unfair class system. As Ingram and Allen (2019) showed, variation is then sustained by ongoing cultural snobberies and prejudices. Higher education scholar Tristan McCowan focused on the ways in which employability differs from employment. The former may well facilitate the latter, but it is no more than an individualised personal characteristic. As McCowan (2015) pointed out, employability is falsely outsourced to universities. Academics are supposed to provide it and students are supposed to acquire it. But even the most employable of graduates that any higher education sector produces will remain unemployed unless jobs are available. Individual universities may find ways to become better at employability than others, and therefore enjoy some fleeting league table success, but only at the expense of graduates from rival institutions. A more skilled workforce overall may benefit international competitiveness, but one graduate’s job offer is usually another’s a near miss. In her Gramscian analysis of the employability agenda, Bela Arora (2015) similarly warned that the way higher education is portrayed in media discourses—with employers as ‘knights in shining armour’ (2015, 642)—opens the door for ‘solutions’ that include more business-facing or corporatised universities. The needs of the economy 40

What does being employable mean? Phil Pilkington, WonkHE , 21.03.19: https://wonkhe.com/ blogs/what-does-being-employable-mean/.

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are often talked about as though fixed and self-evident, even as postCovid societies enter unknown territory. The fetishisation of STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects and their graduates is not universal. A 2021 survey by the Association of American Colleges indicated that US employers actively seek out liberal arts graduates for the breadth and depth of their learning.41 Linguist Maria Fotiadou’s (2020) analyses of university websites and their conceptualisation of employability found that the adjectives real and real-world have become synonymous with the domain of employment, thus rendering irrelevant the domains of education and theory. Graduate labour markets are described as fierce and competitive, naturalising the idea that universities must train students to become job hunters. Educationalist Jo Frankham (2017) showed how universities use language performatively: lots of talk of job-readiness and transferable skills, but insufficient resources allocated to match the rhetoric. Employability is thus a concept that makes many an academic eye roll, not because they do not wish to see their graduates land meaningful, well-paid jobs, but because it is the leaden vocabulary of human capital, another metaphor for the sector’s ambiguous and often obsequious relationship with the business world. The purpose of the employability discourse is to make university staff culpable, even though the sector has a tradition of conscientious careers advisors and support networks that long pre-dates the agenda. It also points to a dystopian and two-tier future for universities, with workplace training for those needing to focus on future pay cheques, but a rounded and liberal education for those less encumbered by financial considerations. Institutional managers sustain the employability agenda when they focus on the generic skills associated with university teaching—effective communication and problem-solving skills are currently fashionable— rather than on discipline-level gains. These mundane attributes could be applied to any level of education, as Paul Ashwin pointed out (2020, 22), or even to non-educational activity (such as writing a shopping list, as Ashwin also noted). The language needed to describe university teaching 41

How College Contributes to Workforce Success, Ashley Finlay, Association of American Colleges, 2021: https://www.aacu.org/2021-report-employer-views-higher-education.

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should be ambitious and confident, capturing the powerful understandings that students are potentially able to absorb. Yet English universities have been complicit in agenda around graduate outcomes, with institutional managers quick to repurpose the language of employability to attract applicants rather than critically considering its appropriateness for their field. Meanwhile, university staff who question the legitimacy of the agenda are framed as wanting important information to be withheld from students or, worse, not caring about what happens to graduates in the job market. In such ways, as Stefan Collini warned in 2017, universities are reshaped as centres of applied expertise and vocational training that are subordinate to their society’s ‘economic strategy’. The employability agenda is based on the myth that graduates are judged by prospective employers mainly on how skilled they are. However, in many cases, what graduates are actually being judged on is how difficult their university was to get into. In the US, young people reportedly approach major employers with only a letter offering them a place at an Ivy League college, such is the kudos that acceptance signals.42 Class systems are accordingly sustained and reproduced. Yet appeals to employability saturate policy discourses such that other sector imperatives are drowned out. In 2020, minister of state for universities Michelle Donelan said that ‘it doesn’t matter about looking at which groups don’t get to university. It’s about making sure that those groups that do go complete, that [courses] lead to graduate jobs’.43 This statement is troubling for many reasons, being flippant about gains in widening participation and suggesting that only instrumental outcomes matter to young people. Sector leaders and institutional managers would do well to wake up to what sociologists and higher education researchers have been saying for some time: that the graduate premium is essentially a measure of inequality within society, and that employability is a zero-sum game over which universities have negligible influence.

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Universities should offer one-year courses, Rory Sutherland, The Spectator, 17.06.17: https:// www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/a-degree-course-should-last-a-year-after-that-let-them-pay/. 43 Minister: Looking at which groups don’t enter HE ‘doesn’t matter’ , John Morgan, Times Higher Education, 15.07.20: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/minister-looking-which-gro ups-dont-enter-he-doesnt-matter.

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Recruiting Without Caps

This section examines what happens when a sector removes number controls for home undergraduate students and liberates universities to recruit as many as the market allows. It covers issues for which universities are often held responsible within public discourses, such as grade inflation and unconditional offers. I suggest that uncapped recruitment leads to game-playing practices as institutions vie with one another for applicants and that the flak that universities receive about their assessment and admissions practices is an inescapable knock-on effect of a freer market in higher education. One major policy change in recent decades has been a shift from governments negotiating with universities how many students should participate, and then funding them through a block grant, to universities being able to recruit freely, and students taking out governmentsanctioned and underwritten loans to pay for their degree. In 2013, the government announced that student number controls at publicly funded higher education institutions in England would be removed by 2015– 16. This was preceded by a relaxation of controls for higher achieving students.44 With caps gone, universities could supply as many places as students demanded (and as many as their facilities allowed, though this seemed a secondary consideration for some). According to Willetts, removing these ‘absurd controls’ (2017, 86) left universities free to exercise their market rights, expanding in areas of growth and contracting where demand was waning. During Covid-19 negotiations, any suggestion that a cap might be temporarily reintroduced was met with alarmist pushback: ‘once imposed, number controls would stay for good’, warned former minister of state for universities Jo Johnson, baselessly.45 Right-leaning policy-makers regard students’ number controls as a symbol of the Left’s vision of socialised education, often framing them 44 Universities: Admissions, Question for UK Department for Education, 23.07.18: https://www. parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-question/Com mons/2018-07-23/167319/. 45 What will higher education look like after coronavirus? Jo Johnson, KCL News Centre, 14.04.20: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/what-will-higher-education-look-like-after-corona virus#.XpXdjO_PIzU.twitter.

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as incompatible with a widening participation agenda: how can access for lower socio-economic groups improve unless universities are free to increase their numbers without government permission? The prospect of such controls worries even progressive political parties because they sound centralised and bureaucratic. They also leave the sector vulnerable to press criticism if an individual working-class student misses out because the government has capped the number of places on their chosen course, as the Laura Spence case showed in 2003 (see next chapter). However, as Mike Ratcliffe explained, when they were in place, student number caps were mostly agreed companionably.46 Universities were normally limited to recruitment at the previous year’s level, plus or minus 5 per cent, and could bid for ASNs (additional student numbers) if required. Through this approach, lower prestige universities were given some protection against higher prestige rivals unexpectedly enlarging an intake at their expense. Moreover, the caps were never on students from any specific socio-economic grouping. This is a revisionist discourse. Universities were free to recruit as many widening participation students within their allocation as they wanted. Many selective universities chose not to do so because they did not want their middle-class applicants squeezed out. Cap-free recruitment is a policy consequence of universities being set on the path to expansion in 1998 by Tony Blair’s 50 per cent higher education participation target. Over the next two decades, the number of full-time, young undergraduates grew steadily. However, discourses of participation have recently begun turning, and Blair’s target is now cited as much by those seeking to gain political capital by scrapping it than by advocates of sector enlargement. At the same time, a discourse of over-expansion has emerged. According to populist narratives, too many students means too little academic rigour. Universities are framed as degree factories pumping out over-qualified (as well as over-sensitive) graduates. Associated slights include those about dumbed-down curricular and mickey mouse degrees. But bringing more students through the doors of higher education need not be something to be defensive about. 46

What’s Wrong with a Student Number Cap?, Mike Ratcliffe, More Means Better, 08.10.17: https://moremeansbetter.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/whats-wrong-with-a-student-number-cap/.

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Universities have much to offer future generations, and a better educated population has the potential to benefit everyone. If historic participation imbalances can be corrected at the same time, all the better. Even many right-leaning observers understand the gains that accrue from expansion. David Willetts described himself as ‘an unashamed believer in growth’ (2017, 8). Among the evidence to support Willetts’s faith in growth from a financial perspective is a 2019 study by John Van Reenen and Anna Valero that mapped correlations between nations’ student populations and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 1950 and 2010, using data from 15,000 institutions across 78 countries. The study unambiguously found that the enlargement of higher education meant more economic growth. ‘A lot of people say there is no point expanding universities because there are no jobs for students to go to’, Van Reenen noted. ‘The evidence here suggests that there is room for expansion, consistent with what governments all over the world are doing’.47 Though GDP alone is an imperfect indicator of progress, it is difficult to make any plausible case for contraction given that university graduates tend also to be more democratically engaged, climate aware, and willing to volunteer their time for social causes.48 In practice, the abolition of caps led to an unseemly scramble for every applicant. Many lower prestige, and some mid-ranking universities, attempted to expand in entrepreneurial (though not always sustainable) ways, while the majority of high-ranking universities continued as normal, secure that their status and history would elevate them above the undignified fray. This trend has been to the benefit of advertising agencies and institutional promotion strategists more than students. In 2019, a newspaper exposé based on Freedom of Information data found that some universities had marketing budgets that ran into several million pounds per year and employed over a hundred marketing staff. One 47

The GDP-Higher Ed Link, Chris Havergal, InsideHigherEd , 31.03.16: https://www.insidehig hered.com/news/2016/03/31/study-based-gdp-impact-projects-creation-many-more-universitiesglobally. 48 Universities’ civic endeavours must reflect students’ priorities, James Sloan, Times Higher Education, 28.06.21: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/universities-civic-endeavours-mustreflect-students-priorities.

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English university was spending fifty times more on marketing (£432 per student) than the lowest spending university in Scotland (£8.22 per student), where the funding model is less rivalrous. Though the Office for Students has value-for-money as part of its explicit remit, its response to the newspaper report was characteristically non-interventionist and market-friendly: ‘it’s for universities to decide how they allocate their resources and it is, of course, understandable that they will want to market their courses to students’.49 In UK higher education, the summer period during which candidates can secure places on courses that did not fill all of their places during the normal recruitment cycle is known as ‘clearing’. In recent years, clearing processes have been marked by new content (mostly digital) and new manoeuvres (mostly underhand). Memes and hashtags abound, with universities clumsily attempting to flaunt their digital street cred. Minor celebrities and reality TV stars can be in high demand for promotional material, with some institutions in 2018 hiring professional footballers to staff their phones during clearing week.50 On social media, metaphors of romance and sex can be excruciating: one institution used a wink-face emoji to intimate they were a good match for unattached applicants; another trolled the clearing campaign of a rival university with a ‘you ok hun? ’ tweet.51 The irony is that would-be students are seasoned at processing fake news, and can quickly spot the gauche hand of university brand managers. As Shakira Martin, then president of the National Union of Students, noted ‘probably the worst thing about this clearing period has been the spectre of university Twitter accounts engaged in ‘street talk’ and ‘banter’, adding that YouTubers who have

49 Universities spending millions on marketing to attract students, Sam Hall and Sally Weale, The Guardian, 02.04.19: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/02/universities-spe nding-millions-on-marketing-to-attract-students. 50 Snapchat DMs, festival tickets and Love Island: Here are this year’s most desperate uni clearing offers, Hamzah Abbas, The Tab, 08.28.18: https://thetab.com/uk/2018/08/28/snapchat-dms-fes tival-tickets-and-love-island-here-are-this-years-most-desperate-uni-clearing-offers-79073. 51 Universities use cringeworthy Tinder-style #clearing videos and rope in Made In Chelsea stars to scoop up disappointed A-level students, Joe Middleton, Daily Mail , 16.08.18: http://www.dailym ail.co.uk/news/article-6068427/Universities-use-cringeworthy-Tinder-style-clearing-videos-ropeChelsea-stars.html.

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never been near a university campus were suddenly being regarded as ‘student influencers’.52 This is not to suggest that institutions should steer clear of the digital platforms that students now inhabit. The traditional prospectus has become as redundant as the travel agents’ brochure, and social media can be particularly important for those young people who lack direct access to advice from those with insider understandings of the higher education system. But derision from right-wing journalists is rarely far away. Among the tweets for which a 2018 Daily Mail piece mocked universities was ‘Do you have a question for us about #Clearing? Head over to our Instagram page where we are currently answering any questions via our stories’.53 The journalist framed the tweet as symptomatic of the sector’s descent into populism rather than as a genuine attempt to reach historically estranged groups. Another university was sneered at for making offers to applicants via SnapChat even though this could be exactly the kind of innovation that allows universities to connect with students through a channel that they know and trust. The depressing saga of unconditional offers a more formalised example of how the cap-free market has influenced admissions practices. Many institutions favoured the practice of accepting home students onto undergraduate courses regardless of their A-level performance because it is an effective recruitment strategy. In 2018, 34.4 per cent of 18-yearold applicants from England, Northern Ireland and Wales received an unconditional offer. This compares to only 1.1 per cent in 2013. The sector’s defence is that unconditional offers can be used to recognise the range of academic and non-academic talents across the applicant pool. But the motivation for unconditional offers is usually market-based: applicants holding an unconditional offer are more likely to convert into fee-paying undergraduates, especially if the offer is accompanied by

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Leave the street slang to students, Shakira Martin, WonkHE , 22.08.18: https://wonkhe.com/ blogs/leave-the-street-slang-to-students/. 53 Universities use cringeworthy Tinder-style #clearing videos and rope in Made In Chelsea stars to scoop up disappointed A-level students, Joe Middleton, Daily Mail , 16.08.18: http://www.dailym ail.co.uk/news/article-6068427/Universities-use-cringeworthy-Tinder-style-clearing-videos-ropeChelsea-stars.html.

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bursary incentives. The problem with the use of ‘conditional unconditional’ offers is not that they are inherently unmeritocratic,54 nor is it that students who receive the offer necessarily underperform at A-level.55 Rather that the practice looks from the outside to be an example of ‘pressure selling’ because students are eligible for their offer only if they accept it as their first choice. A similar controversy rages around grade inflation, where increases in degree award classifications at English universities allow the impression to be given that standards are slipping and that universities are reckless in their assessment of students. As Jan McArthur pointed out, grade inflation is a term of moral panic, not fact.56 Right-leaning politicians and newspaper commentators love to imply that the sector is gripped by an instinct to please its students rather than evaluate them robustly. For example, in 2019, The Telegraph ran the headline ‘Seven in ten students who get less than DDD at A-level graduate from university with top degrees, report finds’.57 One might easily imagine this to be a good news story, praising those students for proving that A-level attainment need not predict or constrain future success, and commending their universities for realising so much untapped academic potential. However, the tone struck was cynical and dismissive. Secretary of state for education Gavin Williamson weighed in, characterising the findings as ‘disappointing’, and urging universities to take ‘rapid action’ so that grade inflation could be ‘stamped out’. He then bizarrely extrapolated that ‘if we carried on on

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The evidence against conditional unconditionals doesn’t stack up, Mike Ratcliffe, WonkHE , 14.01.20: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/in-defence-of-conditional-unconditional-offers-2/. 55 UCAS analysis found that fewer than 2 per cent of applicants who missed their predicted A-levels by two or more grades in 2018 were holding an unconditional firm offer: https://www. ucas.com/file/234561/download?token=O0tzob2H. 56 The great pandemic GCSE and A-level experiment: What if we never went back to the old system? Jan McArthur, The Conversation, 11.08.21: https://theconversation.com/the-great-pan demic-gcse-and-a-level-experiment-what-if-we-never-went-back-to-the-old-system-165838#com ment_2582681. 57 Seven in ten students who get less than DDD at A-level graduate from university with top degrees, report finds, Camilla Turner, The Telegraph, 07.11.19: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/ 07/11/seven-ten-students-get-less-ddd-a-level-leave-university-top/.

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that trajectory, I think in 38 years’ time we’re in a situation where every person will get a first’.58 What would have pleased the secretary of state? Six in ten DDD students graduating with a top degree? Five? Four? How unsuccessful must lower-tariff students be at university for government ministers to feel confident that academic standards are being upheld? The minister’s answer would no doubt be to claim that government has a role in ensuring that previously awarded degrees are not devalued. But there are ways to do this that do not involve demeaning the success of individual graduates. It is no coincidence that the universities under fire here are only those that accept DDD students. The minister’s intervention thus aligns with wider discourses that seek to reinforce hierarchies within the sector, and shame those institutions associated with less well-off student cohorts. If grade inflation is so intolerable to ministers, the most obvious place to begin would be with the sector’s many league tables. Students’ statistical likelihood of being awarded a ‘good’ degree (usually a first or a higher second) is often among the indicators of institutional quality. In a competitive market, it is inevitable that universities cleave to market pressures over time. Sector leaders and institution managers avoid criticising the league tables, perhaps because it would essentially be a criticism of the market. Another legitimate explanation for improved outcomes is that university teaching has become more creative, inspiring and professionalised, and that newer generations of students take their learning more seriously. But again, those in charge of English universities seem unable or unwilling to make this case. A final symptom of higher education’s repositioning as a utilitarian and privatised good is the regular calls for accelerated degrees.59 In an age of information overload, the traditional model can be seen as slowpaced and indulgent. Modernisers also realise that fast-tracking students towards the job market means fast-tracking them towards their loan repayments. The economic rationale for the accelerated degrees was 58 Gavin Williamson pledges to ‘reverse’ university grade inflation as Firsts stay at record high, Will Hazell, iNews, 16.01.20: https://inews.co.uk/news/education/gavin-williamson-reverse-uni versity-grade-inflation-firsts-386629. 59 Two-year degrees to lower tuition fees, Sean Coughlan, BBC News, 10.12.17: https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/education-42268310.

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questioned by Martin Lewis, who pointed out that under the current repayment system ‘the idea that you’ll save money [by doing a two-year degree] is false for lower and middle earners’.60 The discursive challenge for the sector is to reclaim universities as a moment of respite, with some time and space for personal reflection, social interaction and informal learning. Danny Dorling characterised higher education as a ‘safe haven in troubled times’,61 and few undergraduates want their three-year course squeezed into a shorter timeframe. The history of intellectual breakthrough is littered with examples of ideas that needed time to flower, and all university students benefit from space to learn in a less pressured, less hurried environment. In 2020, Nick Hillman made the point that, thanks to rising life expectancy, the proportion of one’s life spent in education is actually lower now than it was one hundred years ago,62 and by many international comparisons, England’s degrees are already abridged. Student number controls were considered irreconcilable with free market principles by right-leaning policy-makers. To make their abolition palatable, caps on numbers were framed as caps on opportunity or aspiration, and therefore the enemy of widening participation. With universities freed to recruit without limits in an open market, admissions practices grew murkier, and institutions began investing unsustainably high proportions of their income in advertising. As the next section shows, the perceived need to out-perform rival institutions became allconsuming, such that notions of higher education as a shared, public good became harder to sustain. Once again, the losers were students, most of whom continued to want their fee income spent not on hip marketing campaigns, but on their learning. 60

MoneySavingExpert founder says two-year degrees won’t help low earners, Rohan Banerjee, New Statesman, 20.10.18: https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/skills/2018/11/moneysavi ngexpert-founder-says-two-year-degrees-won-t-help-low-earners. 61 Six trends in university admissions, Danny Dorling, Times Higher Education, 12.20.15: https:// www.timeshighereducation.com/features/danny-dorling-six-trends-in-university-admissions/201 8407.article. 62 Three problems: Important omissions from David Goodhart’s assault on universities (life expectancy, student choice and degree content), Nick Hillman, Higher Education Policy Institute, 23.10.20: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/10/23/three-problems-the-three-important-omissi ons-from-david-goodharts-assault-on-universities/.

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Market Logic and the Research Excellence Framework

With any marketised system of higher education come mechanisms that seek to measure, compare and rank institutions. The proliferation of league tables enables almost any narrative to be evidenced. On the rare occasion that an institution’s desired excellence story cannot be backed up by an existing metric, it is usually possible to commission a new measurement or award. Within institutions, managers seeking to close subject areas can always find some data to support their difficult decision. This section looks at how university learning has become inseparable from the logic, language and tools of the market. My focus here is specifically on the measurement of research quality; in the next chapter, I turn my attention to teaching quality. Metrics are never value-neutral, as Joelle Fanghanel noted (2011, 27), and most rankings are designed with one agenda or another in mind. KPIs and performance targets may work to some extent in the private sector boardroom, but universities do not exist to enrich shareholders. Some measurements, like value-for-money or graduate outcomes, fail because they impose a financial lens on a non-financial activity. Others, like the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), fail because they assume that the activity being measured is undertaken competitively. However, it is only by creating league tables and metrics that policy gets what it fundamentally wants: losers. Losers are imperative because they signal a high-functioning market. Those institutions chastened by the tables are expected to redouble their efforts or withdraw from the fray. In this section, I focus on the REF, one of higher education’s less contested quality metrics. Operating in different forms since the 1980s, the REF’s purpose is to allow government to allocate quality-related (QR) funding to universities. In the 2021 audit, academic publications (‘outputs’) carried a weighting of 60 per cent in the overall outcome, ‘research impact’ carried a weighting of 25 per cent, and ‘research environment’ carried a weighting of 15 per cent. Outputs were graded on their rigour, significance and originality using a system that presupposes every piece of scholarly research has an inherent ontological value that

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can be neatly mapped against to a numeric score: 1* meant that the work was recognised nationally; 2* that it was recognised internationally; 3* that it was internationally excellent; and 4* that it was world-leading. It is not clear why publications are differentiated on geographical grounds if higher education is the borderless and global industry it claims to be. As psychologist Dorothy Bishop pointed out, measuring everyone against a single world-leading yardstick undesirable as well as unrealistic,63 reducing the complexity and richness of the sector’s scholarship to a solitary, blunt scale. It is also methodologically dubious to assess the extent to which UK research is world-leading without seeking substantial input from colleagues abroad, especially given wealth disparities in the postcolonial world, and the dominance of English language for research publications. Derek Sayer’s Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF (2014) spelt out the audit’s defects in forensic detail, concluding that the REF is based on a flawed process of peer review. Defenders of the approach, such as David Willetts (2017), countered that it is only through this review process that government funding can be distributed in a transparent way. But QR funding is on the decline, and given the divisive nature of the audit, it is surprising that it continues to have such buyin from staff. Many individual academics and disciplines never see the financial fruits of their labour because the extra income is top-sliced into non-existence by central managers seeking to recover investment in their REF strategy. The REF also contributes to the financialisaton of scholarship in more insidious way: in the eyes of many institutional accountants, research unconnected to any funded project in now an indulgence, a pet hobby that should be pursued in academics’ own time. Gradually, only externally paid-for research gets to count as real research. While comparisons between institutions are undoubtedly part of the regime that this book suggests is to blame for universities’ loss of public trust, it is usually within institutions that the audit does the most damage. National REF results are aggregated at discipline level

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Is the benefit of the REF really worth the cost? Dorothy Bishop, Times Higher Education, 28.04.21: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/benefit-ref-really-worth-cost.

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and published anonymously. However, many mock audits at institutional level are individualised and deanonymized, and therefore higher stakes. Nick Turnbull (2021) asks whose agenda the REF really serves— that of the government or university managers?—and points out that as a funding allocation mechanism, it is both expensive and inefficient. The potential for biased assessment of outputs at the local level is immense given the that all departments have their cliques and hierarchies. The peer grading of individual outputs has also changed the way that academic scholarship is written up, not always for the better. Mini sales pitches appear in the introduction of some articles to reassure future reviewers of their excellence against REF criteria. Meanwhile, the sector has more journals and articles than ever, as pressure to publish exceeds the volume of material that can reasonably be assessed through a journal review system that has for many years been stretched to breaking point. Academic Twitter is a constant reminder of the extent to which the model fails: ‘I was invited to review my own manuscript today, three months after submitting it ’.64 The rankings that emerge from research audits are generally predictable, albeit with one or two headline grabbing surprises—usually a lower prestige institution beating a neighbouring higher prestige institution in a particular unit of assessment. Though REF rules were usefully tightened between 2014 and 2021, wealthier institutions continue to poach successful staff from less well-off institutions. To outsiders, the scramble for 4* academics may seem like an ugly ‘transfer window’ for perceived top-end talent, underwritten by mass casualisation elsewhere. As pharmacologist David Colquhoun noted in 2012,65 in the current REF environment Nobel prize winning academics like Peter Higgs would have been fired (or at least moved to some kind of teaching-focused contract) before their ground-breaking work could reach print. One academic interviewed by Lisa Lucas (2006, 165) as part of her work on the research ‘game’ in academic life proposed that instead of a research audit, government funding should be allocated on the basis 64

@jcrenshaw: https://twitter.com/jrcrenshaw/status/1175527713240539136. There is no easy science by which to fire professors, David Colquhoun, The Times, 2012: http:// www.dcscience.net/2012/07/. 65

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of sprint races between vice-chancellors. The race would be over in a couple of minutes, the anonymous biologist reasoned, and then everyone could return to doing more important work. The suggestion was glib, but the model’s advantages of cheapness and quickness are not immaterial. HEFCE’s review of the 2014 exercise estimated its cost to be £246m, a fourfold increase on the previous exercise. The non-financial costs are likely to be even greater, as academics are conditioned to accept relational and often unfair appraisal of their scholarship as part of the job. But despite those costs, rankings remain far from reliable. In 2021, sociologist Jelena Brankovic told the story of her own institution’s rapid rise in the QS World University rankings (over one hundred places in two cycles), which she suggested was attributable to one scholar and her or his publications in one journal, The Lancet. Those articles had hundreds of co-authors, according to Brankovic, all of whom were employed by rival universities. But that did not prevent her institution claiming and celebrating the league table rise, and implying that it was indicative of wider research success. Almost every university would have done the same. Some academics enjoy grading colleagues’ outputs, regarding their own objectivity as beyond question. Stars can reinforce a sense of academic self-worth, and ease creeping imposterism. Perhaps everyone needs to feel 4* sometimes, or believe that their department is better than those elsewhere. But the reason that most academics conform to internal research audits is that they are compelled to do so. Research privileges can be contractually withheld from colleagues who refuse to play the game. Besides, as Sayer (2014) reportedly discovered, universities do not need their employees’ permission to submit their outputs66 ; even dead scholars remain returnable within their final REF cycle. Meanwhile, institutional discourses exploit staff compliance, claiming the audits are a fair and transparent system precisely because they involve academics judging one another’s research. Slowly, it feels normal and necessary for everything one writes to be immediately dissected for its world-leading qualities. In other sectors, the existence of metrics is less contentious. In 2020, plans to scrap waiting targets in hospitals’ Accident and Emergency 66

Against REFonomics: Quantification cannot satisfy the demands of rationality, equity and tolerability, Liz Morrish, LSE , https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/12/22/refonomicsand-reformations/.

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units sparked a furious backlash from doctors and nurses.67 But targets in the health sector serve a different function from those in universities. When hospitals fail to meet targets, it is more often managers that are held responsible than frontline medical staff. Indeed, within media discourses, the government usually end up taking the blame for NHS underperformance. By contrast, when it comes to perceived underperformance in universities, governments are rarely held directly responsible, and ministers are often able to align themselves discursively with public irritation. Scholarly research is about the creation and dissemination of new understandings, contributing afresh to conversations that have been ongoing for centuries, and becoming the shoulders on which future researchers stand. Lucas (2006) concluded that research assessment exercises should reflect this, and not be about chasing the hollow ‘thrill of victory’. Her vision was for a framework that promoted a collaborative, shared venture to create transformative knowledge (2006, 171). But audit culture in higher education has not gone in the direction that Lucas hoped for, and the function of the current REF is assuredly not to help university staff feel treasured. REF dashboards now monitor outputs in real time, and disciplines are chided or patronised based on individual academics’ often inexpert assessment of one another. The process, as Sayer (2014) warned, is one that sews discord within departments, places universities in pointless competition with one another, stifles riskier research, and sometimes ends research careers on the back of faulty methods. Underlying the REF is a lack of trust, as physicist Philip Moriety noted: the bizarre and offensive idea that academics cannot be relied upon to motivate themselves.68 The triumph of research audits has not been to generate data that can be used by governments to distribute funding more fairly, or by applicants to compare institutional quality more precisely. It has been to discipline an entire profession into thinking that their work is of no value unless consecrated by an internal market. 67

Plan to scrap A&E target sparks furious backlash from medics, Denis Campbell and Rowena Mason, The Guardian, 15.01.20: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/15/plan-toscrap-ae-target-sparks-furious-backlash-from-medics. 68 Guilty Confessions of a REFeree, Philip Moriarty, Symptoms of the Universe, 21.09.19: https:// muircheartblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/guilty-confessions-of-a-referee/.

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As Stephen Ball (2012) put it, we come to want from ourselves what is wanted from us.

3.5

Metaphors of the Market

With market-based policy came a new language for talking about the funding of English universities. Student-consumers became empowered as agents of choice and freedom, while institutions became mandated to deliver value-for-money. Policy-makers imagined themselves as catalysts for change, demanding that universities unbundle their provision, and inviting market entrants to disrupt and modernise a stale sector. The metaphors had been familiar in other sectors for some time, but were mostly new to higher education. Sometimes, the dialects of commerce are used in a genuine attempt to encourage a more efficient approach to university management. However, mostly they are deployed by those in positions of power to exaggerate the extent to which the sector is naturally market-like, and to enable unsuitable commercial models to be foisted upon a structurally disempowered workforce. The financial idiom that now dominates, as Stefan Collini noted, is not derived from economic theory proper, but rather from management schools, business consultants and financial journalism.69 Metaphors were central to the valorisation and legitimation of policy change. The phrase challenger institutions emerged in the 2010s to describe new entrants to English higher education, a term presumably coined to reflect their capacity to shake up an obstinate and overcomfortable sector. In 2015, the minister of state for universities Jo Johnson likened challenger institutions to Byron Burgers, an upmarket chain of restaurants that was having similar success in unsettling the fast-food market.70 Unfortunately, Byron Burgers was placed into administration soon afterwards. One of Johnson’s predecessors, David Willetts, 69

From Robbins to McKinsey, Stefan Collini, London Review of Books, 25.07.11: https://www. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n16/stefan-collini/from-robbins-to-mckinsey. 70 Higher education: Fulfilling our potential , Jo Johnson, UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 09.09.15: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/higher-education-fulfillingour-potential.

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justified price differentiation with an analogy to cars. Noting that the two were made by the same company, he said that ‘a mini is not a bad BMW: it is a different kind of car and the same goes for our universities’ (2017, 56). These simplistic metaphors suggest that degrees are fundamentally comparable to hamburgers or vehicles, and imply that all society needs is some light-touch regulation to steer them to market. Discourses of choice, pervasive in justifications of market-based funding models, offer a broader example of how language can misrepresent on-the-ground realities. Policy typically assumes that applicants are alike in their geographical mobility, a homogenous grouping fully and equally predisposed to act on the basis of provider quality. However, choice is little more than a metaphor for many young people. Higher education scholars Claire Callender and Kevin Dougherty (2018) find that choice is, in fact, ‘socially constrained and stratified, reproducing and legitimating social inequality’ (2018, 189). The metaphor denies that young people face all kinds of social, environmental and personal constraints when deciding whether to attend university and, if so, which institutions to apply for. Even before Covid-19 struck, the proportion of stay-at-home undergraduates was on the rise. In their work on student mobilities, Michael Donnelly and Sol Gamsu (2018) noted that patterns were strongly influenced by ethnicity and social background. Young people from less advantaged backgrounds felt compelled to minimise expenditure and keep hold of their local part-time jobs. Simplistic binaries of ‘going away’ vs. ‘staying local’ were also questioned by Mark Holton and Kirsty Finn (2018), who suggested that mobility practices were growing more complex as young people attempted to accommodate competing social pressures and practical limitations. And even where moving away to university is affordable, many young people prefer what Holton (2015) called the ‘collateral’ of local knowledge, and the familiarity of the parental home, prioritising known friendship networks and local geographies over the assumed cultural, academic and lifestyle gains of the traditional away-from-home experience. But the away-fromhome experience remains the ingrained social capital of the wealthier classes, allowing some students to perpetuate the desirable employability attribute of mobility. Research suggests that the aspirations projected on to working-class young people by older generations of careers advisors in

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England are often insensitive to their circumstances (Jones et al., 2021), and Penny Jane Burke offered the troubling example of candidate being rejected at interview because her intention to remain living at home was interpreted as a sign of immaturity (2013, 134). Stay-at-home participation thus continues to be framed needlessly in deficit terms, even though the model is used without stigma throughout mainland Europe. Together with the choice motivation, a key rationale for raising tuition fees was to allow greater scope for unbundling. Breaking up a monolithic sector into smaller, specialist units appealed to many policy-makers as a metaphor not only because it spoke to a consumerist agenda, but because it promised to dismantle a perceived cartel and open up new revenue streams for the private sector. However, higher education sectors quickly splinter when market conditions are imposed. For-profit providers isolate those areas of activity that can turn in a quick buck, unencumbered by any responsibility to the sector as a whole. High-cost areas are avoided, and so too are areas in which may be in most need of trained graduates. Why complicate a lean business model with an expensive medical school? The paradox is that market-savvy providers are unlikely to offer low- or zero-margin subjects, despite their importance to society, unless financially incentivised to do by government, yet any such intervention would fundamentally compromise the ideological basis for marketisation. At the heart of commercial discourses in higher education is the notion of value-for-money. Even the Office for Students acknowledge that value-for-money has no fixed definition, and ‘means different things to different people, and may well shift over time’.71 However, it remains the go-to terminology for policy-makers, who deploy the phrase to rationalise almost any intervention. It is considered powerful because, after all, who could begrudge fee-paying students the right to a fair return on their investment? However, my own research into value-for-money, co-authored with Katy Vigurs and Diane Harris (2020), suggested that students regard it as a largely meaningless lens through which to view education. The undergraduates that we interviewed were unable to state whether or not their degree represented value because they knew neither 71

Office for Students’ value for money strategy 2019 to 2021, Office for Students, 18.10.19: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/336c258b-d94c-4f15-af0a-42e1be8f66a1/ ofs-vfm-strategy.pdf.

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how much it would ultimately cost nor to what kind of career it would ultimately lead. Many resented a concept that reduced their learning and personal growth to an economic metric (Jones et al., 2020). As Stefan Collini pointed out, value-for-money is an empty phrase because no one is ever in favour of not getting it.72 As mentioned in the previous section, within political discourses that are hostile towards higher education, references to low-quality university courses are ubiquitous. In a genuine market, any talk of quality (rather than demand ) would be perverse: the informed choices of fee-paying customers would be all that mattered. But the rhetoric taps into an antigrowth sentiments felt by graduates who may privately prefer that their own degree was not devalued by too many others having one, a suspicion that taxpayers’ money is being squandered on young people with insufficient academic talent, or a wider sense that universities are exploiting the public purse to remain artificially afloat. During Covid-19, the government made it clear that any financial support for the sector would be conditional on high-quality teaching.73 Discourses of quality present a headache for universities. To deny that there is any problem at all—in other words, that even across a huge sector there are no courses at all peddling poor pedagogy or exploiting a vulnerable customer base—would be naïve. But to submit to the charge is even riskier, opening the door to further disparagement. The sector could point out that consistently defining low-quality, or indeed any sort of quality, in English universities is almost impossible. Most publicly available indicators are false proxies. For example, higher dropout rates are often used as a basis to attack lower prestige universities, even though retention is heavily predicted by socio-economic status, with students juggling caring commitments and casual employment inevitably more likely to drift away that those bankrolled by their parents. But dismissing quality as merely another metaphor of the market does not

72

Who are the spongers now? Stefan Collini, London Review of Books, 21.01.16: https://www. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n02/stefan-collini/who-are-the-spongers-now. 73 Universities told to drop courses, cut executive pay and protect free speech to get Covid-19 government bailouts, Will Hazell, iNews, 16.07.20: https://inews.co.uk/news/universities-courses-execut ive-pay-free-speech-covid-19-government-bailouts-545981.

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win the argument. Politicians and media commentators have ample anecdotal evidence of sub-optimal teaching, and many university staff would privately admit that some students are indeed short-changed by their degree courses. The challenge is for the sector to reclaim the right to identify and fix such problems itself. Quality Assurance (QA) processes within the English sector have been worn down by a market-based model that offers few incentives to monitor or raise standards across the whole sector. Counter-discourses must allow for the possibility of variance, and emphatically agree that all students deserve the most stimulating teaching. But they must also point out that the only way to raise standards in the longer term is through collegial processes, such as external advising and the sharing of best practices. The market offers no solution to the problem of supposedly low-quality courses. All it can do is prolong a toxic cycle of exposure and closure. The trite language of quality enables the shortcomings of a rigged system to be overlooked. Economist James Angresano (2016) characterised government intervention within supposedly free markets in terms of the ‘corporate welfare economy’, which he regarded as an insult to private enterprise philosophy. In May 2018, as quietly as possible,74 the Office for Students announced that 25 new providers would share about £10m (0.8 per cent of total sector grant funding),75 justifying the payment with reference to high-cost subjects. Recipient of the windfall included the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (owned by Sovereign Capital ), Arden University (owned by Global University Systems) and Pearson College (owned by Pearson). While these institutions were already benefitting from the public underwriting of their students’ loans, they had not previously benefited from direct government funding through grants. The move might have generated negative press coverage and raised difficult ideological questions. After all, this was taxpayer money being used to influence market outcomes, and rhetoric about students being at the heart of the system is undermined if the 74

Pearson and for-profits gain direct UK government funding, John Morgan, Times Higher Education, 09.05.19: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pearson-and-other-profits-gain-dir ect-uk-government-funding. 75 Recurrent funding for 2019–20, Office for Students: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/pub lications/recurrent-funding-for-2019-20/.

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government is directly propping up the very challenger providers for which it claims applicants have been yearning. However, the backlash was muted. As in other sectors, the use of state money to subsidise profitmaking companies that serve a public role did not attract widespread condemnation. The metaphors of the market had done their job. As I explained in Chapter 1, English higher education policy typically involves discourses of market liberalisation accompanied by interventionist measures. The government’s strategy has been to talk up universities’ levels of market autonomy, drawing heavily on metaphors of choice and freedom, while simultaneously and opportunistically taking statutory control of areas thought to be vote winners, such as grade inflation and free speech. Simon Choat (2017) noted that the Office for Students even retains the power to enter and search the premises of higher education providers. Regulation and deregulation, though antonyms by morphology, have thus become weirdly synonymous in the higher education sector. The upshot is a sector disarrayed and internally divided, lacking in joined-up, outward-facing narratives. When policy-makers turn to fast-food metaphors, it is clear that their conceptualisation of higher education is worryingly shallow. Few other governments liken their universities to chains of restaurants. When students enrol on a university course, they are not purchasing a burger, a car or any other product that can be reduced to crude, value-for-money indicators. These metaphors actually expose the limits of the ideology. The problem for the sector is that, in the absence of other metaphors, populist capitalist-realist discourses are free to distort what universities bring to their nation’s table. And publics are inevitably susceptible to a well-oiled deficit narrative that positions universities as anti-choice, anti-competition, and complacent about quality.

3.6

The Loan That Isn’t a Loan?

The most immediately recognisable symbol of the market in English higher education is its fee structure. Most home students take out substantial loans when they enrol, albeit with repayment concessions, and most overseas students are expected to pay even higher fees upfront.

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An equally significant recent shift in higher education policy has been the removal of caps on undergraduate numbers. This freed English institutions to vie with one another to recruit as many students as market demand allowed. Simultaneously, competitions like the REF insisted that universities vie for research income. Government intrusion was met with minimal resistance from sector leaders and institutional managers, many of whom were won over by the promises of greater powers and a higher salary. Policy shifts were legitimated by naturalisation discourses, as this chapter has demonstrated. ‘There is surely no fairness in asking someone working in a checkout who left school at eighteen to subsidise a future lawyer’, asserted former prime minister David Cameron in his 2019 memoirs. Versions of this argument have been circulating for decades, with someone working in a checkout and future lawyer interchangeable with for a range of jobs considered low-status and high-status. The rhetoric has immediate resonance, conjuring images of a select few enjoying themselves (and moving further ahead) on the backs of the proletariat. It helped to cushion the impact of higher fees in English universities, to dismiss doubters as liberal or lefty elites, and to make indebtedness more socially palatable. But the argument is simplistic. For a start, characterising state support for higher education as a oneway, poor-to-rich subsidy makes assumptions about wealth distribution within the sector’s nation. Where the tax system is progressive, the future lawyer would expect to be making the bigger long-term contribution. And where workers’ rights are fully protected, someone working in a checkout might well be enjoying a stable income with their labour valued accordingly. Statements that see the English sector in isolation fail to acknowledge that many nations operate a taxpayer-funded higher education system with the full consent of their population. Dominant discourses within the English higher education system now tend to deny the status of student loans as debt. Martin Lewis suggested that even the phrase itself is a misnomer, advising students not to worry about what their overall liability may rise to (‘a meaningless figure’), but

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how much—or, rather, how little—is likely to be ultimately repaid.76 Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, struck a similarly comforting tone: students’ loans are not really loans, Johnson claimed, because ‘you’re not going to have bailiffs coming after you’.77 One former deputy vice-chancellor, Alan Roff, went even further, characterising the ‘illusory’ English funding model as one in which loans are not loans, debts are not debts, and repayments are not repayments.78 This is an extension of the blithe political logic that has abounded since tuition fees first became part of the higher education landscape. For example, writing in 2003 as a journalist rather than as a Conservative MP, Michael Gove described student borrowing as an offer that young people would be irrational to turn down: ‘if you’re such a fool that you don’t want to accept that deal, then you’re too big a fool to benefit from the university education I’m currently subsidising for you’.79 In such ways, loans were presented as nothing more than a miscommunicated graduate tax. Such benign readings of the student loan system may helpfully allay some applicants’ fears. However, generic reassurances do not allow for any psychological impact of borrowing, nor for the possibility that student debt is experienced differently by different types of undergraduate. In a 2021 paper authored jointly with Diane Harris and Katy Vigurs, we argued that Pierre Bourdieu’s (2003) notion of symbolic violence most aptly characterised the emotional and mental effects of indebtedness on the individual graduate. Such is the strength of discourse around participation that the state-lender offers little space for the student-borrower to resist, and less well-off graduates report feeling a much greater moral pressure to repay. ‘I’m scared that I might not be 76

Student Loans Mythbusting: The truth about uni fees, loans & grants, Martin Lewis, MoneySavingExpert, 17.05.21: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tui tion-fees-changes/. 77 The great university con: How the British degree lost its value, Harry Lambert, New Statesman, 21.08.19: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2019/08/great-university-con-howbritish-degree-lost-its-value. 78 Student Finance in England from 2012 to 2020: From fiscal illusion to graduate contribution? Alan Roff, Higher Education Policy Institute, 2021: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/ 2021/01/Student-Finance-in-England-from-2012-to-2020-From-fiscal-illusion-to-graduate-contri bution.pdf. 79 If I’m paying for your education, so can you, Michael Gove, The Times, 21.01.03: https://www. thetimes.co.uk/article/if-im-paying-for-your-education-so-can-you-v2hx370h9pj.

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able to earn enough to actually enjoy my life’, one interviewee told us; ‘you owe a certain amount and it kind of just hangs there like a black cloud’, said another (Harris et al., 2021). Benign readings of the system also mask flaws that have been known about since loans were introduced but never addressed. Interim results from a 2021 survey by Muslim Census found that four in five Muslim students who had taken on a loan reported that it had affected their mental health and made them feel they had compromised their faith (because taking out an interest-bearing loan is forbidden).80 Back in 2014, David Cameron vowed that ‘never again should a Muslim in Britain feel unable to go to university because they cannot get a student loan simply because of their religion’, but seven years later most Muslim students felt that the system continued to discriminate against them.81 The future lawyer may indeed feel that their student loan is small fry, a minor price to pay as a stepping stone to long-term financial security. Very low earning graduates may also regard their degree as good value if they overcome the social and psychological hurdles of debt stigma because, so long as their income remains below or moderately above the minimum repayment threshold, their salary deductions will be nonexistent or very small. But middle earners can be hit hardest, paying interest on their debt in full and benefiting from fewest non-repayment concessions. Student-borrowers tend not to understand that loans are, in fact, potentially riskier than mortgages, credit cards or other ‘harmless’ forms of borrowing to which they are likened because the terms to which they sign up are not necessarily the terms to which they will be held. Repayments conditions can be changed at the behest of any government. It would be interesting to know how many of the loan scheme’s advocates would avail themselves of such uncertain forms of borrowing. In fact, advocates of the scheme continue pressing for further marketbased modifications. In 2021, David Willetts argued that ‘universities should be able take a stake in their own graduates’ debt so if the graduate 80

Levelling up unequal access to university education, Muslim Census, 11.10.21: https://muslim census.co.uk/unequal-access-to-university-education/. 81 Student loan system has disadvantaged almost 100,000 Muslim students, Jasmine Norden, The Canary, 12.10.21: https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2021/10/12/student-loan-system-hasdisadvantaged-almost-100000-muslim-students/.

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earns more the university gets more back’.82 The extent to which this model would skew admissions processes at selective universities cannot be overstated: why gamble on the kind of student who may suffer in the graduate labour market when you can recruit those already replete with social and cultural capital? More fundamentally, as Noam Chomsky warned, students who acquire large debts are unlikely to change society: ‘when you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think’.83 Yet disquiet with the English student loan system seems not to be mounting. Public understanding of student fees tends to understate the inter-generation shift in wealth that the fee system precipitates, and underestimate the number of indirect beneficiaries from a marketised higher education system. Those beneficiaries include property developers and private landlords, many of whom continued to collect rents even with accommodation unoccupied during Covid-19. Among the attraction in building student flats is that, unlike with other kinds of development, the planning system does not require any contribution to affordable housing.84 In this chapter, I have looked at how discourses around students have changed as a result of what Alan Cribb and Sharon Gewirtz describe as universities’ centres of gravity being reset by the market (2013). The English higher education sector got lucky—as did some others from around the globe—because overseas students arrived at their doors just as policy-makers were overhauling the way they were funded. Cheap borrowing was simultaneously made possible by historically low interest rates. Credit rating agencies tend to be optimistic about higher prestige universities, in part because they believe governments are unlikely to let any go bust. Institutional managers have thus been able to operate a flawed business model in superficially efficacious ways, rewarding themselves disproportionately on the back of good fortune. 82

How to boost higher education and cut public spending, David Willetts, Higher Education Policy Institute, 30.09.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/09/30/how-to-boost-higher-education-and-cutpublic-spending-by-david-willetts/. 83 Long-term student debt injures the common good , James Gordon, GoodFaithMedia, 03.08.15: https://goodfaithmedia.org/long-term-student-debt-injures-the-common-good-cms-22836/. 84 The free-market gamble: Has Covid broken UK universities? Rowan Moore, The Observer, 17.01.21: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/17/free-market-gamblehas-covid-broken-uk-universities.

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As time goes by, it becomes more possible for right-leaning politicians to reframe higher education discourses in their favour. In 2020, the minister of state for universities felt able to say that ‘quite frankly, our young people have been taken advantage of, particularly those without a family history of going to university’,85 adding that some graduates had been left with pointless debt. This discourse shifts the blame on institutions for peddling low-value degree courses, while ignoring the fact that unfavourable graduate outcomes are primarily a function of a weak job market. Moreover, it helps frame the debate in such a way that the human cost of higher fees becomes immaterial, even though as historian Malcolm Gaskill put it, ‘undergraduates today can’t know how it felt to belong to a state-funded institution whose low-pressure otherworldliness allowed for imagination and experimentation’.86 Gaskill’s argument sounds naïve, so normalised is the high-stakes, hyper-financialised context of modern higher education, where risk is no longer the learner’s indulgence but a credit rating formula in a Moody’s spreadsheet.87 But barely a generation ago, university was not only free from fees for English undergraduates, it was mostly free from the weight of expectation. In many nearby nations, it still is. The next chapter looks more closely at how students are positioned within current discourses of higher education, and how changes to the funding model and policy context have impacted their time at university.

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Minister lambasts English universities for letting down students, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 01.07.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jul/01/minister-lambasts-ukuniversities-policy-for-letting-down-students?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. 86 On Quitting Academia, Malcolm Gaskill, London Review of Books, 24.09.21: https://www.lrb. co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/malcolm-gaskill/diary. 87 Within the new higher education landscape, the influence of private credit rating companies has grown. These companies are usually funded by private subscription and not publicly accountable. However, a credit rating upgrade or downgrade can have a major influence on an institution’s financial status and viability.

4 How University Students Are Talked About

It is only relatively recently in the evolution of universities that students have been regarded as significant actors within policy. For centuries, they stood in the shadows, passive recipients of higher education who were rarely considered relevant to bigger picture thinking around provision, funding or quality evaluation. Sometimes students were the beneficiaries of life-changing teaching; sometimes not. Discursively, the turning point may have been Students at the Heart of the System, a 2011 white paper that set out the UK government’s planned reforms of higher education. Fees had been around for some time, but the paper sought explicitly to empower student-consumers within a new and dynamic market environment. Universities would no longer be the direct focus of regulatory attention. Rather, government would champion and safeguard the interests of the fee-paying customer, and a lightly regulated market would take care of the rest. In this chapter, I argue that the repositioning of students was illusory, a discursive move rather than a policy reality. Applicants’ market power remained mostly imagined, and once at university undergraduates had negligible influence over how their institution operated. Policy conflated diverse groups of students into a like-minded mass of rational agents © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Jones, Universities Under Fire, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7_4

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that cared little for education beyond its capacity to deliver value-formoney and economically favourable graduate outcomes. Communities of scholars became divided into fee-payers and fee-recipients, an artificial separation forced between student struggles (against indebtedness and mental health challenges) and staff struggles (against precarity, metrics and managerialism). I suggest that, despite the different symptoms, staff and students are both casualties of higher education’s subjugation to the market.

4.1

Markets at the Heart of the Discourse

The heart-of-the-system rhetoric is mostly associated with David Willetts’ reign as minister of state for universities from 2010 to 2014. However, many of his successors also found the metaphor appealing, and strategically sought to align themselves with the hard-done-by, shortchanged undergraduate. Not long after taking up the job in 2018, Sam Gyimah revealed his ambition to be ‘not just a universities minister, but also a minister for students, placing a laser-like focus on students’.1 Being seen as an ally rather than a controller is politically expedient. Policymakers focused particularly on the widening participation student, who could readily be framed as a victim of the sector’s historic elitism. The more that the government raised the cost of participation and did away with elements of non-repayable support, such as maintenance grants, the more aggressively it insisted that wider access was its top priority. Students were sceptical, and many protested against a funding model premised on a near-trebling of fees for home undergraduates. In late 2010, groups of dissenting young people, including school-children, were kettled by police in Trafalgar Square.2 But a right-leaning media was keen to support the establishment, and demonise the marchers: ‘London streets in flames again as 25,000 go on rampage in new student fees riot ’ ran

1 A Revolution in Accountability, Sam Gyimah, Department for Education, 28.02.18: https:// www.gov.uk/government/speeches/a-revolution-in-accountability. 2 Met Police ‘kettled children’ at London student protest, BBC News, 11.07.11: https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14029676.

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one headline.3 Some of those present were labelled ‘anarchists’,4 with then Mayor of London Boris Johnson ‘appalled that a small minority have today shamefully abused their right to protest’.5 As discussed in the previous chapter, a higher-fees funding model implicitly encourages students to accredit themselves in readiness for job market competitiveness rather than to engage closely with complex academic concepts. Higher education scholar Rille Raaper argued that marketisation results in a student-consumer ‘primarily concerned with oneself, one’s self-preservation and employability’ (2021, 141), though she also offered hope that new forms of political engagement would better allow young people to resist the positioning imposed upon them. Evidence suggests that a consumeristic mindset hinders learning. Laura Harrison and Laura Risler (2015) noted that where students see education as a commodity ‘they look for the path of least resistance where they can do what is required without expending the energy necessary to engage critical-thinking skills’ (2015, 72). Louise Bunce et al. (2017) similarly found that higher consumer orientation correlates with lower academic performance, and urged governments and universities to resist conceptualising students as customers in the first place. While some academic studies report students demonstrating increasingly customer-like behaviour (such as Woodall et al., 2014), and individual examples emerge of students demanding refunds for unfavourable experiences or outcomes, including during Covid-19, other research evidence questions whether a consumer identity is so readily embraced. Many students demonstrate a nuanced understanding of wider social inequities and the limits of the market. When BBC News spoke to those affected by an ongoing University and College Union strike in 2019, all responses reported were broadly supportive: ‘People absolutely have the right to strike and obviously it does interrupt our studies, but I think 3 Burning with anger: London streets in flames again as 25,000 go on rampage in new student fees riot, Daily Mail , 15.12.10: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1332484/TUITIONFEES-PROTEST-London-streets-flames-25k-rampage.html. 4 Hijacking of a very middle class protest: Anarchists cause chaos as 50,000 students take to streets over fees, Charlotte Gill, Daily Mail , 11.11.10: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-132 8385/TUITION-FEES-PROTEST-Anarchists-cause-chaos-50k-students-streets.html. 5 UK students march turns violent, PA, The Irish Times, 10.11.10: https://www.irishtimes.com/ news/uk-students-march-turns-violent-1.867062.

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in the long run, a week’s worth of lectures or seminars is completely fair enough for lecturers to take off ’, said one.6 That students took the side of employees rather than employers during strike action came as a shock to many sector leaders and institutional managers. But students attending English universities do not generally regard their teaching staff as money-grabbing or greedy. They trust them to withhold their labour only for appropriate reasons, as a last resort. Sector arguments suggesting, for example, that academics should be grateful for their pension deal because it would be viewed as generous in the private sector do not hold water because many students understand that a race to the bottom will hurt their generation even more. When strike action had previously paused students’ learning in early 2018, one vice-chancellor inverted the usual discourse, and noted that ‘for too long the damaging idea that students are ‘consumers’ has been only weakly resisted’.7 The passive, agentless construction here invites the question: by whom? Certainly, the student-as-consumer model was, and still is, disfavoured by many academics. Perhaps he meant it had been resisted too feebly by institutional managers like himself? Jim Dickinson suggested that the apparent epiphany may have been triggered by concerns that students would seek refunds for lost contact time.8 In other words, it is only when students start behaving like consumers that institutional managers began to find market discourse problematic. According to 2017 Universities UK report,9 47 per cent of students regard themselves as a customer of their university. This compares to 94 per cent who regard themselves as a customer of their hotel or their bank, and 18 per cent who regard themselves as a customer of their secondary

6 University lecturers’ strikes: Students on how it affects them, BBC News, 25.09.19: https://www. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-50547643. 7 Over the last few weeks, tensions have been rising in British universities. Now anger is boiling over, Vice-Chancellor’s blog, 16.03.18: https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/the-future-of-uk-universities-vicechancellors-blog. 8 It might be an ‘own goal’, but what’s the score? Jim Dickinson, Medium, 17.03.18: https://med ium.com/all-the-best-lies-are-true/it-might-an-own-goal-but-whats-the-score-a7698124fac6. 9 Education, consumer rights and maintaining trust: what students want from their university, Universities UK, 2017: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/ 2017/education-consumer-rights-maintaining-trust-web.pdf.

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school. Male undergraduates are more likely than female undergraduates identify in this way (51 per cent and 43 per cent respectively), as are those studying at a post-1992 university relative to those at a higher prestige institution (51 per cent and 40 per cent respectively). Universities UK might have taken these findings as a starting point to reengage with the many students who do not regard themselves as customers, or to point out that student identities are far from homogenous. However, the report went in an opposite, though familiar, direction and focused on ‘consumer rights’ and tips to make courses good value-for-money. In such ways, the language of the market was used to appease the slight minority of student-consumers at the expense of the slight majority of student-learners. It is vital that university staff maintain the support of students and, ideally, that closer bonds are formed. But frustration sometimes spills over. For example, an anonymous academic writing for the Guardian in 2015 under the headline ‘My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me’ recalled a series of unlikely anecdotes about undergraduates behaving like brattish shoppers.10 The piece closed with the author wishing that they had the gusto to say: ‘Hey student – all I’m asking for is a little respect, seeing as how much you pay makes no difference to my wages, yet the level of support I am forced to offer you takes up 80 per cent of my time despite the fact that teaching still only equates to 33 per cent of my workload’. The piece thus captured a tendency among a small number of university staff to vent their anger at students. Following initial phases of expansion in the English sector, Elaine Martin quoted one lecturer complaining about having to teach undergraduates that were ‘not cut out for university education’ (1999, 8). Another of Martin’s interviewees was apparently surprised by students’ inability to spell or construct grammatically correct sentences. More recently, Sinéad Murphy complained that teaching is now reduced to the ‘most skeletal of intellectual content, dressed up in a clown suit to entertain the kids’ (Murphy, 2017, 72). This kind of irritation not only misdirected, it is counter-productive, setting academics against their biggest allies in a 10

My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me, Anonymous Academic, The Guardian, 18.12.15: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/dec/18/mystudents-have-paid-9000-and-now-they-think-they-own-me.

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fight for a more progressive higher education system. It is also very unfair to young people who face challenges about which staff often know very little. Students are ridiculed enough in right-leaning media without facing further disparagement: woke student unions in particular stand accused of banning sombreros, cowboy outfits and everything else.11 At the local level, attempts are made to bring unions under tighter control, often with financial incentives to co-operate. The changing roles and conceptualisations of unions are documented in detail by Rachel Brooks, Kate Byford and Katherine Sela (2015), by Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson (2019), and by Rille Raaper (2020). Terms such as domesticated and co-opted feature heavily in critiques, as institutional managers seek to tame the more unruly instincts of their elected student leaders. Morrish and Sauntson noted that many unions are now encouraged to publish strategic plans that directly mirror those of the university, with equality and diversity constructed as ‘marketable’ features (2019, 65). One 2020 report by the right-wing Adam Smith Institute called for a radical shakeup, despite noting that the average student union subsidy amounted to just £75 per student per year.12 The report’s recommendations included splitting unions into different components, with any political wing optional and funded only by students who actively sought membership of that wing. Minister of state for universities Michelle Donelan said that the report raised serious concerns about the funding and operation of unions, adding that the total subsidy of £160m could instead support bursaries. Former chancellor of the exchequer Sajid Javid interpreted the report in familiar terms, framing unions’ campaigns of censorship as ‘an assault on one of our most precious and fundamental rights – freedom of speech.’13

11

‘Woke’ student unions that have banned beef, sombreros and cowboy outfits cost taxpayers and students £165m a year, report finds, James Heale and Jack Elsom, Daily Mail , 21.09.20: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8755033/Woke-student-unions-cost-taxpay ers-students-165m-year-report-finds.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490. 12 The state of the (student) unions, Matt Kilcoyne, Adam Smith Institute, 20.09.20: https://www. adamsmith.org/news/the-state-of-the-student-unions. 13 We pay student unions £165m to threaten freedom of speech, David Williamson, Daily Express, 20.09.20: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/sunday-express-1070/20200920/281668257404284.

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As Andy Westwood noted, attacks on student unions and the National Union of Students play well among Conservative supporters.14 Westwood rightly pointed out that student voice is at the heart of the system only on the rare occasions that students’ interests align with policymakers’ interests. Politicians and institutional leaders have mastered discursive strategies that diminish the validity of opposition to the market. Language matters greatly here. If students dislike the higher fees model, their aversion is attributed to ignorance. If they continue to resist, they are characterised as political , or said to be politicising the agenda. In higher education discourses, political has become a pejorative adjective, used against staff and students whose values diverge from those claimed by the institution. It is deployed as an attempt to occupy common sense territory, signalling that the managerial approach is rational and neutral, while any pushback is emotional and biased. Discourses similarly insist that indebtedness is something solvable through financial literacy. The implication is that students lack knowledge or training in how to manage money, rather than simply lack money. During the 2020 lockdown, a survey of 3500 students confirmed that when their mental health was suffering, the action they wanted universities to take was in the domain teaching and learning, not in the domain of welfare.15 However, budgetholders prefer to see students’ problems through the prism of well-being challenges or mindfulness deficits, which can then be addressed through resilience building. At the same time, institutional brand managers claim to produce not graduates but leaders. Questions about where exactly their followers will come from, given an annual addition to the workforce of half a million leaders, are rarely asked. As Thomas Docherty noted, these new leaders are implicitly expected to subscribe to the existing conservative agenda, and to focus primarily on accruing personal wealth (2018, 214). The kind of leadership needed for progressive structural 14

The student voice at the heart of the system (but only when they’re thinking what we’re thinking), Andy Westwood, Higher Education Policy Institute, 18.08.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/ 08/18/the-student-voice-at-the-heart-of-the-system-but-only-when-theyre-thinking-what-werethinking/. 15 Pearson/WonkHE student expectations survey 2020: https://www.pearson.com/uk/educat ors/higher-education-educators/course-development-blog/2020/07/the-expectation-gap--wonkheand-pearson-research-into-students--.html.

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change—one that emerges from deep, critical, selfless and sometimes unorthodox thinking—is less often encouraged. Andrew Wilkins and Penny Jane Burke suggested that within the market model, young people are ‘summoned as individuals who (through choice or imposition) act on the basis of rational considerations for their own future welfare and employment; in other words, as self-responsible, independent and calculating agents’ (2015, 440). This speaks little to students for whom university may be imagined as a space to explore the world through a non-economic lens, and whose agenda may be driven more by activism than employability. The values and identities of many young people thus pass unrecognised, misrecognised or even unwanted. Discourses that minimise or sneakily deny the often complex economic and personal difficulties in which many students now find themselves only worsen the situation. Undergraduates know that their potential could be unleashed without substantial deductions being made from their monthly income for decades after graduation. Many are aware that other nations manage to fund their higher education sectors more from general taxation than graduate contribution. But the problem is that, despite the discourses that position them at the heart of the system, students’ purchasing and bargaining power remains constrained, and they are mostly helpless to change the higher education context in which they find themselves. Those students who try to mobilise find themselves demonised by a conservative establishment, and the day-to-day impacts of the funding model (including the need to self-fund through part-time work) ensure that most are too busy to resist anyway.

4.2

University Admissions

In this and the following sections, I look more closely at some of the ways through which a market system has become normalised in higher education, and consider the areas of activity that have been most affected. I begin with admissions processes, which are central to the way that universities are perceived and talked about in any society because they determine how places are allocated. In England, processes at selective institutions have traditionally involved a market driven by

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prior academic achievement, with students competing based mostly on their A-level qualifications. Attempts by policy-makers to create a market based on price as well as academic attainment have most failed, for the reasons discussed in the previous chapter: few universities want to associate themselves with discount degrees, so price differentiation is rare. However, this section argues that even prior achievement is a false indicator, and that higher prestige English universities remain too wedded to too conservative an approach. The main casualty is young people from less well-off backgrounds, but the sector also suffers reputationally, standing accused of elitism and unfairness in wider political and media discourses. The paradox of admissions is that universities’ prestige rests on who is excluded far more than who is included. Being seen as hyper-selective carries enormous symbolic value, while attempts to recruit more diverse cohorts in larger numbers can be seen as a sign of low ambition or even desperation. Despite the policy attention to quality, the value of higher education continues to be measured primarily by its perceived scarcity. Within this context, debates often centre around whether students should be selected on attainment or potential . Some take a merit-based view, seeing universities as institutions that exist to reward academic quality rather than attempt to correct for previous failings in the educational pipeline.16 Others see universities as uniquely placed to recognise disparity of prior opportunity, and help to make societies less unequal. The latter is usually characterised as widening participation (or WP for short): the practice of extending openings to parts of society whose members are historically less likely to participate in higher education. But managers at more selective institutions tend to be nervous about framing entry in terms of potential . To be associated with pre-evidenced educational success comes more naturally to them, as though the university is a pre-determined destination for those innately suitable. Students with mere potential do not always carry the cultural signifiers to which 16 Talk of applicants’ quality is ubiquitous, as though genetically determined rather than proxied by qualifications known to correlate with all kinds of social, cultural and economic factors beyond the institution’s control. If universities must talk about quality, it would make more sense for them to do so in term of their graduates and alumni, where at least some credit can be legitimately taken for shaping it.

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universities have grown accustomed, and they may present challenges to the teaching and campus environment. In recent years, selective English universities have moved towards more context-sensitive assessment of applicants. The introduction of ‘contextual admissions’ means that like-for-like comparisons between applicants of different backgrounds are now more likely to be avoided. The privately educated applicant, replete with social and cultural capital, is not automatically assumed to be a better choice that the state-educated applicant from a lower socio-economic bracket holding slightly lesser grades. However, the use of contextual data is no more than a tweak to a fundamentally merit-based system. A bolder sector might instead ask how student cohorts could reflect the ethnic and socio-economic demographics of their communities and of society more widely. Yet even the use of contextual approaches in admissions is distressing to many right-wing commentators. Under the headline ‘These insidious social engineers destroying merit and aspiration’, the Daily Mail published a furious piece in 2003 in which journalist Melanie Phillips accused universities of ‘rigging the system against the middle classes’.17 Similarly disproportionate pushback emerges from powerful lobby groups representing the independent schools sector. In 2012, headteacher Ed Elliott warned that ‘talent maximisation’ would be compromised by contextual approaches to admissions.18 ‘Lowering fences does not teach people to jump higher,’ he said. This was a revealing choice of metaphor. Clearly, the fences here were assumed to be those erected by selective universities to keep out students that Elliott would regard as short on talent. However, it could be argued that the young people jumping highest are actually those who have already overcome multiple schooling and social barriers. The sector’s lack of clarity on admissions opens the door to politicians of all parties to suggest that universities are failing in their public duty. In 2000, chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown drew attention to 17

These insidious social engineers destroying merit and aspiration, Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail , 26.02.03: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-230000/These-insidious-socialengineers-destroying-merit-aspiration.html. 18 Universities ‘are running background checks on applicants so they can fast-track poorer students’ , Sarah Harris, Daily Mail , 20.0612: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2166464/Universit ies-running-background-checks-applicants-fast-track-poorer-students.html.

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Laura Spence, a high-attaining pupil at a state school in North Tyneside who unsuccessfully applied to study medicine at an elite university because, according to reports, she did not show sufficient potential .19 Ms. Spence, who was later awarded a scholarship by an elite US university, suggested that this was a fault of admissions processes: ‘I don’t think I should be put at a disadvantage because of my personality’.20 Brown was criticised for intruding on the autonomy of universities to select their students free from state influence. Liberal Democrat peer Lord Jenkins compared the intervention to the cultural revolution in China, ‘designed not to achieve any practical result but just to stir things up for political purposes.’21 The use of university admissions as a political football has continued since. In 2016, David Cameron claimed that young black males were more likely to be in prison than in leading universities.22 Political ire is licenced by regulatory weakness. The Office for Fair Access (OFFA) made some mostly toothless demands around widening participation, and the Office for Students has been similarly focused on targets rather than requirements since taking over OFFA’s remit in 2018. The goals are sometimes ambitious, such as reducing the ratio of participation between students in the most and least well-off quintiles to 3:1. However, universities are rarely penalised for falling short. The hands-off approach to policy follows that which was expressed succinctly by David Willets when he was minister of state for universities in 2011: ‘not one iota of a quota’.23 In recent decades, the proportion of young people at university from the lowest socio-economic quintile has risen; however, the relentless focus on the young conceals sharp falls in mature and part-time students, as 19

Oxford ‘reject’ wins Harvard scholarship, BBC News, 22.05.00: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/edu cation/759114.stm. 20 A Rejection by Oxford Raises Cry of Elitism, Tom Buerkle, New York Times, 31.05.00: https:// www.nytimes.com/2000/05/31/news/a-rejection-by-oxford-raises-cry-of-elitism.html. 21 Peers condemn Oxford attack, BBC News, 15.06.00: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/792 021.stm. 22 ‘A young black man is more likely to be in prison than at a top university’, Tim Shipman and Sian Griffiths, Sunday Times, 31.01.16: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-young-black-manis-more-likely-to-be-in-prison-than-at-a-top-university-mq699s0hdcb. 23 David Willetts issues warning over £9,000 tuition fees, Graeme Paton, The Telegraph, 17.02.11: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8331580/David-Willetts-issueswarning-over-9000-tuition-fees.html.

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Claire Callender has repeatedly noted.24 Even among young students, participation at English universities has been increased much more than it has been widened . If you open the doors to large enough cohorts, some of the extra places are bound to fall to less well-off students. A higher education sector serving the public good might work more collectively in pursuit of fairer access, systematically identifying, targeting and facilitating under-represented demographics. Resources saved from not having to compete for students in a competitive market could be reallocated from advertising budgets to bursaries. But instead, selective universities mostly invest their time and effort into fine-tuning internal admissions processes to identify individual applicants charitably flagged as ‘deserving’. When it comes to admissions autonomy, inconsistency arises between the perceived threat posed by interference at the top end of the sector relative to that of the bottom end. The idea of quotas or limits on, say, privately educated students at Oxbridge is considered unpalatable, an affront to universities’ sacrosanct autonomy over their own admissions sovereignty. ‘Even in my most radical moods, I couldn’t support such a policy’, said Andrew Adonis in 2019.25 However, at the other end of the continuum, measures are regularly proposed that would result in fewer options for widening participation students. For example, in 2019 a think tank nonthreateningly called Onward suggested the introduction of ‘a grade floor for low value courses’.26 Here, low value referred only to graduate income, and the grade floor proposed was out of reach to many of society’s young people. The idea was criticised for being regressive from the perspective of social justice and university access. However, it was not condemned on the grounds that low-tariff universities should have just as much right to determine their own entry requirements as

24

Where are the lost part-timers? Claire Callender, Sutton Trust, 15.03.18: https://www.sutton trust.com/news-opinion/all-news-opinion/lost-part-timers-blog-claire-callender/. 25 Oxford and Cambridge must launch new colleges for disadvantaged young people, Andrew Adonis, The Guardian, 09.01.19: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/09/oxford-cam bridge-colleges-state-school-students. 26 A question of degree: Why we should cut graduates’ taxes and pay for it by reducing the number of low value university courses, Onward , 15.01.19: https://www.ukonward.com/wp-content/upl oads/2019/01/J6493-ONW-A-Question-Of-Degree-190104.pdf.

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high-tariff universities. So embedded is this double standard within the higher education system that it is rarely questioned. In the absence of a national programme, many higher prestige universities in England have treated the access agenda as little more than a gentle nudge. Simon Marginson suggested that what the sector lacks is a single system lever, such as that which allocates places in California.27 The unspoken widening participation assumption, as I argue in the next section, is that poor-but-brilliant students need cherry picking, not that admissions cultures and practices need overhaul to make them more equitable. As Marginson noted, pushback from independent school lobbyists against any hint of progress would be considerable, and ‘England’s rabid tabloid newspapers, suddenly discovering the virtues of academic tradition, would be relentlessly on the attack’. But the key point that Marginson makes is that any action would have to be collective: ‘No one leading university could act alone without doing itself down. They would have to move together’. In the US, sector policies and discourses around selection tend to be more evolved than in England.28 The focus is often on putting together the right mix of students to form the optimum learning environment, something that organisational sociologist Mitchell Stevens (2007) refers to as ‘creating a class’. This process tends not to be framed in terms of widening participation but as a diversity bonus. Educator-activist Christine Clark (2011) connects the approach to affirmative action policies: ‘treating, or even attempting to treat, everyone equally (‘the same’) only guarantees that existing inequities will be persistently reproduced, or, worse, exacerbated’ (2011, 59). Pioneering research by admissions expert Anna Mountford Zimdars (2016) noted that selectors in both national contexts claimed to be in the business of choosing the best, but how the best was conceptualised differed fundamentally. While admissions staff in the US viewed their own personal histories as an integral part 27

The new politics of higher education and inequality, Simon Marginson, University World News, 23.11.18: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20181121091344153. 28 The US admissions systems is not without problems, as Mountford Zimdars (2016) shows: legacy admissions (‘they’re never going to give you money again if you deny their kid’, 2016, 83), and sports admissions (‘that’s the biggest advantage anyone can have in admissions, being an athlete’, 2016, 79) are both regressive and deeply unfair approaches.

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of their professional identity, English selectors tended to mention their own background much less frequently (2016, 25). Echoing Stevens (2007), one of the US admissions professionals interviewed by Mountford Zimdars said ‘we are putting a class together … we are building a multicultural community’ (2016, 42). By contrast, one selector at an elite institution in England said ‘we like having diverse students but we take the best people’ (2016, 43). The contrastive conjunction but exposed the perceived incompatibility between diversity and quality in the selector’s mind. One way in which the US system differs from England’s system is that the US state bears greater legal responsibility. Whereas Spence had no statutory recourse to query her rejection by an English elite university in 2000, admissions decisions are often lawfully contested in the US and can escalate all the way to the Supreme Court (Mountford Zimdars, 2016, 2). Discursively, this licences policy-makers in England to occupy the moral (and meritocratic) high ground by insisting that universities’ doors must be open to (talented) young people from all backgrounds without risking the support of middle-class voters whose children might be denied their place as part of more substantive reforms. Institutional autonomy conveniently denies snubbed candidates the legal rights that they would have in the US to challenge the decision, as Spence discovered. Sector leaders in England prefer to soak up blame for the occasional misjudgement than to risk losing any control over their local admissions processes. My own research into the personal and professional identities of admissions staff in England, co-authored with Dave Hall and Joanne Bragg (2019), uncovered multiple tensions. Selection processes were internally contested and sometimes erratic. Many staff claimed to prioritise social justice, and saw their role as working closely with local state schools and colleges; however, other colleagues said that they prioritised institutional goals, and saw their role as securing the brightest and best students for their university within a competitive market. It was not the case that academic staff held one view and administrative staff held another, nor were divisions attributable to levels of seniority, to colleagues’ own socio-economic backgrounds, or to any other single factor. Inevitably, within a devolved and sometimes

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ambiguous admissions system, in which different selectors bring their own conceptualisations of fairness and excellence, disagreements arose. In our interview dataset, one (senior, male, academic) admissions tutor confidently asserted that ‘I can always tell if they’re a quality applicant or not’. Interviewed separately, a (more junior, female, non-academic) colleague of his dismissed of such claims, saying that ‘some of them think they’re the best judges of talent ever - it’s like they just know who deserves to get in and who’s going to struggle’. Such discord is unavoidable within an admissions system that relies on human judgement and in which suitability criteria are contested (Jones et al., 2019). Existing inequalities can soon be reproduced, even by the most well-meaning of selectors. Within this context, it is easy to fall into the trap of celebrating individual excellence rather than pursuing systemic change. For example, Tom Sperlinger et al. (2018, 114) argued that interviews can be useful in admissions processes. One of their anecdotes involved an applicant who, with encouragement, was able to perform so well that the interviewing panel applauded at the end. But the danger with such thinking is that it privileges selectors’ instinct to ‘know’ a deserving applicant from an undeserving one. Evidence suggests that unconscious (and conscious) biases make this less straightforward than some academics imagine. Penny Jane Burke (2013, 133–134) offered a counter-example, recounting the story of a black, female, working-class applicant who mentioned her hip-hop influences when interviewed for a place on a fashion course. The subsequent dialogue between the admission tutors bears repeating in full: ‘why should we say we’re rejecting her?’ asks the first interviewer; ‘well she’s all hip-hop and sports tops’ says the second; ‘we’ll say that her portfolio was weak’ replies the first. As journalist Alan Rusbridger noted, unless elite institutions change the way they do admissions, they may be disadvantaging their own future graduates, for whom university entry could soon be perceived as a signifier of social background as much as academic ability.29 Rusbridger argued that ‘creating a more level admissions playing-field is not dumbing down, but helping up’. The model of admission used 29 If Oxford shrugs, Alan Rusbridger, Prospect Magazine, 18.09.18: https://prospectmagazine.co. uk/magazine/if-oxford-shrugs-alan-rusbridger-admissions-lmh.

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by the Open University demonstrates that higher education can benefit those without an accretion of pre-18 qualifications. Lotteries have been suggested as a way forward by many researchers, including sociologist Natasha Warikoo (2016), and some European universities allocate places on oversubscribed courses in this way. Where lotteries have been used in pre-18 education, publics have tended to be hostile,30 but their use offers an opportunity to create a fairer system and jolt universities away from merit-based assumptions. Warikoo (2016) also talked about discourses of colour-blindness in admissions that are implicitly dominant in English universities. Like Clark (2011), Warikoo (2016) suggested that a more productive approach may be to acknowledge the reparative potential of affirmative action. In their current shape, admissions processes at English universities are sub-optimal. IAG is a common abbreviation for the Information, Advice and Guidance that young people are assumed to need. But grouping together information (something in which students often feel they are drowning) with reliable advice and guidance (something which many still find complicated and difficult to access) is misleading. Universities are also often oblivious to what former director of the Equality Trust Duncan Exley (2019) characterises as the ‘toll roads’ on any route to opportunity, such as unpaid internships and the costs of travelling to and from university open days. Market-based systems in higher education exacerbate existing problems, and make admissions processes more corruptible. In England, applicants from well-connected families can be favoured,31 and headteachers of independent schools sometimes brazenly advocate on a rejected applicant’s behalf, as many university admissions tutors can attest. In the US, recent high-profile criminal cases have involved private advisory companies charging wealthy parents large fees to ease or

30

Fury at school places lotteries: Local children losing out on best places as one in 12 comprehensives shun traditional catchment areas, Tamara Cohen, Daily Mail , 23.02.14: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2566276/Fury-school-places-lotteries-Localchildren-losing-best-places-one-12-comprehensives-shun-traditional-catchment-areas.html. 31 Prince Edward and Prince Charles won places at the University of Cambridge based on A-Level grades of CDD and BC respectively. Both graduated with lower second-class degrees.

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cheat their children’s way into top colleges.32 Selectors were bribed and learning disabilities invented. The fairest admissions systems, as I have argued elsewhere (Jones, 2013), are fully context-sensitive and seek to minimise non-academic indicators, like interviews or the personal statement, that can be distorted by either the candidate’s social or cultural capital or by the school-based IAG afforded to them. Paul Ashwin talks about a vicious circle in which social privilege is mixed up with academic ability: those with the most social privilege get the best educational outcomes, and those with the best educational outcomes are then assumed to be the most academically able (2020, 4). The admissions system at English universities captures this cycle perfectly (and has long perpetuated it). So long as higher learning is conceptualised as a reward for those who have already mastered measurements of individual merit, rather than as an opportunity to include those whose learning needs have not yet been fully met and whose intellectual thirst has yet to be quenched, then those at the edges of society will remain excluded. Instead of meaningful progress, new jargon has emerged: in additional to contextual data, the sector now talks of holistic admissions and raised aspiration. All young people must do, apparently, is aim higher. For educationalist Diane Reay, the rhetoric is ‘predominantly babble’ (2017, 185) when policy remains so conservative. The next sections look more closely at the notion of widening participation, and questions whether it is part of the solution or a symptom of the problem.

4.3

The Problem with Widening Participation

As discussed in the previous section, policies that seek to address of under-representation of some groups in higher education are grouped together under the umbrella term of widening participation. This section examines the agenda, which emerged in the 1990s as a political project 32

US college admissions scandal: how did the scheme work and who was charged? Erin Durkin, The Guardian, 13.03.19: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/12/collegeadmissions-fraud-scandal-felicity-huffman-lori-loughlin.

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intended to improve enrolment rates of young people from less well-off backgrounds in particular. The agenda’s objectives are almost universally subscribed to, but in this section I argue that market thinking disincentivises the kind of broader collaboration that might spread opportunities more evenly across society. Practices therefore tend to be premised on identifying anomalous levels of individual merit within groupings assumed to be ordinarily deficient. Among selective English universities, lip service is paid to widening participation but it is rarely a genuine operational priority. At lower prestige institutions, where the most diverse student bodies are typically found, success passes unnoticed because so much attention remains focused on the more elite end of the sector. A young person’s chances of getting into university, and particularly into higher prestige institutions, is largely determined by their background. Data can be cut up in multiple ways (and one thing that has held back progress is the lack of consistency over how to measure ‘access’), but the following statistic captures the problem as well as any: the chances of going to university for a young person eligible for free school meals is about 16 per cent; the chances of going to university for a young person attending a fee-paying school is about 96 per cent.33 Those from more advantaged backgrounds are also more likely to enter higher prestige institutions. This trend was captured by prime minister Theresa May when she acknowledged that ‘almost a quarter of the students at our research-intensive universities come from the 7 per cent of the population who go to private school’.34 By contrast, as Diane Reay et al. (2009) pointed out, working-class students, for the most part, end up in universities seen to be ‘second class’ both by themselves and others. While a higher prestige university is no guarantee of superior teaching, society’s top jobs do tend to get hoovered up by alumni of elite universities, as reports from the Sutton Trust regularly note.35 33 Destinations of key stage 4 and key stage 5 pupils, UK Department for Education, 27.01.2015: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/destinations-of-key-stage-4-and-key-stage5-pupils-2012-to-2013. 34 The right education for everyone, Theresa May, Prime Minister’s Office, 19.02.18: https://www. gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-the-right-education-for-everyone. 35 Elitist Britain—The educational backgrounds of Britain’s leading people, Sutton Trust, 2019: https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Elitist-Britain-2019-SummaryReport.pdf.

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Once again, the language used by the sector compounds the problem. Groups of young people are persistently defined through their deficits: non-traditional, disadvantaged, low-participation—rather than by their systemically misrecognised potential. Enlargement of the sector is referred to as massification, carrying connotations of unwieldiness and threat, as though hordes of commoners are rampaging over college lawns. Furthermore, some activity branded WP is anything but: one university access scheme was criticised after a third of the pupils benefiting from the programme were found to be privately educated.36 Jon Rainford (2017) similarly showed how universities impose attainment criteria for widening participation programmes that are very similar to regular selection criteria, albeit with an added requirement that the applicant meets specified poverty indicators. Diane Reay (2004) suggested that early expansions of higher education in England were actually to the benefit of ‘not-so-bright’ middle-class students rather than more academically able working-class students. Some educationalists, such as Penny Jane Burke and Annette Hayton (2012) even question whether widening participation remains ethical when it is underpinned by the goal of raising individual aspiration rather than addressing structural inequality. Higher prestige universities continue to frame widening participation students as a problem is search of a solution, invoking discourses that shift the blame for under-representation onto schools, parents, applicants, advisers or any other passing stakeholders. As Tom Sperlinger et al. (2018) showed using a 2013 press statement from the Russell Group, tactics include presenting the issue as universal and therefore inexorable: ‘access is an issue for leading universities around the globe’. Institutions can then be positioned as the blameless victim of students’ obduracy or ignorance: ‘we cannot offer places to those who do not apply or have not done the right subjects’. This kind of hand-wringing continues, with one 2020 Russell Group report promoted by the claim that ‘a focus on admissions and outreach is important but without investment in the earlier period of a child’s life, we are unlikely to see as much progress

36 One in 3 pupils on university access scheme privately educated , Jess Staufenberg, Schools Week, 20.03.17: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/one-in-3-pupils-on-university-access-schemeprivately-educated/.

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in widening participation’.37 Few would dispute the academic research showing that socio-economic inequalities in educational attainment first emerge during infancy. But the readiness of higher prestige institutions to continue drawing on such discourses is counter-productive given the extent to which elite universities remain places of social exclusion. These displacement manoeuvres are an extension of the logic that Basil Bernstein’s describes as ‘education cannot compensate for society’ (1970). The slogan may initially seem persuasive. However, if institutional managers and sector leaders wanted universities to be the exception—public spaces that actively seek to redress wider inequalities—then they would soon find that they are exceptionally well placed to take on the challenge. Other distraction discourses in this area include that of gender, as some commentators express concern that male students are now underrepresented in English higher education. ‘We are beginning to look at men as looking more like the disadvantaged group and women looking more like the advantaged group’, said then head of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, in 2013.38 Three years later, women were reported to outnumber men in 112 of 180 undergraduate degree subjects.39 However, attempts to position men as a protected group in higher education can be slippery. A decade or so of under-representations follows several centuries of uninterrupted over-representation. As recently as 1990, there were 26 per cent more male students graduating from British universities than female students.40 Besides, with female students outperforming male students globally at both primary and secondary level, as a meta-study by Raza Ullah and Hazir Ullah (2019) showed, their mounting presence in tertiary education should hardly come as 37

Russell Group sets out plan to transform opportunities for disadvantaged and under-represented students, Russell Group, 27.05.20: https://russellgroup.ac.uk/news/russell-group-sets-out-plan-totransform-opportunities-for-disadvantaged-and-under-represented-students/. 38 Ucas: Men are becoming ‘disadvantaged group’ , Tim Ross, The Telegraph, 19.03.13: https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9940934/Ucas-Men-are-becoming-disadvant aged-group.html. 39 Gender gap in UK degree subjects doubles in eight years, Ucas study finds, Press Association, The Guardian, 05.01.16: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/05/gender-gap-ukdegree-subjects-doubles-eight-years-ucas-study. 40 Boys to Men: The underachievement of young men in higher education—and how to start tackling it, Nick Hillman and Nicholas Robinson, Higher Education Policy Institute, 2016: https://www. hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Boys-to-Men.pdf.

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a surprise. It might also be acknowledged that the majority status of women is observable for undergraduate degrees only. Despite outperforming their male counterparts at that level, women are less likely to become postgraduate students or post-docs. If they enter academia, despite their greater educational attainment, they will have lower salaries and be less likely to rise to senior positions.41 If they do not enter academia, their earnings and career opportunities will remain similarly inferior to those of men.42 Where participation rates by gender become more telling is in their intersection with other variables, such as ethnicity and social class. In 2016, young, white, working-class men were more than 50 per cent less likely to attend university than women from the same socio-economic background,43 and among graduates who achieve the same outcome in the same degree from the same university, those from better-off backgrounds earn 10 per cent more than those from poorer backgrounds five years after graduation.44 Media attention to widening participation can be challenging for the sector to deal with. For example, in 2019, newspapers reported that black students were shunning elite universities ‘due to a lack of AfroCaribbean hairdressers’.45 Most pieces sought to trivialise the issue, and the story allowed Tony Sewell, the CEO of a charity called (and unhelpfully dedicated to) Generating Genius to talk about ‘another lame excuse’ for non-participation. ‘Kids need to get more resilient and get with it’, Sewell said. ‘As a minority, you will have to be confronting a situation where you are the only one. You have to face that and learn how to 41

Women in Leadership: Challenges and Recommendations, M. Cristina Alcalde and Mangala Subramaniam, InsideHigherEd , 17.07.20: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/17/ women-leadership-academe-still-face-challenges-structures-systems-and-mind-sets. 42 Gender pay gap in the UK , Office for National Statistics, 2020: https://www.ons.gov.uk/ employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapint heuk/2020. 43 White Working-Class Boys Are the Group Least Likely to Attend University, Says UCAS, Catherine Wyatt, The Huffington Post UK , 07.01.16: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016/ 01/06/poor-boys-attend-university_n_8921854.html. 44 The degrees that make you rich… and the ones that don’t, Jack Britton, BBC News, 17.11.17: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-41693230. 45 Lack of Afro-Caribbean hairdressers ‘puts black students off applying to Cambridge’ , Jane Dalton, Independent, 10.05.19: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cambridgeuniversity-student-application-afro-caribbean-hairdresser-bame-a8908926.html.

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adapt to that’. However, the findings were based on credible research and, as a founder of Target Oxbridge Naomi Kellman confirmed, hair care is indeed a live issue for many black students. ‘If you are from a majority group you assume you will be catered for, anywhere in the country can manage your hair’, said Kellman. ‘But if you have afro hair, the expertise is needed’.46 The media angle could actually have been that an elite university was finally acknowledging the day-to-day cultural impediments that some under-represented groups face. But therein lies the challenge for the sector. How do universities address barriers to wider access, and take steps to remove them, without incurring disparagement and snide comments? Sociologist of education Louise Archer (2007) deconstructed the widening participation agenda, noting that in New Labour higher education policy discourse, it was ‘more a tool for social control than social justice’ (2007, 635). Tellingly, she closed her critical reflection with the reassurance that ‘notwithstanding the critique offered within this paper, it should be emphasised that I personally fully support the principle of WP’ (2007, 649). Many university staff will understand why the disclaimer was inserted by Archer. To critique the way in which the sector conceptualise access, or to express concern about interventions or language, is to risk being labelled anti-WP. Discussions of admissions policy are inseparable from wider discussions about the privatisation of knowledge, such as those offered in piercing critiques by educationalists such as Michael Apple (2012) and Helen Gunter (2020). In higher education, knowledge is increasingly kept guarded within the institution, with gatekeepers given the job of restricting entry, even among those willing to pay a hefty cover charge. The widening participation agenda is an attempt to deepen the pool of society’s lucky ticket-holders. Thanks to the efforts of those within the university who have embraced it as a meaningful route to widen access, participation among young people belonging to the lowest socioeconomic quintile has increased. However, so too has participation across 46

Black students reluctant to apply to Cambridge University ‘due to lack of Afro-Caribbean hairdressers’ , Camilla Turner, Keep The Faith, 09.05.19: https://www.keepthefaith.co.uk/2019/ 05/10/black-students-reluctant-to-apply-to-cambridge-university-due-to-lack-of-afro-caribbeanhairdressers/.

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other socio-economic quintiles. Institutional discourses rejoice in the often remarkable, against-the-odds successes of individual working-class students, even if those successes emerge against the backdrop of growing inequality. Universities resources would be more ethically focused on amplifying academic research that shows how societies can move towards the kind of educational models that render access agenda obsolete. The next section shows how the notion of widening participation itself rests upon a similarly defective concept: social mobility.

4.4

The Problem with Social Mobility

Universities’ widening participation policies represent the operationalisation of a broader social mobility agenda. Social mobility, as a concept, proves attractive to politicians because it implies both fairness and merit. In higher education, mobility is assumed to be exclusively upward. However, this section argues that discourses of social mobility are problematic because they allow societies to overlook the more systemic failings of a class structure that protects unearned privilege by permitting a small proportion of individuals to be occasionally admitted to those class privileges. The focus of the agenda becomes identifying outstanding talent, not making sure that all can reach their potential, as higher education researcher Ann-Marie Bathmaker (2015, 73) put it. The marketised university loves the language of social mobility, with its ladders and doors, its merit and aspiration. The problem, as Duncan Exley (2019) set out clearly, is that high levels of mobility are not discordant with high levels of inequality; or, to put it another way, equality of opportunity is entirely compatible with inequality of outcome. Exley warned that ladders are not always designed by people who know what it is like to climb one,47 drawing attention to the many interventions that are planned by well-intentioned individuals who bring deeply middle-class values and assumptions. Sol Gamsu talked about breaking the logic of

47 Ladders are best designed by people who know what it’s like to climb one, Duncan Exley, WonkHE , 24.09.18: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/ladders-are-best-designed-by-people-who-knowwhat-its-like-to-climb-one/.

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the ladder, arguing that the social mobility model is insufficient to address inequality of educational opportunity. ‘It is time to burn some sacred cows’ Gamsu argued, ‘first amongst them has to be the idea that raising up a select few and diversifying elite institutions is some educational panacea for the university system. It isn’t.’48 Within social mobility discourses, emphasis is placed on individual merit. The widening participation student who enters an elite profession is held up as evidence of the agenda’s success, even if hundreds like her missed out on a place on the same course. The stories thus provide cover for maintaining over-representation based on social advantage. They also serve an important psychological function for society’s winners, because nobody wants to believe that their own wealth or success is the result of their privilege. Discourses of merit work on the psychological level by appealing to and affirming a sense of superiority, allowing winners to believe that their accomplishments are down to natural born talent and sheer hard work. They also encourage losers to internalise their shame and innate inferiority. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1998) work on elite educational contexts, Vik Loveday (2015) unpicked the cultural deficit assumptions beneath social mobility discourses, showing how working-class values, aspirations and behaviours are assumed to be in need of escaping from. She explained how particular attributes, forms of behaviour and types of knowledge become and stay legitimated, and showed that university acts as a kind of ‘creditor’ to whom grateful working-class participants are expected to feel symbolically, as well as literally, indebted. One of Diane Reay’s (2004) working-class interviewees recalled the response of his friends when he told them that he was applying to an elite university: ‘you’ll never get in there, it’s full of posh people’ (2004, 196). Later in the paper, a prospective student of the same university is reportedly mocked by her father for being ‘too big-headed for her own good’ (2004, 197). According to Reay, meritocracy is ‘the educational equivalent of the emperor with no clothes, all ideological bluff with no substance’ (2017, 48

The logic of the ladder—elite widening participation and the implicit “scholarship boy” discourse which never went away, Sol Gamsu, 16.06.15: https://solgamsu.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/ the-logic-of-the-ladder-elite-widening-participation-and-the-implicit-scholarship-boy-discoursewhich-never-went-away/comment-page-1/.

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62). In discourses of the contemporary university, merit is sometimes rebranded as grit or resilience. This subtle shift underlines further that failure rests on the individual student’s shoulder; no disruption to institutional behaviour or culture is needed. Not only can underperformance be blamed on a lack of commitment, but the reproduction of success patterns can now be explained by some groups’ greater tenacity. Embedded within discourses of social mobility are tropes about young people’s lack of aspiration. As Neil Harrison and Richard Waller explained, these tropes reallocate culpability for society’s failures: ‘It is easier to assert that working-class young people are responsible for their unfortunate position than to concede the severity of the challenges and constraints that they face’ Harrison and Waller say, noting that the latter would carry with it a moral obligation to tackle these inequalities.49 Conceptualising aspiration in terms of individualised economic success is unhelpful and limiting, making young people feel responsible for not thinking in the ‘correct’ way. Even when they do buy into the rhetoric, it does not always lead to success according to the narrow range of indicators imposed. As educationalist Konstanze Spohrer pointed out, addressing perceived aspiration deficits does little to tackle social disadvantage.50 What would change society more than accelerated widening participation at elite universities is an agenda that shuns the discourse of social mobility and instead tackles what Sarah Marie Hall (2019) refers to as ‘everyday austerity’: the issues around housing, healthcare and other living costs that prevent access to the ladders of mobility and the doors of opportunity that other young people take for granted. University researchers are adept at documenting such struggles. But institutional discourses persist with the sanitised and hollow language of mobility rather than the more challenging and substantive issue of inequality. The throwaway remark that university isn’t for everyone is typically made by those who have themselves benefited from higher education

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A lack of aspiration is not the problem, Neil Harrison and Richard Waller, WonkHE , 11.01.19: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/a-lack-of-aspiration-is-not-the-problem/. 50 The problem with ‘raising aspiration’ strategies: social mobility requires more than personal ambitions, Konstanze Spohrer, LSE , 09.05/18: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/raising-aspira tion-government-strategy/.

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(often at the expense of the taxpayer) and who fully expect future generations of their own family to do likewise. The statement itself initially seems a hard-to-refute observation that some young people may be better suited by alternative routes into adulthood and the workplace. However, the political classes’ professed concern about a lack of vocational alternatives should always be treated with caution. It potentially enables competition to be lessened for places at higher prestige universities, and then for graduate employment opportunities to be further hoarded by their own offspring. A dichotomy is often nonchalantly imposed between our kids and other kids. In 2019, prime minister Boris Johnson said ‘it is a great thing that 50 per cent of our kids should have the ambition to go to university, but of course it is equally important that other kids should acquire the skills they need that can be just as valuable’.51 In his memoirs, David Cameron (2019) offered another insight into the self-improving, middle-class logic underpinning higher education policy when he noted that ‘wanting your children to go to university is like wanting to own a home of your own’, adding that ‘as the party of aspiration, we should absolutely support this’. The analogy is telling, because home ownership is also something out of reach for large proportions of the population in an economically unequal society, despite urgings to dream big. Normalising university attendance, as Cameron does, offers no help for young people who have the aspiration but lack the pathways, wherewithal and guidance to realise their goals. In the previous chapter, I argued that employability is something that the higher education sector is assumed to have more influence over than it really does. The same is true of social mobility. Universities cannot create the well-paid jobs needed to sustain upward social movement. The reason that sector leaders and institutional managers embrace the term is because they operate in a marketised and deregulated landscape. The language of social mobility is individualised, competitive and based on the illusion of merit, much like the sector itself. However, pushback against pro-vocational discourses is difficult because those who work in the sector can easily be framed as self-interested or elitist. Clearly, higher 51 Boris Johnson: ‘It’s vital we invest now in FE and skills’ , Fraser Whieldon, FE Week, 25.07.19: https://feweek.co.uk/2019/07/25/boris-johnson-its-vital-we-invest-now-in-fe-and-skills/.

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education should never be the only route open to young people; there is nothing sacred about the university. But the danger is that alternatives become class-matching exercises that reproduce and enshrine existing social hierarchies. The challenge is for universities to view the social mobility agenda through a more critical lens, and not be blinded to structural inequalities by the admirable progress of a minority of few selfstarters. When access to higher education was expanded, it was expected to be a great equaliser. But a couple of generations later, as Kwame Anthony Appiah put it when talking about the ‘myth of meritocracy’, it risks becoming more like a great stratifier.52

4.5

Students’ Variable Experiences of Higher Education

Even when widening participation students are able to navigate a suboptimal admissions process based on the faulty logic of social mobility, many find themselves confronted with cultures, practices and discourses that signify the university campus is not for the likes of them. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant (1992) talked about ‘fish out of water’ experiences for working-class students, and Paul Redmond (2006) more recently talked about ‘outcasts on the inside’. Whichever metaphor is preferred, universities in England have a problem if historically excluded groups of young people continue to feel a nagging sense of what researchers have long described as ‘not fitting in’. This section summarises relevant evidence, and suggests that a marketisation agenda has aggravated the problem by monetising students’ higher learning and affirming existing pecking orders of institutional quality. Ciaran Burke (2015) showed how Bourdieu’s work on capitals and habitus offers a theoretical framework for understanding the impact of social class on the experiences of university students, and on their labour

52

The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve? Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Guardian, 19.10.18: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/19/the-myth-of-meritocracywho-really-gets-what-they-deserve.

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market aspirations, and further problematised the widening participation agenda critiqued in previous sections. Michael Donnelly (2018) approached similar issues through the work of sociologist of education Basil Bernstein, exposing misalignment between the image projected by higher prestige institutions and what many students actually need from them. Bernstein’s (1972) view was that middle-class children better understand the boundaries between home and school. They learn to ‘code switch’ more readily—speaking, thinking and behaving in different ways in different environments—such that the school-to-university transition comes more easily to them. Ann-Marie Bathmaker (2021) drew on narrative evidence to capture ways in which taken-for-granted middleclass entitlement is performed at university, and showed how the social space of the campus is colonised accordingly. To fit in at higher prestige institutions requires cultural capital—awareness of dress code, accent, etc.—as much as academic acumen. Sites of higher education can intimidate students who do not bring those implicitly privileged dispositions. Sociologist Bev Skeggs (1997) explained this in terms of working-class students beginning from a different place to middle-class students. Barbara Read, Louise Archer and Carole Leathwood went further, pointing out that the unspoken institutional assumption is that working-class students must be doing something wrong; their alienation cannot be the fault of the institution (2003). Through interviews conducted with undergraduates in 2018, I found that state-educated students were more likely to be panicked by every day, taken-for-granted aspects of university life, such as showing up to lecturers’ office hours. Their peers from the independent sector, by contrast, felt comfortable about regularly dropping in on staff to chat informally about their academic progress and postgraduate options (Jones, 2018). Independent schools had coached their pupils not only how to pass academic exams, but how to interact with teaching staff and ‘occupy’ the learning spaces around them. Educationalist April L. Yee’s (2014) middle-class, US interviewees were able to articulate directly the strategies through which they advantaged themselves within their colleges. ‘Use people that are here just to help you’, recommended one, while another talked of ‘always getting help because I know I’m gonna need it’ (2014, 84). However, first-generation students were much more

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anxious about approaching staff: ‘I’m nervous, I wouldn’t know what to go talk about … I wouldn’t know what to say or do, so I just don’t go’ (2014, 85). Such qualitative evidence is crucial to understanding the depth of the cultural chasm that triggers alienation and possible underperformance. The chasms do not derive from the supposed lack of student aspiration discussed in the previous sections, as lingering deficit models imply, and they cannot be corrected by cheery open day presentations from wellmeaning academics. Chasms arise because of a deep-rooted sense that there are some places that society does not want some of its citizens to go. The opposite of this is the normalised expectations of progression to higher prestige universities among middle-class students, where ‘transition’ is not a hurdle but an extension of the status quo. This raises the question of whether different groups of students should be treated differently while attending university. Some in the sector worry that middle-class students may become disgruntled (litigious, even) if opportunities are restricted on the basis of their previous advantage. This is reflected in the language of student experience, which denies the possibility of multiple types of engagement by socially and culturally diverse groups. Others would prefer that universities respond to known and persistent outcome gaps in a targeted way. Tensions between non-focused vs focused interventions thus emerge, and the underlying question of why gaps arise in the first place is often obscured. Paul Ashwin (2020, 94) rightly makes the point that there is ‘nothing elitist’ about university teaching. The sector has room to become much more bullish about the ‘powerful knowledge’ that its students receive. However, there is something deeply elitist about a system that restricts access to those young people who already enjoy the most social privilege, and then fails to make reasonable allowances for those working-class students who are admitted. Positive narratives around the value of teaching are important, but they cannot be divorced from a critical focus on which groups in society are most likely to receive that teaching, and any ‘manifesto’ for university education must have accessibility at its core. Alternative discourses are imaginable, just as alternative practices are achievable. Canadian sociologist Wolfgang Lehmann (2014) flipped

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the deficit model and drew attention to the many qualities and energies that students from under-represented groups bring to the university campus. Similarly, co-authored work by Gill Crozier, Diane Reay and John Clayton (2009, 2010, 2019) suggested that many working-class students display a strong sense of class consciousness, and pride in their own against-the-odds achievements. Like Lehmann (2014), they showed how such students appropriate what they call the ‘in-between space’—the gap between the dominant institutional norm and their own authentic selves. Some research in this area, including my own (Jones, 2013, 2018), perhaps assumes too fixed a boundary between groups—the widening participation student, the privately schooled student, the state-educated student, etc.—and the lines between working-class and middle-class may become even more blurred in post-Covid socio-economic configurations. It is possible that in future a wealthy elite may experience higher education differently from an increasingly precarious lower and middle majority. The higher education traditionally enjoyed by many middleclass students—financially available; socially and culturally comfortable—may come under threat in nations where distributions of wealth grow severely unequal. Despite the wealth of critical literature, universities have been painfully slow to acknowledge, let alone address, the barriers that Yee (2014), Burke (2015), Donnelly (2018), Bathmaker (2015, 2021) and others so incisively identify. For all students, transition can be challenging. However, the campus remains an environment with hidden codes and curricula that are accessible to some learners more than others. Students from more privileged social and educational backgrounds often have familiarity with and experience of the kind of independent learning favoured at university. For those educated by the state, particularly in lower performing schools, the culture shock can be sharper, especially at higher prestige institutions. In this context, some groups are able to fast-track themselves ahead of others. Institutional managers respond by referring to awarding gaps as ‘attainment gaps’, nimbly passing responsibility back to the student, and sector discourses project an unequivocally positive view of participation, stubbornly disinclined to acknowledge the possibility that students from different backgrounds and cultures may

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experience university differently. Higher education thus remains a field mostly at ease with its middle-class habitus. ‘Outsider’ students may be helped to understand and adapt to ‘insider’ cultures, but change to those culture is rarely considered necessary. If society’s message, as anarchist academic Lisa McKenzie put it, is that wealthier children must not be allowed to fail, it is one that universities do more to reinforce than disrupt.53

4.6

Market Logic and the Teaching Excellence Framework

In the mid-2010s, research and teaching were regarded by politicians as in need of ‘rebalancing’,54 and the TEF was seen as a way to swing the pendulum back towards the latter.55 Then university minister Jo Johnson described teaching in universities as ‘lamentable’.56 Evidence to support this claim was alarmingly anecdotal, but it struck a chord, particularly with middle-class parents wanting their children to receive greater value from newly imposed fees. Few would deny that the massive increase in research metrics over previous decades had gone unmatched by similar attention to teaching. However, whether the stated policy aim of ‘rebalancing’ was genuine remains unclear given the extent to which the rhetoric also helped justify yet another market-based intervention and set of prizes. Political economist of higher education Andrew Gunn (2018) noted that the TEF was driven as much by market imperatives as by pedagogical ones. When initially launched, it was intended to determine (in part) the level of tuition fees that providers would be allowed 53

Toby Young OfS appointment epitomises how the privileged seldom fail , Lisa McKenzie, Times Higher Education, 03.01.18: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/toby-young-ofs-appoin tment-epitomises-how-privileged-seldom-fail. 54 Teaching at the heart of the system, Jo Johnson, UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 01.07.15: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/teaching-at-the-heart-of-the-system. 55 The Teaching Excellence Framework was later rebranded as the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework. 56 ‘Lamentable teaching’ is damaging higher education, minister warns, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 09.09.15: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/sep/09/lamentable-teachingdamaging-higher-education-jo-johnson-minister-warns.

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to charge students. This was seen as an essential component in the drive towards freer market conditions, alongside enabling more information to reach applicants and allowing new rankings between institutions. TEF assessments would be accompanied by rankings coded as gold, silver and bronze. The first medals were awarded in June 2017. There is no perfect teaching method in higher education; what matters is whether each method is context appropriate and plays its part in creating a coherent degree course that makes a lifelong impression on students and their ways of thinking. Writing some time before the TEF was conceived, educationalist Alan Skelton (2005, 35) sketched out what ‘critical teaching excellence’ might look like. He argued that it would enable epistemologies that led to social critique, informed citizenry, participatory dialogue and, ultimately, emancipation. Suffice to say, Skelton’s (2005) thinking was not to the fore of metric-makers’ mind when the TEF was fashioned. Rather than develop an ambitious framework for capturing the life-changing potential of higher education, policy-makers turned to a narrow range of easily attainable, standardised metrics based on dropout rates, student satisfaction surveys, and graduate employment outcomes. Teaching was conceptualised as merely a means to an end. The TEF’s narrow and generic conceptions of excellence should also have troubled market purists who sought provider differentiation. How can a market function properly if every university was doing the same thing? Capturing how students feel about their university teaching is no bad thing, and finding ways to differentiate high-impact teaching from low-impact teaching has long been considered a worthwhile scholarly undertaking. But the government-imposed framework had little use to the university lecturer trying to enhance their students’ learning. Institutions soon twigged that one way to maximise TEF success was to adopt approved discourses in their provider statements. These statements, accompanying each TEF submission, described not how academics teach, but rather how their teaching was imagined by senior nonacademic colleagues. The formulaic was favoured over the reflexive, as close linguistic analysis of statements by Joanne Moore and colleagues (2017) confirmed. The opportunity for universities to explain to students

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what was distinctive and memorable about the pedagogy at their institution was not taken. Instead, most institution turned to the same over-used phrases—student voice, student engagement, student experience—to make their case for excellence. Learners remained none the wiser about how one pedagogical approach differed from another. The TEF’s reliance on satisfaction scores from the National Student Survey (NSS) was particularly unhelpful. Launched in 2005, the NSS polls all final-year undergraduates to collect their views on the degree course they are about to complete. However, it is methodologically problematic in myriad ways. Students who leave their course before the final year are not invited to complete the survey, and though qualitative feedback is submitted by students, institutional analysis invariably privileges metrics over more detailed comments. The NSS does not attempt to capture the extent to which students have benefited from cross-disciplinary or cross-institution collaboration, become more critical thinkers, or been challenged about the views with which they entered university. The timing of the survey, mid-way through students’ last year of study, is also sub-optimal; asking graduates to evaluate their degree five or ten years after completion would surely yield more meaningful data. More fundamentally, as Johnny Rich noted, satisfaction is not a measure of quality, but rather a measure of the distance between expectation and delivery.57 Though it is going too far to claim, as Lord Lipsey did in a 2017 House of Lords debate, that the NSS is ‘garbage’,58 it remains a dataset that is frequently misused and fundamentally misunderstood. In 2020, the UK government turned against the NSS, previously one of its most cherished metrics, characterising it as a ‘bureaucratic burden’ and claiming that it had exerted a downwards pressure on standards within higher education.59 This, politicians claimed, was because universities were being forced to choose between maintaining standards 57

The true potential of a national student survey, Johnny Rich, Higher Education Policy Institute, 19.04.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/04/19/the-true-potential-of-a-national-student-survey/. 58 Why the NSS is garbage, Lord Lipsey, Council for the Defence of British Universities, 13.02.17: http://cdbu.org.uk/why-the-nss-is-garbage/?mc_cid=ef1356de2f&mc_eid=65adb20b0b. 59 ‘Radical’ review for NSS as ministers say it drives down standards, Simon Baker, Times Higher Education, 10.09.20: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/radical-review-nss-min isters-say-it-drives-down-standards.

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and chasing student satisfaction. However, evidence from large scale reviews of NSS data strongly suggests that this is a false dichotomy. Actually, as Anthony Mark Langan, Peter Dunleavy and Alan Fielding (2013) showed, a positive correlation emerges between courses that are considered to be intellectually stimulating and students’ rates of overall satisfaction. The idea that the survey can be gamed by making academic content easier is largely a myth. Nonetheless, the government called for a ‘radical, root and branch review’ of the NSS on the basis that ‘its results do not correlate well with other, more robust, measures of quality … [such as] progression to highly skilled employment’.60 This U-turn is probably best understood as clash of narratives. The NSS initially drove a narrative of student empowerment, big data supposedly giving low quality courses nowhere to hide. But the NSS stubbornly pointed to year-on-year improvement until Covid-19 struck. Because this was not consistent with a rationale for further market-based intervention, the NSS was hastily reimagined in negative terms, and held to blame for dumbed-down teaching and spoon-fed students. Increased satisfaction could then be regarded as indicative of lowered standards. The discursive about-face was consistent with wider populist moves in English politics. Whereas the instinct of right-leaning policy-makers had previously been to exert control through customer empowerment, governments now began to questions the judgement of consumers and seize control in more direct ways. Other TEF metrics were no less contentious than the NSS. The use of non-continuation data was perverse because, as Nick Hillman noted, not all instances of dropping out are bad.61 Some students legitimately discover that university is not right for them, and across many European universities student attrition is regarded as an indicator of robust teaching. But universities chose to play the TEF game despite its methodological failings. This was not because they were compelled to do so, 60

Reducing bureaucratic burden in research, innovation and higher education, UK Department for Education, 10.09.20: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reducing-bureaucraticburdens-higher-education/reducing-bureaucratic-burdens-on-research-innovation-and-higher-edu cation#the-office-for-students-and-dfe. 61 A short guide to non-continuation in UK universities, Nick Hillman, Higher Education Policy Institute, 2021: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/A-short-guide-to-non-con tinuation-in-UK-universities.pdf.

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but rather because they ached for the prestige that they felt its medals might confer. The TEF offered ways for universities to sell themselves to potential applicants, and the NSS data upon which the TEF partly rested offered ways to confirm long-held suspicions about the shortcomings of individual staff and subject areas. As Liz Morrish (2019) explained, the end result of audits like the TEF is not that student-consumers are empowered by data, but that they are positioned as neoliberal subjects. For Morrish (2019), the TEF’s emergence was never prompted by genuine concerns over quality, but rather by the need to reconfigure universities as instruments of market ideology. Far from an objective, evidence-based assessment of teaching, the audit was a targeted attack on certain kinds of students on certain kinds of courses at certain kinds of universities. The extent to which the sector was being patronised was captured when the prospect of a fourth, Ofstedstyle outcome category, Requires Improvement, was mooted.62 Historian Emilie Murphy called on individual institutions to stop trumpeting their success.63 ‘Doing so only serves to widen division and rivalry, at the expense of working together to help guarantee a fantastic education for all of our students’, Murphy said. But few managers were able to resist the temptation, and several campuses were lit up in gold to flaunt institutional triumph. An independent review of the TEF chaired by Dame Shirley Pearce in 2021 noted that results so far had made little impact on applicants’ decision-making behaviour, and rejected a proposed subject-level layer.64 Yet the main legacy of the TEF has been to solidify a view in managers’ minds that quality teaching is something that can be prescribed from above and is not context dependent. Whether pedagogies can ever return to embracing de-commodified knowledge is unclear. Despite almost universal agreement that metrics capture almost nothing about the 62

Alarm at Ofsted-style plan to rank universities by graduate earnings, Anna Fazackerley, The Guardian, 11.02.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/11/alarm-at-ofsted-styleplan-to-rank-universities-by-graduate-earnings. 63 Stop celebrating the TEF results—your hypocrisy is galling! Emilie Murphy, Times Higher Education, 23.06.17: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/stop-celebrating-tef-results-your-hyp ocrisy-galling. 64 Independent review of TEF , Dame Shirley Pearce, Department for Education, 21.01.21: https:// www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-tef-report.

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underlying long-term value of university teaching, and sometimes distort the value of a higher education, the sector remains beholden to the policy assumption that degree courses are an input–output production line. Indeed, as Bahram Bekhradnia noted, the TEF is the latest in a long line of QA processes within the sector that seem less concerned with raising standards than with ensuring that data are presented in uniform ways.65 With the notion of teaching excellence so poorly defined in policy, the TEF serves primarily as a way of keeping universities under control, part of an overbearing corporate administration structure. Students look on in bemusement, the prospect of an educational sector working collectively to bring them the most stimulating and appropriate pedagogies seemingly slipping further from view. What they want are lecturers who love their subject, and have time to engage with them. However, in reducing students to consumers of a product, and focusing on their satisfaction with their purchase, market logic denies them their most basic of entitlements: the status of learners.

4.7

Pedagogy and Platform

As the last section outlined, the marketised university brings tensions between teaching as a means to excite and provoke students, and teaching as a means to meet predefined and measurable learning outcomes as efficiently as possible. Technological advances complexify the issue, as the digital platforms forced upon the sector by Covid-19 simultaneously offer an alternative model of democratised university teaching (because on-line learning, freed from constraints of physical space and place, is potentially more open and inclusive) and a threat to traditional academic freedoms (because lecturers potentially lose control over how their content is re-used). While I have argued previously that individual academic practices are rarely changed by top-down government directives, such as the TEF, in this section I address the broader structural and

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The great university con: how the British degree lost its value, Harry Lambert, New Statesman, 21.08.19: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2019/08/great-university-con-howbritish-degree-lost-its-value.

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institutional ways in which higher education has been reconceptualised by policy in recent decades. Students are now talked about in conflicting terms, one set of discourses aggressively positioning them as consumers seeking value from their experiences, while another continues to position them as apprentice scholars seeking absorption within an academic disciplinary community. As in other areas, institutional managers fluctuate strategically but uneasily between these different conceptualisations, often under-confident about what a university education is actually for. Positive discourses around pedagogy are vanishingly rare, and teaching is rarely framed as personally transformative or socially important. That is not to say that memorable, challenging and rigorous teaching does not take place on campus; merely that sector leaders and institutional managers sometimes seem embarrassed about drawing attention to it, or articulating what it involves. Suspicions may arise among managers that pedagogy is somehow ‘owned’ by those whose values that are not consistent with their own. In part, this is driven by a policy obsession with outcomes. Barnett (1994) characterised early movements in this direction as a shift from what do students understand? to what can students do?, arguing that academic competence was no longer being conceptualised as command of a discipline, but rather as the acquisition of instrumental skills and know-how. The market has since demanded that universities sell themselves through experiences (such as sports facilities) and credentials (a job market ‘edge’) rather than through education (learning to think differently and better). Potential applicants see through the sales pitch, and many would prefer a frank explanation of the pedagogical principles that will underpin their teaching, but to promote a university on how students learn is regarded as risky because it potentially disempowers managers. Barnett’s vision of university teaching as ‘an opening without closure … education for collective self-transcendence’ (1994, 193) now feels very last century. Within institutional discourses sits the student experience, a phrase that embodies what Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson call the ‘skilful illusion’ (2019, 55) of depriving students of agency while simultaneously pretending to amplify their voice. The student experience is always a singular mass noun, denying the complex reality of multiple students’

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multiple experiences. Students become a homogenous mass of aggregated learning needs and satisfaction levels because the market in higher education does not know what to do with the metric-resistant qualities that many aspire to: intellectual growth; shared values; global citizenship. According to Rachel Brooks and Jessie Abrahams, students regard their new-found consumer rights as ‘merely a form of lip service to placate them’ (2018, 199). Institutional managers are comfortable with students passively experiencing their higher education, and perhaps being granted tokenistic membership of the odd committee, but they are less comfortable with responding to demands for change when it comes to issues like mental health provision or pedagogy, or to student activism in relation to climate change and other geopolitical issues. The traditional goal of university teaching—to create ‘well-informed, inquisitive, openminded young people who are both productive and reflective, seeking answers to life’s most important questions’, as Boyer (1987, 7) put it—is thus compromised, even though many students crave the thinking tools needed to decode, deconstruct and change the increasingly hostile and unequal societies around them, and are keener than ever to be taught by (and become) active researchers. Among the less contested terms in university teaching is that of critical thinking. Almost all educators want their students to question their own values, and critique the information presented to them. But Barnett (2017) argued that the higher education institution must first become a ‘thinking university’. He noted that references to thinking rarely appear in mission statements or on institutional websites, and challenged universities to look into ‘dark spaces that lie hidden beneath prevailing ideologies’ (2017, 83). Educationalist and social activist bell hooks went further, suggesting that university pedagogies should be about ‘teaching to transgress’ (1994): helping students to understand and then disobey dominant racial, gender, and class-based social hierarchies. In a similar vein, higher education and digital literacy expert Lesley Gourlay (2015) rejected institutionalised terms such as engagement to argue that sites of learning should be restless and defiant. These alternative conceptualisations all see participation as something more than attendance. To go to university is not simply to enrol on a course, but to acquire more active and potentially insubordinate ways of thinking,

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and therefore behaving. It is unfortunate that, as educationalist Louise Morley showed, the language of (potentially radical) pedagogies was appropriated and displaced by managerial discourses of quality (2003, 143). In a market-based system, the focus of policy attention briefly became not thinking but learning gain. Fashionable in the late 2010s, learning gain represented the ‘journey travelled’ by students between enrolment and graduation, much as value-added indicators measured pupils’ progress in school. But universities are not like schools. Gains accrue from all kinds of encounters, pedagogical and otherwise, and outcomes are much less comparable across the sector because different institutions are teaching and assessing different subjects with different groups of students in different ways. More fundamentally, learning gain is problematic because it turns the process of absorbing and understanding a concept into a thing, a measurable entity: ‘learning’ ceases to be a verb and instead becomes a noun. Nouns are more market-friendly than verbs because they can be bought and sold, owned and possessed. Students are experts in their own lives, and Barnett (1994) is clear that the deepest learning takes place only when direct experience is drawn upon. Academia is slow to embrace this, preferring instead to ignore or devalue the pre-knowledge with which students arrive. Clichés abound about co-construction of knowledge—students as partners, the shared curriculum—but this requires vulnerability on the part of the institution, which must trade some of its prestige for more open interaction and accept that students sometimes know better than managers. It would also require vulnerability on the part of academics, because if curricula and assessment were genuinely co-created, course leaders would no longer solely control the content or determine which students succeed. Technology has the potential to enhance the relationship between staff and students, and Covid-19 was a game-changer in terms of previously distrustful academics beginning to recognise the value of digital learning. Instead of being belligerently warned that MOOCs66 would make them obsolete, they were offered agency to move between platforms in the 66

Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) are free on-line courses designed with unlimited participation in mind.

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best interests of their students. Technology has the power to democratise higher learning because those unable to attend university in person, for whatever reason, can still access knowledge and connect with staff. Pedagogies can become more ambitious, and lecturer-student interactions more meaningful. However, the move to on-line invariably attracts discourses of standardisation. This can lead to confusion around a fundamental principle of higher education: that understanding is progressed by different academics taking different positions and offering different viewpoints. The temptation also arises for a penny-pinching sector to wonder whether so many platforms and perspectives are needed. For institutional managers, the idea of building a repository of digital content is appealing: any module or course could then be delivered by any member of staff within the area (or even a precarious graduate teaching assistant or post-doc). Ed-tech companies seeking to peddle generic solutions stand ready to exploit openings. In 2019, one English university debuted the world’s first lecture delivered by hologram.67 However, the assumption that universities offer knowledge that can be straightforwardly captured, packaged and transmitted in bulk is one that needs to be firmly rebuffed, just like the myth of on-line delivery being a ‘cost cutting’ opportunity, as learning technologist Allison Littlejohn pointed out.68 Assessment is an area that could benefit greatly from more extensive and imaginative use of technology. Despite some notable exceptions, the sector has remained faithful to very traditional approaches. Methods often seem based on the principle that cheaters must be caught rather than that all students should be inspired to demonstrate what they have become capable of. Jan McArthur asks what messages of self-worth are instilled in students through the sector’s conventional assessment methods: ‘the fetishisation of grades is individually damaging and socially unproductive’, she says.69 Yet the sector persists with the idea that 67

HR for holograms: preparing for the future workforce, Paul Boustead, WonkHE , 22.05.19: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/hr-for-holograms-preparing-for-the-future-workforce/. 68 Universities: learning outside the lecture hall , Allison Littlejohn, IoE Blog, 22.09.21: https:// wonkhe.com/blogs/for-assessment-to-count-as-authentic-it-must-mean-something-to-students/ https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2021/09/22/universities-learning-outside-the-lecture-hall/. 69 For assessment to count as authentic it must mean something to students, Jan McArthur, WonkHE , 03.03.21: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/for-assessment-to-count-as-authentic-it-must-mean-someth ing-to-students/.

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the only true way to measure students’ ability is through exams and essays. Institutions are partly to blame, erring on the side of uniformity rather than creativity. But staff can also be culpable, sometimes guilty of favouring the assessment methods that validate their own academic accomplishment rather than embracing those that might recognise a wider spectrum of capacities. How universities assess their students is a reflection of how universities see their role. If the goal is to prepare students for success in other markets, such as the graduate employment market, then capturing their performance in consistent ways may be justifiable. But if the goal is to stimulate younger generations to become a collective force for positive change in society, then current methods are mostly inadequate. Post-Covid, universities need a clear, persuasive and preferably shared narrative about what their teaching is for. The death of the traditional lecture has been regularly prophesied,70 but it persists because, when delivered appropriately, it can be both instructive and popular. Students generally enjoy hearing experts in their field hold the floor. The challenge is to incorporate other forms of learning rather than to single out any particular mode of interaction for eradication. Various taxonomies visualise pedagogy as a pyramid, with remembering near the base, and evaluation or creation near the peak, such as Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) revision of Benjamin Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of educational objectives. What higher education does is push students upwards, such that retaining superficial facts becomes less important, but the thorough and systematic appraisal of evidence enables ever more nuanced and better-informed understandings. For Barnett (1994), dispositions are more important than deliverables; universities do their job best when they endow students with a ‘critical spirit’—a set of temperaments that enable the major issues faced by society to be addressed in informed ways that demonstrate awareness of underlying power structures and, where appropriate, challenge those structures. Digital approaches alone will aid neither teaching nor assessment. The market offers few incentives

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Shouldn’t lectures be obsolete by now? Matt Pickles, BBC News, 23.09.16: https://www.bbc.co. uk/news/business-38058477.

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to share, so technological advances may be hoarded by those institutions with the most wealth. In the 1980s, philosopher and classicist Allan Bloom voiced concern about the decline of critical higher education in the US, and the likelihood that students would begin seeking ‘enlightenment wherever it is readily available, without being able to distinguish between the sublime and the trash, insight and propaganda’ (1987, 64). Though some of Bloom’s examples may seem dated and elitist—such as his concern that young people may engage with modern cinema without having read classic literary texts—his fear that individuals may become ill-equipped to differentiate insight from propaganda was immensely prescient. The subsequent rise of anti-intellectualism and anti-science, together with the spread of misinformation on-line, has left generations of citizens struggling to make sense of a post-truth society. University teaching offers one of the most effective antidotes to populism. The opportunity to learn with disciplinary experts, as well as from them, is not something that cannot be downloaded on-line or accessed at other educational levels. The challenge, as I explore in Chapter 6, is for those in charge of higher education sectors to recognise and embrace this.

4.8

Racism and Decolonisation

Much of the learning that takes place at university is unintended. Messages are communicated through campus cultures as much as through direct teaching. Critiques of the dominant Eurocentric academic model have long noted that whiteness (and maleness) shape higher education, and determine the nature of interactions within it. These histories are woven into the fabric of many modern campuses: how spaces are designed and named; how courses are conceived and taught; how staff are hired and inducted. The epistemological foundation on which much university learning rests is the white gaze. ‘As a law student I was asked to read 1000s of things’, recalled student Tahmina Choudhery. ‘Not a

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single one was written by a Muslim Woman’.71 This section looks at how students engage with an English higher education system that is not ready or willing to admit the extent to which it is built on the legacies of empire. Central to the notion of racism in higher education is that of representation. Data can be presented in manifold ways, but none reflect well on the sector. Nicola Rollock (2019) noted that there are only 25 black women professors in the UK in total, meaning that there are 3000 black female students for every black female professor, compared to 50 white male students for every white male professor. Fewer than one per cent of the professors currently employed at UK universities are black, and the majority of universities employ between zero and two black professors.72 Whereas about 11 per cent of all academics are professors, only 4.7 per cent of black academics are professors. In 2018–19, of the 540 academics working in ‘top’ managerial jobs, 475 were white.73 Representation is vital because students see black staff undertaking the menial work of campus maintenance more often than they see them at the lectern or in other positions of authority. While it is important to recognise that the cleaners, porters and catering staff matter in higher education, and to pay them accordingly, the message (and the material reality) is one that the sector must address. Rollock (2019) also drew attention to the gruelling Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) labour that minority ethnic colleagues are expected to take on (and assumed to want) without commensurate workload recognition. This is often reflected in the terminology of the institution: EDI has its humble champions, where research and teaching have their directors or deans. Azeezat Johnson and Remi Joseph-Salisbury (2018) began their autoethnographic account of racial microaggressions and knowledge production in higher education with an anecdote by the latter author in which, 71

We can’t separate the issues of race and reopening in universities, Tahmina Choudhery, WonkHE , 03.06.20: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/we-cant-separate-the-issues-of-race-and-reopening-in-univer sities/. 72 Higher Education Staff Data, Higher Education Statistics Agency, 27.02.20: https://www.hesa. ac.uk/news/27-02-2020/he-staff-data. 73 Higher Education Staff Statistics, Higher Education Statistics Agency, 23.01.20: https://www. hesa.ac.uk/news/23-01-2020/sb256-higher-education-staff-statistics.

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while photocopying, he was asked ‘are you supposed to be here?’. As scholars of colour, Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury argue that their bodies are ‘more intelligible as the black male trespasser (or criminal) than as an academic’ (2018, 148). As the authors go on to demonstrate, little is done to understand how racist discourses inform the way in which academia, as a central site of knowledge production, is constructed. Joseph-Salisbury (2019) similarly recounted how students attending one elite English university were sent a CCTV image of a black alumnus innocently walking across the campus earlier that day. He suggested that such incidents are treated by university authorities as ‘isolated aberrations bereft of wider structural and institutional context’ (2019), rather than as racism. Zac Adan, a first-year student at a higher prestige English university who in 2020 was pinned to a wall by security officers for ‘looking like a drug dealer’, described institutional racism in similar terms. He noted that students’ complaints were typically downplayed by senior managers. ‘The university’s reputation comes first’, Adan said. ‘And how they portray themselves to the public and to the media is way more important to them, and making public statements seems to be more of a priority for the universities than the actual welfare and well-being of the students’.74 As with many of the areas cover in this book, the fear of being ridiculed in popular discourses constrains progress. Anti-racist measures are systematically targeted by the libertarian right, with proposed progressive actions exaggerated and misrepresented. For example, in 2020, commentator Joanne Williams characterised the modern university as one in which ‘black students must be taught that if a white friend expresses surprise to see you are both taking the same module, or asks where you are from, or congratulates you for doing well on a test, or says they like your hair, then you are a victim of racial harassment’.75 She added that if none of these things happen, then the student is still a victim if, two hundred years ago, their institution received a donation 74 UK universities are institutionally racist, says leading vice-chancellor, Aamna Mohdin, The Guardian, 28.04.21: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/apr/28/uk-universitiesare-institutionally-racist-says-leading-vice-chancellor. 75 The new racialism on campus, Joanne Williams, Spiked !, 01.12.20: https://www.spiked-online. com/2020/12/01/the-new-racialism-on-campus/.

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from a colonialist. Some students may recognise this discursive strategy more quickly than their lecturers do. They are part of a gaslit generation that has been repeatedly told to sit down, keep quiet and stay grateful. They know how progress can be stunted by distraction discourses that seek to blame them, as individuals, for being hyper-sensitive rather than blame society and its institutions for being discriminatory. It is difficult to engage those politicians and commentators for whom structural inequity is a myth, and racism an illusion deriving from over-zealous academic methodologies. But the kind of cynicism that Williams and others propagate creates nervousness among sector leaders and institutional managers, and can sometimes halt even the most incremental progress. Few issues are as controversial within the sector as decolonisation. Decolonising means adding rather than subtracting; creating curricula that are more expansive and more rigorous. It is about making visible the powerful structures within higher education that usually remain unseen, and the spaces that implicitly favour some kinds of learner over others. As Achille Joseph Mbembe (2016) pointed out, calls to decolonise are not new. However, they are continually construed by right-wing politicians as a pernicious form of wokeness and a fundamental threat to the intellectual veracity of the sector. Speaking to a Daily Telegraph podcast in 2021, minister of state for universities Michelle Donelan described decolonisation as ‘a very dangerous and odd road to go down, and certainly it has no place in our universities’.76 Evidence suggests that decolonisation is, in fact, the only road for the English higher education sector to go down. A 2019 inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found that universities were failing to address tens of thousands of racist incidents every year, and that about one quarter of minority ethnic students, including non-British white students, were encountering racial harassment.77 Similar findings 76

Universities minister compares ‘decolonisation’ of history to ‘Soviet Union-style’ censorship, Peter Stubley. Independent, 28.02.21: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/ history-curriculum-university-michelle-donelan-culture-war-b1808601.html. 77 Tackling racial harassment: universities challenged, Equality and Human Rights Commission, 23.10.19: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/tackling-racial-harass ment-universities-challenged.

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were reported by Sofia Akel (2019), who drew on surveys, focus groups and interviews with a sample of 5 per cent of the ethnic minority student population at one university. Akel found that 26 per cent had experienced racism, with 35 per cent having faced scepticism regarding their nationality, and 37 per cent having felt excluded from participating in university life due to racial discrimination. One male student interviewed by Akel talked about ‘self-preservation tactics that you develop over time that just prevent that thing from happening as much as possible’. The student’s examples included pre-emptively making friends with campus security staff. Many commentators emphasise that decolonisation is not the same as diversity. Recent analysis by Mia Liyanage78 and Nihan Albayrak79 noted that where diversity requires more of the same, just for a wider pool of recipients, decolonisation requires attention to structural problems. In practice, diversity can work to reinforce and legitimate an existing unjust system. Legal educator Foluke Adebisi pushes for decolonisation to go beyond brand-friendly tick-box exercises around internationalising the curriculum or schemes that promote student voice.80 For Neema Begum and Rima Saini (2019), decolonisation involves nothing less than exposing and dismantling imperial practices within the university. But white media commentators know how to push back, even against critiques drawing directly on lived experience of racism on campus. Writing for ConservativeHome, Emily Carver from the Institute of Economic Affairs feigned bewilderment at how terms like microaggression could ever have become part of our lexicon.81 She then made the now familiar discursive move of pretending that incidents of the kind 78

Miseducation: decolonising curricula, culture and pedagogy in UK universities, Mia Liyanage, Higher Education Policy Institute, 2020: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ HEPI_Miseducation_Debate-Paper-23_FINAL.pdf. 79 Diversity helps but decolonisation is the key to equality in higher education, Nihan Albayrak, LSE , 16.04.18: https://lsepgcertcitl.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/diversity-helps-butdecolonisation-is-the-key-to-equality-in-higher-education/. 80 Decolonisation is not about ticking a box: It must disrupt, Foluke Adebisi, University World News, 29.02.20: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200227143845107. 81 To bolster free speech in universities, we need laws taken off the statute book, rather than added to it, Emily Carver, ConservativeHome, 05.05.21: https://www.conservativehome.com/thecol umnists/2021/05/emily-carver-to-bolster-free-speech-in-universities-we-need-laws-taken-off-thestatute-book-rather-than-added-to-it.html.

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noted above were somehow a threat to scholars and their professional independence. ‘That lecturers – who last time I checked are paid to teach and encourage critical thinking – should be put in a position where they are afraid to “misspeak” is nothing short of an affront to a liberal democracy and poses a fundamental risk to academic freedom’, Carver said. In such ways, the principle of academic freedom is inverted, and turned against those who need it most. In a similar vein, when one university library tweeted in 2020 about decolonising their collections, the response of political broadcaster Nigel Farage was to warn that ‘the book burning has started’ and that ‘this fanaticism is very dangerous’.82 Such over-reaction is common, strategic and deliberately provocative. A year earlier, when the Duchess of Sussex mildly advocated decolonisation after learning how many university tutors were white men,83 the backlash was ferocious. Writing under the headline ‘Alas, poor Meghan, you don’t know what you’re talking about ’, columnist Chris McGovern (white, male) wondered if the Duchess (black, female) was sufficiently knowledgeable about race and gender to enter the debate.84 On the same day, Doug Stokes, an expert in international security and strategy at Exeter University, cautioned that the ‘the last thing our universities need are to have ‘male, pale and stale’ voices side-lined’.85 The complacency of commentators like Stokes is patiently questioned by those with first-hand experience of racism in higher education, such as Randall Whittaker.86 Whittaker drew attention to another 82

Nigel Farage warns of book-burning as London library announces it’s ‘decolonizing and diversifying’ its book collection, John Cody, Remix News, 15.06.20: https://rmx.news/article/art icle/uk-nigel-farage-warns-of-book-burning-as-london-library-announces-it-s-decolonizing-anddiversifying-its-book-collection. 83 The Duchess of Sussex wants to “decolonise the curriculum” in new political intervention, Ella Alexander, Harper’s Bazaar, 18.02.19: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/culture/culture-news/ a26384877/duchess-of-sussex-wants-to-decolonise-the-curriculum-in-political-intervention/. 84 Alas, poor Meghan, you don’t know what you’re talking about, Chris McGovern, ConservativeWoman, 19.02.19: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/alas-poor-meghan-you-dont-knowwhat-youre-talking-about/. 85 Universities should resist calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ , Doug Stokes, Spectator, 18.02.19: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/02/universities-should-resist-calls-to-decolonise-thecurriculum/. 86 The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report and disaggregating BAME in higher education, Randall Whittaker, Higher Education Policy Institute, 26.04.21: https://www.hepi.ac. uk/2021/04/26/the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities-report-and-disaggregating-bamein-higher-education/.

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of Stokes’s pieces, condescendingly called ‘Decolonisation is a welcome contribution, but must not be enforced ’,87 noting how the author misrepresented data in relation to ethnicity gaps. Stokes also suggested that reports claiming to tackle racism should no longer be framed ‘a significant step forward’ or ‘a catalyst for change’ when they have historically led to no greater accountability, let alone to positive action. Most decolonisation efforts fall short of actual decolonisation because they come up against an intractable white majority culture that stockpiles power and opportunities. Adébísí pointed out that some also fall short because they do not involve interrupting the persisting remnants of empire; rather, they are driven by the very colonial logics they purport to disrupt. Richard Hall suggested that developing more humane forms of knowledge demands work by the coloniser more than by the colonised (2018, 305), and for Nadena Doharty, Manuel Madriaga and Remi Joseph-Salisbury (2021), widespread calls to decolonise universities have further embedded, rather than dismantled, whiteness. The ‘double-speak’ that the latter authors noted is similar to the ‘racial gesture politics’ to which Nicola Rollock (2019) testified, and which she claimed infects and constrains university discourses. While the language of diversity and inclusion pretends to address discrimination, an opportune status quo is maintained. Decolonisation thus becomes little more than a metaphor, and an added layer of white perspective. Students have long recognised the underlying problem. Anuradha Henriques and Lina Abushouk (2019) traced the mobilisation of student-led movements, from Stuart Hall’s activism in the 1950s to more recent movements like Skin Deep, I Too Am Oxford and Rhodes Must Fall . They showed how universities tend to be willing to admit some shortcomings in respect to diversity, but only then to crow about their efforts to overcome them. Currently favoured solutions—workshops run by bought-in ‘experts’; superficial training around unconscious bias; stepped-up media campaign, typically depicting happily integrated student cohorts—serve only underline suspicions of performativity. Yet according to a survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute and the 87

Decolonisation is a welcome contribution, but must not be enforced , Doug Stokes, Higher Education Policy Institute, 18.03.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/03/18/doug-stokes-the-whitepaper-is-vital-for-the-defence-of-academic-freedom/.

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University Partnerships Programme Foundation, two thirds of people in England back ‘broadening the curriculum to take in people, events, materials and subjects from across the world’. The problem is that less than a quarter support universities specifically ‘decolonising’ the curriculum.88 This reflects the way in which progressive concepts are seized upon and stigmatised by the right: ‘decolonisation’ offers a soft linguistic target because the de- prefix signals negation or removal, something that can be readily linked to wider discourses of cancel culture. All students in English higher education suffer because of the sector’s complacency around race. Staff representation sends out a clear message about who the knowledge holders are, and curricula mostly continue to privilege forms of knowledge derived from a white gaze. Data from the Office for Students shows that the proportion of students awarded a ‘good’ 2:1 degree is 22 and 11 points lower respectively for black and Asian students than for white students.89 Gaps also arise in graduates’ employment outcomes, even when entry grades and subject choice are accounted for.90 The annoyance of media commentators and politicians towards any suggestion of structural racism, let alone towards a meaningful programme of decolonisation, is therefore misplaced. Confident university leaders would rise above the heckles, explicitly name the problem, draw on their research evidence base, put in place substantive corrective policies, seize control of the narrative, and offer higher education as an exemplar for other sectors.

4.9

Students as Allies?

The relationship between universities and the state is continually renegotiated. It is a relationship of mutual dependence, because few higher 88

Public against ‘decolonising’ university courses—but back broader syllabus after Black Lives Matter protests, Will Hazell, iNews, 20.07.21: https://inews.co.uk/news/education/public-universities-dec olonising-curriculum-woke-higher-education-policy-institute-1110643. 89 Differences in student outcomes, Office for Students, 2018: https://www.officeforstudents.org. uk/data-and-analysis/differences-in-student-outcomes/. 90 Wealthy, white students still do best at university. We must close the gap, Chris Millward, The Guardian, 09.04.18: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/apr/09/ wealthy-white-students-still-do-best-at-university-we-must-close-the-gap.

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education sectors could be fully financially self-sufficient, and few nations could sustain a workforce with no universities at all. Governments have some right to expect universities to be responsive to the demand of the wider economy (hence the language of employability) and to be run in efficient ways (hence the language of value-for-money), while universities have some right to operational sovereignty and staff some right to academic freedom. In the English system, a contradictory and unstable environment is complicated further by a finance model that relies on student-as-consumer —or, more accurately, graduate-as-funder— principles. This chapter has demonstrated that the market model is not only educationally ill-fitting but, at times, commercially naïve. Students do not generally regard the teaching they receive as a product. And given the ready availability of information on-line, it does not make sense for the sector to insist on pitching it to them in this way. Indeed, despite all of the market-based policy and rhetoric imposed on the sector, the currency of universities remains their reputation. Applicants select on prestige more than quality, and no number of proxies for excellence are likely to change this. This is important because it means that students can never be empowered market agents in the way that policy-makers imply. Increasingly, applicants are not selected at all, their choice constrained by financial or caring commitments. Students have benefitted from a few of the market’s promised gains. Within this context, all parents, students and taxpayers can do is hope that the sector behaves responsibly. Handed a university, most private enterprises would seek to maximise income by exploiting the brand’s heritage to hoover up as many fee-payers as possible, while spending the lowest sums necessary on student well-being and teaching to avoid censure by metrics. In England, though some institutional managers have been opportunistic in relation to the market’s offer, others have tried to continue educating as normal, albeit in a more commercial policy environment. However, the discursive pressures exerted by politicians and the media become harder to ignore. In 2021, universities were accused of pushing young people on to ‘dead-end’ courses that give them ‘nothing but a mountain of debt’. The accusation came not from a click-bait oped piece on a right-wing website, but from the then secretary of state for education, Gavin Williamson, speaking at the launch of the Office for

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Students’ review of digital teaching.91 Few nation’s governments feel the need to attack their own higher education sector with the venom that the UK government does. Initially positioned at the heart of the system, students now find their choices demeaned and many of their institutions rubbished. This chapter has shown that although the widening participation agenda is discursively central to a marketised higher education, its enactment remains problematic. Universities imagine themselves engines of social mobility, but though some individual lives are transformed, underlying structural inequalities thrive. For lower prestige institutions, many recruiting in left-behind local communities, widening participation is business-as-usual; for higher prestige institutions, progress is underwhelming and overstated. The implied message is that so long as access to university is possible, and some element of mobility is happening, young people have no one but themselves to blame for not succeeding en masse. Multiple discursive strategies are deployed to deride students and their demands: young people are framed as intellectually delicate, unpatriotic and even over-empowered. It often comes more naturally to sector leaders to side with populist majority rule than to back the calls of their own students. Many institutional managers like to reminisce about their own days as protestors and campaigners, partly to curry favour and partly to minimise causes as faddish. But where student activism is so casually dismissed by the sector, the opportunity to form long-lasting bonds with future generations is missed. The University and College Union strike action in the snowy days of early 2018 brought to mind sociologist Les Back’s observation that ‘students and staff can act together, even against the odds, to preserve the revolution in thinking that takes place on any given day in the classroom’.92 A YouGov poll on the eve of that strike showed that just two per cent of students felt that university staff were most to blame for the dispute, with half pointing the finger at the university employers 91

Education Secretary speaks at launch of digital learning review, Office for Students, 25.02.21: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/education-secretary-speaks-at-launch-of-dig ital-learning-review. 92 Interview with Les Back on release of ‘Academic Diary’ , Goldsmiths, 2016: https://sites.gold.ac. uk/sociology/interview-with-les-back-on-release-of-academic-diary/.

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instead.93 Writing about higher education in the US, Astin and Astin (2015) had previously suggested that ‘by working to enhance students’ spiritual and moral growth, we can help create a new generation who are more caring, more globally aware, and more committed to social justice than previous generations, while also enabling students to respond to the many stresses and tensions of our rapidly changing society with a greater sense of equanimity’ (2015, 73). This is consistent with many current issues on which university student bodies are leading the way: sexual consent; climate change; mental health. Former Bishop of Durham David Jenkins rightly pointed out that the market has no interest in the future, that the market has no interest in the public good, and that the market has no interest in the sustaining of communities and the building up of trust.94 To this assessment, I would add that the market in higher education has no particular interest in students, other than moulding them into consumers of a non-product in return for generic promises of economic gain. That higher education is financially advantageous for most individual graduates is not in doubt. But the intense focus on those private benefits, invariably to the exclusion of societal gains, means that much of what else higher education is good for has slowly become indiscernible. The narratives that are needed, as I return to in the final chapter, are ones that speak to staff and students alike, building on the premise that the same kind of structural change would benefit both constituencies. Students remain the best hope that the sector has, and universities would do well to stand four-square behind them.

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Poll shows students support pension strikes and blame universities for the disruption, University and College Union, 22.02.18: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/9345/Poll-shows-students-supportpension-strikes-and-blame-universities-for-the-disruption. 94 The Bishop, the administrators and the university, Mike Ratcliffe, More Means Better, 09.09.16: https://moremeansbetter.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/the-bishop-the-administr ators-and-the-university/comment-page-1/.

5 How Free Speech Is Talked About

Attacks on universities are increasingly based on their perceived incompatibility with, or opposition towards, free speech. There is relatively little evidence that the curtailment of free speech on campus is an issue of any great or growing significance, as this chapter will show, but the charges carry disproportionate weight in political and media discourses. A small number of dubious anecdotes are repeatedly weaponised to conjure an image of campuses being over-run by political correctness, and the chilling effect of universities’ alleged complacency is documented repeatedly by right-leaning think tanks. Even during a period in which Covid-19 was wreaking havoc on universities and wider society, Policy Exchange,1 Cieo,2 Civitas 3 and the Adam Smith Institute 4 all found 1 Academic freedom in the UK: Protecting viewpoint diversity, Policy Exchange, 2020: https://pol icyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Academic-freedom-in-the-UK.pdf. 2 The State of Academic Freedom, Cieo, 2021: https://www.cieo.org.uk/research/state-of-academicfreedom/. 3 Academic Freedom in Our Universities: The Best and the Worst, Civitas, 2020: https://www.civ itas.org.uk/content/files/Academic-Freedom-in-Our-Universities.pdf. 4 Sense and Sensitivity: Restoring Free Speech in the United Kingdom, Adam Smith Institute, 2020: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151ac92/t/5fbb9c453a91 a317f3a6c5fc/1606130758667/Sense+and+sensitivity+-+Preston+J.+Byrne+-+Final.pdf.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Jones, Universities Under Fire, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7_5

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time to issue scaremongering reports on the topic. In 2021, secretary of state for education Gavin Williamson announced a raft of new safeguards in the Telegraph under the headline ‘Turning the tide on cancel culture will start with universities respecting free thought’.5 Williamson thus became one of many politicians taking to paywalled newspaper websites to declare their love for free speech, without any sense of irony. This chapter begins by looking at the so-called culture wars that have spilled on to university campuses in recent decades. It then examines two distrusted concepts that I suggest converge to make the free speech problem in universities seem more widespread than it is: academic freedom and academic expertise. In relation to both, I suggest that historic trust in the sector is challenged by new discourses that undermine universities’ legitimacy: In the case of academic freedoms, institutions are framed as elitist and exceptionalist for clinging hold of traditional rights to be treated differently from other professions; in the case of academic expertise, universities’ alleged monopoly on knowledge is regarded as suspect and politically driven. I argue that the two strands merge into and motivate the political and media hullabaloos over free speech that have become so ubiquitous, and so damaging, in the English sector.

5.1

Culture Wars on Campus

Because they shift public attention away from socially and economically important debates to pettier ones, culture wars can be a blessing for rightleaning politicians. Who ultimately wins the war makes little difference. Indeed, the best outcome is often no outcome: an unresolved war helps both politicians (because public sympathy tends to turn against perceived wokeness in the longer term) and the media (who can gain attention and sales by overplaying a negligible but inflammatory issue). Views on both sides harden, paving the way for further manufactured moral panics.

5 Turning the tide on cancel culture will start with universities respecting free thought, Gavin Williamson, The Telegraph, 16.02.21: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/02/16/turningtide-cancel-culture-will-start-universities-respecting/.

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University campuses make the ideal battlefield for a culture war because they facilitate and encourage unconventional ways of thinking, but the wars now move quickly to social media platforms, where they are amplified and seized upon as evidence of an endemic problem. By this point, the war metaphor is usually redundant: the two sides are unequally matched and, in most cases, only one side actually wants conflict. To give an example, in summer 2021, a small number of students from one elite university voted to remove a print of the Queen from their common room.6 ‘No stance was taken on the Queen or the royal family’, explained Matthew Katzman, who tabled the motion to remove the image. ‘The conclusion was simply that there were better places for this print to be hung’.7 The common room had been home to the print only since about 2013, as another student noted.8 The minutes of the meetings found their way to Paul Delaire Staines, a right-wing political blogger who publishes the Guido Fawkes website,9 and the incident was reported under the headline ‘Oxford College Scraps Queen’. Almost all national news outlets then picked up the story, most in similarly exaggerated terms, and several politicians took the opportunity to pass comment. Oxford vice-chancellor and former Conservative minister Lord Patten branded the students’ decision ‘offensive and obnoxiously ignorant’,10 and Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group of MPs, suggested that those involved should be ‘thoroughly ashamed

6

Oxford University students vote to remove portrait of Queen, Gergana Krasteva, Oxford Mail , 09.06.21: https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/educationnews/19359137.oxford-university-stu dents-vote-remove-portrait-queen/. 7 Oxford student who led ‘woke’ move to remove Queen’s portrait is American, Lee Brown, New York Post, 09.06.21: https://nypost.com/2021/06/09/oxford-student-who-led-move-to-rem ove-queens-portrait-is-american/. 8 President of Oxford college defends students’ right to remove Queen’s photo, Richard Adams and Nadeem Badshah, The Guardian, 09.06.21: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jun/ 09/president-of-oxford-college-defends-students-right-to-remove-photo-of-queen. 9 Oxford College Scraps Queen, Guido Fawkes, Order Order, 08.06.21: https://order-order.com/ 2021/06/08/exclusive-woke-oxford-students-vote-to-take-down-colonial-queens-portrait/. 10 What happened with Oxford students and a portrait of the Queen? The National , 09.06.21: https://www.thenational.scot/news/19361037.happened-oxford-students-portrait-queen-factcheck/.

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of themselves’.11 Educational secretary Gavin Williamson weighed in on Twitter to describe the vote as ‘simply absurd’,12 and a spokesman for Boris Johnson confirmed that the prime minister supported Williamson’s statement.13 Meanwhile, the president of the students’ college, Dinah Rose QC, reported ‘obscene and threatening messages’ being sent to college staff.14 This story broke at a time when the higher education sector was gripped by uncertainty, with a potential third wave of Covid-19 meaning that universities were hesitant about whether they would be able to reopen. Admissions processes were for the second consecutive year being destabilised by the absence of exam results, creating serious questions around equity and the life chances of young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. University finances across the sector remained a cause for concern, and some commentators were pressing for graduates to make bigger student loan repayments from their salaries.15 The removal of the Queen’s photograph offered just the kind of diversion that a right-leaning government needed: an insignificant local tiff that could be overblown to give the expedient illusion of more sinister forces at work. It mattered little that the position taken by Williamson and others directly contradicted the pro-free-speech line of argument that they were deploying elsewhere. The principle of students voting to decide which images adorn the walls of their common room should be entirely consistent with the democratic free speech principles that the government were enshrining in law at the time. But culture wars do not require consistency of logic from the aggressor. Indeed, contradiction can be beneficial if it allows multiple diversionary battles to be fought simultaneously. 11 Oxford college students cancel Queen because she “represents recent colonial history”, The Foxhole, 08.06.21: https://foxhole.news/2021/06/08/oxford-college-students-cancel-queenbecause-she-represents-recent-colonial-history/. 12 @GavinWilliamson: https://twitter.com/GavinWilliamson/status/1402329761565843461. 13 Boris Johnson joins ‘culture wars’ attack on students for removing Queen portrait at Oxford college, Andrew Woodcock, Independent, 09.06.21: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/pol itics/boris-johnson-queen-portrait-oxford-b1862588.html. 14 @DinahRoseQC: https://twitter.com/dinahroseqc/status/1402329920752295945?lang=en. 15 Increasing England student loan repayments ‘would save government £4bn a year’ , Richard Adams, The Guardian, 10.06.21: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jun/10/increa sing-student-loan-repayments-would-save-government-4bn-a-year.

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The story was indicative of an underlying global attack on universities’ status, and on learning more widely. In 2017, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions warned an audience of students in Washington that the American university, ‘once the centre of academic freedom’, was transforming into ‘an echo chamber of political correctness’.16 The previous year, US president Donald Trump had bluntly declared ‘I love the poorly educated’,17 and prominent British politician Michael Gove had refused to cite any economist who supported his position on Britain’s exit from the European Union, arguing that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’.18 Anti-intellectual sentiment thus allows a distinction to be imposed between people and experts (you can be one or the other, it would seem from Gove’s statement, but not both) that is electorally beneficial, diverting suspicion away from a real economic elite towards a mostly imagined scholarly elite. The celebration of ignorance, if carefully managed, can be framed as over-privileged academics finally getting their comeuppance. Underpinning many such stories is the fallacy that social progress has gone too far. The students that voted to remove the print of the Queen can be framed as an embodiment of both the wokeness engulfing the higher education sector and the lack of patriotism corroding wider society. Universities stand accused of producing much of the knowledge upon which perceived excesses rest by seeing injustices where they do not exist, and by inculcating future generations to do likewise. For politicians and media commentators, any student or staff misstep is evidence of a widespread problem. One libertarian think tank placed 35 per cent of UK universities in the red category (a danger to free speech), with just 14 per cent coded green.19 The government should address the free speech crisis through top-down legislation, the think tank argued, speciously. 16

Colleges Are an ‘Echo Chamber of Political Correctness’ , Lisa Marie Segarra, Time, 26.09.17: https://time.com/4957604/jeff-sessions-georgetown-law-speech-transcript/. 17 ‘I love the poorly educated’: Why white college graduates are deserting Trump, Lauren Gambino, The Guardian, 16.10.16: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/16/white-college-gra duates-donald-trump-support-falling. 18 Has the public really had enough of experts? Amy Hawkins, Full Fact, 16.09.16: https://ful lfact.org/blog/2016/sep/has-public-really-had-enough-experts/. 19 Academic Freedom in Our Universities: The Best and the Worst, Civitas, 2020: https://www.civ itas.org.uk/publications/academic-freedom-in-our-universities/.

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In cahoots with the agenda are a small number of high-profile scholars. ‘Academics like me live in fear of the woke hate mob’, wrote director of the Centre for UK Prosperity Matthew Goodwin in the Daily Mail in 2021,20 drawing attention to the posse of ‘rebel’ professors to which he belonged that met in secret to fight the tide of illiberalism. Goodwin is one of several academics who have become adept at securing very public platforms to moan about their experiences of being cancelled . A particular focus for ‘rebel’ scholars seems to be the emergence of so-called grievance fields. Fellow professor of politics, Eric Kaufmann, argued in 2020 that such fields—his examples of which were ‘queer theory, critical race theory, fat studies and critical gender theory’—sustain themselves through moral self-righteousness and the ‘leftist monoculture of the soft social sciences’ that shields them from close scrutiny.21 Critiques such as Kaufmann’s are invariably based on unlikely personal anecdotes (‘after the seminar, I noticed one especially humourless classmate dressed in proletarian gear flogging the Socialist Worker in the quad’), and receive little scholarly attention. This is often construed as evidence of conspiracy to marginalise. However, a more mundane explanation is that attempting to refute positions based on one person’s feelings, rather than on research evidence, is an unproductive use of other scholars’ time. One colleague, Lisa Tilley, resigned from the department of which Kaufmann was head on the grounds that he advocated for white racial self-interest politics. Tilley noted that complaints by students had triggered a backlash from Kaufmann’s far-right followers, which included death threats. ‘There are painful consequences for students who openly object’, she said.22 The right-leaning press are attracted to the idea of an academic turned rogue, brave enough to speak out against the sector’s wokeness. Such scholars find themselves empowered within a context that both shields 20

Academics like me live in fear of the woke hate mob, Matthew Goodwin, Daily Mail , 15.02.21: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9263781/Academics-like-live-fearwoke-hate-mob-writes-politics-professor-MATTHEW-GOODWIN.html. 21 Cancel culture has captured campus, Eric Kauffman, Unherd , 21.10.20: https://unherd.com/ 2020/10/how-cancel-culture-captured-campus/. 22 On resigning from Birkbeck Politics… Lisa Tilley, 31.08.21: https://litilley.medium.com/on-res igning-from-birkbeck-politics-3681c0f65a91.

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and rejoices in their freedom of speech. While contrarian interventions can sometimes be a genuine attempt to open up new dialogues within a fossilised field, mostly they are not. The challenge for universities is a substantial one: to remain open to fundamental reappraisal and tolerant of minority views, while making it clear where academic consensus lies. Worryingly, the Office for Students tends to side with an antagonistic government and media rather than with universities. In 2020, its then Head, Sir Michael Barber, made the following crass analogy: ‘the case for free speech within the law in higher education settings should be made with the same vigour as the case for diversity’.23 This false equivalence conflates the sector’s mostly imagined problem with free speech and its very real problem with racism and other forms of discrimination. The former issue thus gains more prominence than it warrants, while that the latter issue is trivialised. Muddying waters further are groups on the libertarian right with a distinct anti-university agenda. In 2020, former actor Lawrence Fox launched his Reclaim Party on a promise to ‘reform public institutions and defund those who seek to undermine and divide society’.24 In the same year, Toby Young unveiled the Free Speech Union, which regularly lobbies universities about their alleged doctrinaire practices and cultures. Shortly after it was launched, student members of the Free Speech Youth Advisory Board resigned after discovering it was not the independent grassroots movement they had been led to believe, but in fact held close links to the Free Speech Union. Some students reported having faced censure for disagreeing with the official line taken by Young’s organisation.25 Many of the pseudo-libertarian pressure groups that now spike universities’ reputation are well funded and well organised. As Nesrine Malik (2019, 73) explains, their strategy is to saturate the debate rather than win the argument. Press releases are drip-fed to newspaper editors, 23

Sir Michael Barber delivers Commemoration Oration, Nicola Woolcock, The Times, 21.01.21: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sir-michael-barber-in-free-speech-plea-to-stop-uni versity-groupthink-w3hd6srhm. 24 @thereclaimparty: https://twitter.com/thereclaimparty/status/1336757238963331073. 25 Students quit free speech campaign over role of Toby Young-founded group, Archie Bland, The Guardian, 09.01.21: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jan/09/students-quit-freespeech-campaign-over-role-of-toby-young-founded-group.

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while a string of media-friendly panellists and columnists stand ready to comment cheerily on whatever issues of the day are placed before them. The goal is to mainstream a reactionary agenda. Increasingly, culture war stories are picked up and amplified by sympathetic media outlets overseas. In 2021, the Washington Examiner reported that students at university in England could now be awarded a gold star if they passed a ‘white privilege test’ that incorporated lessons on pronoun use, and microaggressions.26 The facts suggest that the higher education sector has much of which to be proud in its free speech record. In 2017–18 alone, the number of events and speaker requests approved on UK campuses (without any conditions or mitigations) was 59,574; the number excluded was 53.27 When, in 2018, the BBC’s Reality Check team sent Freedom of Information requests to every UK university in an attempt to gauge the extent of cancel culture, the 120 responses indicated that during the previous eight years there had been ten student complaints about course content being in some way offensive or inappropriate (only four of which were upheld), six occasions on which universities withdrew invitations to speakers as a result of complaints and zero instances of books being removed or banned.28 In 2018, a report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights noted some possible examples of no-platforming , but concluded that ‘press accounts of widespread suppression of free speech are clearly out of kilter with reality’.29 Universities attacked for their alleged suppression of free speech find themselves in a double bind. It is essential that genuine challenge to established knowledge continues to be heard and actively engaged with. 26 Students who pass white privilege test can win a gold star at UK university, Luke Gentile, Washington Examiner, 29.09.21: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/university-unitedkingdom-woke-course-second-hand-clothes. 27 Prevent monitoring accountability and data returns 2017–18, Office for Students, 21.06.19: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/860e26e2-63e7-47eb-84e0-49100788009c/ofs 2019_22.pdf. 28 Universities: Is free speech under threat? Rachel Schraer and Ben Butcher, BBC News, 23.10.18: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-45447938. 29 Serious barriers limit free speech in universities, Joint Committee on Human Rights, 27.03.18: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/93/human-rights-joint-committee/news/ 91425/serious-barriers-limit-free-speech-in-universities/.

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However, the currency in which higher education sectors trade—expertise—is constantly being devalued in public discourses. Malik (2019) suggested the best response for the mainstream press may be to ignore the manufactured stories that emanate from the right. But for universities, this is risky. As with many of the hostile discourses outlined in this book, with sufficient repetition, there is just enough veracity within the charges to make them stick. Without a clear and forceful counternarrative, publics grow to assume that universities must indeed have some kind of problem with free speech. Sector leaders get caught in a vicious circle, fearful that pushback may trigger further political and media hostility. Any repudiation of the free speech problem is, of course, seized upon as evidence of a sector in denial. Meanwhile, as philosopher Jonathan Wolff noted, ‘the truly significant threats to academic freedom come not from student societies protesting against a maverick speaker, but a deep chill from the top, making university leaders nervous about criticising those with actual power’.30

5.2

Wokeness

A term coined primarily to mock attentiveness to progressive cultural causes that are perceived as trendy or trivial, wokeness is the kind of signifier that is increasingly mobilised against universities. According to a 2021 YouGov survey, 59 per cent of Britons do not know what woke means.31 However, even among those lacking direct familiarity with the term, there is likely to be a sense that some issues have become more discursively prominent than they previously were, such as sportspeople taking the knee in support of Black Lives Matter or the rights of transgender communities. Many of the political and media attacks on the sector cited so far in this book have either explicitly accused students or staff of being woke, or have found other ways to imply 30 In the 2020s universities need to step up as a central pillar of civil society, Jonathan Wolff, The Guardian, 07.01.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jan/07/2020s-universit ies-need-to-step-up-central-pillar-civil-society. 31 What does ‘woke’ mean to Britons? Matthew Smith, YouGov, 18.05.21: https://yougov.co.uk/ topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/05/18/what-does-woke-mean-britons.

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that they are disproportionately alert to racial or social discrimination. Hostile external discourses usually strike a common-sensical tone, and can resonate strongly with publics that have been conditioned to associate universities with political correctness, cancel culture and virtue signalling. Discourses of wokeism or woke culture thus frame universities as being more powerful than they actually are, and as a threat to traditionally held values, while simultaneously trivialising the more systemic marginalisation or oppression of others. In 2020, political theorist Lea Ypi explained why it is helpful for right-leaning politicians and commentators to sustain this pretence: inspiring an unfounded fear of leftist takeover helps those who have already secured political control to maintain authority.32 Academics are easily implicated in this fictional conspiracy. Cultural Marxism, though barely acknowledged on any university curricula, is presented as the coded theory through which leftist educators indoctrinate students and plot to overthrown capitalism. Outsiders unfamiliar with the concept are persuaded that it somehow threatens their individual liberties. As Ypi noted, by focusing on the danger to national values from over-empowered academics, support for reactionary politicians can be sustained even in the face of poor economic performance and failing public policy. One of the sector’s woke conspiracies was thrust into the headlines in 2020 when minister for women and equalities Kemi Badenoch chose to blame many of society’s ills on the pre-eminence of Critical Race Theory (CRT). She accused educators of presenting white privilege as fact to their students, and described CRT as ‘an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression’. The emotive rhetoric may have rung true with many dominant groups already resentful at seemingly being held responsible for the structural subjugation of others, and several media commentators offered full-throated support for Badenoch’s position.33 In the same year, Donald Trump issued a directive 32

Why does the right keep pretending the left runs Britain? Lea Ypi, The Guardian, 12.09.20: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/12/right-pretending-left-runs-britain. 33 Kemi Badenoch is right to take on Critical Race Theory, Calvin Robinson, The Spectator, 21.10.20: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/kemi-badenoch-is-right-to-take-on-criticalrace-theory.

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to all federal agencies to stop anti-bias training that were purportedly based on CRT. ‘I ended it because it’s racist’, Trump later explained, lamenting the ‘radical revolution that was taking place in our military, in our schools, all over the place’, and adding that ‘we were paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach very bad ideas and frankly, very sick ideas’.34 But CRT is not an ideology, let alone part of a radical revolution. Rather, it is a set of scholarly tools and methods for exploring issues in culture and history. It emerged in the late 1980s from a range of disciplines and practices, and allowed its users to highlight gaps in understandings of racial inequality. As Hannah Robbins pointed out, those who criticise CRT tend to misrepresent analysis of social structures as an attack on individuals.35 Lecturers are then invited instead to embrace neutrality, with benign-sounding appeals to teach both sides. But the dilemma arise where academic evidence demands not detached objectivity but urgent action. In 2020, 81 signatories of an open letter argued that targeting CRT amounted to ‘an attack on black scholars and activists who are already struggling against racial injustice’.36 In parallel to the sniping about practices like CRT comes a more sinister strategy of outing individuals perceived to be crossing the line. Malik calls it wokesmearing,37 offering the example of Lola Olufemi, who in 2017 faced front-page national newspaper headlines like ‘Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors’ for asking whether some ethnic minority writers might be added to her curriculum. This Telegraph story (later subject to a small-print apology on the basis of inaccuracy) was accompanied by a Daily Mail story (later deleted) which ran a profile of Olufemi headlined ‘Feminist killjoy* behind the campaign (*It’s what she 34

President Trump has attacked critical race theory. Here’s what to know about the intellectual movement, Cady Lang, Time, 29.09.20: https://time.com/5891138/critical-race-theory-exp lained/. 35 Critical race theory is a methodology, not an ideology, Hannah Robbins, Times Higher Education, 26.10.20: http://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/critical-race-theory-met hodology-not-ideology. 36 Diversity of thought is vital in education, The Guardian, 13.11.20: https://www.theguardian. com/education/2020/nov/13/diversity-of-thought-is-vital-in-education. 37 Students who complain about abuse on campus are being ‘wokesmeared’ , Nesrine Malik, The Guardian, 16.02.20: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/16/students-abusecampus-woke-political-correctness-sexual-racial-bullying.

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calls herself )’.38 Olufemi’s suggestions were reasonable and measured, part of an important wider discussion about postcolonial literature within her college. Students everywhere were trying to engage their institutions in similar conversations. But Malik noted how the press seized on the juxtaposition between a hallowed university and ‘a black arriviste, with a foreign name and a foreign complexion, here to trample over all what was good and rooted’ (2019, 59). Olufemi reported being flooded with racist and sexist abuse, which she implied was ‘not by accident’.39 In a case similar to Olufemi’s, postcolonial scholar and public intellectual Priyamvada Gopal was in 2020 paid compensation by a national newspaper that accused her of inciting a race war. The accusations were based on counterfeit quotes from a mocked-up social media screengrab. However, the abuse that followed was very real. Gopal railed not only against those issuing death threats, but also against her employing institution, which had responded only with a generic and bland statement about the right of academics to express their own lawful opinions. ‘I would like to see the university take the lead in getting the public discussion on race in the UK to be more complex and rich than it is’, Gopal said. ‘So, instead of a statement on freedom of speech, actually saying that there is something to be said about a critical look at whiteness’.40 Perhaps most disturbing is that wokesmearing strategies appear to work. Other students and staff would understandably think twice before risking the kind of vitriol to which Olufemi and Gopal found themselves exposed, especially given university managers’ reluctance to defend individuals who become caught up in a reactionary backlash against the prospect of modest progress. Historian David Olusoga worried that particular ferocity is now reserved for scholars whose work focuses on empire and slavery. He suggested that under assault is ‘academic curiosity 38 ‘Feminist killjoy* behind the campaign (*It’s what she calls herself )’, Fionn Hargreaves, Daily Mail via Pressreader, 26.10.17: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20171026/281698 319996868. 39 Daily Telegraph: Student ‘forced Cambridge to drop white authors’ story was wrong, Adam Sherwin, iNews, 26.10.17: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/daily-telegraph-student-forced-cambri dge-drop-white-authors-story-wrong-99956. 40 ‘Abolish whiteness’ academic calls for Cambridge support, Kevin Rawlinson, The Guardian, 25.06.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/25/abolish-whiteness-aca demic-calls-for-cambridge-support.

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itself, the lifeblood of scholarship that is now being portrayed as a form of cultural treason or misrepresented as political posturing’.41 As noted in the previous section, hostile media commentators increasingly attempt to sew discord between ordinary students and (what they regard as) their over-politicised student unions. ‘Over the past few years’, wrote the deputy editor of one libertarian website, ‘students across the country have begun waking up to how much their unions are entirely opposed to their academic and personal freedom’.42 Other studentblaming discourses point to an agenda of destructive political correctness allegedly driven by younger generations. In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff claimed that in US colleges and universities ‘a movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense’.43 As with other issues discussed in this book, young people are particularly well equipped and predisposed to see through the discursive strategies of right-leaning politicians and media. When a piece in Vice News asked students about the government’s proposal for a Free Speech Champion, responses were emphatic.44 ‘I think the government is overstepping the mark massively’, said one, ‘a platform is a privilege, not a right’. Another student noted that their university lecturers were experts in their field: ‘they can be trusted to make sure that all perspectives are discussed’, she said, ‘and I don’t think that’s something that needs to be the government needs to be brought into’. No-platforming was thus interpreted by students not as an attempt to stifle free speech, but a measure ‘to block speakers who are spouting damaging and toxic rhetoric’.

41 ‘Cancel culture’ is not the preserve of the left. Just ask our historians, David Olusoga, The Guardian, 03.01.21: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/03/cancel-cul ture-is-not-the-preserve-of-the-left-just-ask-our-historians. 42 Censorious universities are a bigger problem than Stepford students, Tom Slater, The Spectator, 14.02.17: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/censorious-universities-are-a-bigger-problemthan-stepford-students. 43 The coddling of the American mind , Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, 2015: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-ame rican-mind/399356/. 44 What Uni students really think of the Tories’ proposed ‘free speech champion’ , Kay Leong, Vice, 23.02.21: https://www.vice.com/en/article/akd9a8/university-students-react-free-speech-cha mpion.

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According to journalist Ian Dunt, prior to announcing the new position of Free Speech Champion, government briefings to the media boasted of a two-pronged attack in its war on woke. The other prong was a meeting of 25 leading heritage bodies, including the National Trust and National Lottery Heritage Fund , at which those groups were instructed to defend British culture and history against the ‘noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down’.45 Attacks on the higher education sector paralleled those on other sectors around the same time: ‘dogooders’ and ‘lefty’ lawyers were targeted by home secretary Priti Patel in a speech at the Tory party conference46 ; UN aid charity Unicef was accused of a ‘political stunt’ by leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg for feeding deprived families in London47 ; and children’s charity Barnardo’s was reported to the charities regulator by some MPs after it published a blog on racial inequality and white privilege.48 The motivation for appointing a Free Speech Champion was not genuine concern about intolerance on campus; rather, it was a part of a wider campaign to smear a range of public institutions for not being fully on board with a jingoistic political agenda. Institutional managers would do well to recognise this. The strategies being used against their staff and students are part of a systematic ideological crusade against universities: teaching practices are misrepresented and research findings undermined. Media commentators and politicians keep the debate at the level of identity politics to avoid having to engage with more substantive issues. Often, the attack centres on groups already marginalised, such as black female professionals. If universities responded to every accusation of wokeness levied against them, 45

Free speech proposals are ‘Trojan Horse for authoritarianism’ , Ian Dunt, politics.co.uk, 17.02.21: https://www.politics.co.uk/comment/2021/02/17/free-speech-proposals-aretrojan-horse-for-authoritarianism/. 46 Home secretary’s ‘dangerous’ rhetoric ‘putting lawyers at risk’ , Harriet Grant, The Guardian, 06.10.20: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/06/home-sec retarys-dangerous-rhetoric-putting-lawyers-at-risk. 47 Jacob Rees-Mogg under fire for dismissing Unicef’s UK grants as stunt, Simon Murphy, The Guardian 17.12.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/dec/17/jacob-rees-moggfaces-backlash-over-unicef-schools-food-aid-attack. 48 Barnardo’s hits back at Tory MPs upset by talk of ‘white privilege’ , Molly Blackall, The Guardian, 05.12.20: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/05/barnardos-hits-back-attory-mps-upset-by-talk-of-white-privilege.

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their pushback would be framed as confirmation of very humourlessness of which they stand accused. However, when it comes to fundamental attacks on academic method, sector leaders must be willing to explain how research sometimes does have political and social ramifications, and that this may lead to dominant orthodoxies being questioned. In a market model, risk averse brand managers would no doubt rather avoid being drawn into public arguments about their teaching practices. However, the alternative is much worse: scholarly methodologies dictated by the whims of nationalistic governments, while staff and students are browbeaten into noiseless acquiescence.

5.3

Academic Freedoms and University Platforms

Where freedom of speech is a general right, protected under the Human Rights Act of 1998, academic freedom is a professional privilege, perhaps best understood as the autonomy to say or write things that more powerful people may not want to hear or read. Academic freedom is necessary for university staff to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs, as enshrined in the 2017 Higher Education Research Act.49 Few other occupations retain an equivalent discourse: medical freedom and legal freedom, for example, are not part of professional idioms for doctors or lawyers. A useful background to the concept of academic freedom is provided by Conrad Russell (2002), who noted that the phrase itself emerges from a medieval tradition that pre-dates current meanings of freedom. When universities were quasiecclesiastical institutions, academic freedoms enabled the autonomy of the Church to be protected. In contemporary times, interpretations of academic freedom differ across nations, ranging from mild claims for classroom sovereignty to the statutory right for university staff to elect

49

Higher Education and Research Act 2017 : https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2017/29/con tents/enacted.

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their own leaders, as Alex Usher noted.50 Some nations use legislation in positive ways, as a means to remind their higher education sector of the duty they have to speak out. For example, New Zealand’s Education Act urges universities and their staff to serve the role as ‘critic and conscience of society’.51 Scholars are sometimes guilty of too casually or too individualistically appealing to academic freedom, in much the same way that their vicechancellors are guilty of making vague appeals to institutional autonomy when faced with a national policy with which they do not agree. In 2021, Catherine Owen warned that the concept of academic freedom is often taken out of context by those who invoke it, and deployed simplistically in an attempt to occupy the moral high ground.52 When Palfreyman and Temple set out the different kinds of freedom that universities afforded by different nation’s legal system (2017, 71), they provocatively asked why university staff believe they have any special claim to ownership of their place of work, reminding academics that they could be regarded as ‘simply hired labour in gowns’. Academic freedom is most crucial where threats arise to the scholarly independence of universities and their staff. Following an attempted coup in 2016, over 5000 staff were sacked from Turkish universities as part of a crackdown on public employees with alleged ties to ‘terrorist’ organisations. Some were fired for signing an Academics for Peace petition.53 In 2018, the Central European University in Budapest, a post-Communist institution created to foster democracy, was forced to move most of its teaching to Vienna because of attacks from a nationalist government.54 In 2021, French minister of higher education, 50 Academic freedom in a pandemic, Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 26.05.20: https://higheredstrategy.com/academic-freedom-in-a-pandemic/. 51 Education Act 1989, New Zealand Legislation: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1989/ 0080/latest/DLM183668.html. 52 Context, Academic Freedom and the Ethics of Internationalisation, Catherine Owen, Higher Education Policy Institute, 23.04.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/04/23/context-academic-fre edom-and-the-ethics-of-internationalisation/. 53 Turkey: Government Targeting Academics, Human Rights Watch, 14.05.18: https://www.hrw. org/news/2018/05/14/turkey-government-targeting-academics. 54 Threatened university faces final deadline, Sean Coughlan, BBC News, 30.11.18: https://www. bbc.co.uk/news/education-46046304.

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Frédérique Vidal, declared that ‘Islamo-leftism corrupts all of society, and universities are not impervious’.55 She criticised ‘radical’ academics for always ‘looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide’. In 2020, according to Anne Corbett, the Polish minister for education declared that, ‘especially in the humanities and social sciences’, the way things were going was ‘not in the direction we would like’.56 Legislation was then promised to guarantee that academics expressing conservative, Christian or nationalist views would not be disciplined. Jeffrey Sachs ran through several similar violations of academic freedoms from across the US, including the Republican representative in Georgia ordering every public college and university to submit a list of courses that teach students about concepts like privilege and oppression, and legislators in New Hampshire, West Virginia and Oklahoma attempting to pass bills that explicitly suppress woke speech and viewpoints.57 Within a truly global model of higher education, the threat to academic freedom anywhere would be a threat to academic freedom everywhere; nations would respond to the closure of any university on political grounds, and academics to the suppression of any ideas, as though it were happening on their own campus. But such solidarity is rare. The global university, as conceptualised in most contemporary higher education discourses, is not one explicitly committed to protecting academic freedoms worldwide. Often, it is merely one committed to networking abroad, with internationalisation code for lucrative overseas recruitment. In England’s higher education sector, intellectual independence may not yet be imperilled as directly as in the examples above, but Bahram Bekhradnia noted that the government was aggressively championing free speech on campus at the very time that it was advancing legislative proposals to cramp citizens’ right to protest and give repressive powers to

55 Are ‘woke’ academics a threat to the French republic? Ask Macron’s ministers, Didier Fassin, The Guardian, 12.03.21: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/12/academicsfrench-republic-macron-islamo-leftism. 56 Moral panics about free speech: How should European universities respond? Anne Corbett, LSE , 23.02.21: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2021/02/23/moral-panics-about-free-speechhow-should-european-universities-respond/. 57 The New War on Woke, Jeffrey Sachs, Arc Medium, 26.02.21: https://medium.com/arc-digital/ the-new-war-on-woke-ced9fd3699b.

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the police.58 Similarly, the Prevent Duty, part of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, continues to be associated with limiting oncampus freedoms, as Jessica Gagnon (2018) and others have noted. For several years, the response of the National Union of Students to the Prevent Duty was to run a Students not Suspects campaign as part of a wider fight against institutionalised anti-Muslim racism and of the repression of student activism.59 However, once again, policy-makers seem not to be troubled by underlying ideological inconsistency. At present, the favoured approach of policy-makers is to enshrine free speech regulation within law, as though only through legislation can universities’ instincts to shut down debate be tamed. The Education (No. 2) Act 1986 has long required the sector to comply in general terms with free speech principles,60 but in 2021 the DfE proposed a new statutory tort to be applied to section 43 of the Act, potentially allowing individuals who feel they may have been no-platformed to sue institutions for compensation.61 The position taken by the Office for Students changed as government pressure grew, as Jim Dickinson mapped.62 In September 2018, the regulator found ‘no evidence of free speech being systematically suppressed’.63 However, by September 2021, the chief executive of the Office for Students, Nicola Dandridge, was telling MPs that ‘we think that there is a serious and significant issue in relation to

58

The White Paper on free speech is intellectually flimsy, Bahram Bekhradnia, Higher Education Policy Institute, 17.03.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/03/17/bahram-bekhradnia-the-whitepaper-on-free-speech-is-intellectually-flimsy/. 59 Students not suspects: Join us to up the fight against prevent, NUS Connect, 08.11.17: https:// www.nusconnect.org.uk/articles/students-not-suspects-join-us-to-up-the-fight-against-prevent. 60 Education (No. 2) Act 1986 : https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/61/2005-04-07. 61 The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill primarily amends the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 but also makes various amendments to the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, the Higher Education Act 2004 and the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 : https://won khe.com/blogs/its-1986-all-over-again-as-free-speech-on-campus-gets-a-bill-of-its-own/. 62 Shouldn’t OfS have some evidence when it says there’s a problem with free speech on campus? Jim Dickinson, WonkHE , 14.09.21: https://wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/shouldnt-ofs-have-someevidence-when-it-says-theres-a-problem-with-free-speech-on-campus/. 63 The Promotion and Protection of Free Speech, Office for Students, 26.09.18: https://www.off iceforstudents.org.uk/media/3662206d-ccf4-4bed-a651-1df37aa0d5f0/freedom-of-speech-report. pdf.

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academic freedom and free speech in higher education’.64 A spot on the board was then opened for the holder of a newly created role: Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom.65 When presenting the second reading of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill to parliament,66 Gavin Williamson was reminded by one MP that problems with free speech in 2017–18 amounted to just 0.009 per cent of speaker invitations. Another MP asked whether Williamson believed in evidencebased policy making. ‘If so, can he cite the evidence for the problem that he is seeking to address? It appears that he is manufacturing a problem in order to have today’s debate’. The minister vaguely assured the MPs that there were ‘unfortunately too many instances where people feel as if they cannot speak as freely as they wish’. One example of censorship is one too many, Williamson might more persuasively have retorted. He might also have asked how many events are never proposed or pursued because of censorial university cultures. But even these arguments are misleading, strategically conflating free speech with the right to be heard or even the right to offend others, and turning an issue of institutional responsibility into one of individual entitlement. Most self-identifying casualties of no-platforming —the name given to the process through which prospective speakers are allegedly deprived of the opportunity to speak—are unhappy about the actions of a particular institution at a particular time. They recognise the symbolic capital of the platform, and are outraged that it could be withheld from them. Many commonly cited examples of no-platforming are bogus because the ‘banned’ speakers actually took the stage. Feminist intellectual Germaine Greer delivered her guest lecture at Cardiff

64

Examination of Witness, Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill , 13.09.21: https://www. theyworkforyou.com/pbc/2021-22/Higher_Education_%28Freedom_of_Speech%29_Bill/030_2021-09-13b.110.4. 65 Government free speech proposals represent a breakdown of trust and confidence, Jim Dickinson and David Kernohan, WonkHE , 16.02.21: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/free-speech-proposals-area-breakdown-of-trust-and-confidence/. 66 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill , Hansard Volume 699, 12.07.21: https://hansard. parliament.uk/commons/2021-07-12/debates/3E5A48AD-72E6-420A-910A-9F1863983743/ HigherEducation(FreedomOfSpeech)Bill.

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University in 2015 as planned,67 as did human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2016.68 In both cases, some protestors argued that the speakers should be turned away. But in both cases those arguments were rejected. Back-and-forth between campaigners and campus managers is normal practice in democratically minded universities, and there is no reason to think that either challenge from student groups or decision-making processes by institutional bosses were at fault, let alone in need of regulation. Yet these occurrences, and others like them, are habitually cited as evidence of cancel culture on campus. In the playbook of right-wing strategies, positioning oneself as no-platformed allows for a rich and full sense of victimhood. However, a mismatch often arises between inflated charges of no-platforming and the more mundane explanations that accompany them. When Michael Gove turned up at the last minute to a live Chanel Four debate for party leaders shortly before the 2019 UK general election, he was not offered a podium by the show’s producers on the grounds that he was not, and had never been, a party leader.69 Gove subsequently claimed to have been no-platformed : ‘I think that’s a denial of debate’, he said. ‘I think that’s a denial of democracy’. This self-positioning captures the levels of privilege and conceit often encoded in claims to speak publicly. It also reflects the discursive power that the status of being no-platformed is assumed to carry. Student- and staff-led attempts to move universities in progressive directions are now regularly framed as incompatible with free speech. For example, proposals to decolonise the campus can be attacked on the grounds that traditional academic values are under threat.70 As 67

Gavin Williamson using ‘misleading’ research to justify campus free-speech law, Anna Fazackerley, The Guardian, 27.02.21: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/feb/27/gavin-wil liamson-using-misleading-research-to-justify-campus-free-speech-law. 68 LGBT event with Peter Tatchell to go ahead despite free speech row, Karen McVeigh, The Guardian, 15.02.16: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/feb/15/lgbt-event-withpeter-tatchell-to-go-ahead-despite-freedom-of-speech-row. 69 Ice sculpture steals show at U.K. climate debate that Boris Johnson skips, Alan Yuhas, New York Times, 28.11.19: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/world/europe/ice-sculpture-uk-deb ate.html. 70 Decolonisation is a welcome contribution, but must not be enforced , Doug Stokes, Higher Education Policy Institute, 18.03.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/03/18/doug-stokes-the-whitepaper-is-vital-for-the-defence-of-academic-freedom/.

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Sylvie Lomer, Parise Carmichael-Murphy and Jenna Mittelmeier noted, such attacks create and perpetuate fundamental misunderstandings about decolonisation, the purpose of which is to support a ‘broadened definition of whose voices matter’.71 In such ways, important issues for the sector are caught up in a charged free speech debate, and progress is stunted. The UK’s Higher Education Research Act requires that universities ‘promote freedom of thought and expression’ and are ‘free to act as critics of government and the conscience of society’ (2017, 3). However, despite this, as Terence Karran and Lucy Mallinson (2017) show, few legal levers are available for university staff who feel that their personal freedoms are threatened. Rather than being intimidated by the persistence and loudness of the free speech lobby, sector leaders must find ways to embrace the spirit of academic freedom in its fullest sense, giving workforces the protection and security needed to speak out with confidence. A first step could be to explain that universities have a duty to accuracy of speech, as well as to freedom of speech. Snubbed speakers tend to frame the issue as ‘why has this platform been denied me?’ rather than the often more appropriate ‘why should I ever have been offered the platform?’. But universities cannot platform every individual that wants to speak, and being no-platformed is far from an automatic indicator of discrimination. The controversy played out so regularly in media and political discourses is a result of outsiders recognising the value of the university stage, and demanding that its distribution be policed more closely. The real danger is that legalistic, bureaucratic and needless attempts to regulate universities in this way mean that fewer staff and students will think it worthwhile to bother inviting speakers on to campus at all.

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Blaming decolonisation for limiting free speech is a red herring, Sylvie Lomer, Parise CarmichaelMurphy and Jenna Mittelmeier, Higher Education Policy Institute, 25.03.21: https://www.hepi. ac.uk/2021/03/25/blaming-decolonisation-for-limiting-free-speech-is-a-red-herring/.

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Expertise Under Fire

Tom Nichols wrote about the death of expertise in modern societies (2017), framing anti-intellectualism as part of an organised crusade against reputable knowledge. Any assertion of expertise, he claimed, triggers challenges to the (elitist) authority of the source and the (antidemocratic) nature of the claimed knowledge. Nichols made the important point that anti-science thinking does not always correlate with a lack of education. For example, parents who opt not to vaccinate their children tend to be more educated than those who accept the evidence (2017, 21). Likewise, the politicians and media commentators who seek to undermine expertise within universities are often those who have personally benefited from the costliest schooling, as the Sutton Trust have shown.72 But the populist idea that every individual’s personal opinion should carry equal weight, just as every individual’s vote should carry equal weight, creates fundamental difficulties for universities. On the surface, many anti-university media stories are inconsequential and light-hearted; a harmless invitation for the reader to conspire with an in-joke at the expense of students or universities taking themselves too seriously. But the sum of their parts is more sinister. Over time, public confidence in expertise is eroded and the inference that universities can no longer be trusted to produce reliable knowledge becomes more widely accepted. One might expect the sector to speak out forcefully against mischaracterisations of university teaching, attacks on academic freedoms, and the targeting of individual staff. But as with many of the examples of this book, a key question is who we mean by the sector. For managers of brand-conscious global institutions, the goal of silencing politicised academics may be secretly shared. In the context of a voracious media demand for new stories, one danger is that academic complexity is reduced to simplicity. The nature of scholarly discovery means that consensus is reached slowly and incrementally, often through divergence over minor details. Sometimes, steps

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65% of Boris Johnson’s new cabinet attended independent schools, Sutton Trust, 14.02.20: https://www.suttontrust.com/news-opinion/all-news-opinion/65-of-boris-johnsons-new-cabinetattended-independent-schools/.

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forward are negated by steps backwards, and occasionally missteps take a field in the wrong direction. But this is not well explained by universities. In a market-based environment, media managers and comms colleagues tend to prefer promoting feel-good stories to more complicated, but perhaps more scholarly significant, advances. Publics needs help from universities to understand all academic research as work-in-progress, to value conflicting perspectives, and to celebrate incremental additions to knowledge. Sometimes, it should be acknowledged, academics are themselves the problem. T. S. Sathyanarayana Rao and Chittaranjan Andrade (2011) tell the story of Andrew Wakefield, the gastroenterologist who published a 1998 paper in The Lancet falsely claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The British General Medical Council subsequently found that parts of the evidence base had been fabricated. Wakefield’s claims led to falls in inoculation rates and increases in diagnoses of measles and mumps, some resulting in death. Nichols offers the similar example of an academic in the early 1990s who denied a link between HIV and AIDS (2017, 9). But rather than provide evidence that universities cannot be trusted, such cases provide evidence that all academic knowledge must be appropriately contextualised and rigorously questioned. Examples of irresponsible or damaging scholarship cases harm the reputation of all academics, but they remain remarkably sporadic thanks to a peer review process which, though agonisingly slow at times, does a thorough job of weeding out fallacious claims to knowledge. The reliability of peer review can be overstated at times (the research that won the 2020 Nobel Prize was rejected by Nature because Reviewer 2 was ‘not persuaded that [the findings] represent a sufficient advance in our understanding’),73 but the majority of academic research that reaches print stands the tests of time. Nesrine Malik (2019) draws attention to a troubling resurgence in pop socio-biological determinism through the likes of Jordan Peterson (2019, 16) and to revisionist colonial histories through the likes of Nigel Biggar (2019, 201). A 2017 intervention from the latter, a professor of theology, elicited a letter of complaint and disassociation from fellow historians at 73

@pipcosper: https://twitter.com/pipcosper/status/1182799512621977600.

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the Biggar’s own institution.74 Biggar predictably framed the letter as evidence of a coordinated attempt to cancel him and bury the truth. In some respects, the letter’s well-meaning authors fell into a carefully set trap: just because their views reflected a broader research consensus, and were more evidence-based and scholarly robust than Biggar’s, did not make them any more valid within the terms of the debate. Rightleaning commentators feed off the crumbs of such controversies. On Conservation Woman, independent scholar Stuart Major agitated for a conservative university, provisionally named the Thatcher-Reagan Institute of Higher Education, to ‘uphold the best ideas of true conservatism, and provide a much-needed foothold for traditional learning in a hostile academic landscape’.75 The emphasis of the mooted curriculum would ‘unashamedly be on the staggering achievements of European civilisation’, and its graduates would be ‘feared adversaries in the culture wars’. The underlying ethos of the new university—that ‘conservatives have the best ideas’, according to Major—might not have been fully thought through in terms of its alignment with wider free speech principles. However, the piece chillingly captured the extent to which universities represent an opportunity as well as a target for the right. As Nesrine Malik (2019, 20) noted, many newspaper editors delight in publishing stories about counter-findings that resonate among readers who feel that academic consensus—and even science itself—is some kind of organised hoax. For example, where neurological studies identify minor differences between children of different sexes, headlines tend to claim that scientists have discovered that human brains are either pink or blue. Malik (2019) draws attention to the substantial attention afforded to Christina Hoff Sommers’ suggestion that small biological preferences may explain gender gaps in STEM disciplines. The suggestion received disproportionate and substantial coverage in right-leaning media outlets because it offered an alternative to less palatable (and supposedly woke) explanations for gender gaps, like discrimination or harassment. 74

Ethics and empire: An open letter from Oxford scholars, The Conversation, 19.12.17: https://the conversation.com/ethics-and-empire-an-open-letter-from-oxford-scholars-89333. 75 To combat the long march, let’s build a conservative university, Stuart Major, Conservative Woman, 02.06.21: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/to-combat-the-long-march-lets-builda-conservative-university/.

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Within this charged context, dangers to the sector quickly emerge from outside agencies, typically think tanks and lobby groups that recognise an expedient discursive bandwagon upon which to jump. In early 2020, Turning Point UK —which describes itself as a student ‘movement’ for free markets, limited government and personal responsibility—launched Education Watch, a platform for exposing university lecturers’ alleged political bias. Turning Point UK mimics its betterestablished and generously funded US equivalent, Turning Point US. In 2020, WonkHE ’s Jim Dickinson exposed Turning Point US ’s connection to major donors that also fund anti-Muslim hate groups, and noted the website’s popularity with alt-right social media personalities and notorious anti-feminists.76 Turning Point UK invited students to ‘submit an incident’, anonymously if they wished, for publication on their website. This formed a part of their fight-back against universities ‘overrun by leftist lecturers who teach their overt political bias as objective truth’.77 Again, this was an imported model, copying the Professor Watchlist in the US that used the same strategy to expose college lecturers for supposedly advancing leftist propaganda. Only a handful of examples appeared on Turning Point UK ’s website at the time of its launch in 2019. One was a seven second video clip of a lecturer telling his students that ‘I’m just trying to get you to think like scientists, not Daily Mail readers’. No further context was offered, though the lecture appears to be about the use of DNA fingerprinting in criminal cases. One could argue that ‘Daily Mail readers’ is an unhelpful stereotype, but the passing comment is hardly commensurate with its public exposure and denunciation. A second example shows a photograph of lecturer’s powerpoint slide about healthcare provision. Turning Point UK ’s criticism is that it ‘fails to mention the massive failures and high death tolls in Marxist states’. In other words, the problem with the slide is not what it says, but what it does not say. The other three examples are similarly contrived. Though groups like Turning Point UK come and go, seizing the opportunity for cheap social media impact then retreating before serious 76

Is this a turning point in the campus culture wars? Jim Dickinson, WonkHE , 02.03.20: https:// wonkhe.com/blogs/is-this-a-turning-point-in-the-campus-culture-wars/. 77 @TPointUK: https://twitter.com/TPointUK/status/1232696189394595841.

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challenge emerges, it must be remembered that students are being invited to report their lecturers anonymously, and that those lecturers are given no right of reply. Many academics make statements which, out of context, could be misinterpreted. Indeed, a familiar pedagogical device involves presenting counter-arguments to students’ positions in order to draw out deeper thinking from them. Since Covid-19 struck, almost most of this interaction is caught on camera and microphone. The potential for material to be edited in ways that distorts intended meaning is immense. But even without such distortion, practices involving anonymous reporting should be condemned by the sector. Given that the likes of Turning Point UK are essentially attempting to no-platform an entire profession on the basis of a trickle of decontextualised, throwaway remarks, one might expect one of the newly formed lobby groups, like the Reclaim Party or the Free Speech Union, to offer a vigorous condemnation. But these libertarian organisations do not exist to take a principled stand. Rather, they are part of a political programme to undermine forms of knowledge that do not sit well with dominant conservative ideology. At its heart, distrust of academic expertise may be driven by a fear that universities have become too open in their access. Sociologist Michael Rustin (2016) noted that the political right shuddered at the idea of those historically estranged from university being welcomed through its doors and, as the previous chapter documented, discourses of overexpansion persist. A particular problem is perceived to be the growth of subjects in cultural studies and the social sciences that are regarded as politically subversive. For many, bloated universities and their culturally Marxist academics are the enemy of meritocratic self-improvement, and the only remedy is the market. By reducing the role of universities to surviving within a hyper-competitive operating environment, rightleaning governments hope to be less troubled by the knowledge produced within their walls. If higher education becomes a space in which students are simply credentialised, with certificates issued in return for ever-higher fees, then resistance to socially regressive policy is bound to diminish over time. Snipes at academic expertise, even if they initially appear trivial, are part of a systematic campaign to delegitimise the sector.

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Viewpoint Diversity

Inseparable from debates about academic freedoms and academic expertise are debates about academic bias. Though endorsing higher education can be problematic for the political left (in England and elsewhere, access to university is traditionally hoarded by the children of middleclass parents, thus perpetuating social inequalities), the sector is much more problematic for the political right. This is because staff in higher education are perceived to be antagonistic towards conservative or establishment values, even where right-leaning governments have been democratically elected. Academics in particular are felt to hold excessive sway over the university curriculum and, therefore, over what future generations learn and how they are taught to think. The extent of this claimed influence often comes as a surprise to lecturers who struggle to persuade their students to do the reading in advance of a seminar, let alone to vote as instructed for the rest of their life. However, right-wing strategists have long fretted that universities are incubating generations of left-leaning adults, the political consequences of which they fear could be psephologically troublesome. Some evidence does suggest that education levels predict ballot box behaviour. In recent UK elections, votes have been shifting left in more educated places, and right in less educated ones: 43 per cent of those with a degree voted Labour in the 2019 General Election, compared with 29 per cent who voted Conservative (the gap in 2015 was only one percentage point).78 Patterns are not only observable in relation to party politics. The 2016 vote by the UK on its membership of the European Union, for example, split very much down the lines of higher education participation, as political scientist Sara Hobolt (2016) illustrated: only 25 per cent of voters with a university degree opted for Leave, while among voters without any qualifications, the proportion was 70 per cent. Even accounting for younger (and generally more left-leaning and pro-Europe) voters being statistically more likely to hold a degree, the difference

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How the education gap is tearing politics apart, David Runciman, The Guardian, 05.10.16: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/05/trump-brexit-education-gap-tearing-politicsapart.

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is striking. These trends suggest that a university education does more than transmit knowledge—it offers an alternative lens through which graduates see themselves and interpret their place in society. For the political classes, therefore, control of policy is regarded as control of future votes. So when Iain Mansfield (2019, 88) listed some of the constraints to which higher education is subject, ‘left-leaning’ was given a section of its own (2019, 89), and academic research accused of being ‘nonindependent’ and subject to ‘group-think’. Mansfield, who was head of education at Policy Exchange before becoming Special Advisor to Conservative MP Gavin Williamson, claimed provocatively that ‘although any sector is subject to vested interests and unconscious bias, only in higher education are those same people writing the research’ (2019, 91). That university staff tend to be more progressively inclined is difficult to dispute. According to research in the US by Mitchell Langbert,79 Democrats outnumber Republicans among staff at elite liberal arts colleges by ratios of 30:1, 33:1, 44:1 and 48:1 in Theater, Music, Sociology and English, respectively. In a couple of disciplines, Langbert was unable to calculate a ratio because the number of self-identifying Republicans was zero. French economist Thomas Piketty (2013) systematically mapped a drift leftwards by more educated voters over the past 50 years. He also noted that this drift reversed a previous direction of travel: from 1940s to the 1960s, the more educated US voters were, the more likely they were to vote Republican. In the UK, Noah Carl’s 2017 report Lackademia: Why do academics lean Left? urged institutional managers to increase viewpoint diversity among their staff.80 The choice of vocabulary here is telling: diversity as a concept is difficult to push back against, echoing important calls elsewhere in the sector relating to gender and race. The language of egalitarianism is invoked to make resistance or non-compliance more complicated. Within this context, the sector is vulnerable to brainwashing discourses that position universities as ‘seminaries of politically correct nonsense – left-wing madrassas whose 79

Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty, Mitchell Langbert, National Association of Scholars, summer 2018: https://www.nas.org/articles/homogenous_poli tical_affiliations_of_elite_liberal. 80 Lackademia: Why do academics lean left?, Noah Carl, Adam Smith Institute, 02.03.17: https:// www.adamsmith.org/research/lackademia-why-do-academics-lean-left.

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purpose is not to disseminate knowledge and promote understanding but to suppress politically incorrect facts and stifle debate’, as Toby Young put it in 2018.81 A couple of weeks later, The Spectator ran another piece by Young, headlined ‘The Neo-Marxist takeover of our universities’, illustrated by a sketch of a student wearing a tee-shirt emblazoned with ‘This is what feminism looks like’ while pointing aggressively at the reader.82 In this piece, Young argued that the balance of power was shifting away from universities and moving in students’ favour because students were now able to shame their institutions through ‘outrage mobs’ on social media. This inverted the more familiar trope of learners being victims of the sector’s poor teaching or executive greed, but it served the same purpose—to drive a rhetorical wedge between the two groups. Such wedges are vital, as I argued in Chapter 2, for the market to take hold. After all, a cosy, mutually respectful relationship between vendor and consumer is not compatible with the kind of cut-throat competition for which reformers yearn. The problem is that students know the power attributed to them is illusory and disingenuously projected, relating only to manufactured culture war issues. Young suggested that students’ primary agenda is to make gains on trigger warnings, safe spaces and bias hotlines. But evidence suggests that students are far more concerned with real issues like indebtedness, joblessness and mental health. Attacks based on academics’ supposed lack of viewpoint diversity push further against universities’ mostly open doors until the very right of higher education to exist is itself questioned. In 2019, conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton lobbied ‘to get rid of universities altogether’.83 His comments, which drew applause from a conference audience, were directed towards one area in particular: ‘It could be that we ought to ring fence the humanities, which after all can enjoy all this 81

It’s no wonder degrees are going out of fashion when universities have become the Madrassas of the Left, Toby Young, Daily Mail , 19.08.18: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-607 5017/TOBY-YOUNG-no-wonder-degrees-going-fashion.html. 82 The neo-Marxist takeover of our universities, Toby Young, The Spectator, 08.09.18: https:// www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/the-neo-marxist-takeover-of-our-universities/. 83 ‘Get rid of universities altogether’ , Roger Scruton, Human Events, 13.05.19: https://humane vents.com/2019/05/13/roger-scruton-get-rid-of-universities-altogether/.

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bigoted leftism largely because they make no difference whatsoever to the general economy, and just give support to the sciences’. He also quipped about setting up his own Scrutopian Institute for Unorthodox Thought. Scruton’s words were far from an off-the-cuff rant, even if they were crafted to appear as such. They bear the hallmarks of much anti-university discourse: the passing reference to taxpayers’ subsidy; the forced dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities; the tropes about left-wing staff. And by proposing his own institute to promote nonconformist thinking, Scruton self-flatteringly positioned himself as a plain-speaking maverick within a hyper-conventional, monocultural sector. The goal of attacks like Scruton’s is to make it received wisdom that universities are filled with like-minded academics, and that nonbelievers are unwelcome. Along similar lines, the Journal of Controversial Ideas was set up to free academics of the constraints of narrow thinking. In societies where many individuals fetishise unorthodox knowledge, and worry that political correctness is a bigger threat than poverty or climate change, associating oneself with ‘brave’ new academic ideas can feel dangerous and exciting. But many of the articles published are unorthodox only in the sense that they lacked the scholarly rigour to be accepted for publication in more reputable journals. Accusations of bias increasingly extend to students as well as staff. In 2020, one student was subjected to disciplinary action after chalking messages of support for a campaign intended to stop their university using a bank that was closely tied to fossil fuel companies.84 Institutional managers reportedly expressed concern that their campus should not become ‘a political space’.85 In such ways, one of the few places in which counter-hegemonic thinking can still take place becomes overpoliced and needlessly controlling. Condemnation of students’ perceived radicalism is nothing new. Nesrine Malik (2019, 67) quotes then candidate for governor of California, Ronald Reagan, attacking one US college 84

Loughborough University reported for ‘systematic crackdown on peaceful protest’ , Freedom News, 10.02.20: https://freedomnews.org.uk/loughborough-university-reported-for-systematic-crackd own-on-peaceful-protest/?fbclid=IwAR2BR_-BkoS5E6Ym14CyzTDozcUna3iXCMIu0-gfwqAq8WTqUCMdtHquh0. 85 ‘Don’t frighten the students’: The crisis of academic freedom in the managed university, Liz Morrish, Campaign for the Defence of British Universities, 20.04.20: http://cdbu.org.uk/dont-fri ghten-the-students-the-crisis-of-academic-freedom-in-the-managed-university/.

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in 1966 on the grounds that ‘a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brough such shame to a great university’. While one might legitimately wonder about the relationship between ‘free speech’ and ‘filthy speech’—is the latter not still an example of the former?—more significant is that Reagan won the contest with a landslide and would later become the 40th President of the United States. Attacking the university is not incompatible with electoral success. What is rarely acknowledged in public discourses around so-called viewpoint diversity is that universities are home to both left-leaning and right-leaning staff. The difference is that the former group tends to sit towards the lower tiers of the power structure while the latter group is more likely to sit towards the top. This perpetuates one of the fundamental paradoxes for outsiders looking in: universities appear to be simultaneously both left wing (in terms of their academics’ political activism and cynicism towards corporatism) and right wing (in terms of their managers’ senior pay and business-like behaviours and language). Culture wars exploit this paradox, insisting that the left has supremacy in the campus battlefield, even though almost all of the field marshals are conservative. If the lack of viewpoint diversity is dangerous at the level of teaching and research, because left-leaning activists are poisoning the minds of future generations, how can it not also be dangerous at the level of governance, where right-leaning managerialists are crafting a sector built on commercial values and marketplace principles?

5.6

Rising Above the Moral Panics?

In the era of fake news, the role of universities is more important than ever. The rise of post-truth cultures make genuine expertise indispensable, as Peter Scott and others have pointed out.86 Universities are more than an opportunity to have one’s individual voice heard; they offer societies a way of better understanding and respecting other people’s values. Among the most useful cultural roles that universities can play is that 86

Rise of populism is a wake-up call for universities, Daniel Sekulich, University World News, 07.04.17: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20170407183839582.

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of trusted archivist. As histories are revised or even deleted for ideological purposes, the sector’s place as documenter of truth becomes vital. However, those on the outside have twigged that the sector is uniquely vulnerable to narratives that belittle its contribution. This chapter has described some of the ways in which universities can be trolled, drawn into damaging culture wars by lop-sided press attention to the most unrepresentative and insignificant of occurrences. Higher education thus becomes inextricably associated with wokeness, its expertise questioned and its alleged political biases exposed. Some elements of this anti-intellectualism can be traced back to the election of Margaret Thatcher as UK prime minister in 1979. According to biographer John Campbell, Thatcher regarded students as idle parasites who creamed from the taxpayer. But her view of the university staff who taught them was even more uncharitable. In a 1988 interview, she accused academics of ‘poisoning’ their students, and held them personally responsible for what she regarded as revolutionary doctrines, such as communism. She specifically complained that ‘some young people, who were thrilled to bits to get to university, had every decent value pounded out of them’ (Campbell 2011, 329). Since Thatcher’s opening salvoes, universities have been subjected to a familiar right-wing playbook strategy of pretending that left is far more influential than it really is. The projected power is not economic. Rather, minor skirmishes in the cultural field are vested with more meaning than they actually carry so that the ‘real’ threat can be framed as no-platforming , cancel culture and safe spaces. The free speech ‘crisis’ in universities is less about the right for opinions to be expressed without censorship than it is about the sense of entitlement that some individuals feel they should have to speak with impunity, free from consequences and objections. Historically (and, in most cases, currently) marginalised groups are not afforded the same rights. Amid the chaos, free speech advocates remind everyone that the marketplace of ideas should be the venue in which all views, however repugnant, are openly debated. The presupposition is that truth always outs, and that faulty logic is always exposed. But as Tom Whyman noted,

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marketplaces invariably reinforce the interests and preferences of those who are already rich and powerful.87 While examples of racial and sexist abuse on social media are being rightly called out, and Twitter and Facebook increasingly required to police their users’ behaviour, universities are being steered in the opposite direction of travel by right-leaning governments. The expectation is that aspiring speakers’ claims to be platformed are privileged ahead of any commitment to accuracy or any responsibility to others. The potential for the situation to worsen is significant, particularly in relation to the intellectual independence of scholars. In 2017, one pro-Brexit Conservative MP wrote to university vice-chancellors asking for the names of all professors involved in the teaching of European affairs, with particular reference to Brexit. He also asked for a copy of the syllabuses they were using. Soon after, the Daily Mail led with a front-page feature on ‘Our Remainer Universities’,88 and issued a hotline number for students or parents to report lecturers espousing anti-Brexit views. It is not easy for universities to rise above the confected panics and devious slurs. One problem is that freedom can mean almost whatever the speaker wants it to mean: would-be presenters insist their freedom is being curtailed because they hold edgy or heretical views; institutional managers play the freedom card to maintain autonomy over processes that may be out-dated or prejudiced; right-leaning governments legislate to protect freedom while ushering in authoritarian policies; and some individual scholars conflate academic freedom with all kind of other prerogatives, such as having their research funded through unethical sources. Some university staff even stand accused of curtailing their own freedom. Henry Giroux talks of the ‘gated intellectual’ (2014, 88), drawing parallels with the gated communities that (pay)wall off wealthy home-owners. According to Giroux (2014), gated intellectuals seek opportunities to erect borders around themselves and their work,

87 The Universities Minister Invented a ‘Free Speech Problem’ at UK Unis—Here’s Why, Tom Whyman, Vice, 01.01.18: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/kzj4w9/the-uni-minister-inv ented-a-free-speech-problem-at-uk-unis-heres-why. 88 The culture wars and a tale of two letters, Mark Leach and Louis Coiffait, WonkHE , 30.10.17: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-culture-wars-and-a-tale-of-two-letters/.

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are comfortable with cultures of surveillance and securitise knowledge individually through entrepreneurialism. Many universities insist on shooting themselves in the foot with questionable internal practices. Freedom of Information requests showed that UK universities paid out £87m in Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) between 2017 and 2019.89 Most may be harmless, intended to ensure that the details of commercial contracts or severance deals remain secret, or that former employees do not steal an institution’s intellectual property. But other pay-offs are more sinister, concealing details of abuse, exploitation, bullying and sexual assault. As professor of engineering Mark Geoghegan pointed out, if the government were serious about protecting free speech, it would first instruct the Office for Students to ban the use of NDAs that seek to silence staff or students.90 Stronger narratives are needed to capture why academic expertise matters. This is particularly important in determining how universities are seen to respond to the more nuanced and sensitive debates that will continue to arise within society, such as Britain’s imperial legacy or the rights of non-binary communities. In relation to the latter issue, the 2021 resignation of philosopher Kathleen Stock following an unedifying row over her views on gender identification and transgender rights epitomised the sector’s lack of clarity around free speech. Many observers felt that Stock’s academic freedom was under-protected by her institution; other asked whether her on-line critics and on-campus protestors also warranted the right to speak freely. With the sector incapable of framing the debate, media commentators took the story as evidence that divergence of opinion was no longer tolerable: ‘Kathleen Stock’s departure shows universities can’t cope with argument ’ ran one particularly damaging headline in The Guardian newspaper.91

89 UK universities pay out £90m on staff ‘gagging orders’ in past two years, Simon Murphy, The Guardian, 17.04.19: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/17/uk-universitiespay-out-90m-on-staff-gagging-orders-in-past-two-years. 90 The real threat to free speech on campus is the NDA, Mark Geoghegan, Times Higher Education, 07.06.21: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/real-threat-free-speech-campus-nda. 91 Kathleen Stock’s departure shows universities can’t cope with argument, Rachel Cooke, The Guardian, 30.10.21: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/30/kathleen-stockdeparture-shows-universities-cant-cope-with-argument.

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The challenge is to persuade publics that universities are the most appropriate places for important but controversial social issues to be debated, and that such debates are already happening. Argument is alive and well in English universities, with staff and students increasingly organising into activist and justice movements. Yet sector leaders and institutional managers exasperate obvious allies—their staff, their students, their communities—by misrecognising the underlying threat. Many seem not to realise that a culture war is being waged against them; some may even empathise with the aggressor. Meanwhile, there is a growing danger that the media’s obsession with confected threats to free speech mean that actual threats pass unnoticed, such as attempt to silence academics about human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.92 In 2021, researchers from English universities were banned from travelling to China, and accused by the Chinese foreign ministry of ‘maliciously spreading lies and information’.93 However, mainstream press coverage of the story was sparse. Within any society, individuals are entitled to their own opinions. This is something that universities have always understood and respected. However, egged on by populist politicians and media commentators, some members of society now feel they are entitled to their own facts, and are questioning why higher education wields so much power in terms of holding knowledge and shaping debate. This is more sinister. The starting point in any fight-back may be to assert that some debates are over: as political journalist Martha Gill pointed out, even the most passionate free speech advocate would not wish to reopen discussions about whether women should be tried for witchcraft or whether the Earth is flat.94 Institutional managers would be well advised to begin recovering their trust in academics. Until universities rely on their own experts and expertise (instead of turning to bought-in solutions), it is 92 Barristers, MPs, and academics are among the Brits now blacklisted from China, Annabelle Timsit, Quartz, 18.05.21: https://qz.com/1989405/barristers-mps-academics-among-brits-nowblacklisted-from-china/. 93 China fights back with sanctions on academics, institute, Yojana Sharma, University World News, 25.03.21: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210325144041486. 94 Free speech isn’t under threat. It just suits bigots and boors to suggest so, Martha Gill, The Guardian, 23.06.19: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/23/free-speechis-not-under-threat-it-suits-bigots-and-boors-to-suggest-so.

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unrealistic to expect those on the outside to have similar confidence. In due course, publics could be helped to better understand that campuses are not, and can never be, epistemically neutral. More than a platform, universities are publicly accountable institutions with a duty to truth and accuracy.

6 New Stories for an Old Sector

Concern for the future of marketised universities is expressed in many ways. Alan Cribb and Sharon Gewirtz warned of the ‘hollowed-out’ (2013) institution, bereft of character and ethically empty, having lost sight of both its roots and its distinctive contribution. In this chapter, I argue that the fate of universities could be even grimmer than Cribb and Gewirtz (2013) envision because higher education is increasingly seen as an obstruction to the enactment of right-wing policy. In some ways, the obstruction is imagined, as this book has shown: universities are not part of any conspiracy to limit free speech, lower academic standards, shield over-sensitive students or spread radical ideologies. But in other ways, the obstruction is real: universities bear testimony to the societal damage done by reactionary policy, they challenge the status quo, and they encourage their students to think more critically, more lucidly and more independently. For right-wing politicians, higher education is now as much an opportunity as a threat. Universities can easily be reimagined as an arm of populist government, their structures potentially offering platforms to the most intellectually shallow of speakers and their heritage lending credibility to the most backwards of ideas. Abetted by right-leaning media, governments worldwide are beginning to execute © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Jones, Universities Under Fire, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7_6

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programmes of delegitimation, undermining academic expertise and ridiculing supposed wokeness on campus. Universities find themselves drawn into culture wars that insist traditional values and ways of life are under threat from an imaged academic elite. The challenge is not only to resist—something that the market’s enticements have so far made tough—but to unite behind new narratives that keep publics on-side. The post-pandemic university need not be like the pre-pandemic university. Covid-19 exposed festering paradoxes in the sector, despite the core role that academic research played in offering solutions. Many students were left feeling like consumers deprived of consumer rights, their institution’s financial sustainability prioritised over their own mental health. But a new model of higher education could emerge that more plainly and more loudly speaks truth to power, and that stands up for everyone in society, regardless of whether they attended university or not. As I made clear in my pre-amble, there is no guarantee that this will happen. The sector’s preference for cautious language and slow, incremental social progress is a gift for those seeking to remould universities as private enterprises serving an economic and political agenda. This chapter argues that only by reclaiming higher education as a public good, both discursively and in practice, can its long-term independence be secured.

6.1

Safeguarding Public Trust

According to a 2017 Department for Education report into British public attitudes to education and children’s services, only 11 per cent of citizens want opportunities to go to university reduced, while 43 per cent want opportunities increased.1 An earlier survey had found that 97 per cent of

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Attitudes to education: the British Social Attitudes Survey 2017, UK Department for Education: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/att achment_data/file/914277/Attitudes_to_education_British_Social_Attitudes_2017.pdf.

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mothers of young children want their offspring to receive higher education.2 These are views that run counter to dominant political discourses of over-participation.3 Despite the hostility of many policy-makers and media commentators illustrated in this book, it is significant (and reassuring) that almost four times as many people want the higher education sector to get bigger than want it to shrink. The enduring, almost stubborn, public support for English universities is a helpful starting point for new stories. To harness public support further, universities require narratives that avoid sounding defensive, apologetic or self-doubting. Negative discourses around mickey mouse subjects have gone unchallenged for decades. But why should universities be defensive about degree courses in, say, media studies given the increasing necessity for young people to make sense of the messages with which they are bombarded, and to sift the fake from the real? Institutional managers too easily fall into the trap of sharing concerns about subjects perceived to be less vocational rather than asserting their value. ‘Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian’, declared one vice-chancellor in 2016, before swiftly backtracking.4 But commentators on right-wing websites like ConservativeHome stay firmly on-message: ‘the idea that a Ph.D. thesis from the majority of universities in such subjects like sociology, philosophy or English literature will be read by almost anyone is a cruel fiction’, explained the Centre for Policy Studies’ Alex Morton, before grumbling about ‘indoctrination’ and the ‘educational blob’.5 Yet universities are also mocked for developing degrees in areas like gaming and virtual 2 Millennium mothers want university education for their children, Centre for Longitudinal Studies, 15.10.10: https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/millennium-mothers-want-university-education-for-theirchildren/. 3 Gavin Williamson’s speech on FE reform, 09.07.20: https://feweek.co.uk/2020/07/09/gavin-wil liamsons-speech-on-fe-reform-the-full-text/. 4 Queen’s University vice-chancellor Patrick Johnston: Can we put my history blunder in the past? Rebecca Black, Belfast Telegraph, 01.06.16: https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/education/ queens-university-vicechancellor-patrick-johnston-can-we-put-my-history-blunder-in-the-past34763168.html. 5 The purpose of education is to give people skills for life. And we have lost sight of it, Alex Morton, ConservativeHome, 05.09.18: https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2018/ 09/alex-morton-the-purpose-of-education-is-to-give-people-skills-for-life-and-we-have-lost-sightof-it.html.

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reality, even though these are the very parts of the economy that have witnessed rapid growth in recent years.6 The discursive onslaught is full of internal contradictions, but underpinning the attacks is the myth that all higher education exists to do is prepare young people for the workplace. Annual surveys by the Confederation of British Industry tend to show that what employers actually value most in graduates are reading, writing and critical thinking skills.7 They also want staff who are comfortable with technology and able to speak different languages. However, certain vocational subjects aside, they do not want universities to ‘train’ individuals for specific jobs. According to bell hooks (1994), students are made to believe that their learning is nothing more than the banking of intellectual capital for deferred gratification. ‘This displacement of meaning into the future’, hooks argued, ‘makes it impossible for students to fully immerse themselves in the art of learning and to experience that immersion as a complete, satisfying moment of fulfilment’ (1994, 166). The funding model that underpins the English higher education system reinforces this displacement of meaning. Students are given the perverse message that the transformative intellectual and social potential of university teaching is secondary to its expected economic gains. Enrolling on a degree course, or even attending a lecture, thus becomes akin to investing in the stock market, the in-the-moment joy of learning obscured by the promised dividends of an imagined future. Michael Rustin (2016) suggested that higher education is best understood as an ‘inter-generational gift’, a contribution to the well-being of future generations made by more senior members of society. Stefan Collini similarly imagined universities as ‘a public good whose costs one generation of the community defrays for the next’ (2012, 165). The idea is not a new one. In 1785, US president John Adams said that ‘the whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people,

6 The Augar review should beware of pandering to political whim, Graham Galbraith, Times Higher Education, 14.03.19: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/augar-review-sho uld-beware-pandering-political-whim. 7 Education and Learning for the Modern World , CBI/Pearson, 20.03.19: https://www.cbi.org. uk/articles/education-and-learning-for-the-modern-world/.

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and must be willing to bear the expense of it’.8 But the current funding model in England largely has the opposite effect, indebting younger generations of graduates so that the old can amass further wealth and bequeath it to their own offspring. As the market took hold, universities misplaced their moral compasses. Jon Nixon talked about their ‘shameful collusion’ (2010, 1) in escalating inequality, suggesting that higher education too readily took up its place in the ‘swamp-land of semi-private, semi-public provision’ (2010, 8). Symbolic of this swamp-land is the world of academic publishing, in which scholars write articles for free, those articles are then reviewed by other scholars for free, and publishers then sell the articles back to universities for money. The principle of pay-walling is based on the self-defeating idea that scholarly knowledge matters only to those with an institutional gateway to the relevant journal, or the personal wealth needed to buy access. Genuinely open access is something the sector owes to its state funder, and is key to safeguarding public trust. George Monbiot likens the current model to economic parasitism, with publishers demanding payment for knowledge that has already been paid for.9 But almost all academics are guilty of tolerating and sustaining an industry that is deeply flawed. Philip Moriarty is among those who acknowledge complicity: ‘I spend quite some time railing about the deficiencies in the traditional publishing system, and all the while I’m bolstering that self-same system by my selection of the “appropriate” journals to target’.10 New narratives are needed more broadly to justify continued state sponsorship of academic research. The impact agenda demands that taxpayer investment yields social change. However, as Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson (2019, 128–29) note, this is often achieved in ways that exclude non-measurable impacts and rely on legalistic language: claims must be corroborated , evidence weighed and testimonies 8 From John Adams to John Jebb, Founders Online, 02.06.17: https://founders.archives.gov/doc uments/Adams/06-17-02-0232. 9 The Lairds of Learning, George Monbiot, 29.08.11: https://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/29/ the-lairds-of-learning/. 10 Addicted to the brand: The hypocrisy of a publishing academic, Philip Moriarty, LSE , 14.03.16: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/14/addicted-to-the-brandthe-hypocrisy-of-a-publishing-academic/.

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gathered, thus enabling a judgment to be reached. Making research more accessible, and more clearly articulating its value and impact, may help to persuade publics that state funding remains defensible even in straightened times. The case is made by philosopher Nicholas Maxwell (2014) that universities might better focus their attention on wisdom than on knowledge. One compelling reason to do so is that they no longer have a monopoly on the latter. As Debbie McVitty noted, experts and expertise can be found more widely than ever before (2019, 12): think tanks and charities do research; YouTube teaches practical skills; facts and information can be Googled in an instant. Maxwell (2014) calls for universities to devote greater resources to addressing existential problems, such as climate change, poverty, population growth, pollution and injustice, and Alexander Gardner-McTaggart (2020) similarly calls for educational leadership to be reimagined as social practice. One problem is that institutions have grown more comfortable with the easily measured, exchanged and commodified concept of knowledge than with the contested, subjective and often politicised concept of wisdom. Universities can be integral to the future that most societies want: a future that faces up responsibly and conscientiously to global challenges, that presses for greater equality, and that educates and empowers all citizens. John Smyth (2020) argues for the sector’s poisonous austerity logic to be replaced by more humanising forces. To achieve this, public trust in universities must be reinvigorated, and those currently excluded from the campus must become central to institutional thinking. Insidious populist narratives will continue to chip away at the bond between higher education and its wider communities, framing higher prestige universities as part of a disconnected elite and lower prestige universities as purveyors of mediocre teaching. The sector needs to respond with comparable vigour and guile. It cannot continue to be embarrassed by its core purpose: to help people learn to think differently and better.

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Escaping Market Language and Logic

For Henry Giroux (2014), the university is one of the few remaining public spheres that nurtures public values, critical hope and substantive democracy. ‘It may be the case that everyday life is increasingly organized around market principles’, say Giroux, ‘but confusing a market-determined society with democracy hollows out the legacy of higher education, whose deepest roots are moral, not commercial’ (2014, 140). Modernisers and reformers tend to care little for the legacy of higher education. The sector’s heritage can sometimes come in handy for branding purposes, but it is rarely considered relevant in terms of shaping policy. Whether universities’ deepest roots are moral is also open to question—and in this book I have attempted to avoid sentimentalising the history of an English sector that is exclusionary and colonial—but Giroux (2014) is right to warn of the dangers to democracy if universities slip further into a market-determined society. A full and honest reappraisal of the sectors’ relationship with the market must be at the centre of any new stories for the higher education. English universities are now judged on a range of metrics that would have been considered absurd only a short time ago, and required to compete for students in ways that reward underhand recruitment tactics and sometimes overlook what is best for applicants. The monetisation of higher education is much more than a turn in the discourse. Debt is a material and painful experience for younger generations, impacting on graduates psychologically as well as financially. New stories need to go hand in hand with new policies, new practices, new distributions of resources and a new contract between universities and the state. A fundamental problem with market logic is that it demands failure as much as it demands success, whereas education does not demand failure at all. Evidence that league tables improve academic performance is scarce, yet market logic insists that competition is the only driver of quality. In some institutions, fear itself has become something akin to a management strategy: staff that dread redundancy are assumed to be more productive; disciplines under threat of closure are assumed to be more compliant. All of this is couched in language that cleanses and misrepresents: in 2021, one academic received an e-mail about looming

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redundancies from his institution that was titled Shaping for Excellence.11 An uneasy stand-off has thus arisen between higher education policy (which fantasises about universities competing furiously against one another on price, provision and mode of delivery, as applicants track which institutions’ metrics are on the rise) and higher education practices (in which diligent academics across institutions of all kinds do their best to pique students’ curiosity, impart the attachment they feel towards their discipline and help make their societies a little wiser). Many university staff suspect that the underlying goal of a free market in higher education is not to raise standards and increase accountability, but to accelerate cultures of surveillance and managerialism, and to penalise a sector seen as ill-disciplined. It should be acknowledged that data in some areas, such as degree awarding gaps and pay differentials, have helped the sector by shining a light on its failings. Though some staff may prefer to work in an environment entirely free from measurements of quality, the broader principle of public accountability is not one from which universities can afford to be seen shying away. Academics have been quick to critique existing indicators, and slower to propose alternatives. But more meaningful metrics are imaginable: applicants could be informed what proportion of their teaching would be undertaken by staff on full-time contracts; current students’ well-being and mental health could be assessed as they move through their degree course; pay ratios could be published, so that median staff salary is captured as a proportion of senior management pay. Any reappraisal of universities’ relationship with the market must also acknowledge that some metrics actually sit comfortably with the ambitions of more meritocratically inclined university staff, for whom competition may indeed be a spur. Social media echoes daily to boasts of individual, as well as institutional, triumphs. However, for most academics, the professional calling in not Darwinian. Lord Robbins captured this perfectly when he noted that ‘British archaeologists are enriched not impoverished if a colleague from another country unearths a key bit of the jigsaw of an ancient civilisation’ (1963, 164). Efficacious teaching and research usually demand an open mindset, one in which 11

@blue_stocking: https://twitter.com/blue_stocking/status/1351450473388253184.

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any instinct towards individualism is supressed in favour of more selfless sharing and advancement of knowledge. Most academics pursue their career because they love their subject, not because they love the income or renown it brings (though this can be problematic if their goodwill is exploited, as I discussed in Chapter 2), and most administrative staff feel a responsibility for students and their well-being that goes beyond their salary. This is the kind of professional devotion that institutional managers too often take for granted, but which other employers covet. Universities democratise knowledge by making the fruits of academic labour available to the many, not the few. They do this both through research (creating new understandings) and teaching (communicating existing understandings). In the long-term, excessive rivalry stifles creativity, and the stratification it produces diminishes the whole sector. Some institutions may revel in short-term wins, but none bloom as a result of endless competitiveness and one-upmanship. To reclaim the narrative is not merely to change the language. However, it is difficult for universities to lead by example, or to lobby for a different kind of policy environment, without first acquiring terminology that more directly speaks to their public role. As Thomas Docherty (2018, 216) noted, the sector is lumbered with a co-opted repertoire of lifeless terms: engagement, aspiration, well -being, diversity. These terms represent important concepts, but are blandly celebrated more often than they are critically defined or meaningfully enacted. Such is their over-use, the words themselves now act as signifiers of corporate nothingness. Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson noted how university mission statement love emphasising commitment to equity, without actually committing to anything more than uncontroversial principles of parity (2019, 114–15). Language is thus used in illusory, self-congratulatory and sometimes greasy ways, untroubled by the messy details of what progress looks like or how it might be attained. New dialects are possible. Higher education could instead be talked about in non-market terms: pleasure, creativity, community, inquisitiveness. The Robbins Report (1963) characterised the role of academics as being to ‘stimulate curiosity’, with the aim of developing ‘a wideranging intellectual curiosity’ in students (1963, 170). But the notion of ‘curiosity’ is now almost completely absent in higher education policy.

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Sometimes universities do vocational things, because many students want and need understandings of their field that help them with their future professional practice. But universities can also be gloriously noninstrumental, granting respite to those who enter the campus. The language of agility, as used by managers and their consultants to bemoan the obstinacy of university staff, could usefully be reclaimed by workforces that have patiently accommodated and adapted to all kinds of ill-conceived and poorly implemented reconfigurations. Through pandemics, wars and famines, scholarly endeavour has remained one of society’s constants. From the student perspective, new language is even more essential. For too long, higher education sectors have assumed that fuzzy allusions to value-for-money will compensate students for being taught by staff who are ever more disaffected and unfulfilled. But a National Union of Students poll found that more than half of university students have become more politicised as a result of the pandemic.12 They increasingly recognise that the market in higher education is not built around their long-term interests, and they want universities to be more than an extension of the retail sector, where success is simply a matter of maximising income and exploiting consumers more callously than rival organisations. Sector leaders and institutional managers are prone to rail against a ‘broken’ funding model which, they rightly claim, means that the full economic costs of research are never recovered.13 But such arguments do not necessarily resonate with wider publics, who tend to be more concerned about teaching than research. To shift the discourse, narratives are required that emphasise not state dependency but the shared gains of higher education. Public goods are, by definition, those which are not exchangeable, tradable or priceable. Everyone in society benefits from a public good, and it is the duty of governments to protect them accordingly. Framing universities in this way would be an obvious way 12

Covid-19 drives 50% of students in UK to become ‘more political’, Yohannes Lowe, The Guardian, 12.12.20: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/dec/12/covid-19-drives-50of-students-in-uk-to-become-more-political. 13 University research is billions underfunded and cutting tuition fees could make the situation worse, warns think tank, Will Hazell, iNews, 09.03.20: https://inews.co.uk/news/university-research-bil lions-underfunded-cutting-tuition-fees-406142.

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forward. Pushback against market policy would not damage confidence in universities, as some vice-chancellors seem to fear; if articulated clearly, alternative narratives would help a flailing sector to regain trust. The market is insatiable, and the process of enactment can never be complete. Within higher education, there will always be some new nugget of information that the student-consumer needs (thus justifying a fresh metric); always an area or approach in need of modernisation (thus justifying a fresh restructure); always a service that can be monetised (thus justifying an intervention from a profit-making externality). Market logic leaves universities perennially battling one another for their share of an inadequate funding pot, while governments step back from the bunfight and evade blame in public discourses. The challenge for universities is to find ways of tolerating, perhaps even embracing, public accountability principles without saying yes to every market measure thrust upon them.

6.3

The Non-Establishment University

The more unequal societies grow, the more important it becomes for universities to side with those at the margins who most need their advocacy. Instead, sector leaders and institutional managers have tended to gravitate towards power, currying favour with those holding policy levers. While some degree of behind-the-scenes diplomacy is no doubt advantageous when it comes to lobbying for regulatory stability, recent indications would suggest that an obsequious sector has become a sitting duck for grandstanding politicians and antagonistic media commentators. The kind of culture wars discussed in the previous chapter become impossible for universities to side-step, and public trust in the sector becomes further eroded. In this context, knowledge itself comes under fire. Bolshevist academics have long been ridiculed in public discourses, their allegiance to Karl Marx often cited as evidence of political bias. But recently the circle of bogeyman thinkers has been enlarged. In 2020, then minister for women and equalities Lyn Truss blamed Michel Foucault for her own childhood, during which she and her fellow pupils were allegedly

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taught about racism and sexism, but not how to read and write.14 Earlier that year, political advisor Dominic Cummings mocked universities graduates for their supposed fascination with French psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan.15 The reason that political figures like to sniffily name-check European intellectuals is to signal their own independence of thought, and position themselves in populist opposition to a mostly imagined intellectual elite. But while the establishment has grown anti-university, universities have assuredly not grown anti-establishment. Institutional managers rarely seek to reshape discourses, let alone to reshape policy. Many observers wonder just how destructive government policy would need to become before triggering anything more than a coded press statement. While private industries lobby tirelessly to minimise regulation and intervention, universities acquiesce courteously. At the institutional and sector level, no one much minded when fees were hiked, changing the fundamental contract between a university and its student. An over-politicised regulatory body is tolerated with a shrug, and metric upon metric is breezily endured. Higher education has become the sector that never says no. Partly, this emerges from an unfortunate and counter-productive closeness between the Russell Group and government ministers. This relationship may have shielded the sector from the cuts that decimated other areas of public spending during the austerity years—while schools were starved of funding, per-student spending in higher education increased, as I discussed in Chapter 3—but protection came at a price. Vice-chancellors, once respected as successful academics willing to turn their hand to administration, lost credibility in public discourses and became seen as opportunists. With the sector compromised, a wave of private enterprises stood ready to profit, from new providers to bought-in consultants. Their motivations could hardly be questioned by institutional managers that had already succumbed to the low-hanging, 14 Liz Truss doesn’t know about Foucault, but she also doesn’t care, Charlotte Lydia Riley, The Guardian, 19.12.20: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/19/liz-truss-fou cault-rightwing-zombie-postmodernism. 15 ‘Two hands are a lot’—we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos… Dominic Cummings, 02.02.20: https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/twohands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/.

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self-rewarding fruits of marketisation. An enfeebled sector is now pushed further towards compliance with flag-waving, post-Brexit agendas. In 2020, think tank Policy Exchange called for universities that would be ‘willing to represent not sneer at those who, for example, justifiably feel pride in Britain’s history, culture and traditions’.16 Such neo-nationalism, as public policy analyst John Aubrey Douglass (2021) characterised it, has become a troubling feature of contemporary political discourses in England and elsewhere; now universities are being expected to reproduce it. Drawing on examples from around the globe, Douglass (2021) documented how neo-national governments tend to be anti-immigrant, doubtful of science and generally isolationist, their goal being to resurrect a mythical era of power and glory, and racial homogeneity. He also noted that universities represent an impediment to nationalism as a route to authoritarian power (or should do, at least).17 Ümit Yıldız (2021) pointed out that appeals to ‘fundamental British values’ serve a dual role, assimilating racist educational policy while simultaneously projecting ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ on to some young people. The most urgent challenge is for sector leaders and institutional managers to recognise this agenda: the forces at work here are altogether darker than the market forces with which the sector has grappled in recent decades. All too often, English universities lack the confidence to take action unprompted, passively waiting for a government directive to mandate them, a new league table to shame them or a right-leaning newspaper to laugh at them. This is captured by the way in which the higher education sector has responded to perhaps the most existential threat facing humankind—catastrophic climate change—despite university scientists being among the first to document the gravity of the problem. Simon Marginson noted that when Covid-19 arrived, the market freedoms of

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Universities at the Crossroads, Lucian J. Hudson and Iain Mansfield, Policy Exchange, 2020: https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Universities-at-the-Crossroads.pdf. 17 Universities in an Era of Neo-Nationalism, John Aubrey Douglas, Higher Education Policy Institute, 22.10.21: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/10/22/universities-in-an-era-of-neo-nationalism/.

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universities and the supposed individual rights of students took precedence over public health principles.18 Next, climate change will bring crises for societies that make Covid-19 look like a dry run. As Robin Shields (2019) reported, higher education sectors mostly ignore the environmental costs of international mobility. Universities face a stark choice: do they join forces to organise and unleash a powerful collective resistance to climate change, or do they continue making token carbon-reduction gestures while operating a business model premised on maximising international recruitment? So far, institutional managers have proved adept at declaring a climate emergency, announcing ambitious goals and then claiming success for every carbon-reducing action that ever happens (even if they were not responsible for it, as when energy companies moved away from a coalbased supply to gas and renewable sources). One university set a target to reduce emissions by 29 per cent as part of an ambitious climate action plan, but over the next five years moved in an opposite direction.19 Students grow frustrated because their preferred actions—often more direct, and around divestment and green buildings—are subjected to lengthy consultations rather than supported immediately. Indeed, the issue of divestment goes to the heart of whether universities are a public good (in which case it would be untenable for cash reserves to be ploughed into fossil fuel companies) or part of the private sphere (in which case investment strategies are legitimately about maximising returns). It took until 2020 for a tipping point to be reached, when over half of universities committed to selling their shares in fossil fuel companies. But this was only after sustained pressure from eco-conscious students who occupied buildings and even threatened hunger strikes.20 18

Covid-19 and the market model of higher education: Something has to give, and it won’t be the pandemic, Simon Marginson, Council for the Defence of British Universities, 17.07.20: http://cdbu.org.uk/covid-19-and-the-market-model-of-higher-education-someth ing-has-to-give-and-it-wont-be-the-pandemic/. 19 How can universities respond strategically to the climate emergency? Claudia Zwar and Simon Lancaster, WonkHE , 10.02.20: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/how-universities-can-respond-strategic ally-to-the-climate-emergency/. 20 Top universities commit to selling shares in fossil fuels after student protests and hunger strikes, Eleanor Busby, Independent, 13.01.20: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/educat ion-news/university-fossil-fuels-divest-russell-group-climate-change-crisis-a9281566.html.

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The question here is why universities needed to be pressured by their students at all. The evidence that fossil fuel contributes to climate change has mostly emerged from the higher education sector itself. Standoffs with students were both avoidable and counter-productive. Yet the instinct of institutional managers was to ignore the science and instead attempt to strike the tone of grown-ups in the room, cautiously seeking to square competing priorities. Because emission-reducing measures were not considered compatible with traditional institutional practices— recruiting as many overseas students as possible, having academics give keynotes around the globe, signing memos of understanding with farflung overseas institutions, etc.—universities were as sluggish to respond to the climate emergency as their fully private sector peers. Many institutions remain comfortable with fossil fuel companies sponsoring their research activity. One argument, favoured by some vicechancellors, is that collaboration can enable transformation. ‘Walking away and taking the moral high ground – “we won’t take your money” means cutting off what could be a critical player in the required transition’, argued scientist James Dyke.21 But this position lacks moral clarity and is perhaps disingenuous. Mat Hope, editor of environmental investigative journalism website DeSmog, took a different position, showing how fossil fuel companies enthusiastically seek out associations with reputable universities as part of a deliberate strategy to soften their image. ‘They are trying to become an integral part of the economics of higher education as a means to encourage a favourable tax environment, and ensure ongoing local and national government support for the industry’, Hope explained. Funding a few campus-based research projects is a lowcost, high-value way for any fossil fuel company to buy mainstream credibility. The sector’s relationship with its regulator and government has become almost akin to Stockholm Syndrome—over-empathy and collusion within a system that holds it hostage. But some will ask what makes universities so special that they should avoid the fate of schools, hospitals, councils and other local institutions. After all, in many other public 21 ‘It’s like tobacco funding health research’: should universities take money from fossil fuel? Rachel Hall, The Guardian, 22.11.18: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/22/its-like-tob acco-funding-health-research-should-universities-take-money-from-fossil-fuel.

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arenas, the drive for efficiency, answerability and market liberalisation has been even greater. The danger is that claiming special status for higher education exposes just the kind of elitism of which it stands accused. A more compelling response to this argument is that if universities are good for anything, it is to bring evidence, objectivity and balanced reflection to public debates. The sector should resist discourses of instrumentalism, not because it is above such thinking, but because such thinking is fundamentally flawed. Internal agenda like employability, internationalisation and widening participation need to be scrutinised with the same kind of academic rigour that a scientist brings to her laboratory or a medievalist to her library. New narratives might seek to explain why markets alone cannot sustain higher education sectors, and why universities must remain free to critique governments of all ideological hues. The discursive imperative for universities now is to seize the ambitious language of genuine societal change; to be transformational, not reproductive, as Jon Nixon put it (2010, 117). In her 2001 paper, How can values be taught in the university?, novelist Toni Morrison set out in stark terms the risk universities take should they fail to interrogate complex ethical problems, guard wider social freedoms and preserve democratic practices: ‘if higher education does not rise to the challenge’, Morrison warned, ‘then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us’ (2001, 273).

6.4

The Anti-Racist University

The idea that universities could be anything other than anti-racist (and anti-sexist, anti-LGBT+ or discriminatory in any other way) is one that remains alien to many in the sector. To them, it is self-evident that universities are spaces of equality and openness, with staff who are uniformly liberal. That the modern higher education sector emerges from a long tradition of exclusionary practice may be acknowledged, but only as the inheritance of a bygone era. Because of this complacency, attempts to improve practices have been painfully slow, and often disingenuous, as I explained in Chapter 4. A casual acceptance of intellectual meritocracy has meant that opportunities have been accumulated and

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reproduced by a mostly white, middle-class academic workforce. When quotas are suggested, or any other kind of positive discrimination, resentment emerges about perceived inequity. The best person must always be hired for the job goes the mantra, whether stated openly or in more roundabout ways. A 2019 piece in The Guardian drew on responses to Freedom of Information requests sent to 131 universities captured the sector’s complacency. Students and staff had made at least 996 formal complaints of racism over the previous five years,22 but more alarming than the quantity of grievances was the way in which they were handled. Over half of institutions did not record instances of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Some did not even record racist incidents individually, instead lumping them together with other forms of discrimination, harassment and bullying. The article, like many that are critical of the higher education sector, concluded with a quote from Universities UK , in this case promising to ‘develop guidance targeted at addressing racial harassment’. The meekness of the response sat uneasily with the harrowing testimonies that preceded it. No apology was offered, nor any promise to standardise reporting processes, let alone to voluntarily publish data in future so that Freedom of Information requests become unnecessary. In 2020, a Universities UK report entitled Tackling Racial Harassment in Higher Education offered a series of case studies from across a range of institutions. But even the title of the publication exposed a disinclination to name the problem with which it was engaging. Some of the case studies were clearly about tackling racism in the sector, not just the racial harassment mentioned in the report’s name. To call the report Tackling Racism in Higher Education would have been to acknowledge a problem about which many in the sector would prefer to remain in denial. As David Mba spotted, some of the report’s recommendations repeated almost word-for-word those from one on the same topic by the

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UK universities condemned for failure to tackle racism, David Batty, The Guardian, 05.07.19: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/05/uk-universities-condemned-forfailure-to-tackle-racism.

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Equality Challenge Unit over a decade earlier.23 As a further example of the lethargy with which racism is currently talked about by institutional managers, note how the vice-chancellor of one elite institution described her students’ Black Lives Matter protests: ‘the kind of issues that I expect people for decades to come will be sitting around tables … debating and disagreeing with one another and reasoning and back and forth and so we should’.24 The statement lacks urgency, and falsely implies a level playing between the two sides, its diplomacy an affront to the energy and activism of the young people protesting. Suspicion soon grows that the university’s commitment is indeed to sitting around tables for decades to come, rather than acting publicly and decisively. Questions also arise about whether this inertia arises in part because institutional donors tend to see matters differently: £100m in gifts to the vice-chancellor’s university were apparently at risk had the statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes fallen. An institutional spokesperson hastily clarified that this potential loss of income was not a primary consideration.25 For educationalist Diane Reay ‘elite universities are not just central in social class reproduction; they are also institutionally racist’ (2015, 20). Reay reflected on the painful irony of spending twenty years researching class and racial inequalities in the school system only to face policies generating the same divisions when switching her attention to higher education (2015, 20). When appointed the UK’s first Black Studies professor, Kehinde Andrews levelled similar charges of institutional racism at his institution.26 ‘Are universities producing knowledge that challenges racism?’ Andrews asked. ‘I would argue that they are not’.

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After a decade of discussion progress on anti-racism in higher education is still too slow, David Mba, WonkHE , 23.04.21: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/after-a-decade-of-discussion-progress-onanti-racism-in-he-is-still-too-slow/. 24 Oxford vice-chancellor ‘delighted’ to see students engage in BLM debate, Press Association, News and Star, 11.06.20: https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/national/18509430.oxford-vice-chance llor-delighted-see-students-engage-blm-debate/. 25 Cecil Rhodes statue to remain at Oxford after ‘overwhelming support ’, Kevin Rawlinson, The Guardian, 29.01.16: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/28/cecil-rhodes-sta tue-will-not-be-removed--oxford-university. 26 Universities do not challenge racism, says UK’s first black studies professor, Alice Ross, The Guardian, 23.10.16: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/oct/23/universities-donot-challenge-racism-says-uks-first-black-studies-professor.

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Other scholars, such as Priyamvada Gopal, draw on their own experiences to call out the ‘culture of denial’ that has developed in relation to matters of race and racism.27 Genuine attempts to correct for past crimes remain rare, but in 2019 one Scottish university agreed to pay £20m in reparations to atone for its historical links to the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.28 Within a fee-based funding system, working-class students of colour could be offered a cheaper or free higher education. Similar programmes at small US colleges have been well received, including one in Oregon that waives tuition for Black and Native American students.29 Founder Michelle Jones said that ‘a lot of what higher education does is actually harmful to students, some students more than others’, drawing attention to research showing that racial inequalities related to debt accelerate over people’s lifetimes. In the US, black college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more than white college graduates, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.30 The anti-racist university must also be actively pro-equality when it comes to disability, sexual orientation and other areas of disparity. Sexism is long noted in the literature—Adrienne Rich’s ‘woman-centered’ university31 was initially imagined in 1979, and Andrea Dworkin described university as ‘strongholds of male supremacy’ in 1993—but institutional management continues to be dominated by men.32 More 27 Oxbridge bashing is an empty ritual if we ignore wider social inequities, Priyamvada Gopal, The Guardian, 22.10.17: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/21/oxbridgebashing-empty-ritual-if-we-ignore-wider-social-inequities. 28 Glasgow University to pay £20m in slave trade reparations, Severin Carrell, The Guardian, 23.08.19: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/23/glasgow-university-slave-trade-rep arations. 29 Portland college offers free tuition to Black and Native American students, Meerah Powell, OPB, 24.06.21: https://www.opb.org/article/2021/01/25/portland-wayfinding-collegefree-tuition-black-native-american-students/. 30 Student Loan Debt by Race: https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-race. 31 So embedded is sexist language in higher education that many students never reflect on completing a Bachelors degree before moving on to a Masters qualification unless prompted to consider how different an impression would be created were a Spinsters degree the precursor to a Mistresses qualification. 32 Women in Leadership: Challenges and Recommendations, M. Cristina Alcalde and Mangala Subramaniam, Inside Higher Ed , 17.07.20: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/17/ women-leadership-academe-still-face-challenges-structures-systems-and-mind-sets.

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recently, writing about staff-student relationships in light of alarming evidence of sexual misconduct, Sunday Blake noted that ‘as a sector, we are miles behind’.33 Blake questioned why the regulator’s approach was to nudge institutions about their policies on harassment rather to adopt the kind of zero-tolerance approach that has been commonplace and successful in fields like psychiatry for decades. ‘Will academia ever have its #MeToo moment?’ asked Anna Bull, co-director of the 1752 Group, a research and campaign organisation working to end staff-to-student sexual misconduct in higher education. Bull noted that most universities neither inform complainants of the outcome of their case, nor publish figures on the number of complaints they receive.34 But the sector seems unable to grasp the seriousness of this issue, let alone to accept responsibility for it. Some universities have reportedly taken to outsourcing student sexual assault cases by paying private companies around £10,000 to deal with individual allegations.35 One 2021 survey found that 80 per cent of students would not trust their university to handle a sexual assault claim appropriately.36 Universities could strive to be exemplars of tolerance, ‘a microcosm of an idealised, inclusive society’ as David Mba put it.37 Yet numerous reports of the lived experiences of minority ethnic staff and students tell a different story. Institutional managers are over-cautious and reactionary, even though no educational institution needs buildings named after

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Permitting staff-student relationships harms education, Sunday Blake, WonkHE , 21.04.21: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/permitting-staff-student-relationships-harms-education/. 34 Will academia ever have its #MeToo moment? Anna Bull, Al Jazeera, 28.10.21: https://www. aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/10/28/will-academia-ever-have-its-metoo-moment. 35 Top unis are hiring investigators to deal with students accused of sexual assault, Greg Barradale, The Tab, 14.06.21: https://thetab.com/uk/2021/06/14/top-unis-are-hiring-investigators-to-dealwith-students-accused-of-sexual-assault-209839. 36 ‘I wasn’t supported’: Only one in 20 students would report their assault to their uni, Lydia Venn, The Tab, 25.11.21: https://thetab.com/uk/2021/11/25/i-wasnt-supported-only-one-in-20students-would-report-their-assault-to-their-uni-229382. 37 After a decade of discussion progress on anti-racism in higher education is still too slow, David Mba, WonkHE , 23.04.21: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/after-a-decade-of-discussion-progress-onanti-racism-in-he-is-still-too-slow/.

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eugenicists38 or slave traders.39 Silence damages the sector most. The challenge is to speak out about these issues, not in self-congratulatory ways that over-state incremental gains, but in ways that candidly admit previous failings and put in place meaningful plans for structural and cultural overhaul.

6.5

Healing a Fractured Sector

Many higher education sectors are complex and hierarchical, but the English sector is particularly inscrutable in the way that it organises itself. As I showed in Chapter 1, this presents challenges to how it represents itself to policy-makers and publics. Where a united, sectorwide position needs to be taken, multiple press statements often emerge from competing mission groups and individual institutions. This leaves universities particularly vulnerable to sustained, politically driven attacks around issues like free speech or grade inflation. Market dynamics do not help the situation, solidifying established hierarchies rather than prompting institutions to behave in more inclusive and collegial ways. Though lower prestige institutions may occasionally outperform their higher prestige equivalents in national league tables, more privileged universities tend to drive home their structural advantages at every opportunity. Thomas Docherty suggested that mission groups should be dissolved because they exist primarily to legitimise and extend inequality (2018, 18). Arguably, the most forward-looking move that the Russell Group could make would be to open up their membership to all institutions, thus creating a more integrated and powerful lobbying force. A recurring problem for English higher education, and one that this booked has touched upon at various points, is that it positions itself outside (and often aloof from) other educational levels. This allows policy-makers to frame higher education as being in competition with 38 UCL launches inquiry into historical links with eugenics, Anna Fazackerley, The Guardian, 06.12.18: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/dec/06/ucl-launches-inquiry-into-histor ical-links-with-eugenics. 39 Bristol: the city that lauds the slave trader, David Olusoga, The Guardian, 27.04.17: https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/27/bristol-city-slave-trader-edward-colston.

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further education, in particular. It is often noted that far more university places are allocated each year than degree-grade apprenticeships (about 30 times as many, according to the Sutton Trust).40 Associated discourses reinforce suspicion that universities are over-expensive. At the launch event of his review of post-18 education in 2018, Philip Augar said that ‘England is a nation of two halves when it comes to post-18. Over £8b is spent on 1.2m undergrads in higher education yet only £2.3b is spent on 2.2m in FE’. Unsurprisingly, universities tend to remain silent on this gap. But a more enlightened approach might involve doubling down on efforts to work with colleagues in further education, sharing resources more meaningfully, and lobbying jointly for both sectors to be more adequately subsidised. Higher education could then be seen not as a rival to other forms of learning and training, but rather as an ally. The university sector could also interact in more selfless and collaborative ways with preceding education levels. For example, if higher education became less wedded to attainment as an indicator of academic ability, then secondary schools and colleges would become freer to operate in less outcome-driven ways. As things stands, many schools and colleges explicitly cite the number of students they dispatch to higher prestige institutions as an indicator of success. Universities have the power to undermine this divisive and gratuitous rivalry. The problems with the university-school relationship were captured by the suggestion in 2012 of then secretary of state for education Michael Gove that universities be allowed to set A-level examinations and therefore ‘drive the system’.41 Gove’s logic was clear: the main purpose of what students do at school is to enable access to higher education, so why not allow universities to decide how pupils are assessed? But universities did not welcome the opportunity to seize control of the nation’s pre-18 qualification system. In fact, the response was unreceptive: academics readily acknowledged that they lacked the professional expertise needed for the 40 Young people ‘more sceptical about value of university’, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 16.08.18: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/aug/16/young-people-moresceptical-about-value-of-university-poll. 41 Michael Gove calls on watchdog to let universities set A-level examinations, Jessica Shepherd, The Guardian, 02.04.12: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/apr/02/michael-gove-uni versities-a-level-examinations.

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specialist job of exam setting. They also pointed out that they were far too busy meeting government requirements of the tertiary sector to fix perceived problems elsewhere. The initiative was soon dropped. The sponsorship of academy schools by English universities has followed a similar pattern to Charter Schools in the US and proved similarly controversial. Educationalist Nadia Edmond (2019) suggested that the practice, often framed in terms of entrepreneurialism, legitimates the ideologically driven move away from public ownership of schools and local authority oversight. Universities are effectively co-opted by government, their status lending credibility to a regressive process of market liberalisation. Like the primary and secondary school sectors before it, the higher education sector is becoming awash with private companies, consultants and social enterprises seeking a foot in the door. Universities need to remain open to new ideas, from wherever they emerge, but also to guard against further privatisation. Paid-for expertise sustains an eco-system of market players whose contribution offers limited returns to the students who fund it through their fees. Moreover, universities that embrace private sector solutions jeopardise their claims to the public good. Hand in hand with the privatised model of higher education is a creeping reliance on charitable donations. A familiar feature of English universities is recruitment of staff tasked solely with raising money from alumni and other benefactors. The Sunday Times Giving List ranks major university donors, and gifts of over £100m are no longer uncommon.42 The problem is that giving worsens inequality and fractures the sector further. The biggest recipients by far are already-wealthy institutions. Discourses tend to revolve around philanthropy, but universities supposedly committed to equality and social responsibility might perhaps begin asking why such individual wealth accumulation is acceptable, rather than rushing to have high-profile donors cut ribbons outside buildings named in their honour. Besides, patronage often comes at a price. Conservative MEP Daniel Hannann was among the benefactors ‘tearing up donations’ to his former college in protest at a vote to remove the 42

£100m donation is Cambridge University’s biggest ever gift, Melanie May, UKFundraising, 06.02.19: https://fundraising.co.uk/2019/02/06/100m-donation-cambridge-universitys-biggestever-gift/.

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statue of Rhodes.43 The statue remains upright, capturing much of the power differential between high-profile donors and the college’s student body. The process of repairing a fractured sector must begin with sincere collaboration. Governments and regulators would find it harder to impose flawed policy on a sector broadly united behind a common cause than on institutions attempting to best one another at every opportunity. Other education levels could be engaged more meaningfully, potentially enabling the formation of a national education system that encourages and facilitates lifelong learning. The idea of the ‘comprehensive university’, as pushed primarily by Tim Blackman as alternative to social stratification by academic selection,44 would more directly facilitate the needs of part-time leaners and mature students. The purpose of universities would be not to credentialise further the highest achieving individuals, but rather to enrich a whole population. This vision seems distant and idealised at present, but that is largely because market discourses have been so adamant that education is an individual enterprise rather than a societal gain. The higher education sector has become nervous about seeing itself as anything more than the sum of its individual parts. But if shared narratives could be agreed and articulated, it is not difficult to imagine alternative conceptualisations gaining traction.

6.6

Integrity in University Leadership

Institutional managers need rescuing from the corporate discourses that bind them: comms strategies are necessary only because straightforward and truthful statements are feared; change management would not be required were underlying rationales strong and self-evident; executive responsibility would be a peculiar concept if decision-making processes 43

Oxford University’s cowardly surrender is a wilful vandalism of history, Daniel Hannan, Daily Mail , 18.06.20: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8438021/This-cowardly-surren der-Oxford-University-wilful-vandalism-history-writes-Daniel-Hannan.html. 44 The Comprehensive University: An Alternative to Social Stratification by Academic Selection, Tim Blackman, Higher Education Policy Institute Occasional Paper 17 , 07.11.17: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Hepi-The-Comprehensive-Uni versity_Occasional-Paper-17-11_07_17.pdf.

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were democratised and decentralised. Much university leadership is a performative pretence considered necessary by an under-confident managerial class anxious to maintain power over a misunderstood and mistrusted workforce. Any university’s most valuable asset is its staff, as politics and higher education researcher Edwin Bacon (2014) pointed out. Few other sectors have access to such high levels of internal expertise. Despite this, as Bacon also noted, academics have little say in how their institutions are managed: architecture departments are rarely consulted on the design of new buildings; educationalists tend not to drive teaching policy; lecturers in economics and business are kept at a safe distance from finance committees. Indeed, institutional managers’ favourite kind of expertise increasingly appears to bought-in expertise from external consultants offering pricey, bespoke solutions. Sometimes, the way in which the modern university operates seems to actively defy its own scholarly evidence. From hiring practices to carbon emissions, a key challenge for the higher education sector is to begin drawing on the supposedly worldleading research it produces to shape its own decisions and activities. A particularly depressing recent trend in the sector is the deployment of bogus consultations to engineer retrospective support for controversial institutional policies. Surveys with leading or closed questions cynically deny staff the space to express views that diverge from an institutionally mandated position. Such strategies backfire in the long run, eroding collegiality and trust, even if in the short-term they allow managers to feel as though they have cunningly gained an upper hand. The irony is that the very attributes considered most desirable in academic staff— the ability to understand complex issues from different perspectives, to see through bullshit language and thinking, and to uncover new ways of seeing the world—are those found most threatening by many of their managers. The core problem for Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson is that ‘those who manage in the academy do not, in any important sense, share its values’ (2019, 216). Faced with this reproach, most institutional managers would counter that to run a university in the current financial and regulatory climate requires pragmatism as well as idealism. But the argument I make in this book is not that the pendulum should swing

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back towards staff because of some nostalgic notion of self-governance; rather, it is that correction is needed because the corporate model has been exposed as ill-fitting to higher education. As former academic Dame Marina Warner noted, while some of the most successful companies in the world, like Microsoft or Google, pride themselves on flat structures, management within universities continues to mimic the hierarchical organisation popular in the business world several decades ago. ‘It’s so 80s’, Warner said.45 David Palfreyman and Paul Temple similarly likened current leadership cultures to the ‘failed fads of yesterday’s management techniques’ (2017, 73). To some extent, as I argued in Chapter 2, academics have been complicit in their own marginalisation, trading management responsibilities for time spent on more fulfilling endeavours, like research and teaching. Bruce Macfarlane (2005) called it ‘the retreat from academic citizenship’, and the vacuum at senior levels was soon filled by business-minded individuals more willing to embrace managerialism and marketisation. Some newly appointed vice-chancellors have no academic background at all,46 a trend likely to continue as universities hunting for senior managers turn not to seasoned scholars but to applicants with a corporate CV and established political and business connections. For Docherty (2018), one alternative is for institutional managers to be elected for a fixed term by their peers, based on a pre-published manifesto. But regardless of how leaders are appointed, universities need to set aside their different missions, to stop asking what makes them individually distinctive, and to accept that they have more in common than the market allows. Leadership would be better focused on providing whole-sector development, and optimising an environment in which all institutions can thrive. The language of world-class universities is offputting to most frontline staff, but even if such hierarchies are accepted

45 The war against humanities at Britain’s universities, Alex Preston, The Guardian, 29.03.15: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/29/war-against-humanities-at-bri tains-universities. 46 Sandstone snakepit: New Sydney uni boss faces academics’ ire, Jordan Baker, Sydney Morning Herald , 13.03.21: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sandstone-snakepit-new-syd ney-uni-boss-faces-academics-ire-20210312-p57aat.html.

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uncritically, the fact remains that world-class universities can only flourish in a world-class system. Many universities now also pursue under-the-radar policies of internal separation, keeping administrative staff away from academic colleagues through distinct line management structures. This bifurcation is intended to prevent or limit cross-contamination of ideas, and therefore to improve workforce compliance. Institution discourses sometimes attempt to frame administrative staff as the real-world professionals who keep the wheels of the organisation spinning, even when academics are busy striking about one thing or another. Thankfully, them vs us tactics tend not to diminish the generally high levels of collegiality and trust that have developed over decades between staff across contract types. It is understood that students’ interests are best served through a dual approach, and that courses run most smoothly where all staff work collaboratively. Central to stronger higher education is leadership that recognises its debt to the society and communities that host, and in most cases, fund the sector. But such social contracts, as Jana Bacevic (2019) noted, are discussed in principle more often than they are enacted in practice. Institutional managers have become proficient at not hearing what their publics are telling them, particularly if it is at odds with their preferred business model. Pre-marketisation, the university was mostly a space in which people could exist without having to spend money, akin to a public library in some respects. But the market shifted universities’ relationships with their communities. Being a ‘good neighbour’ was disincentivised, unless levels of neighbourliness could be measured, ranked and bragged about. As feminist and poststructuralist scholar Miranda Joseph (2002) explained, ‘the community’ is an imagined and romanticised construct, a semi-mythical space in which households organically merge into a single entity. Higher education discourses tend to conflate different agendas and obscure important distinctions: for some in the neighbourhood, the problem may be an elite institution that raises financial and cultural barriers to their children’s participation; for others, it may be that university staff use their street as a term time car park, or that inebriated students keep them awake at night. In contrast, small business owners may delight in the upsurge in term time

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takings, and private landlords may welcome the rental income. Institutional attempts to engage are often patronising and awkward because senior staff, who typically live some distance from the campus, assume they knew what the locals want. The grammar of engagement positions the institution as subject and its community as object. Relational power dynamics are not addressed (is ‘the community’ something that sits beyond the campus, or is the institution part of ‘the community’?), and underpinning the approach is often the unspoken assumption that publics should count themselves lucky to have a university in their midst. Independent researcher and journalist David Ridley (2019) despaired of the ‘deep alienation’ (2019, 18) from their universities that many local residents now feel. In 2020, the University Partnerships Programme Foundation found that 36 per cent of people have never visited their nearest university, a proportion even larger among those from less advantaged social economic backgrounds.47 Visions of the ‘civic university’ are often embraced by intuitional managers, but Ridley dismissed them as ‘yet another badge of honour that entrepreneurial universities can plaster on the sides of their buildings’ (2019, 18). He suggested that communities would have more sympathy for university staff if their gripes were less about their own pay and conditions. Peter Scott (2021, 187) was similarly wary of the ‘civic’ brand, noting that locally elected representatives now have little say in the governance of universities. While institutional managers pay lip service to compromises in areas such as procurement, and extend some facilities to local residents, few can claim to be fully aligned with the needs of the neighbourhoods that host them. Urban historian Davarian L. Baldwin (2021) went further, suggesting that US universities ‘plunder’ their neighbourhoods, exploiting their status as the dominant local employer and landowner. Paul Temple (2019) offered a bleak vision of the future campus, warning that university spaces risk becoming ‘non-places’, soulless and vapid environments with which users feel little connection. ‘Like all non-places’, he says, ‘they are unloved, always someone else’s responsibility’. Temple drew attention to the creeping surveillance culture on 47 A Tale of a Divided Britain, Richard Brabner, University Partnerships Programme, 19.02.20: https://upp-foundation.org/a-tale-of-a-divided-britain/.

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campus. Where universities could once take pride in offering refuge from constant CCTV observation, many now embrace intrusive technologies. Students are tracked to generate learning analytics that are used with varying levels of ethicality and which, as digital education researcher Neil Selwyn (2020) warned, can be discriminatory and oppressive. The call for institutions to be managed with greater integrity, and for a move from tough-sounding top-down rhetoric towards a model that resonates more with staff and students, is essentially a call for collaboration. Universities must become for their communities, not just of their communities. In parallel, institutional managers must find the confidence to adopt exemplary employment practices and reject the precarity that has become normalised in the sector. To get the best from their academic staff, universities must begin wanting the best for their academic staff. Yet anyone enrolled on a training event for leaders in higher education in recent years is likely to have found themselves steered in a very different direction. So long as leadership in higher education is conceptualised as essentially no different from that in profit-oriented sectors, institutional managers will continue being hamstrung by a lack of buy-in from staff, students and local communities.

6.7

Conclusion: Universities Firing Back?

Democracies function best when their populations are critically educated and independently minded. As political and media discourses grow more intricate, publics must become more adept at processing an overload of information and decoding often contradictory messages from multiple sources. This requires the very skills in which higher education specialises. At this point in their long history, universities are more indispensable than ever. For this reason, they might be a cause for celebration and strategic investment. Instead, in many nations, they have been subjected to a programme of marketisation, attended by discourses that smear staff and students and drag the sector into futile culture wars. Few nations have been defined by their universities as much as England. Centuries of scholarship raised the sector to a privileged position, respected globally and relatively free from state interference. But

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this history was also exclusionary, profiting wealthy white men at the expense of other groups, a heritage stained by and inseparable from legacies of empire and colonialism. English universities were a microcosm for their wider, unequal society—if anything, even more stratified and hierarchical. In recent decades, critical researchers began asking critical questions about prevailing power structures, and attempting to give voice to those at the margins. This irked those holding power. Many right-leaning politicians saw no value in funding public institutions that critiqued their ideologies and turned future generations of voters against them. Since the 1990s, policy has imagined the English sector as one that could be reformed into a global brand through a marketisation agenda. Institutional managers mostly acquiesced. But the more that universities succumbed to market-driven funding models and ways of operating, the more difficult it became for them to articulate their basic role and value within society. Alternative visions of higher education, based on non-economic principles, began to grow distant and feel risky. Credibility gaps arose, and publics lost trust. English universities now find themselves in an invidious and untenable situation, dependent on staff that are mostly antagonistic to the business model and corporate ethos that surround them, on home students who grudgingly fund a system that indebts them as never before, and on international students whose premium fees prop up numerous institutional operations that have no direct impact on their learning. As I have attempted to show in this book, the modern university is enabled by multiple discourses operating at multiple levels. These discourses combine to form a common sense pragmatism which steadily naturalises a faulty understanding of education. The logic underpinning the idea of a market in higher education could most sympathetically be framed as a belief that rivalry across different areas of activity will incentivise all stakeholders to function more efficiently and more independently of the state, ultimately breaking down the sector’s hierarchies. But decades of implementation have yielded almost no evidence in support of this. Indeed, competition has reinforced existing orders, regulatory intervention has increased, and staff and students have grown more alienated from the way in which the sector is led. As John Holmwood and Chaime Marcuello-Servós put it, ‘the ideology of the market

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has triumphed over the evidence of its deleterious consequences’ (2019, 318). Now, universities are under fire and under-confident, held hostage by the market’s discourses and tormented by those who regard the sector as little more than an ideological irritant. My focus has been on English universities because their recent funding overhaul has been so speedy and so profound. But across the globe, higher education carries enormous symbolic value to those who seek to monetise public provision for ideological reasons. If universities can be disciplined into market submission, so can any public institution. New myths are created by a hostile media, and new demons conjured: wokeness, cancel culture, safe spaces, no-platforming . The wars are cultural, not material, with narrowly configured freedom of speech discursively privileged over the freedom to participate equally in a democratic society. Universities are assumed to be incapable of renewal without an embarrassment of infantilising competitions and excellence frameworks. This is because when required to reimagine itself as the outside world changed, the sector failed to create new stories. Discourse voids were soon filled by those for whom education was a product to be bought and sold: institutional managers recruited staff who specialised in the games being played, and a new strain of governors emerged for whom higher education was an industry much like any other. Throughout this book, I have been candid about the sector’s collusion with a damaging political project, arguing that some of those entrusted with the stewardship of the university were seduced by discourses that lead to uncritical compliance with an ill-fitting model. Many recognised the disingenuity of the discourses, but mastered what Rosemary Deem (2001) and others refer to as the ‘bilingualism’ needed to switch between audiences. Even the most corporate of managers now place world-leading in finger quotes to signal that they understand the emptiness of the phrase. Academic staff also compromised collegiality to thrive—or simply to survive—in a more cut-throat professional environment. A fog of neoliberal determinism has descended on England’s campuses, with many staff disaffected by their institution’s discourses and practices even at the onset of their careers. Any sector facing attack must learn how to fight back. To repel powerful conservative forces, new stories are needed. These stories must reflect how higher education has emancipated multiple generations,

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while affirming that it must now decolonise and democratise further, and become even more accessible to historically marginalised groups. The challenge is for institutions to prove that they can be relied upon to serve the population without crass market incentives, and that more can be achieved collectively than alone. There is no shortage of academic evidence bearing witness to the damage done to the university in recent decades. However, as Rob Cuthbert observed, governments take little notice of policy commentary that opposes its narrative, even when barefaced inconsistencies are exposed.48 Indeed, academic accounts of the sector sometimes risk being self-sabotaging. John Smyth alludes to the ‘zombie’ business model and ‘dead economic ideas’ (2017, 19) that have become normalised in universities. Sinéad Murphy’s (2017) broadens the analogy to ‘zombie institutions’, with ‘thinking long-gone, only the admin jobs remaining’ (2017, 76). The zombie metaphor clearly resonates, capturing the torpidity of the modern provider and its bloodless managerial vernaculars. But if academics fall into the trap of framing their sector too bleakly, as doomsayers churning out discourses of hopelessness, the critiques grow easier to ignore in the ways that Cuthbert noted. Even in the most corporate and zombified of sectors, universities can be the life force of their communities: places of conflict, exhilaration and imagination. Academics must remember to rejoice in the campus as a space of transformation and possibility, as a shared celebration of what makes us alive. Framing the argument for change in positive terms is crucial: the case for teaching is that academics would form more meaningful and stimulating professional relationships with students if freed from interminable expectations to perform and demonstrate excellence; the case for research is that more could be done with the same resources if academics were no longer required to waste time grading one another’s outputs and applying for grants where success rates are negligible. Unfettered from the market’s constraints, more academics would rediscover the immense intrinsic value of their work: the deep pleasures of discovering new things, and of leaving students energised, enthused and wiser.

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Cronyism, academic values and the degradation of debate, Rob Cuthbert, Society for Research in Higher Education, 20.04.21: https://srheblog.com/2021/04/20/cronyism-academic-values-andthe-degradation-of-debate/.

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All higher education sectors would do well to reassert the fundamental epistemological principles upon which they operate. Scholarship does not settle problems or answer questions, and research never makes itself redundant by reaching its natural end-point. Rather, universities operate in pursuit of truth, constantly seeking more rigorous and transparent ways of understanding the world, and renegotiating what we think we know. It is precisely because knowledge is so contested that expertise is so valuable. In uncertain times, the university is a public asset uniquely placed to help both graduates and non-graduates get better at discerning truth from propaganda, and understand issues central to their own future and to the sustainability of their species. Higher education can prompt societies to move beyond self-interest, and conceptualise themselves as something more than economically rational individuals. Inevitably, this line of argument leaves universities vulnerable to further attack. Firing back hands more ammunition to the sector’s snipers. In an age when universities must jostle to remain go-to sources of knowledge and expertise, the danger of appearing to be a selfappointed intellectual authority is obvious. Well-funded right-wing groups continue to reinforce a false dichotomy between over-politicised academic elites and pragmatic real-world publics, their confected culture wars distracting attention from substantive issues and regressive policy. But the risks of not fighting back are substantially greater. The university comes under fire from politicians and the media not because it is obsolete, but for the opposite reason: because it is a trusted institution that offers one of the few remaining spaces in which authoritative ideologies can be disrupted. For now, publics remain mostly on side. Despite the systematic defamation of the sector, universities are still seen as the likeliest answer to global health and economic crises, such as Covid-19. If universities learn to speak with a unified voice, they can rebound from their market dalliances shrewder and bolder. But if they continue to selfharm by submitting to distorted assessments of their role in society, the political and media onslaught will intensify, and whole sectors risk being reduced to little more than agents of their reactionary governments. Some agency remains. Higher education is not as far down the road of marketisation as other sectors. Managerialism nudges institutional cultures towards measurement and surveillance. However, managers

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cannot afford to slip so far from their labour force that they sacrifice the very human capital upon which universities depend: the love that academic staff bring to their research and their teaching. Even within the narrow terms of the market, universities must remain spaces in which ideas remain free to bloom: world-leading excellence cannot emerge from workforces that are permanently disillusioned and distrustful. The challenge for the sector is to seize the post-Covid moment to embrace a different version of itself, accompanied by new language and new narratives. Leadership is required that has the courage to rebuff disingenuous political and media attacks. Institutional administration is required that moves beyond metrics, reconnects with staff and learns to cherish its student body. Despite the market’s misrepresentations, universities are communities more than businesses, people more than estates and collaborators more than competitors. Higher educator sectors are at their best when operating as a progressive and democratising force in society, collectively holding those in power to account, troubling free market trends and reminding everyone that research evidence and critical dispositions matter greatly. With the trust of publics more firmly secured, a more vigorous case for new policies could be made, and universities could emerge stronger from the wars waged against them. Integrity deficits could turn into integrity surpluses. Institutions could be explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and actively opposed to all other forms of discrimination. They could also be anti-establishment, where research evidence demands, using their platforms to champion society’s underdogs. The first step is for universities to resist being co-opted into a system it is their primary role to critique.

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Index

A

B

Academic expertise 73, 180, 204, 205, 212, 216 Academic freedom 10, 48, 80, 162, 173, 176, 180, 183, 187, 193–195, 197, 199, 200, 205, 212 Academic staff 28, 34, 45, 47, 51, 65, 71, 72, 76, 140, 239, 243, 245, 248 Accelerated degrees 109 Administration 7, 28, 47, 58, 226, 248 Admissions xvii, 81, 103, 107, 110, 125, 134–143, 145, 148, 153, 182 Agility xxv, 48, 52, 224

Black Lives Matter 187, 232 Bourdieu, P. 30, 123, 150, 153 Brexit xxiii, 211

C

Campus xviii, xx, 20, 32, 35, 36, 39, 45, 50, 70, 71, 75, 95, 99, 107, 153, 154, 156, 168–170, 172, 192, 195, 196, 198, 199, 208, 209, 212, 216, 220, 224, 242, 243, 246 Cancel culture 186, 188, 198, 210, 245 Civic university(ies) 69, 242 Clearing 106 Climate change xiv, 73, 74, 164, 178, 208, 220, 227–229

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Jones, Universities Under Fire, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7

261

262

Index

Collaboration xxiii, 33, 80, 144, 159, 229, 238, 243 Community xxiv, 32, 33, 163, 218, 241, 242 Covid-19 ix, x, xv, xvii, xx, xxiii, xxiv, 14, 25, 41, 68, 74, 78, 79, 96, 103, 117, 119, 125, 129, 160, 162, 165, 179, 182, 204, 216, 227, 228, 247 Critical Race Theory (CRT) 184, 188, 189 Cultural capital 125, 136, 143, 154 Culture wars 23, 34, 40, 42, 180–182, 186, 207, 209, 213, 216, 225, 243, 247 D

Decolonisation 171–175, 199 Diversity 13, 100, 132, 140, 172, 174, 206, 223 E

Employability 2, 86, 97, 99–102, 117, 152, 176, 230 Ethnicity 19, 60, 67, 117, 147, 174 F

Finance committees 239 Freedom of information requests 64, 186, 212, 231 Free speech 2, 42, 71, 121, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185–187, 191, 192, 195–199, 202, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 235 Further education 10, 236

G

Gender 10, 22, 54, 60, 94, 98, 100, 146, 147, 164, 173, 202, 206, 212 Governance 10, 12, 16, 20, 64, 68–73, 81, 209, 240, 242 Grade inflation 103, 108, 109, 121, 235 Graduate outcomes 100, 126, 128 H

Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) 6, 114 Humanity(ies) 19, 32, 44, 53, 61, 195, 207, 208 I

Internationalisation 195, 230 Ivory tower 1, 38 J

Jarratt Report 5, 72 K

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 58, 63, 66, 67, 73, 111 L

League tables 3, 7, 12, 16–18, 79, 92, 93, 100, 109, 111, 114, 221, 227, 235 M

Management xviii, xxiv, 7, 13, 14, 19, 20, 68, 70–73, 76, 80, 83,

Index

88, 116, 221, 222, 233, 240, 241 Managerialism 15, 28, 31, 34, 80, 128, 222, 240, 247 Marketisation xxiii, 2, 3, 11, 21, 35, 45, 86, 118, 129, 153, 227, 240, 243, 244, 247 Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) 26, 27, 165 Mature students 90, 238 Merit(ocracy) 36, 100, 150, 153, 230 Metaphor xiv, 32, 38, 41, 62, 99, 101, 106, 116–119, 121, 128, 136, 153, 174, 181, 246 Metrics xxiv, 3, 12, 16, 28, 33, 35, 37, 45, 57, 60, 62, 63, 81, 87, 92, 93, 111, 114, 128, 157–161, 176, 221, 222, 248 Mission groups 8, 9, 81, 235 Mission statements 31, 80, 164, 223 Modernisation 34, 225

263

PhDs 22, 53–55, 217 Political correctness 179, 188, 191, 208 Polytechnics 18, 97 Precarity xxiii, 2, 22, 34, 48, 49, 51–53, 55–57, 81, 82, 84, 128, 243 Privatisation 148, 237 Professors 67, 76, 82, 169, 184, 211, 212, 232 Public(s) xviii, xxiii, 4, 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 24, 26, 27, 34, 40, 44–46, 50, 60, 61, 66, 67, 75, 76, 79, 86, 93–99, 103, 110, 112, 115, 120, 121, 125, 138, 142, 170, 178, 180, 184, 187, 188, 194, 195, 200, 201, 213, 214, 216–230, 235, 237, 241–245, 247, 248

Q

Quality Assurance (QA) 120, 162 N

No-platforming xii, 13, 186, 191, 197, 198, 210, 245 O

Office for Students 6, 7, 17, 63, 65, 72, 74, 106, 118, 120, 121, 137, 175, 177, 185, 196, 212 On-line learning xii, 162 P

Part-time students 90, 137 Pedagogy 77, 79, 92, 119, 159, 163, 164, 167

R

Racism 22, 34, 45, 95, 169–175, 185, 196, 226, 231, 232 Recruitment xv, 50, 70, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 195, 221, 228, 237 Reform 2, 19, 34, 36 Remuneration 63–67, 94 Research Excellence Framework (REF) xiii, 81, 111–115, 122 Resilience 34, 52, 133, 151 Robbins report 4, 223 Russell Group 24, 145, 146, 226, 235

264

Index

S

Schools xv, xxi, 14, 16, 27, 38, 63, 73, 93, 136, 140, 142, 145, 154, 165, 189, 226, 229, 236, 237 Science ix, 24, 32, 49, 73, 98, 200, 202, 204, 208, 227, 229 Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths (STEM) 101, 202 Senate 31, 69, 72 Social capital 12, 53, 117 Social class 147, 153, 232 Social mobility 13, 17, 36, 149–153, 177 Student experience(s) 155, 159, 163 Student loans 20, 65, 88, 93, 94, 122–125, 182 Student number controls xv, 85, 103, 110 Student voice 133, 159, 172

Union xviii, xix, xxii, 22, 23, 56, 66, 75, 129, 132, 133, 177, 183, 205 Universities UK xii, xiii, xvi, xxii, 7, 8, 81, 130, 131, 231 University leadership 239 University marketing 81, 105

V

Value-for-money 13, 16, 106, 111, 116, 118, 119, 121, 128, 131, 176, 224 Vice-chancellors xiii, xiv, xvii, 1, 7, 8, 24, 28, 31, 37, 51, 58, 59, 63–67, 69, 72, 74, 76, 114, 123, 130, 181, 194, 211, 217, 225, 226, 229, 232, 240 Viewpoint diversity 74, 206, 207, 209

T

Teaching Excellence (and Student Outcomes) Framework (TEF) 81, 111, 157–162 Transgender 187, 212 Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) data 59, 60 Tuition fees xxi, 64, 87, 91, 118, 123, 157 U

Unconditional offers xii, 103, 107

W

Wellbeing xvi, xx, 31, 34, 54, 61, 176, 218, 223 Widening participation 13, 36, 102, 104, 110, 128, 135, 137–139, 143–145, 147–151, 153, 154, 156, 177, 230 Wokeness 23, 171, 180, 183, 184, 187, 192, 210, 216, 245 WonkHE 23, 25–27, 43, 68, 203 World-class 30, 240, 241