The Human Significance of the Cuts

By Carlos Frade

The significance of the 'spending review' and the true choice we will make now, whether we want it or not.

What is at stake in the spending review is not a question of so-called 'cuts', how massive they will be and whom will be most affected; that is a merely technical problem which takes for granted the nature and scope of the real problem. Nor is it only a question, absolutely unacceptable as this is, of the hardship which hundreds of thousands are bound to undergo. The gravest problem lies elsewhere.

The facts are plain and well known: a number of major banks lost inconceivable amounts of money while the bankers amassed and continue to amass unbelievable sums for which they pay ridiculous taxes. To avoid the banks' collapse, governments poured in billions of public money to bail them out, thus becoming heavily indebted. But 'financial markets' don't like such public deficits, so governments are quick to plan massive public spending 'cuts' in order to reduce the deficits and please 'the markets', that is, the banks and the bankers. Any mention of tax rises for the well-off is considered blasphemous, while a campaign just launched against 'benefit scroungers' (seemingly a very serious thing, as it includes 'benefit cheat hit squads' ) is not directed at the true scroungers and cheats responsible for the catastrophe, but is the usual ferocious campaign against the poorer and less fortunate. To add insult to injury we are told by ministers that the 'cuts' which will destroy hundreds of thousands of family lives and bring havoc to the whole country are 'fair' – as if words had gone mad and ministers had also been abandoned by the last human capacity, that of blushing with shame.

How is this possible at all? Four elements account for this situation: an oligarchy of wealth as ruling group – in truth a plutocracy; a doctrinaire and extremely contagious political ideology: managerialism; an easily recruitable executive following: a growing managerial class which occupies key positions in all institutions and at all levels through the society; and a standard set of governing tools made up of managerial indicators and above all indebtedness (compulsory debt-incurring) to which 'all and each' are yoked: individuals, including ever younger people such as students, institutions and entire countries.

These four elements make a totally poisonous 'cocktail' – poisonous for anything to do with human dignity, love for the job well done and for the public good, freedom, democracy and justice. How does it work? As any such oligarchy in history, the defining features of the current one are: tireless quest to squeeze everything out of those beneath them, parvenu disdain for learning and culture, and total impunity (the only difference with the old oligarchies being that this one is the result of a subsidised capitalism). As for those who are not part of the oligarchy, it is basically a question of unfitness for a free or political way of life, that is to say, of servitude; but the servitude is voluntary because, in reality, women and men do not mind yielding their liberty and abdicating their responsibility through servile submission, since in the process we become petty tyrants ourselves, and this is a role we seem to end up enjoying, to the point of mistaking it for the responsibility and liberty we have just surrendered.

This is the kind of human beings that the current regime demands, promotes and shapes. It requests them from the very beginning, from the cradle, as the case of university students shows: by yoking students to huge long-term debts, that is, to what governments all over the world now reject for themselves like the plague, the recent Browne's review of HE (strangely called an 'independent' review despite the unmistakable belonging of its author to the aforementioned oligarchy) seeks to make sure that students will be consumers and nothing but consumers. The difficulty is that a university degree proper is not something one can just 'buy', for buying something is the easiest thing to do if one has money, but a degree demands effort and dedication, qualities which nobody in their right mind has ever attributed to consumers. That is why claiming that 'students' paying more will demand 'more' (Browne's review) is sheer sophistry. 'More' of what? Indeed such 'students' will demand more easiness, more good-timeness, and will request their qualifications regardless. Pleasing and flattering angry consumers: that will be 'teaching', the only 'teaching' permitted by the managerial indicators of 'student' satisfaction. But it was never a question of teaching or education; rather the purpose is to transform HE into a market, that is, into yet another profit-yielding machinery to feed the oligarchy with what it cherishes most: cripple human beings.

We can thus see the true alternative the so-called 'cuts' place before us, here and now: either to consecrate a situation of servitude whereby a country governed like a herd of cattle continues to feed the oligarchy with its daughters and sons, or to show the resoluteness of able and responsible women and men to, both collectively and individually, stand up against this infinite injustice and start to define our own fate. Only hardship without dignity and pride should be feared. This is the choice: want it or not, we will choose, and it will be the result of that choice what we will bequeath to those coming after us.

Carlos Frade is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Salford. This article first appeared on the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees website on 13 November.
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Education towards Heteronomy: A Critical Analysis of the Reform of UK Universities since 1978.

By Gordon Finlayson and Daniel Hayward

In the last thirty years the university system in the UK has changed radically, and since 2003 it has also changed rapidly. Four different rationales have been put forward by successive administrations or their appointed advisors for these reforms:

1. Expansion
2. Efficiency
3. Economic accountability – i.e. value for money
4. Political accountability – i.e. democratisation or widening participation.

At the same time all the reforms have been accompanied by the now implicit, now explicit aim of undoing the old collegiate organisational structures of universities and replacing them with corporate structures. This now endemic structural transformation of universities has been by far the most important effect of the reforms. It would be wrong to think that universities have survived more or less unchanged in their nature and function, while merely having been made larger, more efficient, more accountable, more open to a broad social constituency and less remote from social needs.

In the following we will present critical history of UK Higher Education reform. We show that universities are fast losing their status as self-governing educational institutions and their relative independence from the economic and political systems. The academic values that used to govern their activities of researching, teaching and learning have gradually been sacrificed to the instrumental values of economic usefulness and financial rentability. Where universities were once part of the ecology of civil society (as opposed to the state and the economy) they have now been politically repositioned as engines of economic growth. In place of education, they are now supposed to offer training for work. In place of research and free inquiry, they are supposed to produce the intellectual property and human capital required to drive the knowledge economy.

The narrative we offer is of necessity abbreviated, stylised and simplified. It is not supposed to be a detailed and comprehensive account. Still we believe that the broad contours of our interpretation are correct, and consistent with the historical facts of Government policies and their implementation in the period. The aim of the narrative is to pick out the overall pattern in successive Higher Education and University reforms, and to provide sufficient context for those affected to make sense of the changes which are currently being ushered in at breakneck pace throughout the university sector. These changes have not come out of nowhere. Nor are they just the unplanned, quasi-natural consequences of broader social and historical changes: they are the effects of specific policies aimed at repositioning the UK in respect to the global economy, and of the various audits put in place to monitor their performance.

For more on this see here.
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Letter from Professor Simon Blackburn, University of Cambridge

Dear Dean,

I wish to add my voice to those who have protested against the
threatened closure of Middlesex philosophy department. You may say
that it is unsurprising that a philosopher should object to this
move, but this goes beyond Trades Union solidarity to the heart of
what a university needs to be.

As the world shrinks and international cooperation becomes ever more
important, the humanities are crucial to our futures. We cannot act
together with others without understanding their culture, their
ideas, their ethics, their religions and their politics. Without
communication the alternatives are conflict and destruction. The
humanities educate us into at least some understanding of these
things, and among the humanities philosophy is most directly
concerned with them.We must also give others some understanding of
the ideas that animate our own culture, and this means first
identifying and testing them ourselves. It is the special
responsibility of philosophy to keep alive that investigation and the
critical and analytic spirit that it requires. This spirit was first
identified in Socratic Greece and has infused the whole history of
the West for more than two thousand years. Nothing worth calling a
university can be crass enough to think that this spirit is
dispensable, in the name of materialism or economic progress.

It is not apparent why the philosophy department was singled out,
given its place at the top of the research profiles of your
faculties. One must hope that the decision was not taken in awareness
of the size of the stakes and the catastrophic example it offers to
the rest of the world.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Simon Blackburn, FBA, FAAAS
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Ian Pears on Middlesex Philosophy Fiasco

On to Middlesex

The wave of cuts which began in places like Sussex, King’s London and Hull has now hit Middlesex, which has announced it is going to close its philosophy department despite the fact that it is one of the highest rated departments in the university.

Read the full article
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Open Letter to the Management at Middlesex University

From the editors of 'Storm Breaking upon the University'

An open letter to Michael Driscoll (Vice-chancellor), Waqar Ahmad, (Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research and Enterprise), and Margaret House (Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic), University of Middlesex.

We believe you are responsible for taking the decision to close down all the Philosophy Programmes at Middlesex and the renowned Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. We are dismayed to hear about this decision, which is not only regrettable, but unwarranted and misconceived.

We understand that the Dean, Professor Esche, told staff that the Department’s high research reputation makes no ‘measurable’ contribution to the University. This is untrue. In financial terms, the Department’s QR funding amounted (according to HEFCE’s own figures) to over £150,000, in 09-10. 42 new MA students were recruited in 2009, a figure that is the envy of most philosophy departments in the UK. This itself represents an appreciable stream of income and it makes the decision to close down philosophy at Middlesex all the more perverse.

The reason why Middlesex did so well in the RAE, and that it recruits so well, is the outstanding reputation of CRMEP both within the UK and internationally. It is one of the leading centres for continental philosophy in the UK, achieving a 5 in the 2001 RAE and a GPA of 2.8 in the 2008 RAE – the same as Leeds, Nottingham and Edinburgh and above Warwick, Durham and Glasgow. Professors Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward and Peter Osborne, along with Dr Stella Stanford, and Dr Christian Kerslake are all outstanding researchers who are respected in the profession and beyond. Moreover, they have produced academic progeny who have established excellent reputations of their own and are helping other Universities to thrive. This is a sure indication of the good health of Philosophy at Middlesex and of the high quality of its teaching.

Of course not all contributions to a University are “measurable” in financial terms. This does not make them less important or mean that they do not bring substantial benefits (including economic ones) to the University. Philosophy’s contribution to the national and international esteem, reputation and good standing of the University should be valued very highly. Such things are hard won, and once the department is closed down, not recuperable.

We ask you to consider the immense damage that will be done to Middlesex by closing a department with such an impressive research reputation. Already there has been a national and international outcry, both within the discipline and beyond. Prospective students – both undergraduate and postgraduate – will be put off, and prospective and current staff will not regard Middlesex as a safe place of employment. It will certainly weaken the loyalty of the best academics at Middlesex working in other areas.

Good management practice in circumstances where the closure of a department is being considered is to have a full-scale external review of the department, with both internal and external expert panel members. Middlesex does not appear to have conducted such a review. Maybe this is because they can anticipate that it would quickly find that the department has all the hallmarks of long-term viability: an excellent research reputation, astonishingly good PG recruitment, and increasing undergraduate applications. Not holding a review reflects extremely poorly on the management team and again damages its institutional reputation.

In closing down its highest-ranking department for reasons of short-term financial expediency, in the face of such powerful countervailing considerations, Middlesex is betraying its own academic values. We urge you rethink this decision.

Yours sincerely

Gordon Finlayson
Andrew Chitty
Kess Van Der Pijl
Alana Lentin
John David Rhodes
Hazel Cox

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On the Proposal to Close Philosophy at Middlesex

By Adrian Piper

I am an innocent bystander and do not purport to speak for or represent anyone directly involved in the evolving situation within UK academic institutions. From where I sit, the "surprising absence of comment that has so far taken place here" does not look to me to be motivated by "the old continental/analytic divide." I sense that what we are seeing is rather a classic deer-in-the-headlights moment.

Over the past few decades in the UK, various government agencies have enforced a series of astonishingly ill-considered and debilitating policies on academic institutions. These include the abolition of tenure, the insistence on self-defeating relevance requirements for obtaining academic funding, the legal attack on freedom of speech and research, the abrupt and unwarranted cancellation of senior academic positions, and now the utterly arbitrary closure of a department that meets virtually all of the criteria for funding and protection these agencies have previously demanded. Such capricious and destructive exercises of administrative power, by agencies and institutions entrusted to protect both the nation's educational and scholarly mandate and also one's own professional wellbeing in accordance with fair and equitable rules on which both parties have agreed, are deeply, horribly demoralizing – not only because they violate standards of fair play and public service, but also because they deliberately remind each one of us of our individual impotence to prevent, resist or rectify them.

With each such experience of being repeatedly betrayed, or brutally and peremptorily robbed of one's power to do one's job – to serve the educational and research needs of one's students, one's institution, one's nation and of the international scholarly community, the sense of shock, disbelief, and unreality increases; and with it, the speechless paralysis we are now witnessing. This speechlessness defines the moment in which one feels trapped in the hypnotic glare of the headlights on an oncoming driverless bus relentlessly bearing down on one, veering crazily from side to side, the steering wheel spinning out of control, on a road that offers no zone of safety because the traditional rules of the road are no longer respected. At earlier points along this route, it may have been possible to believe one could at least save oneself, by fleeing to one side of the road or the other, or by hopping onto the bus and grabbing the wheel, harnessing its power to steer it and its passengers to safety. With this latest travesty of reason, justice and good faith, it is now clear that no such impromptu attempts at rational control have been effective, because the steering mechanism itself is malfunctioning. It needs new parts.

There are several possible endings to this scenario of speechlessness. In one, the collision happens while pedestrians watch silently from the sidelines with open mouths, and there is blood all over the road: arbitrary funding cuts, departmental closures and appointment cancellations now proliferate, and accelerate without obstruction, effectively disabling academic education and research in the UK for decades to come, the survivors continuing to limp along with spirits broken by these repeated reminders of their individual powerlessness to avert the disaster.

In a second ending, the ultimate explanation of the silence is that there is simply nothing more to say. The closing of the Middlesex Philosophy Department fully illuminates the situation for what it is, and the needed response is clear – and forthcoming. The fight response of the academic community is mobilized at the last minute to avert this disaster after all; and speech and discussion on lists such as this one are replaced by concrete collective action off-list that ensures its future survival. This moment is a defining one because it can go either way.

Professorin Dr. Adrian M. S. Piper
APRA Foundation
Berlin

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Vice Chancellor's Pay Increases: Wage Restraint Urged on Academics

Cuts, what cuts? University vice-chancellors' pay up by 10%

Despite funding cuts of £900m which threaten 14,000 academic posts vice-chancellors pay and benefits rose by 10.6% last year

Read this article here

Meanwhile the UCU is is worried about a public sector pay freeze.

"David Willetts, Conservative shadow minister for universities, told Times Higher Education that his party "believes universities need to hold down their pay costs" and would "work with Hefce" on the "exact mechanisms" to achieve this.

He added: "Universities would find it very hard to explain to students and their families if costs were going up because of pay increases much greater than the rest of the economy was enjoying."

Read about this here.

I'm not worried about this. There should be a pay freeze, especially among the higher earners. Isn't the problem rather that wage restraint is being urged on the lower earners while at the top deputy vice-chancellors, such as Malcom McVicar are making statements like these:

"There is an international market for senior university executives and academics; if the UK is to grow and succeed, we must be allowed to compete. Simply, if we don't pay appropriate salaries, we won't get decent people to run or teach in the universities." Read more here.

This argument can't be used only for Senior Executives and Senior Academics. If it applies to them, it also applies to academics and to skilled support staff further down the pay scales. After all, in the final analysis a university without jobbing academics is not one. Surely what we need in these times is a demonstration of wage restraint from senior managment.

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The Great American University

This is a Must Read Review of a Must Read Book. The Great American University by Jonathan Cole. Cole was the Provost and Dean of Faculty of Columbia University and a former colleague in the Sociology department there of such luminaries as Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld.

Let me just emphasize some of his findings. Cole lists some core values, which are, the reviewer notes, "a kind of educational 12 commandments" and which "should be touchstones for the sector".

1. promote universalism so that merit prevails and only impersonal criteria are used in establishing scientific facts;
2. favour organised scepticism and question anything that resembles dogma;
3. create new knowledge through the provision of a decent infrastructure including laboratories and research libraries;
4. guarantee free and open communication of ideas and allow for criticism through open and public exchange;
5. advocate genuine disinterestedness so that individuals do not profit financially from their research;
6. promote free inquiry and academic freedom so that orthodoxies are constantly questioned;
7. base research on international communities that communicate openly with each other;
8. use peer-review systems so that arguments are tested by the best in the field;
9. work for the common good so that a more enlightened public can emerge;
10. ensure that governance involves the "company of equals", making sure that academics have a significant voice in running the institution they are part of;
11. promote intellectual progeny so that the next academic generation can emerge;
12. maintain the intellectual vitality of the community by attracting the best minds.
Plenty of food for thought here. Note that the restructuring of Universities undertaken in the last ten years in the UK, by the Labour Government, in the light of the Lambert Review, explictly violates 9.


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The End of Research

See this letter by Ian Pears in response to Ross McKibbin's article in the LRB. You'll find it at LRB 32, no.6, 25th March 2010 Or read below.

The End of Research

Ross McKibbin’s excellent article on the inane proposals of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) for the future regulation of research misses one point: the degree to which the universities themselves – or rather the manageriat controlling them – have connived in the subordination of academics to centrally generated goals (LRB, 25 February 2010). Hefce, after all, is not some corporate Trojan horse; it is largely made up of former academics who have made the transition into university management, and have in so doing vastly increased their salaries and their power.

Eight out of 15 of the Hefce board are university managers, the rest coming from business; nine out of 11 members of the research committee, ten out of 14 on the skills committee and 15 out of 18 on the access committee are senior university administrators. Working academics – teachers and researchers – are conspicuously absent. Hefce is, in reality, little more than a managerial oligarchy, and its power is extraordinary: no other country in the world hands out so much money (some £7 billion a year) to such a small group with so little external supervision over what it does. It answers to no one except the secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, and in effect is the means by which the government stranglehold over universities is maintained. This is spelled out specifically in the document detailing the role of the chairman, which is ‘to support the wider strategic policies of the secretary of state’. This represents a complete change of focus from the old University Grants Committee, which Hefce replaced in 1992. The UGC was set up in 1919 as a buffer, to prevent direct government interference in the universities. Hefce was set up to facilitate precisely that interference.

The board is not elected, but appointed in a manner that is far from transparent. It may consult on proposals but can, and does, disregard objections: as long as it does the minister’s bidding, its powers are near absolute. Not that there are many objections, as many of its proposals, like the current ones on impact and assessment, are sent out to precisely the same sort of people who generate them in the first place. Senior administrators appointed to Hefce propose changes, senior administrators in universities approve them; the academics themselves are rarely consulted. The most prominent demonstration of this system of mutual support and reinforcement came a few years ago at Oxford when academics revolted against the vice-chancellor’s attempts to dissolve the university’s democratic structure and impose centralised management. Hefce intervened, somewhat shabbily, on the side of the vice-chancellor. I know of no case in which it has urged greater accountability on the part of management. Indeed, when there are complaints against the management of a university, Hefce frequently finds that there is no case to answer, or only raps the offender lightly on the knuckles.

Thus when it was censured by Parliament in 2002 for ‘failing in every respect’ to follow the code of practice on access to government information, Hefce shrugged it off. It took no action when it was revealed that London Metropolitan University had inflated its submission for the Research Assessment Exercise in 1992 and 1996, and misplaced the dossier detailing the charges for 18 months. It ignored London Met’s massaging of its data on student numbers for years; only at the end of last year, when it was revealed that the university had claimed £36 million of funds for students who had dropped out, did Hefce urge London Met’s governors to ‘consider their position’. Here it was building on an old track record: it did nothing when Luton submitted false student data in 2003, and whitewashed complaints against Middlesex in 2002 by asking the university to respond to charges rather than investigating them fully (it then kept the report secret).

Hefce’s style is mirrored inside the universities, which have been slowly converted into hierarchical, authoritarian organisations in which the last vestiges of accountability (e.g. senates with real supervisory power) have been degraded, and guarantees of academic freedom (tenure in particular) abolished. It goes without saying that this undermines researchers’ freedom. It is hardly conducive to fearless innovation if, as is currently happening at King’s College London, a head of department can decide which aspects of historical research are worthwhile (including his own, as it turns out) and close down others (King’s has proposed to get rid of the UK’s only chair in palaeography); or if administrators, using figures whose analysis they control, can denounce certain subjects as ‘sub-critical’ and axe them.

Such administrators identify themselves as the masters of the institution, not its servants, and come to regard academics who were once colleagues as employees to be managed. Pay levels are a good indicator of how power is concentrated. To give some examples, at University College London, while spending on academic departments rose 79 per cent between 1999/2000 and 2008/9, administrative costs rose 119.6 per cent, and the vice-chancellor’s remuneration rose 168.4 per cent. At Bristol, spending on departments rose 84.6 per cent, administration was up 261.2 per cent, and the vice-chancellor’s reward was up 113 per cent. The average pay package of a vice-chancellor is now more than £190,000 (higher than the prime minister’s), and for the Russell Group it is around £250,000. The head of UCL gets a total of £404,000, Nottingham £333,000, Oxford £327,000 and Birmingham £332,000. In many cases these salaries are presented as recompense for increased responsibility, for which read more power.

While lecturers are assessed endlessly by students, administrators and Hefce itself, the managers answer in practice only to the board that appointed them in the first place. In the case of King’s, the senior administrators’ salaries in 2008/09 were determined by a remuneration committee of three people: a marquess, a hotel designer and a banker. The reasoning behind their decisions is not made public, and if there is any performance review it is kept secret.

All this suggests an explanation for Hefce’s periodic bursts of regulatory frenzy. Academics know, as I suspect Hefce knows, that the imbecilic methods of assessment under proposal will do nothing at all to improve output. But I fear that the quality of research is not the point. Control is. Leaving people to do their jobs without monitoring their every step is almost literally incomprehensible to a body specifically set up to wield power.

The humanities are an example of this self-defeating desire to dictate: for many years now, the need to produce RAE fodder to satisfy arbitrary and largely pointless benchmarks has detracted from real and substantial research. The same goes for the fatuous new ideas for assessing impact. At best these will tie academics up trying to find some way of finessing the system; at worst they will produce populist nonsense aimed not at refining the way the public thinks about issues but merely at filling a hole in the market. ‘Impact’ will make the humanities less about education, more about entertainment.

Iain Pears
Oxford

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Academic H1N1: The Viral Spread of the Business Model in Universities

A piece on the situation at Sussex by Jim Collins at Georgetown. He was Leverhulme Visiting Research Professor here from January to June 2009.

Higher education budget cuts are everywhere, especially in universities funded principally by public authorities, whether the central government, as in the UK, or state governments, as in California. The universal cry goes up: trim the fat! We need lean, market-driven universities; let us apply sound business practice to those inefficient, cobweb encrusted relics of the now lost Golden Age. American historians have banded together to support the efforts of our colleagues in the Royal Historical Society to fight such cuts, such as those announced for the University of Sussex, which have prompted a staff strike vote, student demonstrations, police violence, and arrests, or at King’s College, or at the California State University system. YouTube is filled with videos of student protests against fee increases and staff cuts across the Anglo-American world.

The budget crunches at Sussex and King’s are just the tip of the iceberg: 6,000 staff at UK universities either currently face or will soon face redundancies. In the US, systems like those of California or Nevada, where students are demonstrating about the possible closing of colleges and the abolition of certain major fields in universities that survive the cuts, are looking at budget cuts of 10% or even more, and at sharp tuition increases (32% in California). To help make up for nearly $600 million in cuts, the California State University system announced that all 47,000 of its employees would have to accept ‘furloughs’ (i.e., unpaid days off) two days each month: this action cuts their pay by 10%, but does not reduce their theoretical base salary.

Tenure offers some protection to full-time US professors, but thousands of part-time teachers have already been laid off. American law allows universities to break tenure and terminate professors if the program in which they teach is eliminated. The University of North Texas, Dallas Campus took that approach a step further: they announced that the entire teaching staff of 38 must reapply for their jobs. They covered their legal tracks by saying that a new college would be in place, the University of North Texas at Dallas. (Orwell would be proud.) Amazingly enough, King’s College proposes to apply the same trick in the UK, on a much vaster scale: they, too, will terminate all contracts and make every member of arts and humanities staff reapply for his or her job for 2010-11 (one wonders who will serve on the search committees for the teaching jobs).

Universities in the US and, especially in recent times, in the UK, have gone to the business model of education: the situation has reached the point in the UK that higher education is now subsumed within the responsibilities of the Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills. Putting Higher Education under that Ministry, because higher education is just skills acquisition (and tying the subcategory of Higher Education to Intellectual Property, and placing them under a lawyer whose expertise lies precisely in media law and in employment skills) makes it obvious that the Labour Government is thinking in such terms. Higher Education is, in part, skills acquisition: one of the most important of those skills is critical analytical thinking. Somehow, the cuts seem to focus especially on fields, like History and Literature, that rely on open-ended learning and critical analysis of narrative sources, and on such programs at schools, like Sussex or satellite American state universities, that serve a broad range of socioeconomic groups. Students at Oxbridge or the Ivy League will continue to get that sort of training, which, now as always, focuses on the social elite; students at places like Sussex or the University of Louisiana, Lafayette (which just eliminated Philosophy as a major) will get less and less of it.

European Civilization, following in the footsteps of its Classical predecessor, has long believed that the study of philosophy, history, and literature are the best ways to develop the highest levels of such thinking, aside from problems specifically tied to modern sciences. Higher Education serves as well as the center of our collective quest for knowledge and understanding, both for their immediate material benefits, and for their broader philosophical ones. Long experience has taught our civilizations that the search for the latter, in ways we cannot necessarily pin down, translates into progress on the former. Steps like the abolition of the Chair in Palaeography at King’s diminish us all, because they will eventually remove from us any chance of learning from newly discovered ancient texts.

This shift to the free market business model (at precisely the moment when that model has failed cataclysmically in the economic world) entails two key changes: 1) administrators, oh, excuse me, ‘professional management’ (see below), now define those who attend universities as ‘consumers’, not students; and 2) universities have shifted to the managerial model. The shift to the ‘consumer’ label puts curricular content effectively into the hands of those taking classes. Consumers like history courses on, say, Hitler, and dislike those on, say, the Renaissance, so faculty must teach the former. Specialists who teach the Renaissance, because their ‘product’ does not sell well, must be made redundant: the inexorable law of the market.

History Departments should therefore focus almost all teaching on the period after 1900: in fact, in the cuts mentioned above, Sussex proposed precisely to eliminate teaching of the social, economic, and political history of Continental Europe prior to 1900, on the grounds of insufficient consumer demand for the product. Now that Harry Patch is dead, we can soon dispense with World War I, too; after all, today’s American students are as roughly as chronologically distant from the Battle of the Somme as I was from the Battle of Gettysburg, when I was an undergraduate. The idea that the faculty should set the curriculum (an idea, let it be noted, that is embedded in the statutes of almost all universities), on the assumption that people come to study with people who know more than they do, has effectively disappeared. Curricula always need to be modernized, and student input must play a vital role in that process, but core elements that make a university education a university education must be preserved.

The shift to the managerial model of business entails dramatically increased layers of administration, oops, ‘management’, and a concomitant reordering of the ratio of administrative to teaching costs. In former times, both in the US and in the UK, universities followed the Republic of Letters model: professors alternated in administrative positions, usually for 3- or 5-year terms. I held such a position at Georgetown from 2000-03, supervising 40+ tenure-track professors, 25 or so part-time teachers, 80 PhD students, a full-time staff of three, several part-time staff, and budgets totaling well over $5 million. My additional salary came to $8k/year, not built into my permanent pay; the university also allowed me a semester of paid leave after my term. A manager ‘dean’ or ‘head’ with similar responsibilities would likely make well over $100k/year in the US.

What has happened, on both sides of the pond, is that costs of administration, as a percentage of total university expenditure, have risen sharply, while 'instructional costs' (i.e., professors' salaries) have dropped dramatically as a percentage of total budgets. Many American universities (including mine), aware of the dubious popularity of such a shift, changed their budgetary categories in the mid 1990s to make it more difficult to track them. Sussex, the university so much in the news, did the same on its annual financial statements in 2007-08, just as it decided to hire 12 new Heads of Schools, a new managerial level. Perhaps Sussex could publish their salaries (at least in aggregate), and offer specifics on just how much outside grant money covers parts of their salaries, as it claims. Sussex might also provide details on new staff – both lower level ‘professional management’ and clerical – hired to work for this new bureaucratic level.

Sussex offers an ideal case of academic H1N1. The pre-2007-08 categories were “Administrative” and “Other, including clerical and manual”. The new categories, so redolent of the change discussed here, are “Professional management and professional support” and “clerical”. The former group has had explosive growth in two years: from 740 posts in 2007 to 814 in the 2008-09 budget; for the first time, in that budget, managers and support staff (other than clerical) outnumber the teaching and clinical staff (whose numbers have fluctuated sharply, from 773 in 2005 to 753 in 2007 to 808 in 2008-09).

Published budgets use broad, slippery categories, but a comparison of ‘staff costs’ for ‘Schools’ (i.e. faculty) and ‘Administration’ offers some insights into the process. Combining those two categories at Sussex, one finds that ‘administration’ accounted for 12.9% of the total in 2004-05 but for 15% in 2008-09. Perhaps it’s because Sussex has many more high-end salaries. The Vice-Chancellor’s salary has risen from £148k in 2004-05 to £227k in 2008-09. In 2004-05, only three people (one of them the VC) made over £90k at Sussex and no one made over £150k; in 2008-09, 20 (sic) people made over £100k, of whom six made £150k or more. Given that ‘professional management’ surely make most of those big salaries, it’s little wonder that nominal ‘staff costs’ for administration have risen 55.6% in the last five years, while nominal teaching costs have gone up about 30% (5/6ths of that nominal increase for teaching costs can be attributed to inflation, 15%, and to increased undergraduate enrollments, 10%).

Sussex differs only in minor details from other Anglophone universities. If we look at budgetary evolution over the past 20 years, the figures will show exponential growth in ‘professional management’ costs. Year after year, I read in the Georgetown Hoya, our student newspaper, that tuition must rise a given amount (3% for 2010-11) in part because of increased costs for faculty, yet the tuition increase always exceeds by a considerable amount the faculty pay increases: in 2010-11, we reportedly face a salary freeze, so the spread is the entire 3%. (To be fair, managers also face a freeze this year. Fringe benefits costs – such as the University’s contribution to medical insurance and retirement – will also go up.) At this point, Georgetown’s case of Academic H1N1 is terminal: a quick glance at a University organigram from 1990 and one from 2010 would show just how ‘managerial’ we have become. Memo to funding agencies: this model wastes astonishing amounts of money on unessential services!

Want to cut some 'fat' in university budgets? Given that universities exist to TEACH, cutting administration, sorry, management, makes a lot more sense than cutting teachers. In making necessary budget cuts in Higher Education, authorities should seek, above all, to preserve its two essential elements: teachers and libraries. They must seek, of course, to preserve as well the physical plant, and staff maintaining it, necessary for classes and related activities to take place. They have to provide for an administrative apparatus to keep the universities functioning. Perhaps they might want to consider a retro move: turn ‘professional management’ back into ‘administration’.

In looking at cuts, they would do well to compare the evolution in spending in those three broad categories, in percentage terms. Should they do so over, say, 20 years, they will find the third one to have grown increasingly gluttonous. Time for the three little piggies to go on a diet? Start with the real gluttons, the ones who take the largest mouthfuls at the trough.


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