Universities and the Neo-Liberal Revolution

By Bob Brecher

Here is John Stuart Mill, the intellectual founding father of “traditional” liberalism:

Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings. … What professional men should carry away with them from an University, is not professional knowledge, but that which should direct the use of their professional knowledge, and bring the light of general culture to illuminate the technicalities of a special pursuit. … And so of all other useful pursuits, mechanical included. Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits it impresses. (Inaugural Address to the University of St Andrews, 1867)

And here is “Lord” Browne, the failed ex-CEO of BP and spear-carrier for the neo-liberal revolutionaries in today’s mandate-free government:

Higher education matters because it transforms the lives of individuals. On graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to move from one job to the next. (Browne Report, 2010)

What, then, is going on? Education has always served two quite contrary needs: continuity and renewal. Now, provided the numbers are small, that is no great problem. The majority of that small minority can be safely relied upon to deal with continuity: the universities of Oxford and Cambridge have performed that task magnificently for centuries. And the small minority (of the small minority) who do concern themselves with renewal will have in mind only those forms of renewal that serve, rather than undermine, the ruling order. So we should not be surprised that Cameron has a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (I’m not joking) from Oxford; his sidekick, Clegg, a BA in Social Anthropology from the same institution. This presents a problem for contemporary capitalism. It needs to engage the vast majority for its project – as consumers, if not as producers. And as it becomes more technologically complex, so it needs workers with more and more skills and more and more knowledge: with the increasing pace of technological change, it also needs those workers to be “flexible”, as Browne so disarmingly tells us. In short, the old division between those fit only for secondary modern schools and those who can be permitted to enter grammar school needs to go much deeper and to go on for much longer. Universities themselves need to instantiate that class divide – across which a few may safely be allowed to cross, as they will never constitute a sufficiently large body, let alone a sufficiently organised one to constitute a threat. Hence the falsely egalitarian ending of the “binary divide”, between universities and polytechnics in 1992. Hence, too, the supine acceptance by “Universities UK”, the Vice-Chancellors’ club, of what the government is doing, and indeed the support of its élite, the “Russell Group”, for massive increases in tuition fees.

So again, it comes as no surprise that the most noticeable thing about academic responses to the Browne Report is that no one has seen fit to locate its recommendations in the context of the government’s commitment to using the so-called economic crisis as a pretext for initiating a neo-liberal revolution beyond Thatcher’s wildest dreams. It is as though its plans for the universities were ignorant, spiteful, blatantly illogical or all three. But they are not; and unless we understand government policy for what it is we have not the slightest chance of overturning it, whether in the universities or elsewhere. The transformation of the universities from being a public good, and recognised as such, to being at once providers of private consumables and a vanguard of the values thus entrenched is an integral part of the neo-liberal fundamentalists’ opportunistic revolution. Let me give just a few examples, taken from the universities’ trade rag, the Times Higher Education (THE). One commentator tells us that ‘The Browne proposals risk creating a two-tier system under which most institutions, serving the greater majority of students, “will be offering a worse – and also more expensive – experience”’ (‘Review’s quality drive branded ‘dangerous’, 4 Nov. 2010). But the proposals risk no such thing at all: they are carefully designed precisely to achieve it. Of course downgrading ‘to “non-priority” status’ of the arts, humanities and social sciences will be ‘a disaster for the nation’s intellectual and cultural life that undermines the very idea of the university’ (‘What price the soul of a university?’, 28 Oct. 2010). But for the avatars of neo-liberalism this will be not a disaster, but rather an opportunity. Compare Milton Friedman’s disarming honesty in the Wall Street Journal, the bankers’ trade-rag: ‘Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system’ (‘The promise of vouchers’, 5 Dec. 2005).

Why is it that neo-liberals need to marketise the universities, almost as much as they need to marketwise the NHS? First, because neo-liberalism requires that the majority of people are taught not to think clearly and not to question what they’re told, lest they rebel. Second, and this is even more important, if the universities can be made into vehicles of the neo-liberal creed then they will do more than most other social institutions to reproduce and enforce that creed. Not only will “students” come to believe that everything – and perhaps everyone – is a commodity, but their teachers will themselves be products of the same ideology. For who but the rich will be able or willing to take on postgraduate work once they’re already tens of thousands of pounds in undergraduate debt? The arts, humanities and social sciences, in the few élite institutions in which they remain, will function as finishing schools for the wealthy, taught – if that is the right word – by their own. Everything else – from engineering to physics to business to design – will become bereft of critical content, taught – again if that is the right word – by people who understand themselves to be “delivering” quantifiable commodities to their customers. So again, it will not be ‘a huge mistake’ to ‘value our students simply for what we can get out of them or what they might earn in the future’ because ‘they will in turn estimate our value by what they can get out of us’ (‘Hefce chief: prepare for tough journey’, THE 28 Oct. 2010). On the contrary: that is exactly what Browne intends. The neo-liberal revolutionaries know exactly what they are doing and why. They intend to take advantage of the current “crisis” – the ideological power of which is n inverse proportion to its material reality -- by encouraging the élite universities to go private in frustration if for no other reason, forcing the “bottom of the range” into the hands of commercial companies such as Kaplan and BBP and slowly strangling the rest as any sort of public institution. At least some academics are coming to realise this, and have just formed the Campaign for the Public University (http://publicuniversity.org.uk).

So what is to be done? We must understand the ideological nature of the ConDems’ attack on the universities and not be sidelined by their disguising it as a cost-cutting exercise: this year’s planned bonuses for top bankers amount to three times current public spending on the universities. We have to understand and oppose it, not in isolation, as though it concerned the universities alone, but for what it is: a genuinely revolutionary policy. Students, administrators and academics need at once to take themselves seriously as members of a university and to join forces with all the other workers, paid and unpaid, whom the multi-millionaire fundamentalists around the Cabinet table regard as so much dross. Most pressingly of all, academics have to understand, realise and use the power that as academics they have. A good starting-point would be to refuse to act as the self-interested egoists too many of them have become and whom the neo-liberals would have the rest of us become; to refuse to compete with one another, whether within or across institutions, or with other groups of workers; and to make a new reality of what was once known as solidarity.

Bob Brecher (Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Brighton)

This article first appeared on the Science for the People website on 3 January 2011.
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Discussion of the Current (Crisis?) Situation of HE in the UK

You can find an intelligent overview and analysis here:
http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/digest-from-subtext-on-the-uk-situation
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Message from Professor Simon Jarvis

Dear friends and colleagues,

I attach a link to an interview which I gave recently on local radio, in case, like me, you wish to oppose the assault which is currently in train on the humanities and social sciences, and in case, if so, this might divert or hearten you. Please forward to anyone on whom it might have the same effect(s). Apologies to anyone for whom this is already old hat.

My bit starts at around 14.08:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00cb84b/Andy_Burrows_30_11_2010

If you are moved to further action, you might want to consider joining a campaign in which I am involved: Humanities and Social Sciences Matter. Our statement follows below. You can sign the petition at

http://humanitiesmatter.wordpress.com

If you should like to register support for the Cambridge occupation, you can do that at:

http://www.gopetition.com/petition/40989.html

Good wishes to one and all!

Simon


Britain has an higher education system that punches far above its weight internationally, especially compared to the USA and Europe. The productivity and creativity of our arts, humanities and social sciences are one of Britain's great economic and cultural success stories. Yet the Coalition Government is poised to jeopardise all this needlessly and irresponsibly. There is no defensible economic basis for its proposed changes: these will only increase public expenditure in this and the next Parliament.

The nationwide scale and duration of this week's enormously peaceful student demonstrations reflect this deep skepticism about the Government's reasons and reasoning.

We believe that:

1. Everything our universities have achieved should not be recklessly risked after three weeks reflecting on the deeply flawed 'Browne Review'; 2. The block Arts & Humanities teaching grant should not be summarily slashed on this basis; 3. We need a public enquiry to create a positive vision for British universities fit for the 21st century.

The Coalition Government is not offering any such vision - theirs is neither fit for our children, our economy nor our future.

If you believe in this too, please visit our campaign website http://humanitiesmatter.wordpress.com and sign the petition you can find there.

Simon Jarvis

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The End of the Public University in England

By James Vernon

I graduated from the University of Manchester in 1987 with no debt. I paid no fees and received a maintenance grant to earn a degree in Politics and Modern History. If my seventeen year old son were to follow in my footsteps he would graduate with debts of at least £50,000 and were he to study in London that could rise to £90,000. In the space of a generation we have witnessed the destruction of the public university.

The Browne Report released last week, and effectively rubber stamped in the savage public sector cuts announced yesterday, was simply the final nail in the coffin. Under the beguiling but misleading title 'Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education' it effectively announced that university degrees are no longer considered a public good but a private investment. Accordingly, it is the individual student, not the public, who will pay its cost. Tuition fees will rise from £3,225 to a minimum of £6,000 rising to a potential ceiling of £12,000. State funding will fall from £3.5bn to just £700m - a total of 80% but a 100% cut in areas like the arts, humanities and social sciences that apparently have no public utility.

The cost of a university education may be charged to the individual student but they will be forced to pay for it through the sort of debt-financing that governments across the world now consider so inappropriate for themselves. The scale of national debt is so ruinous we are told it requires emergency austerity measures (like all state intervention these days couched in the inevitable military metaphor of Osborne's 'war of welfare and waste'). Students, meanwhile, will be encouraged to take on loans based upon an imagined future income. They will effectively gamble that the loan will eventually pay-off by enhancing their future job prospects and earning power. It will be a hedge against their future security. What are effectively sub-prime loans are guaranteed by the state. Higher education is now modeled on the types of financial speculation that has helped get us in to this mess.

It is thankfully still just about inconceivable that primary and secondary education could be treated in this way - indeed, Osborne claimed he would be investing more in these areas. There at least it seems education remains something that serves a public and social function. Clearly something magical occurs when one turns eighteen and your education becomes a matter of personal not public gain.

When education becomes a private investment not a public good the principle of universal provision necessarily falls by the way. It used to be a central pillar of the British higher education system that all institutions offered a similar range of degrees at the same price (if not with the same prestige). A degree in biochemistry at Cambridge cost the same as one in cultural studies at Liverpool John Moores. In making students customers of educational services Browne opens up the English and Welsh university sector (Scotland has it own more sanely run system) to the vagaries of student demand. Different universities will compete with each other charging variable rates for different degrees depending on the quality of their service and the branding of their product. Everyone recognizes that Departments and programs be cut, many will be reduced to teaching factories where the link between teaching and research is severed, and some campuses will close altogether or be sold off in pieces.

As so often in Britain when business is the model we are told this is how things are done in America. Indeed, it is. Last week the State University of New York cut its programs in Classics, French, Italian, Russian and Theater. In the last two years the University of California has raised its tuition by 32%, introduced furloughs for its workers that represented an effective 8% pay cut and are now seeking to restructure the pension packages of its employees.

There are however real differences between the American system and the model being developed in Britain. The now ailing public universities in America existed in a diverse sector with privates (ranging from the small liberal arts colleges to the Ivy League campuses with their enormous endowments), community colleges and the rapidly expanding for-profits like the online degree factory the University of Phoenix. Private endowments and federal programs like the Pell grant scheme enable both public and private universities to at least be seen to maintain 'access' to a diverse student body. Yet even they seem unable to prevent the fortification of privilege amongst those social and ethnic groups most able to take the loans to gamble on their futures. The rest are likely to be driven in increasing numbers to for-profits who offer a faster, cheaper, denigrated, on-line education.

The lessons to be learnt from the American experience are that fees will continue to rise, unequal access between rich and poor will become structural to the system, and the for-profit sector will grow. Buckingham University, once the only for-profit private in the entire UK, may well become the model. In July, the Minister responsible for higher education, David Willetts, made BPP (now owned by the University of Phoenix the largest online for profit in the US) the second for-profit capable of granting degrees in the UK. With Obama's administration accusing Phoenix and co for using public funds and federally guaranteed student loans to leverage more private debt from students the for-profts are turning their attentions to the UK. Encouraged by David Willetts the for-profit sector awaits in the wings hungry to buy up or 'rescue' the publics that will surely fail in the years ahead.

Many politicians and university administrators present the Browne report as a reasonable response to the expansion of student numbers at a time of austerity and shrinking public budgets. Quite apart from the falsity of the choice between rising student fees or reduced numbers of students it is an argument that belies the length, depth and scale of the present crisis.

Firstly, it is not unique to England. Across Europe and the Americas students and their teachers have been protesting against the same processes: the public disinvestment of higher education, rising fees and levels of student debt, the expansion of management and administrative systems for measuring efficiency or 'excellence' of services, the quest for new fee-paying consumers online or overseas, the casualization of academic labor, the restructuring of pensions. Yet, the destruction of the public university in England is widely seen as a test-case where these processes are unraveling faster and further than anywhere else.

Secondly, the storm has been brewing for decades. There should be no wistful nostalgia for a once pure public university. In the nineteenth century the great 'redbrick' provincial universities were founded on the alliance between industry and ivy. In the post-war period a good deal of academic research served a decolonizing state uneasily placed in the cold war arms race as the student protests of the late 1960s recognized. It was hardly news then when in 1970 Edward Thompson railed against the erosion of intellectual life and academic governance by the captains of local industry that ran Warwick University, Ltd. And, of course, despite the faux radicalism of the new universities that enabled the system to expand after the Robbins Report of 1963, universities remained the preserve of a privileged elite charged with running the welfare state with just 457,000 students in 1971 – 14% of the age group.

If the public university had always been a faustian bargain with industry and the state the rules of the game certainly began to change decisively during the 1980s when I was a student. First came the effective freeze on hiring following the Lawson budget cuts of 1981. In 1993 when I was appointed to teach at the Department that had taught me it was the first permanent appointment in over a decade. Next came the stripping of the student maintenance grants I had marched unsuccessfully to protect in the mid-1980s. And then there were the infamous administrative systems for auditing the efficient use of public funds at universities by measuring the productivity of academic labor: research outputs by the Research Assessment Exercise from 1989, teaching by the Quality Assurance Agency in 1993 renamed the Teaching Quality Assessment in 1997. One consequence of this, consistent with the merging of the former polytechnic sector in 1992, was the growing incentives on a frequently dwindling and increasingly casualized labor force to admit more students and teach ever larger classes. Inevitably these auditing systems not only greatly increased the amount of time academics spent talking or writing about the research or teaching they would do if they only had the time to do it. It also catalyzed the staggering growth of management personnel.

New Labour only made things worse. Faced with the systematic under-funding of the universities, the expansion of student numbers (funding per student fell 40% from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s), and the decline in real terms of academic salaries, they answered the call of the last official review of the funding of higher education handed from one government to the other – the Dearing Report. If Dearing enabled the introduction of a £1,000 for tuition (and the final abolition of the maintenance grant in 1999), by 2006 it had increased to a variable rate up to £3,000. The final indignity came with the shift from the RAE measurement of academic's research productivity – which, in the name of generating 'output' had arguably produced a great deal of increasingly specialized and unexciting publications – to a concern with its utility or 'impact' under the absurdly named Research Excellence Framework from 2008. Unsurprisingly, as universities now answered to the Department of Business, Skills and Innovation, impact was measured in increasingly narrow and economistic terms.

Before rushing to join the denunciations of our short-sighted and philistine politicians we have to accept that no-one within the English university sector emerges from this process with much dignity. Administrators have grown fat, plumping up their personnel, enlarging their office and buildings, as well as inflating their salaries. Most damagingly they meekly accepted the economistic logics that drove the auditing of productivity and were naive enough to believe that the introduction of fees would supplement, not replace, state funding. They have turned away from the public they are supposed to serve in the quest for new 'markets': professional schools, overseas students, and creation of empires with institutions that franchise their degrees.

The Last Professors of the public university have hardly fared better. They have been only too content to learn and internalize the new rules of the game in the name of self-advancement. I was one of the new breed of entrepreneurial academics who had only ever worked in this system. I quickly learnt that research grants came to those who spoke whatever language the research councils were speaking in, that one had to recruit postgraduates to generate income, that quantity not quality of publications was the measure of scholarly productivity. Those who went on research leave or won big grants for research projects were happy to hire replacements and assistants on short-term contracts. At the opposite end others seemed content to become stars, to play musical chairs as institutions competed for prestige through big names with long CVs of publications, and to see their professorial salaries climb into the stratosphere in the name of their new market value.

The past twelve months has seen many wake up from this bad dream. As respected individuals, programs and Departments – all festooned in the baubles of research excellence and prestige indicators - have been cut students and their teachers have mobilized. There have been marches, protests, online petitions, teach-ins and occupations. These struggles have been very local – at Sussex, Middlesex, King's College, etc – but those involved were in conversation with or at least virtually connected to protests elsewhere in Berlin, Berkeley and Buenos Aires. It has been on these front-lines that the defense of the public university has begun to be articulated. And it has been the targeting of the arts and humanities in the cuts that has made it possible.

The humanities, along with the arts and even the interpretive social sciences, have become the true test of the public value of higher education. As the recession grips market models of utility and efficiency have surely been exposed as a dangerous fallacy so this is a good moment to re-articulate the purpose and role of humanities and social sciences in ways that justify renewed public investment in them. We could have expected more from those like the British Academy or Arts and Humanities Research Board that institutionally represent the humanities in the UK. Instead, they have effectively caught themselves in arguments about economic impact and the capacity to aid national economic recovery that they are doomed to lose (see the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Leading the World and the British Academy's The Public Value of the Humanities). We should not be surprised then that the Browne Report recommends the complete withdrawal of public funding for the teaching of the arts, humanities and social sciences in contrast to the STEM subjects that will continue to be supported.

The defense of public universities is intricately tied to arguments that can establish the public value of the humanities. We need to get beyond the hand-wringing of those who believe only philistines require the humanities to be justified just as much as the meek reproduction of the government's own vocabularies of impact and value. We can and should remind the world that it is our classes that students want to take. Despite a decade of the rhetorical marginalization of our disciplines in the UK as not relevant there are more studying in the arts, humanities and social sciences (1,073,465 in 2008/9) than in the STEM subjects (829,115) and they are growing at a faster rate (a 28% increase since 2001/2 as opposed to 20% increase for STEM). Indeed, in all likelihood, the arts, humanities and socials sciences are cross-subsidizing the more expensive STEM fields that teach fewer students in more resource heavy infrastructures and laboratories.

Why then do we face increased demand from students for the arts, humanities and social sciences? There is no one reason why students take these classes and we do not need a one-size fits all justification of their public value. There are for sure those that rightly view these subject areas as helping them prepare for the world of work without necessarily providing a clear career trajectory in the social field or the knowledge and culture industries. Students recognize that even vocational training can not ensure life-long careers any longer. Instead they require a set of skills – of critical thought and analysis, of reading and digesting materials quickly, of making presentations and convincing arguments across a range of media – that equip them for a flexible labor market in which they may work across multiple sectors.

We need, however, not stop at these instrumental ends. We should be gratified to recognize that students are no less concerned with becoming citizens of the world. They realize that the humanities provide them with not just an education in the issues and problems that face our global society but the forms of analysis that allow us to connect our particular local experiences to sometimes global processes. They also provide the language training necessary for us to understand the perspectives of other cultures. No less importantly, given the democratic deficit and seemingly growing disenchantment with our political system, the humanities teach our students the critical skills they require to become active and valued citizens of our democratic life. Often they teach them that it is possible to think of themselves in new ways, to discover a new identity and to forge around it a politics they share with others that challenges and enriches our democracy.

Finally, the humanities, like the arts and social sciences, offer us the opportunity to think otherwise. In an age in which the financialization of everyday life appears to demand an economic value is attached to everything we need to be reminded that this was not always the case. The humanities speak to different systems of value, different orders of pleasure and enjoyment, that we can all enjoy – of imagination, beauty, laughter and wonder. It is these qualities afterall that make us fully human, that enable us to appreciate what is unique about our own culture as well as what it is we hold in common with the rest of humanity.

A good deal is at stake. We must defend the vision of a publicly funded university able to support classes in subjects that do not generate economic benefits. This is not the measure of who we are or who we want to become.

James Vernon (University of California, Berkeley)

This article first appeared on the Inside Higher Education website on 27 October 2010.

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Valuing the Humanities

A panel discussion organised by the British Philosophical Association with:

Martha Nussbaum (Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and
Ethics, University of Chicago)

Lord Rees of Ludlow (President of the Royal Society, Astronomer Royal, Master
of Trinity College Cambridge)

Richard Smith (Former editor, British Medical Journal; Director, Ovations
Institute)

James Ladyman (Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol; co-editor,
British Journal of the Philosophy of Science)

Mark Lawson (BBC Journalist, Presenter Front Row, and Writer.)

Friday 17 December, 2.30-5.00pm
Hong Kong Lecture Theatre, Clement House,
London School of Economics, Aldwych
Followed by a reception in the Senior Common Room

All Welcome

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'The Two Cultures' Fifty Years On

As part of the event, WHY HUMANITIES? Onora O'Neill gave the following talk
on 4 November 2010, in Senate House, London. You can find Onora O'Neill's speech here:

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/11/onora-oneill-the-two-cultures-fifty-years-on
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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.

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