Markets in Mind: Economic Tensions in British Higher Education
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MARKETS IN MIND: ECONOMIC TENSIONS IN BRITISH HIGHER EDUCATION SEÁN HAND ||||| The article traces the emergence of the marketizing trends in UK higher education, focuses on some major government-driven instances and recent examples of this shift, and concludes by contemplating what trends beyond national control will effectively drive policy and practice in UK higher education in the near future, as universities adapt to emerging "market forces". In 1905, Bill Reid, a former Harvard athlete, for a move from undergraduate tuition being was wooed back to the campus on a salary funded entirely by government grants to a dual approaching that of the university's President, in system wherein individual tuition fees would be order to help Harvard beat Yale ... at sport. By levied, albeit supported by low-interest govern- the beginning of the twentieth century, the Uni- ment loans. 2 Commissioned in 2009 by a govern- versity of Chicago was marketing itself to ing Labour party, but reporting the following year students, and the University of Pennsylvania was to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition already running a Publicity Bureau. 1 Higher edu- government, the Browne Report had notoriously cation in its modern form is no stranger to what spent a grand total of £ 68,000 on its research we call "market" forces. However, what we can (from a research budget of merely £ 120,000), isolate here as the growing marketization of with the major part of this expenditure paying modern British higher education, implicit from for one unpublished opinion survey of students its nineteenth-century philanthropic foundations and parents that focused on how much partici- to its "plate-glass" expansion, became ideologi- pants would be willing to pay if fee payments cally explicit only in the monetarist period of the were restructured. The UK government's sub- 1980s and early 1990s, where the introduction sequent 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review of competition, performance models, quango gov- (CSR) filleted the Browne Report for its own ernance, and market-share drivers paved the way selective purposes, casually ignoring, for example, for the current scene of corporatist management the Report's inclusion of Modern Languages in a in UK universities. list of subjects it felt should be safeguarded, and ratifying a dully productivist privileging of so- FEES AND FORCES: CHANGING THE FUNDING called STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Eco- STRUCTURE OF BRITISH HIGHER EDUCATION nomics, Mathematics) in future teaching funding The 2010 Browne Report, which mentioned subvention, which overall scheduled a reduction economics thirteen times and the "vision" thing in the higher education budget of almost £ 3 bil- once, was therefore not actually effecting any lion by 2015.3 In brief, a portfolio rationalization, revolutionary change when it argued for the based on a fundamentally commercial insistence raising of limits on a fee structure already on required capability, together with a trans- introduced after the 1997 Dearing Report which, ference of cost from state to consumer, based among other recommendations, had first argued similarly on an individualization of the return on ARGUMENTE UND MATERIALIEN ZUM ZEITGESCHEHEN 84 35 S E Á N H A N D investment, engineered an incremental instru- up to what education can do for you. A core part mentalization which UK universities for almost of this pact is entirely reasonable, insofar as it two decades had ineffectually opposed, not least harks back to the aspirational and meritocratic given the conflicted loyalties of a new generation origins of the redbrick university sub-sector; of professional vice-chancellors and their manage- what has definitely changed, though, is the now ment teams. Certain post-CSR manifestos of near-total privatization of the contract, meaning outrage or entropy offered a slightly predictable that collectivist support for higher education is mix of the politics of occupation and the culture no longer unquestioningly assumed by a pater- of manicured contempt.4 Such academic publica- nalistic national governance. tions were, of course, mostly ignored by a public Deep background rationalizations for this concerned with its own atomized and more ur- social, economic, and moral change can always gent sense of financial vulnerability. Beyond the make appeal to historical analysis of a more immediate economic circumstances, though, what recent drop in funds relative to the post-Cold the change in mechanism also illustrated was War investment in university-located competi- just how far away British universities centrally tive advantage, or to sociological theories about now were from even paying lip-service to Karl hypermodernity's confusion of the arenas of Jaspers’ existential concept of the public uni- thinking and consuming, or even, when the versity, and how instead their real energies and melancholy mood really takes hold, to quasi- resources had become transferred much more on Heideggerian meditations on technologization to the task of competing privately for financial and the "catastrophe" of civilization.7 Whatever survival, sectoral position and brand develop- your corrosive theory, there is clearly now in ment in a complex quasi-market.5 place in the UK university model (in imitation of a highly partial conception of the US higher edu- FROM COLLEGIALITY TO CAPITAL: THE RISE cation world) a surely irreversible shift from state OF THE CORPORATE BRITISH UNIVERSITY to consumer, from public to private goods, and So the Humboldtian view that when uni- from an assumption of complex collegiality to versities are left to achieve their own objectives, one of complex capital. Within the university they also fulfil those of the State, but from a itself, modified dynamics of governance now much higher and effectively moral standpoint is neutralize some of the more traditional centres now largely supported only rhetorically by either of soft authority, which increasingly find them- UK universities or the British state, even though selves bypassed by strategic plans, cost centres, many in academic and ministerial positions of focus groups, away days. Some of this is senior responsibility sincerely believe that they legitimated by pointing back to the complacent continue to adhere to this mission.6 Behind the conservatism of a previous generation of senior rolling phrases and outreach images, UK uni- homo academicus, or forward to the next testing versities feel driven to engage more and more instance of quasi-darwinian selection. By the corporately in amateurish versions of A & M, same token, research, knowledge, students and searching for alliances that will improve perceived teaching are now no longer merely sine qua non clout or impress the "stakeholder", or tinkering elements of the university, but have of them- with pricing propositions, or obsessing over rank- selves also become the signifying plumage of ings, citations and the market-geared statistics market strut and display. The self-selecting elite relating to employability and graduate salaries. universities known as the "Russell Group" there- All of this bureaucracy and dependency, grown fore emphasize their research (which is always ironically in the name of autonomy, in turn gen- "world-class") as an exclusive property that erates its own burgeoning para-academic man- associatively will enhance their students' even- agerial cadre, and comes to endorse subcon- tual purchasing power. Another group of univer- sciously a sense that university attendance has sities, termed the "Million + Group", looking become less participatory support for civilization to valorize its ex-polytechnic brand, highlights itself and more a purchaseable careerist advan- "knowledge", in alliance with "skills", as a dif- tage. Ask not what you can do for education, sign ferent form of appeal, this time to "graduate 36 ARGUMENTE UND MATERIALIEN ZUM ZEITGESCHEHEN 84 MARKETS IN MIND: ECONOMIC TENSIONS IN BRITISH HIGHE R EDUCATION employability". The quasi-market that contains to increase excellence, within its "framework", these differentiations equally encourages an however any of that may be defined, the logical almost designedly amateurish use of marketing purpose must be to promote and enforce an literature, internet presences, ex-graduate diplo- increased instrumentalization of the already mats, and the like. This is essentially no different reduced amount of centrally funded research in approach from advertising for other paradox- activity. This is plainly betokened by the inclusion ical products, such as friendly banks, knowledge- in the REF of a new element termed "Impact", able cars, or food grinning with health. At the which involves adjudication of the economic and most cynical end of this phenomenon, degrees social benefits of research deemed to have taken are openly presented as commodities that can be place only during an assessment period and owned but not traded or shared, that is, as an in- beyond academia. This measurable element will vestment by the student customer in her own now generate 20 % of an overall qualitative rat- individualized capital. This idea, once accepted, ing (and no doubt more in subsequent exercises). then becomes enforced in the academy through a Pure research is logically thereby disadvantaged loop mechanism that introduces into universities relative to activities that are deemed to offer a the obligation to state in advance and monitor in more demonstrable return on investment. Since standardized (and standardizing) format