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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University
The UK’s universities are beleaguered and besieged. Redundancies continue to be announced. Cardiff, Dundee, Edinburgh, Kent, Queen’s Belfast, Sheffield; the list goes on and on. Perhaps 10,000 jobs will go in this academic year, and that’s just the beginning.
Governments of both parties have allowed an intense crisis to gain so much speed and power that it now resembles a tsunami, unstoppable without an emergency rescue operation and then a huge programme of remedial work on universities’ financial defences.
Almost everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. For one thing, there is just not enough cash in the system to make it run properly. The real value of tuition fees in England has fallen by more than a third since 2012, and funding elsewhere in the UK is no better.
There is little sign of any cavalry on the horizon. The increase in universities’ national insurance contributions has more than eaten up the recent tiny rise in annual fees. Recent changes to visa rules have made it more difficult to attract the foreign students who pay to subsidise the whole system.
The bad behaviour of a few institutions is also squeezing the life out of everyone else. Supposedly prestigious Russell Group universities have mounted a campaign of extraordinary aggression, expanding recruitment to pull in every student they can get their hands on. Further down the league tables, everyone else has been forced into a grim scrabble for numbers.
Increasingly desperate, universities have made things even worse by taking the one-size-fits-all advice of a handful of consultancies to cut services in each department and centralise everything from recruitment to IT. They have also started to drop subjects that do not pay a huge surplus into those merged offices.
The result is a lesson in how not to manage anything: a steady culling of the productive units that actually make money (namely academic departments), and a constant increase in the cash demands of the core. As most of the university is thinned out or abolished, there are then fewer and fewer income-generating departments to support the centre. Eventually, the whole edifice will collapse.
Scottish and Welsh governments have been forced to pump in emergency cash. That is only the thin end of a very large wedge and taxpayers will pay the eventual heavy price. It is very likely that there will be at least a handful of institutional failures, though they may be dressed up as mergers or “reorganisations”.
There is little sense or order to this academic recession. What could have been a managed retreat risks turning into a disorderly rout, as universities let people retire or move or make them redundant on the basis of who will go and who can be eased out. Without any real controls in place, the country’s research and teaching base is being hollowed out without any reference to strategy or need.
The whole mess is an uncontrolled laboratory experiment gone wrong, with all the usual safety protocols and stabilisers switched off — a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together out of all the worst bits of public policy from your nightmares.
There’s a bit of supposed free market here, but with price caps that neutralise the effect; a little bit of student consultation there, which it’s harder and harder to react to with no money; and a dribble of regulation everywhere at mostly ineffective levels. We need to put this monster out of its misery, before starting again.
Everyone knows that you can lean on your reputation and on fickle passing trade for a while. But neglect your core business — in this case, teaching home undergraduates — at your peril. That’s the disastrous strategy the UK governments have forced universities into. That is why they are failing, and will continue to fail.
