The streets of London will soon be bustling with architecture students starting their first year at UCL’s Bartlett faculty. Armed with illuminating quotations from great authorities they will inspect, for example, the Nelson staircase at Somerset House, marvel at its elegant, soaring wit, discover for themselves its moral purpose, and never take staircases for granted again. At the same time, University of Westminster architecture undergraduates will seethe under and over the city, mapping where global warming will flood it and creating apocalyptic, realistic flood defences. Last year a similar project won every prize going. The head of the English department at Roehampton, Jenny Hartley, (the author of a highly praised book on Dickens’s house for fallen women) will organise reading groups in prisons. War studies students at King’s College, London will spend their second year gaming every battle in the second world war from both sides to see if they can get them to come out differently, while history undergraduates at Queen Mary prepare questions to put to the cabinet secretary when they meet him. The dentistry department at King’s has invented an online course that is managed in the developing world by students and teachers—and is changing the subject. Meanwhile, politics undergraduates at Hull prepare for placements with local politicians.
Doesn’t that all sound like important, mind-expanding fun? It is a tiny, biased fragment of the thrilling things happening to students in a university department near you. This is what universities ought to do: grow people. Those courses depend on much-maligned “research,” in that they are the product of passionate knowledge and the compulsion to communicate it. In each case the students are not merely handed a bundle of learning, and told to ingest in a lump like a python, but sent away to think for themselves and be inspired.
The QS world university rankings published in early September ranked Cambridge as the top university in the world and Oxford, UCL, Imperial in the top ten. What an achievement. British institutions as diverse as Goldsmiths, a tiny college set in a gritty urban place but with a worldwide reputation, and the University of the West of England, creatively serving its local community, are besieged by students from home and abroad. Universities are a significant export business—in 2007-08 students from outside the EU brought in £1.9bn—and our future depends on them. Of course we must be alert for opportunities to improve our universities, but nevertheless it does not look like some sad, failing sector. You might have thought we would be proud of something that punches way above its weight in terms of money spent.
Far from it. Universities have already been squeezed and are braced for large reductions in the October spending review. Business Secretary Vince Cable recently gave a speech saying that only “commercially useful” science should be government-funded, an attitude that reflects a sour distrust of universities. Why haven’t people risen up to protest that universities are dear to them and marched to protect them? Why, when middle-class parents leave no stone unturned in plotting university entrance for their bunnies, haven’t they been louder in their defence? Why haven’t students been fonder?
One reason that universities are not thus cherished is that they have been transformed over the past 30 years. And, as one distinguished vice chancellor told me: “Everybody is interested in universities, everybody has a view of them but no one much understands how they work.” The danger is that policy will be made (as in part seems the case already) based on what people are reading in the news.
The prevailing view is that “too many people go to university” (today, 31 per cent of British adults aged 19-64 have a degree or higher); that there are “too many universities” and that too many of them do often pointless “research.” It is said that the idea of a university has been diluted—by rapid growth, by the old polytechnics straying out of their narrow remit of practicality and by John Major’s policy of renaming them all universities in 1992. The last was a “big mistake” according to Nick Butler who, as a special adviser to Gordon Brown, helped set up the Browne review (headed by John Browne, the former head of BP) which will in October report its recommendations on university funding and how the student contribution should be made. But there is a bigger question of what—and who—university is for.
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Butler told me he wants to “set the universities free of state dependency and dull uniformity,” echoing the claim that they have become too similar. He argues that “you would not attempt to rate all restaurants on one scale—nor should you universities,” and that this is a false kind of egalitarianism. Universities teach different people different things and almost everyone agrees we need more cheap and cheerful US-style community colleges, which offer shorter courses to students who might not otherwise get the chance to go to university and which focus on local needs.
There is another criticism: that the expansion of higher education has, conversely, been too inegalitarian, as the middle classes have done disproportionately well out of it. There is also some disquiet that our universities are not teaching the kind of courses we need. Finally, there is deep hostility to—and mistrust of—the direction that the Research Assessment Exercise gives to academic research (of which more later).
David Willetts, the minister for universities and science, is appreciated by universities because he is interested in what they do and is willing to go out and talk to them. Where does he stand on all this? (For more on this, read 'Prospect roundtable: Blame it on the baby boomers'.) Like Nick Butler he believes in more radical diversity, more “world-class universities” as well as teaching-only colleges. He aims to protect the “stem subjects” (the sciences), make students happier, prioritise teaching, and cut costs drastically—perhaps by as much as 35 per cent over four years. Gosh. Butler similarly talked to me of fewer universities, two-year degrees and the challenge of maintaining and extending needs-blind entrance (which means admitting students on ability, not means to pay). Yet our richer universities do not have the endowments that US institutions have and there is real anxiety that while the very rich and the very poor will be able to go to university, it is the modestly-incomed families that will be priced out of expensive institutions, or even worse, expensive subjects like medicine.
The fact that universities do not speak with one clear or convincing voice makes it hard for them to hold off the reformers. They have so far presented a united front but that will not hold after the spending review in October, when a dog-eat-dog battle will probably break out. They do, of course, compete with each other for students, as I noticed recently when a brochure for Leeds—a large, successful university—dropped through a friend’s letterbox for her son. It was dismayingly preoccupied with drinking, music and nightlife, while downgrading the information about the courses. I was embarrassed by it. It was no way to attract young people—who in my experience are all potential idealists—into interesting lives.
Universities have also failed to articulate any sense of national purpose or responsibility—even though much of what they do enriches our private and collective lives immeasurably. It took the Queen of all people to ask academic economists why they hadn’t seen the credit crunch coming. And why haven’t universities come up with an imaginative solution to the new youth unemployment? What should we do about the long tail of young people who are left outside the system (and for whom university might not be the right place)?
Universities have used fee-paying foreign students to increase their incomes. The (occasionally indecent) dash for these—what Pat Loughrey, warden of Goldsmiths, called “the Shanghai gravy train business model”—has been exciting in some ways but also destabilising, and we ought to be concerned with some of its impact. What do foreign students need? What kind of curriculum will best educate them? In some disciplines, like maths or biochemistry, that may be a stupid question, but in subjects such as arts, economics and communications, we should be more thoughtful if we are not merely to exploit them.
And in the mêlée, universities have often failed to rethink what British students need. What curriculum is right for a multicultural society which needs to forge common identities? Some subjects, such as English and history, attract few foreign students—yet they are of great national importance. So how do we support them without all that foreign cash? And do we really want universities that are dominated by foreign elites rather than being forcing houses for our own future? Despite the easy encomiums about globalisation, what we need universities to teach our citizens is different from what many foreign students from very different places need. Neither question has been addressed. It is the reimagining of our common duties and pleasures that universities need also to dwell on.
There are clearly things wrong with the status quo—but the “new radicals,” Willetts and Butler, face some tricky trade-offs. Clearly the key is funding. Willetts says in his Prospect interview: “If we want to have a large number of people going to university, and if we want to finance a reasonable quality of education, then we have to look at the ways in which graduates in one way or another make a contribution after they have graduated—and we await the Browne report before making final decisions on that.” Although it is unlikely the coalition will go for a graduate tax which, apart from giving the money to the treasury rather than universities, would push abroad too many of the graduates our economy needs. So it is very likely to permit a large, and variable, hike in fees.
Yet we already have a model for letting fees rip—and we can see that its consequences are discriminatory. If you are a Prospect reader it is likely that you—or your children—will not just do an undergraduate degree but a Masters as well. An economics MA at LSE, for example, costs £19,000. There is no state funding for Masters degrees yet they are becoming a key gateway to top professional jobs—but only middle-class young people can afford to do them. As foreign students flock to Britain to take these degrees and top out their education, MAs have become a kind of finishing school. These degrees are a vital part of keeping departments afloat and can be a delight to teach—but their purposes are muddled and their impact discriminatory. They are also the only way into further academic research (you cannot do a PhD without doing a Masters first), so they act as a filter for future academics. Some departments use a portion of their “research” money to fund bursaries to correct this distortion. But it’s a rum business.
Willetts wants to “incentivise” teaching—a laudable aim, but I worry that he, Browne, Butler and others think that Oxbridge tutorials are what good teaching is. Going to university is a rite of passage and students don’t perhaps always bring the dedication to it that they used to. Universities have grown because that is what government made them do. It has brought many new people to exciting courses. While setting students’ minds alight in this way is lovely (and utterly demanding), handcrafted teaching is expensive and government spending has not kept pace. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, spending per student in higher education only increased from just over £4,000 in 1997-98 to little more than £4,500 this academic year (excluding research). Over a similar period, there was an increase of 20 per cent in the number of 18 to 19 year olds going to university. Oxbridge spends about £9,000 each year more per student on top of what it gets from government and fees. Last year in my department at Westminster it was possible for one senior member of staff to have accumulated 75 individual students with whom they were supposed to have a personal tutorial relationship, from first year undergraduates to PhD students. Yet universities have produced important and creative ways of dealing with large numbers of students—remember those courses I mentioned at the start.
A strange beast called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has also reshaped universities. The idea was to provide incentives for scholarship by reviewing the contribution of departments to research and allocating new money to those that did it well. Now everybody seems to hate the RAE.
And it is flawed—one of its invidious effects has been to produce disciplinary narcissism. Because everybody approves of science, that was the model ridiculously applied across all disciplines, so “key journals” and “peer review,” which matter in science, were advocated everywhere. But in the humanities and social sciences, a different approach is needed; books ought to matter a great deal more than articles, and writing for a popular audience is important in these disciplines. Naturally enough, given the incentives, people began creating “journals” and untold forests were felled and filled with reams of dull research. The RAE has tied young scholars down by Lilliputian strings into ever more finicky theoretical debates just at the stage when they should be thinking big important things. It is publishing for the shelves.
Worse, across a whole range of disciplines the RAE has set academics off on a mad “theoretical” and “global” hunt. As Willetts points out in his Prospect roundtable discussion, the best way to score highly in a research excellence exercise if you’re a business school academic in Britain is to get published in a peer-reviewed business studies journal in the US. But these journals often focus on sophisticated statistical techniques applied to US industrial sectors, so the system is pulling our researchers away from studying the British takeover market or the Midlands engineering industry. We should be helping the academy turn back to the world it lives in.
Nevertheless, the RAE did expose ossified and second-rate departments (even in grand places) and subject areas. Previously when the professor of Very Important Widgets told his boss how world class he was, the vice chancellor had no reason not to believe him. Not now. The RAE has also revealed exciting work going on in unexpected places. It demonstrated that “quality” and “originality” were not predicated on snobbish hierarchies. In my experience academic innovators—great scholars and people who see new worlds—often emerge from particular departments, and their universities can either nurture or murder them. Fostering them can often be in tension with supporting the all-round star quality of the “world class university,” because those are not necessarily the places where such innovators are found.
Willetts should be careful to preserve the most important thing the RAE has done—to allow universities to flower on the basis of their own initiative and to develop in unexpected directions. Sheffield, for example, was a narrow, industrially-based technical university. The research money that its humanities departments won for themselves by creative, hard research work has helped it change into a vigorous place with the synergies gained from a whole range of disciplines—politics, literature and architecture—which make it far more fitting for the new city, from where the old industries have almost all gone. In particular it gave the humanities, and some new disciplines such as design, development studies and communications, a chance to grow. Much of this research money is now likely to disappear, as it is in Britain’s internationally famous art and fashion schools, which stimulate many contemporary industries from the media to fashion—but they offer no “stem” science subjects to protect them from the blizzard of cuts.
Willetts has another problem, shared across Whitehall, which is how to find a new language and practice of accountability. Universities are monitored because people did not quite trust them. In an endless attempt to specify what they ought to do well, vast paper trails of audits and great offices of audit responsibility gathered around academics like flies. We swim in target soup. Of course, academics and universities ought to be held accountable. But all too often what these things attempted to measure, such as research value or current “impact,” disappeared in the attempt to specify them.
So why do we need universities, and what might the new radicals be in danger of losing sight of? Universities are on the frontline of creating new citizens, and one of the things they ought to do more is discuss difficult ideas. Uncomfortable arguments keep democracy alive. Although reducing universities to the useful engines of the economy is not a desirable goal, private industry spends too little on research and development and the universities remain the great powerhouses of scientific research. A study by Imperial College found that £3.5bn a year spent on publicly-funded research generates an additional annual output of £45bn in British companies.
The danger is that the new radicals may re-fossilise old snobberies. The upgraded polytechnics are the places mainly attended by young people who are the first in their families to university. Universities, at their best, deal in the effervescent magic of summoning up something greater than the intellectual sum of the parts, they are huge engines—if run excitingly—of hopeful improvement and social mobility. Naturally, they will have to change, but some of the reforms should be left to the really good vice chancellors. Too many are grey, male managers who don’t love the core business.
Willetts does not feel like a Gradgrind—the headmaster from Dickens’s Hard Times who is only concerned with facts and figures. In the novel, Gradgrind is contrasted unfavourably with Sissy Jupe, his pupil. It is not so much that her view of the world is more attractive, but her rational appreciation of things is more adequate than his narrow utilitarianism. Similarly, one might conclude that narrow philistinism is not in the national interest. Willetts wants to make universities concentrate on teaching people more lovingly—a fine corrective, although attention is expensive stuff. Finding ways of financing universities is his central problem, but he ought to be careful not to throw the imaginative babies out with the bathwater.
And governments ought to be as wary of picking intellectual winners as they are of their ability to choose industries. You have to follow what the public needs—which is sometimes different from what the public wants—and not pursue institutional self-preservation, but focus ruthlessly on creativity, imagination, ambition. And fun, Mr Willetts. Interesting is always the best fun.
HOW MUCH DOES HIGHER EDUCATION COST BRITAIN?
£12.9bn Amount spent on higher education by the government in the fiscal year 2009-10, out of a total spend of £669bn.
2.3 per cent The increase in real terms of spending on higher education from 1997 to 2010.
£10,057 Amount spent annually per undergraduate by academic institutions in 2007, including teaching and research.
£3,290 The maximum annual tuition fee that universities are allowed to charge British students.
£7,000 The approximate minimum cost of student living per year.
£25,421 The household income cap above which students are not eligible for tuition-fee grants.
£1.9bn The amount brought in by foreign students outside the EU in 2007-08, an increase of 313 per cent since 1994-95. Fees range from £8,000 to £25,800 depending on the course.
£24,700 The projected average student debt of those entering higher education in 2010, an increase of 5.4 per cent on the previous year.
£449m The cuts to higher education announced in February—a more than 5 per cent reduction nationally. Further cuts of about 5 per cent a year for five years are expected.
