University renewal: “The times they are a-changing”?

For three months in the early part of this year, many British universities were in turmoil. Not the turmoil we now treat as normal—the ‘restructurings’ so often the first resort of institutional leaders. Or rather, not that only. In fact, it has been uproar rather than mere turmoil. For decades, university teachers have responded to successive assaults in cowed silence. Politicians and the press have preached the gospel of globalisation: markets as inevitable, technological advance as inexorable, flexibility as panacea. In the process, academic staff—teachers and researchers—have been dismissed by the thousand to cover costs; subjects have been reinvented as budgetary units, to be realigned, grown or downsized at whim; intellectual integrity, disciplinary knowledge, professional relationships, personal careers and lives have come a very distant second to the transient needs of financial viability and reputation. Academics have whinged and whimpered, but on the whole gallows humour, rather than active resistance, has been the genre of choice.

Now, for the first time, ordinary teaching and research staff, and administrators, at British universities have said ‘No’ to managerial assaults of this kind. They have stood up, they have been counted, and they have won signal victories in two battles. In the first, across all the older universities (those established before 1992), after 14 days on strike, union members overthrew an attempt to massively reduce academic staff pensions.¹ In the second, a union general meeting overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence in the Open University’s vice-chancellor (or executive head), forcing him to resign.

The Open University is, of course, at the heart of this journal’s concerns. Founded in the 1969, it provides courses of part-time study for adults. Since then over two million students have enrolled in its courses. Over the years, we have carried many articles about it and its students. Open universities across the world have been inspired by—some even modelled on—it, such as the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, and Hong Kong’s Open University. The UK OU’s current crisis arises against a complex political backdrop. Over the last decade, despite warm words about ‘the knowledge economy’ and skills, UK Government policy has marched arm-in-arm with a head-long collapse in adult participation in education and training. As Alan Tuckett pointed out in these pages just over a year ago:

Two million adult learners in further education have been lost since 2004, (from 4,600,000 to 2,650,000 adults) and provision is reducing dramatically. … The situation for adults in higher education is no better: tripling of undergraduate student fees has led to a 30 percent drop in Open University student numbers, along with a marked decline in other part-time higher education participation by mature students … at a time when higher education as a whole is growing significantly. (Tuckett, 2017, pp. 230–231)

More generally, committed to economic orthodoxy, Britain’s Government has been unable to escape the decade-long great recession hangover, while the decision to leave the European Union (‘Brexit’) presents massive policy overload, not to mention adverse economic consequences.

The university pensions crisis, of course, has arisen in much the same political and economic environment. The higher education background, explored previously in this journal (Holford, 2014; Holmwood, 2014) and elsewhere (Collini, 2012, 2017; Holmwood, 2011; McGettigan, 2013), has included shifting the financial burden of higher education from the state to students (or their families)—the pill made a little less bitter by a state-supported (and dubiously sustainable) loan scheme; a more liberal regulatory climate, to generate ‘innovation’ and competition in the higher education ‘market’, and encourage ‘new providers’; and a new ‘Office for Students’ to oversee ‘quality’, distribute what remains of public funding, and control the fees ‘providers’ can charge.²

This remarkable realignment of official policy—from higher education as public to private good (Holmwood, 2016) did generate some public debate. Minor changes were made to the draft legislation as a result. But British universities themselves have been silent as lambs. One of the achievements of twentieth-century British politics was a recognition of universities’ role in public education: this was the achievement of R.H. Tawney and Raymond Williams, of the polytechnics, of the adult education movement, of the Open University—among many others. Free and publicly engaged universities are central to the maintenance of democratic debate, and of democracy itself. Yet their leaders today—more worried about their own institutions’ reputations than the sector as a whole—seem to prefer damping down discussion. Few, if any, vice chancellors spoke up against the legislation, their attitude perhaps illustrated in a comment by a former president of Universities UK (UUK: the rebranded committee of vice-chancellors and principals). Referring to the organisation’s silence over a scandalous appointment to the new Office for Students board in January 2018, he said: ‘It’s very difficult for an organisation to be critical of the people who regulate them. It’s like saying “We don”t like the referee”.³

There might be a case for vice chancellors themselves ‘keeping mum’ in order to allow room for discussion within their institutions, or across society, about the changes. There is little or no sign that they did so. This is hardly surprising: they have, of course, risen to the top by ‘playing the game’; and the rules of the game tell them to focus on the relatively narrow range of measured outputs (teaching formally enrolled students, publishing research in peer-reviewed journals, and so forth) endorsed by the state. Promoting public debate—public education—is neither measured nor funded.

Whether ordinary academic staff shared their leaders’ views was not so clear. They have, it is true, long acquiesced in the ‘new normal’ (Anderson, 2008). But does passivity, and ability to follow the rules, imply belief in them? Some cynics—Foucauldians and ageing lefties alike—have imagined teaching and research assessment as inescapable technologies of government. The strike has proved them profoundly mistaken. It also came as a shock to most of British universities top leaders.

The first sign of this mistake came with the strike ballot. Perhaps because of their closeness to students, academics have generally been averse to striking. Moreover, recent legislation has made strike action extremely difficult in Britain. Since 2017, in order to call a legal strike, not only do a majority of trade union members have to vote in favour of strike action in a postal ballot, but the number voting in total must be at least half of all those eligible. In ‘important public services’—including education—at least 40 per cent of all eligible members must vote in favour. Many believed this would mean strikes became in practice impossible. In fact, across all institutions those voting averaged over 58 per cent of the membership; 88 per cent of those voting voted to strike.

What ensued was 14 days of action learning. Remarkable numbers of colleagues turned out to join the picket lines and demonstrate their support. Students—who, according to the popular wisdom, are now consumers, keen to get value-for-money in a world where they pay handsomely for their tuition—showed widespread, though by no means universal, support. But most unprecedented was that support grew as the strike continued. The growth was partly because those actively engaged organised, and showed their powers of creativity. They established picket rotas, organised braziers (the strike took place in the depth of winter, with thick snow on several days), invented and painted posters, wrote leaflets. But, as one member has written, ‘something much more profound was happening’:

It probably started from the small picket line conversations that developed between us—but which deepened as we got to know each other better. These conversations were sometimes with colleagues we didn’t know from other parts of the university, but oftentimes these were colleagues we already ‘knew’— but actually we don’t really ‘know’. It was as though we had been liberated from the often mundane chatter of institutional life, and the rushed meetings and corridor conversations to rediscover having time both with, and for, each other. It was the pensions issue that brought us together in the snow, but our conversations were much more about the university we work in, what frustrates and alienates us about the modern ‘entrepreneurial university’ and how we can both imagine, and create, something better. Perhaps the greatest irony is that it has been by taking strike action, and withdrawing our labour from our employer, that we have rediscovered real meaning in our work. (Stevenson, 2018)

At many universities, the union organised ‘teach-ins’ (because many universities made it impossible to organise them on university premises, they were often branded ‘teach-outs’). Colleagues, union members, led and contributed to ad hoc discussions and debates. At Nottingham University, for instance, topics included ‘Poetry and Protest’, ‘Labour in the rise and fall of democratic higher education’, ‘Beyond reworking: Retaking worker-control through cooperation’, ‘Activism beyond the picket line: Winning the battle of ideas’, and ‘Fees are a feminist issue: How do we reclaim teaching and learning in the neo-liberal university?’

The strike is now finished. The university employers have conceded much they originally declared impossible, ‘unsustainable’. The union has rightly hailed it as a great victory, which has changed the ‘terms of trade’ in workplace industrial relations at British universities. That is certainly true. Though the agreement was a messy compromise—in the view of some union members, too messy and too much of a compromise—the employers have learned that they cannot treat their staff as forever passive and accepting.

Of course, that people learn when on strike is hardly a new discovery—as the work of Marx, Lenin or Gramsci, not to mention more recent social movement literature, testifies (Holford, 1995). What took place in the recent British university strike, at least for those actively engaged on the picket lines, was profound and (pace Lenin (1970)) deeply political learning. (Though in the light of the recent decline of labour movements, learning even ‘trade union consciousness’ might be regarded as highly significant.) The learning, which took place through discussion and action, challenged the neoliberal idea of the university, of learning as a consumer product. The question at issue now is how far this can be developed: will we now, as university leaders no doubt hope, return to normal, to ‘business as usual’—or will the learning lead to the renewal of the university?

Time will tell. The will is clearly there—but as colleagues have discovered, after the strike there is ordinary work to be done, and the ordinary work of academics today can leave little time for changing the world. But the reimagining of the university as ‘a collegial space where we work together, make time for each other, debate ideas and push boundaries’ (Stevenson, 2018) is important not only for British universities, but for popular learning—and lifelong education—the world over.

John Holford
Steven Hodge
Marcella Milana
Richard Waller
Sue Webb

Notes

1. Strictly speaking, the dispute occurred at universities established as universities before 1992. Many of the polytechnics and colleges which were granted university status as a result of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 trace their origins back for decades, even centuries. For reasons that need not detain us here, there is a different pension scheme in ‘pre-1992’ and ‘post-1992’ universities, and changes were proposed only for the former.

2. The new regime applies in England. Higher Education in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are matters for their devolved administrations. By population, however, England dominates: according to the Office for National Statistics, of the total UK population (65.65 millions in mid-2016), 84.2 per cent lived in England, compared with 8.2 per cent Scotland, 4.7 per cent in Wales and 2.8 per cent in Northern Ireland (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2016#population-of-england-reaches-55-million; accessed 16 April 2018) .

3. In the same vein, the UUK’s chief executive had written to all vice chancellors in the midst of the media furore about the appointment, ‘I do not believe it would be in the best interests of the sector for UUK to publicly challenge this ministerial appointment’ (quoted in Fazackerley, 2018). (The appointee, a government acolyte with a predilection for offensive and sexist tweeting, was forced to resign.).