What’s happening to our universities?

Prometheus often runs debates and they attract considerable attention. In part, this is because we select contentious topics, and invite participation from those who have something to say on these topics. Many academics, writing conventional papers for conventional journals, have something to publish rather than something to say. Moreover, we allow our participants to leave behind what can be the constraints of writing for journals: our debates demand no literature reviews, no plodding explications of methodology, no surveys with supporting regressions. In their place, there is passion, supported by logic and argument. The length of the papers in the current debate suggests our authors really do have something to say. Never before has a debate filled a full issue of Prometheus.

The current debate is unbalanced. In preparing a debate, it falls to the general editor to seek out respondents as likely to disagree with the proposition paper as agree. This does not usually present problems; demonstrating that an argument is woefully inadequate or just plain wrong is a task to be relished, while making concurrence fascinating can be a struggle. ‘I agree with Nick’ is not a response that stirs. The respondents to Ben Martin’s proposition paper are all basically in agreement with him and have risen to the challenge of making consensus interesting. In a lengthy and adventurous proposition, Martin challenges respondents to pick him up on omission and inadequacy. Just occasionally they do, but always within an overall framework of concern that something is indeed very wrong with our universities.

Martin argues that universities have sacrificed their traditional collegial structure for something more efficient, for hierarchical systems that senior managers can monitor and control. And yet, this is not simply crass managerialism; the latest management methods favour flat organisation over hierarchical. Something else is afoot, but what? Stranger still is the meek acceptance of wholesale change by university academics, expressed nicely in the parable of the frog: dropped into boiling water the frog jumps out and saves itself, but if the water is heated gradually, the frog lets itself be boiled. The parable is picked up by most of our respondents as they attempt to answer the question Martin begs: just why have academics allowed themselves to be gradually enfeebled? Why has such an intelligent, knowledgeable and articulate group let itself be boiled with hardly a croak of protest?

Given the importance of this topic, not just to a few parboiled academics, but to higher education as a whole, it is surprising that no one would accept the general editor’s invitation to challenge the proposition. Dozens were offered the opportunity. There are many from whom to choose, many who trumpet the merits of universities. UK universities are regularly claimed to be ‘the best in the world’ (as are the universities of other countries). As successive universities ministers in the UK, David Willetts and Jo Johnson were both invited to contribute. They were invited more than once. Neither replied. In backing Britain’s futile attempt to remain within the European Union, Johnson (2016) boasted he had the support of ‘an academic community that delights in challenging received wisdom’, a claim Martin disputes and Johnson was unwilling or unable to defend. Also asked were those who head the agencies of higher education in the UK. They were very busy. Busiest of all, though, were the vice chancellors, far too engaged in other matters to put pen, or at least their own pen, to paper.

There is a lesson in this behaviour: it is that those who proclaim the excellence of universities do so for reasons which may have little to do with the excellence of universities. They do so to sell the university’s wares in an imperfect market; to fill the pages of glossy brochures, increasingly directed to picking the pockets of alumni; and to procure favourable coverage in the media. They do so in sound bites – largest, biggest, bestest – designed to make a favourable impression and discourage serious consideration. They do so with the banal vocabulary of the marketeer – leading, excellence, outstanding, impact, growth, performance, exciting, global, world class, yet more excellence. Why is it, asks Philip Moriarty (2015), ‘that university marketing is so tediously derivative, so mind-numbingly clichéd and, too often, so buttock-clenchingly embarrassing’? Perhaps it is because words, the very tools of the academic, are being used to batter rather than persuade, an approach unsuited to debate. There was purpose to the seclusion of the quad, even the isolation of the ivory tower: they provided the peace and security required to think, to listen, to debate, to learn. They kept the barbarians at bay.

Thomas Docherty and Connor Woodman both hale from Warwick University. They have apparently never met and neither knew that the other was contributing to this debate. Docherty is a senior academic at Warwick, Woodman a student: both think there is something amiss in our universities. Docherty’s experience is notorious, of course. He was recently suspended for over a year for ‘inappropriate body language’ and ‘sighing’. Your general editor – himself suspended from Sheffield University for asking an inadmissible question at his department’s away day – cannot but empathise. Docherty argues that growth in what universities do is no longer a means to an end, but the end itself. Competition among universities allows some to grow more or faster than others. To triumph in this competition, the university must offer products compatible with market demand for a compliant, unquestioning workforce. There is little market demand for critical, querying individuals. There is even less within the university, where institutional values – brand values – are not to be questioned. Universities, argues Docherty, are agents of the state, preparing their students for a life of intellectual servitude. They have no place for academic freedom and anyway, as the water warms, the frogs soon forget what academic freedom was.

Connor Woodman associates the extinction of the democratic university with neoliberalism, and provides examples from his own university. How could he not? Woodman can have no personal experience of the student disturbances at Warwick in the 1970s, of the world in which E.P. Thompson edited Warwick University Ltd (1970). Both, Woodman (2016) notes, have been just about expunged from the university’s current accounts of its first half century. And yet, enough resistance to commercialisation survives to remind the present generation of students that past cohorts expected more from a university than a 2.1 and a job, and that universities once offered more than a brand.

Woodman sees the university response to Prevent, the UK government’s programme to sniff out and deter extremism in the education system – and thereby prevent the growth of terrorism – as one example of managerial duplicity. Though Ben Martin does not actually mention Prevent, several of the response papers discuss it. Prevent is really directed at primary and secondary education, but university managers have seized the opportunity it offers to enforce compliance. Mark McGovern argues that universities over-comply, and not just because they wish to play safe and show willing, but also because they have an interest in suppressing dissent. Extreme ideas of any sort have been outlawed on many campuses, debate prohibited. Campuses are to be safe places, students protected from opinions that may upset them (see Heath, 2015). The student experience, measured (and manipulated) in student satisfaction surveys, is to be unremittingly pleasant. It is no surprise that the area in which thinking is most stifled by university interpretation of Prevent is critical research and inquiry into political violence, terrorism and extremism.

McGovern focuses almost entirely on Prevent, observing that university managers exploit the programme to bring unruly academics into line. But he goes further, much further: if the university is not a place of dispute and debate in which ideas are tried and tested, it is nothing. University managers do not share this view. They have often come to understand the demands of business from their own experience of the university as a business, a place that has no time for people and ideas that do not fit. They assume business demand is simply for employees who will satisfy the requirements of performance measures, who will passively accept ideas that sink down from the top. In fact, businesses need regular shocks to their systems, their managers need exposure to challenging new thinking. Without these, the UK syndrome lies in wait: the ‘best universities in the world’ expected to prop up a low wage, low productivity economy.

In response to market demand for yet more managers, management schools have experienced unrelenting growth and now dwarf all other university departments. Management academics – all pulling together, singing from the same hymn sheet, and marching in mindless metaphor to the same drumbeat – have not exactly championed critical thinking in the university. To mix yet another metaphor, the management school may well have been the Judas goat for whole ponds of academic frogs: come on in, the water’s fine.

McGovern extends his observations to university ethics committees. From their original concern to protect the privacy of individuals participating in medical research, they have extended their responsibilities to ensuring that no university research, even student research, poses reputational risk to the university (Hedgecoe, 2016). A requirement of the sciences that participating individuals give informed consent effectively becomes censorship in the social sciences when approval must be obtained from the source of any attributed thought. In the arts, it is a nonsense, especially in history, where much information is from and about individuals long dead.

John Holmwood insists on the relevance of context. What was the traditional university to do in a world of creeping and then galloping neoliberalism? Never and nowhere was supporting the ivory tower an option. For decades, the ivory tower has symbolised unacceptable concentration of power and prestige. In contrast, the modern accessible, competitive, businesslike university is portrayed as reducing inequality. It’s spin of course. To be sure, the traditional university was inadequate in that only an elite enjoyed what it offered, but its replacement is hardly egalitarian. The neoliberal university sells its product to those who can afford it, thereby exacerbating inequality. This is not a truth universally acknowledged, especially in institutions where actual critics are punished and potential critics slowly boiled. Holmwood ends his response rather nicely: ‘A truly sustainable higher education system would be one that addresses its own role in the reproduction of inequality and, in doing so, finds its way back to values that define the university of the future’.

Ken Coates adds a Canadian dimension to the debate. A neoliberal world expects universities to respond to market demand, but the market fails dismally with things that are difficult to define and hard to measure. The market looks to numbers for assistance. And so, the neoliberal university quantifies. University managers have captured what the university does in a bewildering array of performance measurements and targets, indicators and league tables. Their purpose is to sell the university, not least to its own academics. In an email sent earlier this year, the new vice chancellor of Warwick University assured staff that ‘Warwick is riding higher than at any time in its history, according to every league table at which you might look’ (Croft, 2016).

In the promotion of the university, accuracy supplants veracity. University managers massage the numbers so that their own university is near the top of some table or other. Semmelweis University is ranked 2nd in Hungary and 532nd in the world according to URAP (whatever URAP may be); Hull University boasts that it has leapt five places up national league tables (from 52nd to 47th); Surrey that it is ranked 42nd and 49th worldwide for its proportion of international staff and students respectively; and the University of Bedfordshire that is 28th in the UK in hospitality subjects, including sport, tourism, leisure and recreation.

Quantifying academic performance has a purpose beyond promotion of the university. As Laurie Taylor (2016) hints in his Poppletonian proposal for a CEF (a cranial excellence framework), it’s all to do with subservience:

… as academics had so readily endorsed the dubious measurements of research quality in the REF [research excellence framework] and were apparently about to follow a similarly acquiescent path in the case of the new TEF [teaching excellence framework], it was difficult to see how they could possibly object to a system of measurement that had been pioneered by so many distinguished 19th-century phrenologists.

University managers, even those who were once academics, can be cowed by academic expertise. They cannot compete with the authority of the expert, but the playing field is levelled when academic expertise is reduced to numbers. Once quantified, academic performance can be managed. Those publishing in top journals or bringing in most research money can be rewarded, and the heat turned up on those who do not.

Margaret Thornton provides an Australian perspective. She echoes a theme important to Coates, suggesting that vice chancellors may have been as boiled as the university’s academics. Most have been spineless in standing up to government or any other stakeholder. Many have become whatever the occasion demands, chief executive one moment, academic the next; salesman hawking the university’s product and then academic guaranteeing its quality; leader commanding the salary of a CEO, but a humble scholar too. Cognitive dissonance must pose problems (Woodman, 2016). Thornton looks beyond the commercial advantages of this duality to its strategic and tactical benefits, vice chancellors being held to account by neither internal reporting procedures nor external shareholders. As autocrat walking on water, the vice chancellor is prone to forgetting that even in the private sector, the university is at the mercy of government. Governments are fickle. The response of Warwick University (2016) to the UK government’s recent Green paper on higher education is perhaps more brazen than wise:

Whilst universities do provide benefit to society in the most general terms, the ‘right’ of the public at large to have an interest in the ongoing contribution of universities to the wider public good is unclear, given the diminishing contribution of the public purse to the sustainability of UK higher education institutions.

Thornton is less sanguine than Coates that universities still play a useful public role. She, too, finds universities ridden with managers determined to stamp out dissent at every level, managers who have come to see their role not as helping academics, but as telling them what to do. Non-academic staff numbers now exceed those of academic staff in UK universities, their ranks swollen not by people in clerical and manual posts, but by managers, professional and technical staff. Thornton finds that committees of academics have been disbanded or stripped of their powers, and replaced by clusters of managers and their support staff. ‘Each manager is answerable to a more senior manager up the line whose job it is to ensure the compliance of those below. In this way, a complex web of subinfeudation militates against resistance.’ The academics Thornton interviewed react by meekly complying with managerial diktat in the hope they may be overlooked, left alone to get on with something they still find worthwhile. When seeking a place to hide, the frog may choose the pot.

So, this is a debate that reveals differences in perspective rather than differences in opinion. Each participant acknowledges that something is wrong with the university, that the university has lost its way. The university operates in a commercial market in which competition is both fierce and dominated by the market’s imperfections. The university has responded to market uncertainty about supplier and product by exploiting an academic legacy long exhausted and academic values now largely mythic. This strategy has required the capabilities of a corporate university rather than a collegial one, and the suppression of the latter and all it entails by the managerialism of the former. But with so much value embodied in its academic reputation, there can be no wholesale slaughter of innocent academics. Academics must be disempowered, but without damaging a carefully crafted and guarded public image. The university’s marketeers and public relations experts declare academic values to be core to all the university does, and yet many a university deceives students about the student experience that lies ahead, bribes them to answer student satisfaction surveys, shapes research projects to fit management impact strategy, distorts research results to satisfy the university’s publication plans, condones plagiarism, inflates grades, and games activities to produce better measures and indicators of performance. The academic freedom that once lay at the heart of academic values has been reduced to the freedom of the frog to leap from the pot before it boils.

Why have academics allowed themselves to be slowly boiled? Why have they not felt the heat rising and saved themselves? Perhaps because they have succumbed to the temptation to compete rather than cooperate, an individualism reflected in their low and declining union membership. Many years ago, Eugene Garfield used early computers to calculate how often academic papers were cited, a matter of little interest in the 1960s beyond the world of the librarian – unless academics could be encouraged to compete (Macdonald and Kam, 2007). The key was to confuse frequency of citation with quality of paper, a deceit that has allowed the construction of impact factors, journal rankings, and academic performance measures – all crucial to the transformation of universities from communities of scholars to businesses with hierarchies of employees. Academics, whose highest aim in life may well be to score enough hits in top journals to keep their jobs, have been boiled. And, in truth, the boiled can still function in a university environment where papers are written to be counted rather than read, where students are to be satisfied rather then taught, where compliance is rewarded as loyalty and conformity as scientific consensus, where the gaming of performance measures and indicators is second nature. And if academic competition were somehow reduced, some collegiality restored; if the water were allowed to cool just a little, would the frogs have learned anything? Would they leap out of the pot, warmer but wiser, or would they just resume their lethargic paddle to oblivion?

Stuart Macdonald
General Editor