‘In its relation to society, a free university should be expected to be, in a sense, “subversive.” We take for granted that creative work in any field will challenge prevailing orthodoxy. A physicist who refines yesterday’s experiment, an engineer who merely seeks to improve existing devices, or an artist who limits himself to styles and techniques that have been thoroughly explored is rightly regarded as deficient in creative imagination. Exciting work in science, technology, scholarship, or the arts will probe the frontiers of understanding and try to create alternatives to the conventional assumptions. If, in some field of inquiry this is no longer true, then the field will be abandoned by those who seek intellectual adventure. These observations are clichés that few will question—except in the study of man and society. The social critic who seeks to formulate a vision of a more just and human social order, and is concerned with the discrepancy—more often, the chasm—that separates this vision from the reality that confronts him, is a frightening creature who must “overcome his alienation” and become “responsible,” “realistic,” and “pragmatic.” To decode these expressions: he must stop questioning our values and threatening our privilege. He may be concerned with technical modifications of existing society that improve its efficiency and blur its inequities, but he must not try to design a radically different alternative and involve himself in an attempt to bring about social change. He must, therefore, abandon the path of creative inquiry as it is conceived in other domains.’
Noam Chomsky, The Function of the University in a Time of Crisis (1969)¹

The social function of the university is in question as never before. The interplay between the academy, the state and finance capital (as part of what David Harvey calls the state-finance nexus) shows the complicity of institutions, departments of economics and individual academics in establishing and maintaining neoliberal hegemony; the surrender of the system of higher education to the logic of capitalism is well advanced.  To understand these phenomena is at once to broaden the question beyond the narrow topic of tuition fees, and to appreciate the sheer scale of the challenge facing the university and the left.

The neoliberal university

In the 2010 documentary film Inside Job, we see how the traffic of influential ideas and individuals among top US universities, Washington and Wall Street contributed to the frenzy of deregulation that enabled the financial crisis. A network of revolving doors saw executives from Goldman Sachs and other major banks take up policy positions inside the White House and the Treasury, before landing key roles at the head of Ivy League institutions, from where they lent academic credibility to calls for ever greater freedom for the financial sector.

Inside Job dramatically depicted the incestuous revolving door between government, Wall Street and academia. Although the film focused on individuals complicit in the most recent financial crisis, tensions between the university and the influence of capitalism go back a long way (Veblen was writing about it back in 1918²). In Britain there is also a route between key universities and the financial regulatory agency (not to mention recent controversies over links between British universities and despotic regimes). But the problem is much broader than this. Since the 1970s, a succession of legislative acts have extended the logic of neoliberal capitalism throughout the fabric of British universities. It is this, rather than a few corrupt individuals like those featured in Inside Job, that is the issue.

Acts of Parliament, backed by “independent” reports from captains of industry, have served to reduce per-student public funding of universities; to concentrate the allocation of research funding among a small number of institutions and a minority of academics; to put publicly-funded research at the disposal of private capital amid its own comprehensive withdrawal from R&D; and to establish a utilitarian model of higher education whose purpose is to provide “a closer fit between what is taught in higher education and the skills needed in the economy”³:

‘British universities are in fact being driven by priorities shaped by the needs of big business. They are being reconstructed to provide British and foreign corporations with the academic research and the skilled workers that they need to stay profitable. At the same time they are being transformed from scholarly institutions into profit centres earning foreign exchange for the economy of the United Kingdom.’
Callinicos (2006): ⁴

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), introduced in 1986, and especially its replacement by the Research Excellence Framework (REF), have made academic research explicitly subservient to the demands of the economy:

‘Much of our current performance is based on knowledge transfer from cutting-edge, internationally competitive research. This is important. But we must also make sure that businesses can access all the rest of the knowledge and expertise held by the HE sector. At the same time, we want to provide incentives for the less research intensive universities to make close and productive links with business to promote the local and regional economy.’⁵

The creation of a highly-incentivised system for funding academic research has transformed social relations in universities where such research is carried out,i but it has also achieved the stated aimii of encouraging certain types of research and discouraging others:

“The RAE, in economics at least, is forcing researchers towards the orthodox, neo-classical paradigm. Their argument is simply that the orthodox journals are more prestigious and therefore articles published in those journals are ‘worth more’ than those published in non-mainstream alternatives. They present evidence to show that many economics departments actively encourage applicants with mainstream-journal publications when they have job vacancies. Academic economists with insecure job tenure are thus under pressure to do research within the orthodoxy. (Harley and Lee, 1997; Lee and Harley, 1998)

More generally, the pressure on all academics, whatever their discipline, to produce research output, as opposed to simply being engaged in research, must encourage them to undertake ‘safe’ research projects, that is, those which are more likely to yield publishable, if not world-changing, results. Johnson suggests the RAE promotes ‘normal’ science, in the Kuhnian sense (Johnson, 1996: 115, f/n 5). And Fox has argued that, besides functioning ‘to control junior members of the academy, disguise power struggles, and justify decisions that are non-merit based’, ‘the reward structure of publication can perpetuate intellectual hegemony’ (Fox, 1992: 103/190, f/n 2)”⁵

These mechanisms, together, have tended to reward research by established academics which adheres to the mainstream body of previous work. They therefore contribute to strengthening, rather than challenging, prevailing intellectual orthodoxies – in economics perhaps more than any other field.⁶ Little need for a revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the academy, when academics can be trained to respond to market signals themselves.

Lower quality, higher price

Neoliberalism demands a transfer of resources from the public domain to the private, in accordance with the demands of capital. The neoliberalised university reflects this in the expansion of universities as a training resource for capital, while shifting the long term funding burden from public expenditure to the student, while minimising the upfront cost to the state.

The outcome is university education delivered on the cheap, while the burden of student debt rises exponentially. Academic pay has declined in relative terms over decades, contact time has reduced, staff/student ratios have ballooned.i None of this is new. What is new is the scale of the retreat from public funding now demanded.   

While headlines have emphasised the 300 per cent increase in tuition fees enacted by the British parliament last December, the withdrawal of public funding from all non-STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine) subjects is the more significant feature of the current crisis. This move is entirely consistent with the requirements of capital. It creates a systemic dependency on the new, private, providers which will be admitted to the sector, replacing those public universities which are now at risk of closure:

“In our proposals, institutions will face increased competition. They will compete for students and they will set different charges. They may also face competition from new providers of higher education and, if they fail to meet students’ aspirations for learning, they might ultimately close or be taken over.” ¹¹

It also formalises and deepens a distinction between elite universities on the one hand, which offer well-resourced courses, a full range of pure and applied subjects, and access to world-class research, and a patchwork of impoverished institutions racing each other to the bottom in order to maximise the revenue squeezed from each student on the other. 

For a minority of students, university education will continue to fulfill a broad range of personal and social needs and ambitions, which may or may not be directly related to a job.  That will not change.

For the majority of students however, their role as consumers¹² of a university degree, and the function of that degree as an increasingly expensive and precarious entry ticket to the workforce, is accepted as a given. It is endlessly reinforced by governments, employers, and universities themselves. It is this group, and the institutions they attend, which are most threatened by the current crisis of higher education funding.

Resistance

Across the world, students have been at the forefront of resistance to the neoliberal attack on education, from California, to the UK, to France, Greece and North Africa.i In the face of violence and arrest, they have inspired others as well as achieving varying degrees of success. In the UK, they ignited the broader movement against austerity. They occupied buildings on dozens of university campuses; they put the education crisis on the front pages; they brought the coalition government close to its first parliamentary defeat; and they helped develop new networks and tactics of cooperation, sometimes including established groups like trade unions, at others connecting with and nurturing new, less formal anti-cuts formations.

But is this enough? University resistance has been largely confined to the larger cities, and the bill to triple tuition fees, though close, was passed. On many campuses, such resistance as there was has struggled to regain its momentum since December.  Unions representing students and education workers themselves remain prone to a debilitating, sclerotic conservatism. Looking ahead, what are the challenges, where are the opportunities?

The key challenge is to articulate the class nature of this crisis in a way that extends beyond the bromides of #solidarity hashtags. As students in France and Italy have demonstrated, the precarity of the young, of school and university students, of education workers, of interns, is a crucial unifying dynamic.

And precarity is a class issue. The short-term contract, the unpaid internship, the lost jobs and the low-quality/high price education are all part of the same picture. The fight over pensions that university and school teachers face, as part of the broader attack on public sector pensions, is part of the same fight over precarity. We must be much more inventive and energetic in bringing that dynamic to life. That means redoubling the effort to mobilise among our own constituency and others. Reaching out beyond our occupation to non-urban campuses. Students asking to address meetings of teaching unions, and vice versa. Repaying the energy and solidarity of school students, as some activists have done. Organising with part-time workers, with interns, with non-union catering staff.

That’s in the short term. But, as I have argued, the institutions themselves are a key part of the problem. The Left must not content itself with fighting a rearguard action merely to mitigate the successive waves of educational neoliberalisation, but must reclaim the university along the lines Chomsky proposed over 40 years ago. We have the opportunity, as the final nail is driven into the coffin of the public university, to reimagine the university, as a space for genuine critical inquiry, liberated from the stifling, deadly embrace of capital. Maybe - and here’s an idea - it could take the defunders at their word, and create new universities, which may look quite unlike the impoverished institutions envisaged by capital, and are quite unencumbered by the existing corrupt, corporate regime that they are now destroying. 

See also:

Harley, S. and F.S. Lee (1997) ‘Research Selectivity, Managerialism, and the Academic Labour Process: The Future of Non-mainstream Economics in U.K. Universities’, Human Relations, Vol. 50, No. 11: 1426-60.

Fox, M. Frank (1992) ‘Research Productivity and the Environmental Context’, in T.G. Whiston and R.L. Geiger (eds.) Research and Higher Education: The United Kingdom and the United States. Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, Buckingham: 103 - 111.

Johnson, R.J. (1996) ‘Managing How Academics Manage’, in R.E. Cuthbert (ed.) Working in Higher Education. Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, Buckingham: 101-118.

Notes:

1.  Otero, C. T. (2003) Chomsky on Democracy and Education.  New York: Routledge Falmer
2. Veblen, T. (1918) The higher learning in America: a memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men. New York. Republished 1954, Academic Reprints, Stanford CA
3.  Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (2010), Independent Review of Higher Education and Funding (“The Browne Report”), p.23
4.  Callinicos, A. (2006) Universities in a Neo-Liberal World. London: Bookmarks Publications
5.  Department for Education and Skills (2003), The Future of Higher Education, p37
6.  Callinicos, A (2006)
7.  H M Treasury, Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014, July 2004, http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk
8.  Harvie, D (2000) Alienation, Class and Enclosure in UK Universities. Capital & Class 2000 24: 103 London: Sage Publications, page 113
9.  Lee, F.S. and S. Harley (1998) ‘Peer Review, The Research Assessment Exercise and the Demise of Non-Mainstream Economics’, Capital & Class 66 (Autumn): 23-51. London: Sage Publications
10.  Callinicos, A (2006)
11.  Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (2010): 49
12.  Molesworth, N, Scullion, R., and Nixon, E., Editors (2011) The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. London: Routledge
  Cf. ‘A Real Education – the British Student Movement’ by Jamie Stern-Weiner, in this collection.