There has been a great deal of fuss in England over the past couple of weeks about proposals by the philosopher A.C. Grayling to set up a private college, the New College for the Humanities, to teach fee paying students and, he maintains, defend the humanities in an age when they are under attack from governments obsessed by economic growth.
The disdain subsequently heaped on the heads of those who originated the scheme has been remarkable. Terry Eagleton, a literary critic and erstwhile Marxist theorist, described the plan as odious. A large portion of academics from Birkbeck college, Grayling’s own institution, wrote to denounce it. The head of Royal Holloway College put out a statement of disapproval about the courses, the head of New College, Oxford, put out another disapproving of the name. A meeting to discuss the idea was disrupted by a miniature riot, complete with smoke-bombs. Arguments in favour have appeared in the Financial Times and from the (conservative) Mayor of London; arguments against primarily in the Guardian.
The locations indicate the political split of the argument: so far it has been along almost classical left/right lines. Grayling (who rather regards himself as a pinko) was clearly taken aback by the response, but then took to the comments pages as well to mount a defence.
His point about the need to protect the humanities, for academics to get back to their knitting and pay attention to students has some considerable merit, of course, although he is scarcely the first to make it.
The humanities have indeed been targetted as economically unproductive; the vital freedoms to research have been undermined; government policy is to force academics into devoting more time to research because of the funding structure, then to criticise them when they do so. Pressure (real and implicit) has been put on research councils to divert money into government approved projects. And the new, complex fee structure based on loans is to be accompanied by a staggering new level of regulation which will extinguish most of the remaining autonomy that universities possess.
There is thus a case to be made that the biggest danger now to academic freedom, and the continued surivival of the humanities, is the government itself, which has switched in the past 30 years from being the acknowledged guardian of intellectual freedom to its greatest and most powerful enemy. Unless the humanities – or a section of them – break the stranglehold somehow, then the prospects will be bleak indeed. Some form of autonomous status does, at least, need to be thought about as a component of any solution -- although universities, of course, are already supposedly private institutions.
So far so good; or at least defensible. Up to this point, Professor Grayling scarcely deserves the intensity of the assault which has greeted his actions. Nonetheless, there are deep flaws in the idea behind NCH, and these seriously compromise the validity of the whole scheme.
From a perfectly reasonable starting point, the arguments rapidly become less appealing. In his Independent article, for example, definitions seem a little loose. Professor Grayling also insists that his critics argue to his strengths, rather than their own, which is rather disingenuous of him. It is only a legitimate plea if he, in turn, is prepared to argue on his critics’ strong ground as well, and this he does not do.
To bolster the case for the new college, two main comparisons have been deployed; one is the example of private American universities, the other Oxford and Cambridge. Both have their problems.
Nobody doubts, of course, the impressive nature of the American private universities. The big seven have been staggeringly successful, and the many private liberal arts colleges also have an exceptionally high reputation. Were NCH to emulate them it could make a significant contribution – although the vast cost, the continued social exclusivity and the consequently unhealthy concentration of resources into a few places (more even than the Oxbridge/the rest divide here) would be hard for the more collectivist British ever to accept.
But NCH is not going to be another Amherst or Williams – even geographically, as a metropolitan bias is likely to impose crippling overheads before it is even off the ground. Most of the American liberal arts colleges are buried deep in the country for a reason: it is cheaper there. NCH will be competing for space in some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Financially, a small market town in the north of England would have been more sensible – although less chic.
Nor will NCH provide an intellectual community, its own facilities or even its own degree course: it will be teaching bits of the London University external degree syllabus like any tutorial college. Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr do not, I think, download their curricula from the internet, nor do their students pop off to the local state university if they want something to eat.
Rather than being a high-end liberal arts college, NCH as currently set up is a bare-bones profit-making company, and in this sector the record of equivalent organisations in the U.S. has been both dismal and, recently, mired in controversy. NCH has shareholders, investors and all the rest of it, and I know of no example anywhere or at any time when such an organisation has achieved anything of note. Obscuring the distinction between non-profit and for-profit in the general term “private” is not helpful.
Equally, the college has been decidedly vague over what the "profit" bit actually means: is it a merely legal convenience, or are they seriously expecting to extract revenue? The lack of precision here leaves the entire venture open to suspicion as to the ultimate motives. Indeed, in his article in the Guardian, and another in the Independent, Professor Grayling never even mentions the word "profit," let alone deals with the very real issues aroused by a profit-seeking educational company.
The second comparison – to Oxford and Cambridge – is also dubious. This is not entirely Professor Grayling’s fault; he at no time suggested that he was going to try and rival the two universities; that was the gloss put in it by the newspapers. Nonetheless, he did rather bring it on himself by saying the NCH would emulate the experience of the students with the one-to-one tutorial which is the jewel in the crown of the Oxbridge system.
I am doubtful about this aim, not because it is unworthy, but because I think that it misses the entire point about the tutorial system and why it is both so successful -- and so difficult to reproduce anywhere else.
The tutorial system is both expensive and time-consuming. Fellows of Oxford colleges typically teach 12 to 15 hours a week, and in addition give lectures and seminars, so that there is a basic load of around 20 hours teaching, plus marking plus setting exams. They have no secretaries and so do much of the administrative work themselves, and matching up teachers and students individually can take large amounts of time.
On top of that they spend much time in meetings of both college and whatever faculty they belong to, take their turn at college offices (Dean, finance, admissions and so on) and, finally, produce research to satisfy government requirements.
This is an unusually heavy load, and is not significantly better paid than jobs anywhere else in the Higher education sector. It is maintained primarily because of a sense of ownership: fellows are members of the governing body of the college, and are the trustees of their organisation. Even heads of house have very little power in comparison. The decision to work harder than they need is theirs alone, despite the best efforts of government and university to take that power away.
The point is that only an extraordinarily powerful collective spirit can maintain a system which is wearisome and frequently subject to outside attack, and it is this which is likely to be absent from the New College of the Humanities. How could it be otherwise? The grand figures who are the shareholders will not, it appears, be getting down and dirty with undergraduates day after day. The teaching staff equally will have no sense of ownership or control – because they will have neither.
Even junior research fellows in many Oxford colleges are on the governing body with an equal vote to everyone else. Will NCH emulate this egalitarian practice? If it does not, any comparison to the "Oxbridge experience" will be ephemeral window-dressing, and although the documentation is so far hazy, it appears that all effective power will in fact be concentrated into the hands of founders and investors, with little going to the people doing the work.
Professor Grayling suggests that his college will, in the long term, be able to sustain a financially (though not educationally) inefficient teaching system in a structure designed to maximise profit, and also be able to attract teaching staff who will be simultaneously high quality and mere employees.
It may be that some ingredient has not yet been mentioned, but as it stands I do not see how this can work, especially in an organisation with unnecessarily high fixed costs and no endowment. Tutorials are sustained by the underlying structure of the colleges: it will be exceptionally difficult to graft them onto an entirely different format.
This points to a further problem underlying both the outraged response to the proposed college and the bemused failure to understand that response. It was presented, from the start, as a celebrity venture: rather like a fantasy football team, heavy emphasis was placed on the high-profile figures involved. The first thing a visitor to the website sees is a large photograph of Professor Grayling; click a link, and there is another one...
This was a terrible mistake. The English have a profound distrust of such people – celebrity academics, I fear, have not the slightest idea how much they are disliked almost on principle. Much of the new professoriate is based in the U.S., which is even worse, and collectively made the error of assuming the venture would be well-received because of their participation. In fact, it was the main reason for the violence of the reaction.
This may be a national failing, but not taking it into account was very foolish: on its own it guaranteed that the new venture would be perceived as an initiative by a bunch of grandees dismissive of their erstwhile colleagues and ready to profit from their misfortune.
Subsequent reports that some of the partners would only be jetting over from the East Coast to give a couple of lectures every year did not help either: paying £18,000 to be taught in tutorials by the likes of Niall Ferguson is one thing; paying that amount of money to see him a couple of times at the far end of a lecture theatre when you can watch him on the telly for nothing is another.
The founding fathers of NCH, in fact, lack the collective spirit which a venture like this must have if it is to succeed in the long term. Many of them were, at one time, fellows of Oxbridge colleges; nearly all left, often enough because they were not suited to the (very real) constraints on their own liberty that being a tutorial fellow involves.
Equally, they are, for the most part, old men – only Ferguson is under 50, most are over 60, and one is 80. Three decades of feminism has resulted in one woman being involved. There is nothing wrong with the wisdom of age, of course -- indeed, I find it more compelling with every year that passes -- but I doubt they will surprise their students with new ideas. And it does pose the problem of what happens next.
Even if founded with the most honourable intentions, what about their successors? How is that transition to be made? If a shareholder wishes to sell up, what is to stop the institution falling into the hands of people who are seriously keen on the idea of maximising profit? Members of the governing body of an Oxford college are not there, after all, because they buy their seat, and do not expect a return on any investment.
Good will and intentions are rarely, in the long term, a match for money, and he who controls the money, controls the organisation. The idea that academic freedom can be maintained without an overwhelmingly powerful mechanism to limit the influence of outsiders is a naive one – as, indeed, the fate of public universities has demonstrated in the past 30 years.
A simple point illustrates this: several of the leading figures are evangelical atheists, with a highly contemptuous view of religion. How will NCH teach history, which cannot be understood without an extremely sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon? What place, and what guarantees, will there be for any young, untenured, historian with a more nuanced view?
The professoriate presents, in any case, an unusual view of the humanities: a quarter of them are scientists, but there is no-one who has much interest in anything other than the Anglo-Saxon world. There will be a compulsary course on scientific awareness, including evolutionary biology, but, it seems, no art, no languages, only a superficial glance at the classics and ancient history and no literature except for English. Nor, of course, is there to be even an optional module in understanding religion.
If the cultures of France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain scarcely exist, the rest of the world is entirely absent. Of the three historians on the board, two write only about England, one writes predominantly on England. The subject convenor is also an English historian.
It may be that a system of checks and balances has been concocted and its profile will become less parochial as it evolves. But it would have been a good idea to highlight this from the beginning, rather than giving the impression that the students would be primarily taught by a bunch of labourers controlled by absentee landlords.
A venture set up by a younger generation of academics, with Grayling et. al discreetly in the background acting as godfathers, might have received a warmer reception, and might have been demonstrably stable institutionally. But it is not a characteristic of many of the founders to shun the limelight.
And that, perhaps, is the final, and greatest, problem with the new venture. Professor Grayling is acting because he considers the battle within the national university system to be over. But for many in that system it has only just started, after a long and shameful delay.
It was the duty of his generation to fight that battle, but it did not. Had serious opposition been mounted 10 or 20 years back then there would have been a very much better chance of success.
But collectively, his generation let it happen, and fell back instead on gaming the system. A few took the opportunity to get as much celebrity as academics can in a culture which cares little for scholarship.
Such people should not now be delivering lectures about saving the humanities: they had their chance to do so, and they blew it. It is time they stood aside. A little more activity when they were in their prime and the humanities might not have needed saving; a little more humility now and the reception given to their proposal could have been radically more favourable.
Indeed, their response is still that of their generation: a world weary belief that nothing, really, can be done. Government policy can never be changed. No effective argument to defend the humanities can be made, and the only thing to be done is to cocoon them in a setting where no defence is needed. You have to adapt to power, not challenge it, for there really is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher said all along.
It is a fatalistic, and gloomy outlook. And the greatest problem with NCH is that it is a monument to that belief.
-- Iain Pears
Note: it is a pity that the NCH website has already adopted the tendency of businesses to report only good news about themselves. "NCH in the news" http://www.nchum.org/who-we-are/nch-in-the-news does have a somewhat selective account of its media representation -- despite the widespread criticism, not a single link implying any negative reaction has been put up. This is not the best way of establishing your credentials as the defender of open debate.
23rd June: Credit where credit is due; the website now has a much fuller list of news comment, and includes a few of the unfavourable ones.
29th July -- no; they're gone again. Now only neutral or positive comments (or complaints by Professor Grayling at his ill-treatment) appear on the web page.
Showing posts with label humanities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humanities. Show all posts
Friday, 17 June 2011
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
How the Humanities -- a talk given a Birkbeck, November 2011
I feel that in addressing this meeting I am preaching to the converted. I doubt there are many people here who do not believe already that the arts and humanities are worthwhile, and that they deserve their place in British Higher Education. Many other people here have spoken and given their reasons. I would like in my alloted time to speak from the standpoint of someone who spent many years analysing corporations, and a fair amount of time in the last few months looking at universities and their often strange ways. Then I wish to put all of that into the context of what is going on all around at government level. Not Why the humanities then, but how the humanities.
The first point to bear in mind is that there is a certain futility in talking about education when discussing Higher Education policy, as that has long been of only minor importance. Politics and power have, for the last 30 years, been of much greater significance. It was not out of a desire to improve universities but to discipline them that the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s chipped away at tenure and university autonomy. John Major’s decision to double the number of students without funding them in the early 1990’s had more to do with massaging down youth unemployment figures than producing an educated population. The abolition of the binary divide was more concerned with driving down costs and exploiting the opportunity to corporatise the polytechnics than to give university degrees to all. The Lambert report under Labour was primarily occupied with making universities more useful to business. And the creation of the likes of hefce had as much to do with strengthening central control as it had with ensuring that the best research was funded well.
Now universities are to be hit by another tsunami of reform, and all the signs are that it is a worthy successor to past initiatives in the sense that it is ill-conceived, will be badly executed, and has little to do with the question of educating the population. This is perhaps inevitable for a review conceived by Labour as a means of securing more funding for universities without paying for it, modified by the Conservatives to be a means of facilitating cuts, and modified again by the Liberal Democrats to appease their backbenchers. In such a scramble, educational priorities slipped down the rankings, and the question of precisely how English universities are to maintain their remarkably high level of achievement has been largely forgotten. The result seems to be an actual cut in universities’ income instead of an increase, delivered in a complex and inefficient fashion, and laden down with so many conditions that any benefits will be more than offset by new burdens and obligations. One thing seems clear, and that is that although the government might not be willing to pay for the humanities, it will not, as a result, be surrendering any of the power it has over them.
The general incoherence is, this time, on an epic scale. For the last few years, we have been told that our great problem is that we have individually taken on too much debt, so the government is adopting a policy which will make a larger proportion of the population take on higher debts than ever before; this is known as choice. We are told the country’s future depends on a well-educated workforce, and then the government takes measures to reduce the appeal of that education by tripling its cost.
And above all, we are told that market disciplines will be introduced, but the result is to be a system of such tangled complexity that market forces are the very last thing which will apply.
In the grand scheme of things, a overall cut of 10 per cent or so to the total budget might not be so bad. Most companies, after a decade or so of interrupted growth could deal with such a thing relatively easily. Costs invariably can be reduced; it is in the nature of organisations to become a little flabby over time. It is where those cuts fall which is crucial. A well-run company will go after unnecessary overheads first of all. Management structures are simplified, expenses squeezed, all to protect the core activities which are the essential engines of growth and profit when the economy turns.
With the universities, much could be done here. Vince Cable could do more than issue limp begging letters asking vice-chancellors’ nicely if they wouldn’t mind being a little bit more restrained on the pay they give themselves. His department could ban daft schemes which divert funds into Ozymandias-like ventures into the sands of Araby. It could insist that all peripheral activities, like sponsoring rugby teams, building sports centres, acquiring palaces, stop immediately. Universities could do away not only with the fatuous mission statements and glossy strategy documents, but also with the people who write them. They could accept that employing about a thousand people in public relations departments might be a misuse of funds. The government could demand that the central administration budget be cut down drastically and immediately. It has instead been notably silent on the issue.
Not to be too polemical, King’s College London this week launched an appeal for £500 million. If treated as endowment at the usual yields, this would produce about 16 million a year, not even enough to cover the increase in central administration costs since 2002. Whether prospective donors will be told what they will be in effect paying for remains to be seen.
At the same time as revenue will drop, even with the rise of student fees, costs will also be driven up inexorably. Universities are charities, and do not pay tax, but they do pay VAT, and this is going up to 20 per cent next year, enough on its own to blow a hole in the budget. There is talk of a compulsary employers’ levy to make up a deficit in the pension fund, which will also be expensive, and possibly very expensive. Many universities are going to be forced into spending more on fund-raising, but with no change to the tax regime for donations, they will all be competing for the same pot of money, spending more in an expensive beggar-thy-neighbour policy. Nor is sending alumni out into the world laden with debt going to increase their generosity in later years. Equally, costs will be driven up by the business of administering a complex fee structure, and complying with whatever directives come from the new super-quango the government sets up. Best of all, perhaps, it seems as though the government is going to cut the teaching grant before the increased revenue from fees starts flowing, risking a quite unnecessary short term funding crisis that could well doom many courses, and even institutions, that might otherwise be viable.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of British Higher Education policy.
Why is this happening? One reason is that, if you commission a report, the answer you get depends on the question asked, and the person you ask. The question was limited to that of student fees, and so the answer did not touch on the greater structure of university funding, much of which comes from research monies. The remit of the committee was carefully designed so that it did not look at why it was reasonable to stop subsiding students, while continuing with much larger subsidies to businesses by allowing them to get a great deal of research on the cheap. It did not ask whether, if it is fair for students who benefit to pay for their education, it might not be reasonable to ask companies, who benefit from an educated workforce, to pay more as well. It did not deal with the question of why, if bankers can threaten to leave when their finances are threatened, the best and brightest students might not adopt the same reasoning, and go abroad if their education can be had under better circumstances elsewhere. Nor did it deal with the consequences for the much-vaunted “knowledge economy” if these students don’t come back again.
And the question was asked of Lord Browne, whose successor carried the can for the Gulf of Mexico disaster while trying at the same time to strip out “the unacceptably high overhead costs” “arteriosclerosis and bureaucracy” which weighed BP down during the period Browne was in charge of it. Lord Browne was a highly successful businessman, but he came to the task of reviewing fees with predictable ideas, attitudes and responses. Putting a question to a man wedded to “flash and fluff,” as the Economist phrased it, guaranteed that the one thing that would not be part of the answer would be a critique of the hugely expensive bureaucratic structure that has grown up over the past few decades. Indeed, he ended up recommending a system which will require much higher administrative costs.
All this will happen under a programme billed as introducing market forces into higher education. It would have been preferable if it had done so. I am, in general, quite keen on market forces in their proper context, and have a high regard for well-managed companies. But I do not believe that market forces have much of a role in situations where the market has to be artificially created, and is then interfered with before it even starts operating. With markets, it is all or nothing, and in the case of universities under the current arrangements, it is not going to be all, so would be better if it were nothing.
In a completely free market, the humanities would clean up. Faced with a choice between an arts degree costing £8,000 a year, and one in science costing upwards of £30,000 a year, then history and philosophy would suddenly become very popular for everyone except those determined to work as scientists. But it is not to be. The natural cost advantages that the humanities enjoy will be erased by continued subsidy to the sciences, while the natural disavantages of the humanities – their lack of access to research money – will continue unchanged.
Charging for what used to be free is not going to be balanced by an ability to become more flexible. Universities will be exposed to some of the pressures of a market system, but their responses will be limited by government directives. To put it simply, many departments may well close not because there is no demand for places, and not because students would not pay higher fees, but because the government will not let supply and demand meet up in a market driven fashion. This would be fine if it was prepared to pay to make up the difference, but it won’t do that either. It is after all possible that greater access and stability could be achieved by increasing fees still further. Personally I would disapprove strongly, but if a university could charge £15000, and divert a large portion of this into a needs-blind admissions policy in the Harvard manner, this might work for some institutions. But we will never know. Rather, universities are to be forced into an ill-fitting straitjacket designed purely to triangulate the political needs of the governing parties.
The market to be introduced is so rigged that, were it to be implemented in the City, the fraud office would soon enough be fingering the collars of the perpetrators. Every reference to market forces is disingenuous in the extreme. Universities will not compete against each other, but will rather operate as a cartel, or a series of cartels targetting different market segments. The normal market disciplines on managements will not apply, as there is no means left of effectively challenging or criticising their decisions. The choice available to students will be converted solely into what level of debt to incur. Internal costing of departments will remain opaque, random and arbitrary.
One thing that those in the arts must beware of is being bamboozled by arguments that their subjects are non economic, loss-making, sub-critical or whatever term may be in fashion. People in the humanities are not generally very good at reading balance sheets and financial statements, but they really should get into practice. As pieces of creative writing, the average university accounts are marvels. For exercises in the analysis of texts, they offer perfect study material. What they say, what they do not say, what they emphasise, what they hide away in dank little corners on page 23 are wonders of obscurantism. They should be read carefully, not least because of the pleasure that can be derived from sending in Freedom of Information requests to get the information left out.
The most important thing to remember is that however many numbers and statistics are deployed to give an impression of precision and rigour, these are all fiction at departmental level. A decent accountant could make any faculty show a profit or a loss simply by juggling the figures to get the result desired. All the highly complex and sophisticated accounting techniques brought in over the past decade or so are essentially fraudulent, because they are based on entirely subjective assumptions. To take an example, the philosophy department at Middlesex was closed because it made a loss, and this fact was dutifully reported in the newspapers. But it only made a loss because the university creamed off more than 50 percent of its revenue in central charges, and those charges were not only set more or less at random, they were beyond the control of the department to influence. An entirely independent faculty, which could negotiate a fair price for use of rooms and libraries, and which had some control over other outgoings – like a say in the vice-chancellor’s magnificent salary – could easily have managed to show a profit. The sin of Middlesex philosophy was a failure to meet an arbitrary internal benchmark determined by the needs of the administration for funds, not being a financial basket case.
Another thing to note is the extraordinary nature of the loans system being proposed, which is that students will be charged at 3 per cent plus inflation for a very long period of time once they hit a certain level of income. This is sheer profiteering disguised as fairness. Essentially, the government will be requiring individuals to issue 30-year index-linked bonds on their own balance sheets, rather than do it itself. A few sums shows what this might mean. For the government will raise the money to advance the loans on a flat rate basis. It will, in other words, borrow the money at about 2.5 per cent, and lend it out at 6.1 per cent, more if inflation increases. While it will enjoy the benefit of seeing its real debt eroded by inflation, the student will not be permitted the same escape route. If only half the total number of students take out a loan of £7000 every year, then that would amount to a transfer from the state’s balance sheet to those of individuals which stabilises over 30 years at about £110 billion. The government would pay a peak £2.75 billion a year in interest for this, and receive peak income of £6.75 billion back, as wage inflation will ensure within 12 years that most graduates earn over the £41,000 benchmark which triggers the maximum levy, and there seems to be no provision for this to be index-linked.
Even Barclaycard would applaud such audacity, not least because there are measures to guarantee this income stream by imposing financial penalties on anyone who wishes to pay off their debts early – a unique and almost feudal arrangement, where individuals are going to be forced to remain in debt, effectively to provide the government with cash flow, for most of their working lives. I know of no other case of a government requiring its citizens to be in permanent debt. The argument that this is just like a mortgage is specious, as mortgages are not index-linked, there are a wide variety of different time periods available, individuals have a choice of which ones to take, and they are secured on hard assets which have traditionally risen in value over time. None of these conditions apply to student loans.
It should be noted that this does nothing for total debt levels; it merely shuffles them around, massaging down the government portion by increasing the private portion. It is financial jiggery-pokery similar to that of the Private Finance Initiative. And already there have been suggestions that this be taken one stage further, that the government might try to raise money by selling off the student loan book -- George Osborne mentioned this as a long-term aim in his last budget (Guardian 22 June 2010).
If such a thing happens, then we will at least be able to console ourselves with having witnessed a stupendous feat of financial wizardry. Having transferred liabilities from banks’ balance sheets onto the public accounts because of the financial crisis, student loans will progressively transfer public debt onto individuals. If the loan book is then sold to financial institutions, the banks will have successfully transmuted their liabilities into assets in a way which makes turning dross into gold seem almost commonplace.
For all that, the changes that are coming need not be bad for the arts and humanities, although the dangers are so clear and considerable that they need little elaboration from me. All crises present opportunities, but the ultimate outcome depends on who siezes those opportunities. The rise in student fees is a devious manoeuvre which is fundamentally unfair and profoundly inefficient. But it will inevitably switch more attention back to teaching and away from research, which will play to the humanities’ strengths. For the past 30 years, the desire to squeeze the arts into a scientific research-heavy model of funding has forced them to compete on a field where they cannot win. There is no way that they can raise the sorts of money in research grants that the sciences can collar, no way that they can justify themselves in terms of direct and measurable contribution to economic growth. Nonetheless they have been required to try, and have been all too easily depicted as a redundant indulgence as a result.
Training the minds of the young effectively and efficiently is another matter, and the area where the humanities excel. With luck, the whole system may begin to be rebalanced, and teaching may come back to enjoy equal status once more. In this, the students are natural allies, quite likely to join any protest against the idea of their fees being diverted to other things. They may be willing to stump up for their own education, they may not be quite so keen to fund a vice-chancellor’s pay rises. They may want to know where their money is going, and how it is spent. As most humanities departments operate on a shoestring, this natural curiosity in the young is a characteristic which should be encouraged.
Many years ago, the historian Alfred Cobban gave an interview in which he talked about getting his Professorship at UCL. He was taken aside by the head of the college and told that, while UCL would be quite happy if he wanted to do any research, he must realise it would be in his own time. He was being paid to teach, and nothing else, and would he please remember that. This did not prevent him from producing a large number of high quality books and articles, and indeed his entire generation produced vast amounts of research without having to be bullied or bribed into doing so. Very few people now can even imagine how such a system could work, so used have we become to managerial insistence that without incentives and penalties, league tables and assessments, nothing would ever get done. But it did, and I suspect it would work just as well now. When academics have something to say, they rarely have to be forced or cajoled to say it.
But they can only do so if they have time, and in the humanities time is often more precious than money. Many research grants in fact are used up literally to buy time. A proper response to the changes coming down the line would be to begin the process of stripping out the vast amounts of busy work that have accumulated over the past few decades. It would abolish the RAE for the humanities, dispose of the constant internal assessments, cancel huge numbers of committees, get rid of professional heads of departments and return them to the ranks where they could pull their weight as teachers – in short, dispose of everything which was not immediately and directly related to teaching, leaving more space for doing research at other times. Linked to an administration that was genuinely committed to stripping out other unnecessary expenses, then the humanities could live under the new regime and even prosper in a world that was simpler and less subject to random manipulation. It will never be easy to deliver a high quality education on a quarter of the income per head that a major American university gets, or a third of the amount that Eton charges, but it would then be do-able, just about. At least there would be the possibility of surviving until some future government comes along and launches yet another review to unravel the mess made by the last one, as will inevitably happen. But my concern is that unless a very real amount of genuine soul-searching is undertaken by everyone from government down – a reexamination far more substantial that the superficial tampering of the Browne report – then by that stage irreparable damage may have been done.
-- Iain Pears
The first point to bear in mind is that there is a certain futility in talking about education when discussing Higher Education policy, as that has long been of only minor importance. Politics and power have, for the last 30 years, been of much greater significance. It was not out of a desire to improve universities but to discipline them that the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s chipped away at tenure and university autonomy. John Major’s decision to double the number of students without funding them in the early 1990’s had more to do with massaging down youth unemployment figures than producing an educated population. The abolition of the binary divide was more concerned with driving down costs and exploiting the opportunity to corporatise the polytechnics than to give university degrees to all. The Lambert report under Labour was primarily occupied with making universities more useful to business. And the creation of the likes of hefce had as much to do with strengthening central control as it had with ensuring that the best research was funded well.
Now universities are to be hit by another tsunami of reform, and all the signs are that it is a worthy successor to past initiatives in the sense that it is ill-conceived, will be badly executed, and has little to do with the question of educating the population. This is perhaps inevitable for a review conceived by Labour as a means of securing more funding for universities without paying for it, modified by the Conservatives to be a means of facilitating cuts, and modified again by the Liberal Democrats to appease their backbenchers. In such a scramble, educational priorities slipped down the rankings, and the question of precisely how English universities are to maintain their remarkably high level of achievement has been largely forgotten. The result seems to be an actual cut in universities’ income instead of an increase, delivered in a complex and inefficient fashion, and laden down with so many conditions that any benefits will be more than offset by new burdens and obligations. One thing seems clear, and that is that although the government might not be willing to pay for the humanities, it will not, as a result, be surrendering any of the power it has over them.
The general incoherence is, this time, on an epic scale. For the last few years, we have been told that our great problem is that we have individually taken on too much debt, so the government is adopting a policy which will make a larger proportion of the population take on higher debts than ever before; this is known as choice. We are told the country’s future depends on a well-educated workforce, and then the government takes measures to reduce the appeal of that education by tripling its cost.
And above all, we are told that market disciplines will be introduced, but the result is to be a system of such tangled complexity that market forces are the very last thing which will apply.
In the grand scheme of things, a overall cut of 10 per cent or so to the total budget might not be so bad. Most companies, after a decade or so of interrupted growth could deal with such a thing relatively easily. Costs invariably can be reduced; it is in the nature of organisations to become a little flabby over time. It is where those cuts fall which is crucial. A well-run company will go after unnecessary overheads first of all. Management structures are simplified, expenses squeezed, all to protect the core activities which are the essential engines of growth and profit when the economy turns.
With the universities, much could be done here. Vince Cable could do more than issue limp begging letters asking vice-chancellors’ nicely if they wouldn’t mind being a little bit more restrained on the pay they give themselves. His department could ban daft schemes which divert funds into Ozymandias-like ventures into the sands of Araby. It could insist that all peripheral activities, like sponsoring rugby teams, building sports centres, acquiring palaces, stop immediately. Universities could do away not only with the fatuous mission statements and glossy strategy documents, but also with the people who write them. They could accept that employing about a thousand people in public relations departments might be a misuse of funds. The government could demand that the central administration budget be cut down drastically and immediately. It has instead been notably silent on the issue.
Not to be too polemical, King’s College London this week launched an appeal for £500 million. If treated as endowment at the usual yields, this would produce about 16 million a year, not even enough to cover the increase in central administration costs since 2002. Whether prospective donors will be told what they will be in effect paying for remains to be seen.
At the same time as revenue will drop, even with the rise of student fees, costs will also be driven up inexorably. Universities are charities, and do not pay tax, but they do pay VAT, and this is going up to 20 per cent next year, enough on its own to blow a hole in the budget. There is talk of a compulsary employers’ levy to make up a deficit in the pension fund, which will also be expensive, and possibly very expensive. Many universities are going to be forced into spending more on fund-raising, but with no change to the tax regime for donations, they will all be competing for the same pot of money, spending more in an expensive beggar-thy-neighbour policy. Nor is sending alumni out into the world laden with debt going to increase their generosity in later years. Equally, costs will be driven up by the business of administering a complex fee structure, and complying with whatever directives come from the new super-quango the government sets up. Best of all, perhaps, it seems as though the government is going to cut the teaching grant before the increased revenue from fees starts flowing, risking a quite unnecessary short term funding crisis that could well doom many courses, and even institutions, that might otherwise be viable.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of British Higher Education policy.
Why is this happening? One reason is that, if you commission a report, the answer you get depends on the question asked, and the person you ask. The question was limited to that of student fees, and so the answer did not touch on the greater structure of university funding, much of which comes from research monies. The remit of the committee was carefully designed so that it did not look at why it was reasonable to stop subsiding students, while continuing with much larger subsidies to businesses by allowing them to get a great deal of research on the cheap. It did not ask whether, if it is fair for students who benefit to pay for their education, it might not be reasonable to ask companies, who benefit from an educated workforce, to pay more as well. It did not deal with the question of why, if bankers can threaten to leave when their finances are threatened, the best and brightest students might not adopt the same reasoning, and go abroad if their education can be had under better circumstances elsewhere. Nor did it deal with the consequences for the much-vaunted “knowledge economy” if these students don’t come back again.
And the question was asked of Lord Browne, whose successor carried the can for the Gulf of Mexico disaster while trying at the same time to strip out “the unacceptably high overhead costs” “arteriosclerosis and bureaucracy” which weighed BP down during the period Browne was in charge of it. Lord Browne was a highly successful businessman, but he came to the task of reviewing fees with predictable ideas, attitudes and responses. Putting a question to a man wedded to “flash and fluff,” as the Economist phrased it, guaranteed that the one thing that would not be part of the answer would be a critique of the hugely expensive bureaucratic structure that has grown up over the past few decades. Indeed, he ended up recommending a system which will require much higher administrative costs.
All this will happen under a programme billed as introducing market forces into higher education. It would have been preferable if it had done so. I am, in general, quite keen on market forces in their proper context, and have a high regard for well-managed companies. But I do not believe that market forces have much of a role in situations where the market has to be artificially created, and is then interfered with before it even starts operating. With markets, it is all or nothing, and in the case of universities under the current arrangements, it is not going to be all, so would be better if it were nothing.
In a completely free market, the humanities would clean up. Faced with a choice between an arts degree costing £8,000 a year, and one in science costing upwards of £30,000 a year, then history and philosophy would suddenly become very popular for everyone except those determined to work as scientists. But it is not to be. The natural cost advantages that the humanities enjoy will be erased by continued subsidy to the sciences, while the natural disavantages of the humanities – their lack of access to research money – will continue unchanged.
Charging for what used to be free is not going to be balanced by an ability to become more flexible. Universities will be exposed to some of the pressures of a market system, but their responses will be limited by government directives. To put it simply, many departments may well close not because there is no demand for places, and not because students would not pay higher fees, but because the government will not let supply and demand meet up in a market driven fashion. This would be fine if it was prepared to pay to make up the difference, but it won’t do that either. It is after all possible that greater access and stability could be achieved by increasing fees still further. Personally I would disapprove strongly, but if a university could charge £15000, and divert a large portion of this into a needs-blind admissions policy in the Harvard manner, this might work for some institutions. But we will never know. Rather, universities are to be forced into an ill-fitting straitjacket designed purely to triangulate the political needs of the governing parties.
The market to be introduced is so rigged that, were it to be implemented in the City, the fraud office would soon enough be fingering the collars of the perpetrators. Every reference to market forces is disingenuous in the extreme. Universities will not compete against each other, but will rather operate as a cartel, or a series of cartels targetting different market segments. The normal market disciplines on managements will not apply, as there is no means left of effectively challenging or criticising their decisions. The choice available to students will be converted solely into what level of debt to incur. Internal costing of departments will remain opaque, random and arbitrary.
One thing that those in the arts must beware of is being bamboozled by arguments that their subjects are non economic, loss-making, sub-critical or whatever term may be in fashion. People in the humanities are not generally very good at reading balance sheets and financial statements, but they really should get into practice. As pieces of creative writing, the average university accounts are marvels. For exercises in the analysis of texts, they offer perfect study material. What they say, what they do not say, what they emphasise, what they hide away in dank little corners on page 23 are wonders of obscurantism. They should be read carefully, not least because of the pleasure that can be derived from sending in Freedom of Information requests to get the information left out.
The most important thing to remember is that however many numbers and statistics are deployed to give an impression of precision and rigour, these are all fiction at departmental level. A decent accountant could make any faculty show a profit or a loss simply by juggling the figures to get the result desired. All the highly complex and sophisticated accounting techniques brought in over the past decade or so are essentially fraudulent, because they are based on entirely subjective assumptions. To take an example, the philosophy department at Middlesex was closed because it made a loss, and this fact was dutifully reported in the newspapers. But it only made a loss because the university creamed off more than 50 percent of its revenue in central charges, and those charges were not only set more or less at random, they were beyond the control of the department to influence. An entirely independent faculty, which could negotiate a fair price for use of rooms and libraries, and which had some control over other outgoings – like a say in the vice-chancellor’s magnificent salary – could easily have managed to show a profit. The sin of Middlesex philosophy was a failure to meet an arbitrary internal benchmark determined by the needs of the administration for funds, not being a financial basket case.
Another thing to note is the extraordinary nature of the loans system being proposed, which is that students will be charged at 3 per cent plus inflation for a very long period of time once they hit a certain level of income. This is sheer profiteering disguised as fairness. Essentially, the government will be requiring individuals to issue 30-year index-linked bonds on their own balance sheets, rather than do it itself. A few sums shows what this might mean. For the government will raise the money to advance the loans on a flat rate basis. It will, in other words, borrow the money at about 2.5 per cent, and lend it out at 6.1 per cent, more if inflation increases. While it will enjoy the benefit of seeing its real debt eroded by inflation, the student will not be permitted the same escape route. If only half the total number of students take out a loan of £7000 every year, then that would amount to a transfer from the state’s balance sheet to those of individuals which stabilises over 30 years at about £110 billion. The government would pay a peak £2.75 billion a year in interest for this, and receive peak income of £6.75 billion back, as wage inflation will ensure within 12 years that most graduates earn over the £41,000 benchmark which triggers the maximum levy, and there seems to be no provision for this to be index-linked.
Even Barclaycard would applaud such audacity, not least because there are measures to guarantee this income stream by imposing financial penalties on anyone who wishes to pay off their debts early – a unique and almost feudal arrangement, where individuals are going to be forced to remain in debt, effectively to provide the government with cash flow, for most of their working lives. I know of no other case of a government requiring its citizens to be in permanent debt. The argument that this is just like a mortgage is specious, as mortgages are not index-linked, there are a wide variety of different time periods available, individuals have a choice of which ones to take, and they are secured on hard assets which have traditionally risen in value over time. None of these conditions apply to student loans.
It should be noted that this does nothing for total debt levels; it merely shuffles them around, massaging down the government portion by increasing the private portion. It is financial jiggery-pokery similar to that of the Private Finance Initiative. And already there have been suggestions that this be taken one stage further, that the government might try to raise money by selling off the student loan book -- George Osborne mentioned this as a long-term aim in his last budget (Guardian 22 June 2010).
If such a thing happens, then we will at least be able to console ourselves with having witnessed a stupendous feat of financial wizardry. Having transferred liabilities from banks’ balance sheets onto the public accounts because of the financial crisis, student loans will progressively transfer public debt onto individuals. If the loan book is then sold to financial institutions, the banks will have successfully transmuted their liabilities into assets in a way which makes turning dross into gold seem almost commonplace.
For all that, the changes that are coming need not be bad for the arts and humanities, although the dangers are so clear and considerable that they need little elaboration from me. All crises present opportunities, but the ultimate outcome depends on who siezes those opportunities. The rise in student fees is a devious manoeuvre which is fundamentally unfair and profoundly inefficient. But it will inevitably switch more attention back to teaching and away from research, which will play to the humanities’ strengths. For the past 30 years, the desire to squeeze the arts into a scientific research-heavy model of funding has forced them to compete on a field where they cannot win. There is no way that they can raise the sorts of money in research grants that the sciences can collar, no way that they can justify themselves in terms of direct and measurable contribution to economic growth. Nonetheless they have been required to try, and have been all too easily depicted as a redundant indulgence as a result.
Training the minds of the young effectively and efficiently is another matter, and the area where the humanities excel. With luck, the whole system may begin to be rebalanced, and teaching may come back to enjoy equal status once more. In this, the students are natural allies, quite likely to join any protest against the idea of their fees being diverted to other things. They may be willing to stump up for their own education, they may not be quite so keen to fund a vice-chancellor’s pay rises. They may want to know where their money is going, and how it is spent. As most humanities departments operate on a shoestring, this natural curiosity in the young is a characteristic which should be encouraged.
Many years ago, the historian Alfred Cobban gave an interview in which he talked about getting his Professorship at UCL. He was taken aside by the head of the college and told that, while UCL would be quite happy if he wanted to do any research, he must realise it would be in his own time. He was being paid to teach, and nothing else, and would he please remember that. This did not prevent him from producing a large number of high quality books and articles, and indeed his entire generation produced vast amounts of research without having to be bullied or bribed into doing so. Very few people now can even imagine how such a system could work, so used have we become to managerial insistence that without incentives and penalties, league tables and assessments, nothing would ever get done. But it did, and I suspect it would work just as well now. When academics have something to say, they rarely have to be forced or cajoled to say it.
But they can only do so if they have time, and in the humanities time is often more precious than money. Many research grants in fact are used up literally to buy time. A proper response to the changes coming down the line would be to begin the process of stripping out the vast amounts of busy work that have accumulated over the past few decades. It would abolish the RAE for the humanities, dispose of the constant internal assessments, cancel huge numbers of committees, get rid of professional heads of departments and return them to the ranks where they could pull their weight as teachers – in short, dispose of everything which was not immediately and directly related to teaching, leaving more space for doing research at other times. Linked to an administration that was genuinely committed to stripping out other unnecessary expenses, then the humanities could live under the new regime and even prosper in a world that was simpler and less subject to random manipulation. It will never be easy to deliver a high quality education on a quarter of the income per head that a major American university gets, or a third of the amount that Eton charges, but it would then be do-able, just about. At least there would be the possibility of surviving until some future government comes along and launches yet another review to unravel the mess made by the last one, as will inevitably happen. But my concern is that unless a very real amount of genuine soul-searching is undertaken by everyone from government down – a reexamination far more substantial that the superficial tampering of the Browne report – then by that stage irreparable damage may have been done.
-- Iain Pears
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