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Different pipers, same tune
1 November 2009
1994 Group chief warns that the sector must dance to the music of ‘value for money’ whether Labour or the Conservatives lead. Melanie Newman reports
Universities will have to dance to the same “value for money” tune regardless of which party is in power after the general election, according to the executive director of the 1994 Group of small research-intensive universities.
In a speech to a National Union of Students’ conference in Manchester last week, Paul Marshall predicted that the sector would face a 15 per cent funding cut whether Labour or the Conservatives rule.
The five years following the election will be “the most exciting, dramatic and completely terrifying years higher education has known for at least 30 years”, he said.
“So close are the two parties that I believe the system that will exist in 2015 will be largely the same no matter which one wins. For higher education, the theme will be value for money.”
The sector will be expected to carry out improvements and “radical redesigns” against a backdrop of 15 per cent cuts in the first three years of the next Parliament, he warned.
He predicted that the new government would “push forward with a system of credit accumulation and transfer, break down barriers between full-time and part-time study, raise the status of further education, and genuinely provide access to higher education for all”.
At the same time, ministers will redirect existing teaching resources towards subject areas they think will provide the greatest returns to UK plc, he added.
Phil Harding, chairman of the British Universities Finance Directors Group and finance director at City University London, agreed.
He told Times Higher Education that City’s financial forecasts assumed 10 per cent cuts over two years.
Mere “good housekeeping” and higher numbers of international students would be insufficient to cope with these cuts, he added.
Mr Harding said that finance directors throughout the sector were paying more attention to broader issues of financial sustainability.
“They’re looking harder at programmes’ relative levels of financial performance,” he said.
He suggested that the sector was likely to see an overall reduction in the variety of taught courses on offer, as universities concentrate their efforts on the most profitable areas and scrap cross-subsidies.
“There’s a real risk to institutional diversity. It will be very interesting to see the extent to which the next government intervenes to protect that diversity and prevent institutions withdrawing wholesale from areas that don’t make money.”
He said he believed that the sector would see more state intervention, even if the Conservatives are in control.
melanie.newman@tsleducation.com
Readers' comments
Couldn't agree more! But the question is "what value?" Or, perhaps more accurately, "what values?" And, which ever party dominates British politics, the attached question is: "how much money?" If we want a world-class Higher Education system we really must be clearer about what that entails, and then we must invest in that very thing. I'd say this is not rocket science; but it would seem from evidence, on all sides of politics, that it is. . .
Yes, the massive assault on academe continues (dressed up in slogans like "value for money" or "greater accessibility") and will continue under any government drawn from the present political class. The reason is quite simple: all the political parties now represented in parliament have bought entirely - willy or nilly, it makes no difference - into the system called capitalism. But capitalism is inimical to any value except a quantifiable economic criterion: all other values - aesthetic, scholarly etc. - become mere instruments to be exploited according to that criterion. Meanwhile, the remnants of cultivation among members of the ruling class (yes, there is one) are disappearing as its older generations die off, so one won’t find much help or even interest among the politicians and oligarchs. It's therefore not very difficult to see why the horror story of which Mr Marshall is sketching the next chapter is a probably irreversible tragedy (no deus ex machina in sight). "What distinguishes capitalism is not the pursuit of material riches but the subordination of ... diversity ... to the rule of quantity .... Calculating is not thinking, and the arithmetical rationalization on which capitalism is built degenerates into madness when it leads people to believe that what cannot be calculated for that very reason has no significance" (Alain Supiot in Homo Juridicus). Finance directors throughout the sector "are looking harder at programmes’ relative levels of financial performance", we read. That is the fundamentalist dogma - fundamentalists cannot learn - which now drives all government economic policy, in Britain as in the whole of the western world. “Intellectual honesty is being systematically destroyed. Like trust, judgment and responsibility, intellectual honesty is thought to have no cash value and thus to be worthless”, wrote Richard Gombrich in 2000. Now roll on the next 15 per cent of funding cuts ...
Paul Marshall is reported as saying that 'The five years following the election will be “the most exciting, dramatic and completely terrifying years higher education has known for at least 30 years”'. He makes it sound like a ride at a fun-fair. "Exciting" is a funny word to choose if this ends up anything like the early 1980s: retrenchment, inability to develop or expand, a generation of would-be academics lost. Or is this a Freudian slip: an opportunity for some VCs to do what they really want, with the cuts a handy pretext?
"ministers will redirect existing teaching resources towards subject areas they think will provide the greatest returns to UK plc" A great shame, then, that what "they think" and what is really the case are almost always two different things. Since when have government ministers been good at picking winners?
I think that the time has come to brush up our cvs and leave the blighted isles for an overseas job. I hear from friends running search committees in the USA and Canada that there are lots of UK applicants at the moment.
'Envoi -- The Age of Universities (late 11th c.- early 21st c.) in the West may be drawing to a close .... Eventually, there may still be “academics” of sorts (or “knowledge entrepreneurs”, or high-grade, or not so high-grade, purveyors of “knowledge services”, some of them still claiming, perhaps, one wonders, without even a tinge of embarrassment, lineal descent from the academics/scholars of yesteryear), but no longer academics-in-universities (certainly not scholars-in-universities, in contradistinction to academic managers, or skills-managers), no longer universities at all .... Eventually, there may be no-one able (even if they were so inclined) to write an elegy for Academic England, or even just to entertain the bare possibility of such a thing, for no-one will have any clear and distinct memories of how things were, no-one will know any better, or any different ...' R.I.P. (Herminio Martins, Oxford and Lisbon)