Magazine: The Times Higher Education Supplement
Issue: December 30, 1994
Title: RESENTMENT SMOULDERS AS YEAR TURNS
In 1994 consolidation bit in higher education. Growth continued
in further education. Staff in both sectors saw no real increase
in their pay despite substantial increases in their workload --
especially in further education. And some students darn near
starved because of the inefficiency of the Student Loans Company..
These are all the results of Government policy. That policy with
regard to higher education is, as reflected in Education Secretary,
Gillian Shephard's speech in early December to the vice chancellors,
to decide on "the quantity of higher education that the nation can
afford" and to set about ensuring, by cash limiting the money, that
that is all that is available. They have decided that the nation
cannot afford further expansion of full-time study for the fore-
seeable future. The period of consolidation has been prolonged
indefinitely. Only expansion in self-financing part-time study is
encouraged.
The Government has sought to turn aside wrath at this continued
stagnation and at the pressing problems of institutional funding
and student support with the time honoured device of setting up
a review -- Robbins revisited as Mrs. Shephard described it to
the Committee of Vice Chancellors. This review involves asking
questions of mind boggling generality like "What is the purpose of
higher education?" and "How much of it do we need?". This has not
gone down too well. "Do they mean to tell me they didn't know?"
one of our readers asked in December -- after 15 years in office
and after imposing all manner of time consuming requirements.
The Government's main concern has been, of course, with public
spending targets not higher education purposes. Their gamble was
that higher education would acquiesce. It was an uninspired but
correct bet. The Government has continued to predict correctly how
far it could push the higher education system without institutions
breaking for freedom. Their control has been irritatingly adept.
The quiessence of British vice chancellors contrasts markedly with
the Dutch rectors' recent refusal to implement the cuts sought by
their Government or the resistence in the summer by the Paris
rectors who refused, despite the law, to admit more students without
more money.
The Government could not, however, be sure when the year began that the
gamble would come off -- in the autumn of 1993 demands to restrict
admissions were by and large ignored. They could not know that in 1994
higher education institutions and funding councils together would
tacitly agree to deliver. They have therefore acted also to restrict
demand using a somewhat callous device, namely the unfair and
inefficient student loan scheme. No action has been taken to reform the
student support system despite loud complaints about rapidly mounting
debts and student hardship. indded benefits have been cut further and
grants are reducing fast. The conclusion is unavoidable that it suits
the Government well to have people frightened off higher education by
hardship.
Policy towards further education differs in that expansion is still
encouraged. But here too the amount of money for teaching each student
is falling and nothing has been done to improve support for students,
indeed, tighter restrictions on local authority spending can only make
discretionary grants yet scarcer.
In further education it has also become clear in the past year that the
Government has a political agenda. The decision in November once again
to withold part of the grant to further education pending wider
introduction of new contracts has revealed their determination to break
trade union's ability to resist "efficiency savings". With all these
many pressures on staff and students, 1994 ended with considerable
resentment on university and college campuses. This resentment has, for
example, put paid to all talk of introducing a third semester -- an idea
which had been running strongly last year. No one is interested with
expansion halted. And in any case, institutions are increasingly busy
earning their living in the summer through other activities -- research,
conference lettings, short courses. The income from these activities is
now vital and will not lightly be given up. It is particularly important
to help service debts built up when it was assumed expansion would
continue and now, as the National Audit office report in November
showed, threatening the financial health of a substantial number of
institutions. Resentment has surfaced too in increasingly bitter
infighting between groups of universities particularly over research
funding as those that have (the Russell group) manoevre to keep what
they have while those that want (all the others in their various
groupings) intrigue to get some of it off them. Straitened circumstances
have also led to acrimony as university and college managments have
tightened up on accountability, sought to remove incompetent staff and
become impatient of consultation. This in turn has produced counter
campaigns about probity, academic standards or academic freedom. Debate
about institutional management got a lot nastier in 1994 in both further
and higher education. What then can be expected for 1995? Certainly no
let up where Government funding overall is concerned with the Chancellor
filling his piggy bank for tax cuts not spending programmes. The
decision to keep per capita spending cuts for next financial year at
over 3 per cent in higher education and 5 per cent in further education
where there is still expansion, will be rough especially with interest
rates going up again. The decision to cut the student grant by 8 per
cent not 10 per cent next year (on top of this year's 10 per cent) will
make little difference as loans mount. Funding and student support are
not even to be considered in Mrs. Shephard's review until an initial
report has been produced sometime next summer on the global questions.
The first question for 1995 must be, therefore, whether staff and
students in higher education will sit quietly waiting for a better
future or whether anger will erupt in demonstrations. Vice chancellors
have warned the Education Secretary that they think it will. The next
question is how far it will be possible, in these circumstances, to
introduce in higher and further education the kind of changes which, if
successful could mitigate some of the present strains. Substantial
investment is needed in new technology systems, libraries, lecture and
classrooms, laboratory safety. Changes in the funding rules make it
easier for institutions to borrow money for upgrading but with expansion
indefinitely postponed they cannot be confident they can meet interest
payments.
New technology is likely to be one of the areas of greatest
excitement in 1995. The great majority of UK academic staff across
all disciplines now have their own computer and one of the unsung
successes of the British higher education system in the academic
electronic highway, Janet and its broadband successor, SuperJanet.
These provide all academics with access free (to them) to the
Internet with all its capacity for information sharing and
democratic subversion. It came as a nasty shock to vice-chancellors
to discover late this year, for example, that their research
students were discussing among themselves through Janet the merits
of the Russell group of research universities. Was its formation in
their interest or not?
For the THES a new development came with the debate which sprang from our
reports of arguments at the British Association over the relationship
between science and social science. This took on a life of its own on
the Internet during the autumn, gave rise to a weekend conference at
Durham in December and returned to the Internet for further refinement.
This sort of development will rapidly undermine control of the higher
education news agenda by official groups -- the Department for
education, the funding councils, the Committee of vice chancellors, the
trade unions, the political parties. It will make it much easier for a
paper like ours to hear grass roots views, to test reactions to new
developments. It will make it easier for groups like the graduate
students to share information about, for example, terms and conditions
for students who undertake part-time teaching. In the next year. The
THES expects to build further on its present modest electronic presence
so as to make the paper much more accessible to all levels of the
academic community round the world. We expect the Internet to change not
only the way academics work but also the way reporters gather news and
views - and change them in ways we cannot predict.
Happily much of the investment required by higher education has
already been made and the costs of hardware are coming down as
numbers rise. There will still need to be money spent -- demand for
terminals, for wiring buildings, for software is virtually insatiable
-- but the rewards are likely to be dramatically geater than the
costs as people become familiar with new ways of gaining information.
Meanwhile, back home quality assurance is likely to be one of the
hottest higher education policy issues of 1995 with the CVCP and the
funding councils battling it our for control. With supreme irony,
the CVCP, which is rumoured to have stitched up a deal with the
English funding council, once again elected as its chairman the
man chosen to head that council. New elections had therefore to be
called as Christmas loomed. They will now usefully be able to elect
a chairman knowing whom he -- or she since the number of women vice
chancellors went up dramatically late in the year from one to three --
will be up against.
They should elect someone who will take a firm line. During the past
year higher education's own audit system has demonstrated its
determination to highlight poor quality control while the funding
council assessment system has come in for increasing ridicule --
not lessened by the latest circular just before Christmas. Action
will be needed from higher education itself if quality assurance is
to be organised in a way which improves quality rather than
diminishes it.
Course design and delivery is also likely to move up the agenda.
One college principal recently identified the biggest feature of the
past year in further education as the "death of the course".
Students in his college now take all manner of units, long, short,
full time, part-time, at a number of levels. They come in for blocks
of study, in the evenings, for a term, for a year, building up
qualifications as they go. This process is likely to accelerate
especially in further education but also in higher as expansion in
full-time study is prevented and institutions turn to short course
and part-time options to earn extra revenue.
For higher and further education, the challenge will be to get
credit accumulation and transfer systems up and running so that
the students taking these units can stack them together and build
on them later to gain recognised qualifications. In this they will
need to work with the professional bodies and the awarding bodies
for vocational qualifications.
All this is likely to push higher education further away from
research and sustained scholarly styles of education towards
vocational courses geared to short-term horizons. A process which
is likely to get a further boost as the Government's policies for
gearing research to wealth generation work through in allocations
to the research councils.
Research money in universities may be reduced. Mrs. Shephard has
asked the funding council to advise her on the split between
teaching and research funding with the obvious implication that
some of the research money will be switched at least to applied
work and possibly to teaching to mitigate the effects of all
"efficiency savings" otherwise falling on teaching. Furthermore
the undertaking that research money moved from the funding
council to the research councils last year would be ring fenced
for universities can no longer be relied on now that the sums
are no longer separately identified in the accounts. Some of
that money may well seep away to research institutes geared to
industry.
Taken together, these pressures could mean that the swing to
practicality in universities both in course design and research
will go further and faster than the Government expected or intended
-- as so often happens when it starts to push higher education
about. Higher education will need to fight for its "core
business". This core is a lot more uncomfortable than vocational
training and applied research for wealth generation. It requires
subversive ways of thinking, rude questions, curiosity driven
research, forthright debate. The outcome will necessarily be
unknowable and should not be guessed at. It cannot be specified
in any funding contract or measured by any set of inspectors.
Room must be retained for it to continue.
------------------------------------------------------------