A success recast as a great mistake

Discussing the predicament UK universities find themselves in, James Purnell, vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts London, quoted a former US congressman, Morris Udall, who once observed that “everything has been said, but not everyone has had the chance to say it”.

Udall might have been talking about interminable political debates, but his weariness resonates in higher education: the problems bedevilling the sector’s failing funding system are now so well rehearsed that it can feel futile to warm them up again.

But as Purnell and his fellow panellists on a King’s College London webinar last week identified, the financial challenge is tied up with much more.

Universities face a crisis of confidence, with both internal and external drivers, and no easy solutions.

Lord Willetts, the former Conservative universities and science minister, was brutally frank in his assessment of where higher education currently sits in political priorities.

Universities are not only low priority for government, he said, they are also low priority within the Department for Education.

In short, there are no political knights in shining armour due over that horizon for the foreseeable.

The debate, which included contributions from King’s president Shitij Kapur and Universities UK chief executive Vivienne Stern, asked how we have got here.

One observation was that the fundamental issues are mirrored across many Western systems.

As Stern put it, that is largely because countries have never fully got to grips with what massification means, and that, for all the benefits – not least that countries that expand higher education make a profit from doing so, in the sense that graduates contribute more through their taxes than is invested from the public purse, and take less from the welfare state – “that doesn’t help us with the immediate problem, which is that it costs a lot to expand participation”.

“That perhaps explains why you get a large number of people who argue that this massification business has gone too far,” she said, “but I would argue in fact that we have quite a way to go – and that is the most fascinating and difficult political puzzle I’ve ever encountered.”

So funding is central to this Rubik’s cube. But it is not the only facet to a multidimensional puzzle.

In our cover story this week, we take a look across the Atlantic at how embattled US universities and colleges are fighting back against a particularly vicious and ideological onslaught. Or, more accurately, how and why they are not – at least with any coherent strategy or apparent efficacy.

The loss of confidence in universities seems to be crucial here.

In the BBC podcast Things Fell Apart, presented by the journalist Jon Ronson, there is a striking comment from a professor of law at Syracuse University, discussing how culture wars grew and festered on US college campuses, with disastrous consequences for the collegiate environment. “Something has changed drastically in the last five or six years; the whole atmosphere has changed,” he said. “I don’t think we faculty were scared of our students as we are now – it is very strange.”

While the US is at the front line of the culture wars, there are signs that in the UK, too, universities have found it difficult to respond to shifting internal sands.

A recent tribunal judgment, which found that the Open University failed to protect gender-critical scholar Jo Phoenix from harassment because it was “afraid” to be seen as aligning with views that 368 staff and students had denounced as “transphobic”, is a case in point.

If universities have lost the confidence to face such internal challenges, it is hardly surprising that they have also found it difficult to respond effectively to external critics.

Those critics, meanwhile, have been emboldened in their attacks, and in the pursuit of their ultimate goal: a return to a smaller sector delivering less higher education to fewer people.

As Stern identified in the webinar discussion, expansion of higher education has been a great success story of the past 30 years.

And yet it is now one of the great successes of the “more means less” brigade that this extension of opportunity finds itself repainted as the opposite: in the words of the UK prime minister, no less, as one of the country’s “greatest mistakes”.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com