Later this week, Professor Stefan Collini – a vocal critic of the ‘crazed market vision’ driving government higher education policy – offers his thoughts about the past, present and future of the British university in a talk at the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds. Words: Laura Ager
Professor Stefan Collini has spent much of his life studying at, working in and writing about universities. He is a distinguished author, academic and Royal Academy Fellow who has published several books on the literary and intellectual history of Britain. Increasingly he has positioned himself at the forefront of critical debates around the role of the British University in society, and it is on this subject that he will be speaking here in Leeds on Friday night. We can expect to hear some startling insights into how the ‘idea of the university’ is currently being transformed, following rapid and destabilising changes within recent UK Higher Education policy.
Professor Collini has never shied away from intervening in public debate, he was a ‘publicly engaged academic’ long before that sort of thing became a ‘thing’
He gives public lectures all over the world and contributes regularly to a range of non-academic journals and newspapers. In recent years, he has publicly defended the BBC and the right for students to protest but he is best known for his unflinching critique of the direction that Higher Education policy has taken, going as far as to suggest that driving these changes now is a “crazed market vision”.
Back in 2003 he warned that the dominant language being used in relation to the ‘higher education sector’ had become increasingly populist and that it would be able to account for ongoing public expenditure on universities only in economic or utilitarian terms.
In a similar way to the commodification processes that have gutted other similar areas of the public sector, a shift in emphasis from use-value to exchange-value was an indication of the ‘hollowing out’ of the social role of Universities along ideological lines, a symptom of everyday neoliberal political drift.
Collini urged us to be vigilant.
“The only two forms of justification that such governments can assume will be accepted by their electorates are, first, the benefits of ‘research’, especially the medical, technological and economic benefits; and, second, manpower planning, the training of future employees in a particular economy.”
In an essay published in the London Review of Books he subjected the ‘idea of the University’ to rigorous interrogation, doing away with the usual popular or nostalgic visions of the ‘civilising’ role of Universities and crafting a more historically accurate account. Fast forward several years and many of these ideas had developed into his 2012 book, ‘What are Universities For?’, a book that not only considered the question that made up its title, but also rather ominously asked ‘and who may destroy them?’
As a Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Clare Hall College, Cambridge, Collini’s specialist research interests are in the history of literary culture and public cultural debate. In 1994 he published a book on Matthew Arnold (Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait) and he later compared the work of T. S. Eliot, George Orwell and many other British authors in Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006).
Had he always had a sense that he would spend his life both within and defending Higher Education, or if he had perhaps set out with a different aim in mind?
“I’m not sure I had any very clear career ideas in mind, beyond a vague desire to be something that involved writing and thinking about literature and history” he says. It was only while he was working on the history of British universities in relation to intellectuals in the nineteenth century that his senses were ‘sharpened’; he could see that “contemporary HE policy was producing some undesirable consequences in universities”.
“Since then I suppose I’ve just not been able to stop myself from arguing against what have seemed to me some of the worst aspects of these policies.”
From the turn of the millennium, Collini has written at length in response to the publication of every major new Government paper concerning HE, including his afore mentioned criticism of 2003’s The Future of Higher Education White Paper. The article openly mocked its sloganeering language, or “pseudo-market guff”, pointing out the empty phrases such as ‘driving up quality’ and ‘rewards’ for academics, “as if they had just found lost treasure or an escaped criminal”.
His response to The Browne Report in 2010 suggested that many of its critics failed to understand its gravity. “Essentially” he said, “Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good…. [the review] signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state”.
“Anyone who thinks the change in 2010 was merely a rise in fees, and that things have settled down and will now carry on much as usual, simply hasn’t been paying attention” he went on to write, in the London Review of Books.
Collini’s argument was that Browne’s proposals cast students as exclusively economic agents, or rational consumers of services. These reforms would open the doors to fully fledged, market-based competition between institutions, turning Britain’s University sector into ‘Higher Ed Biz’.
Collini saw the 2011 White Paper that followed the Browne Review as a new form of intergenerational injustice, as did other commentators at the time.
It is worth restating the current situation regarding student fees, because so many people are unaware of how much they have changed since their first introduction in 1998, especially those who took up the first wave of ‘mortgage style’ loans. The rise in the standard tuition fee means that the majority of UK students now pay £9000 per year for tuition.
The sweetener has always been that the student loans system lends low-interest funds to full-time UK undergraduate students to pay their tuition fees, loans which are paid back when you graduate, but only when you start to earn over a certain threshold.
Initially set at a level of £1000 per student per year, from September 2006 variable tuition fees of up to £3,000 were allowed. Following the 2010 parliamentary spending review, and as part of the Browne Review’s reforms to HE funding announced in 2010, the upper threshold of tuition fees per student, per year was raised to £6000 in 2012. At the same time, any Treasury contribution to the teaching fees of students enrolled on ‘non-essential’ degree courses in band C and D subjects (mostly arts and humanities) was abolished.
“Whatever view you take of this government’s macroeconomic policy” Collini wrote in The Guardian in 2011, “the truth is that the new higher education system will not reduce public expenditure in the short or even the medium term”.
The effect of social class in determining life-chances has been something the successive Governments have claimed to be tackling, but participation rates for different social groups in elite Universities are far from equal and students now face a tremendous economic burden if they choose to study for a University degree. The majority of students, facing these higher fees, might be tempted to choose degree courses that are easier or cheaper to complete, or take the ‘sensible’ option to study subjects that lead to higher earnings upon graduation. That leaves arts and humanities subjects in a tricky predicament.
Many graduates will not pay the loan back, of course, but since the introduction of fees, the Government has also been finding ways to shed this particular debt to private investors, who pay a knock-down price for the log book. While once eternal deferment might have been an option for the student with a more reflexive disposition towards accumulation strategies, Collini has news for you:
“George Osborne gave students a sly stab in the back in the November Spending Review when he slipped in, unannounced, that the terms of loans taken out since 2012 are to be varied retrospectively”.
Yes, that’s right, the earnings level at which repayments start will not in fact be increased in line with average earnings, as was promised at the time, and now repayment terms can be altered after the loan is taken out as well.
How sympathetic has the media and wider public been to his message about the drastic extent of the recent changes to Universities?
“Reactions from the media have been very mixed” he says “and I have been subjected to some ridiculously hostile and ignorant attacks. But reactions from the public, such as reach me, have been nearly uniformly positive. I think there are a lot of people out there who have nothing to do with universities directly but who sense that recent HE policy has taken a wrong direction and are anxious about what this might mean for their children and grandchildren.”
But what can Universities do to resist having their core missions changed by neoliberal values?
“There are no easy answers to this” says Collini. He made the point a long time ago that “it is no good just saying that universities are autonomous bodies and what goes on inside them is no business of the state’s. That idea would have seemed pretty odd at most times and places in the history of universities”.
But he believes that one way to resist political interference lies in keeping working academics, rather than professional managers, in charge of core University business and he adds that other important goals are “trying to keep alive an idiom that properly represents what we try to do…. and enlisting public support for these purposes”.
So with a controversial new Higher Education and Research Bill currently making its way through Parliament, which will, if passed, introduce another set of quantitative measures into Higher Education (the ‘TEF’) that many fear will formalise an already unequal system into an unregulated competitive market place with Universities able to charge students differential fees, now is a pretty good time for us all to engage with what Collini is saying.
Stefan Collini – Speaking of Universities | Howard Assembly Room | Friday 24th March 2017 at 7.30 pm. More information and tickets here.
Laura Ager is an event organiser interested in film & festivals as modes of engagement & education. Follow her on Twitter: @doc_u_laura