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Monthly Archives: September 2019

Vicky Gunn


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Notes from North of the Tweed: Valuing our values?

By Vicky Gunn

In a recent publication, Mariana Mazzucato1. pushes the reader to engage with a key dilemma related to modern day capitalist economics. ‘Value extraction’ often occurs after a government has valued work upfront through state investment and accountability regimes. The original investment was a result of the collective possibilities afforded by a mature taxation system and an understanding that accountability can drive positive social and economic outcomes (as well as perverse ones). The value that is extracted is then distributed to those already with both financial and social capital rather than redistributed back into the systems which produced the initial work via support from the state in the first place. This means that the social contract between the State and its workers (at all levels) effectively has the State pump prime activity, only to watch the fruits of these labours be inequitably shared.

I find this to be a useful, powerful and troubling argument when considering the current relationship between State funded activity and the governance of UK HE. As a recipient of multiple grants from bodies such as the Higher Education Academy (now AdvanceHE) and the Quality Assurance Agency (now a co-regulatory body in a landscape dominated by the Office for Students), I have observed a similar pattern of activity. What this means is that after a period of state funding (ie taxpayers’ money), these agencies are forced through a change in funding models to assess the value of their pre-existing assets. The change in funding models is normally a result of a political shift in how they are valued by the various governments that established and maintained them. The pre-existing assets are research and policy outputs and activities undertaken in good faith for the purposes of open source communication to ensure the widest possible dissemination and discussion, with an attendant build up in expertise. After valuing these assets, necessary rebranding may obscure the value of this state-funded work behind impenetrable websites in which multiple prior outputs (tangible assets) are pulled into one pdf.  Simultaneously, the agencies offer intangible assets based on relationships and expertise networks back to membership subscribers through gateways – paywalls. This looks like the unregulated conversion of a value network established through the collaboration of state and higher education into a revenue generating system, restricting access to those able to pay.2. If so, it represents a form of value extraction which is limited in how and where it redistributes what was once a part of the common weal.

Scottish HE has attempted to avoid this aspect of changes in the regulatory framework in two ways:

  • Firstly, by maintaining its Quality Enhancement Framework (QEF) in a recognisable form.3. Thus: the state continues to oversee the funding of domiciled Scottish student places; the Scottish Funding Council remains an arms-length funding and policy agency which commissions the relevant quality assurance agency; Universities Scotland continues as a lobbying ‘influencer’ that mediates the worst excesses of external interventions; and the pesky Office for Students is held back at the border, whilst we all trundle away trying to second guess what role metrics will play in the quality assurance of an enhancement-led sector over the next five to ten years. Strategic cooperation and value co-creation remain core principles. And all of this with Brexit uncertainty.
  • Secondly, by refocusing the discussion around higher educational enhancement in the light of a skills agenda predicated not on unfettered economic growth, but on inclusive and sustainable economic growth.4.

Two recent outputs from this context demonstrate the value of this approach: The Creative Disciplines Collaborative Cluster’s Toolkit for Measuring Impact and the Intangibles Collaborative Cluster’s recent publication.5. Both of these projects were valued for the opportunity they provided of collaborative problem solving across Scottish HEIs. Their outputs recognise it is now more important than ever to demonstrate the impact of what we do. Technological advances in rapid, annualised data generation is driving demands to assess the  value of our higher education. The prospect of this demand requiring disciplinary engagement means academics leading their subjects (not just Heads of Quality, DVCs Student Experience, VPs Learning and Teaching) need to be more aware of frameworks of accountability than before. Underneath the production of these outputs has remained a belief in the value of cooperation over the values of competition.

However, none of this means that those of us trying to maintain a narrative of higher education as the widest possible state good can rest on our laurels. If we are to seize this particular moment there are some crucial tensions to problematise and, where appropriate, resolve. We need formal discussion around the following:

  • What is to be valued through State influence in Scottish HE? How does the ‘what is to be valued’ question relate to the values and value of this education socially, culturally and economically?
  • How are these values and value to be valued through the accountability framework for higher education in Scotland?
  • What will the disruptions created by a new regulatory framework in England (based on a particular understanding of value and values) mean for how Scottish institutions continue to engage with the QEF, when they will probably also have to respond to a framework that would like to see itself as UK-wide?
  • How can we protect years of enhancement work from asset stripping and value extraction? How can we continue with an enhancement framework with social, cultural, and economic benefits for Scotland and its wider relationship with the world, at the same time as supporting reinvestment into the enhancement of Scotland’s higher education?
  • There is a push to revalue ‘success’ as simple economic outcomes, away from inter-relational outcomes that capture intangible but nonetheless critical aspects of that education – social coherence, wellbeing, cultural confidence and vitality, collective expertise, innovation, responsible prosperity. That path of value extraction may result in more not less inequality: how can we mitigate it?
  • How can all of this be done without merely retreating to the local? Bruno Latour has noted how locality is a cultural player in the current political inability to engage effectively with the planetary issue of the day: climate crisis.6. He notes the sense of security in the local’s boundaries and a perception across Europe that we somehow abandoned the local in the push to be global. The local is important. Yet, he clarifies, climate regime change means withdrawal into the local in terms of value and values – without interaction across political boundaries at a global level – is tantamount to wilful recklessness. How we can enable higher education to secure the local and the global simultaneously is surely the big question with which we are grappling. How can Scotland’s HE leaders engage to ensure the value and values we embody through our accountability regime do not get mired in local growth agendas unable to measure the impact of that growth within a global ecology?

Sitting within a creative arts small specialist institution, these questions seem both overwhelmingly large (how can a minnow lead such a conversation, surely only a BIG university can do this?) and absolutely essential. In the creative arts our students are, in their own frames of reference, already challenging us on the questions of value, values, environmental sustainability and inequality through their artistry, designerly ethics, and architectural wisdoms. I am, however, yet to hear such a recognisable conversation occurring coherently across the various players (political, policy, institutional) in the wider sector, except in activities related to the localities of cultural policy, the creative economy, and HEI community engagement.7.

Perhaps it is time for sector leaders, social, cultural, and economic policy-makers, and student representatives to work together to identify the parameters of these questions and how we can move forward to resolve them responsibly.

SRHE member Professor Vicky Gunn is Head of Learning and Teaching at Glasgow School of Art.

Notes

  1. Mazzucato, M (2018) The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy,  Penguin, p xv
  2. Allee, V (2008) ‘Value network analysis and value conversion of tangible and intangible assets’, Journal of Intellectual Capital, 9 (1): 5-25.
  3. This 2016 description of the sector’s regulatory framework of enhancement remains broadly the same:  https://wonkhe.com/blogs/analysis-devolved-yet-not-independent-tef-and-teaching-accountability-in-scotland/
  4. See the Scottish Funding Council’s latest strategic framework: http://www.sfc.ac.uk/about-sfc/strategic-framework/strategic-framework.aspx
  5. Enhancement Themes outputs: Creative Disciplines Collaborative Cluster: https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/current-enhancement-theme/defining-and-capturing-evidence/the-creative-disciplines
    Intangibles Collaborative Cluster: https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/current-enhancement-theme/defining-and-capturing-evidence/the-intangibles-beyond-the-metrics
  • Latour, B (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime Polity Press, p 26
  • Gilmore, A and Comunian, R (2016) ‘Beyond the campus: Higher education, cultural policy and the creative economy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22: 1-9


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Beyond TEF Cynicism: Towards a New Vocabulary of ‘Excellence’?

By Steven Jones

One might expect that asking a room full of diverse stakeholders to discuss ‘teaching excellence’ would result in all kinds of quarrels and disagreement. In fact, the SRHE’s September 2019 event (The impact of the TEF on our understanding, recording and measurement of teaching excellence: implications for policy and practice) was a refreshingly convivial and creative affair.

Everyone present agreed that the TEF’s proxies for excellence were wholly inappropriate. In fact, there was surprisingly little discussion of existing metrics. We all felt that the consumerist language of ‘value for money’ and the instrumental lens of ‘employability’ were inadequate to capture the nuanced and complex ways in which curiosity can be sparked and orthodoxy challenged in the HE classroom.

Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka spoke about the absence of the student voice in TEF policy, noting that conceptualisations of ‘excellence’ tend to overlook the very moral and critical components of transformative teaching that students value most highly. Michael Tomlinson drew attention to student-as-consumer framings within the ‘measured market’, noting the inevitability of institutional game-playing, status leveraging and brand promotion in such a relentlessly competitive environment. Both speakers suggested that students were misleadingly empowered, lacking the agency that policy discourses attribute to them.

I tried to push this idea further, beginning my talk by asking whether any lecturer had ever actually changed the way they teach because of government policy. There was broad agreement that while excellence frameworks influenced professional cultures and co-opted university managers, they barely touched academic practice. Lecturers know their own students – and know how to teach them – better than any White Paper.

But is the TEF actually about university teaching at all? Or do too many barriers sit between policy and practice for that to be a realistic aim? Policy enactment in HE is interrupted by institutional autonomy, by academic freedom and, increasingly, by lecturers’ professional identity. The TEF’s real purpose, I would argue, is more about manipulating the discourse. It manufactures a crisis, positioning intractable academics as the problem and students as the victim, thus allowing competition to come along and save the day.

Grade inflation is one area in which the contradictions of top-down policy discourse are laid bare. The market demands that lecturers mark students’ work generously (so that ‘value added’ columns in league tables don’t hold back institutional ranking). Then policymakers wade in, attacking institutions for artificial increases and threatening fines for those who persist. The logic is inconsistent and confused, but this matters little – the discourse persuades voters that their own hard-won education successes are being devalued by a sector overprotective of its ‘snowflake’ customer base.

TEF provider statements offer the opportunity for universities to fight back, but evidence suggests they’re bland and indistinct, tending towards formulaic language and offering little additional clarity to the applicant.

But despite such missed opportunities, 73 Collier Street was full of new ideas. Opposition to metrics wasn’t based on change-resistance and ideological stubbornness. Indeed, as respondent Sal Jarvis noted, we urgently need to measure, understand and close differential attainment gaps in many areas, such as ethnicity. But there was consensus that current proxies for ‘excellence’ were incomplete, and creative thoughts about how they could be complemented. What about capturing graduates’ long-term well-being instead of their short-term satisfaction? Or encouraging institutions to develop their own frameworks based on their specific mission and their students’ needs? How about structural incentives for collaboration rather than competition? And a focus on teaching processes, not teaching outcomes?

The argument that the TEF is less about changing pedagogies than manipulating wider discourses shouldn’t bring any comfort to the sector. I tried to show how the dominant logic of teaching excellence primes the sector for more fundamental policy shifts, such as for-profit providers receiving taxpayer subsidy on pedagogical grounds. One delegate spoke to me at the end of the event to offer another example, explaining how employability-minded managers within his institution were squeezing out critical engagement with cultural theory to allow for further skills-based, professional training. The TEF may not change practice directly, but it retains the power to nudge the sector away from its core public roles towards more privatised and instrumental practices.

The challenge for us is to articulate a confident and robust defence of all kinds of university teaching. We need to explain how our pedagogies bring lifelong gains both to our students and to wider society, even if initial encounters can be difficult and unsettling. Policy has taken us a long way down the market’s cul-de-sac, but what’s reassuring is that we’re now moving on from TEF-bashing towards a coherent counter-narrative. This event confirmed that universities have more meaningful things to crow about than their fleeting goldenness against a bunch of false proxies.

SRHE member Steven Jones is a Professor of Higher Education at the Manchester Institute of Education. His research focuses on equity issues around students’ access, experiences and outcomes. Steven is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He teaches on the University of Manchester’s PGCert in Higher Education. The view expressed here are his own.


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“I blame the teachers”

by Paul Temple

If you sometimes get the sense that your teaching isn’t having much effect on the students in front of you, then perhaps you need a bit of advice from colleagues at Hong Kong’s schools and universities. There – at least, according to China Daily, Beijing’s Pravda equivalent (2 September) – the “root cause of young people’s participation in the Hong Kong protests” is to be found in the teaching taking place in high schools and universities. As a result, “rioting protestors are…ordinary young men and women, including many university students who have…lost their moral bearing”. What is this incendiary teaching about, capable of turning normally well-behaved young Hong Kongers into raging mobs? Liberal studies in high schools, covering topics such as “Hong Kong today”, “globalisation”, “energy technology”, and “public health”, are apparently behind a lot of the trouble. Well, the very titles fairly set your pulse racing, don’t they? I’m planning to get one of these Hong Kong teachers, who can apparently turn a class on public health into an incitement to confront the riot police, to share some tips on stopping a class drifting off when one of my own presentations somehow fails to energise them.

But perhaps the real villain of the piece is the teaching of what is described as critical thinking where, to China Daily’s obvious bafflement, “different [textbook] publishers have different political views”. What’s needed, clearly, is for “The government [to] either directly provide contents for the publishers, or establish an official scrutiny mechanism”. I may have missed some nuances in the various posters I saw plastered around Hong Kong during a visit in early September, but I’m pretty sure that “More intervention by Beijing in textbook publishing” wasn’t a key demand of students who have regularly formed peaceful, dignified human chains encircling their university or high school campuses as a gesture of support for democratic values.

This detail perhaps helps illuminate the widening gulf between the Party bureaucrats in Beijing and their local enforcers in the shape of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, and the pro-democracy activists, with the Hong Kong Chief Executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, routinely described in the local press as “embattled”, caught in the crossfire. Local opinion varies on whether she defied Beijing in withdrawing the extradition bill at the centre of the storm, or whether Beijing decided on a tactical retreat which she executed. Both explanations may be partly true.

Either way, “too little, too late” seems to sum up the situation: withdrawal of the extradition bill has done nothing to prevent the protests, which seem to have developed a momentum of their own. Investigations into allegations of police brutality at earlier demonstrations are now a demand, with placards simply saying “831” (a reference to injuries sustained by protestors at an event on 31 August) being displayed at later protests – and so on, and on. Both sides are digging in. Beijing is said to be determined to stop Hong Kong sliding into what is called a “colour” revolution (Georgia and Ukraine being examples, involving massive largely non-violent street demonstrations), but there are also parallels with the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. There, concessions made by the communist regimes that would, only months before, have been regarded as major achievements by reformers were, by the time they were made, dismissed as mere stages on the way to wider change. In Eastern Europe, the demand was to return to pre-1945 national democratic (more or less) structures that hardly anyone could remember. The Hong Kong equivalent is to look back fondly on colonial structures and processes. It is a strange feeling for a visiting Brit to see young people, born after British rule had ended in 1997, waving the colonial-era Hong Kong blue ensign as a gesture of defiance. Nothing could be more calculated to enrage Beijing apparatchiks. It is difficult, at the moment, to see this ending well.

SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.


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Dismissing your vice-chancellor

by GR Evans

“Over a few days in September, five universities announced their vice-chancellors were leaving” reported the Guardian in November 2018. The universities included Liverpool John Moores, Southampton, Bradford and Anglia Ruskin. Elsewhere new vice-chancellors were ‘starting’ at the Universities of London, Reading, East London, Sunderland and Belfast. The turnover, suggested the Guardian, was ’unprecedented’. Certainly there had been damaging press coverage on the size of some vice-chancellors’ salaries, but there did seem to be a problem in both getting and keeping the staff at that level. But some vice-chancellors whose conduct has been criticised have recently ‘agreed’ to step down rather than facing a formal procedure for dismissal.

Times Higher Education has recently covered the dismissal of Swansea’s vice-chancellor, which seems to have taken place without reliance on any special provision for the ‘removal’ of the university’s vice-chancellor. This raises the question whether such provision is appropriate, or indeed justified. From a practical point of view alone there will be a difficulty in dismissing  such a chief executive because he or she will normally be listed in the institution’s procedures as the ultimate decision-maker in the dismissal of its employees. But is the head of the institution a special case?

The Model Statute created by the University Commissioners under the Education Reform Act 1988 (s.203) was designed to provide a special protection against dismissal for academic staff when academic tenure was abolished. It applied to all universities then existing and it had a special section providing for ‘removal’ of the heads of institutions. This was clearly needed, for in the case of the ‘removal’ of academic staff only the vice-chancellor could decide whether to initiate the new disciplinary procedure.

Oxford retains the provision, requiring eight members of the Council to make a complaint to the Chancellor and if he considers there may be good cause, the Council must appoint an internal tribunal. The tribunal will comprise a person with judicial or substantial practitioner experience as a solicitor or barrister and not employed by the University, with two members chosen by Council, one of whom must be a member of the academic staff.  The Chancellor would make the decision to dismiss the vice-chancellor, based on the findings of the tribunal.  Cambridge (whose vice-chancellor had been one of the post-1988 Commissioners) retained the wording of that provision until 2010, allowing ‘any three members of the Council’ to complain to the Chancellor ‘seeking the removal of the Vice-Chancellor from the office of Vice-Chancellor for good cause’. Any ensuing charges would be considered by an internal University tribunal in a similar way.

The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge have their own versions of the Model Statute under which the Head of House may similarly be ‘removed’. New College, Oxford  could  set about removing its Warden if nine members of its governing body made a complaint to the Sub-Warden.  The whole governing body would then decide whether there was a prima facie case, with a tribunal to follow if they considered there was.  Girton College, Cambridge may remove its Mistress if three members of its governing body make a complaint to the Vice-Mistress,  with a tribunal to follow and dismissal, if recommended, made by the Vice-Mistress. In all these college examples there are minor variations on the details of the procedure.

A high-profile and unique recent instance of the attempt to ‘remove’ a Head of House in Oxford has been the case against the Dean of Christ Church. The Dean is both the Dean of Oxford Cathedral and the equivalent of a vice-chancellor in his autonomous college. The difficulty of keeping the two roles in balance prompted a Christ Church Oxford Act in 1867. As Head of the College, the Dean’s potential dismissal came under the College’s provisions under Education Reform Act 1988. Christ Church allows ‘any seven members of the Governing Body’ to initiate a call for removal of the Dean from office. The internal tribunal which has just so expensively found no good cause at all against the Dean is a legacy of that provision.

Swansea was free to change its rules and abandon the post-1988 provision because since 2006 universities have been able to modify their Model Statute arrangements without having to seek Privy Council approval, and many have eagerly done so. Procedures for dismissal of academic staff  have frequently been moved to a lower level in the domestic legislation and all staff may be subjected to a single set of employment procedures. A post-1992 university such as Buckinghamshire New University has no statutes but an Instrument of Government approved by the Privy Council under the Education Reform Act 1988 s.124A(3). Any dismissals are carried out under its general HR policies.

Bath still has the Model Statute provision in its statutes, with at least three members of Council making a complaint to the Chair of Council, a Tribunal of three, and the final decision to dismiss made by the Chair, but there was no need in the circumstances for that procedure to be followed when Glynis Breakwell decided to retire. But ‘going quietly’ with a ‘settlement’ can be very expensive. Both Bath and Bath Spa Universities faced strong criticism for the size of the ‘golden goodbyes’ paid to their departing vice-chancellors; Christina Slade ‘stepped down’ as vice-chancellor of Bath Spa in 2017.

A review of the legacy of the clumsy Model Statute provision for removing a vice-chancellor seems overdue, and with it fresh consideration of whether the head of an institution is a special case when it comes to dismissal.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge, and CEO of the Independent Dispute Resolution Advisory Service for HE.


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Academic capitalism – or worse?

[1] By Phil Pilkington

There has been much discussion on academic capitalism, the neo-liberalism of universities, the new entrepreneurial management which is transformative rather than transactional. Much has been done to reinforce this change and self-perception by government (in the UK) from the creation of the HE market, the panoply of measuring instruments (however flawed) and the imperative of third stream income to compensate for the loss of state funding.

However, ‘academic capitalism’ is a misnomer: it does not and cannot exist except in the ‘for profit’ sector. Exogenous forces require universities to generate income, sometimes leading to operational surpluses, making universities appear to act as if they are for profit. This is seen in two ways, neither of which are endogenous: the need for growth to remain operationally viable, and the imposition of regulatory controls of quality, responsiveness to ministerial opinions etc, as a consequence of the irony of a Hayekian model of the public sector[2]. But this is appearance and not reality. The marketisation of HE is an outcome of applying Hayekian principles to the public sector; it is not in itself capitalism. Academics are employees who may have ‘professional ethics’ and hard-earned specialisms which are bought in the labour market. Nevertheless, universities are not generating surplus value, a necessary condition for capitalism, as they have no shareholders with which to extract value from the means of production as capital which can become independent of the labour that produces the profit/surplus. The substantial critique of capitalism was that surplus value could be lost or expropriated from the locale of production and converted into more capital. No matter how much university management and governance may copy, or are required by government to enact, business practices in the neoliberal era (measuring performance, contracting out, international competition, and general entrepreneurialism), the challenge to produce operating surpluses is no different for the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other large charities which ‘gift back’ the surplus to the charity from trading activities. Students’ Unions as social enterprises have been doing this for decades with their wet sales supporting their charitable purposes.  Perhaps a discursive view of universities as social enterprises tout court may be helpful for their governance and for deciding how operational surpluses should be applied, perhaps ring-fencing cost centres of undergraduate teaching and research.

Nor is the call for a more skilled and ‘employment ready’ workforce a lowering of universities by promoting an HE sector relevant to and supporting the economy. This purpose was one of the planks of the Robbins Report[3]. This instrumentalist view of education is not new; and this knowledge-servicing role applies to the students as well as the institutional purpose. The polytechnics, and their actual geography, were intended to support the industries of the time, particularly aerospace, steel, chemicals, shipbuilding, mining and the motor industry. What is new is the dissidents’ complaint about the new capitalism of universities, which perhaps obscures some deeper and more disturbing concerns about the situation of universities in the knowledge economy.

The complaints are familiar: a dystopian decline of Western civilisation; the creation of the academic precariat; jeopardising the academic mission; moral decay; avarice; Faustian bargains; dumbing down with student-consumer as sovereign; and so on. But the symptoms of capitalism in HE are shared with other sectors; the precariat as an outcome of the loss of employees’ rights or employers’ opportunities in a flexible labour market; new management systems, and so on. Globalisation is not an essential condition of capitalism but is a late capitalism feature. Global reach has long been a feature of imperial higher education, as in the founding of the LSE, sans academic capitalism. Big science has been international and collaborative for more than a century.

The trappings of capitalism – changes to employment practices, the Taylorism of activity measurement, the creation of a market and the management response, including branding strategies for competitive survival – do not make higher education a capitalist system. The extremes of private enterprise branding go further than universities striving to gain market share and a sense of corporate identity. For example, Sir Philip Green’s channelling money out of BHS ‘in effect monetised the firm’s history as a reliable counterpart for workers and lenders’ (Woodruff, 2018). There are close comparisons in the HE sector in monetising heritage/status: the 100-year financing bonds of Oxbridge suggest a strong leverage through historical branding, compared to say the ability of the University of West London to borrow. Marketisation or branding reinforces the stratified inequalities of the HE system and entrenches the market (Brown, 2018). Nevertheless, this is still not extracting surplus value. Similarly, the contracting out of cleaning services in a local hospital does not make the hospital capitalist. It is the surplus value extracted by the contractor that is capitalist in that, again, the net profit creates capital. Building roads, providing a police force, maintaining state schools etc, are essential for the existence of capitalism (and much else): they are not intrinsically capitalist but act as support services for capital.

Sheldon Rothblatt’s (1997) heart-warming celebration of universities as the second oldest western tradition, that has offered so much in our journey of progress and civilisation, begs the debatable current status of universities as capitalist or indeed even as enduring institutions. (I am reminded of Hobbes’ (1655) paradox of the ship of Theseus which each year came into harbour for a refit:  when is it no longer the same ship? Rothblatt sees similar changes in society and universities but doesn’t argue for a causal relationship.) Universities mutate or emerge over time within the material conditions of power and the economy – from Papal Bull and Royal Charter through Parliamentary legislation, ministerial statutory instruments and finally independent (sic) agency.  Will their function and form now will mirror the current neoliberal conditions of globalisation, public sector regulation and deregulation of the private sector? Not quite. The new cycle of knowledge economies is unlike previous regimes for the supporting universities. It is a different economy for universities and for all of us in some deeper ways.

Universities were, and in some respects still are, the providers of new technologies which advance production and manufacturing processes, new materials and industries as well as long term global opportunities and risk assessments via scientific understanding. Universities have fulfilled that role since the late nineteenth century. What is different is specifically the nature of the new economy which is a new form of market, as capital must search for new markets. This is a new model of business enterprise distinct from manufacturing and traditional service industries – the mining or rather possession (as intellectual property) and exploitation of data as privately-owned property. The case for knowledge as a public good is strong (Marginson, 2013) but the change in what counts as knowledge comes with a stricter control of social conditions. The possession of knowledge begets a new ontology and epistemology. It is the thread that runs through capitalism: the transfer of the public good to the private, from the enclosures onwards, so that old ontological claims appear as delusional, fictions and myths.  Universities and their students are both agents within the knowledge economy and the raw materials.

Universities have been exploited by business in the new technologies with significant growth in profit margins for business, which has enabled the financialisation of business rather than its technological development. The exhortations for universities to provide the materiel for innovation and development obscures another trend.  This is eloquently and passionately explained by Mariana Mazzucato in The Entrepreneurial State (2013). Businesses reduce research costs by contracting out to universities, whilst reaping the major and rapidly increasing profit share which is then used to buy back stockholdings to increase share value. This process continues as competition continues to drive down business research costs , increasing share value (which is capital), and increasing reliance on universities as subcontractors to allow for this business strategy. The knowledge economy is ‘cutting edge’ but universities become a contracting out service industry not just for ‘pushing the technological boundaries’ per se but to be used for capital gain (which is then ‘lost’ to the production process and to the universities’ research centres as surplus value). As Mazzacuto might say, the universities become not so much capitalist agents of the new economies as the exploited.

The knowledge economy flowed from state intervention in the US and the UK but is invisible in plain view. Large corporate R&D centres (Bell, Dupont, Xerox, et al) have largely disappeared and university research in the public domain is used by the new technological businesses. For example, all the Apple innovations of touch screen, GPS, internet, microelectronics, and voice activation were government funded developments.

There is another aspect of the cognitive economy of data and intellectual property ownership which is intimately connected to universities in the new wave of entrepreneurism. This is the monetisation of data within the sector. Not the creation and control of patents resulting from research, but the monetisation of data not previously considered. This new wave of capital is not limited to education. The harvesting of data in the health sector (and the contingent insurance industry) has been a site of contention and dispute in several countries in the last five years[4].

The sale of tranches of the student loan book (losses to the Treasury estimated by the National Audit Office for one tranche as over £600 million) will be a carefully calculated risk for the buyers. In the US student loans are considered as approaching sub-prime liabilities, now with more than a trillion dollars of debt. In the UK part of the value of purchasing student loans stems from the personal data to be harvested for the next 40 years in the interchange between the debtor and the new loan-holders.  A more spectacular example of information converted to a form of capital is the sale of Turnitin.  This is no elevated concept of innovation and development other, simply the ability of capital to create a new ontology of products to be marketed within the cognitive economy. Turnitin was sold in 2008 to Warburg Pincus, then in 2014 to a Singapore-based wealth fund (for $752 million) and finally to a holding company of Condé Nast in 2018 for $1.75 billion. Turnitin has itself acquired other companies in 2018 such as Vericite and Gradescope. Jesse Stommel of the University of Mary Washington, Virginia, noted: “How much of that $1.75 billion is going to the students who have fed their database for years? I have a pretty good guess; zero billion.”

The charge of academic capitalism is misplaced when there should be a growing concern about how late capital will find new ways and practices to exploit the university sector.

Phil Pilkington is Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, a former CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union, an Honorary Teaching Fellow of Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE.

References

Brown R (2018) ‘Neoliberalism, Marketisation and Higher Education’, Professorial Lecture, University of West London

Hobbes T (1655) De Corpore

Marginson S, (2013) ‘The Impossibility of Capitalist Markets in Higher Education’, Journal of Education Policy 28(3)

Mazzucatto, M (2013) The Entrepreneurial State, Anthem Press

Rothblatt S (1997) The Modern University and its Discontents, Cambridge

Woodruff D (2018) ‘Profits Now, Costs Later’, London Review of Books 40(22)

[1] I am extremely grateful to Ian McNay for his advice and support; the faults here remain mine

[2]  Hayek F (1944) The Road to Serfdom. It is difficult not to take an ad hominem approach to Hayek as a friend of dictators, but also as a paradoxical, confused and failed political theorist; his concept of price as information when human thought is irrational is a foundation of the current dispensation. For neo-liberal policy makers (ie the government/OfS) the uniformity of price in the UK HE sector offends against rational market efficiencies driving down prices. The consequent conspiracy hypothesis of cartel price fixing is another neo-liberal trope: the sabotage of government policies by self-interested public sector management and civil servants. Some university leaders have supported the neo-liberal project on the rationality of price levels by suggesting that the artificial limit set by government at the top end should be lifted and the market could be liberated to compete with Ivy League fee levels (prices). There are alternative models of pricing: a holistic model for price for HE could include prior costs (school fees, private tuition, the housing market reflecting catchment areas, etc).

[3]   My thanks to Ian McNay for a reminder that the Robbins Report included ‘the instruction in skills suitable to play a part in the general division of labour…’ and pointing out the skills support by polytechnics for the heavy industries in the north and north east of England. The assumption throughout the 1940s and 50s, from the 1944 Education Act and Claus Moser’s statistical planning of HE for Education Minister David Eccles, was that 80% of the workforce would be engaged in manufacturing and manual work.

[4] In the UK, following the Health and Social Care Act (2012) there was a requirement that all GPs’ case notes be returned to the central care.data to be exploited commercially, this appears to have been abandoned in 2016 after a campaign in part organised by GPs. In Denmark there was a rescinding of a similar arrangement. Data sharing (sic) between Deep Mind (the AI branch of Google) and a London NHS Trust was considered by the Information Commissioner’s Office to be a breach of law. In Italy a deal was made with IBM in 2016 for access to health data (Source: New Scientist, April 2016).


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“A market exit…with a material negative impact”

by Paul Temple

Our late and much-missed friend David Watson used to say that every government department should have an office marked “Cassandra”. Whenever a new policy was proposed, someone had to poke their head round the door and say, “Cassandra, what went wrong when we last tried this?”. David went on to point out that, just as the mythological Cassandra was cursed to make accurate predictions that were never believed, so policy-making would plough ahead regardless of what the Cassandra down the corridor told them about last time’s mistakes. Still, he thought, it would be nice to know in advance in just what respect a policy was going to fail.

A number of Cassandras predicted, in general terms, the disaster – or “material negative impact” [1] , in OfS-speak – that has now overtaken the 3,571 students of for-profit GSM in London. This was one of the “alternative providers”, so enthusiastically promoted by David Willetts following the 2011 White Paper. In my chapter on private sector higher education in Claire Callender’s and Peter Scott’s Browne and Beyond: Modernizing English Higher Education (2013), I invented the conditional-optimistic tense to describe the White Paper’s language about “alternative providers”: “new entrants to the sector…may have different strengths…they may offer particular well-honed teaching models…” (2011 White Paper, para 4.5). They would shake up the stuffy old university sector with a bracing private-sector ethos – although the exact problem to which they would provide the answer was never precisely set out. This was evidence-free policy-making, but with a blithe assurance that everything would turn out for the best (remind you of anything?). I suspect that the unlucky GSM 3,571 would now prefer to have been at a university with some of the boring old strengths.

The OfS email to other universities about the GSM collapse could serve as a text for a doctoral class on bureaucratic buck-passing: its message might be summarised as, “We’re only the regulator; can the rest of you do something? No, we won’t do anything to help.” The GSM 3,571 are, it is clear, on their own; OfS isn’t going to do anything constructive to clear up the mess. On the contrary, when asked “whether transferred students can be subject to special arrangements relating to the reporting of their progression, completion or in respect of other outcome data/metrics…The answer is no.” Nice.

As I noted in my 2013 chapter, you didn’t need particular insights, let alone Cassandra’s skills of prophecy, to foresee problems ahead in the “alternative” sector – because we had the worked example of the United States before us. A devastating critique of for-profit higher education there was made in 2012 in a report by Senator Tom Harkin, Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “In this report”, Senator Harkin was reported as saying, “you will find overwhelming documentation of exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation”. The for-profit sectors in the US and the UK depend on easily-available public funding to cover student fees and light-touch regulation of institutions with minimal records of achievement and limited accountability. It is a tragedy that British politicians, driven by free-market ideology, and regulators, following politicians’ biddings, failed GSM’s students so comprehensively.

SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.

[1] Office for Students email, 21 August 2019