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Higher education as a politicians’ playground

by Rob Cuthbert

Higher education has always been something of a playground for junior politicians; HE ministers usually serve only short terms, and many are practising for bigger jobs. (Liz Truss and Boris Johnson were both briefly shadow HE ministers.) The Coalition period was an exception, with David Willetts serving for four years and evidently deeply engaged and interested in HE. Since he left in 2014 the political game-playing has sadly degenerated, becoming ever more disconnected from the real issues facing the HE sector.

In 2024 fifty or more universities have declared or are likely to declare redundancies, as their funding position becomes ever more perilous. Student fees have been frozen at £9250 for a decade, and their real value has declined to the extent that they are now worth no more than the £6000 which applied in 2012 before the fee went to £9000. According to Mark Corver of DataHE: “… universities have lost, in real terms, around a third of their income since 2012. Most of that has happened recently. Universities have lost the equivalent of almost £3 billion from their annual UG teaching funding in just the past 18 months.”

The long-running dispute in half the sector over changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme might have recently been resolved, but there are now major concerns about the cost of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme in the other half. UUK chief executive Vivienne Stern and UCEA chief executive Raj Jethwa wrote to Minister Robert Halfon on 18 March 2024 asking for more flexibility in whether post-92 universities must offer TPS membership to their staff, noting that 27% of post-92s had declared redundancies in 2022-2023 and 46% had done so since August 2023. TPS contributions rose sharply on 1 April 2024 as Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 18 March 2024.

Pay disputes have led to repeated strikes and action short of strikes, especially marking and assessment boycotts, affecting the whole sector. This, coupled with Covid, has meant increased workloads for academic and professional staff in major and repeated reconstruction of teaching programmes, with many universities relying increasingly on a precariat of staff on short-term contracts. Negotiations between employers and staff are inevitably complicated by the wide range of institutional fortunes, which makes affordable resolution for everyone difficult to achieve. Covid and employment disputes have brought massive disruption for students, with class actions for compensation continuing as an additional looming threat to HE budgets. Problems with student mental health have reached epidemic proportions, affected not only by the pandemic and loan-driven student debt but also the spiralling cost of university and private student accommodation, which is in short supply in many places.

In 2024 we do expect a general election, but we don’t expect the massive problems for UK HE to be an election issue. Voters mostly care much more about cost of living, the energy crisis, climate change, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the NHS … and even within education, universities rank well behind schools and nursery places as topics for political debate. As Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 16 May 2023, HE Minister Robert Halfon declared that “… the sector was in a “fairly strong” position – compared with much of the economy given the current financial difficulties – and implied management may be to blame at universities faring badly, rather than his government’s funding system.” Halfon resigned unexpectedly on 26 March 2024, so after 14 years of Coalition and  Conservative government we have our ninth new HE Minister, Luke Evans. It is the eleventh such appointment, since both Jo Johnson and Chris Skidmore served twice, and only four of the 11 appointments lasted for more than a year. There is a striking contrast with appointments as Schools Minister, the role in which Nick Gibb has served for most of the last 14 years, despite being sacked and reappointed by successive prime ministers.

For most of the Coalition period the Universities Minister was David (now Lord) Willetts, who was perhaps the main architect of the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) 2017, eventually steered into law by Jo (now Lord) Johnson. HERA legislated for the HE ‘market’ and created a new regulator, the Office for Students (OfS). The policy sought to drive up quality through competition, with an influx of new ‘alternative’ providers; the Act made extensive provision for failing HE institutions to go out of business. Willetts’ special adviser, Nick Hillman, later became an effective Director of HEPI, but his HEPI blog of 14 February 2024 asked ‘Whatever happened to all those alternative providers?’,  while still defending the policy to which he contributed. A more plausible view is that the HERA version of the ‘market’ in HE had been tried and comprehensively failed. Against the success of a few new providers like the Dyson Institute there have been many more seeking to provide mostly lower-level courses, mostly in business, mostly in London. Operating an HE institution is a complex, difficult and long-term activity, and after relaxing requirements for entry to the higher education ‘market’, government was forced to crack down on the more egregious excesses of some of the new alternative providers. ‘Driving up quality through competition’ has been shown up as a fantasy; what always worked much better was relying on the intrinsic motivation of people in HE to do the best for their students, in what has always been vigorous competition with other institutions. Self-regulation is of course inadequate: HE institutions need external quality assurance and control, but the OfS chose to do away with the QAA, the designated quality body, by setting conditions which jeopardised QAA’s international credibility and forcing QAA to step down. Instead the OfS has set up its own quality arrangements in an apparently long-term plan which goes against all the expectations when HERA was enacted. 

That was the good news. A new government was entitled to try a new policy for HE, as it did. It didn’t work, so what happened next? Not repeal, of course, but neither was it, as we might have hoped, adaptation of the new policy to make it work better. In the chaos and increasingly rapid turnover of the post-Brexit administrations, politicians in the DfE and elsewhere became obsessed with culture wars. They brought forward a major new piece of legislation which had nothing to do with HE finance, staffing issues, student problems, or even the supposed focus of ‘levelling up’. Obsessed by immigration numbers, government even doubled down on HE’s financial problems with visa restrictions seriously affecting international student recruitment, especially for postgraduate recruitment which for many years had underpinned the viability of STEM disciplines. It was convenient for government that the OfS continued to give reassurances about HE finance, but it was hardly surprising, since government had installed a Conservative peer as the OfS chair.

The new legislation was the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, education’s contribution to armaments in the culture wars. There were, of course, problems in some, perhaps even many, HE institutions over what might and might not be said in different contexts. A HEPI blog by Josh Freeman on 13 October 2022 argued that there was a problem with self-censorship and ‘quiet’ no-platforming. In the US some prominent university presidents lost their jobs arguing with politicians about the need to protect diversity in HE debate. The war on woke has not perhaps reached that pitch in the UK yet. But the Act required OfS to appoint a free speech ‘tsar’, as it did, and OfS issued proposals on 14 December 2023 on how the free speech regime will operate, launching a consultation on 26 March 2024. The results are unconvincing to those on the ground in the institutions. Jim Dickinson blogged for Wonkhe on 6 March 2024 about the shambles which government has created with its free speech legislation: “We are literally less than six months away from OfS opening a complaints scheme under which one group of students will say another’s actions amount to antisemitism, while the other will say they are threatening their right to express legally protected anti-Zionist beliefs – both saying their free speech is threatened as a result, both arguing they are being harassed, and both reasonable in asserting that they were assured their free speech and protection from harassment was assured.” The Act may even rival the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 for its unworkability in practice.

The principal cheerleader for the new Act was Education Minister (and for two chaotic days in the fall of Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Education) Michele Donelan, who continued to champion it even as she moved to become Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in the Sunak administration. Donelan relied on a press release from right wing think tank Policy Exchange to pick a fight with UKRI about the members of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. The release was written by Donelan’s former special adviser Iain Mansfield. UKRI suspended its Committee and their membership pending an inquiry, which exonerated the members, one of whom sued Donelan for libel and won £15000 damages, as Faye Brown reported for Sky News on 12 March 2024. The damages were paid by the government, prompting widespread disbelief; Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt even suggested that we should cut Donelan some slack because she had not taken the £16000 redundancy payment to which she was entitled  from her two days as Secretary of State for Education. It would all be deeply embarrassing, if government ministers were still capable of feeling shame.

The playground urgently needs more grown-ups, to do higher education policy as if higher education mattered.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. Twitter @RobCuthbert


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Freedom of speech and students’ unions

by Phil Pilkington

In March 2023 Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), wrote a review of Freedom of Speech in Universities: Islam, Charities and Counter-terrorism by Alison Scott-Baumann and Simon Perfect (both SOAS), covering freedom of speech, populism (of the left and right), ‘no platforming’, and students. I disagree with his argument and his conclusions.

Nick Hillman’s review may appear a slight text, but it demands a response as it sheds light on a particular and influential perspective on higher education. The comments on freedom of speech interest me as someone who over many years had to ensure events with guest speakers either did or did not take place, running to hundreds of events. Hillman notes correctly on risk assessment: ‘you do not always know which event which will be the one that flares up’. One event I approved did not go well: the experience of a student’s conversion from Sikh to Islam caused a furore, not on campus, but throughout the region and nationally, ignited by formidable Sikh activists. Nick Hillman perhaps has limited experience of the consequences of such events, which can include death threats, social media storms, massive impact on ethnic minority groups on campus and their alienation from the culture of the university. ‘Flaring up’ is a delicate euphemism. Many opinions in the review are misleading because they are ahistorical and expressed without the benefit of material, practical experience.

The book identifies four possible responses to the issue of free speech on campus: libertarian; liberal; guarded liberal; and no-platforming. Hillman says the authors back the ‘liberal’ approach and “the authors regard the threats to free speech on campus as coming almost wholly from the right”. He argues however that there are threats from the left, exemplified by Jeremy Corbyn’s period as leader of the Labour Party and its association with anti-semitism. The authors argue that right-wing populists “sneak into the gap” between neo-conservative and right-libertarian, an argument Hillman criticises because: “the right are portrayed as wrong if they want to limit more extremist speech, wrong if they push for a looser libertarian approach and wrong if they take a position in the space between these two positions. If you’re on the right and you have a view about free speech, it is deemed to be incorrect on sight, which seems unconducive to a reasonable conversation. At this point, the careful architecture of the authors’ argument starts to crumble, not least because left-wing populists and others (eg the NUS) are in exactly the same ‘gap’, which is really a chasm.”

Hillman’s suggestion is that to have a ‘no platform’ position while opposing the PREVENT strategy is to occupy an equally inconsistent liberal ‘gap’. But there is no inconsistency: the matter is much more subtle, complex and dangerous. There is a case for both positions on practical and historical grounds. Historically, a ‘no platform’ position was taken up in the 1970s by many students’ unions against the rise of the far right (the National Front and later the British National Party) which had gained some questionable success in marches in the East End of London and some success in local election results into the 1980s. Students’ unions are often conflated with the National Union of Students (UK), but  many students’ unions[1] did not have ‘no platform’ policies and a few were not affiliated to NUS, which is a confederation of students’ unions, guilds and associations.

A university or polytechnic campus was a focal point for the far right, not to gain support from the students or staff in debate but as a ‘piece of theatre’ for their supporters, who would have been suspicious of higher education. This situationist political action had the lineaments of populism, more recently shown in the occupation, and videoing for social media, of campus buildings by National Action, an organisation which celebrated the murder of Jo Cox MP and is now proscribed by the Home Office. No platform policies were subtitled ‘for Racists and Fascists’. Nick Hillman may have had in mind more celebrated and extremely rare cases of ‘cancel’ culture, but these should not be confused with ‘no platform’ policies nor the actions taken by students against the rise of racist political groups and parties. This stand was important in itself and influential in later legislation for protected characteristics in the Equalities Act. The other purpose of the policy was of course to ensure support and harmonious relations on campus when ethnic minorities were threatened.

No Platform policies were arrived at by debate, with motions democratically passed by the student body. PREVENT in contrast is a statutory duty of universities, instructed by the Secretary of Education under the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015 to have a PREVENT policy and strategy which should “balance freedom of speech with the assessing of risk of external speakers”. Unlike No Platform policies it was not debated by the student body. Responsibilities under the Act rested with university trustees/governors, but as a member of staff at a students’ union I was allocated some responsibility for ensuring duties were met and I liaised with anti-terrorism police officers on the adoption of the policy. My experience confirmed the findings of Greer and Bell that the liaison was almost entirely taken up with intelligence of far right and multinational far right groups active in the area who could target the ethnic minority community and students. Political objections by some students’ unions (and NUS) to PREVENT were based on the perception that it was Islamophobic. Attacks on Muslim students on campus at that time, both verbal and physical, reinforced their perception that PREVENT discriminated against them. There was no causal connection between the Act itself and the attacks, but the ‘hostile environment’ was a reality: I established a Hate Crime Reporting Centre within a students’ union to support Muslim students (amongst others).

For many the practical objections to PREVENT were insuperable. The monitoring required to trigger concern for ‘indicators of being drawn into terrorism’ was impossible: for example, that lecturers and other staff should note changes in behaviour, declining academic performance, etc. What might have been possible in a school classroom setting could not apply to a cohort of hundreds of students on a computer science course, for example. Staff training was advised, so that they might notice changes in behaviour likely to be related to susceptibility to terrorist activities. This might have focussed on academic staff and personal tutors, but in our mass HE system I prioritised training for staff working in halls of residence to notice changes in behaviour; it was nevertheless unlikely to be effective.

Overall, to suggest a ‘liberal gap’ between no platforming and opposition to PREVENT fails to recognise the details and the historical roots and practices of the two. It was and is more complex than that.

The review then goes on to address failures in understanding right and left populism and the related threats to free speech. There are some difficulties with this application of populism. I have suggested that the historical origin of no platforming was a reaction to the rise of a violent far right in the UK using a campus and its students as part of a situationist spectacle, against an (educated) elite rather than for support. These historical origins open up a wider discussion. Speech is more than opinion and our right to hold or possess it. Freedom of speech has some conditions of origin and direction, otherwise it would be simply incomprehensible noise. The theatre of speech has attributes beyond facts, truth conditions, empirical evidence, or whatever other enlightenment features may be included in ‘debate’. Debates are rare – most external speakers give a presentation, answer a few questions and then leave. These linguistic details are rarely considered in the discussions about free speech. The focus is on the handful of cases involving ‘cancelling’ or postponement, among the tens of thousands of events each year. Why is this a priority for HE, given the problems facing the sector? Why has it become such a priority? Who has driven this as an issue? Has it been tangled up with a populist view of HE in the UK?

Using the criteria developed by Michael Cox (LSE) for an understanding of populism, it can be argued the UK government is not so much right of centre, as Nick Hillman suggests, but is a government becoming right-wing populist. How is that possible and how could it be related to interests in free speech and universities? Cox’s criteria for right wing populism match many government policies and rhetoric in the UK. Populism of the right is nativist, declaring allegiance to those living ‘somewhere’ (with no social or actual mobility in deindustrialised regions) against the socially and literally mobile who live ‘nowhere’ (graduates, the metropolitans). It distrusts elites, has a disdain for intellectuals, promotes a conspiracy theory of the establishment as traitors, is sceptical about science, and seeks to ensure cultural elites (eg Arts Council, BBC, museums, university governance et al) are ‘loyal’. Some of Cox’s criteria may not be met, but recent developments in the Illegal Immigration Bill, following Theresa May’s Home Office policies of creating a ‘hostile environment’ and the Windrush generation deportations, contribute to a perception of the current government as right-wing populist.

Cox argues that left wing populism is rare, given that the basic condition of populism is nativistic (or ethnically based) whereas the left will focus on class divisions across ethnicity and be internationalist. However, Hillman identifies Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, and ‘Corbyn-mania’ as left populism because of the antisemitism attached to his time as leader. The apparent implication, since half of university staff and two-thirds of students supported the Labour Party at the time of Corbyn’s leadership, is that many in universities also supported a form of left populism.  This leaves hanging the thought that perhaps they presented dangers as a form of populism to the university spirit, essence or whatever it is about freedom of thought and speech. Hillman says the ‘gap’ between free speech and clamping down or cancelling becomes ‘a chasm’. But that depends on who is deciding what happens in that gap. The free speech imbroglio – if it is that – flows from some deliberate choices. We should ask not how it happened – it began as a counter to racists and fascists attempting to threaten campus unity and vulnerable individuals – but how it became such an obsessive issue for some. An issue which crowds out the academy precariat, the loss of research collaboration with Europe, the financial instabilities of HEIs, the enormous foreign investment in halls of residences, the rise of AI to challenge the curriculum and assessments, graduate indebtedness, et al.

Hillman’s review then turns to students’ unions, suggesting that stricter controls have been introduced; his meaning is not clear unless he means the incorporation and charitable status formalised by the Charities Act of 2006. That Act made students’ unions accountable to a board of student trustees, with charitable status no longer depending on the ‘parent institution’. The recruitment of external lay trustees by student officers allowed for greater expertise on financial, commercial and employment matters but overall control and campaigning policy remained in the hands of elected student officers via student councils, referenda and general meetings according to their constitutions. Ironically, this is the strongest form of democratic control on a UK university campus, notwithstanding trade union activities, in terms of size and scope of activities. Hillman went on to say: “the authors condemn the common idea that student unions should avoid political campaigning that is not focused on students. They envisage students backing a motion that devotes resources to protesting about a national economic policy and argue ‘we think their students’ union should have at least the possibility of enacting the motion if they so wish.’ This sounds more like finding an excuse to divert charitable funds from their proper use than protecting free speech. If a group of students want to campaign against a national economic policy, there are plenty of existing and legitimate routes for them to do so (including joining a political party) aside from (mis)using their fellow students’ charitable financial resources.”

The misuse of funds by students’ unions has long been a trope. It was certainly around in the 1970s and early 80s over alleged support for the IRA or hunger strikers. Probably the biggest financial scandals within students’ unions were the seeming misuse of funds to support rock bands – or to put it another way, to provide grants and arts subsidies to future global rock stars such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer. This was considered to be ultra vires by the then Attorney General in 1973, at a time when there was no legal identity for students’ unions. Unions subsequently separated commercial operations from charitable core activities.

The case against students’ unions campaigning on ‘non-student issues’ because it would be a misuse of students’ resources is simplistic on two grounds. Firstly, there is the question in a universal HE system of what is and is not a student issue. NUS research showed that over 80% of students were concerned or very concerned about climate change – an NUS led survey won a UN award for environmental understanding in the tertiary sector.  So is global warming a student issue? Tick. What about the growth of foodbanks? Students have been accessing them through agreements between students’ unions and the Trussell Trust. A tick for the cost-of-living crisis. Inflation and government fiscal policy are connected, so what are the limits? Childcare costs and the mature students’ society? Disabled students and the benefits test? And so on. A student body is a global body. There is interconnectedness and there is empathy. Who is to decide if ‘x’ is a worthy subject for a students’ union to campaign about? The student body decides on policy collectively. As a charity the students’ union has a legal personality; to make a collective decision is to form a corporate opinion.

Secondly, charities have been deeply concerned with their gagging by the Lobbying Act of 2015. This goes much further than students’ unions and their alleged profligacy in ‘irrelevant’ campaigning. The Act states that charities (including students’ unions) may have political activities in accordance with the aims and objectives of the charity, but not party politically. When there is a close correlation between a charity’s position and that of a political party manifesto (which is usually a position opposing the ruling party) then there is considered to be a contravention of charitable status. The objection to the Act’s powers over charities is not limited to students’ unions, it has been an objection voiced by many large and respected charities such as Amnesty UK, Friends of the Earth, Shelter, et al. Is the condemnation of supposedly ‘irrelevant’ campaigning another aspect of right-wing populism?

Assumptions about parallels between left and right wing populism are highly questionable, and practical knowledge and experience of campus issues around freedom of speech and counter-terrorism points in a very different direction to the one encouraged by topical but superficial political narratives, such as those represented in Nick Hillman’s review.

Phil Pilkington’s former roles include Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, and CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union. He is an Honorary Teaching Fellow of Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE. He chaired the SRHE Student Experience Network for several years and helped to organise events including the hugely successful 1995 SRHE annual conference on The Student Experience; its associated book of ‘Precedings’ was edited by Suzanne Hazelgrove for SRHE/Open University Press.

[1] Note: ‘students’ unions’, not as in the review ‘student unions’

Ian Mc Nay


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Ian McNay writes…

by Ian McNay

My main concern in this post is about academic freedom, free speech and surveillance. I write as one who worked on Open University courses in the 1980s (under a previous Conservative administration) which were investigated for alleged Marxist bias.

Bahram Bekhradnia, in a recent HEPI blog, has identified the small number of complaints about free speech on campus which have provoked a government response, and the ideological base of those making them. The same was true in my experience – single figure numbers of complaints about courses with 5,000 students a year in some cases and many more thousands of ‘drop-in’ viewers and listeners for OU/BBC programmes. The allegations were found to be unjustified, but led to significantly increased levels of internal monitoring and accountability. The BBC staff were very scared of possible government sanctions.

For one radio programme, Rosemary Deem, an SRHE notable, was barred from contributing because she was, as I then was, a member of the Labour party. Two was too many. I was forced to accept a distasteful right-winger, who insisted that his contribution – denying Tory cuts to education budgets – could not be criticised, questioned, commented upon, nor edited. The new rules said that all elements of a course had to be internally balanced – not one programme putting one point of view and a second with another. Ditto for course units. The monitoring group said the programme was biased, lacked balance, and should not be broadcast. I said that students were intelligent enough to recognise his ‘pedigree’ and it went out.

In 1988, another programme, on the Great Education Reform Bill, was broadcast at 2am. We arrived later that morning to a phone message from DES demanding a right of reply. The programme had featured John Tomlinson’s comments/critique. He was the Chief Education Officer of Cheshire, hardly a hotbed of revolution. We pointed out that DES staff had been sitting in our ‘classroom’ and that comments could be made to their tutor, discussed with fellow students in self-help groups, and used, if evidenced, in assessments.

My concern is that, as someone who writes on policy and its impact, my work can be seen as ‘disruptive’ [a basic element of much research and education] and ‘causing discomfort and inconvenience’ to some people – mainly policy makers. Those terms are from the current draft bill on police, crime, sentencing and courts, which aims to limit public demonstrations of dissent. Given trends in other countries, and government resistance to a more balanced view of history, I wonder how long it will be before there is more overt intrusion – by OfS? – into controlling the curriculum and suppressing challenging, but legitimate views. In the OU, Marxist critique disappeared for years, as self-censorship operated to avoid recurrent problems of justification. It could happen again.

That goes alongside recent developments with Microsoft surveillance which are intrusive and irritating. The university has just had an ‘upgrade’. In my experience, such upgrades, like restructuring, rarely improve things, and often do the opposite. I now get daily emails from Cortana, a Microsoft offshoot, saying things like ‘Two days ago you were asked a question by X. Have you replied?’ The answer is that ‘if you are reading my emails, you will know the answer to that question’. Undeterred, this AI avatar offers me advice on how to organise my coming week, blithely ignorant that I have only a 0.2 contract. When it says I have 85% of my time ‘spare’, that implies that of my 20% load, only 5% that week was not observable. Its daily plan for me is to spend 2 hours in the morning, ‘focus time…to get your work done’.

The rest is spent not getting my work done, but on email and chats, taking a break and lunchtime and two hours to learn a new skill and develop my career. Wow! Do those in charge of the balanced academic workload know about this prescription? It also believes that all emails are ‘developing your network … you added 23 new members to your networks last week’. A computer network must be much less demanding than my criteria require for the term. Its autonomous, unaccountable and unexplained treatment of my emails includes frequently deleting when I click to open one, and designating as ‘junk’ PDF journal articles relevant to my work sent by Academia. I then have to spend time digging around to find both of these. It also merges emails into a stream so that finding one of them needs a memory of the last one in the stream – often an automatic reply. More time spent digging around.

Then there are the constant disruptive phone calls to verify my sign in. The automated voice advises me that ‘if you have not initiated this verification, you should press such-and-such a key’. I did that, twice, once when two such calls came within 50 seconds of one another, which I thought suspicious. How simple minded I was! The ‘solution’ was to bar me from access until the systems administrators had sorted things. That meant a full day or more in each case. The two most recent calls even came when I had not moved to laptop based work, and I now no longer log out, so I do not sign in, but leave the machine on all day every day which may not be good ecologically, but it helps my mental health and state of mind.

I accept the need for computer security, with university generated messages warning about emails from sources outside the university, such as OfS, AdvanceHE, or HEPI and Research Professional through a university subscription, asking if I trust them. Up to a point, Lord Copper. But balance is the key. I knew there was surveillance – in a previous institution a NATFHE e-mail was held up to allow management to get its reply in simultaneously with its being sent. This, though, is blatant and overt. I suppose that is better than it being hidden, but it is neither efficient nor effective. Am I the only one experiencing this, a human being balancing Marvin, the paranoid android, or do others have similar experiences? If the latter, what are we going to do about it? It has implications for research in terms of the confidentiality of email interviews, for example.

And, finally, on a lighter note … my local optician has a poster in the window advertising ‘Myopia Management’. That sounds like a module to include in the leadership programmes that some of us run.

SRHE Fellow Ian McNay is emeritus professor at the University of Greenwich.

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Cronyism, academic values and the degradation of debate

by Rob Cuthbert

The pandemic has accelerated many trends which were already apparent, such as the switch away from the high street to online purchasing, and in HE the move to on-line, remote and asynchronous learning. The influence of social media has also accelerated, partly or wholly replacing the normal policy business of face-to-face discussion and debate. But perhaps the most significant change of all for HE has been the accelerating decline in the quality of regulation, governance and policy debate.

The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 may come to be seen as the high water mark of a particular kind of policymaking which has been ebbing rapidly ever since: the tide has gone out on deliberative and measured debate. A majority in HE strongly opposed marketisation, but the Act was the culmination of a long period of debate which at least gave credence to opposing views and saw them represented in discussion inside and outside Parliament. The market ‘reforms’ were promoted by ministers – David Willetts and Jo Johnson in particular – who had at least grudging respect from many in the system, because of their own respect for academe, however partial it sometimes seemed. And much though we might regret the marketisation changes and seek their reversal, we might also accept that they were enacted by a government which had a mandate for change explicitly endorsed by the electorate. But that was then.

In 2019 the government was returned with a sufficient majority to ‘get Brexit done’, which it did, much to the dismay of most in higher education. HE’s dominant Remainer sentiment no doubt helped to fuel disregard in Whitehall for HE opinion. What is often wrongly still called ‘debate’ has been polarised, accentuated by social media’s echo chambers during the lockdown. In the ‘culture war’ both sides have dug their trenches and hoisted the ‘no surrender’ flags. In HE this has diverted attention away from the real and massive problems of the student experience in the pandemic, and towards the misrepresented and overstated issue of free speech, academic freedom and diversity of opinion. The supposed justification for recent free speech initiatives in HE has been amply covered elsewhere, and is summarised in SRHE News 44 (April 2021).

In this culture war academics and academic institutions have their share of blame. The Policy Exchange ‘research’, cited in support for the Secretary of State’s recent announcements, shoddy though it was, nevertheless pointed to the issue of Remainer conformism in much British academic culture, in which some staff have self-censored their support for Brexit. I tried much earlier to parody this conformism, arguing that “perhaps the best thing to do was to accept the will of the people, freely expressed”. But democracy depends on the willing consent of the governed, and the governed in HE are increasingly unwilling to consent to changes in which their views are simply ignored. There is no shortage of comment on new policy initiatives; the HE sector is comparatively well-served by think tanks such as HEPI and WonkHE, as the recent CGHE seminar on ‘Universities in Medialand’ suggested. But there is little sign that government takes note of policy commentary which contradicts its current narrative, even when obvious contradictions are pointed out. Thus, for example, market forces must rule, except when students choose the ‘wrong’ universities. The student experience is paramount, except  when students report high levels of satisfaction – so the National Student Survey, until yesterday a crucial element for teaching excellence, must today be rubbished.

Nowhere has the contempt for opposing views been more obvious than in the appointment of a new Chair for the Board of the Office for Students. The notes to the 2017 Act establishing the OfS explained that: “This Act creates a new non-departmental public body, the Office for Students (OfS), as the main regulatory body, operating at arm’s length from Government, and with statutory powers to regulate providers of higher education in England.” (emphasis added). The first OfS chair was Sir Michael Barber. It was rumoured that Barber sought a second term but was denied. Who might be appropriate to take on the role? Another respected figure with experience of HE and of working with government, able to sustain that arm’s length role for the Office? Former UUK chair Sir Ivor Crewe (former VC, Essex) was interviewed, as Sonia Sodha and James Tapper reported for The Observer on 14 February 2021: “Perhaps it was the long passage in Professor Sir Ivor Crewe’s book The Blunders of Our Governments about the way ministers’ mistakes never catch up with them that led Gavin Williamson to reject the expert as the new head of the Office for Students. Or maybe the education secretary was put off by the section of the 2013 book, written with the late Anthony King, dealing with how ministers put underqualified, inexperienced people in charge of public bodies. The job of independent regulator of higher education in England was instead handed to James Wharton, a 36-year-old former Tory MP with no experience in higher education who ran Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign.” The selection panel had been criticised for its dominant reliance on government supporters rather than HE expertise, but the chair-designate was nevertheless still to have his appointment endorsed by the Parliamentary Education Select Committee.

The Committee’s approval was very likely but could not be taken for granted, and Nick Hillman made some sensible proposals in his HEPI blog on 12 January 2021 on ‘How to grill the prospective chair of OfS’. We’d have suggested grilling on both sides, but presumably Boris Johnson’s campaign manager only has one side. The Education Select Committee duly questioned Lord Wharton of Yarm on 5 February 2021 and endorsed his appointment, which was announced by OfS on 8 February 2021. Rob Merrick reported for The Independent on 2 February 2021 that Lord Wharton had been subject to ‘hard questioning’, in the course of which he said he didn’t see why he could not retain the whip, nor why his role as Boris Johnson’s campaign manager should raise any conflict of interest issues.

So the ‘independent’ regulator was to have a partisan chair who proposed to retain the government whip. Conflict-of-interest issues raised themselves almost immediately, with wider ripples than expected. Lord Wharton had just been installed as Chair when he was revealed to be a paid adviser to a company seeking to build a cable connection through land at the University of Portsmouth. The company, Aquind, has a £1.2billion project to connect the electricity grids of the UK and France. It wants to put a cable across University of Portsmouth land, which the University opposes because of the disruption it would cause. Portsmouth Council and local Conservative and Labour MPs all oppose the project. Aquind director Alexander Temerko is a Conservative Party donor, whose website has several pictures of him with Lord Wharton, and also pictures him with the Prime Minister and Secretary of State Gavin Williamson. The planning dispute, involving possible compulsory purchase, has reached the Secretary of State for Business, but the previous incumbent Alok Sharma had to recuse himself from the case because his constituency party had received £10,000 from Temerko. Sean Coughlan told the story for the BBC on 19 February 2021, noting also that: “Conservative MP David Morris, another recipient of a donation, had to apologise to the House of Commons for a breach of paid advocacy rules after asking a question in support of the Aquind cable project.”

Lord Wharton’s appointment was greeted with incredulity in HE, but attracted little interest more broadly; in macropolitical terms the chair of OfS is a small bauble. And there were of course already many higher-profile reports of cronyism in government. The difficulty for HE is that the regulator may now be driven further and faster to unrealistic extremes. OfS, obediently pursuing its statutory responsibilities and ‘having regard to ministers’, is already in danger of leaving HE realities behind:

  • On 14 January 2021 the OfS wrote to universities and other HE providers, hard on the heels of a DfE letter to OfS, saying that the regulator expected institutions “to maintain the quality, quantity and accessibility of their provision and to inform students about their options for refunds or other forms of redress where it has not been possible to provide what was promised.” Universities are losing tens of millions every week during the lockdown, without the kind of support provided for many other sectors, and on student hardship “the government can never quite resist overselling the multiple purposes to which the money might meaningfully be put”, as David Kernohan and Jim Dickinson argued in their WonkHE blog on 2 February 2021.
  • The OfS consultation document issued on 26 March 2021 put into practice the ‘instructions’ received earlier from Secretary of State Gavin Williamson. It proposed to steer more funds to STEM subjects and, among other things, halve additional funding for performing arts, media studies and archaeology courses. WonkHE’s David Kernohan was quick off the mark with his critical analysis on 26 March 2021.
  • OfS announced on 30 March 2021 that after the first phase of a review of the NSS, commissioned by Universities Minister Michele Donelan, there would be ‘major changes’ including dropping all references to ‘student satisfaction’. Of course, consistent reports that 85% or more of students in most universities are satisfied with their experience would be embarrassing for a government determined to prove otherwise.
  • OfS Director Regulation Susan Lapworth blogged for WonkHE on 31 March 2021 about a new condition of registration which would allow OfS to step in where a provider was at risk of failure, not to rescue the provider but to prevent a ‘disorderly’ closure. OfS had consulted on the proposal, which was not supported by most respondents, but went ahead anyway. The condition affects only the failing provider. Two obvious problems: (1) failing providers might not be inclined or well-placed to take the protective measures which OfS deems necessary; (2) previous experience shows that students need help from other institutions to facilitate transfers, but the Condition is silent on other institutions. They will often be willing, but might be unable to help without further support.

In the past funding councils were statutorily responsible for in effect providing a buffer between HE and government, to regulate excesses on either side. There is no danger of ‘provider capture’ in the new framework, the risk now is that the arm’s-length relationship with government has very short arms. Recent US experience shows the danger of such closeness. The Obama administration’s tighter regulation of for-profit HE after well-publicised shortcomings were swiftly reversed by Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, but Joe Biden is now progressively restoring Obama’s closer regulation. Such to-ing and fro-ing simply creates a more disorderly system for students to navigate.

We can learn a better lesson from the US: Michelle Obama’s dictum “when they go low, we go high”. We need to reinforce our support for academic values across the sector by continuing to show respect for opposing views, and to win cases by argument rather than by seeing who can shout loudest on social media. We have examples in the way that, for example, Eric Lybeck (Manchester) has offered to debate free speech with the authors of the Policy Exchange report. We also need to broaden the base of explicit opposition, and not leave it to the usual suspects: in particular, we need university leaders to step up and speak out more than they do.

It is often true that leaders can be more persuasive in private conversations than public speeches, but in current circumstances leaders, especially vice-chancellors, need to be more concerned that they will lose the confidence of staff and students if they fail to speak out publicly. There are honourable exceptions, but too many vice-chancellors seem to be more interested in avoiding blame than speaking out about real problems. It is certainly not easy, operating in the space between government, staff or student disapproval and social media pile-ons from the left or right; just one past or present remark or action, if uncovered or reinterpreted, could be career-ending. But that is why our leaders are well paid – to pursue the best interests of the institution and the people in it, not to be silenced just because the  problems are very difficult, nor out of fear or self-interest. We have recently seen research leaders not hesitating to speak out about proposed cuts in research funding – and those cuts have now been reversed. We need more people, leaders and staff on all sides, to speak truth to power – not just playing-to-the-gallery ‘our truth’, but a truth people inside and outside HE will find persuasive.

Rob Cuthbert is an independent academic consultant, editor of SRHE News and Blog and emeritus professor of higher education management. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of SRHE. His previous roles include deputy vice-chancellor at the University of the West of England, editor of Higher Education Review, Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and government policy adviser and consultant in the UK/Europe, North America, Africa, and China.