The Guardian view on university strikes: a battle for the soul of the campus
The market model in higher education has created an intellectual precariat who are right to fight back.
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In his classic work The Idea of a University, the recently canonised St John Henry Newman described the core goal of higher education as “the cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued for its own sake”. Most of the lecturers who began just over a week of strike action on Monday will have entered academia hoping to play their part in that noble enterprise. Instead they find themselves in the vanguard of perhaps the most concerted and widespread wave of industrial action that our university campuses have known.
In February and March last year, staff at 65 universities voted to strike over changes to their pensions, which could have seen many lose considerable sums in retirement. That ongoing dispute is part of the explanation why lecturers are back on the picket line. But this year they are also protesting in large numbers at stagnating pay, insecure contracts, and an ever-growing workload driven by often unachievable targets. An argument that began on the arcane territory of pensions investment has morphed into a full-blown challenge to a marketisation process that has, over the last decade, transformed university life for those who study in it and those who teach in it.
From 2010 onwards, student tuition fees, introduced by Labour in 1998, became the chosen vehicle for an ideological revolution on campus. Tripling the cap to £9,000, David Cameron’s coalition government launched the era of the student consumer, tasked with shopping around for the best education deal. Universities, faced with huge cuts in funding from Westminster, responded accordingly by diverting huge resources into marketing and upmarket student accommodation. An architecture of competition was built, as limits on student numbers were lifted, pitting institutions against each other via a new bureaucracy of audits, assessments and satisfaction surveys.
The new emphasis on student experience was overdue and welcome; it gave undergraduates power and voice. But the perverse consequences of the marketisation process have become familiar. Huge levels of student debt built up, to be paid back at exorbitant interest rates by either the student or the taxpayer; a new breed of vice-chancellor emerged, aping the language and drawing the salary of a business CEO, and attended by a court of financial managers and marketing experts. There was a huge diversion of resources to sometimes risky investment in real estate.
In this brave new world, the almost forgotten fall-guys have been the academics whose job it is to deliver “the product”. According to research by the University and College Union, average academic pay has fallen by 17% in real terms since 2009, as investment priorities have been diverted elsewhere. An intellectual precariat has come of age, made up of millennials who stumble from year to year on temporary contracts, often part-time, wondering where the next teaching gig is coming from. The drive to keep student numbers buoyant has led to relentless micro-management of academic performance, much of it driven by questionable assumptions such as those of the teaching excellence framework, which a recent study found constructed “excellence” as the development of employability in students.
The world of our universities has become anxious, tense and, for many, chronically insecure. A YouGov poll found that four out of 10 academics had considered leaving the sector as a result of health pressures. In a sector intended to promote the life of the mind, this does not seem to be a good way to do business. So far these strikes have received an encouraging level of support from students, some of whom have reportedly been warned by university authorities to stay away from picket lines. Overturning the wrong-headed priorities of our universities would certainly have the support of St John Henry Newman.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/25/the-guardian-view-on-university-strikes-a-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-ca
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