England has effectively abolished its public university system ****************************************************************************************** * England has effectively abolished its public university system ****************************************************************************************** Professor Howard Hotson criticizes the British government reforms of higher education. He of manifesto In Defence of Public Higher Education [ URL "http://publicuniversity.org.uk/w uploads/2011/09/In_Defence_of_Public_HE11.doc"] which was published by Charles University translation [ URL "http://www.iforum.cuni.cz/IFORUM-13838-version1-branme_final.pdf"] . Pr visited Prague in November and now you can read an interview with him Prof. Hotson, the UK higher education system is considered as one of the most successful s world. Your universities are successful in global rankings as well as make real contributi and regional development - and still the government decided to perform the reforms. What w decision? Well, that is the central question which we intend to raise with the government. One can r documents foundational to these reforms – the Browne Review [ URL "http://www.bis.gov.uk/a corporate/docs/s/10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf"] of 2010 higher education White Paper [ URL "http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://dis hereform/white-paper/"] of 2011 – without ever encountering either a sustained argument or body of empirical evidence explaining why it is that the UK university system requires rad one finds is an argument grounded in the unsubstantiated assumption that markets are the m ways of distributing scarce resources and therefore that marketising the university system more efficient. So, the intention of the reform was not to correct something wrong but to make the system education even more efficient… That is right. Another way to look at the situation is to go back to the original, official brief given t Review: its task was ‘to examine the balance of payments between students, graduates, taxp and employers’. The OECD's annual publication Education at a Glance [ URL "http://www.oecd eag2012.htm"] provides a wonderfully comprehensive range of international comparative stat could and should have been used to examine this balance on an international, comparative, empirical basis. But that was not the case of the Browne Review? That’s correct. At no point in the Browne Review did they actually fulfill the task they h the government, and it is not difficult to see why. If they actually had looked at the rea data, they would have discovered: a) that the British university system was actually serio in comparison with most of its international competitors and b) that public spending on hi was much lower in the UK that in most other developed economies. They also would have disc private businesses were not contributing their fair share to the UK knowledge economy. And seen that the financial burdens placed on the students even prior of these reforms were fa in all but one or two countries in the world. So if the Browne Review had fulfilled the in examined ‘the balance of payments between students, graduates, taxpayers, and employers’, have concluded that shifting still more of the financial burdens to students and graduates justified. Now, of course there are financial problems in the UK, as in the most other countries. We deficit; we then used an enormous amount of public money to bail out the banks; the length cut tax revenues and increased unemployment expenditure; and consequently taxes needed to areas of public expenditure cut back. The key question is, who should pay for correcting t mistake: the generation which made it, or the young people who will suffer from it? The go solution was to withdraw 80% of the direct public support for undergraduate education and fees to an average of over ?8000 per year, by far the highest level of any ‘public’ univer the world. What many of us regard as most morally repugnant is the fact that the parliamentarians mak not only had all of their tuition fees paid by the taxpayer but also much of their univers expenses as well. When I arrived in the UK in the late 1980s, David Cameron (now Prime Min of the Conservatives) was studying in Oxford, Nick Clegg (now Deputy Prime Minister and le Liberal Democrats) was studying in Cambridge, and Ed Miliband (now Leader of the Oppositio Labour Party), was the student president in my own Oxford college, protesting about the fa rents were going up. So these people had a virtually all-expenses-paid-ticket to universit the taxpayer. They then walked out of university into the kind of jobs that young people t dream of; they bought the kind of houses today’s young people can only dream of; they bene the unsustainable financial boom of recent years; they paid inadequate levels of tax to fu services; and they therefore share responsibility with the still older generation for driv deficit. It is the moral responsibility of the generations which caused this problem to so instead this generation of politicians is passing on the problem to the younger generation responsibility for it and who will in any case need to cope with the enormous ecological p previous generations are also created for them. This is fundamentally unjust. Nevertheless, the Browne Review was published and then the government started to draft the amendment. Students logically did not agree and large protests followed, the In Defense of manifesto was written by leading UK university personalities, there were other actions don reform – but finally, despite massive public disagreement, the government succeeded. Could key factors of the government success? Well, the crucial tactical move the government made was to take the decisive parliamentary early in the process. The Browne Review was published on 12 October 2010. The crucial parl trebling tuition fees was taken less than two months later, on 9 December 2010. This was m the publication of the White Paper on 28 June 2011 revealed the real nature of the governm university reforms. As well as being rushed, the key vote was taken against the backdrop o exaggerated concerns about the stability of the British currency. The manufactured mood of was that, if the UK government didn’t start solving its budget deficit by transferring the to students, the UK would be preyed upon by the international currency markets and end up or Portugal – a rather absurd supposition, give the tiny contribution of undergraduate edu overall budget. In any case, the new funding arrangement does not actually decrease the amount of money th has to borrow, in fact it increases it at least in the short term and possibly in the long It just moves the public debt from the deficit ledger to a different ledger. Because some is going to be paid back by graduates, it does not count towards the annual budget deficit no one can accurately forecast how much of their tuition loans the average graduate will p a lifetime of work, this huge speculative gamble simply transfers risk from current taxpay taxpayers. In this respect too, this solution is selfish and irresponsible, solving the pr the current generation by storing up more problems for the next generation. There is another higher education system in the UK – the Scottish one. What was behind the the Scottish government to pay the fees for students in Scotland? Did somehow Scottish hig institutions contribute to this decision? No, not to my knowledge, at least not directly. The essentially difference is a cultural o society is more cohesive, and they have a far more deep-rooted sense that providing everyo access to higher education benefits the entire nation. But the really crucial point here i One of the implicit arguments which is always made – and these arguments are very rarely m is that there is no other alternative to trebling English tuition fees. There is an altern is the one practiced not only within the most prosperous European countries but also withi portion of the United Kingdom itself. Scotland has determined for the foreseeable future n raise tuition fees but to eliminate them completely as the Liberal Democrats famously prom joined the Coalition government. It is not the Scottish position but the new English one which is radically unprecedented. country has ever done what the English have just done: eliminated almost all direct public undergraduate teaching overnight, effectively abolishing their public university system at a pen. Even the Americans have a public university system, and three quarters of American in that public university system. England is the only developed country on the face of Ear effectively abolished its public university system. And I think you only abolish your publ system when your country has become so fragmented – ethnically, socially, and economically longer regard themselves as belonging to some kind of cohesive community. Do you think that is the case of the United Kingdom? This is what the government is tacitly assuming, but it remains to be seen whether they ar fact, there is no evidence that the English actually want their public university system t and the government knows this. A series of polls have shown that the majority of people wa of undergraduate teaching expenses to be paid from public sources, as they were until this The Browne Review committee conducted another survey on this same subject which confirmed of people of all social backgrounds wanted the government to continue to cover half or mor education expenses. But the Browne Review committee suppressed the result of their only pi research from the final report because it undermined their preferred funding solution, and were only revealed by a freedom-of-information request after the report was published. The two main UK politic parties – both the Conservative and Labour – know that their propo highly controversial and did everything possible to avoid putting them before the British deliberately commissioned the Browne Report before the 2010 election so that it would repo election, since this allowed them to remove any reference to radical higher education refo election manifestoes. Now, why would they want to do that? Because they knew that proposin overhaul the UK university system would not be popular with voters. Candidates from the th Liberal Democrats, signed pledges to abolish university tuition fees altogether, even thou doubts that such a pledge was affordable. Why? Because they knew that such a promise would with voters. Since then, in the spring of 2012, the government withdrew its planned higher from parliament because they knew it would encounter popular opposition. So, the evidence what has just been done to the English university system is not what the British people wa therefore is: why they are doing it anyway? And this is partly where this lobbying comes i for Universities has spent much more time talking with the lobbyists from the private for- sector then he has for instance with the students that he is supposedly putting at the hea university system. This is the dimension of the problem I tried to outline in my lecture a Sciences. We are facing higher education reforms as well. There were large protests in the spring of the reform was very much like other reforms – pushing more corporate-like governance, intr fees, changing the role of external bodies within the universities. We also had a White Pa solid evidence and with manipulative surveys. However, the protests were successful and th least temporarily withdrawn. We believe that one of the key success factors was strong inv academic self-governance in the protests. Do you see any relationship between the universi the public character of higher education? Changes to university governance are needed in order to subserviate universities to the go thereby to business. In order to transform universities from genuinely autonomous and inde governed by academic values into instruments for delivering government economic policy, go purely monetary values of the marketplace, you need two things. The first is docile univer trained in business administration rather than academic subjects and responsive to instruc government. The second is rigid and authoritarian hierarchical line management systems. Bo been introduced in virtually every UK university aside from Oxford and Cambridge. These rigid line management systems are appropriate to manufacturing industry; they are no which creative industries or Silicon Valley work; and they are not appropriate to universi impact on morale is catastrophic: when collegial decision-making is replaced with instruct university management, a sense of personal engagement in teaching and research disappears counterproductive results. In many even of the best UK universities now it is the discipli critically discuss your own experience of authoritarian and hierarchical university manage because by doing so you are bringing your university into disrepute. So instead of being a expression, the university is becoming a place where you cannot even reflect publicly on y experience without facing disciplinary measures. Is there any alternative to this line management governance? There are two universities in the UK which are not managed in this way, and they are gener as the best: Oxford and Cambridge. Within the past decade, attempts were made to impose co government on these two ancient universities as well, but because sovereign authority was in the university senates, these attempts were defeated. As a consequence, there is nobody can tell you what to do and yet everything is conducted in a collegial way because everyon that they have to share responsibility for the good of their college, for the good of thei for the good of their faculty. This collegial and democratic form of governance makes radi policy extremely difficult, and managers therefore regard it as ineffective, inefficient, need of ‘modernization’. But in financial terms it is actually extremely cost-effective pr it is attractive to academics. Oxford and Cambridge attract some of the best academics in and manage to retain them even thought they are worked extremely hard and relatively poorl reason is because, once you have worked in a collegial university which has preserved acad and is governed by genuinely academic values, it is almost inconceivable to surrender that collegiality and become a part of an autocratic, corporate machine in order to make a bit doing a bit less work. To do so is to surrender what is most important, which is a sense o sense of independence and interdependence within this collegial society. And this is a les government has overlooked completely. The astonishing thing is that we have a completely d of how university should work staring us in the face, right in the middle of the UK univer indeed at the very apex of the UK university system, in the most famous and successful uni country. This model is still viable and it is still the best way to do things. And yet the the English university system are so blinded by management school dogma that they prefer n Howard Hotson, professor at St. Anne's College at Oxford University, focuses on the intell is also the chairman of Steering Committee of Council for the Defence of British Universit