Universities under attack

by Dave Sewell on 29.01.10

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder, and cheap and cheerful theatres up and down the country are gearing up for the pre-Christmas pantomime season. It’s appropriate, then, that for the second consecutive month I can give a starring role to a certain cartoonish villain we all love to hate. That’s right folks, it’s none other than the Business Secretary, First Secretary, Comeback Kid and Prince of Darkness himself, Lord Peter Mandelson. Last month he was “beyond rage” egging on the millionaire managers of Royal Mail to smash the posties’ union that had thwarted his plans for privatisation. Now that dispute has ended – or at least stalled – in a worrying stalemate, leaving Mandelson free to devote his full attention to the one group in society that still wasn’t quite skint enough: university students.

Mandelson took control of higher education when Gordon Brown merged two of the most clumsily-named ministries in his clumsily-rebranded government: “Skills, Innovation and Universities” with “Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform”. The BBC news website reported the merger under the headline UNIVERSITIES MERGED INTO BUSINESS, and those four words pretty much sum up Mandelson’s vision for the glorious future of higher education.

This very week saw the launch of a review into higher education funding. The Tories and the big business union CBI have already spent the better part of this term howling for an increase in tuition fees and the review is, in part, Mandelson’s strategy for waiting until after the general election before admitting that he plans to do exactly the same thing. Even with fees capped at their current level Alex Parry, one of this week’s lottery winners, told the press “I always wanted to go to university but was worried about the debt I would be in. Now I don’t have to worry.” If they go much higher, the Euromillions draw will end up replacing UCAS. But if only, if only it was just about fees.

We all know someone who’s been let down by the creaking, bloated failure that is the Student Loans Company. And as cuts to public sector spending start to hit, universities across the country are firing staff, reducing teaching time, discontinuing courses and closing whole departments. In my town people still give a little shudder when you mention Maggie Thatcher, who attacked students among many, many others, but when she cut funding to universities it was to the tune of 2% or 3%. Now UCL is facing cuts of 6%, King’s College 10% and London Met 25%. Just hours before I sat down to write this, the University of Birmingham revealed plans to close its Sociology Department.

This is basically what all three parties have got lined up for the whole public sector, if you hadn’t already noticed, but in the case of education there is only so far they can push it. Capitalism has been around for more than 300 years now, and as it has developed it’s come to demand more of its workforce. Once, it took little more than the ability to stay awake for 18 hours pushing a little wagon full of coal or losing limbs to a monstrous cotton spinning machine and you had a job for life. Now you need to know how to access a database and everything.

Capitalism needs educated workers – up to a point. It’s pretty irrelevant to the boss if you have an understanding of the world that lets you fulfil your creative potential, and it’s downright worrying if you are so trained in critical thinking that you can question authority. And so he’s not too worried if the schools of English Lit and Philosophy go to the wall. But if you don’t have the skills you need to be productive at work, he’s missing a trick. Some universities in have already appealed to businesses in their area for funding an, in return, offered specialised courses. You can now get a degree in middle management designed especially for MacDonalds or Tesco.

Mandelson has seen this ball, and he’s committed to running with it. If that wasn’t clear enough from the evil glint in his eye, the makeup of the review board is a dead giveaway. The board is dominated by university managers and business interests, with the only student being vetted for their “independence” from NUS. It is chaired by Lord Browne, Baron of Madingley – and if that’s not a pantomimey title, I don’t know what is – and former head of BP, a man who presumably never needs to use internet search engines because he can ask an actual Butler whose name is Jeeves. I think we can safely guess whose needs it will put first when considering the future of education.

Among the proposals Mandelson has put to the review board is the idea of making “understanding business” a compulsory module on every degree course. We don’t know in detail what this module will consist of, but I predict that it will be almost as exciting as that stupid Key Skills thing we had to sit through in college. Another is to make universities publish statistics on each course, giving the graduate employment rate or estimated boost to future earnings. This is inspired by the little red, yellow and green labels that tell you how much salt, sugar and fat are in your supermarket ready meals.

I’ll say it again: that was inspired by supermarket ready meals. Soulless, tasteless, unhealthy and unsatisfying – but dirt cheap and just about enough to keep you alive. University has never seemed more appealing.

Dave is remembering Chris Harman 1942-2009 – activist, teacher, writer and comrade