The focus on universities as businesses is of concern to all

Much happens within university administrations that profoundly affect students, but of which they remain unaware. Often, this is simply because such invisible machinations are uninteresting or unproblematic—financial ruminations, bureaucratic procedures, and so on. At other times, however, the unseen activities of university administrators are more pertinent to student wellbeing and so should be made clear, especially when they have detrimental consequences for those students’ educations and ‘student experience’. There are many economic, political, and institutional factors affecting modern universities, our own included, but one of the most insidious ones is surely the attempted reorganisation of university activities in line with a new economic agenda—one which places profits ahead of learning, to the detriment of both the students, as learners, and academics, as teachers.

Why should this particularly matter to undergraduates? Don’t these changes only affect academics? No. They will and do affect undergraduates because it affects the teaching you receive and the policies and ideals that academics must operate within. By ‘commercialising’ universities, the ‘undergraduate experience’ is diminished. The interest isn’t in producing well-rounded individuals, whose interests and potentials have been explored and developed. University administrators and policy-makers are preoccupied with ‘key skills’ and ‘knowledge transfer’, intent not on educating students but on training future workers. Ideals like the ‘pursuit of knowledge’ and ‘finding oneself’ may sound clichéd, but they reflect values which are broader and deeper than the narrow utilitarian ones that are being promoted by Lord Mandelson, whose Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has assumed control over university policy-making.

“So what?”, you might reply. “Employment prospects are grim and being attractive to employers is essential.” Such pragmatism views the ‘pursuit of truth’ as naive and idealistic—fine on paper, but hardly suited to the realities of post-credit crunch Britain. However, one can turn this pragmatism on its head by appealing to the economic and consumerist mindset that supports it. Think about it this way. Undergraduates are being told—by Lord Mandelson, no less—to think of themselves as ‘consumers of the educational ‘products’ of their universities, which increasingly model themselves on businesses. Considering this change of attitude, it makes sense for student-consumers to want value for money: after all, today’s undergraduates are paying more for their degrees and face a bleak job market upon graduation—so, are you getting a good deal for your money?

Arguably not. There are no clear incentives to invest time and energy in maximising teaching provision. The government assigns university budgets according to their research activities—books, journal papers, and so on—rather than according to the quality and extent of teaching, such that we are actually disincentivised from investing our time and energy in teaching. Yet at the same time, universities are taking on more and more students, even as we are being pressured to focus more and more on research and economic ‘performativity’. Caught between these two competing demands, teaching inevitably loses out.

Reassuringly, undergraduates have become increasingly alert to these changes. Some object to the lack of ‘contact time’ with the academic staff, or complain about the inadequacies of the university library, or by querying where their tuitions fees go and how they are spent. Such discontents are sometimes spurious or explicable, but often the problems they indicate are wholly justified: especially when one considers that many of them stem from gross underinvestment in aspects of universities which don’t translate into increased economic output, of which teaching is the obvious example. After all, it’s cheaper to teach students if the courses are ‘thinned out’ and made easier—less need for labour-intensive teaching and expensive books, and so on. This sort of thinking smacks of a crass ‘business ethos’ in which university administrators pursue ‘efficiency’ across the departments and faculties by attempting to increase their activities (student teaching, research activities) whilst striving to reduce the financial and other resources available to them. It’s “business efficiency” all over again, but whilst it might work well in the commercial and industrial sectors, it has grim implications for undergraduate teaching.

An extreme cynic might suggest that in the current ‘University, Inc.’ system, students really are just ‘cash cows’. They arrive, pay their fees, receive a factory-farm education, and graduate—whilst the universities gets on with the far more profitable business of producing new technologies, products, and companies. The emphasis within British universities on recruiting postgraduates from outside the ‘Home/EU’ funding zone—particularly from Asia—is one example of this—such students are, individually, worth three times those of ‘home’ students. Josephine Butler College is another example: it added seven-hundred-and-fifty undergraduate students to the university—a 5% increase to the student population. Yet at the same time, staff numbers didn’t see a corresponding increase to cope with these new students. This suggests that the University is making a pure profit from those new students: assuming each one pays the usual tuition fees, that’s just under than two and a half million pounds a year (before deductions for running costs and so on). The ‘cash cow’ principle suddenly seems much more plausible.

Departments are being asked to do more and more with less and less. We must take on more undergraduates (without increases in teaching budgets), produce more high-quality research (without corresponding funding or resources), and compete with other similarly-ranked institutions (according to abstract ‘league tables’ and economic ‘performativity’ rather than excellence in teaching and research). Apologies to all you undergraduates but, in the emerging scheme of things, you just don’t seem to matter all that much.