EcoLogics

‘Labour was elected to extend opportunity. This is our defining mission in politics, to secure a future fair for all.’ Tony Blair

‘As one commentator puts it graphically, universities are “the coalmines of the 21st century”’ Tony Blair

(Both statements made in the context of a speech on higher education reform given in 2004)

Note: as the title suggests, this essay is the third in a series: if you’ve not done so already, you may wish to go first to Lord Leitch’s Levers (Part 1) and Lord Leitch’s Levers (Part 2).

In this, the third and last part of a series of posts about the Leitch Review of Skills, I would like to consider some of the implications of the Review for higher education in the UK. I will do so by engaging in a case study of recent changes at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol.

Why a case study about UWE? In 2005, UWE appointed Sir Howard Newby as vice-chancellor of the university (1). It later also appointed his partner Lady Sheila Newby as Assistant Vice-Chancellor. In the year that followed, the Newbys engaged in a process designed to transform UWE, a university with some 33,000 staff and students, into an institution devoted to what Howard Newby describes as ‘knowledge exchange’. Knowledge exchange is Newby’s version of the Leitch Review’s discourse of skillism. And indeed, as will become clear in this post, Newby’s rationale for knowledge exchange more than fulfills Leitch’s proposal to engage in what might be described as a skillification of higher education. Newby and his partner Sheila were arguably intent on transforming the university into an institution that would focus mostly, if not entirely on the teaching and learning of so-called economically valuable skills, and whose research would be designed to service what Newby describes as ‘UK Plc’.

I was one of several staff members who resigned from their posts at the university when the nature, extent, and full academic implications of knowledge exchange began to become clear. But Newby himself suddenly resigned from his post at UWE in July of 2007, scarcely a year and a half after he arrived at the university. Some of the UK’s national media have described the controversial circumstances in which Newby left UWE (2), and I myself published a post on this subject in late August 2007 (see The UWE Experiment). While I will revisit one aspect of the controversy in this post, I would like to focus on a critique of the discourse of knowledge exchange itself, and to consider its implications for the future of higher education at UWE and any other university that might be inclined to follow its lead.

* * *

Not so long ago, the changes that Newby proposed to introduce to UWE would have been dismissed out of hand as being inappropriate for higher education. The UK has a significant educational sector (called further education) devoted to the provision of vocational skills of the kind preferred by Leitch, and as recently as the late 1990s, it would have been inconceivable for a university such as UWE to appoint a vice-chancellor in order to transform it into a further education institution, or even a hybrid higher/further education institution. It is thus pertinent to begin this account with an explanation of the circumstances under which the board of governors of UWE presumably came to see this process as a Third Way for the university. How was it that the boundaries between higher and further education came to be blurred, but also, why was it that a Third Way came to be regarded as being necessary in the first place?

As I noted in earlier posts, the general context for the rise of what I have described as the discourse of skillism (or skillification) can be explained from the perspective of the consolidation of a neoliberal ideology in the UK. I have explained how I define each of these terms —discourse, ideology, neoliberalism, and skillification— in those same posts (for an account of the first three terms, see ‘Neo-Liberalism, Northern Rock, and the Ghost of Pinochet‘; for an account of the nature of skillification, see Lord Leitch’s Levers Part 2). Briefly, skillification is the reduction of education to the teaching and learning of so-called economically valuable skills. Put differently, skillification is a transformation of education into something that can be used either to make money, or to support business—especially but not only, big business. It is now one of the central planks of the New Labour party’s strategy for economic and social development, and as such it is part and parcel of New Labour’s neo-liberal ideology. Neo-liberalism is premised on the fetishization of business, and on the idea that in the 21st as in the 18th century—Adam Smith’s century—there is such a thing as a marketplace where the invisible hand of market forces is at once driven by, and capable of attenuating, individual selfishness. This such that over time the marketplace ensures the common good. Like many other critical social scientists, I argue that such a marketplace has never existed, and that Adam Smith himself would probably be the first to object to the facile, to not say caricaturesque way in which neo-liberals have used and abused his Wealth of Nations (3).

While much has been made of the fact that Gordon Brown invited Margaret Thatcher to 10 Downing Street soon after he became prime minister (4), it is arguably the case that New Labour was already transforming itself along the lines of neo-liberal principles by the early 1990s. By that point, and as noted by a number of critical observers, Blair and Brown had decided to abandon earlier Labour pledges to repudiate the Thatcherite revolution. Instead, they embraced business-friendly policies, and eventually enshrined monetarism by way of the delegation of the power to set interest rates to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee(5). While this change is widely regarded as one of the many triumphs of Gordon Brown’s chancellorship, recent events involving the Northern Rock and other banks have revealed a rather darker side to the change.

A more detailed examination of neo-liberalism, its history and numerous contradictions is beyond the scope of this post. It suffices to say that, at the time that Newby was hired as vice-chancellor, UWE, and indeed many other universities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland found themselves caught up in a veritable political pincer movement that expressed quite clearly the contradictions that are inherent to the English variety of the neo-liberal ideology.

On the one hand, both Conservative and New Labour politicians had been keen to proclaim the need for greater access to higher education, and had been happy to legislate in order to attempt to achieve this end. So it is, for example, that in 1992/93, many former polytechnics were formally recognised by the Conservatives for what they always were—universities; and that in 1999, Tony Blair proclaimed a target of 50% access to higher education for young adults(6). But even as such apparently noble aims were declared, first the Conservatives and then New Labour failed to ensure that funding for higher education—especially but not only funding for learning in higher education—increased at the rate that was required to sustain the politicians’ commitments(7).

The first and most obvious sign of this contradiction was the Tories’ introduction at the very end of the 1980s of so-called ‘top-up’ loans for students. Several years later, New Labour’s own imposition of the hugely unpopular top-up tuition fees made it an accomplice of this Janus-faced policy. As I explained in the first post in this series, the 2001 New Labour manifesto had promised ‘We will not introduce “top-up” fees and have legislated to prevent them’. It was thus at once disappointing, and utterly consistent that shortly after his accession to the prime minister’s office, Gordon Brown announced that he would continue this policy by privatizing the public student loan scheme introduced by the Tories. Even if students had been forced to go into debt to procure a higher education, they had at least benefited from subsidized interest rates. In future they would have to secure loans from the private banking sector, and now at whatever rates that sector might wish to set. This sector, along with several other others in the UK, began to see the possibilities of doing business in higher education, and increasingly, it was the advocates of the de facto privatization of higher education that began to determine New Labour’s policy.

* * *

Two sets of social groups paid, and are likely to continue to pay the highest cost of New Labour’s neo-liberalism. First, following the introduction of the mentioned policies, the numbers of working class and so-called ‘mature’ students in higher education in the UK took a nose-dive. This is something for which New Labour has been rightly taken to task. It will undoubtedly be one of the legacies of Tony Blair—a particularly glaring legacy in the light of the first quotation in this post’s epigraph.

Second, by 2006, lecturers and researchers across the UK had seen their salaries decline by some 40% in real terms over a 20-year period. During the 2006 campaign to redress this decline, the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) and the New Labour government’s allies in the national media disseminated tendentious information that suggested that the lecturers’ wage position was far better than it actually was. The implication was that academics were a privileged group that was greedily demanding impossible wage increases. In fact, the best indication of the validity of the lecturers’ campaign is found in the words uttered by Tony Blair himself on January 14, 2004, during a speech given in a conference on university reform: ‘The shortfall of teaching funding has badly hit the salaries of academic staff, which have shown practically no increase in real terms over two decades. This at a time when professionals in virtually every other sector, including school teaching and the health professions, have improved their positions significantly; and when competition among graduate employers at home and abroad for the most talented potential university researchers and teachers is greater than ever. An estimated 1,000 UK academics have left jobs here for universities abroad, a quarter alone going to the US.’[8]

The newly-formed University and College Union’s (UCU) capitulation to a 13.1% offer, to be spread over three years—in fact, a real increase of probably 1% or less per annum after factoring in the rising retail price index—is a testament to New Labour’s neo-liberal commitment to so-called ‘fiscal rectitude’. I say ‘so-called’ because of course, Blair and Brown were quite happy to abandon that rectitude when it came to waging war, to pouring billions into surveillance systems such as the UK’s proposed identity card scheme, and most recently, to bailing out Northern Rock.

There is one other element of context that I need to present in order to explain how it is that knowledge exchange came to be seen by the UWE directorate as the ‘solution’ to UWE’s real or perceived problems. In the early part of its first administration, New Labour seemed committed to what was essentially a non-stratified system of higher education. As late as 2000, David Blunkett, then the Secretary of Education and Employment, appeared to maintain this commitment in a speech given at the University of Greenwich. But in the following years, this aspect of the New Labour policy did a u-turn. After the publication of the White Paper in 2003 (The Future of Higher Education), it became clear that New Labour was now intent on concentrating public funding for research, and on developing a categorization that would, in effect, discriminate between ‘research-intensive’ and ‘teaching-led’ universities. In so doing it appeared to cave in to calls—ostensibly from the heads of Britain’s most prestigious ‘old’ universities—to ‘put polytechnics back into the box’(9). In fact, and as will become clear below, there may have been additional voices demanding not so much to ‘put the polys back into the box’, but for Tony Blair and then for Gordon Brown to open up the former polys’ cash boxes so as to make these available to a new type of free privateer: entrepreneurs seeking to build national and transnational corporations on the back of New Labour corporate welfarism, as applied to further and higher education.

Taken together, these circumstances meant that the senior managers of newer universities such as UWE were forced—perhaps encouraged is a better word— to look for new sources of funding if they were to escape the teaching university/research university dichotomy. Many feared that failure to do so might even compromise the ‘new’ universities’ ability to survive in the medium to long term.

It was in this context that Howard Newby was presumably able to persuade UWE’s vice-chancellor selection committee that he could offer a Third Way that should secure what may well have been presented as UWE’s very survival as a university. The main aspect of this Third Way would involve the introduction, to not say the imposition of a regime based on what Newby describes as knowledge exchange. I would now like to consider knowledge exchange in some detail.

* * *

Put simply, knowledge exchange is Newby’s take on knowledge transfer, which is itself a form of what was once known as technology transfer. Both technology transfer and knowledge transfer are discourses designed to procure the efficient commercialization of knowledge—especially but not only the knowledge produced via research in universities.

Of course, most if not all research produced in universities has long been the object of changing forms of commodification. Anyone who claims that universities are somehow exempt from such a process is clearly mistaken. Indeed, a strong argument can be made that university degrees are a fairly reliable mechanism with which to ensure an orderly translation of cultural and symbolic forms of capital (education, and social prestige) into economic capital. It doesn’t seem like an overstatement to suggest that, were it not for this process, universities as we know them today would not exist.

This point should however not obscure the fact that in universities, as in the case in some other public institutions, certain boundaries have long existed that have preserved what Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (10) once described as the relative autonomy of cultural reproduction, in this case, of higher education. This relative autonomy is what has allowed allegedly useless subjects such as history and literature to be taught. But it is also what has allowed lecturers, researchers and university students to engage in critical investigations of a variety of practices that have posed serious threats to democracy, and in many cases, to the physical well-being of people over the last century. Insofar as this has been the case, it is possible to argue that the relative autonomy of universities has served society rather well (11).

To be sure, this is only one part of the picture. Rather more devious uses have been given to that selfsame relative autonomy, and this is where the advocates of technology transfer, and knowledge transfer come back into the picture. Generally speaking, the advocates of technology and knowledge transfer are not interested in the relative autonomy of universities. On the contrary, they tend to see it as a problem. This despite the fact that the relative autonomy of the advocates’ own universities is arguably what has made it possible for them to theorize technology or knowledge transfer, and to make an academic career from this activity. Howard Newby is arguably a case in point.

The objective of knowledge transferists such as Newby is thereby a deeply paradoxical, if not a contradictory one: academics such as Newby are arguably intent on using the very autonomy of universities as a space in which to theorize the means for the loss of that autonomy. More often than not, this objective has been legitimated on the grounds of the generation of (national) wealth. Indeed, just as Lord Leitch regards economically valuable skills as ‘the lever’ for the creation of ‘wealth and social justice’(12), the technology and knowledge transferists have long regarded their own discourse as another ‘lever’ with which to secure the wealth of the nation.

Such claims can be shown to be spurious in two fundamental ways. First, the sponsors and clients of the ideas (and of course of the processes) of knowledge transfer are predominantly high tech industries, which tend to be led by some of the UK’s, and on occasion some of the world’s most powerful private corporations. The wealth of the nation should not be conflated with the wealth of such corporations. Moreover, strictly speaking there is no such thing as a national wealth. The point is not to echo Thatcher’s ‘there is no society’ discourse, but rather, to critique the implicit idea that there is somehow an automatic continuity between general indicators of the wealth of a nation, and the distribution of that same wealth amongst all of that nation’s citizens. This idea is a false one in so far as there is no guarantee of an equitable distribution of wealth. On the contrary, in many cases the wealth that one social group might procure by way of technology transfer might well lead to the impoverishment of another group that loses out, directly or indirectly, to that selfsame process. Indeed, in so far as many employers have long used new technologies to reduce staff levels, the argument might well be made that, unless there is some kind of intervention by the state, technology transfer might well lead to greater unemployment.

This problem is analogous to the fundamental problem associated with the Leitch Review’s skillism, which I described in the second part of this series. Like Leitch, Newby has sought to dissimulate this contradiction by way of public relations campaigns that have sought to persuade students that knowledge exchange is fundamentally about ensuring, as the UWE website puts it, ‘teaching and learning for employability’. But just as Leitch’s media interviews betray what are arguably his structural interests in this process (see Lord Leitch’s Levers Part 1), Newby’s own discourse provides some clues as to why the Conservative and New Labour governments may have awarded him first a CBE, and then a knighthood. Far from critiquing the potential role of knowedge transfer in generating deepening social divides, Newby has made it his mission to promote new and more efficient ways of securing the mentioned commodification of knowledge. His most significant contribution has arguably been to come up with more and more radical—one might just as well say more and more reactionary—ways of undermining what I described above as the relative autonomy of teaching, learning and research in universities.

* * *

A lecture given by Newby at Sussex University (13) at about the same time that he took up the Vice-Chancellorship at UWE is instructive of the manner in which Newby proposed to take this logic to UWE. In the course of the lecture, Newby suggested that the older models for the commodification of research were fundamentally flawed insofar as they remained embedded in linear conceptions of the flow of information from universities to what he described as ‘UK Plc’. In future, the commodification of research should begin in the universities themselves. This would require ‘UK Plc’ to determine from the outset what research should take place. Like Leitch, Newby described this fundamental shift by way of the seductive image of ‘user-led’ or ‘demand-led’ practices. This self-same imagery is now a central aspect of UWE’s account of its own sense of mission, and indeed the University’s interim administration (following Newby’s departure) has stated that it intends to continue with this policy (14).

In the same lecture, Newby argued that knowledge transferists have focused too much on the research activities by established academics; in future, knowledge transfer should be extended to curricular design, and to the actual teaching and learning in university classrooms. University graduates, regarded by Newby as future employees of industry, should emerge with a pertinent mixture of knowledge, skills and aptitudes. But equally, when graduates eventually returned to university to engage in continuing professional development, they should use the discourses acquired in industry to ‘refresh’ the universities’ curricula, to ‘feed’ the universities’ research agendas, and to develop the universities’ learning and teaching ‘markets’. This ‘two-way flow’ is what justifies Newby’s proposal of a new name for the process, which should now be called ‘knowledge exchange’. On this level too, UWE is moving towards becoming a living example of Newby’s proposals: along with a sweeping proposal to ‘rationalise’ the structure of the university by reducing its number of faculties from nine to five, the university is intent—or at least under Newby was intent— on prioritizing forms of teaching and learning that its directorate regards as being conducive to knowledge exchange.

Regarded in isolation from the point I made about relative autonomy, this might all seem like good common business sense. When, however, one realises that it is a recipe for the elimination of the relative autonomy of universities, the proposal is seen for what it is: an effort to institute a neo-liberal regime at the heart of higher education. As if anticipating a fierce reaction by academics in the UK’s universities, Newby’s lecture in Sussex tempered his proposal with a convenient division of labour: not all universities would find this programme suitable, and so only some should be devoted to ‘knowledge exchange’. That said, insofar as no university would be resourced to do everything on a ‘globally excellent’ level, then each university would need to identify its own strengths and focus on these. In the emerging higher education ‘marketplace’, each university would have to consider its focus in relation to its ‘brand’ and its institutional position with the said ‘marketplace’. So in effect, even as Newby suggested that only some universities should devote themselves to knowledge exchange, he made it clear that his overall conception of the field was now one of an ‘emergent’ marketplace.

* * *

As I noted earlier, the ideological blind spot of neo-liberalism lies in its fetishizing conception of a marketplace that never was. Markets today—indeed, markets yesterday and tomorrow—are not best conceived as an association of monadic ‘individuals’ whose mutual greed works over time to benefit the common good. Markets today involve giant corporations that can be their own ‘visible hand’ vis-à-vis any particular context. This corporate ‘hand’ is frequently driven not only by greed (Adam Smith was certainly right on this count), but by informal and not-so-informal networks that serve to connect government with large corporations and with the key managers of public, or ‘mixed’ institutions such as UWE. The news reported by Private Eye on 25 May 2007 of a possible conflict of interest between Newby’s non-executive directorship at Carter & Carter Group plc, and his attempt to provide this same firm with a UWE contract for vocational training, provides a glimpse of how such networks might affect policies on both a national and an individual institutional level.

Carter & Carter began as an automotive repair company, and thanks to an aggressive policy of expansion, now describes itself as a ‘major provider of government funded vocational learning and outsourced services to large corporate organisations and SMEs’(15). It is a key player in the ‘Train to Gain’ policy that is so favourably regarded by the Leitch Review. The company owes much to New Labour’s programme of ‘welfare reform’ and skillism. Were it not for these policies, Carter & Carter would almost certainly have grown in a rather different way.

Two aspects of Newby’s Carter & Carter saga are instructive for the purposes of this critique. First, and as I began to suggest above, the affair provided a fascinating insight into the manner in which an ostensibly disinterested government policy might be affected (if not actually motivated) by a network of perfectly legal, but utterly interested corporations, directors, and public (or public/private) entities such as UWE. Whether there was anything corrupt in Newby’s attempt or not, the existence of such networks—especially but not only those that have grown on the back of what has to be described as corporate welfarism—puts paid to the idea of an open and ‘free’ marketplace of the kind proposed by neo-liberals such as Brown, Leitch, and Newby himself. On the contrary, the networks reveal the importance of leverage in the increasingly hegemonic status of neo-liberalism across the UK. In the context of higher educational reform, this leverage can apparently count on the support not just of the Prime Minister and the upper echelons of the New Labour government, but of a veritable who’s who of Britain’s transnational corporations. As I noted in The UWE Experiment, Richard Brown, chief executive of the Council for Industry and Higher Education, was quoted by the Times Higher Educational Supplement as saying that if universities didn’t embrace the skills ‘revolution’, ‘then the private sector will continue to take this market. Universities have to decide how much of a loss that would be’(16). As I also noted in that post, the Council of Industry and Higher Education is funded by several of the UK’s largest, and indeed most controversial private corporations—the list includes BAE Systems, Rio Tinto, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco and BUPA(17).

As part of the above, and second, the Carter & Carter affair reveals how the economic reductionism that is the heart of the Leitch Review is likely to transform the very nature of higher education. As I noted earlier, Carter and Carter specializes in vocational education, and is particularly keen on ‘Train to Gain’, a scheme that is designed to take the training to the workplace itself. ‘Train to Gain’ is arguably all about eliminating education as a space that is separate from business. Insofar as Newby’s knowledge exchange is precisely about such a scheme, then it is hardly surprising that he felt that Carter & Carter would have something to offer UWE—indeed, it is my understanding that Newby had proposed for UWE to engage in some kind of partnership with Carter & Carter. Such a partnership would only have been conceivable if Newby was intent on tranforming UWE into a provider of vocational training, and/or if Carter & Carter had designs on the higher education sector. One of the reasons why I and several other colleagues left the university was that it became apparent to us that Newby was intent on imposing precisely such a policy of vocationalization on the university. Indeed, by the spring of 2007, it became apparent to us that Newby and his associates were working, however consciously or unconsciously, to undermine not just the distinction between higher and further education, but the very autonomy—the relative autonomy—of UWE as a university.

In this context, Newby’s attempt to promote not just Carter & Carter, but the logic of knowledge exchange at UWE may be regarded as an instance of a classically neo-liberal inversion: where education was once seen as an activity that should be protected from the greed of businesses and the ideology of the government of the day, Newby’s knowledge exchange transformed it into a government-led, indeed government sponsored opportunity to generate profits for ‘employers’—in particular, employers such as Carter & Carter, who now constitute part of a burgeoning industry made possible by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s ‘fiscal rectitude’ vis-a-vis higher education, if not other forms of public service.

* * *

No doubt New Labour and Newby, like Leitch himself, will have heard all of this before, and will point out that, as an academic, I have an axe to grind in this whole matter. Less easy to dismiss is the possibility that knowledge exchange might compound Britain’s class divide in at once a new, and a very old way.

In a very old way: it was once the case that the poor did not have access to the so-called ‘finer things in life’. Amongst these, an ‘appreciation’ for literature, philosophy, art and other historically bourgeois activities were part of a world from which the British working man and woman were actively excluded until the first, if not the second half of the 20th century. One of the many strengths of the post-1992 universities was that even if their focus was predominantly on a ‘technical’ education (hence the name, ‘polytechnics’), many still included (as UWE does) courses in the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. This diversity—the embodiment of the principle of universitas which gives universities their name—as coupled to more open entrance requirements, meant that at least some working class students gained access to the ‘arts’. It is difficult to overstate the significance, from the point of view of a critique of ideology, of this historical development.

If, as Newby’s Sussex lecture implies, universities such as UWE would no longer adhere to the ideal of universitas; and if, on the contrary, they would become sites for a Carter & Carter-like provision of skills, where only ‘useful’ or ‘economically valuable’ ‘skills’ would be taught; and if, finally, the only universities that would still adhere to universitas would be the older elite and increasingly expensive universities, then it is not difficult to foresee that we have in knowledge exchange the perfect recipe for the re-introduction of the old class-bound knowledge divide.

This ‘old’ class divide would, however, be re-instituted in a new way: at least some working class students might well be expected to continue to enter universities; but a class-bound combination of tuition fees and entrance requirements might ensure that they would be far more likely to enter those universities where the ‘elite’ forms of knowledge would not be taught. Insofar as it has long been the case that such forms of knowledge are associated with one’s symbolic capital; and insofar as symbolic capital is a key, if not the key to one’s social class, then this too, could serve to deepen Britain’s class divide. Blair, Brown, Leitch, and Howard Newby would thereby have the dubious honour of having set Britain’s educational clock back by a century or so even as they appeared to reset it for the future.

* * *

I want to conclude this post—and this series—with two questions:

First, what are the practical risks for an institution such as UWE of going the way of knowledge exchange? (As I noted above, the acting UWE administration, led by Steve West, has said that it will continue with Newby’s policies.)

And second, who stands to gain the most from such ‘risk-taking’?

The main risk is what I described in the second post as ‘all-eggs-in-one-basketism’. At present, a university such as UWE can rely on a steady income produced by cohort after cohort of students who stay for three years. Leitch’s recipe for skillification, and Newby’s recipe for its higher educational variant, ‘knowledge exchange’, compromises this ‘steady state’ in two fundamental ways.

First, and as I noted in the second post, Leitch is keen to follow his political masters’ lead in displacing, if not replacing the three-year degrees (themselves shorter than their equivalents in many other OECD countries) with even shorter degrees: as noted by Leitch, any further expansion of higher education ‘should not be “more of the same”, based on traditional three year honours degrees. Rather, additional provision should be based on new types of programme offering specific, job-related skills such as Foundation degrees. The Review recommends that that this is the right basis for future HE expansion…’[18]. In some respects, this seems like an almost infantile way of cheating students out of a full higher education: say that you are going to get more people into higher education, but then drastically reduce the amount of time, and presumably the amount of capital investment required to run, if not to procure the degrees in question.

Universities that go down this route would be forced to compete for what is, in temporal terms, at once a rather short-lived form of funding ‘per capita’, and a recipe for much additional administrative work. If my experience at UWE is anything to go by, the most traumatic times of the year for both staff and students are always the beginnings and endings of academic courses, when induction procedures or end–of–course marking really concentrates the work for students, academics and academic-related staff. If the government has its way, and if Newby’s keenness on CPD prevails, the number of ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ might increase exponentially. But presumably lecturers and admin staff would still be paid the same relatively low salaries to do more and more administrative work, and to spend more of the year doing it. Indeed, if one recent conference (‘Universities: Public or Private?’) is anything to go by, universities might fully privatise themselves to ensure a greater ‘flexibility’ on the part of their staff (19). No doubt such a ‘flexibility’ would be required to impose more and more draconian work conditions.

Second, this self-same process would almost certainly mean that, far from securing its finances, the university would, if anything, be even more exposed, albeit, now to the vicissitudes of skills ‘vogues’ and to economic downturns more generally. What nobody in the UWE board of governors seems to have figured out is that ‘demand-led’ means that the educational provider loses a great deal of control over the educational process. The provider is now subject to the whims of corporations who demand this or that product, and do so when it suits them. In effect, by putting all of its educational eggs in the business skills basket, the educational provider ties its institutional fortunes to entities that are likely to be as ruthlessly determined to have things their way as Newby was to transform UWE into a UWE-KE. [Update: months after this post was written, it was announced that Carter & Carter was going into administration. For an account of this process, see my new post on the subject.]

Is this the kind of professional world that will motivate academics to stay in UWE, or indeed, in the UK? Or is it perhaps a reflection of the fact that, many if not most of UWE’s governors and leading directors are not academics, and/or people with direct experience of ‘front of house’ teaching, learning, and research?

* * *

If the drawbacks are so clear, who, then, stands to gain from the ‘skillification’ of higher education (if not from adult education more generally)?

On December 14, the Murdoch’s News Corporation put out a £2 million advertisement across most broadsheet newspapers in the UK which offers a clue to the answer to this question. The headline of the massive advertisements was ‘Free People Free Markets Free Thinking’(20). Presumably, and in the wake of Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch’s advertisers would like us to regard the Murdoch empire as an ‘up-market’ testament to the power of free people, free markets, and by implication, free thinking. But of course, the concentration of power in corporations such as Murdoch’s News Corp is arguably the best possible evidence that such advertisements are a big lie: neo-liberalism—and let us not forget that Rupert Murdoch is one of its highest priests—fatally undermines the freedom of people, the freedom of markets, and the freedom of thinking (21).

Thus far, higher education in the United Kingdom and in much of Europe has escaped the interest of such corporations. But it is my contention that those who stand to benefit the most—if not exclusively—from the change to skillification and to knowledge exchange are precisely the free privateers who see in universities something akin to the next frontier in the commodification of knowledge and symbolic forms more generally. As early as 2000, the same David Blunkett that seemed to be advocating a non-stratified higher educational sector noted in his speech at Greenwich University that ‘Learning has become big business…The global market for higher education is already estimated to stand at £300 billion per year’(22). It doesn’t take a financial genius to figure out that the potential for profit by firms such as Carter & Carter is enormous. Nor does it take a Machiavellian to figure out that the potential for the accumulation of symbolic, if not of actual economic capital is also enormous for all those managers who, like Leitch and Newby, associate themselves with the vanguard of the commercialisation of higher education. Last but not least, one doesn’t have to have a crystal ball to predict that once that ‘market’ takes off, it will be dominated by Murdoch-like corporations that will be extolling the virtues of ‘free people and free markets’ even as they ensure by way of the elimination of universities’ relative autonomy that there is rather less space for truly free thinking.

* * *

It might seem to academic staff in and beyond UWE that this process is an unstoppable juggernaut. In fact, the current difficulties being faced by the Brown administration—in particular, the growing public awareness of what I describe as its virtual, if not actual corruption—constitute a significant juncture that can and must be exploited by a determined and organised UCU. The campaign recently mounted in Oxford University (23) shows that it is still possible to defend the ideal of universitas. It also shows that it is not just the ‘new’ universities that are under threat from neo-liberalism. Faced with a bullying upper management, lecturers can and must mobilize their own extraordinarily wide-ranging networks to defend what is left of higher education’s relative autonomy, and to prevent universities from becoming, in Tony Blair’s words, the coalmines of the 21st century. Part of such a campaign would involve learning to ‘just say no’. But of course, it would, it must also involve coming up with real alternatives capable of securing both the finances of universities, and their relative autonomy. I would have thought that this should not pose great difficulties for institutions full of experts in everything. The problem, as always, is to organise.

UPDATE March 2009: About a year and a half after EcoLogics published this post, Newby has struck again, this time at Liverpool University. See Howard Newby at Liverpool University.

UPDATE May 2009: For a recent critique of the way in which the UK’s funding councils have started to be controlled by the corporate sector, see George Monbiot’s ‘Captive Knowledge’ at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/

References

1) In the UK, the vice-chancellor is usually the equivalent of a rector, or president of European and U.S. universities, respectively.

2) see for example, Anthea Lipsett, ‘Will the Newby Broom Sweep Clean?’, in http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/careers/story/0,,2132912,00.html?87%3A+Education+news, accessed July 24, 2007, and Private Eye 1185, 25 May 7 June 2007.

3) The Leitch Review of Skill’s triumphant quotation of Adam’s work (5) is an example of such an abuse. ‘Even back in 1776, Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” suggested that “the greater part of what is taught in schools and universities… does not seem to be the proper preparation for that of business”’. Leitch Review of Skills, pp. 10-11.

4) In the wake of that invitation and its widespread publicity, Simon Hoggart, one of the Guardian’s columnists, suggested that ‘I’m sure I’m not the only person to think of the end of [George Orwell’s] Animal Farm, when the pigs, now walking on two legs, have moved in with the humans. The other animals gaze through the windows at their masters: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig…but already it was too late to say which was which”’. See http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,,2169811,00.html, accessed September 23, 2007.

5) For example, Simon Jenkins, a former editor of The Times, writes that ‘Blair and Brown decided to curry favour with the City. Eager to seem business-friendly, Brown abandoned his pledge to reverse Thatcher’s union legislation and privatisation. He decided never to raise income or business taxes, and bizarrely chose Geoffrey Robinson as his buddy. His only act of delegation, ever, was to the one profession he trusted, the financiers of the Bank of England.’ See ‘Another fiasco, but Brown is forever a sucker for business’, in Guardian, November 28, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2218210,00.html, accessed December 1, 2007.

6) ‘So today I set a target of 50 per cent of young adults going into higher education in the next century.’ Tony Blair’s speech in 1999 to the Labour Party conference. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/460009.stm, accessed December 17, 2007.

7) I am by no means the first to note this contradiction; see for example, Claire Callender’s (2002) analysis in ‘The Costs of Widening Participation: Contradictions in New Labour’s Student Funding Policies’ in Social Policy and Society, 1:83-94, Cambridge University Press.

[8] for the full text, see http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/tuitionfees/story/0,,1123197,00.html, accessed December 17, 2007.

9) For a summary of the changes in the shift, see the text of David Watson’s keynote presentation, ‘New Labour and Higher Education’ for the AUA Conference, Queens University Belfast, 11 April 2006. www.aua.ac.uk/publications/conferenceproceedings/2006belfast/davidwatson.doc, accessed 17 December 2007.

10) see (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. London: Sage.

11) This self-same ‘relative autonomy’ is arguably what has also allowed theoretical physicists and other scientists to engage in speculative research whose results might not have had an obvious application in the first instance, but which in many cases have ended up revolutionizing everyday life and producing untold millions for those who eventually commercialised the knowledge.

12) Leitch Review of Skills, p. 3.

13) see the SPRU 40th Anniversary of Events 2006 at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/1-6-4-1.html, accessed December 12, 2007.

14) http://www.uwe.ac.uk/aboutUWE/knowledgeTransfer.shtml, accessed December 17, 2007.

15) http://www.carterandcartergroup.com/GlobalHome/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx, accessed December 17, 2007.

16) Quotes taken from Tony Tysome, ‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’, www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=2037536, accessed August 24, 2007.

17) see http://www.cihe-uk.com/fundingorganisations.php, accessed August 24, 2007.

18] Leitch Review of Skills, p. 77.

19) See for example the ‘Universities: Public or Private’ conference presentations at http://www.ahua.ac.uk/presentations.html, accessed December 17, 2007.

20) a copy of the advertisement can be found at www.blogs.vianow.com/figureitout/NewsCorp1.pdf.

21) Anyone doubting this might wish to examine the findings of a British parliamentary enquiry on media ownership and the news. See ‘Murdoch admission on paper’s stance’, in Guardian, November 24, 2007, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-7100110,00.html, accessed December 17, 2007.

22) A copy of the speech is available at the university’s website. See http://cms1.gre.ac.uk/dfee/#speech, accessed December 17, 2007.

23) See ‘Oxford dons reject finance reform’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6190469.stm, accessed December 17, 2007.

In my posts about the Leitch Review of Skills, I have repeatedly referred to the discourse, but also to the ideology of neo-liberalism. A reader has helpfully suggested that I should explain how I distinguish between discourse and ideology, and what I mean by neo-liberalism [or what in later posts I now spell as neoliberalism, without the hyphen]. I am glad to clarify the first point, and the on-going saga of Northern Rock provides a welcome opportunity to explain the second point (what is neo-liberalism), albeit in a somewhat indirect manner.

* * *

To begin with the difference between discourse and ideology: building on the work of Foucault(1), but also echoing the definitions of post-Foucauldian analysts who engage in something known as ‘critical discourse analysis’(2), I take it that discourse refers to more or less systematically organised statements that reflect the meanings and values of specific institutions, or more likely, of clusters of institutions. The principle is firstly that ideas have individuals as much as individuals have ideas. But also, that ideas—perhaps I should say ‘certain ways of thinking and doing’—tend to emerge in, and be shaped by, institutional contexts. So it is, for example, that lawyers have a particular way of approaching legal matters, and that medical specialists have a certain way of articulating the matters pertaining to their specialism. The same is, of course, true for all academic disciplines, and indeed for many everyday ways of approaching a variety of practices. Whatever the context, the ‘way of approaching’ or the ‘way of articulating’ is the discourse.

Now in the case of law and of medicine as in most if not all other professional discourses, discourse is enabling insofar as it allows individuals and groups to act on problems and to resolve them in a certain way. The difficulties, in so far as there are difficulties, arise when a certain ‘way of approaching’ is not recognised as being just that—a certain way of approaching something; or, what is almost the same, when, over time, a discourse that was once relatively explicit becomes transparent or invisible to its own users, its own ’subjects’. When this happens, there is a risk that discourse generates a kind of ‘tunnel vision’ that disables its agents (those who use it, or reproduce it) from developing a critical perspective vis-a-vis whatever is being represented. It is, finally, also the case that discourses, or rather their agents, tend to colonize new domains for which the discourse is inappropriate. A case in point, the colonization of healthcare and educational systems by a neo-liberal discourse such as I describe below.

I’ve now explained, however briefly, what I mean by discourse. I reserve the concept of ideology to refer to the process whereby one or more discourses—but also, meaningful forms more generally, be they linguistic or not—serve to establish and/or sustain durable relations of domination within a social group, or indeed across social groups(3). Simplifying greatly, the discursive process begins to include some, and to exclude others in a durable and relatively systematic way.

I find that this is a useful distinction because discourses (and their subjects) do not necessarily produce ideological relations (as defined above), and also because some discourses can be produced to contest ideological relations. Of course, the successful discourse, or rather its agents, may eventually work to establish new relations of ideology; but if we don’t make this distinction, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that any and all discourses are always already ‘ideological’.

* * *

What, then, is neo-liberalism? On one level, neo-liberalism is a discourse, that is to say a set of statements—but also its associated forms of subjectivity, values, and implicit ‘world view’— whose subjects or agents have fetishized the virtues of a market which they conceive, apparently, along the lines of Adam Smith’s metaphor of an invisible hand. I use ‘fetishized’ in the anthropological sense of the word: like all Moderns (and I suspect we are mostly that these days), the advocates of neo-liberalism are a superstitious lot (I contest in this way the idea that we Moderns are somehow above anything like superstition). What makes the superstitions of neo-liberals special is that, whatever else they do, neo-liberals worship the notion that society is fundamentally about business, and that business works, ‘ceteris paribus’, along the lines of a quaint 18th century market where what is sold is what is bought, where the price of what is sold is, ‘over time’, commensurate with what is offered, and where selfish individuals working to maximize their own profits ensure, as a group, the ‘common good’. I have liberally (or perhaps illiberally) sprinkled inverted commas because of course, no such market existed in the 18th century, and it goes almost without saying that no such market place exists today.

That, however, has not stopped a select few groups of people from using the seductive image of the romantic market place to make themselves obscenely wealthy. It is on this level analysis that the ideological dimension of the discourse comes into the frame. Neo-liberalism has helped some groups of people to grow wealthier and more powerful, even as it has arguably ensured that others have become more impoverished, and more marginalised. While this has, on occasion, been a matter of design, more often than not it has been a matter of ‘knock-on effects’, of ‘unforeseen consequences’, or, perhaps more accurately, of ‘foreseeable unforeseens’. For example, while neo-liberals tend to be avid State-bashers, much of their leading members’ wealth and power is a function of what has been described as corporate welfarism: as I noted in the context of the Leitch Review of Skills, the advocates of neo-liberalism are exceedingly good at getting the State to deregulate things when it suits, and to re-regulate them (or at any rate to bail them out) when it doesn’t. It is probably true that no one sets out these days to try to make the poor poorer; but there are certain policies and forms of governance that can be shown to have had just that effect in the past. If this is the case, why should anyone reproduce those policies, and those forms of governance?

* * *

Of course, economic liberalism has come and gone for centuries now, but its neo-liberal variant came roaring to life in the 1970s when American monetarists led by Milton Friedman allegedly demonstrated that its principles could be made to work in Chile—that is to say, in Pinochet’s dictatorship. The Conservatives in Britain were the first to try to emulate this nefarious experiment. Indeed, it is not surprising that Margaret Thatcher was so keen to visit Mi General during his infamous house arrest in London; whatever Pinochet’s role in the Falklands/Malvinas, after Pinochet Thatcher was the second ruler to sign up for Friedman’s neo-liberal model and its bitter prescriptions. We seem to have forgotten about the mass unemployment that followed. In one of the great ironies of the time, Thatcher’s own Cecil Parkinson is famous for having said in an interview in the pro-Pinochet paper El Mercurio that ‘It [the Chilean economic experience] is very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain.’

I might add that we should not be surprised that it was Gordon Brown’s own [ally] Jack Straw who pardoned Pinochet and let him go back to Chile. New Labour, whose members are even more neo-liberal than the Conservatives, must now be hoping that we have forgotten that the Chilean experiment came to an end in 1983 when Pinochet had to nationalise some of the largest Chilean banks to stop them from going completely bankrupt.

Did I hear anyone utter (or think) the words ‘Northern’ and ‘Rock’?

References

1) See especially Foucault’s essay ‘The discourse on language’ in M. Foucault (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Translated by A.M.S. Smith, New York: Pantheon Books.

2) See for example Norman Fairclough’s account at www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/norman/critdiscanalysis.doc

3) This definition owes much to the work of J.B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, Cambridge: Polity, 1990.

By way of a (second) epigraph:

‘…you know, there is no such thing as education. There are individual employers and employees, there are skills and there are businesses. And no government can do anything except through businesses.’ (Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘No such thing as society’ statement, as translated by the New Labour skills policy)

In Lord Leitch’s Levers (Part 1), I focused on the ideological significance of the fact that Gordon Brown commissioned Lord Sandy Leitch to lead what subsequently became known as the Leitch Review of Skills: Prosperity for All in the Global Economy—World Class Skills (1). In this post, I would like to offer a critique of the Review itself.

The Review is a relatively short document by the standards of its genre. However, its 154 pages are full of statistics and policy recommendations. Many of these (the policies, but also the statistics) are so questionable that each could, and indeed perhaps each ought to be the subject of its own extended critique. For example, the Review’s main argument is premised on comparisons with the educational systems of a variety of countries, many of which have not only different systems of qualifications, but crucially, social systems with cultural particularities which the Review ignores.

Unfortunately, a detailed critique of this and many other similarly questionable assumptions would make even longer what is already an overly long post. I have thereby decided to limit the scope of my analysis in two ways. First, I will only engage in a general analysis of the key discursive aspects of the Review. And second, I will focus on the manner in which the mentioned aspects impinge on higher education. In this post I will focus on the critique of the text itself, while in the third and last post, I will examine the practical implications for higher education.

I should perhaps clarify that when I speak of ‘discursive’ aspects of the Review, I refer to the procedures by which the Review sets out at once to construct a convenient problem, and to exclude, overtly and not-so-overtly, alternative ways of interpreting that problem. Put differently, if the definition of the problem already constitutes a form of ‘bias’, its subsequent development serves to compound that ‘bias’, and also to make it difficult for readers to imagine entirely different ways of approaching the issues at stake. The objective of a discourse analysis is thereby to reveal the convenience of the problem; to show how this convenience is both dissimulated, and legitimized by ostensibly ‘objective’ and ‘disinterested’ representations; and to reveal the contradictions that link such representations to broader social dynamics (2). [Update December 12, 2007: I have published a post on the difference between discourse and ideology here. This same post also explains what I mean by neoliberalism.]

* * *

I should perhaps begin by noting that in producing such an analysis, I find myself in a rather paradoxical position. I very much share what seems to be the Review’s main concern: redressing the UK’s—and especially England and Wales’—long history of underinvestment in education.

My own interest and concern with this underinvestment is that it reflects a history of conservative (if not Conservative) efforts to use education, or rather the denial of education, to try to maintain the privileges of the most privileged, as well as the marginality of the most marginalized. By contrast, the Review’s concern is ostensively that today the UK’s educational levels are lagging far behind those of many of its OECD competitors. The Review argues that this is bound to have implications for different social sectors’ abilities to compete in a context of more and more aggressive forms of globalization. While it is clear to me that what I will describe as ‘skillism’ (or ’skillification’) is not the answer to this challenge, it is difficult to find fault with the Review’s apparent goal of providing the means whereby all those of us who live in the UK might be better able to ‘invest’, as the Review puts it, in our own educations.

* * *

The problem—the classically discursive problem—is that the Review does not actually set out to encourage us to invest in our own education. As I explained in the first part of this series, the word ‘education’ is no longer a part of the New Labour’s vocabulary, and instead, the emphasis is now on ‘skills’ and on ‘training’. It might be thought that this is a purely semantic issue. In fact, and as I hope to show in this and in the next post on the subject, the elimination of what I referred to in the first post as the ‘E-word’ (Education) and its replacement by the ‘S-word’ (Skills) marks an important ideological turn in the fate of the UK’s educational provision.

As I also noted in the first post, the Latin root for education is educat, which is in turn related to educere, which means ‘lead out’. This etymology reminds us that, historically, the semantic charge of the word ‘education’ has been associated with leading people out of prejudice, and towards more critical ways of explaining and interpreting the world. This arguably continues to constitute the predominant model of schooling today. It is thus significant that there is no reference whatsoever to this model, this discourse, in the Review. On the contrary, the notion of improving skills is repeatedly justified in the terms of a neoliberal discourse (and ideology) of deregulation, of ensuring gains in productivity, and above all, of developing the ‘flexibility’ and ‘mobility’ of the workforce.

The architects of the Leitch Review might well suggest that there is no contradiction between the two sets of discourses as they might apply to education—they are two sides of the same ‘coin’. In this and the next post, I want to make the case that the ideologies that underpin the two discourses (the Enlightenment and the neoliberal) are actually quite different. I also want to make the case that the turn to the discourse of skillism—a spin-off of neoliberalism in the context of education—is part of a concerted strategy whose advocates—New Labour politicians and their mentors in the private corporate world—have three inter-related objectives. The first of these objectives, which might seem like the least controversial, is apparently to improve the UK’s, or at least the UK’s private corporate economic productivity and competitiveness. The second, which is by no means automatically continuous with the first, is to secure corporate control over key aspects and levels of education in the UK. The third objective, which the Review only acknowledges in passing, is to open up new business opportunities, to take the form of enterprises specializing in training for business. As I will explain in Part 3, the ultimate effect of the Review’s proposals will be (or would be) to fatally undermine the quality of higher education as one of the UK’s last remaining spaces for the production of forms of knowledge that are both independent, and potentially critical of skillism, and its parent, neoliberalism.

* * *

Perhaps the best way to begin to engage in such an analysis is by considering the Review’s representation of the notion of ‘skills’.

In a box titled ‘What do we mean by skills’, the Review begins by acknowledging that ‘there are a large number of different types of skills and they can be split into a number of different categories’(p. 28). However, the Review immediately reduces skills to a single, all-encompassing category: the Review is only concerned with ‘economically valuable’ skills, which its authors define as skills that ‘benefit individuals through higher wages and businesses through improved productivity’(p. 28). This reduction—this economic reductionism—pretty much says it all: the Review is only interested in skills if they result in higher wages, and in improved productivity.

Were it not for the socially dominant nature of this way of thinking, I would not need to say anything more about the Review. But of course, at the beginning of the 21st century, many people in the UK might regard this as a reasonable reduction, or indeed, as no ‘reduction’ at all: surely higher wages and productivity can encompass an extraordinarily wide set of skills, ranging from what the Review itself describes as ‘soft skills’ such as an ability to communicate effectively in teams, to the ‘hard’ skills that, say, an IT engineer might need to develop a new kind of computer, or its software?

To be sure, how could the Treasury be concerned with anything other than economically valuable skills? After all, the Review was commissioned by the Treasury, and one of the Treasury’s main roles is to ensure the economic well-being of the nation, is it not?

I will answer each of these questions in turn. First, the point is not to deny that increased wages and productivity might well constitute criteria that could embrace a wide—a very wide—set of skills. One has only to think of the range of skills, and skilfully made products in the UK to understand that the logic of commodification does indeed encompass an extraordinarily wide set of activities and interests.

This account is nonetheless a typically discursive one (in the sense defined earlier) in that something that seems perfectly objective conceals, by this very objectivity, quite a lot of ideological baggage. The Review is saying, in effect, that henceforth an individual’s education ought to be determined entirely by the, or rather a, market. This means, in principle at least, that any forms of knowledge that are not recognized by the said market would not, or should not be taught or learned as part of a drive to transform the level of education amongst the different social groups that constitute the UK.

Where the argument about the Treasury is concerned (that the Treasury would of course be concerned only with ‘economically valuable’ skills), the reverse point is actually the more pertinent. The issue is not really whether the Treasury should be concerned with economic matters, narrowly or widely defined. That is its function. The real issue—and one that anyone familiar with history of the Blair vs. Brown dynamic will recognise—is that Brown has had ambitions that go far beyond matters concerning the Treasury. This is readily apparent in the Leitch Review. Although the Review is ostensibly only about matters concerning economic productivity, the real agenda, the real interest is one that potentially affects each and every form of education in the land. Indeed we have here too, a typically discursive dynamic, whereby one institution and its allies attempt to define, for all other institutions and their associated sectors, an issue that is, or ought to be, essentially plural.

In making the last point, I deliberately contradict the Enlightenment values regarding education: a social group’s education, a nation’s education, must be at least partly a matter of diversity, difference, and pluralism. While care has to be taken that this self-same diversity is not exploited by the conservatives (or the Conservatives) to generate class-, ‘race’-, or ethnic-based segregation, just as much care must be taken to avoid the opposite risk. When one social group or sector—especially but not only a privileged social group—imposes its educational agenda on everyone else, then we have a recipe for ideological relations. Put more technically, a scenario is more likely to unfold whose agents employ the teaching and learning of certain meanings in an effort to ensure that those selfsame meanings serve to develop and sustain durable relations of domination within, and across, social groups (3).

* * *

I can well imagine that anyone who is sympathetic to Leitch/New Labour would dismiss my arguments as an example of ‘ivory tower’ thinking. So let us, for a moment, keep to the confines of skillism, which I define as the discourse that reduces educational matters to what looks like a purely economical conception of skills (I say ‘looks like’ because no conception is every purely economical; there is always a political, and we might also say a cultural economy, but the political and cultural values of a certain approach to economics tend to be dissimulated by invocations of supposedly neutral ‘market forces’).

In one particularly telling passage, the Review notes that ‘Employers in the survey felt that soft skills were lacking (particularly team working and customer handling skills, each of which were mentioned as lacking in one half of all workers lacking proficiency)’ (p. 41).

It is quite easy to imagine how this ‘skills gap’ might have emerged. Not so long ago, so-called ‘soft skills’ were either not regarded as skills, or were not regarded as being ‘economically valuable’ skills. Henry Ford, for example, would have dismissed ‘soft skills’ out of hand. As automobile manufacturers in the United States were eventually to learn, the cost of this oversight was enormous. To be sure, even today, the idea that the skills in question are somehow ‘soft’ betrays the lingering masculinism of many forms of vocational education.

The lesson that might be gleaned from this example is that what counted yesterday as economically valuable skills might not count as such today, and vice-versa. Insofar as this is the case, a similar point might be made about future skill definitions and valuations. Put simply, there can be no doubt that the valuation of skills is a temporal matter, that is to say, it is subject to change over time.

Now this is a point that the authors of the Review would certainly recognise. As I noted in The UWE Experiment, the Leitch Review declares, rather absolutely, that ‘No one can predict future demand for skills with certainty’ (p. 4). While I will explain below that there is a discursive motivation for this statement, it is valid from the point of view of the issue of the temporality of skill valuations.

What the authors might be less inclined to accept is that by trying to reduce skills to what the current market regards as ‘economically valuable’ skills, they make their policy particularly prone to the danger of obsolescence.

Of course, any and all definitions of everything have this problem (the problem of ‘obsolescence’). One thing, however, seems clear: anyone who favours the principle of ‘all-eggs-in-one-basketism’—reducing a complex, and plural set of practices to the constraints of one narrowly defined set of criteria, in this case the criteria of increased wages and productivity—is likely to be particularly exposed to the mentioned risk.

* * *

In Part 3 of this series I will explain in more detail why educational ‘all-eggs-in-one-basketism’ is risky—indeed, hugely risky. Here I should note that New Labour’s Leitch Review is not content to leave things there. The economicist reduction of skills to the ‘economically valuable’ is corresponded by another remarkable reduction: where education has thus far been provided by a complex network of public, private, and public-private institutions, the architects of the Leitch Review would like to drastically simplify, and revise the balance of educational provision in favour of business. As the Review puts it, ‘…as far as possible, funding should be routed through mechanisms which put effective purchasing power in the hands of customers. This will give training providers a real incentive to deliver the skills that employers and individuals need, flexibly and responsively. If providers do not deliver, they will not receive public funding’ (p. 17-18).

It might be argued that this statement implies a shared responsibility between employers and individuals. In fact, numerous other statements make it clear that those who will really have the power are employers: ‘Over the last decade, the division of responsibilities for improving adult skills between government, employers, and individuals has evolved further. The government has taken steps to build a more flexible, demand-led skills system. A major recent innovation in England has been Train to Gain, which offers employers support in designing and sourcing flexibly delivered training to meet their needs’ (p. 49). Or rather more baldly, ‘To deliver economically valuable skills, employers need a strong voice and must able to scrutinise and shape strategy and delivery’ (p. 77). Of course, it doesn’t take a political wizard to figure out that especially in the context of the New Labour administration, it is not the everyday ‘individuals’ that shape policy, or determine what skills are delivered when and where. It is the organisations—especially the large corporations—that do.

The proposed changes thereby constitute a fundamental change in what we might describe as the political economy of education, and as part of this, the acquisition of skills, i.e. who decides what will be taught and learned by whom, for whom, when, and where. The change is at once justified and dissimulated by way of a false opposition between two simplistic codewords: what the Review describes as a ‘supply driven’ and a ‘demand led’ provision of skills.

According to the Review, a ‘supply driven’ approach (note the choice of words…) is ‘based on the Government asking employers to articulate their needs, and then planning supply to meet this’(p. 49). This approach, the Review would have us believe, is a poor one because it fails to meet employers’ demands. By contrast, a ‘demand led’ approach (note again, the choice of words) responds to demand ‘rather than trying to plan supply’.

The real meaning of the opposition (which is clearly a false one—there must be both planning, and demand for skills and for education more generally) is that the architects of the Review would like to see an end to government control over the provision of skills training, and a shift to the political economy I mentioned earlier: henceforth, and with a couple of significant exceptions, it is the employers who should take control of skills provision.

As part of this shift, the Review also suggests that the current system for acquiring skills is overly complex: there are too many different government agencies, there is too much bureaucracy, there is too much red tape. The tape must be cut, the bureaucracy must be slashed, and the superfluous agencies eliminated; the system must be simplified. ‘The Review has found that the complexity of the current system prevents employers and individuals from effectively investing in skills improvements.’ ‘Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, said that the system “should be substantially simplified”. He argues that this is a vital measure of employer engagements is to move beyond the “bemused indifference” of today’(p. 72).

There may be some truth to this argument. But given the recommendations that are made on the back of this criticism, one can well imagine that there is also an ulterior motivation for branding the current state arrangements as ‘overly complex’. On the one hand, if there is a real pluralism in the provision of education, then we would expect to find a considerable variety of possible institutional sources and procedures for acquiring skills. If, on the other hand, a certain social group wants to exert control over the provision of education, then we would also expect an effort to try to reduce the complexity so as to make it easier for that group to exert that control. As the Review itself puts it, ‘…employers routinely complain that the system is too complex and they are unable to exercise effective influence over it’ (p. 77).

In order to secure this control, the Review proposes to eliminate several of the existing government agencies, but also to make sure that the agencies that are left, or that are created on the back of its recommendations, are ‘demand led’ and indeed, ‘employer led’. I do not have the space to explain in detail just what agencies would be eliminated, and which ones would be created or strengthened. It suffices to note once again that the changes are designed to shift the balance of power over the design and the actual provision of skills to ‘employers’.

* * *

Here too, it might be argued that the proposed changes are surely a good thing. If the employers provide the jobs, and if the largest private and public sector employers provide, as the Review claims, more than 50% of the jobs, why shouldn’t they call the shots, and why shouldn’t the system be biased in their favour?

The most obvious reason involves the short-termism especially of large private corporations, whose managers have been shown again and again to be preoccupied with securing their own extraordinarily high wages against the demands of their shareholders. A somewhat more subtle justification involves the question of corporate accountability. Especially the private corporations that stand to acquire the most control over the educational process tend to be, by their very nature, virtually unaccountable to all but the most powerful of their managers. They tend to be unaccountable to local communities, and more generally, to any entity incapable of matching their enormous economic, political, legal and public relations resources. I might add that New Labour’s record on this matter closely aligns it with that of the Conservatives; as a former editor of the Times recently noted, ‘The word business still mesmerises Brown. To most people the occupation is about making money. To Brown it is a mysterious priesthood of infinite competence. To build a school or hospital, run a prison or plan an urban renewal, you must pledge partnership with a “businessman”. Private money is always good, public bad.’(4).

In this context, suggesting that the proposed changes would benefit individuals (or the broader society) is a bit like saying that the tail would wag the dog, or that the two would wag ‘in partnership’. To be sure, in the chapter on ‘Employer Engagement in Skills’, the Review makes it clear that individuals wanting to ‘invest’ in skills would need to secure the advice and consent of their line managers, and/or of a new careers service that would itself be ‘demand led’.

Given this political economy, it is not difficult to imagine that, on this point alone, the whole Leitch edifice could come tumbling down. The employers who don’t value the acquisition of new skills—and the Review recognises that there is a huge proportion that don’t—could refuse to support any training whatsoever. But also, far-sighted employees who wanted to develop ‘unusual’ skills might well be told that these were not the skills desired by the management, i.e. they might not be regarded as ‘economically valuable’ skills. And of course, people wishing to broaden their horizons (professional, spiritual, artistic, etc.) via so-called ‘non-economically valuable’ skills would presumably have nowhere to turn to unless they had significant funds to pay for them. One has to wonder what would happen to forms of education that would encourage creativity, that key dimension of all aspects of life, but which is all too-often branded as not being ‘economically valuable’.

Whatever the value of creativity, it seems quite clear that the upshot of this system is that at least the acquisition of higher qualifications would continue to be as strongly rooted as ever in social class, or what the Review recognises as a problem of ‘access’. In the educational world conceived by the Leitch Review, social class would now be even more strongly tied to the UK’s corporate hierarchy, which itself remains hardwired to some of the oldest forms of class-making.

* * *

This shift is likely to have many, and very serious implications for most if not all educational practices in the UK, but especially for adult education. History teaches us that there are very good reasons for ensuring that the provision of different forms and levels of education maintains a strong degree of autonomy from any particular government, and from any particular business. The point is not to deny that businesses ought to be able to provide some of their own skills training, or to have a say in the provision of state-run education; many routinely do, and have done, for centuries. The point is to question the need for a decisive shift in the balance of provision in favour of the interests of corporations, and their managers.

This point really comes to a head in the context of higher education. As is the case of so many other aspects of the Review, a casual reader might be forgiven for coming away with the sense that the Review has ‘something for everyone’, not least the academics of Britain’s many investment-starved universities. And indeed, in his foreword, Sandy Leitch speaks of an ‘excellent higher education system’ (p. 1) and the Review proposes to greatly increase the proportion of people who have higher qualifications. If the current proportion of people with skills at level 4 and higher is 29%, the Review proposes to increase this proportion to 40% by 2020 (p. 41). The Review also states repeatedly that increased investment is required in higher education.

A closer reading reveals that there is a sting in the tail of each of these proposals. On the one hand, the Review suggests that the costs of any increased investment in HE should be borne by ‘individuals and employers’ which it suggests stand to benefit most from the investment. This is tantamount to agreeing with New Labour’s strategy to divest the state of its obligations towards university students and higher education more generally.

On the other hand, the reference to employers providing the funding is also tantamount to ensuring that on this level too, businesses will have a far greater control over education. The following quotes more than confirm this suspicion:

‘Growth of this order [from 29 to 40%] is unlikely to be achievable by trying to expand further the current model of HE. There are limits in capacity, and also limits to how far the current model of HE can fully meet the expectations of the greater volume of employers and employees who would need to be attracted. Further improvements in the UK’s high skills base must come from workforce development, and increased employer engagement’.‘…the Review recommends a rebalancing of the priorities of HE institutions to make available relevant, flexible, and responsive provision that meets the high skills needs of employers and their staff’ (p. 68). Elsewhere, the Review echoes the New Labour government’s position that new growth in higher education ’should not be “more of the same“, based on traditional three year honours degrees. Rather, additional provision should be based on new types of programme offering specific, job-related skills such as Foundation degrees. The Review recommends that that this is the right basis for future HE expansion…’(p. 77).

A similar logic is applied to postgraduate education. ‘Postgraduate, or Level 5 Skills, such as MBAs and PhDs, can provide significant returns to organisations, individuals, and the economy as a whole. These higher level skills are key drivers of innovation, entrepreneurship, management, leadership, and research and development.’ ‘Level 5 Skills should also be an important feature of greater employer collaboration with HE, as recommended by Richard Lambert’s Review of Business-University Collaboration…’ (p. 68).

In one of many similar examples of purely rhetorical invocations of a need for ‘fairness’, the Review nonetheless notes that there is a growing social class divide in access to higher education, and urges universities and the Office of Fair Access to ‘improve access’ (p. 68). But such exhortations are in sharp contrast to the Review’s determination, as I mentioned earlier, to continue with New Labour’s strategy to shift the costs of higher education to students (or to businesses). As I will note below, this is one of several ways in which the private corporate sector is only too happy to either continue to ignore, or to let the state (via the universities) pick up the tab for the social costs of the growing class divide. On this level, as in its more general recommendations, the disjunction between the policy proposals with teeth, and the rhetorical calls for ‘fairness’ offer further evidence that the Review is a recipe for increasing class divides as a function of access to education.

It is also interesting to note finally that, unlike other aspects of the Review which are backed up, however flimsily, with research-based evidence, the Review’s criticisms of, and recommendations for higher education are based on no direct evidence whatsoever. The closest the Review comes to backing up its claims is a reference to another review commissioned by the Treasury (the Lambert Review), produced once again by another business executive (Richard Lambert). If Leitch is an insurance man who has, by his own account, devoted his life to work in the financial services industry, Lambert was formerly the editor of the Financial Times, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary council, and now the director general of the Confederation of Business Industries. Is the reader really expected to believe that Lambert and Leitch have the best interests of the nation in mind?

* * *

I will consider the precise educational and social implications of this approach to skills in higher education in the third and last post in this series. I want to conclude the present post by considering two contradictions in the Leitch Review, the first of which reminds us that economic laissez-fairism is never really just that: economic laissez-fairism, or indeed, economic laissez-fairism.

In proposals that remind the reader rather vividly of the current Northern Rock fiasco, the Review suggests that, aside from acting as a guarantor of the deregulation of educational provision, the state should act as a kind of safety net for what the Review describes as ‘market failures’.

‘Market failures’ involve four problems that are arguably an inherent aspect of the Review’s neoliberal approach to education: ‘short termist attitudes to investment in skills’; ‘credit market failure’, or individuals’ and firms’ inability to borrow the costs of training; ‘information failure’, the absence of accurate information about skills requirements, or a skewed distribution of such information; and ‘externalities’, the ‘social costs or benefits of decisions that are felt more broadly than just through returns to individuals or firms’(p. 59).

The admission of such ‘failures’, but also the vocabulary used to describe them, is richly ironic. Even as the architects of the Review reject ’supply driven’ approaches and even as they attempt to secure control over the educational process by way of skillism, they admit that ‘market failures’ might yet scupper their ‘best intentions’. This is almost, but not quite tantamount to admitting by way of a recourse to corporate welfarism that there is, after all, more to education than skills. The Review nonetheless employs a typically discursive turn in an effort to dissimulate the contradiction that emerges with this recognition. The turn involves the transformation of what might best be described as educational ‘internalities’ into skills ‘externalities’. What is an integral aspect of education—its social, cultural and inevitably political nature— is made to appear as some kind of external ‘factor’ that only impinges tangentially, or by mistake, on the acquisition of ’skills’. One of the advantages of this turn is that it allows the managers of corporations to attempt to control the educational process when it suits them, but also to hand back the control (and the concomitant social responsibility) to the state when things don’t quite work out.

The issue of control leads me to the second contradiction. As I noted earlier, the Review states very clearly that ‘No one can predict future demand for skills with certainty’ (p. 4). The discursive motivation for this statement can be found in the false opposition I mentioned earlier: the Review’s architects wish to undermine what they describe as the principle of ‘supply driven’ educational provision. Doing so nonetheless sets up a contradiction which informs every aspect of the Review. If no one can predict skills, then how can the architects of the Review produce a report that contains 154 pages of policy recommendations based on a veritable raft of predictions concerning the UK’s future skills requirements?

The answer is, of course, that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to try to plan and to predict educational needs, at least on some levels. In this sense, the Review constitutes its own best evidence that its fundamental opposition between the ‘supply driven’ and ‘demand led’ provision of skills is an utterly interested, if not a false one.

In Lord Leitch’s Levers Part 3: Skillism and ‘Knowledge Exchange’

Update January 21, 2007: Now even the head of Marks & Spencer is acknowledging a deepening class divide: see ‘Diamonds for rich inside M25; hard times for the rest. After M&S’s boss observed a huge economic divide in the UK comes a survey showing the rift between capital and country‘ in Guardian January 21, 2007.

For a recent critique of the way in which the UK’s funding councils have started to be controlled by the corporate sector, see George Monbiot’s ‘Captive Knowledge’ at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/

References

1) The Review was published in December 2006 by the UK’s Treasury. An online edition is available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/leitch_review/review_leitch_index.cfm. Accessed December 1, 2007.
2) My approach builds on what might be described as a Foucaultian approach to discourse analysis. For an introduction to such an approach, see S. Hall, (1992) ‘The west and the rest: discourse and power’, in S. Hall and B. Gieben (Eds.) Formations of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 275-323.
3) J. B. Thompson (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press.
4) Simon Jenkins, ‘Another fiasco, but Brown is forever a sucker for business’, in Guardian, November 28, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2218210,00.html, accessed December 1, 2007.