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.