Big Society, Big Oil, Muzzled Universities (I)
Please note: this post is part of a series. Click on any of the titles below to see the rest of the posts.
Part I (this post)
At a time when news reports are emerging that BP is allegedly trying buy the silence of American scientists, Britain is allowing a former CEO of BP to determine the future of its own universities
This week the BBC World Service broadcast an alarming report (1) about BP’s efforts to buy itself a water-tight—perhaps we should now say ‘oil-tight’—defence during the numerous lawsuits that it will face in the coming years. According to the BBC, BP is recruiting leading scientists from American universities, and offering them significant sums of money in exchange for contracts that would effectively bar the scientists from publishing the research they produce for BP.
This is a claim that BP is of course denying. But the BBC report offered what appears to be damning evidence, including a reference to a contract, and testimony from academics approached by BP. ‘The BBC has obtained a copy of a contract offered to scientists by BP. It says that scientists cannot publish the research they do for BP or speak about the data for at least three years, or until the government gives the final approval for the company’s restoration plan for the whole of the gulf. It also states that scientists may perform research for other agencies as long as it does not conflict with the work they’re doing for BP.’ Where the testimony of academics is concerned, the BBC piece included an interview with Professor Robert Shipp, the chair of the Marine Sciences Department at the University of South Alabama, who explained that BP had offered to work not just with him, but his entire department comprising dozens of faculty members.
According to Shipp, his department were initially keen on the idea because BP suggested that it wanted them to work to develop the ‘best restoration plan possible’ for the northern Gulf of Mexico. Shipp agreed to meet with three BP lawyers, and in the BBC piece he noted that ‘…during the meeting we expressed some interest, but we also laid the ground rules that, any research we did, we would have total control of the data, transparency, and the freedom to make those data available to other scientists and to subject the science to peer review. They left and, um, we never heard back from them.’
In the same broadcast, Professor Kerry Nelson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, condemned BP’s strategy. ‘It’s highly destructive. I mean, at some level, this is really BP versus the people of the United States’… ‘Our ability to evaluate the disaster and write public policy and make decisions about it as a country can be impacted. This is really one huge corporation trying to buy faculty to silence in a comprehensive way.’
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Even if the scale of BP’s alleged efforts to muzzle scientists seems unprecedented, anyone who has followed the fortunes of academic research over the last two or so decades will not have been surprised by the news. Many forms of academia have never been independent from industry, and even those that have enjoyed a degree of autonomy cannot be said to be totally free from market pressures. Alas, even these forms of research that do have a relative autonomy—predominantly in the so-called ‘pure’ sciences, and in the humanities and social sciences—are now threatened by a neoliberal tide every bit as destructive as the one that is affecting the northern Gulf of Mexico.
Aspects of this process have undoubtedly been a long time in the making. Indeed, many readers of this article might be inclined to shrug and assume that the commodification of academic work is the inevitable outcome of the kind of free-market ethos that has come to pervade all walks of modern life. Cynical readers might further note that the process is being driven at least partly by the willingness of many academics to sell their research to big business.
A case in point, the Marine Sciences department at the University of South Alabama. While Professor Shipp was no doubt honest in his requirement that his department should maintain its autonomy and transparency, it strikes me that the effort to negotiate with BP was disingenuous. It was the equivalent, in marine terms, of a Copepod sitting down to negotiate with a Southern Right Whale. ‘My colleagues and I will only agree to be swallowed up on condition that we can return to sea if there is any danger of death by digestion’. Thank goodness that there are still academics who, like Professor Shipp, attempt to dictate critical terms and conditions to the corporate deathstars. But did Shipp and his colleagues really believe that BP would be applying anything other than its own criteria to the notion of the possible in ‘the best restoration plan possible’?
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I’d like to believe—but I may be wrong—that these and most other academics would never go near a BP if they had an easy choice between working with an oil giant, and doing well-funded, independent research of their own choosing (or indeed, ‘restoration’ work funded by the government). While the capitalist urge to make more and more money is by no means absent from the bodies of academics—one of the academics quoted by the BBC article was quite happy to work for BP’s reported offer of $250 an hour—work for the corporate giants often comes ringed with requirements that run against the grain of even basic principles of sound science. The academic may make money, but s/he will not necessarily earn the coveted respect and recognition of peers in the process.
From this perspective, if academia is being slowly taken over by big business, it is because there is a context which is increasingly forcing academics to make the business choice. Some might try to describe this process in terms of the old fable of an ‘invisible hand’, one which in this case is slowly pushing academics in the direction of the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’. There may be some truth that there is a general drift towards more business-led research. But in the UK at least, there has been a very visible hand, or what is better described as a visible shove that is forcing academics to work for private corporations. Beginning with New Labour, but continuing apace now that Dem Tories (also known as the LibCons or the ConDems) are in power, British governments over the last 13 or so years have taken extraordinary steps to force academics to engage in what is described as ‘business-university collaboration’. This process has developed thanks to a combination of ‘top down’ efforts, and the intervention of neoliberal ideologues working as senior managers in some of the universities.
I have devoted many pages in this blog to the efforts of Howard Newby to institute (many would say impose) the logic of ‘knowledge exchange’ within English universities. Newby is a former New Labour-appointed quango manager who worked to transform first the University of the West of England, and then Liverpool University into centres for knowledge transfer, a term which is arguably a codeword for teaching and doing research for the benefit of businesses—especially but not only big businesses.
Where the top-down interventions are concerned, I have also critiqued the process by means of which New Labour transmuted Britain’s Department of Education into two new departments, one of which was the Department of Innovation, Universities, and Skills (DIUS). In turn, this department was then transformed into ‘BIS’, the acronym/homonym for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (for more on this change, see my New Labour’s Assault on Higher Education). The changes meant that, astonishingly, in Britain the Secretary of State who oversees higher education policy is the same person who oversees the country’s business policy. The conflation speaks volumes, as does the fact that in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s administration, BIS was given to —perhaps even created for— a politician who was forced to resign not once but twice from cabinet thanks to financial scandals: Peter Mandelson, popularly known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ (for more on this, see Peter Mandelson in Higher Education, or, When New Labour’s Amazonia Came to Britain’s Universities).
In those fateful years, the increasingly visible hand of big business managed to secure what was arguably one of the most strategic political coups in the postwar period: under the prime ministerships first of Tony Blair and then of Gordon Brown, New Labour effectively agreed to change higher education funding regimes such that, in future, any state funding for higher education in the UK will be contingent on the researcher demonstrating that her/his proposal can be used to make money for a business. This is an aim that New Labour would undoubtedly deny, clothing it as they have in more ambiguous wording that winks and nods in the direction of ‘socially useful’ research. But in my own, and I dare say most non-rightwing academics’ view, there can be little doubt that this was, and remains both the New Labour and the LibCon aim.
I have analysed the details of this process in other posts and so will not repeat the analysis here. It suffices to quote one particularly evocative, if turgid passage from one of the many policy reviews that New Labour commissioned, with businessmen (and it was all men) as heads. The review in question, titled ‘Race to the Top’ (it arguably should have been ‘Race to the Bottom [Line]’), was headed by the former CEO of Britain’s once most successful supermarket, Sainsbury’s. On page 6 of the review(2), published in 2007, ‘Lord Sainsbury of Turville’, a New Labor donor as well as a former Science Minister, stated that ‘The Research Councils (RCs) should agree and be measured against firm knowledge transfer targets, including specific targets for knowledge transfer from their own institutes, and for the funds they will be spending on collaborative R&D through the TSB. The successful Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) that place newly qualified graduates in companies, and for which there is high industry demand, should be doubled in number, subject to the Business Support Simplification Programme (BSSP).’ Less than two years after this review was published, it became a formal requirement that any project obtaining research council funding should demonstrate exactly how the research would help the economy, where ‘the economy’ was itself arguably a codeword for business.
This shift was years in the making—Newby’s experiments at UWE began in 2006, and before that he’d arguably been working to introduce a business agenda in the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). But in late 2009 the process suddenly speeded up. The change in pace was justified with reference to the suddenly urgent need to reduce the budget deficit. What was never explained was why the neoliberal machete should be taken to the higher education budget, but not to the budgets of two new cold war-style aircraft carriers, let alone the replacement for the Trident nuclear missile system. Just before Christmas—the timing was almost certainly deliberate—Mandelson announced that universities would have to cut their budgets by about a billion pounds over a period of two to three years. In the furore that followed, he appeared to allow a little of the old poison to seep back out when he suggested that all that was required was ‘a little belt-tightening’ (Mandelson had of late been working very hard to relaunch himself as a ‘fun’ politician). He further suggested that one way of saving money would be to reduce Britain’s already short college degrees from three to two years. Students should take more web-based courses (presumably from their parents’ homes), and academics should fund their research by working more closely with businesses (for more on the furore, see Mandelson’s Extremities).
Far, then, from being a matter of an invisible hand, the process involved a very visible shove. If it is left unchecked, its ruthlessness will almost certainly result in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the England, Wales and Northern Ireland’s higher education sector (the Scots will hopefully going their own way with this). How extraordinary that, at a time when other countries are trying to encourage the unemployed to obtain college degrees, English politicians are slashing and burning our higher educational system, and handing it over on a silver platter to transnationals such as the Carlyle group.
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In this three-part series, I’d like to consider the latest development in the trend. Even as Mandelson had a go at the universities’ budgets, he established the curiously named ‘Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance’. I say curiously named because no one would expect a review not to be independent (at least not nominally so); I wonder if Mandelson realised from the start that there would be suspicions regarding the independence of the review. If so, he was quite right to worry. In keeping with its past practice, New Labour handed over this educational review to yet another businessman. This was, however, no ordinary businessman. It was John Browne that led BP during its early 2000s image makeover, and, even more controversially, during a string of industrial accidents and environmental disasters which culminated in a scathing report whose publication was followed by Browne’s almost immediate resignation. Why, we may ask, did Mandelson believe that what was arguably a failed oilman would do a good job of sorting out our universities’ funding crisis?
In the next part of this series, I will offer an in-depth analysis of Browne’s work as CEO of BP, and its implications for his current role as the chair of the review of Britain’s higher education funding. In the third post in the series, I will then consider the politics, indeed the political culture behind Browne’s appointment.
References
1) The report was broadcast by the BBC World Service in Newshour on 22/07/2010, 22 GMT. The quotes in this post are my own transcriptions of the broadcast.
2) A digital copy of the review is available at the RSC’s website: http://www.rsc.org/ScienceAndTechnology/Parliament/sainsburyreview.asp
