New EcoLogics

UWE has ‘acted early’ in the past; it appears to be doing so once again

Staff at the University of the West of England (UWE) are on strike today. It is the first local strike in the institution’s history, and this fact alone gives pause for thought (staff have of course participated in national strikes, but this is the first UWE-specific strike). Academics tend to be a very conservative bunch when it comes to industrial action, and I suspect that staff at UWE are no exception to this rule. So eyebrows must be raised by the news of the strike; critical observers will ask whether the university’s directors have done all they could to engage creatively with the challenges faced not just by this, but by all of Britain’s institutions of higher education.

As is well known, the sector is facing huge cuts thanks to the country’s three main parties’ discovery of the virtues of ‘fiscal austerity’ in 2009-2010. (Let us not forget that it was Peter Mandelson who first swung the neoliberal machete at our higher education). In this context, few would question that universities will be forced to engage in some form of reorganisation, some form of cost-cutting over the coming years.

But readers will remember that UWE has a special history when it comes to restructuring exercises. Back in 2006 and 2007, when the university was led by Howard Newby, the university’s directorate began to engage in an experiment that involved transforming the institution into a centre for ‘knowledge exchange’. At the time, many believed this to be a codeword for a form of vocationalisation, or what I have described as ‘skillification‘. More recent news regarding the reorganisation of the university’s subject areas would appear to validate this interpretation.

During this transformation, the university was publicly accused by at least one professor of  ‘managerialism’. According to Michael Chanan, one of several leading researchers who left UWE at the nadir of the controversial changes, “The problem was one of senior management simply not listening. In a word the problem is ‘managerialism’. When Newby came in he imposed a new restructuring four years after the last one without asking any questions about what the last one was for.” Many will now wonder whether a similar accusation might be levelled at the current cadre of directors.

What is at issue in 2011 is the manner in which the current directorate, fronted by John Rushforth, a Howard Newby-era appointee, has gone about managing the cost-cutting exercise. I’m told that the university’s vice-chancellors are engaging in a programme of forced demotions, if not de facto compulsory redundancies, with little or no consultation with staff. Those most affected by this action—professors, readers and principal lecturers—are being forced to reapply for their posts. UCU says that about 25% will not get their posts back, and that staff paid by the hour are next in line for a ‘review’.

In my opinion, this sounds very much like an elaborate way of engaging in compulsory redundancies by other means. I certainly hope I’m wrong, but it seems that UWE is forcing its senior staff to go through a humiliating ‘selection’ process—one that effectively contradicts the university’s own previous decisions to promote the best staff. This kind of process will surely force many to choose between compulsory demotion, and redundancy. However you represent the process, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that it does involve compulsion.

It doesn’t take an expert in management to figure out that the exercise will also affect those who are able to hold on to their jobs. I’m told that many key staff are not going to be replaced. If this is true, those who escape the UWE machete may well face an even unhappier work atmosphere than there was at the lowest point of Howard Newby’s tenure at the university. Such a scenario would raise the question of what the exercise will do not just for staff morale, but for future student applications; would you want to study in a university if it gets a reputation for being full of grumpy staff who are worked off their feet, and feel increasingly resentful about their jobs?

It goes almost without saying that this an interpretation of events which UWE’s senior management would contest. The BBC is quoting Rushforth as saying that

‘We are determined to invest in teaching and research where we can. The university is investing in 40 new academic teaching posts and has created new professorial posts.

‘We have been able to protect front line teaching staff and put more investment into consistent contact hours to students.’

‘By acting early, to date, we have been able to avoid compulsory redundancies and been able to be supportive and sensitive to those involved in the changes.’

I leave it to the critical discourse analysts to decide whether there is any ‘spin’ in that statement. At least one aspect of the statement does ring true: Rushforth is certainly right to highlight the UWE directors’ willingness to ‘act early’. Years before the financial crisis occurred, and years before the crisis was used to rationalise the New Labour/Neo Tory onslaught on higher education, UWE vice-chancellors began to embrace the brave new world of what is now known as David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. One interpretation of their willingness to ‘act early’ is that Howard and Sheila Newby were remarkably far-sighted managers who helped to steer the university on to what would prove to be a course towards financial survival. (I wonder what any staff being forced to resign now would say about that.)  Another interpretation is that the Newbys were part of a group of neoliberal managers within HE who joined an unholy alliance of politicians, private equity firms and private training corporations intent on establishing a beachhead for the de facto privatisation of Britain’s higher education.

Whatever one’s opinion on the matter— and whatever the financial scandals associated with it —it is starkly apparent that the hidden costs of the current restructuring exercises are likely to be extraordinarily high. Even if one questions the appalling way in which the Conservative and the New Labour governments have managed higher education policy over the last 20 years, one paradoxical outcome seems very clear: many new universities such as UWE have produced departments with world-class academics. This is a truth that many in Britain’s elite universities might find hard to acknowledge. But it is proven by the results of the last Research Assessment Exercise, which showed that many departments in the country’s former ‘polys’ were punching far above their weight when it came to world class research. (Conversely, it showed that many departments in the elite universities were punching far below their weight, but that is another matter).

The point I am leading up to is this: many leading academics based in the newer universities are now in their 50s, and will still have a decade or more of what should be the most productive teaching and research ahead of them. However, if faced with the dogmatic consequentialism of Britain’s HE policy—or indeed, with restructuring exercises such as the one at UWE—many will prefer to either leave the country, or leave academia itself.

If so, what an ingenious way that Britain’s conservative politicians and their acolytes within our universities have found to preserve what many would still like to describe as one of the best higher educational systems in the world.

Then again, does anybody seriously believe that David Cameron, Nick Clegg or any of the other leading politicians care about anything other than corporate research departments? The question increasingly has to be whether this verity also applies to some of the directors of the universities themselves.

For an analysis of the politics of the process that led up to the UWE cuts, see BPP, Apollo Global, and the Private Universities. See also Big Society, Big Oil, Muzzled Universities (parts I-III). You can read more about the discourse of knowledge exchange, and EcoLogics’ analyses of the plight of British universities since 2007 by going to the Higher Education category of the blog.

Update on 16 February 2011: A video blog on last Thursday’s industrial action at UWE can now be found at New Statesman Video Blog http://bit.ly/eApuaK