In
February, the Annual Dearing Higher Education Conference 2012
was held at the University of Nottingham entitled The Business and Growth Benefits of Higher Education. At the
meeting, the Director-General of the CBI, John Cridland, demanded that business
does not only co-operate with universities in the setting-up of spin-off
companies but that it should also be more closely involved in the actual shaping
of university curricula. But should the training of future workers for industry,
the city, and the knowledge economy in Britain really be the main preoccupation
of higher education? The workshop ‘For a Public University’, recently organised
by the local
UCU association and supported by the Centre
for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), the Centre for Research in Higher, Adult & Vocational
Education (HAVE), and the International Political Economy Group (IPEG)
was a crucial counterweight to the interests of business on our university
campuses. Significantly, it too was held at the University of
Nottingham, on June 15, and raised some pressing issues as to whether
universities should be generating profits for business or prophets for society.
John
Cridland’s demand is, in many ways, symptomatic of wider developments in higher
education both in Britain and around the world. In the UK, the introduction of
tuition fees of up to £9,000, the related commodification of degrees, and the
increasing focus on employability has gone hand-in-hand with salary cuts and
the devaluation of USS pension benefits for staff members. These material
concerns have been accompanied by a general devaluation of the academic profession
as a whole.
Globally,
a battle is being waged against students, academics, and the public service of
education. In Canada, the premier of Quebec, Jean Charest,
has announced that university tuition fees should be raised over the next five
years leading to an increase of 60 percent sparking wide student
protests. In Chile, across 2011 to 2012, massive student-led protests have sought more
direct state participation in secondary education as well as an end to the
existence of profit in higher education. After all, student tuition fees in the
country account for 80 percent of spending on higher education and the protests
have ‘presided over the biggest citizen democracy movement since the days of
opposition marches to General Augusto Pinochet a generation ago’, according to
the Guardian. In Australia, despite
the University of Sydney recording a substantial surplus, management have proposed
job cuts of up to 340 staff members. In 2012 the National Tertiary Education Union
(NTEU) launched a campaign calling for management to rescind the planned
cuts and to “invest in staff, not stones”. In the United States, Noam Chomsky
has railed against the assault
on public education, including sharp tuition fees coupled with cutbacks in
services threatening to undermine the much-admired University of California
state college and university system. In Britain, the 2010 protests against impending fees resulted
in 50,000 students on the streets of London becoming subject to police
brutality, leading prominent human rights lawyer, Michael Mansfield, to
highlight that the riot squads were aimed at quashing political protest. The calls for
the co-ordination of a global education strike across November 14-21, 2012 by a
coalescing international
student movement might be significant in binding such developments.
Within
universities in the UK, the trade union experience in many institutions is that
management informs the union with neither a consultation of the union’s views
on these developments nor an attempt to negotiate over these changes.
Ultimately, this is down to the way power is distributed within institutions.
As long as local associations fail to mobilise their members more successfully
to balance the power of management, the latter do not have to pay attention to
the views of their workforce. Yet, even if a union was invited to negotiate
changes, these negotiations would mainly focus on the shape of restructuring,
not on how to do it differently. In order to achieve the latter, trade unions
need to set the overall frame of reference. Demonstrations, strikes and
negotiations with management are all necessary and important, but on their own
they are not enough. Unions need a clear vision of what an alternative to the marketisation
of education could look like. The formulation of what such an alternative
vision might resemble was one of the objectives of the ‘For a Public
University’ workshop.
In his
essay on ‘Intellectuals and the Class Struggle’ [1971] in Revolutionaries,
the renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm surveyed how university students were
likely to form a permanent discontented mass providing movements of the left (and
the radical right) with activists.
“In
a sense the system which maintains vast numbers of young people for a few more
years outside employment is a modern middle-class equivalent of the Old Poor
Law of the early nineteenth-century: a concealed system of outdoor relief”.
Today,
though, we are far from the aftermath of 1968 and the radicalisation of
intellectuals, young or old, allied with the support of workers and other
discontented strata. In deliberating how to support higher education as a
public good accessible to all it is important to avoid the presumption of an
assumed ‘Golden Age’. Yes, mass higher education made universities accessible
to ever larger parts of society. But higher education also excluded the more
marginalised members of society on the basis of race, class, and gender. Alternative
visions for the public university also have to be aware of the new
technological possibilities and dangers embedded in the increasing
internationalisation of education. The public university of the twenty-first
century will have new dimensions and it will look differently from mass higher
education during the second half of the twentieth-century. What is, however,
essential is heightened resistance against the commodification and
marketisation of higher education in the first place. The workshop ‘For a Public
University’ held at the University of Nottingham was one advance in this
respect. Will it be supported?
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