Category: political economy

The higher education sector across the anglophone parts of the world, amongst others, is in continuing crisis. At present that crisis is most visible in the UK through the proposed, and implemented, redundancy programmes, real-terms cuts to overall investment in research and ongoing (at present – annual) national level pay disputes between the largest academic trade union and the employers group.

As we lurch into the latest iteration or flavour of that crisis – the growth of (highly visible) redundancy programmes at Russell Group universities, and ongoing cuts at all universities nationwide, I have been involved in discussions that often return to the phenomenal critical work that arose throughout the 2018 USS pensions dispute, between academic staff in the UCU and the employers bodies Universities UK and the University and Colleges Employers Association, see especially USSBriefs. Re-reading the Brief written by Clive Barnett on the financialisation of UK higher education I was struck by the resonance of his final list of whole scale changes to higher education, not only in the UK, with the ongoing crisis today:

We can substitute ‘dispute over pensions’ or ‘pensions dispute’ for ‘staffing cuts’:

1. The financialisation of higher education is bringing about a sea-change in how the public purpose of higher education — and the role of students, teaching and research within it — are conceived.
2. The dispute over staffing cuts discloses the integral relationship between the adoption of particular models of university financing and the consolidation of unaccountable systems of centralised and hierarchical management.
3. The central theme that connects the staffing cuts, capital investment programmes, and routine experiences of mismanagement in universities is risk: how it is conceptualised; how it should be measured and forecast; and whether and how it should be shared.
4. It is important to differentiate between the argument that higher education is currently an imperfectly functioning market that could be made more perfect, and the argument that it might not be a good idea to imagine it either should or could be in the first place.

Clive’s link to Stephen Toope the Cambridge VC’s piece is instructive, it clearly shows the distance between, broadly speaking, liberal values of academic freedom & the wider ‘positive externalities’ of higher education’s value and the pseudo-marketisation and narrow assetisation of universities and especially their students. In 2018 Toope observed:

for a generation now, politicians of all stripes have talked as if UK universities are broken, and hence in need of “market discipline”. They talk as if our students, smart and energetic people, are in need of protection. This is an own goal.

We are just beginning yet another review covering higher education that fails to get to the heart of concerns around the role of universities.  The focus should be on what values our society expects to see reflected in our universities, not just value for money. 

I suggest this argument remains just as pertinent (if not more) today, in 2026, as in 2018. It also illustrates, I think, the degrees to which the imagination of UK HE as a sector, a workforce and as a ‘good’ has been captured by management consultancies, selling ‘solutions’ to university leaders and government. This form of groupthink of management consultancy ‘solutionism’ to the knotty problems of higher education funding adopted by a self-selecting, and self-perpetuating, class of university ‘leaders’ (all steadily increasing their own salaries and aggrandising their titles, as ‘President’ for example) exemplifies what André Spicer calls ‘functional stupidity‘. indeed, many of the examples that come through in Spicer Alvesson’s wonderful book – The Stupidity Paradox – are directly observable in the actions and behaviour of university leaders, including (list adapted from here):

• Executives who more interested in impressive power point shows than systematic analysis.
• University leadership development initiatives which would not be out of place in a new age commune.
• Universities employing technology firms more interest in keeping a positive tone than addressing real problems.
• University leadership focused more on developing impressive strategies than educating students.
• Central university executive departments obsessed with branding when all that counted was the price – see, for example, the recent rebranding exercises of many universities.
• Universities throwing millions into ‘change exercises’ and then when they failed do exactly the same thing again and again

‘Functional stupidity’ is the condition of apparently ‘smart’ people being discouraged from critical thought and reflection. Spicer and Alvesson argue that these forms of stupidity are a paradox – it is perhaps ‘normal’ to think of stupidity as work, especially in institutions such as universities, as ‘bad’, and yet it can prove to be successful or useful. The growth of the university sector in the UK, for example, might demonstrate the successes of particular kinds of ‘functional stupidity’. Even so, and as Toope argues above, there comes a time when that functional stupidity needs to be urgently challenged. While the cuts to academic staff pensions were, largely, reversed in the pensions dispute, the wider trends of financialisation of higher education and the functional stupidity that, I argue, undergirds its remains. It is becoming ever more an existential matter for higher education in the UK.

What “counts” cannot always be counted, at least in the ways these forms of functional stupidity dictate. As colleagues in the Centre for Social Mobility at Exeter have so clearly articulated in a post for the Higher Education Policy Institute (here):

University leadership is stewardship as well as financial management: holding together measurable outputs and immeasurable goods, institutional sustainability and public purpose. While it may seem prudent to cut while institutions still have manoeuvring space rather than when that is the only choice, there is not only danger that universities cut too much; it is that they cut the things they do not know how to value – and that cannot be easily restored once lost.

Universities need to count carefully. But they must also remember what cannot be counted.

if those invested in universities, their students, staff and collaborators/partners, are not able to convince wider society to have the more fundamental conversation about what society wants from higher education, including, I would strongly argue, a serious rethink of tertiary level vocational education and training, then we risk losing the culture, expertise, institutions, vitality and so much more that universities and colleges contribute and nourish in society more than ever.

The urgent task for all who believe in the power of education as a social good is to wrestle back the imagination of what our society can and should do for and with higher education. It is not, yet, too late – but we are fast running out of time and capacity to avoid irreversible damage.