The Tory Culture War on Universities

The Tories are in crisis, but the wheel of vindictive government still turns. Announced at the end of last week, Universities minister Michelle Donelan outlined their latest attack on higher education provision. Branded as a common sense concern with "value for money", what Donelan is proposing is the restructuring of the university sector by the back door using the tried and trusted anonymity of metrics to do the job.

Launching her broadside against "mickey mouse degrees", she argues their proliferation - backed by zero evidence, of course - threatens to undermine the social mobility advances made during the Conservative government. This "progress", according to their own figures, includes half a million more children in poverty since 2012, people from privileged backgrounds being 60% more likely to get a professional job than those who are not, and in 2019 those from working class backgrounds who made it into the professions earned on average £6k/year less than their counterparts. While this is true, Donelan argues there are 25 universities from which fewer than half graduate to professional occupations or what we call "graduate destinations", implying it's HE institutions rather than Tory policy that's responsible for this state of affairs.

Having introduced new targets for apprenticeships and technical courses, Donelan is keen to bring forward a "quality assurance plan". Alongside the recently rested Teaching Excellence Framework, 75% of students will now be expected to finish their degree and programmes will be judged against a 60% benchmark for graduate destinations. Any course that does not meet these requirements will have to carry a 'requires improvement' badge, letting students know a course is inadequate. There has also been chatter on the HE grapevine that this system could be backed by fines for persistent offenders.

From the view of the lobotomised taxpayer, it seems reasonable. Money won't be wasted on unnecessary degrees, students will move to courses with greater remuneration opportunities, and lecturers are going to have buck their ideas up instead of wasting time pushing woke nonsense and trying to shut down free speech. A measure, in other words, designed to play well to the Tory base - a technocratic fix fully in line with culture war objectives.

The outcomes of this would be manifestly unfair and utterly absurd. In the first place, one look at our Oxbridge-dominated media and political elites is enough to show anyone that universities do not exist on a level playing field. They are stratified by class, by prestige, and by the extent institutions can lever their reputation to bring in research monies. Oxbridge for example are directly subsidised by the government to the tune of billions through such grants, whereas provincial universities are lucky to get a couple of million quid. And then there is geography. Universities in the Midlands and the North have a tougher time of it graduate destination-wise because London retains the lion's share of the top jobs. Indeed, it was this realisation that scuppered previous plans to introduce a scheme like Donelan's. And this is where the government is responsible. Two years into his miserable premiership, Boris Johnson's promises to fix infrastructure and rebalance the economy have proven not to be worth the tissue-thin manifesto it was printed in. Universities and the careers of hundreds of academics and thousands of support staff will carry the can of their failure.

This is how it will work. High drop out rate? Sub-par graduate outcomes? Said courses are slapped with Donelan's remedial notice, and future students will steer clear. The consequence will be a further contraction of arts provision, something the Tories don't have time for anyway, and less time for critical research as humanities and social sciences departments invest their time chasing the metrics. To survive, some institutions will effectively redefine themselves as technical institutes (polytechnics, anyone?) and compete directly with the FE sector for recruits. Courses and jobs will disappear, and perhaps entire universities - with appalling consequences for local economies. But the end result, the Tories wager, is a rebalanced system. Technical and vocational education for the many, and the humanities, arts, and social sciences an elite preserve offered by a smaller layer of institutions. An attempt to wind the clock back to before 1992, but with less choice.

This offers up three obvious difficulties. For one, it spells the end of many prospective mature students, particularly those who have or are near to retirement. We're going to see universities actively discourage people from entering HE later in life simply because "graduate outcomes" defined in narrow terms make them a risky proposition. Every older student makes hitting that 60% target that bit more difficult, hence tens of thousands will find their entry into the university system barred. It also raises problems around international students too. Traditionally money spinners for British institutions thanks to the premium fees they get away with charging, tracking graduate destinations becomes more difficult the more a university depends on students from overseas. With some courses having dozens of entrants from dozens of countries, a question mark hangs over how everyone is to be tracked. Therefore some programmes, even at Russell Group institutions, might fall foul of the graduate benchmark simply because adequate returns can't be filed. This says nothing of the amount of resources sunk into this exercise better spent elsewhere. And lastly, it creates an incentive for universities to manufacture graduate outcomes of their own, particularly in areas far from the cities of metropolitan opportunity. There would be more pressure on recruitment from their graduate body, perhaps even rebranding admin roles as requiring a degree. More significantly universities would have an incentive to expand postgrad provision with a range of discounts and postgrad certificates. Certain elite institutions already game the metrics by handing out Masters awards as a matter of course because they deem their undergrad provision exacting enough.

The actualité won't trouble the Tories, it never does. Attacking universities fulfils a dual political function for them. It gives the government space to carry on pushing the war on woke rubbish. Divide and rule by another name, in other words. But it also takes aim at a key oppositional grouping - academics. The Tories are against academia not just because the Conservative Party is the stupid party, but because of what it represents. For one, in the right wing imaginary universities are the source of social liberalism that's undercutting conservatism across the Western world. Getting shot of what we might loosely call the liberal arts by shuttering courses and replacing them with vocational and technical programmes might set back the rise of this culture and perhaps send it into reverse. It won't, by the way. The second is directly related to the authoritarian core of the Tory project. From Thatcher onwards, successive Tory and Labour governments have centralised authority in the executive and, particularly, the office of the Prime Minister. Between 1979 and 1997, this meant not just a war on the labour movement, but on the relative autonomy and authority enjoyed by the constellation of the state's institutions. This, which took place under the rubric of Thatcher's war on expertise (which finds its cultural echoes today in Tory anti-maskers and anti-vax idiocy) saw the government exercise its direct authority over different state functions, with internal markets and target cultures designed to police and discipline institutions. Professional knowledge and expertise were secondary to the application of political technologies, effectively proletarianising these occupations and gutting them of the capacity to challenge the government's authority. Academia with its knowledge and, at its best, informed critique of policy and governance is one such potentially autonomous point of authority to bring under the market cosh.

That the Tories prefer to discipline state institutions this way shows there's nothing neutral or technical about the metrics they introduce. The likes of Donelan talk about value for money because they know a direct political attack on occupational groups they want to bring to heel is more likely to elicit public sympathy than an apparent technical tweak to how higher education is regulated. Let there be no doubt that their seemingly innocuous measure is designed to reshape the entirety of the university system over a relatively short space of time. The result will be a more elitist system, job losses, closures, and a restriction of opportunity.

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