Thursday 27 January 2022

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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11 comments:

BCFG said...

I have long argued that ‘woke’ is a right wing project, one which the Tory Tories happily use to further their own authoritarian ends. Woke hysteria functions to pretend there is any difference between all the various Tory parties. It gets the activists on all Tory sides steamed up.

I think most so called ‘woke’ subjects could be learned in a few lunchtimes at home, and they remain the least critical of all the subjects from where I am sitting. If there is one thing woke will not tolerate it is critical thinking. Woke demands obedience, and if you don’t comply, your job and liberty are at great risk, as well as your, if you have them, advertisers money.

So no need for a vast university system for those. And that is the answer, don’t rely on the government for these studies, create your own. Join a left sect or something, and attend their universities. I am sure this great lack of ‘woke academia’ will have the lower classes crying out to join any organisation that will fill this painful gap in their lives.

I suppose History and Economics will still be taught though, the question is which version? If the past 150 years are anything to go by, the version that the ruling class want you to digest.

But this article is peppered with woke bluster, and interspersed with something completely different.

I can’t quite work out if this article is intended to promote ‘woke’ ideology as critical or protest at the ill treatment of the lower classes? And before you ask, the 2 are very much mutually exclusive.

Blissex said...

«The result will be a more elitist system, job losses, closures»

Most likely for university staff, but the university sector has at the same time expanded and become more intense (30 years of "efficiency savings") and I doubt many on the left or the right will worry much about university staff losing their (often brutal) jobs.

«and a restriction of opportunity.»

And here there is a very funny point, because that is not just absurd, but it is stale blairite/mandelsonian/neoliberal propaganda: opportunities depend on jobs, not on degrees, expanding the supply of graduates does not by itself expand the demand for graduates, that depends on the supply of jobs that require a degree, and that is not so easy to expand. The UK is no longer the core and headquarters of an immense empire, and headquarters/staff/desk jobs requiring a degree are not in ample supply. My estimate is that at most 10-15% of jobs really require university degrees, up from 2-8% decades ago, but that is pretty much an upper limit. The majority of workers cannot be lecturers, surgeons, chartered accountants, design engineers, etc., even with the expansion of "bullshit jobs".

Perhaps the delusion that getting an UK degree would result in the opportunity to get a graduate middle or upper-middle class job could have been innocently held 30-40 years ago, but it is had been thoroughly exploded since. A large part of the UK workforce is enormously overqualified; degrees have long since had the main purposes of keeping people off the unemployment rolls for 3-4 years (or more) and of giving employment to university staff and builders.

The case can be made that a university degree experience has an intrinsic worth, as a kind of intellectual/cultural finishing school, more as an *avocation* than as a vocation: so that for example media studies, sociology, computing, medieval history, engineering, ... degrees have that value rather than for very meager vocational purposes (leading to "good jobs").

I agree with that case, but I suspect that few mothers want to pay taxes to give the children of other mothers an avocational experience, and few potential students want to get into a lot of debt and miss on several years of earnings for the sake of their avocational passions, whether they be for art history or electronic engineering.

I personally think that instead of deluding the gullibles that a greater supply of graduates will result in a greater supply of middle and upper-middle class jobs it would be better for the "left" to campaign to make non-graduate jobs better paid and more secure, that is to have more non-graduate middle and upper-middle class jobs: once upon a time (not many decades ago) only a (small) minority of bank branch managers had degrees, for example.

Blissex said...

«The result will be a more elitist system, job losses, closures»

Most likely for university staff, but the university sector has at the same time expanded and become more intense (30 years of "efficiency savings") and I doubt many on the left or the right will worry much about university staff losing their (often brutal) jobs.

«and a restriction of opportunity.»

And here there is a very funny point, because that is not just absurd, but it is stale blairite/mandelsonian/neoliberal propaganda: opportunities depend on jobs, not on degrees, expanding the supply of graduates does not by itself expand the demand for graduates, that depends on the supply of jobs that require a degree, and that is not so easy to expand. The UK is no longer the core and headquarters of an immense empire, and headquarters/staff/desk jobs requiring a degree are not in ample supply. My estimate is that at most 10-15% of jobs really require university degrees, up from 2-8% decades ago, but that is pretty much an upper limit. The majority of workers cannot be lecturers, surgeons, chartered accountants, design engineers, etc., even with the expansion of "bullshit jobs".

Perhaps the delusion that getting an UK degree would result in the opportunity to get a graduate middle or upper-middle class job could have been innocently held 30-40 years ago, but it is had been thoroughly exploded since. A large part of the UK workforce is enormously overqualified; degrees have long since had the main purposes of keeping people off the unemployment rolls for 3-4 years (or more) and of giving employment to university staff and builders.

The case can be made that a university degree experience has an intrinsic worth, as a kind of intellectual/cultural finishing school, more as an *avocation* than as a vocation: so that for example media studies, sociology, computing, medieval history, engineering, ... degrees have that value rather than for very meager vocational purposes (leading to "good jobs").

I agree with that case, but I suspect that few mothers want to pay taxes to give the children of other mothers an avocational experience, and few potential students want to get into a lot of debt and miss on several years of earnings for the sake of their avocational passions, whether they be for art history or electronic engineering.

I personally think that instead of deluding the gullibles that a greater supply of graduates will result in a greater supply of middle and upper-middle class jobs it would be better for the "left" to campaign to make non-graduate jobs better paid and more secure, that is to have more non-graduate middle and upper-middle class jobs: once upon a time (not many decades ago) only a (small) minority of bank branch managers had degrees, for example.

Blissex said...

As an additional point on vocational vs. avocational, and the supply of jobs opportunities, recently the Conservatives have been considering whether to stop or cut down funding degrees and research in "legacy" areas, by which they mean engineering and computing. They are "legacy" areas because the relevant UK industries have moved to China and India (like steel, docks, cars before them), and anyhow for the few remaining jobs in the UK in those "legacy" areas there is a huge supply of engineering and computing graduates from China and India, whose degrees have been paid by the chinese and indian taxpayers, and who expect much lower salaries than "lazy, uppity, unaffordable" UK workers.

The result is not only that most engineering and computing products are imported (except for defence related ones), but that even in the few remaining successful engineering and computing businesses a large number of graduates are indian or chinese; I am familiar with some of those businesses, and they not only have large offshore labs (not just factories) in China and India, but also often 30-50% of the engineering and computing employees *in the UK* are indian or chinese, even if the percentage of indian or chinese origin residents of the UK is 10 times smaller. Same in the USA, for example:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-05/tech-immigrants-a-map-of-silicon-valleys-imported-talent
"One third of the startups in Silicon Valley are founded by Indian Americans. in 2010, Asian Americans became the majority of the tech workforce in the Valley for the first time, making up 50.1% vs. 40.7% for whites. In 2012, 51 percent of the Valley's population spoke a language other than English exclusively at home, compared with 21 percent in the U.S."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-06/why-silicon-valley-s-asian-americans-still-feel-like-a-minority
"On the other hand, there’s some basis to see Silicon Valley as a beacon of progress in the representation of Asian Americans, who account for a quarter of the population in the Bay Area. Alphabet, DoorDash, and Zoom all have Asian American CEOs. Pichai, who’s originally from southern India, leads a company where more than 40% of the U.S. workforce is Asian. At Facebook Inc., the figure is even higher, and Asian employees slightly outnumber White ones. [...] At Facebook, where 46% of U.S. workers are Asian, only 26% are director-level or higher, though that number is up from 21% five years ago."

The percentage of asian residents in both the UK and the USA is around 3-5% IIRC.

If the few "good jobs" even in STEM areas means that STEM degrees are not that much of a path to middle or upper-middle class jobs for UK graduates, how useful are most UK degrees for *vocational* purposes?

Blissex said...

«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»

As I argued in a previous comment, that is not going to work too well either.
The basic problem is that just as there is a colossal worldwide oversupply of labour, with the global wage being around $1-$2 per hour, there is also a large oversupply of graduates, and of technical graduates too, with the global salary for engineering and computing being $6,000-$10,000 per year. Except for the very top "creative geniuses" with elite degrees from MIT or Cambridge.

«Courses and jobs will disappear, and perhaps entire universities - with appalling consequences for local economies»

Where? In countries with expanding economies there has been a huge growth in the number of courses and jobs in universities, and universities have been created even in small towns. Here is an example:

https://www.4icu.org/id/east-kalimantan/

That is part of the large oversupply of graduates worldwide, paid for by non-UK taxpayers.

Unless the argument is made that degrees are mostly for avocational purposes (a tough sell), in the absence of growth of suitable graduate jobs, universities, degree courses and university jobs in countries like the UK are "the tail wagging the dog"...

Dialectician1 said...

“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.”

Here's some evidence:

“In short, higher level education no longer leads straightforwardly to higher level jobs; this has serious implications for considering the role of education in the process of social mobility and provides an uncomfortable truth that politicians seem reluctant to acknowledge – that is, education is no longer capable of delivering the promise of social mobility.

Talking the Talk of Social Mobility: The Political Performance of a Misguided Agenda. Nicola Ingram & Sol Gamsu Jan, 2022

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13607804211055493

As the authors conclude, "The social mobility agenda is the enemy of equality".

Blissex said...

«education is no longer capable of delivering the promise of social mobility.»

That is what I meant by "opportunities depend on jobs, not on degrees, expanding the supply of graduates does not by itself expand the demand for graduates, that depends on the supply of jobs that require a degree".

«As the authors conclude, "The social mobility agenda is the enemy of equality"»

And that was I meant by saying "blairite/mandelsonian/neoliberal propaganda" as I was thinking of that usual quote from Roy Hattersley in 2001:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/24/labour2001to2005.new
"In fact, success has emboldened the Prime Minister to move further to the Right. [...] Tony Blair discovered a big idea. His destiny is to create a meritocracy. Unfortunately meritocracy is not the form of society which social democrats want to see. [...] A Labour government should not be talking about escape routes from poverty and deprivation. By their nature they are only available to a highly-motivated minority. The Labour Party was created to change society in such a way that there is no poverty and deprivation from which to escape.

One of the most popular arguments for thatcherism, whether original or mandelsonian, is that "the UK economy" suffers from too much egalitarianism, and "meritocracy" is the solution. But other countries have taken the opposite path until recently:

https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21723123-more-needs-be-done-ensure-it-survives-immigration-changing-swedish-welfare
"Sweden has long been admired for its blend of prosperity and social cohesion. Its model combines high taxes, generous welfare, collective bargaining, high educational standards and a reasonably free-market economy. The result is high living standards: the lowest wages, for example in hotels or restaurants, are far higher than minimum wages elsewhere in Europe says Marten Blix, a Swedish economist. Relative to other countries that have comparable data, Swedish men in manufacturing earn the highest minimum wage. [...] For decades Sweden consciously tried to get rid of low-skilled service jobs, says Karin Svanborg-Sjovall, of Timbro, a free-market think-tank. “We are fanatics about equality here,” she says. These jobs now need to come back to help newcomers."

As to "equality", there are several versions, some of which may be more "sellable" than others:

#1 Liberal equality: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread“.

#2 Social insurance equality: equality with a lower bound: eliminate poverty and deprivation, so that nobody has to "sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread", but some can become rich or very rich "as long as they pay their taxes", as someone :-) said.

#3 Equality with both a lower and an upper bound (lower to upper middle class), as the rich and very rich don't just enjoy their wealth, they also use it to subvert and suborn politics and to bully the less rich. Many ancient republics, Athens, Rome, etc. had "censuary" laws to avoid that.

In the current political situation I think the the "left" would have a much better chance of "selling" #2 than #3, just as I think that "reciprocity" would "sell" a lot better than "solidarity".

Anonymous said...

1. BCFG is correct in that 'woke' is a manifestation of a bourgeois revolution, not class conflict, in which context it could be said to be of the 'right'. To be fair, its roots came in genuine class conflict - the demand for black people in the US to 'wake up' about their state, and race and social class are intrinsically tied in the US in a different way to the UK - but then like BLM it was co-opted by the bourgeois revolutionaries for the usual nefarious purposes.

2. The class situation in the UK strikes me as being different than elsewhere (in the world) - I may be wrong, but it seems, among the white working-class at least - to have roots that precede capitalism, and were codified possibly as far back as the Norman Conquest. This makes consciousness far harder to shift, even with increased earnings or education. I was one person that did rise up the ladder and developed a sense of class consciousness, but this was when class was the dominant analytical tool - and subject for discussion both politically and culturally. I was listening to The Jam the other day, and it was all about class. Now class has been elbowed out of the discussion and demoted to just one of a basket of 'grievances'(which very much suits the purposes of the bourgeoisie) yet clearly, regardless of whether the nature of class is evolving, it remains the only meaningful tool to promote genuine equality. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors about this - the gatekeepers of social theory are like the clerics of the catholic church, but, like the message of Jesus, the truth of the prophet's message is disconcertingly and disruptively for those gatekeepers) simple.

Blissex said...

"race and social class are intrinsically tied in the US in a different way to the UK"

That's the usual woke buffoonery of the right-wing distraction tactics: in the USA there is no small minority of white colonizers oppressing the darkskinned majority, the darkskinned minority is quite small, 10%, and 80% of the oppressed working class is non-darkskinned. The game of the right-wing wokeists is to divide the working class into small "intersectional" groups based on color, sexuality, etc., and create resentments among these groups, while pointing out that the markets are "meritocratic" and blind to identity, but the "racist white working class" is the enemy of everybody else, not the owner class.

Bllissex said...

«and universities have been created even in small towns. Here is an example: https://www.4icu.org/id/east-kalimantan/ That is part of the large oversupply of graduates worldwide, paid for by non-UK taxpayers.x

Consider Mulawarn University or Makassar State University:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/@-0.4685201,117.1530449,14z/
https://www.google.com/maps/place/@-5.1700413,119.4342151,14z/

Why should an UK employer prefer University of Poppleton graduates to those of Mulawarn University or Makassar State University? They are all non-prime places churning out "bulk headcount" workforce, where cheaper is simply better.

The argument could also be made that any preference for University of Poppleton graduates, in their large majority white english, would be "white supremacist": there are many more dark skinned people in the global graduate output than white english, and therefore any progressive UK employer pursuing "social justice" should offer employment opportunities reflecting that global workforce racial distribution and adopt a liberal policy of "affirmative action" towards that end.

So what should UK graduates do until "social justice" is achieved? Ideally they should choose to have been born to an upper-middle class or upper class family sending them to an public school and then to a prime place like Oxbridge, and owning a property and business portfolio, because that is the kind of meritocratic "achievement" that gives an advantage for working in lucrative finance and real estate businesses over "bulk headcount" nobodies from whichever identity group, and it is that "achievement" that has been richly rewarded by policy for the past 40 years under Conservative, New Labour, LibDem governments.

BCFG said...

Given we are entering the 6th mass extinction, caused entirely by capitalist production, then Blissex’s desperate attempt to save the capitalist system of exploitation via reformist ‘equality’ measures is so pitifully short of what is required that you might as well call Blissex a dye in the wool Thatcherite for all the good it will do.

It also puts into some perspective the quite baffling obsession that a self proclaimed socialist would have in replacing one form of Toryism with another, and with Bojo the clown in particular.

The only and I mean, literally the only solution to the real problems we are now facing is the end of exchange. Arguing for anything else puts you in the same camp as Trump as far as I am concerned. You might as well be crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. The end of exchange represents extreme equality, let us call it option #4, though in reality it is option 1,2 and 3 too.

Social mobility is of course a bourgeois concept but it should be noted that social mobility has always been higher in the more 'social democratic' nations, such as Sweden, than 'red in tooth and claw capitalist' nations such as the UK. The Thatcher period saw a sharp decline in social mobility.

Blair was an opponent of social mobility because under his brutal regime, while he was massacring people abroad, at home he ensured occupations ‘raised their standards’ by requiring degrees for entry rather than GCSE’s. For example, before Blair to be a Journalist required 5 GCSE’s, whereas under the Blair regime to gain entry you had to be a graduate. This is a gentrification process. This was about consumerism, and raising the standards for consumers, or at least improving the marketing PR to give the impression of improving standards, not about any form of social mobility.

Now Journalism is a bad example because Journalists before and after Blair were rotten to the core, but it also affected many other occupations. We saw a proliferation of the market in education, so instead of lifelong education we got lifelong paying for magazines that no one ever reads to be dropped through the door occasionally.