News & Views item - January 2011

 

 

A View of the Threat to British Universities has Bearing on Australia's Academe. (January 5, 2011)

A TFW follower brought to our attention a 4,000-word article recently written by Simon Head* for the January 13, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books -- "The Grim Threat to British Universities".

 

Put succinctly: "The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the one thing upon which their worldwide reputation depends: the caliber of their scholarship... The intervention of the state in the management of academic research has created a bureaucracy of command and control..."

 The control system has two pillars. The first is the “Research Assessment Exercise” (RAE)... [the] second is the funding process by the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) that follows the announcement of the RAE results. It is this that gives the system real teeth, since academic departments receive less money if their RAE ratings fall short."

 

The heart of Dr Head's argument can be summarised in the following four paragraphs, and while it should sound a clarion warning to Australian policy makers hell bent on forcing through its Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), current signs make that appear increasingly unlikely. 

 

Dr Head's noting of how the United Sates has avoided the RAE/HEFCE governmental "monopolist powers over the funding for research in all disciplines" is of interest, i.e. "the burden of academic managerialism in the US has fallen on the teaching rather than the research side of university life".

 

In HEFCE’s texts, words like “quality” and “excellence” have become increasingly empty. For the handful of British universities that are world-class—Oxford, Cambridge, and the various components of the University of London foremost among them—the HEFCE system is especially dangerous, because the reputation of these universities really does depend on their ability to do first-rate research, which is most threatened by HEFCE’s crass managerialism. In Britain there are scholars who will continue to produce exceptional work despite HEFCE and the RAE. But by treating the universities as if they were the research division of Great Britain Inc., the UK government and HEFCE have relegated the scholar to the lower echelons of a corporate hierarchy, surrounding him or her with hoards of managerial busybodies bristling with benchmarks, incentives, and penalties.

 

To what degree do such methods prevail in American academia itself? It would be surprising if practices so central to the American zeitgeist during the past twenty years had thrived only on foreign soil. In the US, higher public education is the responsibility of the individual states, and the power of private universities also ensures that there can be no American HEFCE exercising monopolist powers over the funding for research in all disciplines. The lifetime security of employment that academic tenure provides—and that no longer exists in the UK—gives the senior professors, who in 2007–2008 made up 48.8 percent of teachers in higher education, the power and confidence to stand up to university managers and head off an American version of the RAE. But their success in doing this also points to the dubious bargain that many of them have struck: relatively little teaching, especially undergraduate teaching, is usually required of them, and in return they are left in peace to carry on with their research.

 

The result has been that the burden of academic managerialism in the US has fallen on the teaching rather than the research side of university life, with university administrators achieving collectively what in the UK has been achieved by government fiat. The imposition of the industrial model on teaching, and especially the teaching of undergraduates, has been most damaging in the state universities below the elite level and in the two-year junior and community colleges that together, Jack Schuster and Martin Finkelstein remind us in The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers, make up the great majority of American institutions of higher education.

 

At this lower level the prolonged and continued decline of funding from state and local governments had had a pervasive effect even before the present financial crisis hit, forcing university managers to behave more and more like their corporate counterparts and to treat academic departments as “cost centers and revenue production units.” In the science, mathematics, and engineering departments of eleven public research universities examined by Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades in Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, we find an assembly line where increased “student credit-hour production” has become the target of management’s “incentive based budget mechanisms.”

 

And in Australia the increasing overreliance on funding from international student fees has added a malignant distortional force effecting our university sector.

 

Finally, this comment from a TFW reader: As a person who has merely tried to publish in the most appropriate journal, I object to my younger colleagues being forced to publish in the most fashionable journal - as judged by teams of rankers, impact factor measurers and junior journal editors who screen submitted papers. The ERA's journal rankings are cheap surrogates for actually reading and critically evaluating the content of papers. I think science is entering a Dark Age, as working scientists have become the lowest trophic level in one of the many bureaucratic food webs.

 

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*Simon Head is an Associate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford and a Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. His most recent book is The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age. (January 2011)