Gary Younge is a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester.
I graduated from university in 1992 with no debt. Student loans had been introduced a year earlier, but with my mother dead and my father absent, I was on a full grant. There were no tuition fees. The only work I did was studying for my course; the only worries I had were either romantic or academic. That was true for most of my contemporaries, whatever their backgrounds. Towards the end of my degree I applied for a Guardian bursary to study journalism; if I didn’t get it I planned to teach English as a foreign language some- where hot while I weighed up my options. I really didn’t think about money at all. I didn’t have any; I didn’t earn any; I didn’t owe any. What was there to think about?
In the three decades since then, successive governments, both Labour and Tory, have commodified education to within an inch of its meaning. Students have become clients and units; foreign students, particularly from China, have become cash cows; institutions of learning have become big business. The student experience was once a rite of passage, and leaving home, sharing flats, reinventing yourself, learning your limits, balancing study and social life were all central to it. I enjoyed my time at university. I grew as a human being; I learned things; I had time to figure things out, to study and distance myself from my upbringing.
Now being a student seems, for many, like an apprenticeship for work. More than 1 in 3 live at home; when I was at university it would have been closer to 1 in 20. Close to 2 in 3 students are in part-time jobs; those who enrolled last year will leave with an average debt of £45,800. No wonder a third of first-year students have moderate to severe depression. When I travelled abroad as a student I remember telling people I met that the government had paid for my entire education. They would be dumbfounded. “It makes sense,” I’d say. “Because if I get a good job I can pay it back in taxes and someone else can have the experiences that I’m having.” It pains me to think that, for the time being, that’s no longer possible.
Sophie Lewis studied in the UK and is now an unpaid visiting scholar at the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and teaches courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Before the current headline-grabbing crises in higher education, there were myriad slow-boiling others, constitutive of the capitalist university, channelling the contradictions of class, gender, coloniality and racial domination upon which modern academia was built. As Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell identified in 2018, the liberal consensus that there is a crisis in higher education against which we must defend (“the crisis consensus”) hinges on the assumption that the university is a progressive institution by nature and a good in itself. Easy for me to say (as a self-employed, PhD-holding para-academic), but perhaps we should rethink that assumption.
Helen Charman teaches in the English department at Durham University.
The structural crisis in higher education is also a personal one; increasingly, it feels desperately so, as much as I try to maintain a broader perspective. Teaching, of course, is personal: at its best it provides surprising opportunities for growth and connection for everyone involved. Research can be, too. But what I mean here is that the politics driving the impoverishment of working conditions within universities and the housing and cost of living crises that are engulfing students and staff alike is the personal disguised as the circumstantial, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is punitive, vindictive, uncaring, spiteful, and ugly.
I don’t labour under false illusions about the university as an institution, but I don’t think a serious argument can be made that it won’t be a loss when it is finally accessible only to the children of wealth, and the “savings” made on paying people fairly are ploughed into more fantastically ugly buildings with names like the Princess Anne Business, Innovation and Enterprise Centre. This is all happening to people; I think about all the brilliant teachers I’ve worked with who couldn’t make meagre hourly-paid contracts work any more, who couldn’t publish work for no wages, of all the books left unwritten and discussions left unhad – and I want revenge!
Bronac Ferran recently completed a PhD thesis in English literature at Birkbeck, University of London.
At present, the arts and humanities in the UK face exceptional challenges. While science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are priorities for government funding, subjects within the arts and humanities that are relatively open-ended with respect to defined career paths, such as English literature and philosophy, face reductions in funding and a higher risk of closure. Such areas of study, less directly geared to adding visible financial value to the national economy, appear increasingly like slipstreams in a policy agenda flowing irreversibly in market-led directions. But if we consider the most daunting 21st-century global challenges, it is clear that these require making connections between STEM domains and areas of the arts, humanities and social sciences. As well as the oft-cited area of machine learning, where issues of data ownership and authorship grow every day more challenging, we might also look at the ultimately human-centred sphere of medicine, that calls for empathetic as well as analytic approaches to the human subject. So, too, does the world’s environmental crisis, which demands systemic rather than specialist processes of redress. As traditional courses in the humanities decline, might new multi-subject areas emerge to bring together disciplines that were traditionally held apart in silos? Might this crisis also be an opportunity? What would a new university of the future look like if we were starting from zero?
Waseem Yaqoob is a lecturer in the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London.
Crisis: a moment of acute breakdown. With university staff in their fifth round of industrial action in as many years, the condition of UK higher education seems ever-more chronic. Rooted in its transformation into a simulated market by a neoliberal vision of education as investment in human capital, students paying exorbitant fees have become rational investors and universities and academics self-optimising entrepreneurs selling a product, governed by an oligarchy of managers, administrators and HR who monetise education, increase revenue and squeeze productivity from staff. Nominally sover- eign, students are valued only as income, their numbers hiked without commensurate increases in staff. For academics, this means constantly rising workloads and fewer resources. The whole tottering edifice, awash with fee income spent on almost anything but education, relies on endemic overwork and a rapidly diminishing reservoir of goodwill among staff, testified to by the frequency of strikes.
The reality is imperfectly masked by gurning PR that touts the merits of a broad education, garnished with the jargon of social justice. My employer, Queen Mary University of London, which ranked top for social mobility at the UK Social Mobility Awards in 2021, intends to be “the most inclusive university of its kind”. In 2022, it became infamous for threatening unlawful pay deductions from striking staff, encouraging students to snitch on teachers who mentioned strike action, and underpaying its lowest-paid staff (the majority women from racially minoritised communities) for more than a decade. The contradiction between the historical associations of holistic learning with human flourishing and the tawdry reality of institutions run as piratical corporate entities is obvious. Rather than offering shelter from the alienation of the job market, universities inculcate its discipline. Crisis can also name an opportunity. Academic self-governance was liquidated long ago but a restive desire for autonomy remains, channelled into a union that through a national strike threatens to contest the grip of the menagerie of bureaucrats. Even an indefinite strike (a possibility) is not forever, and whether the power manifest in a rupture dissipates at its end will depend on whether students and staff can make imaginable a different kind of organisation of education with a different reason for being.
Juliet Jacques completed a PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of Sussex in 2019 and teaches at the Royal College of Art.
What is the crisis in higher education? The creation of a management class drawn from outside the academy, and the use of tuition fees to devalue non-STEM subjects and discipline students for the rest of their lives, are the first two things that spring to mind. But really, the crisis in higher education is a subset of the crisis of neoliberal capitalism.
Devorah Baum is an associate professor in English literature at the University of Southampton.
I studied at university when it was still free, which allowed me to embrace the student experience. Since I’ve been teaching things have changed, as I understood a number of years ago when one disgruntled undergraduate, unhappy with a mark she’d been given, announced: “I’m a customer here and I didn’t pay to receive this.” Clearly not an ideal attitude, but not uncommon, misguided, or even inaccurate. The student experience has been converted into a consumer experience and that can only be damaging for education, because the problem with customers is that they’re always right.
Thomas J. Watson is a PhD student at the University of Leeds.
I first attended university before the reforms of the 2010s. Surveying a realm of comparatively unalienated labour, relatively removed from profit’s predations, I developed ambitions to teach in higher education. Work, I supposed, would be meaningful and stable, largely devoid of commercial indignities. Reality has since disabused me of this optimism. In the past 12 years, British universities have undergone rapid – and unprecedented – privatisation, in developments ill-communicated to the public at large. The industrial upshot has been deteriorating pay and conditions. Junior staff, of which I am one, typically migrate from precarious job to precarious job, subsisting on daily, or hourly, paid roles in the hope that regular wages will follow. For those without kin-based support, the sector is shutting its doors. In UK art schools – the vanguards of marketisation – lecturing budgets have been sufficiently slashed as to beget degree courses with merely one permanent employee. Classes, possessing ever more students, ever fewer tutors, offer worsening value for money. Master’s degrees, for instance, will now routinely charge over £13,000 a year for home applicants, over £25,000 to overseas candidates. The resulting postgraduate situation is exclusionary, denying a necessary academic stepping stone to those lacking either independent wealth or the willingness to burden substan- tial debt. The sector at times feels exploitative: lecturers are obliged to comply with a seeming Ponzi scheme that supplies deflating credentials for inflating prices while affirming the degrees’ inherent – or labour market – benefit to students who receive shoddier educations and dimmer prospects. Amid economic decline, UK universities face a bleak horizon. But reasons for hope remain. Students, politicised and supportive of unions, want more; academics, increasingly organised and militant, see the necessity of transformation. A better university is possible. Its realisation, however, will require struggle.
Jo Grady is general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU).
Higher education in the UK generates tens of billions of pounds in income each year, largely from student tuition fees. However, this money isn’t invested in staff, who haven’t received an above-inflation pay rise for 13 years.
Across higher education, the story is one of insecurity. As well as falling pay, 90,000 staff are also on temporary contracts, unable to plan their future and constantly forced to reapply for their jobs. For the university vice chancellors who lead the sector, the story is much different, however: their average salary has increased to £315,000 a year, with the highest paid pocketing £714,000 last year.
Rather than support their workforce, vice chancellors have embedded exploitation into higher education, so that a workload crisis leaves university staff working on average 16 hours for free on top of their contracted hours. With conditions like this, it is no surprise UCU just won its biggest-ever vote for strike action, with overwhelming support from students. A sector that treats staff as more than simply units of labour, and students as more than consumers, is a sector that has a far better chance of success.
Ed Luker completed a PhD on post-war modernist poetry at Northumbria University in 2017 and taught at the University of Surrey, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, and Greenwich University before leaving academia in 2022.
Nine years of study to will the lecturer dream into existence, constant professionalisation but only ever treading water – and all it took was one email from me: “cheerio, dears”, holding back my fuck yous. I finally did it. After over 100 job applications, I pulled the cord on my “career” – the constant exploitation, anxiety and exhaustion, while carrying the title “doctor”. University changed me. Keston, JD, Gordon, Ian – you expanded my perspective, sharpened my analytic capacity, grew my imagination. But those beautiful tools were buried under these collapsing institutions. For now, I’m done.
I felt the collapse inside me, giving myself over to teaching outdated courses for no money, to indifferent students (aside from the beautiful few). I couldn’t stand the feeling of heaping a lifetime of debt upon any of them. Brand new buildings sprung up all around me while I could barely make rent; my time given to marking for no recompense, with no space to teach in ways that would create real improvements. I would receive email invitations to things like “Blockchain Applications with Big Innovation Centre”, and I’d laugh instead of cry. But I got out, and I’m all the happier for it. ◉