I was very pleased with our workshop, “Reconstructing the British University,” that ISRF held on 24-25 November in York. It was completely engaging from start to finish as we discussed our papers about our unhappy object of attention.

We reviewed work on the British university’s broken budget model, whose study has been led by James Brackley for the last eighteen months (see his paper with colleagues who were also in York). We talked about a dysfunctional managerialism defining the system. We reviewed material on staff stress and overwork under what often feels like management’s structural disrespect for academics, their knowledge, and their work. We analysed student struggles with tuition costs, debt, and adequate university investment in their studies.

None of us felt that universities needed to be in such constant trouble. We discussed next steps for our collaborative research, which will develop a coherent story about what has really happened to universities and how they can be reconstructed.

Towards the end I collected urgent issues around the table, and was impressed by how much everyone cared about the quality of universities. No one had the least intention of giving up.

At the same time, we now have preliminary agreement that most things about universities need to be fixed. Many delegates noted the university’s democratic deficit: neither faculty members nor students have any sustained input or direct role in crisis decisions, or even the sense that their views and expertise are taken seriously.

From time to time, I try to understand autocratic management by reading organisational scholarship. Advice I’ve never seen there includes, “ignore your experts,” “be your inner dictator,” and “shrink to greatness.” Yet most British academics experience these very practices on most days.

Government’s only expressed sympathies are for students, and yet the student view around the table was summarised as “we’re not part of this either.” There’s not a lot of freedom for us, one said--not a lot of academic freedom, especially as courses are getting cut.

Others wondered about the strategies coming from academics. We seem very reactive, one said: agency is always coming from above. People are bumbling around. There’s no vision, no active redesigning.

Another thought the University and College Union (UCU) was another strategy vacuum. It exercises its rights to review financial data and bargain in relation to formal announcements of prospective redundancies. But it seems to have little interest or insight regarding academic issues and quality, and no overall plan.

Still another concluded that we may not grasp the scale of what is happening. This is an unprecedented contraction in higher education when you think of the number of courses closing. In many places whole disciplines are being wiped out. We need to create an outspoken response.  if we wait for public outcry it will be too late.

In other words, UK academics are living through a Great Contraction. Our project’s first goal is to be completely clear about what is happening.

One can’t find this clarity in government proceedings, judging from a hearing of the House of Commons’ Education Committee. Its title was suitable enough: “Higher Education and Funding: threat of Insolvency and International Students,” So were its witnesses: the Rt Hon Baroness Smith of Malvern, Minister for Skills, Department for Education; Patrick Curry, Director for Higher Education Oversight, Department for Education; and Susan Lapworth, Chief Executive, Office for Students (OfS). Smith and Lapworth are effectively the dual heads of Labour party university policy, and Curry holds a number of higher education policy briefs within the Department for Education.

The core question was whether enough universities are facing insolvency to justify setting up a special insolvency regime. Committee Chair Helen Hayes started by asking Smith to confirm or deny prior confidential testimony “that a provider could collapse before the end of the year” (Q95).

Smith rejected this claim in the vehement bureaucratese to which her auditors seemed accustomed: “I do not think I would necessarily say before the end of the year that there is an imminent collapse, no,” she began, before launching into a tribute to the government’s White Paper solution to such problems: “specialisation, efficiency and strong governance,” coupled with a new “certainty” that tuition caps will rise with inflation, which will make universities “able to, I think, plan more efficiently and more strategically than has been possible for them to do up until this point.” Apparently, Smith was proposing that insolvency is not a general threat because it was caused by the previous government.

After waiting Smith out, Hayes replied, “If a university did reach the point of insolvency, what would the Government do?”

This caused Smith to note, “First of all, I do not think that you suddenly wake up one day and you are in insolvency...” --and so on: Smith repeatedly affirmed that much work would be done and many conversations would take place among a large number of concerned “Government Departments in order to ensure that students’ and taxpayers’ best interests were protected.” Protected perhaps by mergers, perhaps by closures, perhaps by students transferring to another university—I got the feeling that government would discuss various possibilities with universities without actually doing the structuring and certainly never the funding of them.

Susan Lapworth, the head of OfS, testified that indeed “we do not have powers and funding to intervene to prevent an institution from failing—that is not our role—nor do we have sufficient tools to be confident that in those large, complex cases we would be able to intervene to secure reasonable outcomes for students.” In short, Lapworth confirmed that powers to intervene don’t exist, and Smith confirmed Labour government’s unwillingness to create them (see also Q102). It’s as though the fact that the ship doesn’t have enough lifeboats shows there’s not to be an imminent sinking, no.

Labour has thrown the prevention of the bankruptcies that it alleges are so unlikely to happen onto the plate of universities themselves, so Liberal Democrat Committee Member Manuela Perteghella’s question was apt (Q106): “what incentives are there now for universities to partner, merge, take over those institutions that are on the brink of financial collapse?”

Smith’s very long answer essentially said, “there’s a merger between Greenwich and Kent—so the incentives must already exist...”

To its credit, the committee members pursued the OfS data on insolvency risks (I have a lot to learn about UK parliamentary procedures: how could they not have received and reviewed relevant data in advance?). Eventually, Lapworth produced a couple of key statistics (Q116). The number of British universities at risk of “exiting the market” in two categories, within 12 months or within 24 to 36 months, is 50. About half of that number, or 24, are at risk of exit within 12 months.

Thus 24 was the correct answer to Hayes’ opening question to Smith. As she tried to say before Smith interrupted her with further obfuscation, a third of British universities are at risk of insolvency and exit within 36 months.

Once Smith was done trying to redefine Hayes’ “high level of concern” as Government’s “high level of engagement, yes, and a high level of understanding” (Q118), the questions turned to Labour’s tax on international student revenue.

These revenues, you’ll recall, have been the partial but indispensable remedy for aggregate university losses (which came to £2.4 billion in 2023-24, as I noted last month in my critique of the White Paper). Members were unconvinced by Smith’s arithmetic that tried to prove that the tax’s negative impact on universities’ already inadequate revenues would be minor.

But the topic did allow her to assert that addressing the “disadvantage gap” via the restoration of (very small) maintenance grants could only be funded by an additional carve-out from overseas students. This of course violates the public-good principle of university access and affordability under which both are supported by the public at large. It shocked me to see a Labour minister’s refusal of this basic point, and to hear her degrading public support for higher education in crisis as a “Government bung” (Q111).

In spite of the members’ efforts, no one asked some crucial questions:

Do British universities have enough money to function at a high level of quality?

If not, how large, exactly, is the estimated gap?

How much additional funding is needed to achieve the actual stability for educational practices that Labour says it wants?

Since we can’t and shouldn’t raise tuition fees above inflation, must Labour not in fact plan to reconstruct public funding?

Finally, how do you justify Labour’s actual reduction of overall university revenues? This figure is from Universities UK’s Autumn Budget Presentation.

Such questions must be posed repeatedly until they are answered. But they were not. Frontline UK academics have their work cut out for them.