Governing (Through) Crisis

What Future for UK Higher Education?

Presentation to University of Ljubljana,

March 2nd, 2011

Susan Robertson, University of Bristol

…by Aug 2008

OUTLINE OF PRESENTATION

1. Crisis, HE and the State

2. Welfare Statism and the ‘Crisis of Crisis Management’

3. Neoliberalism - transformation of HE in the UK

4. Neoliberal states and the ‘Crisis of Regulatory Policy’

5. Governing UK HE through crisis (again)

6. Contradictions

Crisis, HE and the UK - Questions

Is the current financial crisis in the UK,and the displacement of that crisis into the public sector--in particular the university sector--challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism as a political project?

Or, is the current crisis deepening and intensifying neoliberalism, with what effect, and what long term outcome for higher education and its public good nature?

major staff and student demonstrations, occupations against the changes continue

Welfare Statism and the ‘Crisis of Crisis Management’ (Offe, 1984)

Offe argued we need a political theory of crisis as capitalism is an inherently a crisis prone system

The study of crisis needs to be focused, not on the level of events, but on the mechanisms that generate events (or, see Dale’s ‘core problems, 1982)

Crises are processes that violate the grammar of social processes, and the counter-acting tendencies in place

Welfare Statism and the ‘Crisis of Crisis Management’ (Offe, 1984)

….this state is characterized by constitutional and organizational structures whose specific selectivity is designed to reconcile ad harmonise the privately regulated capitalist economy with the processes of socialisation that this economy triggers (Offe, 1984: 51)

Welfare Statism and the ‘Crisis of Crisis Management’ (Offe, 1984)

However..when the state’s resources to manage crisis (fiscal, legitimation, and mass loyalty) fail to absorb the crisis generating a ‘crisis of crisis management’

Dale (1982) argued that when these contradictions which the state must manage are deeply implicated in the state’s institutions and its social contract with its citizens, such as education…

Crisis of the Keynesian Welfare National State

Rising commodity prices, declining profits, accelerating labour costs, and movement of industries to less developed economies by late 1960s

Search for a new basis for capital accumulation - turn to ‘services’ as opposed to goods

Keynesianism discredited; attempts to manage the crisis deepened the crisis

Neoliberalism emerged as a alternative political project, and advanced (UK, US, Australia, NZ….)

Neoliberalism - Transforming HE

‘Competitiveness’ a dominant logic

New Public Management mobilised to reorganise public sectors, including universities

Advance of services sector and knowledge economy arguments

Focus on human capital and skilled labour as means for developing competitive HE for the economy

‘Magnet economy thesis’

Neoliberalism - Transforming HE in UK cont…‘Discourse of derision’ of educators (Ball, 1990)

Jarrett Report (1985) corporatisation

First private university (1983)

1992 removed divide between polytechnics and universities; doubled number of university students over night

Dearing (1997) Higher Education in the Learning Society

Neoliberalism - Transforming HE in UK cont…Labor Intensifies trends

Our Competitive Future (Department for Trade and Industry, 1998)

Expansion of access (toward 50%)

Focus on innovation, business and knowledge transfer such as with Sainsbury, 2007 (Race to the Top)

Expansion of full fee-paying international students; 8% income for sector but declining share overall

For-profit providers (2007) begin to operate; 2009 Degree awarding powers to BPP/Apollo Global

Income and Expenditure of UK Higher Education Institutions 2006/7 (HESA)

Neoliberal States and the ‘Crisis of Regulatory Policy’ (Offe, 1996)

Emergence of ‘governance’ rather than government limits ability of the state to steer, particularly financial sector

Neoliberal subject, multiple identities, fragmented loyalty, economic sovereignty

Ceding sovereignty across scales limits ability to manage crises

But, Arrighi (2003) argues speculative finance capital emerges in the autumn years before the collapse

Governing UK through Crisis (again)

1. Coalition Government outlines radical cuts to public sector spending in UK in Comprehensive Spending Review

2. Public sectors represented as inefficient (not banking system) and in need of dramatic cuts over 4 years

3. Major cuts to quangos

4. Removal of Regional Development Agencies; new Local Economic Partnerships

5. Idea of the ‘Big Society’ - reduce the role of the state in funding, and increase voluntary activity

“The engagement between Higher Education researchers, Higher Education practitioners and policy makers, can often seem like a dialogue of the deaf. There is the problem of sequence when policy choices seem to be made in advance of research led investigation of the field. There is the problem of premature closure when policy options are apparently chosen without full consideration of the alternatives. There is the problem of over-simplification when judgments about a policy choice are presented in aggressively certain terms. There is the problem of co-ordination when policies pursued by different arms of the same Government, either within a department or, more seriously in relation to Higher Education, across several Government departments, can confuse and inhibit each other. There is the problem, of course, of selective attention. But perhaps most important, there is the problem of corporate memory – when a policy fails to be assessed against the history of the last time it was tried. The UK is particularly bad at the last one of these” (Watson, 2011, January)

Governing UK HE through Crisis (again)

1. £3 billion reduction in publicly funded grant to universities 2012-2015

2. ‘Graduate premium’ arguments continue to be advanced

3. Graduate contribution threshold to increase to between £6000 and £9000 (from 2012)

4. New Student Loans Scheme to fund up-front tuition costs; pay back when earning over £21,000

Governing UK HE through Crisis (again) cont

5. (Selected) universities and departments face closure; job cutting is now under way, returns on investment are down, academics conditions of work being contested, radical over-halls of whole staffing

6. Unemployment of graduates rose dramatically (from 11.1% Dec 2008 to 20% Feb 2011) growing faster than the jobless rate

Governing UK HE through Crisis (again) cont

7. Funds for Higher Education to come from expanding the international student market (transnationalisation), greater levels of commercialisation of IP (spinout firms, patents), and increased financialisation of sector (for instance student tuition)

Expand opportunities - For-Profit Firms

Challenges to the ‘grammar’ of higher education

Graduate premium exposed (from no return, to highly selective returns to elite professions) (legitimation)

Political trade-offs on student loans, and administrative errors means that it will generate significant costs for the state in absorbing unpaid loans (fiscal crisis)

Commodification of education, the transformation of the idea of ‘public’, and prioritisation of the third mission (legitimation)

Radicalisation of students (withdraw loyalty)

In significant tension with other legitimation strategies for rule, such as immigration (administrative rationality)