The assault on universities : a manifesto for resistance

201 Pages·3.453 MB·English

by  Michael Bailey, Des Freedman

The Assault on Universities

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‘The thoughtful papers collected in this important book represent a
landmark intervention. They are essential reading for anybody seeking
to understand the crisis in British education and the forces that produced
it. Here is a timely and astute defence of the university that breaks free
from the unimaginative pattern that can see education as only either a
corporate or a private good. The manifesto shows what can be done
to revive and expand our universities restoring their social mission.’
Professor Paul Gilroy, London School of Economics
‘The corporatising of universal education is one of the most insidious
and dangerous attacks on the very notion of human rights. This book
calls us to arms. Every student, every educator who cares should read it.’
John Pilger
‘This is an essential book. The future of our universities is up for grabs
and the manifesto will play a huge role in providing alternatives at a
time when the government says there aren’t any.’
Clare Solomon, President of the University of London Union
2010–11 and co-editor of Springtime (2011)
‘Universities are the new front line in the battle between the market and
society. Students are being groomed for a life of debt on a learn-to-earn
treadmill. Campuses are being commercialised at every turn. The
Assault on Universities tells the story of what’s happening to higher
education, why and what we do about it.’
Neal Lawson, chair of Compass and
author of All Consuming (2009)
‘The Assault on Universities is a valuable contribution to ongoing global
conversations about the possibilities of social, political and economic
justice and the central role of cultural institutions and practices,
especially education, in them.’
Professor Lawrence Grossberg,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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The Assault on
Universities
A Manifesto
for Resistance
Edited by
Michael Bailey and Des Freedman

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First published 2011 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Michael Bailey and Des Freedman 2011
The right of the individual authors to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3192 8 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3191 1 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 84964 601 7 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 84964 599 7 eBook PDF
ISBN 978 1 84964 600 0 ePub
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed
and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are
expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and
Edwards Bros in the United States of America
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Contents
1. An Introduction to Education Reform and Resistance 1
Des Freedman
Part I The Changing Idea of the University
2. The Idea of the University 15
John K. Walton
3. What is a University Education For? 27
Neil Faulkner
4. Fighting for the University’s Life 37
Nick Couldry
Part II Current Challenges and Future Visions
5. Economic Alternatives in the Current Crisis 49
Aeron Davis
6. Re-imagining the Public Good 59
Jon Nixon
7. The War Against Democracy and Education 71
Nick Stevenson

Part III Critical Pedagogy
8. The University as a Political Space 81
Alberto Toscano
9. The Academic as Truth-Teller 91
Michael Bailey
10. Impoverished Pedagogy, Privatised Practice 103
Natalie Fenton
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vi The Assault on Universities
Part IV Student Politics
11. Student Revolts Then and Now 113
John Rees
12. The Politics of Occupation 123
Feyzi Ismail
13. Achievements and Limitations of the UK Student
Movement 132
Ashok Kumar
Part V International Perspectives
14. Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University 145
Henry A. Giroux
15. Education Reforms in a European Context 157
Marion von Osten
16. International Students and the Globalisation of
Higher Education 168
Kirsten Forkert
Part VI The Manifesto
Demands on Government 179
Demands on Universities 179
Signatories to the Manifesto 180
Notes on Contributors 183
Index 186

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1
An Introduction to Education
Reform and Resistance
Des Freedman
‘REfoRm’
A celebrated education reformer noted recently that ‘it is only
when services are paid for that their beneficiaries really appreciate
them and that their employees strive to perfect them. A world in
which students pay for their own university education will be a
world where the universities are better funded, intellectually freer
and where economic justice ensures that the burden does not
lie on the taxpayer but on graduates.’1 Who issued this moving
tribute to the market? Margaret Thatcher? Ronald Reagan?
David Cameron? Nick Clegg? No, Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor
of the University of Buckingham (fees: approximately £9000
per year), the UK’s first private university and an institution
that is ‘proud never to have accepted Goverment [sic] funding,
favouring instead our academic independence’.2
Kealey’s words are significant because they so clearly

articulate the ConDem coalition’s devastating perspective on
higher education policy as contained in the Browne Review on
education funding and student finance and the government’s
own legislative programme of 2010–11. This includes a
commitment to withdraw most public subsidies for universities,
shift financial responsibility on to students who are now to be
treated as customers, increase tuition fees to a level that an
emerging market can sustain, re-package student debt and loans
as ‘deferred payments’ and re-designate universities themselves
as sites of service provision, consumer activity and commodity
exchange. The UK’s higher education system is to be transformed
1
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2 The Assault on Universities
into a patchwork of academic supermarkets with, at one end,
research-led Russell Group universities continuing to super-serve
wealthier customers with a wide range of niche offerings while,
at the other end, former Polytechnics in the Million+ group will
be forced to clear their shelves of distinctive or idiosyncratic
goods and to focus on those products for which there is already
a clearly defined (mass) market. All shoppers, meanwhile, will
have to pay higher prices.
This will be the state of British higher education in the second
decade of the twenty-first century should the ConDem ‘reforms’
be fully implemented and internalised by universities themselves.
It is a picture of renewed privatisation, intensive marketisation,
rampant financialisation and a challenge to the very notion of
the university as a mechanism for addressing social inequality
and facilitating the circulation of knowledge whether or not
it has immediate practical consequences. It is the substitution
of private economic activity for robust public life. Of course
universities are not, and never have been, pristine sites of
autonomous intellectual labour – you only have to consider the
close collaboration between many universities and the defence
and security industries across the world. However, like many
other publicly funded institutions which do not always live
up to expectations (the BBC and the NHS spring to mind),
a strong defence of the principle of public provision carries
with it the possibility not only of ‘holding the line’ but also of
invigorating and democratising these institutions. This involves
both imagining and campaigning for policies that best express

the public interest and most effectively protect it against those
who are determined to place all areas of human activity under
the discipline of the market.
Responding to the attacks on higher education, however,
also requires an understanding of the various contexts behind
the ‘reforms’. According to the government, the most pressing
challenge is the need to secure stable long-term funding for
universities in the light of the budget crisis caused by what it
describes as an unsustainable deficit caused by the previous
Labour government’s profligacy. What this means in practice
is a decision to shift the burden of paying for higher education
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An Introduction to Education Reform and Resistance 3
from the state to individual students. This is not a victimless
crime. Research conducted by UCU has found that the scrapping
of all public funding for the teaching of arts, humanities and
social science subjects (as part of an 80 per cent cut to the
annual block grant to universities), together with cuts of over
£1 billion that have already been announced, means that some
40,000 jobs and 49 English universities are at risk.3 The most
vulnerable institutions are those teaching-intensive universities,
often former polytechnics with the highest level of working-class
students, who do not have the international students, research
contracts or established ‘brands’ to help them withstand the
removal of public funding.
This is, of course, only one small part of the government’s
neoliberal programme of privatisation and spending cuts which
will see billions of pounds withdrawn from public services
and welfare budgets as well as the devolution of power away
from publicly accountable institutions to, for example, GPs in
the running of the health service, academies in the provision
of secondary education and housing associations in the
management of social housing. We are therefore likely to see
huge job losses affecting civil servants, NHS staff and council
workers at precisely the time when unemployment, by the start
of 2011, had already reached nearly 8 per cent with nearly one
million young people without work, the highest since records
began in 1992.4 The government’s scrapping of the Education
Maintenance Allowance (EMA), originally aimed at improving
participation rates in further education, will only compound the

problem of youth unemployment.
Indeed, the government’s determination to shrink the higher
education budget is utterly counter-productive if it wishes to
seek a way out of the recession. The UK already spends a lower
proportion of its GDP on higher education (0.7 per cent) not
only in comparison with EU and OECD averages (1.1 and
1 per cent respectively), but also in relation to a whole series of
countries including the USA, Portugal, New Zealand, Iceland,
Hungary and Mexico.5 Now it wishes to reduce this even
further even though its own policy documents are filled with
rhetorical flourishes about the importance of higher education
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