{"id":133998,"date":"2014-07-29T20:36:04","date_gmt":"2014-07-29T20:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=133998"},"modified":"2014-07-29T20:36:04","modified_gmt":"2014-07-29T20:36:04","slug":"british-university-system-faces-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/british-university-system-faces-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"British university system faces collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Mount<\/em><\/p>\n

Half of Britain\u2019s 150 universities must close down if the system is to remain viable, according to a senior academic.<\/p>\n

Sir Roderick Floud has proposed a plan for mass redundancies and closures to be adopted by the government in which he criticised the \u201cmessy, muddled non-system of higher education\u201d as \u201cinefficient\u201d and in need of root-and-branch reform. Floud is the former head of Universities UK, an advocate for universities, and has run several universities.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that we have too many universities, that they are trying to do too many different things, and that the way we fund their research is fundamentally flawed,\u201d Floud wrote in\u00a0Times Higher Education<\/em>. \u201cWe don\u2019t need two or more universities in each of our major cities, glowering at each other and competing to attract the attentions of businesses and local authorities. Why does Leeds or Sheffield or Oxford, for example, need two vice-chancellors, registrars or groups of governors?<\/p>\n

\u201cIn London, the situation is even more bizarre, with some 40 universities within the M25 [the London Orbital Motorway] and more arriving by the day. We have conservatoires and art colleges which could perfectly well be faculties of a larger university,\u201d Floud continued.<\/p>\n

Merging departments would eliminate the \u201cduplication and waste\u201d of courses \u201cgiven at several different universities in the same city at roughly the same time\u201d each term \u201cin an age when every student can download a lecture on to a tablet or smartphone.\u201d<\/p>\n

This would mean cutting the number of higher education institutions by \u201cat least one-third if not one-half,\u201d with the destruction of thousands of courses and jobs.<\/p>\n

Floud called for central government to act because \u201cexperience suggests that universities will not make such radical changes for themselves, [while] the Higher Education Funding Council [for England] has remained supine in the face of the evidence that all this is unnecessary and inefficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also called for major research-oriented universities to scrap undergraduate teaching to focus instead on postgraduate students. This would mean cutting 6,000 places at Oxford and Cambridge alone. He called for academics to spend less time teaching, shifting the role to postgraduates, which would reduce teaching quality.<\/p>\n

Floud\u2019s report nevertheless highlights some of the major problems facing universities, including being starved of state funding and forced to rely on fundraising schemes. \u201cWe now have the bizarre spectacle of [the government] setting universities a target of raising \u00a32 billion a year to substitute for cuts in public funding. That would mean having more fundraisers than academic staff in architecture and planning or in agriculture and veterinary science. This is sheer madness,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He paints a stark picture of the creeping commercialisation of the education system. \u201cVice-chancellors are now expected to be supplicants for gifts rather than academic leaders or university managers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are trying to be conference organisers, caterers, sporting promoters, careers advisers, pastoral counsellors; they run great estates, research institutes, theatres and concert halls; sell souvenirs and T-shirts, act as property developers and invest on the stock market.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey set up overseas subsidiaries, finance start-up companies, develop science parks, maintain some of the most beautiful buildings in Britain, run some of our greatest museums, art galleries and libraries. They even run buses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Universities increasingly rely on private philanthropists, such as scholarships provided by wealthy alumni. \u201cIt is adding insult to injury to tell us that the state will not support [universities] and that we should spend our time going cap in hand to hedge fund millionaires to fund such vital public services,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

Universities have suffered massive\u00a0spending cuts<\/a>\u00a0in recent years, greater than the extra income from the tuition fee increase of 2010. The UK spends less on its higher education system than any other developed nation except Japan. For university workers, real wages have been slashed by 13 percent over the past five years.<\/p>\n

University bosses are responding to the financial crisis by calling forincreased tuition fees<\/a>. In response, however, Floud called for the cap on tuition fees to be raised above the current \u00a39,000 level. \u201cInstead of fundraising, universities should be allowed to charge a fair price for the services they provide,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The vice-chancellor of Liverpool University, Sir Howard Newby, recently urged the removal of the cap. This will erect a further barrier to working class youth studying for a degree.<\/p>\n

The higher education system is being hollowed out as part a broader privatisation agenda. Alongside sky-high fees, this has seen a rapid proliferation of\u00a0private universities<\/a>. Hundreds of private institutions are now able to adopt the prestigious \u201cuniversity\u201d title, award official degrees and issue state-backed student loans.<\/p>\n

These trends will only accelerate following the appointment of Greg Clark as the Minister for Universities in the recent cabinet reshuffle. Clark, a former advisor to big business working for Boston Consulting Group, has been trusted with several responsible posts by the Conservative Party and says he wants to \u201cbuild on the work of the brilliant David Willetts,\u201d his predecessor who tripled tuition fees to \u00a39,000 per year.<\/p>\n

Calls for a trimmed-down education system are entirely in line with the profit interests of finance capital. Their pro-business demands were put forward by the\u00a0Economist<\/em>\u00a0in a leading article entitled \u201c\u00a0Creative Destruction<\/a>,\u201d which looked forward to the future of the privatised \u201ceducation industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

The journal complains that \u201cthe business has changed little since Aristotle taught at the Athenian Lyceum: young students still gather at an appointed time and place to listen to the wisdom of scholars.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow a revolution has begun, thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the university.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using the budget crisis as a pretext, the\u00a0Economist<\/em>\u00a0calls for a reduction in face-to-face teaching in favour of online courses. The resulting concentration of provision would entail the wholesale decimation of jobs, wages and conditions for teaching staff and the closure of all but the dominant international universities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWere the market for higher education to perform in future as that for newspapers has done over the past decade or two, universities\u2019 revenues would fall by more than half, employment in the industry would drop by nearly 30 percent and more than 700 institutions would shut their doors. The rest would need to reinvent themselves to survive,\u201d commented the\u00a0Economist<\/em>\u00a0.<\/p>\n

Online courses would also \u201creinforce inequality\u201d as \u201csuperstar lecturers will earn a fortune, to the fury of their less charismatic colleagues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Education and research would fall victim to market forces. Less \u201cmarketable\u201d courses, such as humanities, would suffer further cutbacks, while subjects demanded by corporations, such as business and sciences, would increase in availability.<\/p>\n

Teaching quality would be reduced, with less interaction with academics and fellow students. Those who fall behind in their studies would be more likely to drop out.<\/p>\n

This piece<\/a> was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Mount Half of Britain\u2019s 150 universities must close down if the system is to remain viable, according to a senior academic. Sir Roderick Floud has proposed a plan for mass redundancies and closures to be adopted by the government in which he criticised the \u201cmessy, muddled non-system of higher education\u201d as \u201cinefficient\u201d and in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":133999,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1615],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-133998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-uk-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}