Mixed messages for universities

The tide of history may sweep away the short-termism that distorts today's higher education system

By Peter Scott

One of my most treasured possessions is the rather crackly cassette of an interview I did with the French historian Fernand Braudel in Paris not long before he died. Braudel’s most famous book was The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a classic work in the Annales tradition. It is a perfect expression of his distinction between histoire événementielle, political history in all its brilliant but superficial turbulence, and the longue durée, the deep flows of social, economic and cultural change. Braudel tells us much more about the transhumance of sheep, and their shepherds, in the Pyrenees than about the court of King Philip.

It is a useful distinction to bear in mind when considering the future of higher education. Since the 1998 report of the Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education chaired by the late Lord Dearing, and commissioned by the last Conservative Government although implemented (sort of) by the incoming New Labour Government, there has been a succession of reports, white papers and ‘Framework’ documents setting out shifting policy agendas. This is the histoire événmentielle. But there has also been an accumulation of more fundamental changes in the nature of demand for places in universities and colleges, of the graduate labour market and even of the intellectual and scientific structures expressed through research and teaching. This is the longue durée.

A lot of attention is paid to the first; much less to the second. Maybe it should be the other way round. Take fees and funding, for example, the most urgent issue facing higher education as the public finances collapse in the wake of the banking crisis and consequent economic downturn. Seen through the lens of histoire événmentielle the future seems plain – the fees cap must be raised, or abolished entirely, to make good the yawning deficit which will shortly open up as a result of the large-scale reductions in public funding. The only challenge is to manage the tricky politics of this inevitable shift because reconciling fair access with high fees is difficult, perhaps impossible, and also because cutting middle-class subsidies is always unpopular.

But seen through the lens of the longue durée things look different. First, the Manichean distinction between grants to universities (public expenditure – unaffordable) and student fees (private money – without limit) appears more problematical. It is only valid if up-front loans are withdrawn, whatever the cost in terms of social justice, or if the student loan book is genuinely privatised, i.e. no sweet-heart deals with banks, no tax breaks for individuals, because otherwise public debt has not really been reduced. Secondly, a more fundamental issue comes into sharper focus – the overall level of investment in higher education, public or private, which an advanced society like Britain needs to make to secure its future. In other words a very different notion of affordability – not what we can afford to spend but what we cannot afford not to spend.

Affordability in this second sense is a fundamental issue. Compared with other OECD countries Britain spends a low proportion of its GDP on higher education, even if only public funding is counted, and also has one of the lowest costs per graduate, because first-degree courses are shorter but also because wastage rates are low. Yet, in a histoire événementielle view of the future, further erosion in unit costs is inevitable. Public funding will be cut faster than fees can be increased – and fee income may never plug the full gap. Also the experience of the United States demonstrates that higher fees generate new costs because students demand improved services (and as often social and recreational as academic services).

The same contrast between short-term politics and long-haul change also influences how we think about the future pattern of universities, the second big issue in higher education policy. The histoire événementielle and longue durée views both suggest that greater diversity of missions is needed – but then they part company. The former leads towards the idea of diversity-as-hierarchy because, frankly, class thinking is so deeply embedded in the English (let’s exempt the Scots and Welsh) psyche it is the only kind of diversity which makes sense to lots of (important) people, because the ghost of ‘more means worse’ has never really been exorcised and also because the lack of funding encourages a beggar-my-neighbour struggle which the ‘top’ universities are likely to ‘win’.

But a longue durée view leads to a very different interpretation of diversity, one that celebrates pluralism to reflect the complex and multiple engagements between mass higher education and the ‘knowledge society’ of the 21^st century. Our definitions of both teaching and research are being stretched more and more every year – in the case of the former, the long revolution begun half a century ago by the Open University and now continuing in the form of community and work-based learning, so central to the Government’s skills agenda; and in the case of research a similarly long march ranging from the now despised critical social sciences through to the controversial emphasis on ‘impact’ in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework.  These two opposing ideas of diversity, therefore, offer a stark choice – a few (no more than six?) ‘world-class’ universities at the peak of a class-based hierarchy or a plurality of creative spaces where academy, economy and society interact and in which ideas and innovation flourish?

Closely linked is the third big issue, the size of the system and future prospects for student growth. The short-term politics point to steady-state if not contraction. The present Government has finally abandoned its flagship 50-per-cent participation target. The Conservatives, despite their pledge to create 10,000 more places if elected, appear to be even more sceptical about expansion. Moreover the number of 18-year-olds will shortly begin to decline. QED – no more growth. But the message from the longue durée is different. Detailed number-crunching by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) disaggregating demographic patterns by class and region and factoring in trends in school achievement and immigration suggests there will be little or no decline in demand for higher education. And the lessons of history are even more decisive. The true drivers of demand are deep-rooted changes in aspirations and identities, as we have moved to become a graduate society (like the United States), and equally deep-rooted changes in occupational structures (in common with all other knowledge-based high-skill economies).

The fourth big issue – the market or planning (or, in 21^st-century speak, ‘steering’) – is also complicated by the tension between histoire événmentielle and the longue durée. The first favours the market. As fees rise and (direct) public funding declines, universities will become progressively less dependent on the State; they will make their own futures; and control agencies, like HEFCE, may even fade away. Politicians, of course, are eager to encourage such talk – provided institutional autonomy is exercised by corporate managers and not by free thinking academics; and without giving the slightest indication that they are prepared to relinquish any of their powers. So a distinctive policy agenda emerges – tougher governance, more business-like management, diversification away from public funding and the rest.

But, once again, the longue durée tells a different story – a story of the inexorable ‘nationalisation’ (no other word will do) of higher education as universities have been given increasingly precise guidance by the State and its agents, regardless of short-term politics (Old and New Labour, One-Nation and Thatcherite Tories). The very idea of a ‘system’, and even the very category ‘higher education’, were inventions of the modern State. Flowing beneath the political surface are powerful currents – cumulative revolutions in elementary, secondary and then higher education each feeding the next; the progressive extension of the State’s responsibilities in the wider domain of ‘civil society’; and the growing idea of education, especially higher education, as an investment in an advanced economy. These deep currents are not easily reversed by bathetic neo-liberal rhetoric.

The lesson of Braudel’s distinction between surface turbulence and silent depths for higher education policy-makers is that it allows us to see the future as more open. The standard account, based on the histoire événementielle of current political fashions, suggests that the future will be private (rather than public), hierarchical (rather than pluralist), steady-state (rather than expansionary), managerial (rather than communitarian) and driven by the ‘market’ rather than planned. But higher education’s longue durée suggests other possible futures – less clear-cut perhaps but also more hopeful.

19 January 2010

Peter Scott. Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University London,