Public no more

Martin O'Shaughnessy of NTU writes:
The British higher education sector is facing cuts of a greater severity than other areas of public service which are hardly being spared themselves, such is the enthusiasm with which the current coalition pursues its radical anti-state sector agenda. The cuts are being accompanied by a sharp rise, a more than doubling, in tuition fees that, at over £3 000 per annum, were already tremendously high by Western European standards. The combined effects of the cuts to government funding of university teaching and the rise in fees amount to nothing short of a revolution in British higher education. The revolution is a multi-faceted one, yet only one dimension of it, the tremendously increased costs to students, is being discussed to any extent, with the result that the true nature of what is happening remains almost uncommented on. Little is as yet being said, for example, about the numbers of lecturers who may lose their jobs, the departments that may close, or the universities that may face bankruptcy. Yet even these potentially disastrous consequences are only a part of a bigger change. What is planned is effectively a privatization of the university system as state funding of it is shrunk to a much smaller proportion of its overall income. One could argue that, when New Labour brought in the £ 3 000 per year tuition fees, we were already well on the way to a marketized system, but the marketization was partially compensated for by state funding that still expressed a recognition that the university system was a collective, public good. It is this recognition that is now to be swept away, with very little public debate as yet about its consequences. At the same time, the remaining state funding is not to be distributed equally across all areas of the curriculum: so-called STEM subjects (Science, technology, engineering and maths) and perhaps languages are to be at least partially protected while others (notably the humanities) are, it seems, to get nothing at all. This selectivity is justified by its defenders in terms of national economic performance and economic competitiveness: in the process, education sheds any broader civilizational or, heaven forbid, critical role and becomes merely an instrument whose role it is to support the economy. At the same time, and as part of the same set of interconnected processes, students are cast very firmly in the role of customers whose collective task it will be to discipline universities and their staff by their allegedly informed consumer choices: paying twice as much as before, or more, or pushed towards economically ‘useful’ subjects, students will be, it is felt, hyper aware of the value of their degree on the jobs market and will shift their resources away from less bankable courses and less prestigious universities. Faced with this customer pressure, the theory goes, universities will be forced to deliver greater student satisfaction and, notably, to improve on teaching standards that, we are told, are too poor, although no studies are cited and no evidence produced, such things presumably being part of the tired arsenal of self-indulgent academics nostalgically attached to critical thinking. The depressing thing is that none of these changes are really surprising: to some extent they merely confirm processes that have been underway for a considerable number of years, in the universities as in other areas of public service. Yet they also represent a very sharp radicalisation of the sort that only an event of the dimensions of the current crisis would permit and again underscore how the crisis is being instrumentalised by the political right, applying its own dose of shock therapy.
There is of course something paradoxical about the whole process underway. What is being presented as a removal of state interference and liberation of educational consumers is in fact being driven by the state, as evidenced not least by its setting of the rules about student loans and its distortion of market mechanisms through selective funding of subjects. The irony here is that Humanities subjects that seem likely to suffer greatly as the cuts bite have been very popular with students: it seems that many of those educational consumers not put off by the already high levels of student debt choose subjects deemed not to be of immediate economic utility. The state now clearly feels the need to persuade its ‘freely’ choosing consumers to choose in ways more in line with its own priorities. Whereas once the student was to be educated as a rounded citizen, he or she is now to be an entrepreneur of the self, making wise investment choices when selecting a university subject, calculating the profit-loss ratio between lifelong earnings and long-term debt, ready to take his or her place in the entrepreneurial society, alongside the entrepreneurial university and the enterprise state [1].
We have been here before, of course. A key part of the Thatcherite revolution was the aim to generate new subjectivities: the mass sell off of public housing and of state owned industries combined with the calculated and sustained attack on trade unions was meant to produce a nation of share and home owning individualists, no longer dependent on collective instances or tied to traditional solidarities. This new revolutionary wave is meant to continue the transformation. Yet something has also clearly changed: despite the many traumas associated with the changes it wrought, Thatcherism could at least seem to make a positive appeal by its promise of a democratisation of home and share ownership. Now, what is being democratised seems to be debt and constraint: we are all competing against each other and to compete effectively, we must take on debts that will constrain our future choices. As neo-liberalism’s seductions wear thin, the constraints must be cranked up.
Where is France in all this?! Comparing France and the UK, one is struck not only by the capacity of young French people to resist and their high level of awareness of what is at stake but also by the sustained discussion of the impact of neo-liberalism in the French public sphere, not least because public intellectuals still play an important role. A question that would then arise is why the British university sector has not played a more prominent role in the generation of critique. Could it be that we too have been effectively disciplined by the constraints and incentives of the entrepreneurial university? [2]
[1] To place this in the broader contexts of new modes of governance associated with neo-liberalism, see Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s important work La nouvelle raison du monde. See also their article here http://lafranceetlacrise.com/2010/10/26/%c2%abje-lutte-des-classes%c2%bb-resistances-et-contre-conduites-sous-le-neoliberalisme-par-pierre-dardot-et-christian-laval/ , and for a series of video interviews with them, see http://www.journaldumauss.net/spip.php?article462).
[2] A piece that helped me get my own thoughts straight and which is well worth a look is James Vernon’s ‘The end of the public university in England’ http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/the_end_of_the_public_university_in_england
For a French site devoted to defence of the public university, see http://www.sauvonsluniversite.com/