Higher Education

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, there has been a great deal of comment today about fees and the economic impact of university education. My contribution might however be titled, “Never mind the quality, feel the width”. That is, my concerns are about the quality of higher education, its overregulation in some areas and underregulation in others. Your Lordships should not doubt my devotion to the cause and my understanding of what difference a university education can make. I confess in public that it took me nine goes over three years at the entrance examinations before I was able to get my place at Oxford, when the numbers of women were very limited.

Fast-forwarding half a century, when I was head of an Oxford college I spent half my time fundraising. Teaching in the humanities is hardly funded at all and institutions are heavily reliant on the good will of alumni donations. Yet the alumni themselves will be paying off their loans and, later on, financing their children’s education for much longer than hitherto. It was predictable from the start of the new loans system that many would never earn enough to repay. Indeed, there is a subtle message in the system to women: government policy makes it sensible to find a husband while at college and never work, or take the lowest-paying part-time jobs in order to avoid reaching the threshold for repayment. It was clear that others would escape the jurisdiction and that enforcement would lead to a situation as expensive to the nation as the one it replaced.

Many do not realise that the £9,000 raised by fees has been clawed back from the universities by reductions in the funding that they used to receive for teaching. The dash for cash is overpowering and debilitating. It has led to the frantic chase after foreign students, which is a good but not an unmitigated good—for their quality, if one is not careful, can often be less than optimal. After their intake reaches a certain level, the foreign student loses that which he or she came here for: the company of British students and all the available time that lecturers have to give them, as foreign students tend to need a bit more help than others do. Cutting fees as an attractive political offering will simply mean less money for universities to spend on good teaching and research, and will make them even more susceptible to dropping standards for applicants.

Talking of the diverse and international nature of universities, is it not a shame that in Scotland a student from England or Wales has to pay full fees whereas a Scottish student does not? We have heard a great deal today about attracting foreign students, yet within our own borders we have this discrimination, which detracts from the mobility of students and the collegiality that ought to exist between those who study in Scotland and those who study in England and Wales.

Let me scotch right away the notion that a university education benefits only those who receive it, and that therefore only they should pay for it. The entire population benefits from the services of doctors, scientists, architects, civil servants, authors, teachers and all the other professions that graduates may enter; indeed, the children of a woman graduate benefit from her care even if she is not in work outside the home. University education is for the public good, regardless of who pays for it. Nevertheless, it is dangerous for students to see it largely as a stepping stone to a more lucrative career, or for academics to lose interest in teaching because only research counts in the allocation of resources. This is because the supply of graduate jobs, or jobs that graduates think that only they are qualified for, is not limitless and there is a great deal of disappointment.

To graduate from a not very well known university with a low-class degree may not seem to be a good investment at all, unless one looks at the real purpose of university education. Universities exist to add to the sum of knowledge in the world and to the sophistication of human thought. They exist to equip people to change society. Their graduates are learning to look for a good life, truth, wisdom, virtue or beauty. They are not just acquiring knowledge or skills for their own sake; they must also be doing something that they love and see themselves as being formed by education. It is a privilege, a pleasure and a social, moral and personal good. Never mind the job you may or may not get afterwards—it will change your life.

Yet the student as pure consumer has become central to the recent perception of university education, and student satisfaction reigns. A few years ago I was the first independent adjudicator for higher education, charged with resolving student complaints from all universities that could not be settled internally. I am glad to say that under my successor, Robert Behrens, universities are given good guidance on the swift and fair settlement of complaints. In my time, though, too many of the complaints were really about students being awarded a level of degree lower than they thought they deserved. Universities are under pressure to give students the benefit of the doubt, especially when the league tables—quite wrongly, in my view—give a university a higher rating if it gives more first-class degrees, so that they have lost their rarity and degree classifications no longer serve the purpose that they should. Some complainants took the view that every student had a right to a second by dint of turning up and paying fees. It would be better to abandon those broad classifications and move to the American-style transcript, with more detail of individual scores.

Students now tend to see themselves as having consumer-type rights and contracts. University prospectuses look like holiday package brochures, with the same allure that may not materialise. Using business language, education is treated as something that can be “delivered”, but it is not a neat, complete package that needs only to be skilfully handed from one to another in order to ensure continuation and success. It is a participatory and continuing process, the content of which is never fixed. No amount of good teaching can succeed without the intelligent participation, reception and contribution of the student, and that is why some have to accept that they will in fact fail, for all sorts of reasons. Student satisfaction and the attraction of more students at any price should not be as central as they are, and student satisfaction should not dominate over education and scholarship, as seen and shared by the academics who have spent a lifetime assessing how to educate the next generation. Student satisfaction measured by survey is a subjective metric and can cast no light on quality and judgment. In the London traffic yesterday, I saw a bus with the statement blazoned on its side that a certain university was number one for student satisfaction in a certain topic. I checked and found that the same place was 101st overall in the Sunday Times league, which is measured in a different way.

Student demands ought not to lead to more spoonfeeding or more reluctance to challenge, criticise and place under intellectual pressure. A few years ago, vice-chancellors were colossi bestriding the land. At the moment, unfortunately, too often they are known because the salaries that they command are out of all proportion to the salaries that their lecturers receive.

Where does this business attitude come from? It comes in part from those who have been selected by the Government from time to time to review university education and its future. I join others in calling for universities to be under the Department for Education and for another review to gauge the purpose and extent of our tertiary-level education and its funding. I hope that the Government will not again select a businessman and set him or her—more likely him—to reform higher education. It would make more sense to put a philosopher or academic economist in charge of reforming banking and business practices than the other way around. In the recent past, as we know, reviewers have seen higher education merely in terms of economic or private benefit. Lord Robbins was a university professor himself and an exception, supported by my noble friend Lord Moser, to whom one must pay tribute for his role.

Would Lord Robbins have approved of what is going on today? I think he would have approved of the expansion but not of the drop in quality or the flight from teaching to research, and he would certainly not have liked the proliferation of expensive quangos, among which one must single out the potentially damaging and unnecessary OFFA. My own solution would be to sever the links between universities and state and to use the HEFCE grant to fund a rolling endowment programme with the aim of eventually endowing most universities, leaving them free to set their own fees and scholarships, funded for the poorer by the fees from the better off.

I shall cast a quick glance at one area where I regard university conduct as underregulated, or at least see it as carrying on in disregard of universities’ obligations under the Education (No. 2) Act 1986, which requires higher education institutions to secure freedom of speech within the law for members and visitors. Academic freedom and freedom of speech are two different concepts. The Equality Act 2010 requires universities to eliminate discrimination, victimisation and harassment, and to advance equality of opportunity between different groups and foster good relations between different religious and racial groups. Student unions are not exempt from the law; they are charities and covered by the relevant obligations. However, there are young people on campus who are vulnerable to extremism indoctrination and are repeatedly on the end of terrorist, racist and hate speech from visiting speakers. Time does not permit me to go into the various laws that control speech and conduct on university campuses, but there are some recent examples of disgraceful behaviour that vice-chancellors have failed to control. Some of them seem to me to be weak in allowing campuses to become free arenas of hate speech and places where minorities may be victimised.

I shall give some recent examples. A lecture on Egypt at SOAS was disrupted and terminated by Muslim Brotherhood supporters in October last year. A lecture by David Willetts MP was disrupted at Cambridge in November 2011 by objectors to his policies, when, ironically, he was to speak on the idea of university education. The LSE’s ties to Libya were reported on by my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf. Then there is hosting of lecturers who promote homophobia, and the contemplation of the tolerance of gender segregation. Violent, sexist, homophobic, racial supremacist, racist and extremist beliefs do not qualify for protection under our law because they are incompatible with the human dignity and rights of others. I hope that the Minister will encourage vice-chancellors to remember their duty, now that their campuses are microcosms of the mixed society in which we are located, to promote good relations, to uphold the law and above all to respect and foster education for its own sake.