Higher Education Funding

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the parlous state of our universities—extending far beyond, although deeply interrelated with, their funding crisis—was a subject of considerable discussion at Green Party conference last weekend, so I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for securing this timely debate.

I am going to focus on the deeper and broader problems of which the funding crisis is a symptom rather than a cause. The University and College Union (UCU) fringe, at which I spoke at Green Party conference, summed it up with “Cancel the Market”. The chair of the Office for Students recently claimed that the “golden age of universities” could be over. That is not how recent decades look to growing numbers of academics and other workers in universities, to students or to the communities that house them.

Forced by neoliberal ideology to become competitive businesses, with control taken from communities of scholars and put into the untender hands of business managers, universities have certainly grown their shiny, glass-fronted buildings—and their debt loads. They have added to GDP with massive student fees that weigh —unpayably—on their graduates for decades. They have presided over growth in staff numbers—increasingly, low-paid workers on zero-hours and other insecure contracts. Universities have bulged across disadvantaged communities and then risked dumping them deeper in the financial mire. I was in Hull last night, where one in 10 academic staff faces the chop and the city faces a significant economic blow.

The neo-liberalisation of the university is a trend that has progressed, to varying degrees, around the world. It has been accompanied by the meteoric rise of the work of the website Retraction Watch—exposing fraud and error at startling levels—and the replication crisis, a growing area of literature and of great concern. This is not an accident. It is what the market—what publish or perish—demands: volume and rankings, not innovation and sense.

Visiting universities, I often see that the most celebrated academics are those who have produced a spin-out company, a marketable product. That attitude has seen, particularly from the former Government, a drive against the humanities and creative subjects, dismissed as luxury, unnecessary items, “More STEM, more STEM—there’s money in it.”

At the Green Party conference at the National Education Union fringe, a despairing student from a fast-expanding and hopelessly overstretched aeronautical engineering course asked, “What do we do when the universities collapse?”

Positively, I would say that this direction of travel has come not from within universities but from ideological forces here in Westminster, but universities, students, academics and communities want something different and they have lots of ideas. We have to look to them for the ideas for how to repair this situation.

I also note the Slow Knowledge movement, as charted by Cal Newport. His model of slow productivity has three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality. How do we create institutions that do that? How do we take this crisis of funding and turn it into an opportunity—as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said—to change direction?

The world needs our universities to generate knowledge and wisdom to reshape our broken economic, social and environmental systems, not just debt and new profit opportunities for planet-wrecking products. To quote the Australian academic Tyson Yunkaporta, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University:

“I’ve been chipping away all the bits of the Age of Reason that contain world-terminating algorithms and I have to tell you it’s getting a bit thin”.