Representing 30 years of higher education change: UK universities and the Times Higher

Journal of Educational Administration and History

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 58-83

  Gewirtz, Sharon ^a   Cribb, Alan ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Higher education; Marketisation; Policy trends; Privatisation; Spin; Times higher

Indexed keywords

EID: 85027931208     PISSN: 00220620     EISSN: 14787431     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00220620.2013.730505     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1997).
2. Cris Shore and Susan Wright, 'Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neoliberalism in British Higher Education', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5, no. 4 (1999): 557-575.
3. Marilyn Strathern, ed., Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000).
4. Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan, 'The Suppression of Ethical Dispositions Through Managerial Governmentality: A Habitus Crisis in Australian Higher Education', International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice 6, no. 4 (2002): 351-370.
5. Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
6. Erica McWilliam, 'Changing the Academic Subject', Studies in Higher Education 29, no. 2 (2004): 151-163.
7. John Beck and Michael Young, 'The Assault on the Professions and the Restructuring of Academic and Professional Identities: A Bernsteinian Analysis', British Journal of Sociology of Education 26, no. 2 (2005): 183-197.
8. Bronwyn Davies and Eva Peterson, 'Neo-liberal Discourse in the Academy: The Forestalling of (Collective) Resistance', Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences 2, no. 2 (2005): 77-98.
9. Sue Clegg, 'Academic Identities Under Threat?', British Educational Research Journal 34, no. 3 (2008): 329-345.
10. Jill Blackmore, 'Academic Pedagogies, Quality Logics and Performative Universities: Evaluating Teaching and What Students Want', Studies in Higher Education 34, no. 8 (2009): 857-872.
11. Kerry Holden, 'Lamenting the Golden Age: Love, Labour and Loss in the Collective Memory of Scientists' (unpublished paper, King's College London, 2011).
12. Mark Murphy, 'Troubled by the Past: History, Identity and the University', Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 33, no. 5 (2011): 509-517.
13. We had some concerns that sampling approximately one-fiftieth of the issues from the same point in the year might be inadequate to capture the full range of key themes. For that reason, we picked three years at random and chose to look at several other issues for those years. This exercise persuaded us that the sampling frame was adequate for our broad purpose. The reasons for this are (a) the large number of stories per issue, and (b) the fact that major stories tend to persist over many weeks and months.
14. Run since 1978 and written in the form of a report from the fictional University of Poppleton, this column provides a close-to-the-bone parody of university life. 5Previous work on HE policy and politics has tended to draw primarily on survey data and personal experience, for example.
15. A.H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992/1995).
16. Maurice Kogan and Stephen Hanney, Reforming Higher Education (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000).
17. Brian Salter and Ted Tapper, Education, Politics and the State (London: Grant McIntyre, 1994).
18. Ted Tapper, The State and Higher Education (Ilford: Woburn Press, 2007).
19. With the Times Higher used more occasionally as a supplementary source.
20. 'Times Past, Times Future, Times Higher', THES, October 18, 1996.
21. The University Grants Committee (UGC) was the quango responsible for advising the government on the allocation of funds to British universities.
22. 'Universities Resist UGC Cuts Plan', THES, November 16, 1979.
23. HM Treasury, The Government's Expenditure Plans 1980-1981 (London: HMSO, 1979).
24. 'CVCP Prepares to Fight Cuts Under New Leader', THES, November 16, 1979.
25. 'Students Plan a National Strike', THES, November 16, 1979.
26. 'Students Plan a National Strike', THES, November 16, 1979.
27. 'Students Plan a National Strike', THES, November 16, 1979.
28. 'The Doctor's Prescription for Cuts', THES, November 16, 1979.
29. 'Unions Muscle in on Debate', THES, November 20, 1981. 1981 saw the first staff redundancies and course closures resulting from reduced government expenditure on HE: Kogan and Hanney, Reforming Higher Education.
30. 'Unions Muscle in on Debate', THES, November 20, 1981. Those institutions that were predominantly arts and social science focused, for example, Keele, were hit particularly hard by the cuts.
31. W.A.C. Stewart, Higher Education in Postwar Britain (London: Macmillan, 1989).
32. In 2010, after a long period of relative quietude, protests were once again to feature prominently in the pages of the Times Higher following the government's decision to reduce the HE budget by 40%, raise the fee cap from just over £3000 to £9000 and further 'rebalance' the sector in favour of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.
33. Rebecca Attwood, 'Thousands March as Students and Staff Join Forces Against University Cuts', THE, November 10, 2011.
34. However, whilst there were some striking parallels between the 1981 and 2010 protests, there were also some notable differences, including the fact that vice-chancellors were this time on the other side of the dispute from students and lecturers, with many vice-chancellors having supported the fee rise and some actively lobbying for a total removal of the fee cap (Russell Group, 'Russell Group Response to the Browne Review of University Funding', http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/russell-group-latest-news/121-2010/4544-russellgroup-response-to-the-browne-review-of-university-funding/) (accessed November 22, 2011).
35. UGC, University Development 1962-1967 (London: HMSO, 1968).
36. Kogan and Hanney, Reforming Higher Education, 144.
37. Claus Moser, 'The Robbins Report 25 Years After', THES, November 20, 1987.
38. 'UGC Plans Interventionist Policy to Cope with Spending Cuts', THES, November 14, 1980.
39. Although arguments for greater selectivity and the concentration of research funding into fewer centres of excellence can be traced back even further. For example, see Council for Scientific Policy, Second Report on Science Policy (London: HMSO, 1967); Science Research Council, Selectivity and Concentration in the Support of Research (London: SRC, 1970).
40. 'UGC will Intervene', THES, November 14, 1980.
41. 'Academic Life in Peril', THES, November 20, 1981.
42. 'Hard Right and Soft Left', THES, November 20, 1981.
43. 'Never Mind the Width', THES, November 18, 1983.
44. The formalisation of approaches to quality assurance of the kind being advocated here began in earnest from the mid-1980s onwards via the establishment of the RAE, codes of practice for external examining and postgraduate training, teaching quality assessments, the Graduate Standards Programme and the Higher Education Quality Council (which became the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in 1997).
45. Reynolds Report, Academic Standards in Universities (London: CVCP, 1986).
46. DES, Higher Education: A New Framework (London: HMSO, 1991).
47. G. Parry, R. Cox, C. Loder, and G. Williams, Assessment of the Quality of Higher Education (London: Centre for Higher Education Studies, 1994).
48. 'Unions Clash over Appraisal', THES, November 21, 1986.
49. Jarratt Report, Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities (London: CVCP, 1985), par. 3.41.
50. Henkel, Academic Identities and Policy Change in Higher Education (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000).
51. The Jarratt Report was followed by the Croham Inquiry which recommended a reconfiguration of the UGC, and a year later, under the Education Reform Act (1988), the UGC became the the Universities Funding Council (UFC) at the same time as the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council was established.
52. Croham Report, Review of the UGC (London: HMSO, 1987).
53. Whilst for the polytechnics this represented a move out of local authority control and hence was perceived as conferring upon them, 'a new level of freedom... [f]or the universities it signified the end of a system based on personal relationships, trust and a shared belief in the value of academic self-regulation': Henkel, Academic Identities, 40. The UFC had a greater representation of industrial and business interests and institutional managers and a smaller representation of academics than its predecessor. This change also marked the end of the 'block grant' system and the inauguration of a 'contract culture' which carried with it the expectation that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) should see public funding less as an entitlement and more as something to be earned in return for providing a service.
54. Kogan and Hanney, Reforming Higher Education, 155-156.
55. 'Rankings Campaign Prompts Bath to Reconsider Cuts', THES, November 21, 1986.
56. The suggestion that the institutionalisation of research assessment might penalize ideological dissent has continued to rear its head from time to time. For example, see Henkel, Academic Identities.
57. 'Dissension in the Ranks', THES, November 21, 1986.
58. 'Efficiency Study Warning', THES, November 16, 1984.
59. 'Management Firms Besiege Freed Colleges', THES, November 20, 1987.
60. 'Big Plug for Student Share in GB Ltd', THES, November 20, 1987.
61. This perspective received intellectual 'nourishment' from Martin Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Correlli Barnett's The Audit of War (London: Macmillan, 1986).
62. The body established in 1981 to advise the government on academic provision in, and the allocation of resources amongst, the maintained sector HEIs.
63. THES, November 15, 1985.
64. THES, November 15, 1985.
65. THES, November 21, 1986.
66. THES, November 20, 1987.
67. 'The Flight from Philistinism', THES, November 21, 1986.
68. 'Basic Work in Danger', THES, November 20, 1987. This was a view also articulated by some of the science academics interviewed by Henkel a decade later: Henkel, Academic Identities.
69. 'Research in the Humanities', THES, November 17, 1989. The same has also been said of the RAE, and its replacement, the 'Research Excellence Framework', which, like the research council model of managing research, rewards more collective modes of academic engagement, and a continuous 'production line' approach to publication in which 'outputs', usually in the form of journal articles, are produced at regular intervals over the course of one's career.
70. Such pressures make traditional humanities norms, and also traditional norms within certain science disciplines (like theoretical physics), harder to sustain: Henkel, Academic Identities, 133-9; Strathern, Audit Cultures. In a parallel set of developments over the same period, graduate study has also been gradually reconceived to privilege an STRD model: Henkel, Academic Identities.
71. Alan Cribb and Sharon Gewirtz, 'Doctoral Student Supervision in a Managerial Age', International Studies in Sociology of Education 16, no. 3 (2006): 223-236.
72. 'Evaluation of Research Impacts on Non-Academic Audiences', THES, November 21, 1997.
73. 'The Value of Higher Education in the Modern World', THES, November 17, 1989. This emphasis on generic competencies was to become increasingly evident across the full spectrum of HE programmes, including at doctoral level. For example, see RCUK, Joint Statement of the UK Research Councils' Training Requirements for Research Students, Vitae, http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/RCUK-Joint-Skills-Statement-2001.pdf (accessed July 14, 2010).
74. After three years of declining student enrolment, numbers began to rise again in 1985/1986: Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion, 93.
75. Kenneth Baker, Secretary of State for Education and Science, 1986-1989. November 21, 1986.
76. I.e. the era guided by the principle enshrined in the Robbins Report, Report of the Committee on Higher Education (London: HMSO, 1963), that HE should be available to anyone able to benefit from it.
77. 'Baker U-turn on Student Demand Forecast', THES, November 21, 1986.
78. Although it should be noted that not all who supported widening access did so on equality grounds.
79. Kogan and Hanney, Reforming Higher Education, 74-75.
80. THES, November 15, 1985.
81. THES, November 21, 1986.
82. Manpower Services Commission (1973-1987) - a quango, with representation from industry, the trade unions, local government and the education sector, responsible for coordinating UK education and training provision.
83. THES, November 21, 1986.
84. Polytechnics Central Admissions Service.
85. THES, November 18, 1988.
86. THES, November 18, 1988.
87. Alison Utley, 'Take Us as You Find Us', THES, November 17, 1989.
88. THES, November 18, 1994.
89. Alison Goddard, 'DTI to Reward Cooperation', THES, November 19, 1999.
90. Kam Patel, THES, November 19, 1999.
91. Olga Wojtas, THES, November 16, 2001.
92. Celia Whitchurch, 'Shifting Identities and Blurring Boundaries: The Emergence of Third Space Professionals in UK Higher Education', Higher Education Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2008): 377-396.
93. THES, November 20, 1998.
94. Indeed, according to an analysis of Higher Education Statistics Agency data carried out by the Financial Times, the numbers of managers employed in UK universities increased by 33% between 2003/2004 and 2008/2009 compared with a 10% rise in the number of academics.
95. David Turner, 'University Managers Outpace Academics', Financial Times, February 22, 2010, http://cachef.ft.com/cms/s/0/82a755b0-1fe8-11df-8deb-00144feab49a.html#axzz1ej0iChOE (accessed November 25, 2011).
96. William May, Beleaguered Rulers: The Public Obligation of the Professional (Louisville, Westminster: John Knox Press, 2001).
97. TSL, 'Company Profile', http://www.tsleducation.com/company_profile.asp (accessed May 27, 2011).
98. This account of the shift in emphasis and indeed the whole passage on the recent history of the Times Higher is informed by informal interviews we conducted with three current employees of the Times Higher in November 2011.
99. Matthew Reisz, 'On the Shoulders of Giants', THE, October 13, 2011.
100. Note 4.
101. THES, October 1, 1999.
102. THES, November 18, 2005.
103. THES, November 21, 2003.
104. 'Brilliance of Academe Celebrated', THES, November 17, 2006.
105. 'The Shortlist for Times Higher Education's Fifth Awards Ceremony Has Been Unveiled', THE, September 10, 2009.
106. Ann Mroz, 'Awards 2009: THE Leadership & Management', THE, www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/Journals/.../THELMA%20WINNERS%20SUPP%20JUNE%2009low.pdf (accessed July 14, 2010).
107. As an increasing number of agendas are set by external accountability demands - for example, the RAE, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), the THE/Thomson Reuters world university ranking criteria - there are few decisions left for institutions to make, beyond the decision of how best to jump through the accountability hoops associated with these demands, and hence the autonomy of individual institutions, agencies and the sector as a whole is becoming effectively obsolete.
108. Given that the policy priorities of each HE institution are largely determined by these external accountability demands, it makes comparatively little sense, and may even be counter-productive, to allow democratic processes of governance. This arguably adds up to an erosion of the independence of, and the checks and balances provided by, distinct HE actors and agencies (e.g. Universities UK and HEFCE), which have increasingly been incorporated into a common mindset.
109. Phil Graham, Hypercapitalism: New Media, Language, and Social Perceptions of Value (New York: Peter Lang, 2006).
110. 'Times Past, Times Future, Times Higher', THE, October 18, 1996.
111. Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion in which university practices are analysed through this lens alongside professional wrestling and the pornographic film industry (New York: Nation Books, 2009).