Transcript Introductory lecture

Governing (Through) Crisis
What Future for UK Higher
Education?
Susan Robertson, University of Bristol
Presentation to University of Ljubljana,
March 2nd, 2011
…by Aug 2008
OUTLINE OF PRESENTATION
1. Crisis, HE and the State
2. Welfare Statism and the ‘Crisis of Crisis
Management’
3. Neoliberalism - transformation of HE in the UK
4. Neoliberal states and the ‘Crisis of Regulatory
Policy’
5. Governing UK HE through crisis (again)
6. Contradictions
Crisis, HE and the UK - Questions
Is the current financial crisis in the UK,and
the displacement of that crisis into the public
sector--in particular the university sector-challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism as
a political project?
Or, is the current crisis deepening and
intensifying neoliberalism, with what effect,
and what long term outcome for higher
education and its public good nature?
major staff and student
demonstrations, occupations
against the changes continue
Welfare Statism and the ‘Crisis of
Crisis Management’ (Offe, 1984)
Offe argued we need a political theory of crisis as
capitalism is an inherently a crisis prone system
The study of crisis needs to be focused, not on the level
of events, but on the mechanisms that generate events
(or, see Dale’s ‘core problems, 1982)
Crises are processes that violate the grammar of social
processes, and the counter-acting tendencies in place
Welfare Statism and the ‘Crisis of
Crisis Management’ (Offe, 1984)
….this state is characterized by constitutional
and organizational structures whose specific
selectivity is designed to reconcile ad harmonise
the privately regulated capitalist economy with
the processes of socialisation that this economy
triggers (Offe, 1984: 51)
Welfare Statism and the ‘Crisis of
Crisis Management’ (Offe, 1984)
However..when the state’s resources to manage crisis
(fiscal, legitimation, and mass loyalty) fail to absorb the
crisis generating a ‘crisis of crisis management’
Dale (1982) argued that when these contradictions which
the state must manage are deeply implicated in the
state’s institutions and its social contract with its citizens,
such as education…
Crisis of the Keynesian Welfare
National State
Rising commodity prices, declining profits, accelerating
labour costs, and movement of industries to less
developed economies by late 1960s
Search for a new basis for capital accumulation - turn to
‘services’ as opposed to goods
Keynesianism discredited; attempts to manage the crisis
deepened the crisis
Neoliberalism emerged as a alternative political project,
and advanced (UK, US, Australia, NZ….)
Neoliberalism - Transforming HE
‘Competitiveness’ a dominant logic
New Public Management mobilised to reorganise public
sectors, including universities
Advance of services sector and knowledge economy
arguments
Focus on human capital and skilled labour as means for
developing competitive HE for the economy
‘Magnet economy thesis’
Neoliberalism - Transforming HE in
UK cont…
‘Discourse of derision’ of educators (Ball, 1990)
Jarrett Report (1985) corporatisation
First private university (1983)
1992 removed divide between polytechnics and
universities; doubled number of university students over
night
Dearing (1997) Higher Education in the Learning
Society
Neoliberalism - Transforming HE in
UK cont…Labor Intensifies trends
Our Competitive Future (Department for Trade and
Industry, 1998)
Expansion of access (toward 50%)
Focus on innovation, business and knowledge transfer
such as with Sainsbury, 2007 (Race to the Top)
Expansion of full fee-paying international students; 8%
income for sector but declining share overall
For-profit providers (2007) begin to operate; 2009
Degree awarding powers to BPP/Apollo Global
Income and Expenditure of UK Higher Education
Institutions 2006/7 (HESA)
Neoliberal States and the ‘Crisis of
Regulatory Policy’ (Offe, 1996)
Emergence of ‘governance’ rather than government
limits ability of the state to steer, particularly financial
sector
Neoliberal subject, multiple identities, fragmented
loyalty, economic sovereignty
Ceding sovereignty across scales limits ability to
manage crises
But, Arrighi (2003) argues speculative finance capital
emerges in the autumn years before the collapse
Governing UK through Crisis
(again)
1. Coalition Government outlines radical cuts to public
sector spending in UK in Comprehensive Spending
Review
2. Public sectors represented as inefficient (not banking
system) and in need of dramatic cuts over 4 years
3. Major cuts to quangos
4. Removal of Regional Development Agencies; new
Local Economic Partnerships
5. Idea of the ‘Big Society’ - reduce the role of the state
in funding, and increase voluntary activity
“The engagement between Higher Education researchers, Higher
Education practitioners and policy makers, can often seem like a
dialogue of the deaf. There is the problem of sequence when policy
choices seem to be made in advance of research led investigation
of the field. There is the problem of premature closure when
policy options are apparently chosen without full consideration of
the alternatives. There is the problem of over-simplification when
judgments about a policy choice are presented in aggressively
certain terms. There is the problem of co-ordination when policies
pursued by different arms of the same Government, either within a
department or, more seriously in relation to Higher Education,
across several Government departments, can confuse and inhibit
each other. There is the problem, of course, of selective attention.
But perhaps most important, there is the problem of corporate
memory – when a policy fails to be assessed against the history of
the last time it was tried. The UK is particularly bad at the last one
of these” (Watson, 2011, January)
Governing UK HE through Crisis
(again)
1. £3 billion reduction in publicly funded grant to
universities 2012-2015
2. ‘Graduate premium’ arguments continue to be
advanced
3. Graduate contribution threshold to increase to
between £6000 and £9000 (from 2012)
4. New Student Loans Scheme to fund up-front tuition
costs; pay back when earning over £21,000
Governing UK HE through Crisis
(again) cont
5. (Selected) universities and departments face closure;
job cutting is now under way, returns on investment
are down, academics conditions of work being
contested, radical over-halls of whole staffing
6. Unemployment of graduates rose dramatically (from
11.1% Dec 2008 to 20% Feb 2011) growing faster
than the jobless rate
Governing UK HE through Crisis
(again) cont
7. Funds for Higher Education to come from expanding
the international student market
(transnationalisation), greater levels of
commercialisation of IP (spinout firms, patents), and
increased financialisation of sector (for instance
student tuition)
Expand opportunities - For-Profit Firms
Challenges to the ‘grammar’ of
higher education
Graduate premium exposed (from no return, to highly
selective returns to elite professions) (legitimation)
Political trade-offs on student loans, and administrative
errors means that it will generate significant costs for the
state in absorbing unpaid loans (fiscal crisis)
Commodification of education, the transformation of the
idea of ‘public’, and prioritisation of the third mission
(legitimation)
Radicalisation of students (withdraw loyalty)
In significant tension with other legitimation strategies for
rule, such as immigration (administrative rationality)