The sight of early morning placards has become a fixture across UK campuses. ‘Pay us what we deserve’. ‘We are the university!’. There are specific grievances of course, about pensions, pay and workload, but we now seem to be in an era of permanently poor industrial relations. So why are the professors always picketing?
When I went to university in the early 1980s, I was part of a relatively small number of people of my age who went to relatively small universities. About one in seven people stayed on in higher education, and the University of Sussex, where I studied, had about four thousand students. It now has around 19 thousand. One in three 18 year olds went to university this year, which means that there are nearly two million undergraduate students being taught by around two hundred thousand academic staff in institutions with an income of around £44 billion.
On the one hand, this is a success story. Elitism has been replaced by inclusion, with more working class and minoritised students than ever before. Even better, the income to cover some of these costs is being raised by teaching half a million overseas students. Gleaming new buildings are going up in every university town and British higher education appears to be doing very well indeed.
But one of the costs of this expansion is that universities have become more like businesses, operating in a market with progressively less of their funding coming directly from the state. They compete with each other for students and research grants, pay their senior managers very handsome salaries, and performance manage their staff using every metric imaginable. No wonder that their academics feel increasingly like employees working for big corporations.
I still remember my shock when, in 1994, I saw my first university advert which claimed that (in this case) De Montfort University was the place to go, improbably using a sea lion escaping from a killer whale to illustrate ‘preparation for life’. Universities now advertise everywhere, on public transport, billboards and every available piece of virtual estate on the internet. Not only does this relentless marketing and building need to be paid for by getting in more punters, it also shapes thinking about everything from the research and publications that best game league table positions to how to best cultivate ‘under-served’ international markets for students.
The sheer immodesty of the claims made by every university in the UK about their ‘distinctiveness’ and ‘excellence’ does rather give the game away, but the real problem is that this is now language used within the institutions as well as outside them. The dominant form of talk is tied to the management strategies of the organisation, such that assumptions about growth are largely unquestioned, and students are treated as ‘customers’ who have ‘experiences’. The lecture theatres get bigger, but students are told that they are unique. The proportion of precariously employed lecturers continues to rise, but staff are still told that the institution cares about their well-being. Universities have become more and more like their business schools.
In the UK, academic staff have become workers in very big organizations. Specialist employees to be sure, but still parts of a gigantic machine, and their careers and aspirations are shaped by the strategic imperatives of the business university. To get promotion, you must write in the right places, get research grants (the bigger the better) and demonstrate ‘leadership’ (of modules, courses, committees and so on). You must also make sure that the students score you highly on your teaching assessments, and hence ‘innovate’ in module delivery whilst ensuring you pay attention to developing ’employability skills’.
There are many good reasons why we should care about what students think of their lecturers. And research academics should publish, and sometimes they will need to get grants to support their work. And of course academics should be involved with running their institutions by sitting on committees and developing new courses, and students should think about what jobs they want to get after graduating. The problem comes when all these activities become quantified, no longer pursued as elements of good practice within a profession, but instead audited and fed into HR processes which are in turn shaped by institutional strategies for growth and competition.
For example, even something as humble as an academic article is now measured and weighed for the ‘impact factor’ of the journal it is published in, or whether it reflects an international network of authors. Any citations will be greedily counted and fed into the ‘h index’ of the academic on their CV, as well as the reputational claims and rankings of the department, faculty or university. The gap between what universities claim about themselves in their marketing, and how they manage their staff yawns ever wider. Just as employees in Amazon warehouses are doubtless bemused about the adverts that show them happily smiling, so do academic staff increasingly feel that they are ‘human resources’, objects of calculation to be deployed for the benefit of their employers.
The expansion of UK higher education is a success in many ways, but it is based on a market that treats students as bags of cash and academics as the labour necessary to extract the value from the students. For many academics, particularly those now on a semi-permanent state of strike, they no longer feel as if their employers really care about them, whatever the VC or HR department says. Measured, prodded, and lectured about ‘hard choices’, their experience makes them feel increasingly alienated from the governance of their organizations. When their placards say ‘we are the university!’ they are asserting what they feel should be the case, but isn’t. So, just like other employees with little power over their working lives, they go on strike.
So, next time you see a professor on a picket line, just think of them as another worker.
Martin Parker is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Bristol and lead for the Inclusive Economy Initiative.
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