The University Conundrum

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath has become notorious as the highest-paid head of an English university. While the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford has [in my view, mistakenly] defended her more modest stipend by drawing comparison with US salaries and footballers' wages, nobody doubts that she has been attracted to Oxford in international competition because of her proven talents and experience. The lady at Bath, however, appears as a sort of machine product: she was deputy V-C before being given the top post in the same institution - very rarely a good thing - and before that she was a professor in a middle-ranking university. There is no evidence at all of her exceptional abilities or achievements.

How have the Vice-Chancellors come to be so highly paid? This is an intriguing story: especially as the number of universities has risen from fewer than 40 when I was a student to about 150 now. Long ago the universities ceased to be part of any national plan for 'manpower' development. The last serious attempt to do that was in the nineteen sixties with the Robbins Report. They proposed, and the government accepted, very significant expansion of the system, both by increasing the number of universities and increasing significantly the student population in the existing institutions. Some - notably Loughborough - were designated as Colleges of Advanced Technology [CATs] and although that status has been eroded away Loughborough stands well in the league tables of universities because it has stuck closer to its founding mission than have most other institutions.

The University in which I was employed for a quarter of a century had a world reputation in materials science: metallurgy, glass, ceramics etc. Robbins recommended further strengthening this orientation, and new buildings were provided with superb facilities; even a small steel rolling-mill.. But UK students were not interested. The a few students who were UK citizens rattled around in the workshops and laboratories, as an increasing number from emergent countries came, learned assiduously, and took the most advanced skills home to build up Britain's competitors.

Ever since then, there has been a nonsensical push for a higher proportion of the population to get degrees; but this has never been linked to building up the skill base that Britain requires. I was horrified this year to see that the Faculty of Social Sciences [of which I was Dean more than thirty years ago] produced nearly four times as many graduates as the whole of engineering and applied science: and while the majority of the Social Sciences people were UK nationals, the majority of engineers and metallurgists were from overseas. As emergent economies forge ahead, Britain is being clogged with 'skills' that are not needed: some are even socially and economically destructive, as with Economics [see this blog, passim].

As this daft situation has been built up, the universities have been decoupled entirely from the local authorities who used to have some control of funding as the bodies that paid for students fees, maintenance grants, union membership, sports subscriptions and so on. Councillors and Directors of Education had some power of the purse over higher education, and their representatives served on governing bodies. Technical colleges that had been directly controlled by local authorities merged with teacher-training colleges and gained designation as polytechnics: and at that time there was a genuine hunt for real talent to head these rapidly expanding institutions. Salaries of Directors of Polytechnics shot higher than the universities paid their V-Cs; so when the polytechnics became redesignated as universities the established V-Cs were able to demand parity. Thus the racket began of ratcheting-up the boss-man's pay; as a prestige game rather than evidence of performance.

Since nobody now has the slightest idea what the lower-ranked seventy or so 'universities' are for, there can be no criteria for assessing the performance of their heads that reflects the national interest. So at present students borrow billions of pounds to buy 'education' which is aimless and not properly quality-controlled. A really great British achievement!

Education, Immigration and Austerity

More than thirty years ago I was Dean of Social Sciences in a major English University, from which I had previously graduated. As a graduate, I regularly receive information from the university, accompanied by invitations to make donations to various aspects of the work that goes on there. In the latest issue, they gave figures for the numbers of graduates in each faculty: and social sciences was more than twice as prolific as any other Faculty. When I was on the staff, social sciences were similar in size [and therefore in numbers of graduates] to the arts, science and engineering faculties.

During the time when I was Dean, the worst of the Thatcherite destruction was being done to the steel and related engineering industries in the region: which had the impact of reducing dramatically the potential for growth of the materials sciences parts of engineering. In the subsequent decades demand from students - especially, from UK students - has been pathetic in applied sciences [which mean that there has been plenty of capacity to train tens of thousands of scientists and engineers and metallurgists for emergent economies], poor in pure sciences and weak in the 'hard' arts like languages. The result is that Britain has been preparing people to do parasitic jobs in the media and other sectors where no material product emerges, and in financial services [which, at high risk, brings significant income to Britain from the world economy: and which could now be threatened by Brexit].

The material economy requires workers to do jobs that are alien to UK graduates, who are 'too good' for farm work or for ordinary jobs in the retail and hospitality sectors, or in building and construction; so those jobs have been taken up by migrants, many from the EU and many from beyond Europe. Thus it is important to note that simply barring EU immigrants will not make the total net migration statistics 'look right'; but it will denude agriculture, construction and hospitality of their essential workforces.

The educational system has totally failed to create the British workforce that Britain needs. Teaching tens of thousands of young people every year the dogmatic nonsense that is uttered by the Econocracy makes the situation worse, because it renders reality incomprehensible to the people who are supposedly educated to illuminate economic life.

Thus the material economy has stagnated: except for those areas of the services sector which largely import the material components of the things they use, and import their labour: to which the British population comes - largely with borrowed money - to buy consolation for their nagging awareness that their incomes have generally not grown [in real terms] for more than ten years. Companies are hoarding their profits, or returning them to shareholders in buy-backs [in the cases where they still make profits, usually in overseas markets]. The only conspicuous sphere of investment is the proliferation of branches of quirky dineries, nail-bars and bars; none of which are famous for longevity.

The misapplication of neo-Keynesianism in the later nineteen-sixties and early' seventies means that it has been impossible to persuade an 'Economics Profession' dominated by 'rational markets' nonsense that a keynesian stimulus would restart the real economy. Instead, successive government have adopted and stuck to the policy of austerity; which has clearly become a mantra that will eventually provoke a populist revolt. The misdirection of education over the last four decades means that the economy lacks the people who could implement a Keynesian reflation of the economy; and the economic devastation that the Thatcherite monetarists achieved means that many of the means by which a traditional Keynesian restoration of economic growth could be accomplished do not exist. Yet is is only by a strong pattern of state support for the revival of construction and manufacturing that the economy can be rebuilt. It will be a task of immense complexity; but it must be achievable.

More of this in the coming days.