Students are the new customers

EDUCATION
Jill Stephenson deplores the corruption of
our universities

Walter Humes [SR Issue 115] is correct in saying that universities are over-managed. The demands placed on them by funding councils and, ultimately, governments, have encouraged this. The Blairite obsession with measuring everything and then regarding the number yielded from this measuring exercise as accurate, meaningful and the important basis of policy has resulted in attempts to quantify the unquantifiable. How do you measure 'quality' of research in such a way as to arrive at a numerical result? You establish committees of 'peer-reviewers' that spend vast amounts of time that would be better spent on research, and 'task' (a favourite management term) them with assigning numbers to individual pieces of research 'output' – or books and essays, in layman's language.
     The important thing is that the whole enterprise yield a result in numerical terms that funding and government functionaries and bureaucrats can understand. Hence, 3* is used instead of 'beta alpha'. The people who massacre the English language by using Martian management-speak ('higher net worth individuals', eg) need to have a readily comprehensible symbol, and nothing is more readily comprehensible than a number like 3.
     Then there is measuring quality in teaching. Normal humans would expect this to be done by having inspections of people actually teaching. But that would be extremely labour-intensive – expensive – with every lecturer and tutor being monitored by one inspector, or perhaps more. The result is that teaching quality is measured largely on the basis of the paperwork that the teachers submit. Certainly, teachers and students are interviewed by a panel of fellow-academics – some from different universities, and some from different disciplines, from the one being assessed. But the voluminous preparatory paperwork is the major item for consideration. Not surprisingly, those writing the documentation spend a great deal of time embellishing achievements and curtaining off dark corners.
     This has two results. One is that – and this is only one instance of it – people in universities whose purpose is critical enquiry (no need for any other 'mission statement', 'critical enquiry' says it all) gloss and distort reality in the manner of propagandists or marketing 'executives'. This is perhaps the most depressing aspect of university life in the 21st century – although at times one is spoiled for choice – namely that institutions dedicated to stripping away propaganda and the manipulation of information are deeply complicit in it. The other result is that government and funding council functionaries can say: 'You have been rated as excellent. Therefore you manage extremely well with the funding you have been awarded. You could probably manage almost as well with a bit less funding'.
     Weaning universities off public funds is the major aim. The Thatcher government naïvely believed that it could, almost overnight, graft onto British universities the American culture of 'alumni' donations. Universities speculate to accumulate: armies of people from 'development offices', along with wealthy or celebrity 'alumni', travel the world seeking donations from grateful graduates. In some institutions, this has been quite successful, but on nothing like the US scale. The need, therefore, is to adopt other methods of turning universities into businesses, and cajoling academic staff, who may be trained and skilled as chemists or linguists or medics, into turning themselves into 'fundraisers'.
     The problem with this is that universities are not the same as businesses. Any businessman is clear in his mind about what his product is and who his potential customers are. But, while a university's product is students, it is also now encouraged to regard students as its 'customers'. The tyranny of the 'National Student Survey', hated by most students and staff alike, means meeting the reasonable, and sometimes the unreasonable, demands of students, who do not necessarily know what is best for their education. For example, in some classes students ask for a lecturer's notes to be placed on the course website. This is not educationally desirable, because listening to a lecture, digesting it and jotting down notes is a 'transferable skill', the kind of generic skill that employers hope recruits will have, regardless of the discipline that they have studied. And I have learned a lesson from all the talk about fundraising: as an aspiring business person, I am certainly not giving away for nothing the lecture notes that I have worked hard to produce.