Keith Hart on Wed, 6 Feb 2002 23:27:04 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> The British Universities |
In response to the exchange between Tiziana and Brian Fifteen new universities were added to Britain's collection in the 60s by government fiat. By the time I got my PhD in 1969, the academic labour market was most favourable to the supply side. There were 23 lecturing jobs I could have applied for, at least one of which had no applicants. This was because the new universities were still expanding and their graduate students had not yet reached the market. The situation turned very fast around 1970, with the end of expansion and a large supply of new would-be professionals. The Tory government of Heath chose this moment to announce a pay review for higher education which included the polytechnics and teachers training colleges as well as the universities. The Association of University Teachers (AUT, the lecturers' union) chose to stay out of this review on the grounds that we were part of the ruling class, the Civil List, and should not be mixed with the others. The Civil List dealt separately with the pay of admirals, judges, professors and so on. It obviously expressed the idea of a small circle of ruling insiders, most of them brought up in Oxbridge or aspiring to go there. Now, although the university expansion of the 60s was significant, the proportion of the population entering as undergraduates was still much lower than in the leading European countries, about 1 in 8. Even so the mass recruitment of first-generation lower class provincials into the profession (a delayed consequence of the Butler Education Act of 1944, you might say, the Beatles effect in higher education) posed a problem for the idea of university teachers as part of the charmed circle of ruling insiders. The Polytechnics were given a pay rise of 25% and the universities nothing. At the same the government was negotiating with the AUT over conditions of work in the universities. A series of concessions were made in exchange for small pay rises. Many of my activist colleagues at this time were Trots, entryists in various organizations. I used to argue with them. Why are we selling the work privileges of university life for pay increases that could be obliterated at any time (we were entering the peak period of 70s inflation)? They replied that the bulk of the punters out there were scientists and everyone knows that they can only be stirred by trade union economism of th ebasest sort. I asked again why we were placing our faith in the state. Shouldn't we try to build a broiad educational alliance with the schoolteachers unions (the NUT was very powerful). They might even accept our leadership. But we have to find a popular constituency somewhere. As it was, most people thought university teachers were snobs and had too many holidays. No politician would lose any credibility by shafting us. And indeed Wilson's Labour government a couple of years later froze out pay in a year of 25% inflation, thereby wiping out the small increments laboriously negotiated by the AUT. When I look back at my generation, what strikes me most forcibly is our inability to handle reproduction. We thought of ourselves as orphans (an idea I got from Luisa Passerini's Autobigography of a Generation on the students of Turin 1968), cut off from our parents' generation and consequently without a clue what to to do with our own children, students and the others who depended on us. The sheer task of upward social mobility many of us faced absorbed all our energies. We had no time to reflect on how to conserve the free profession we had joined, how to repoduce ourselves. And of course, it was never the intention of our masters, those on whom most of my peers were so touchingly reliant, to allow us all into the ruling class. Instead the university teachwers had to be pushed down the class system. It started as niggling about pay and status in the 70s. The die of our collective proletarianization was cast then. But it took Margaret Thatcher to work out how to put the boot in with a vengeance. Let me not exaggerate. Intellectual and social life in the British universities in the 70s (and even more in the 60s) was relatively generous. We still didn't have too many students. We were able to sustain an ethos of moral responsibility towards our colleagues and those we taught that compared favourably with France, Germany and Italy, where mass enrolments had gone further and sooner. The Cold War kept a steady flow of capital-intensive research projects coming in, which on the whole was good for morale. Certainly we social sceintists emulated the mantra, Research is King, without being as directly useful to the powers as the real scientists. My story is mainly about that early turning point. the gruesome finale is better known. Thatcher decided that she would pick off all interest groups who might use the old corporate state to obstruct her programme of market liberalisation. Chief among these were the unions (especially the coalminers) and the big cities (both London and the provinces). She cleansed her own party of the old Tory gentry who nourished some humane fantasies. But she also took on the civil servants, the judges, the doctors and, of course, the universities, which represented a form of cultural resistance to the subsumption of local powers by the central government. The only institution she left unharmed, for obvious reasons, was the City of London. The English ruling class has always been ambivalent about education, especially about higher education. What would they all do with it, if not undermine the status quo? Thus in the 80s, the Tories pursued a policy of dumbing down in which they genuinely aspired to convert Ukania into an offshore facility for international corporations, supplying cheap semi-skilled assembly labour in competition with the East Asian Tigers and from a postion of being inside the European Community. What could be better suited to banishing subversive thoughts from subjects' minds than the tedium of the assembly line? By now the university teachers had lost whatever radicalism was a spillover from the 60s and they settled in for trench warfare with the bureaucracy, a war which inevitably they lost. At a time when most people think that the communications revolution and market liberalisation have had a decentralizing effect on society, the British state has been cranking up its programme of centralization remorselessly. Tocqueville once argued that the British had a striong state and a decentralized administration, while the French had a weak state and a centralized administration. Since 1945, the trend has been in the opposite direction for both countries. Because of the decentralized powers of the shires and the municipalities, as well as the composition of the Establishment with its focus on Oxbridge, Britian largely missed out on the chance to go for a modernist centralized university syllabus when the chance arose, in the 1920s. The result was a kind of amateur flexibility which was the strength as well as the weakness of the British, when compared with Europe and, even more, America. This tradition was brutally demolished in the 90s, the culmination of a process begun in the late 80s. A sort of bureaucratic revolution has descended on the universities. One with a decidedly neoliberal side to it. Tiziana evoked it all very well from the perspective of someone in the trenches today. With a fiscal squeeze inevitable, the government wanted to concentrate its spending in the best places, without increasing the amount. This meant breaking up the myth that all British universities were alike and equal. It also meant completing the proletarianization of university teachers by reducing their autonomy and putting them into fierce competition with all and sundry, even their most immediate colleagues. The method of assessing research, teaching and the rest has been well publicised. It is now like painting the Forth Bridge. It never ends. As soon as one exercise is completed, another is on its way. Slowly the victims master the system, upgrade their scores and then get told that the money isn't available after all because there were too many winners. At a time when the internet is revolutionising information, academics are subjected to a baroque escalation of publishing standards. Every ISBN or page number has to be documented, when two words will find it for most of us. The number of universities in Britain was doubled in the 90s by the simple expedient of adding the polytechnics to the list. This made it easier to discriminate between them. Everyone was forced to expand recruitment (Oxbridge resisted), up to three times. So that the proportion of an age cohort going to university was tripled. No more money or other resources were coming, however. The combination of mad bureaucratic directives and expanded enrolment has eroded to breaking point the moral consensus that British university teachers once supported. A radical differentiation of the personnel has taken place, with the more established, better known individuals enjoying enhanced rewards and freedom, while the upcoming generation of scholars has been reduced to a casualized, underpaid labour force with no long-term prospects. The same lower-class provincials, like me, who struggled to keep their heads above water at the start of their careers now callously ignore their responsibilities to the next generation (for a change!), while they take unpaid leave (replaced from any number of sources) and the university saves money by hiring a postdoc for a pittance. How the Blair regime fits into all this would take another essay. Perhaps what I have described is a Third Way (only joking). I would say that the universities as a significant national institution hardly existed before the twentieth century. In the 1890s, the middle classes in search of higher education would be more likely to go to a theological seminary. There is probably no institution more closely wedded to the fortunes of state capitalism, the attempt to control markets and accumulation through national bureaucracy. Certainly there is no class more reactiuonary and backwardlooking than the university teachers, who, after all that has happened, still cling to their tattered intellectual standards, but don't ask searching questions about the need for change.There is no reason why people seeking higher education in the 21st century should look to the universities for it. They have passed their sell-by date. And it was us, the lucky beneficiaries of our parents' war and its aftermath, who threw it all away. Keith Hart # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net