BADGER PIECE 28 JAN - Koos Couvée
Education policy expresses at the deepest level the societal vision of any governing party. It contains their view of the role of public services, as well as the kind of subject that they want to see produced by these. In Britain’s case, the idea that universities have to become part of a market economy rests on the assumption that economic competition is the essence of human existence. And viewing students as “customers” rests on the idea that education has strictly instrumental value, and that “student demand” is the same as employer demand – the needs of business.
The logic of the government’s plans, which also transpires through our University’s Green Paper, is that “the world is rapidly changing”. Britain must keep up in order not to fall behind other universities and institutions competing on the global education market for research funding and students. The irony is that indeed, the world is changing, but the governments and managers (the latter less so however) are actively bringing about these changes. It seems that, after Thatcher, “there is no alternative” (to the market). Although we might have some archaic ideas of social equality and education for its own sake, we need to be realistic, grow up, and make some money otherwise we will perish.
Free-market reforms are always revolutions imposed from the top-down. And although they are often claimed to “free” people and institutions from previous constraints (i.e. bureaucracy, ineffectiveness in decision making), they go hand in hand with a much more controlling culture of surveillance, measurement, and performance targets. It is not a surprise that over the last decade, Britain has seen an increase of middle line managers of over a million. In the University’s strategic plan, it is said that a 5 year Operational Plan will be developed to guide the implementation of the strategic plan from the top-down, which will determine how money is to be spent. It is no wonder that critics of the free market speak of market-Stalinism. New Labour is now forcing universities to become “free”, that is, open to market dominance.
At Sussex, it is not surprising that Council has been the only body able to seriously comment on the proposals, leaving committees like Senate and the wider student community only negligible input. Indeed, the nature of the free-market is highly anti-democratic and by and large anti-intellectual. This is because it would indeed be quite dangerous to debate these issues – the implications are often quite clearly inhumane, boring, homogenising, alienating and above all stressful. Fortunately the free-marketeers have a powerful weapon – realism. You are either with them, or you lack an “appetite for change”, you are conservative, an obstruction to “progress” and “effective decision making”.
In contrast to the almost fully complacent culture of Britain, students and members of faculty in France and Greece are actively resisting similar policies. The EU is trying, and in many ways succeeding, to standardise Higher Education throughout Europe to market control, hand in hand with business (the Bologna Process), but this process is meeting with resistance everywhere. Recently a number of Sussex students visited a University in France, where the VC was urging students and members of faculty to go on strike, organise their own classes and defy Sarkozy’s privatisation laws. The Education Not For Sale campaign seeks to bring students and staff together to do exactly this – to organise autonomously and stir up the debate we would otherwise never have.
