An Introduction to the Self-Hating University

Error message

  • Deprecated function: The each() function is deprecated. This message will be suppressed on further calls in _menu_load_objects() (line 579 of /var/www/drupal-7.x/includes/menu.inc).
  • Deprecated function: implode(): Passing glue string after array is deprecated. Swap the parameters in drupal_get_feeds() (line 394 of /var/www/drupal-7.x/includes/common.inc).
Published by Matthew Davidson on Tue, 23/02/2016 - 1:52pm in
Higher education

[I'm archiving for posterity a few articles I wrote for a now-defunct website. This is the second, from February 2014; here is the first, and the third.]

Distance learning just isn’t worth as much as on-campus tuition. That’s the opinion of Professor Jim Barber, vice-chancellor of the University of New England and self-satirist of note; or at least that’s what his opinion appears to be if one engages in a little speculative reading between the lines. He has just announced his intention to charge significantly less for online than on-campus courses. Moreover, in a stroke of breathtaking audacity, the money foregone will not be lost from the UNE administrative budget, and certainly not from executive salaries; Professor Barber is taking it from his students. From 2014, external students undertaking distance education will be exempt from the Students Services and Amenities Fees (SSAF). As for the subsequent defunding of student services, well tough luck.

“University students around the country are increasingly voting with their feet and not showing up to class,” says Barber, while making the very cuts that will make showing up to class even less desirable, “yet we continue to slug them for our services whether they use them or not. This is a pretty inefficient way to run any enterprise let alone a service industry.” (University of New England, 2013).

Barber proclaimed at a conference last year that “unbundling” is “where best practice is heading pedagogically. MOOCs [Massively Open Online Courses] are an extreme example in a bigger movement towards unbundling of services. Excellence in the business of higher education will increasingly mean individualised levels of service delivery, so pay for what you want and as you go.” (Streak, 2013).

Even before one begins to speculate over the prospect of pay-as-you-go lavatories for the recklessly profligate micturators on campus, it may seem extraordinary that a v-c would explicitly boast that his own institution deliberately aims to be the no-frills Ryanair of the higher education “service industry”. Nevertheless he maintains that “while most traditional universities around the world continue to press their governments for more funding, UNE is trying to move in the other direction.” (University of New England, 2013). UNE's staff and students just aren't worth the money, according to Professor Barber, and such naked contempt for students and staff alike is not as rare among university administrators as you might think.

In the US, San Jose State University has been leading this allegedly inexorable unbundling by outsourcing course delivery to proprietary MOOC providers. When asked whether this might lead to a decline in the quality of the education his students receive, SJSU's president merely deadpanned “It could not be worse than what we do face to face.” (Bady, 2013).

Such disdain for the practices of “traditional universities” is common throughout the world wherever Thatcherite principles of governance have taken hold. The “self-hating state”, to use George Monbiot's incisive term, “renounces its powers. Governments anathematise governance. They declare their role redundant and illegitimate. They launch furious assaults upon their own branches, seeking wherever possible to lop them off.” (Monbiot, 2013). It is therefore hardly surprising that when the self-hating state determines the regulatory environment in which universities operate, the state's attributes are reproduced in the self-hating university.

As Simon Marginson (2013) observes, the self-hating Australian government “prefers automatic economic mechanisms that remove the need to make and defend arguable policy positions”. In its turn the self-hating Australian university disavows any intrinsic purpose or values, and therefore any responsibility for the social consequences of its operations. It is merely a commercial service provider - shapeless clay to be moulded by the economically rational student-customer to suit their interests.

Two policy pumps maintain this pedagogical vacuum: Income-Contingent Loans (ICLs), and the Demand Driven Model (DDM). These and/or similar mechanisms pertain to an increasing number of other countries; the differences between them are interesting, but arguably increasingly marginal, so for simplicity the Australian example will be taken as broadly representative.

The pioneering implementation of Income Contingent Loans was Australia’s Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). It was adopted in 1989 as a resolution to the tension between greater participation in higher education (spurred in part by the abolition of tuition fees in the 1970s), and the Hawke/Keating Labor government’s “considerable fiscal parsimony”, to quote the charmingly diplomatic chief architect of HECS, Bruce Chapman (1997).

To be politically palatable, HECS necessitated a reframing of public education as an individual good rather than a social good. In this way it could be argued that public funding of higher education is a form of progressive taxation: If, broadly speaking, the better educated are the better paid, it is unfair to tax the poor to fund the rich. To the counter-argument that higher education is an important way for the poor to improve their lot in life, “HECS' defining feature - income contingent repayment” (Chapman, 1997) appeared to be the perfect have-your-cake-and-eat-it rejoinder.

Indeed many commentators have marvelled at the “elasticity” of tuition pricing wherever income contingent loans are available, particularly in the wake of the unprecedented tuition hikes of 2010 in the United Kingdom. But in the Australian Universities’ Review, Emory McLendon (1997) posited a persuasive explanation for the ease with which students transitioning from high school to university accept the prospect of deferred fees: “The key word is deferred and the key factor is being 18 years old. […] A young student would tend to view the deferred payment of HECS in a similar light as a superannuation payout. It is simply too far into the future to be of great concern.”

Rachel Wenstone, vice-president of the UK National Union of Students suggests another explanation for demand-side price elasticity and “increased participation”, even in the face of the 2010 tripling of tuition fees: “With more than a million young people unemployed in the UK, some may feel like their options are somewhat limited and that choosing a situation which involves huge debt is the only way to enhance their employment options.” (Garner, 2013).

Nonetheless, consensus on tuition price elasticity is far from universal. In response to sectoral labour market shortages in the mid-nineties, the incoming Howard government introduced a tiered fee structure, with the intention that the price differential between disciplines would offer an incentive for students to enter those professions with the greatest demand for new skilled labour. Bruce Chapman was appalled. Recall that his scheme was designed to recoup the cost of higher education along economically rational, user-pays, free market lines. In his eyes, these changes were “not coherent, nor […] based on a well-defined set of economic principles” and charging inexpensively-trained lawyers more than expensively-trained nurses was “arguably poor economics” (Chapman & Nicholls, 2013). A genuine free market ideologue would sit back and allow the wages of nurses to rise in response to demand. Of course, to the nominal free market ideologues in government, the overriding principle is that free markets are fine for the plebs, but when the interests of employers are threatened, the free market can go fly a kite. Chapman clearly missed the memo.

While proponents of a commercialised higher education system point to growing participation rates in recent decades as a measure of its beneficial effects (at least on employment prospects), it is far from clear whether and to what degree this is the case. Longitudinal studies of the long-term effects of university study on either the individual or society are virtually impossible to use as a basis for policy prescription when the university is in a state of constant crisis and reinvention. The benefits that have accrued to the graduate of a generation ago cannot reasonably be assumed to apply to the graduate of today’s radically changed system.

To anybody involved in higher education prior to the reintroduction of tuition fees, the suggestion that one might attain a Bachelor of Business in Convention and Event Management, that economics would be taught as a component of business studies rather than vice versa, or that publicly funded universities would be teaching rank pseudoscience, would be considered laughable. However vocationalism and a business-centric view of the world is a logical consequence of user-pays tuition with a primary focus on financial return on a student’s “investment”.

Outside the small number of elite institutions that carry on the task of educating a privileged few, the majority of universities have embraced the pursuit of the “three Ms” of New Public Management (NPM): markets, management, and measurement. Lee Parker (2013) identifies this as “a clear example of goal displacement, whereby the financial resourcing of university missions and operations has become the end in itself.” Far from freeing each university to develop a unique character, and providing incentives for higher education to diversify and specialise, the result of commercialisation is quite the opposite. “Operating in a global marketplace and reflecting NPM, universities inevitably converge, presenting often-times homogeneous brands, missions, product and service offerings, and general organisational profiles.” (Parker, 2013)

Even so, you may ask, isn’t it undeniable that student-consumers are indeed “voting with their feet”, and that there must be some degree of declining demand behind the oft-repeated claim that there is a “crisis in the humanities”? As noted above, the apples vs. oranges obstacle to meaningful comparison of today’s universities to those of a generation ago makes quantifying any such effect problematic, and formal research with the aim of critically evaluating this contention is thin on the ground. American statistician Nate Silver recently dipped his toe into the quagmire and has tentatively concluded that “the relative decline of majors like English is modest when accounting for the increased propensity of Americans to go to college. In fact, the number of new degrees in English is fairly similar to what it has been for most of the last 20 years as a share of the college-age population.” (Silver, 2013). While this may be seen as some comfort to proponents of traditional academia, the more troubling corollary of this observation is that it seems quite likely that the liberal (indeed liberating) education that one would have expected to receive at university a generation ago remains just as much the preserve of elites as ever.

That the much-lauded increased participation in higher education, and avowed concern for students of “low socioeconomic status” (SES), is principally directed towards addressing the skilled labour requirements of industry brings to mind an adage from Earl Shorris, founder of the Clemente Course in the Humanities: “the poor are so often mobilized and so rarely politicized.” (Shorris, 1997). As Noam Chomsky notes, self-funded education is “one important way to implement the policy of indoctrination of the young. People who are in a debt trap have very few options.” (Chomsky, 2011). The combination of tuition fees and student loans effectively serves as a sin tax on the kind of education that produces politically empowered human beings rather than docile employees.

References