Sir Anthony Seldon was the Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020.
Universities have woken bolt upright to the fact that they can be, indeed must be, masters of their own futures. They are one of Britain’s greatest assets and treasures. Everyone reading this blog knows that. The shame is that governments haven’t accepted their responsibilities fully to ensure the sector’s current and future flourishing.
When I became a Vice Chancellor in 2015, I was proud to be in such a distinguished and diverse company, but also perplexed. Universities at the time were providing over 300,000 jobs, and contributing over £200 billion to the economy – some 8.5% of GDP. They included some of the most respected academic and research universities in the world, but also were the engines of hope in a large number of Britain’s less prosperous areas where they were providing vital economic, social and cultural cohesion.
Yet rather than punching its weight and driving policy, the sector kept its head below the parapet. Vice Chancellors were largely unknown on the public stage including the BBC, while the voice of Universities UK (UUK) in the carpeted corridors of Whitehall and Westminster was so hushed as to be all but inaudible.
Did Vice Chancellors have some mystical belief in the foresight, benevolence and efficacy of government? If so I had formed a different view based on my writing on successive administrations over 30 years, never more sceptically so than during the almost continuous dysfunctionality that descended on Downing Street after the Brexit Referendum. For all the qualities and seriousness of some officials and aides, ‘out for lunch’ was the invisible sign hung on the door to Whitehall for nearly 10 years.
If public institutions don’t set the agenda themselves, others will set it, and sure enough, the sector was soon engulfed in a series of disobliging stories, of which Vice-Chancellors’ pay was perhaps the most egregious. In the second half of the 2010s, the sector was finding itself battered from all sides, including from its own staff and students.
This maelstrom coincided with something troubling in politics. The quality of ministerial leadership under David Willetts and Jo Johnson was broadly supportive and engaged. But darkness was descending. Government now joined in the media and public game of university bashing. For government to attack university leadership was a risible case of the kettle calling the pot black. The quality of governing and public sector oversight indeed over the 14 years of Conservative rule was the worst in the party’s history. Few areas were so poorly handled by it latterly as universities.
My belief, argued in particular in a HEPI blog in March 2019, was that the sector should not be looking to government to lead us nor to think tanks to come up with policies. We should be standing on our own feet and dictating not receiving the agenda: shaping the discourse and public debate not cowing and taking the pounding. To my mind, UUK was the one and only body that could provide the necessary leadership. I suggested various ways, many impractical, for UUK to step up, drawing inspiration not just from similar HE ‘peak’ bodies abroad but also in the UK from groups as diverse as the CBI and the Football Association.
The blog didn’t land well with the great and good in the sector who chose to interpret it as an attack on them and, even less plausibly, on staff at UUK HQ. Neither was my intention. Nothing came of the campaign, although some Vice Chancellors in private agreed. But the moment wasn’t ripe for change, least of all with so many more pressing worries in their in-trays, from pensions to freedom of speech.
What on earth were the Conservatives thinking about with universities? Why did they obsess about trivia when they could have been thinking about how to enlist the sector in their three great (but hollow) missions, economic growth, Brexit and ‘levelling up’? Why didn’t they foresee and plan better for the current financial predicament, with 40% of universities now running unsustainable deficits, and several including Coventry, Huddersfield, Kent and York rumoured to be in difficulty? The predicament is as acute and appalling as it is unnecessary and avoidable.
In the early 2020s, I fondly imagined that Labour’s leadership, if indeed they won power, would have a much more robust and imaginative vision for universities. Not a bit of it. ‘Dreadful’ was the one word answer I received from a senior member of the Starmer camp when I asked what their was view of the sector. They were distinctly unimpressed by the failure of the sector to get a grip but gave no indication of constructive solutions. ‘Vacuum’ was a word I rapidly decided better summed up their lack of forethought when, after the Liz Truss débâcle, It was entirely obvious to everyone, if not apparently to they themselves, that they would be forming the next government. The truth is they were far more concerned about the economy, the NHS, illegal immigration and prisons to be able to find the bandwidth for universities.
Terrific! Labour were preoccupied elsewhere while the Conservatives remained hostile to serious thinking on universities. Even after Rishi Sunak took over in October 2022 and some sanity returned to the madhouse, the penny-pinching Treasury remained setting the financial agenda, and largesse to universities was not high on their list.
Thank goodness then for UUK which is launching its groundbreaking report today, Opportunity, growth, and partnership: a blueprint for change from the UK’s universities.
Professor Dame Sally Mapstone, the President of Universities [and HEPI’s Chair – Ed], writes starkly in the Foreword that:
We stand at a fork in the road in the history of the UK’s universities. There is now a clear choice. We can allow our distinguished, globally competitive higher education system to slide into decline. Or we can act together, as institutions and with government, to ensure that our universities are able to deliver for the nation into the 2030s.
Fighting talk, and absolutely right at last to be so.
The report is tremendous, with eight chapters written by high-powered ‘commissioners’, including Peter Madelson, David Willetts, Andy Haldane and Julia Black. The common aim is to create a stronger and more financially sound education sector than exists today. It is bursting with good ideas. HEPI’s Nick Hillman believes it is the most powerful intervention by UUK in living memory.
Government are clearly in a mood to listen, frightened in part by the very real possibility of university closures. The test of this report is whether it will mark the high point of UUK activism, or merely the staging post on an entirely new vision for it and the sector. If there is a question mark – no more than that – with the report, it is whether it is a little too keen to address the new Government’s agenda. Growth and enhanced opportunity for all are most certainly the right objectives for government and for universities. But there is much in the regulatory framework which is intrusive, unnecessary and backward looking, and which hamper universities’ freedom of thought and action. The headlong drive to value universities for employability and the salaries of their leavers, which lies behind the LSE’s rise from fourth to first in The Times rankings, is narrowing and distorting the liberal education mission of HE, not the least in the fast approaching world of AI (Artificial Intelligence) when broader human and collaborative skills will be required.
The dream is for government to be following the agenda of UUK, not vice versa. To achieve that, and it’s already moving rapidly in the right direction, UUK needs to grow and for existing bodies including the Russell Group to cede more authority to it. Having its own in-house body pumping out top-quality research and advocacy papers would be good too. It’s all hands on deck, and could begin by merging with HEPI!
Anthony Seldon’s latest book is Truss at 10.