Diagnosing the crisis in higher education

Diagnosing the crisis in higher education: a call for contributions on what next?

We have laid out the context below as a starting point for a debate on strategy in the new term. Mainly, this context is one we already know, as we’ve been hearing about it at work and on the news. However, what we have been discussing less is what we can do about it.

We invite contributions of no more than 1000 words that put forward strategy positions and write-ups from experiences of what works/doesn’t work. The aim is to share these contributions so we can have some clear ideas and arguments to discuss collectively at the next Rank-and-File University workers meeting on Sunday 26th January: https://lu.ma/tfklf7y3

Areas for discussion can cover, but need not be limited to:

• Concrete plans for a national funding campaign

• How to respond to the upcoming ballots

• How to politicise a pay dispute

• The role of students in future strategies

• Strategy ideas for uniting redundancy struggles

• The role of the ‘Three Fights’

• Strategy ideas from non-academic workers

• The future direction of HE

You can submit contributions by emailing us.

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Although the warnings have been sounded many times before, the higher education sector is in crisis. Changes in student numbers have been a key driver of the current crisis. For some universities, this has been the decline of the international student market after recent visa changes. While for others, the constant expansion in home student numbers up the ranking tables has also prevented home growth, leaving many places unfilled. Universities have reorganised to compete with each other over attracting more students - along with the much higher international fees. Managers have often predicted permanent growth, with few preparing for the prospect that numbers may plateau - or even decline. This has combined with other related financial crises, often involving mismanagement, building new buildings/campuses, or VC vanity projects. The sector is increasingly casualised, threatened by the spectre of AI, and divided over the value of research and disciplinary specialisms. This means facing down existential crises for some institutions.

This has all occurred against the backdrop of a policy vacuum in addressing the challenges facing Higher Education. In the absence of a coherent strategy for the sector, successive governments have either adhered vaguely to outdated neoliberal orthodoxies or, more recently, sought to exploit the sector for shallow political gains. With the international student market undergoing what appears to be a long-term shift and the statutory constraints on university funding remaining unchanged, it is the impulsive groupthink of university leaders that is driving the sector toward such dramatic changes. There is no discernable ideology in the background of any of this, no cohering vision which managerial classes are actively pursuing. There is simply the ethos of ‘Change Management’ which repeats: the future is crisis, we must prepare the organisation to deal with it. 

As the QMUL UCU mapping project has documented, in the last two years, there have been announcements of redundancies and restructurings happening in at least 85 universities. This is approximately half of all institutions. This is unprecedented in Britain. The announcements range in scale from cuts responding to the latest downturn in student income, the opening of voluntary severance schemes, and much more aggressive changes - some of which risk the continuation of the university. So far, there have been announcements of compulsory redundancies at Goldsmiths, Huddersfield, Hull, Keele, Kent, UCLan, Oxford Brookes, Arts University Plymouth, Plymouth, Sheffield Hallam, Chichester and Coventry.

There is a real possibility that multiple universities could be forced to close over the next year. Many are risking breaching their funding arrangements or cannot meet their requirements to pay salaries. The Office for Student modelling suggests that nearly three quarters (72%) of universities could be in deficit by 2025-26, and 40% would have fewer than 30 days' liquidity - a basic condition for a university to operate. In response to these projections, the only 'answer' the OfS has is mergers, closures, and institutional refinancing none of which address the structural problem. The current government has been clear that there will be no bailouts for failing universities. Instead, other universities may take on students, with little plan beyond that.

The sector is undergoing an intense and deeply damaging phase of transformation. Institutions are being radically resized, with employers seeking massive cost base reductions and eye watering staff student ratios. Programme closures, professional service restructures, and curriculum reviews have become a permanent feature of many institutions' annual activities. Exorbitant fees are paid to management consultancies, with virtually no understanding or care about the sector, to audit the affairs of universities and prescribe areas of efficiency savings.  The diminishing role of critical thinking within British academia has reached a terminal stage. Principled and innovative programs are being systematically shuttered, while course content is increasingly homogenised to align with confused and self-defeating metrics drawn from disoriented student cohorts and superficial market signals. 

This has lent itself to a massive deskilling of the teaching workforce, as more and more casualised workers are called upon to offer a one-size fits all approach to content delivery, rendering their senior counterparts an easy target for cost saving. This simultaneous degradation of student and academic life has been further exacerbated by the rapid proliferation of AI technologies, which have deepened the impoverishment of intellectual engagement across the sector. Meanwhile, research time continues to be drastically reduced, leaving academics struggling to balance teaching workloads with their scholarly obligations - a situation which is ultimately held against them when they face competitive redundancy processes. 

Nor are non-academic workers free from this radical decomposition in higher education. They have similarly been affected by redundancies, while pressure mounts on programme offices to meet evermore fanciful student recruitment targets, on libraries to offer new “services” such as click-and-collect that give the illusion of enhancing the “student experience”, and maintenance staff to keep shiny new (and often empty) buildings looking shiny. Workloads intensify and increase, and staff numbers continually fall, all while we are periodically told, in a particularly depraved form of gaslighting from management, that our jobs are not actually necessary. Restructuring programmes for departments, as well as entire institutions, seek to casualise, deskill, and outsource as much non-academic work as possible, often met with dismay but limited resistance from a largely disorganised and fragmented section of the higher education workforce. Where resistance has been mounted with more vigour to these attacks on working conditions, it has often been sectional within the non-academic workforce, despite the inherent interrelatedness of working conditions within the various different components of this workforce. 

Ballots

In UNISON, a consultative ballot on this year’s pay offer ran through August, and following the union’s recommendation, 80% of members voted to reject the pay offer. However, oddly, any reference to negotiations on working conditions was absent from the consultative ballot. UNISON’s higher education service group executive then voted to move to a ballot for industrial action, which was originally meant to start in early November and run until January. However, the national union bureaucracy overrode this decision, pushing the ballot’s starting date back to mid-January, meaning it now won’t end until March, with April looking like the earliest any potential strike action could take place. Around a third of UNISON branches have opted-out, meaning they won’t be included in the ballot. However, this opting-out has been geographically disparate, for example, no branches in Greater London have opted out of the ballot.

There are concerns within local branches around getting over the legal turnout threshold required for strike action. Previous national ballots by UNISON have only met the turnout threshold in a couple dozen universities, and no doubt running a pay dispute during a wave of redundancies will add new challenges. The slow march of the bureaucracy to even get to a ballot has also not helped the situation. However, all is not lost. The ballots and strikes on 2022/23 have brought in a wave of new, often young and militant, reps into local UNISON branches, and the potential for co-ordinated, industrial action with UCU has breathed fresh wind into many’s sails. Despite naysayers and adverse conditions, a national strike ballot is obviously wanted, and has been fought for by a part of the university workforce that, despite past weakness, is growing in levels of organisation. 

The results of the recent UCU national consultative ballot on pay and working conditions also provides an indication of what may happen with another campus union over the next year. The UCU bureaucracy did little to build for the ballot, other than sending emails. HEC recommended a rejection of the pay offer and acceptance of the pay-related offer. The turnout in the ballot was 27% and the results were: 68% rejected the pay offer, 86% accepted the terms of reference on the pay-related offer, and 53% were willing to participate in industrial action.

We should be honest that this is a low turnout - it would have failed to meet the legal threshold for industrial action. However, given the lack of any concerted attempt by the union to build the ballot, it was also a surprisingly high turnout. There is a clear rejection of the pay offer, yet many members were also clearly prepared to settle on the so-called “pay-related” elements (anti-casualisation, workload, and equality) despite no discernable movement on any of these. From the ballot, it would seem that many members are happy to split the four fights, ending three of these.

Strategically, in the context of sector-wide cuts, ending the three fights and focusing only on pay, is not the optimum scenario. Branches that have recently undergone, are currently experiencing, or are facing the threat of a redundancy program may lack the immediate appetite for a national pay dispute. While the main issues that such branches will be imminently facing are: ⁠increased workload, ⁠⁠worsening equalities and ⁠⁠increased casualisation or illegitimate sacking of casual workers. The result of the consultative ballot on the three fights reflects, perhaps for the first time, a unified stance taken by all UCU factions, agreeing that the employers’ proposed terms of reference for developing a framework on casualisation, workload, and equalities are satisfactory. This means that while branches continue to face further deterioration on all these fronts, the prospect of national industrial action on these issues will be postponed in favor of a phase of negotiations over a non-binding framework covering the most basic principles. 

However, as we now move toward a national ballot over pay, this will be the first opportunity in over a year for branches across the sector to mobilise for a national industrial dispute. It is unfortunate that the machinery of the union makes it difficult to synchronise the terms of disputes with the most pressing issues of the moment. In reality, however, it is not the technical terms of national dispute mandates which get workers out of bed in the morning and onto a picket line. For example, in 2018, changes to pensions served as a pretext to build a campaign narrative about the wider impacts of marketisation on higher education. This had a massive mobilising effect, bringing together different constituencies of the workforce, many of whom were not directly affected by the terms of the dispute but who had an appetite for systemic change in the sector. The dispute also gave rise to an awareness and willingness to challenge the undemocratic structures of the union. 

Since the suspension of the 2023 UCU national dispute, the political landscape has radically shifted: a year of sustained organising across the sector around Palestine, the rise of a new Labour government and its decision to uncap domestic fees, the return of the incumbent UCU General Secretary, and the first year in six years without national industrial action in the sector. Repeated calls during the 2023 dispute to “bank and build” and to develop a “proper strategy” now ring hollow, following a year of inaction with neither meaningful base-building nor strategy discussions being prioritised by the union.

We should take this as a lesson: retreats into recovery phases do not necessarily provide a good basis for momentum building. Historically, it has been during sustained phases of national industrial action that wide sections of university workers have developed a proactive relationship with their union branches, strategy and broader struggles. Even in periods of political demoralisation, workers have felt a sense of collective identity in dashed aspirations. As local branches face the unfolding crisis unevenly, university workers have never been so atomised and disconnected from the national union. A national dispute at this juncture could help draw together isolated defensive struggles and give political expression and industrial power to a strategy for the future of Higher Education.