Speaking of Universities

by Stefan Collini

Various justifications have been offered for current policies, not always with conscious cynicism: ‘the need to reduce public expenditure’; ‘the need to secure a sustainable financial future for our universities’; ‘the need to make student choice effective’; ‘the need to make students bear some of the expense of their education’. However valid as goals in their own right any of these may be, as justifications for what is being done to higher education at the moment they are simply not persuasive. In reality, the overriding aim is to change the character of universities and make them more closely conform to market ideology. The innocuous phrase ‘private providers’ represents the shark in sheep’s clothing: profit-seeking capital is to be allowed to run higher education in the way that it increasingly runs (ruins?) so many aspects of our common life. Universities must thus be made over into businesses, selling a product to customers: if they reduce costs and increase sales, they make a profit; if they don’t, they go bust. Profit is the only indefeasible goal, competition the only effective mechanism.