British Academic Leadership, with Even More Leaderocity than in the U.S.
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Ed Kiely on the terrible university leadership in the Britain that matches or is even worse than what is happening in American universities. In the British case, it is being helped by our old friend Keir Starmer taking far right positions on limiting international students, which just undermines these schools even more since they are as reliant on foreign students for tuition as American schools. But the leadership class there is as overpaid and feckless as here.
Most of the opprobrium aimed at universities is fantastical. I only wish that academic life was as radical and subversive as its detractors believe: if higher education was as committed to ‘woke indoctrination’ as the Tory peer Nat Wei claims, I imagine I would spend a lot less time on administrative emails. More reasonable criticism has tended to focus on the glut of shiny buildings that universities have commissioned in recent years. The extent of improvements shouldn’t be exaggerated – to install a new radiator in my office last year, the whole building had to be evacuated and sealed off because there was known to be asbestos in the walls – but a construction boom did follow the abolition of the cap on student numbers. According to one study, between 2014 and 2019 ground was broken on projects worth a total of £8.8 billion.
Universities saw these new buildings as a means of attracting overseas students as well as sources of income in themselves. But how were these construction projects to be funded? The solution, at least for some institutions, was to start issuing bonds. Cambridge was one of the first universities to do this. Its 40-year bond, issued in 2012, received an Aaa rating from Moody’s, which judged it more secure than British government bonds. By the time Cambridge issued its second bond in 2018, raising £600 million, Manchester, Southampton and Leeds had followed suit and the market was worth more than £4.4 billion, almost 15 per cent of the sector’s annual income. The turn to bonds gave universities another reason to strip academics of their defined benefit pensions. (The recent pensions dispute, which lasted from 2018 until 2023, was the longest in the sector’s history.) The investor prospectus for Cambridge’s 2018 bond listed ‘financial risks associated with the pension scheme’ as one of the factors that might affect the bond’s performance.
The increased complexity of university finances is often used to justify vice-chancellors’ exorbitant salaries: median pay last year was £340,901. As in other industries, the enormous wage disparity within universities distances the corporate leadership from the concerns of rank-and-file employees: it helps to steady the hand that wields the axe. The responses of some university leaders to their institutions’ deteriorating finances have smacked of opportunism. My own employer, Queen Mary University of London, is rushing through the merger of several departments, and the loss of at least 59 jobs, in response to what senior management refers to vaguely as the university’s ‘financial situation’. Unions have alleged that the university has been slow to provide any financial data that might justify the cuts to them and their members.
Labour’s policies on universities can appear contradictory. It wants to reduce the number of international students, leaving universities even more cash-strapped, but according to the New York Times it is spending £50 million on attracting US researchers affected by Trump’s policies. (The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology says that the UK is ‘open for business on international science’ and wants to help ‘some of the world’s best researchers bring their ideas to life here’.) The government is introducing one measure that will do something to address universities’ precarious financial position: from this autumn, the cap on tuition fees will be lifted. UK students will pay £9535, raising an additional £390 million. But that gain will be cancelled out by the government’s changes to national insurance, which will cost universities £372 million. The government has also announced funding cuts for 2025-26, reducing spending on high-cost subjects and access by £108 million, and halving capital spending.
For young academics – I’m an early career fellow – the situation looks bleak. We have all received at least three years of highly specialised training, often at great expense – my PhD cost the taxpayer £100,000, of which I received around £14,000 per year. But the supply of permanent jobs, or ‘open-ended positions’ as they are now called, has all but dried up. When one does come up, the competition is intense. A recent opening for an entry-level lectureship at a Russell Group university attracted two applicants who already had permanent and senior positions at other institutions. Even academics with secure jobs don’t feel secure. Meanwhile, those of us on fixed-term contracts sit and wait for our funding to run out. Never mind: my university’s website tells me that ‘great ideas can and should come from anywhere.’
Great ideas will come from anywhere–Chinese universities that will probably start to dominate the world soon enough. Those ideas won’t challenge anything around order. But then what capitalist wants that anyway?