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In one of David Lodge’s famous campus novels, a young English literature lecturer pictures her university as “the ideal human community, where … people were free to pursue excellence and self‑fulfilment, each according to their own rhythm and inclination”. A non-academic friend comments wryly: “Well, it’s nice work if you can get it.”
Nice Work was written in 1988, in part as a fictional response to the Thatcher cuts to higher education at the time. It’s safe to say a contemporary equivalent would need a different title. Forty years on, universities like to sell themselves along the lines of Robyn Penrose’s romantic vision. But the marketised reality for modern university staff, particularly those at the sharp end of a deepening funding crisis, is another world altogether.
As the Guardian reported this month, almost a quarter of universities – including prestigious Russell Group institutions such as Durham and Cardiff – are taking a scythe to budgets and planning to shed staff. The Office for Students (OFS), the university regulator established in 2017, has predicted that 72% of higher education providers in England could be in the red by 2025-26. Up to 10,000 redundancies or job losses are in prospect. The Royal College of Nursing has warned that nursing courses are being “engulfed” by the cuts, even as the care sector seeks to fill 40,000 vacancies. Arts and humanities subjects are also in the line of fire.
Airily, the OFS is calling for more of the same, recommending “bold and transformative action … while continuing to deliver for the students of today and tomorrow”. Easy to say, extremely hard to do. But what about the poor bloody infantry?
Demoralised university staff, whose pay has been declining steeply in real terms, are not responsible for the dysfunctional marketisation of higher education, which is at the root of today’s financial black hole. Successive Conservative governments are, having failed to foresee how treacherous the politics of raising tuition fees would be. Nor did academics have anything to do with the decision to impose visa restrictions on high-fee‑paying foreign students, which has compounded the problem. Yet it is they who must bear the brunt of Westminster’s cumulative mistakes, in the form of acute job insecurity, insufficient resources, pressures from panicked managers and increasingly untenable workloads.
As one vice-chancellor rightly told the Guardian, this unfolding crisis is largely passing under the radar. The drip-drip nature of the bad news being delivered on campuses up and down the country is relentless but dispersed. That does not make it any less stressful for those attempting to fill gaps in teaching left by departed colleagues, or for a thirtysomething humanities lecturer wondering whether, after years of impoverished study, their job will even see them into middle age.
At present, Labour is doing little to help. In November, Bridget Phillipson announced that the annual tuition fees cap would go up in line with inflation from April, the first rise for eight years. A £285 rise to £9,535 will modestly increase the debts of individual students, while doing little to address the overall problem. A new settlement is desperately needed – one that properly restores a sector that delivers a public good to the public realm. And which enables a sense of professional vocation, for those who work within it, to be renewed.
