British Universities in the Brexit Moment

Mike Finn

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787437524
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This timely book providesan invaluable analysis of the impact the Brexit decision has had, and will have, on Britain's universities. International by nature, British universities draw their students and staff from across the global community. Britain is a major beneficiary of EU-sponsored research funding through the Horizon 2020 scheme and partnerships as part of the European Research Area. Britain's universities have world-leading reputations, with the UK sector second only to the United States in international prestige. Brexit has – already – affected this, with a drop in student recruitment from abroad and an increase in EU academics electing to leave the British university system.
British Universities in the Brexit Moment offers the first book-length treatment of these issues. It situates the 'Brexit question' in the context of prevailing developments in UK higher education such as marketization and provides an indispensable guide to the material impacts of Brexit on Britain's universities.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: BRITISH UNIVERSITIES IN THE BREXIT MOMENT

[W]e must emphasise the common element in civilizations, rather than the minor variations. We must teach at all times the impersonality of knowledge and the transcendence of values. We must dwell on the universal element in the human spirit. Above all, we should set our forces against the intrusion into science and learning of the anti-social forces of nationalism … We need — Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, all of us — to return to the outlook and values of the Aufklarungzeit, to that Enlightenment which stressed the unity of humanity, rather than its differences. Without weakening the sense of duty to their local society, we must seek to make our young men and women citizens of that republic of mind which knows no frontiers.

— Lord Robbins

‘The University in the Modern World’, an address to the Conference of European Rectors and Vice-Chancellors, Gottingen, 2nd September 1964 in The University in the Modern World (1966b)

In this policy sector in which more is achieved by coordination and choice than by law, [the] EU has embodied the idea that institutions, individuals, and ultimately the state, become more competitive by being more cooperative. There is much that can be done and much diversity retained within systematised rules and values.

This notion is foreign to much of the British population.

— LSE Commission on the Future of Britain and Europe,Higher Education and Research: Report of hearing held on 8 December 2015 (2015)

… academics have politicised higher education. The fact that the UK voted to leave the EU, against the advice of many academics and other so-called experts, has left many academics feeling depressed. Their political project appears to be over.

— Dennis Hayes (2016)

THE BREXIT ‘MOMENT’ AND BRITAIN’S UNIVERSITIES

Brexit and universities may at first seem disparate topics to a disinterested onlooker. One relates to existential questions about the place of Britain in the world, the other to the education of its people. And yet, even in that sentence, it is possible to discern — even before explicating economic links, political ambitions and cultural ties — how Brexit and the universities are interrelated. This is because the education of a country’s citizens is never innocent of assumptions about that country’s place in the world, and because universities — as institutions — at least to some extent, enshrine certain visions of the society they inhabit. Indeed, the sector-level analysis of an institution such as the university offers reflexive insights into the macro-level of the Brexit moment itself, since in many ways, Britain’s universities and their relationships with the European Union throw into sharp relief the broader issues and problems the United Kingdom and its democracy must now confront.

Whilst much attention thus far has focused on how Brexit may negatively impact UK research funding (Finn M., 2016a; Engineering and Technology, 2016), or the security of non-UK EU staff (Savage M., 2017) or the appeal of UK universities to EU students (Morgan, 2017a) — and due attention to all these will be paid here — it’s worth noting at the outset that this book is also an extended reflection on what the Brexit moment says about the place of British universities in the society they seek to critique, support and advance. This book then is a study of British universities in the Brexit moment — not simply Brexit’s material impact on those universities, important though that will be in due course.

Its focus is on the implications of the Brexit moment for Britain’s universities, and that word is carefully chosen. ‘Impacts’ would imply a definitive verdict. This book doesn’t attempt that. What it does seek to do is highlight the potentialities of the Brexit moment for universities — in the hope that within this ‘great debate’ universities will be able to recover some measure of control over their own destinies. This book rests on the premise that we are living through a ‘Brexit moment’ in British political culture, of which the referendum itself is certainly the centrepiece, but which is not simply reducible to the referendum itself. The Brexit moment is the apotheosis of Britain’s existential post-war dilemmas about its place in the world, but it is not merely that. It is a moment of profound interaction between those dilemmas and a genuine breakdown of the post-war British social contract, a breakdown in which universities are themselves implicated (in a number of ways). At the risk of oversimplification, this breakdown can be conceived of as follows: the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent pursuit of ‘austerity’ policies by successive governments have resulted in a measurable decline in the standard of living (Butler, 2013; Hastings et al., 2013). Simultaneously, the gulf between the winners and losers of contemporary British political economy has become stark. As the Grenfell Tower tragedy showed so brutally, the gap between rich and poor in this country — the real value ascribed to human beings — costs lives (Eaton, 2017). The social divide in Britain has itself — in Baudrillardian vein — been commodified into the realm of the hyperreal (Baurdrillard, 1994). Working-class communities are demonised through reality TV shows from The Jeremy Kyle Show to Geordie Shore, whilst conspicuous consumption is celebrated via Made in Chelsea and Meet the Russians.

The popular perception that life-chances have diminished and the social contract has broken down has been growing. One interesting aspect of this is its generational flavour (Gardiner, 2016). The breakdown of the ‘intergenerational contract’ is a key feature of the Brexit moment (Gardiner, 2016). In 2010, Ed Howker and Shiv Malik published a book entitled Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth (Howker & Malik, 2010). In the book, Howker and Malik argued strenuously that the post-war generations had enjoyed benefits and life-chances out of proportion to their successors. As ‘millennials’ became demonised by their elders, often in the Brexit moment as a ‘snowflake generation’ (Fox, 2016), Howker and Malik chronicled the advantages the post-war state doled out to those same elders, from mortgage-interest relief to help them onto the housing ladder to final salary pension schemes and ‘free’ higher education after 1962 (Howker & Malik, 2010). The millennial generation, by contrast, entered the working world saddled by debt in a consumer economy driven by rising house prices and credit. The latter plunged them further into debt whilst the former made it increasingly unlikely they could enjoy the privilege of owning a home. And that is without raising the question of tuition fees, and the ever-growing cost of higher education.

At the same time, discourses of globalisation — integral to neoliberal political economy since the 1970s (Harvey, 2005) — promoted human capital theory as the magic ingredient in a successful ‘knowledge economy’. This discourse fell on fertile ground in Britain, as we shall see later. Higher education expansion was the ideal vehicle for this vernacular human capital theory — more trained brains, more economic growth ran the argument. Though questioned by senior economists, notably Alison Wolf (2003), this has been the axiom at the heart of British higher education expansion over the past several decades (Brown & Carasso, 2013). Successive governments told the swelling ranks of students that the investment would be worth it; that a ‘graduate premium’ would subsist, making the fees and loans worthwhile (BBC News, 2004; Vasagar, 2010). The breakdown of this consensus in the Brexit moment, and the return of the tuition fees debate, is but a symptom of a broader socio-economic malaise (Sparrow, 2017). The comparative success of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party with the young in the 2017 General Election was at least in part attributable to ‘his post-austerity platform, which included a signature commitment to abolishing university tuition fees’ (Wheeler, 2017, p. 46). As the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, Stuart Croft, notes, for the young this resonated in the Brexit moment:

I think the Brexit element is really important as well, as it’s been interpreted — or it’s being felt — I think by a lot of people who are student-age and recently-graduated that there’s been a closing of doorways, a closing of opportunities, a closing-in really of everything … we’ve seen significant youth vote in favour of Remain, and even more significant votes in favour of Labour, who seem to be offering — quote unquote — ‘hope’ against some of the things around austerity, and around fees. (Croft, 2017)

But it was about more than that — it was about providing a ‘credible alternative to the economic assumptions that have dominated British politics for nearly four decades’ (Wheeler, 2017). Those assumptions — which had turned students into consumers — impacted across society and politics. The 2016 referendum result wasn’t their Gotterdammerung, nor the 2017 election result for that matter. But it did mean that they were contested as they had not been for a generation or more.

The Brexit moment in British political culture — where the referendum is seen as a touchstone, rather than an isolated event — is the concatenation of a range of forces in British society, many of which universities have not been isolated from. One such force was anti-establishment sentiment, which reflected rising discontent with austerity, but which in some political guises also represented the outcome of the mainstreaming of far-right discourse (Stocker, 2017). Central to the Brexit moment has been the revitalisation of nationalism as a viable discourse at the heart of British political culture. Indeed, the very language of British higher education policy post-referendum has been emphatically nationalistic (see Chapter Three). A consistent feature of the referendum campaign was the prevalence of discourses on immigration and Europe that espoused a neonationalist frame for Britain and a ‘dynamic reconstruction’ of her historical memory (Trentmann, 1998, p. 230) in favour of nationalist conception of the past (and the future). This was a vision of Britain, and her place in the world, which was antipathetic to the ‘networks’ which characterised globalisation and its vision of global interconnectedness (Runciman, 2016a).

Yet universities exist within transnational networks, and since the medieval period always have done (de Ridder-Symoens, 1992). During the lifespan of the European Union and its predecessors, such networks have been facilitated, endorsed and even sponsored by the organisation itself. The revolt against networks, perceived by David Runciman amongst others, amounts to some extent to a revolt against the very values of the university in Western society (Runciman, 2016a). When the British public elected to leave the European Union, Britain’s universities found themselves at one end of a gulf of understanding between them and a significant proportion of the population. As the Cambridge classicist Robin Osborne notes:

One of the things that I suspect was true of almost everybody in the academic world was that it took the Brexit revolt to reveal how separate their world was and their set of expectations were from that of what turned out to be a narrow majority of the rest of the country. And I think no-one really realised that they were quite so out of touch. (Osborne, 2017)

Runciman enumerated university towns which were outliers in their region as Remain-voting bastions in otherwise Leave territory; ‘Newcastle in the North East, Warwick in the West Midlands, Exeter in the South West, Norwich in East Anglia’ (Runciman, 2016a, p. 5). ‘University towns’ were — according to the historian Peter Mandler — ‘pockets of London-like entitlement scattered all over the country’ (Mandler, 2016). For Mandler, academics contributing to the debate ostensibly on the Remain side exacerbated this gulf:

The Remain campaign undoubtedly contributed to widening this divide. Rather like the New York Times’ attitude to Trump, Remain thought it could laugh off Leave, or dazzle it with ‘facts.’ A very large part of the Remain campaign was focused on troupes of ‘experts’ — investment experts, science and university experts, fiscal policy experts — signing collective petitions and open letters declaring their loyalties to Europe. This played directly into anti-elitist sentiment. (Mandler, 2016)

Europe was seen as a good deal for ‘the establishment’, including ‘experts’ of the academic variety. Academics may not have seen themselves as part of the ‘elite’, but, as Osborne notes, this reflects their own distance from the wider public.

The implications for the university in Britain occasioned by the Brexit moment are profound. Economically, Britain’s universities stand to suffer considerably because of Brexit. Culturally, Britain’s universities have already sustained reputational damage as a consequence of the vote, but more than this have become more isolated from the national community they serve. Politically, British universities — fee-heavy, and unable to deliver on inflated government promises in terms of social mobility — stand in conflict with a government agenda aiming to repurpose them in the service of economic nationalism. These are but three examples of how the Brexit moment poses challenges to Britain’s universities. As this book will explore, they are far from the only implications.

One theme, which has recurred consistently in the research and writing of this book, is that of citizenship. The historian Matthew Grant writes of ‘three registers’ of citizenship; that of legality, that of belonging and that of ‘engagement’ (Grant, 2016a, 2016b). In his ‘first register’, citizenship cuts across the topics discussed in this book in a range of ways. In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty developed the concept of European citizenship (European Commission, 2017a), which will soon be removed from British citizens post-Brexit. This removal will end their freedom of movement within the EU — and potentially more critically the continued possession of such citizenship will no longer guarantee EU27 citizens, including many academics, right of remain in the United Kingdom. But beyond that, it also touches on broader issues regarding changes in British state and society which were taking place long before Brexit. Labour came to office under Tony Blair in 1997 with one of their senior figures pledging to ‘institute a modern view of the relationship between the citizen and the State’ (Mandelson & Liddle, 1996, p. 192). New Labour — and governments since — became fond of referenda as mechanisms to gain greater legitimacy for decisions, or even abdicate responsibility for them (Flinders, 2009). This integration of direct democracy within a representative system posed fundamental challenges to the nature of that representative democracy, not least the place of expertise. As the legal scholar Michael Dougan puts it, in the Brexit context this has laid the groundwork for the regular democratic legitimacy of both Parliament and Government to be ‘challenged by the irregular democratic authority of popular referendums’ (Dougan, 2017a, p. 2). As the political scientist Matthew Flinders characterised it, by the end of the New Labour era Britain was in a state of ‘democratic drift’ (Flinders, 2009). This sets in contemporary context Grant’s belief that ideas of citizenship in Britain are ‘diffuse’ (Grant, 2016a). And this is without taking into account ideas of academic citizenship, which are customarily transnational and borderless. Meanwhile, in attempting to fulfil the requirements of Grant’s third register — that of ‘engaged’ citizens (Grant, 2016a) — academics found themselves demonised. As Dougan puts it, academics ‘who volunteered to perform the public service of participating in various debates surrounding the 2016 referendum’ were met with ‘ferocity’ from some quarters (Dougan, Editor’s introduction, 2017a, p. 5). This book then is also a study in what the Brexit moment means for competing notions of citizenship, and the problems which ensue when these cannot be reconciled with one another. Brexit may be seen as, at least in part, the failure to develop an authentic and successful ‘European citizenship’. But this was not for the want of trying, and universities were — and are — at the heart of these conflicts in the Brexit moment.

THE BREXIT VOTE AND THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

What is clear is that on 24 June 2016, academic citizens across the United Kingdom awoke to news the vast majority of them had dreaded: in the previous day’s referendum, the people of Britain had voted to leave the European Union (Clarke, Goodwin, & Whiteley, 2017; Oliver, 2016; Shipman, 2016). At one academic conference taking place that day, proceedings were described as ‘more of a wake … experienced academics, who thought themselves hardened to trauma by years of bombardment from REF, TEF and NSS, were almost in tears at the first session’ (Edwards, 2016, p. 113). Within hours the Prime Minister tendered his resignation, and the United Kingdom as a whole was plunged into uncertainty, with the depreciation of the pound the first significant economic symptom (Allen, Treanor, & Goodley, 2016). At time of writing, for Britain, and her universities, that uncertainty still shows no sign of abating.

In the words of the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, Brexit meant Brexit, a meaningless phrase that could not hide the uncharted territory into which the United Kingdom, was now headed. Much of the pre-referendum debate had been conducted on two levels — an appeal to economics and an appeal to nationalism (Scott Crines, 2016); a dichotomy characteristic of Britain’s interactions with the European Union over the course of their tortured relationship. In terms of the former, Brexit had implications for the whole of the UK economy, but nowhere was this truer than in the case of higher education.

Higher education has been a growth industry undergoing rapid expansion in the past several decades and is, by most indicators, a ‘world leading’ sector of the British economy. Looked at purely in financial terms, universities and other institutions of higher education are estimated to ‘contribute £73bn’ (at 2016 values) to the wider UK economy, ‘including £11bn of export earnings’ (Hubble, 2016, p. 3). Reputationally, the rankings which proliferate in the globalised higher education landscape routinely rate Britain’s sector second only to that of the United States. ‘Leading’ British institutions (a phrase in commentary customarily referencing members of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities) typically feature in the upper echelons of the rankings, and in the past decade Oxford and Cambridge have taken turns at the summit of different league tables (Kershaw, 2011; Press Association, 2016). As Jo Johnson, the Universities’ Minister, put it in a conference speech to university leaders in September 2016:

Our universities consistently rank among the best in the world, with 34 institutions in the top 200, and more than twice that number in the top 800. UK universities are home to both world-class teaching and life-changing research, and they have been for many, many years. (Johnson, 2016a)

The dramatic expansion of higher education since the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, which converted the former polytechnics into universities, and the concomitant rise of the ‘knowledge economy’ discourse which promoted higher education as both socially just and economically vital, ensured that throughout the UK universities were — or became — significant players in regional economies (N8 Regional Partnership, 2016). In Leave-voting Sheffield, the city’s two major universities — the Russell Group University of Sheffield and the post-1992 Sheffield Hallam University — joined forces to promote economic growth in the region through a new ‘prospectus for the Sheffield City Region’ (Morgan, 2017b, p. 36). A report in 2016 estimated that eight northern research-intensive universities contributed over twice the amount to the northern economy than the income provided by Premier League football (University of Sheffield, 2016). This placed the universities’ collective contribution to the regional economy in the range of £6.6bn gross value added (GVA), creating nearly 120,000 full-time equivalent employment roles (University of Sheffield, 2016). In recent years, universities have reshaped Britain’s built environment, with the construction of new buildings and the attendant (and not uncontroversial) ‘boom’ in student accommodation at the heart of towns and cities (Bennett, 2017). As Nick Hillman, the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), is wont to put it, when searching for a university, ‘look for the cranes’ (Cocozza, 2017).

This shift in the economic ‘presence’ of Britain’s universities was driven by a dynamic of expansion — in terms of institutions and student numbers — which had characterised the post-war period but which accelerated dramatically after the 1990s. As Stefan Collini notes:

In 1990 there were forty-six universities in the UK educating approximately 350,000 students. Twenty-six years later, following the founding of a whole raft of new universities, often based on an earlier college of higher education, there are now more than 140 universities with over two million students. (Collini, 2017, p. 1)

Brexit has economic implications for universities, to be sure. But it also has cultural and political ones. Universities are now more prominent in British public life and popular culture that at any previous point in history. A greater share of the UK population than at any previous point has an investment in them....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter One Introduction: British Universities in the Brexit Moment
• Part I The Impact(S) of Brexit
• Part II The Implications of The Brexit Moment
• Part III Conclusions
• References
• Index