| 8 mins read
SUMMARY
- Britain's universities face an acute financial and moral crisis: they are increasingly criticised as elitist, self-serving and disconnected from the everyday lives of UK citizens.
- Populist politics and public opinion reflect a growing suspicion of universities.
- Research-intensive universities are distant from disadvantaged communities and ‘left behind places’ which are deeply affected by regional inequalities.
- To regain trust and renew their social license, universities must redefine their moral purpose and find new ways of engaging with places and communities across the UK.
Britain's universities face a serious financial crisis, expressed most obviously in recent job losses. Thirty years of sector expansion have come to an end. Yet it seems like only yesterday that universities were the leading edge of the global ‘knowledge economy’, the means of social mobility and key to the regeneration of post-industrial towns. The political weather has changed, and the value of universities is being questioned.
Universities are being recast as unaccountable and self-serving ivory towers and repositories of woke excesses and ‘Mickey Mouse’ courses. In his investigation of the depleted finances of universities, Sam Freedman observes that universities ‘have few friends these days’. The causes of the crisis are several and complex, but it is clear that despite their economic significance, universities are neither a ministerial priority nor a doorstep issue.
In an era of populism, they make an easy political target. As Nature, the organ of the academic elite, put it recently:
Higher education has become a point of societal division, and a target of attacks by populist leaders who accuse universities of not fully representing all shades of the social and political spectrum in their teaching and research. Increasing restrictions on visas and immigration in many countries are also straining a model that has become reliant on international movement both of students—who often pay higher fees than do their domestic peers—and of researchers.
The US experience may prove to be a harbinger. In 2021, the now Vice-President, J. D. Vance, announced: ‘The universities are the enemy … we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country’. There is little evidence that US universities grasped the severity of these words at the time. But the Trump administration has followed through on the threats, choosing the world's richest university, Harvard, as its primary target. In key respects, the Trump administration takes its inspiration from Viktor Orbán's shackling of Hungarian universities.
The problem of universities
Universities represent a new front in the populist war against elites. The locus of the populist backlash lies in the former mining villages, seaside resorts and mill towns that make up ‘left behind places’. In a recent speech at UCL, Kim McGuinness, Mayor of the North East, said: ‘I know this place is packed with brilliant scientists and students. But… what difference can your research make in Ashington, Wallsend, Sunderland, or Consett?’ Surely, this is a question that universities must answer.
Britain's highest-ranked research-based universities are distant from its most disadvantaged communities. London universities are generators of social mobility, but in regions like the North East, social mobility has stalled, meaning the higher education system as a whole is reproducing geographical inequalities. The top twenty universities for social mobility are all located in London. Universities alone cannot fix these problems, but they should acknowledge their role in producing them.
Recent research from YouGov shows that 45 per cent of Britons believe too many young people go to university, while 23 per cent think the number is ‘about right’ and 10 per cent say not enough go. On the other hand, 46 per cent say apprenticeships prepare young people better for the future than degrees. Less than half of supporters of Reform UK believe universities are good for the country (45 per cent) compared to approximately 67 per cent of the wider public.
‘Research breakthroughs’ mean little in left behind places where making ends meet is paramount and economic growth is something that happens for other people. It is unclear whether universities have much to offer our most disadvantaged communities.
Meanwhile, Universities UK's own research shows that, in focus groups, participants state that universities produce graduates for jobs that do not exist, cater for students that do not stay and do not care about their communities, promote innovations that places do not need and leave students with crippling debts. Here, universities are viewed as extractive rather than productive, and face a moral crisis.
The gathering storm
A storm is gathering around universities that will make current challenges pale. The skies have already darkened in a place like, say, Durham, where the university faces a Reform-led council which has declared war on net zero and EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion), shibboleths that rule academic life. Some might ask, ‘So what?’ But the council is the land-use planning authority, so its decisions will materially affect the development of the university. Similar questions are relevant in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire, where Reform controls county councils, and in Hull and East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire, where it controls mayoralties.
Critics are reheating arguments about the uselessness of universities from the USA and Hungary for a UK audience. According to Nigel Farage, universities are ‘drunk on foreign money’ and ‘poisoning the minds of students’. You have been warned.
An acute financial emergency is now overlaid by a more profound moral crisis. Anthony Finkelstein has suggested that ‘[u]niversities cannot present themselves as purely cosmopolitan institutions, beyond the immediate concerns of this country and its citizens’. Being a node in a global knowledge network is not enough: universities must also consider their national and local responsibilities, including their obligations to ‘left behind places’.
Charting a way forward
Universities must find new ways to connect with disadvantaged communities, and to offer new accounts of their societal value. New ways of working are required, alongside a long-term commitment to building trusted relationships with local and regional communities as a core function. We need a renewed focus on community-oriented research, bringing academic expertise to bear on problems faced by disadvantaged places and people. It is an open question as to whether universities have the capacity and will to meet this challenge.
General statements about economic value appeal to technocrats, but they do not connect with hearts and minds and they do not translate into a solid base of citizen support that is ever more urgently needed if universities are to survive this new era.
Digested read created by Anya Pearson in collaboration with the authors.
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