Universities: None of your business!

Cinzia Yates

Universities have existed on these islands for over a thousand years. They are integral to our society and culture and key to the concept of civilisation.

Universities represent centres of learning to protect and develop knowledge and to disseminate that knowledge for the good of mankind through teaching and writing. We can complain about ivory towers and elitism, but the fact remains, without universities we would know very little.

Things we rely on every day; medicine, democracy, history, architecture, engineering etc. all exist because we have universities.

Although we have known that there has been an issue with the UK Higher Education system for a while the last month has seen a crunch point, with Cardiff University the first to announce major cuts, cuts described as a cruel and unnecessary, by the University and Colleges Union (UCU), in an attempt to stay afloat.

Sadly, Cardiff is now one of many universities across the whole of the UK to announce such cuts representing a major crisis in UK HE.

So, what has gone so wrong that, after 1000 years, the value of universities is being questioned in the UK and so many are being allowed to fail?

Has knowledge ceased to be integral to our society? Have we discovered and learned everything we can? Or is this a sign that we have a major lesson to learn in 2025?

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Not everything is a business

 I have worked in and around universities in England and Wales for a couple of decades. Although my aspirations to be an academic were dashed when I realised my research areas might be a little too niche, even for university research, I turned my hand to research development and a career in supporting academic colleagues to gain funding to undertake research in a variety of fields.

I specialised in arts and humanities research but have worked across the full gamut of disciplines.

University research is not free. Researchers need to be paid, as no one should be expected to provide their labour for free.

Even desk-based researchers like historians need libraries and computers and access to global archives, and we know that medical researchers need expensive kit and labs and reams of research staff.

Regardless of your discipline research costs actual money. For a thousand years universities have found money to undertake research, because the value of research has always been understood. A byproduct of research is teaching.

Researchers almost always also teach, and often teach based on their individual research, disseminating that research and the knowledge generated by it. Monarchies and governments for centuries have understood this and supported that teaching through scholarships and grants for those who showed a clear talent in the field, and making a bit of extra cash by charging those who didn’t, or who wished to travel from other countries to access our excellent teaching and knowledge. It worked well as a model.

Until recently.

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Neoliberalism

Until neoliberalism, when everything, every aspect of culture and society was required to show a ‘return on investment’ and every key institution that made our civilisation was expected to become a ‘business’. We saw it through the 80s with Thatcherite privatisation of national services such as the railways and coal and steel. We see it with the creeping nationalisation of the NHS, with every life and every medical intervention needing to show its financial worth in money saved. And while universities are not private businesses, that has not saved them from being pushed into a constant fight to prove ‘return on investment’ to continue to receive government funding to survive. We must know the price of everything, but recognise the value of nothing.

Whose side is the REF on?

You’ll see a lot of discussion of the value of academia, and why it’s wrong to cut academic jobs and certain courses. UCU has been out in force to defend academic staff who are the focus of impending redundancies and job instability. There are reams of articles on the effect of cuts on students, of brain drain, on the importance of teaching. but I am yet to see an article or discussion of the role of REF in all this. And REF is a major player in this game, the irony of which is not lost on me.

REF stands for Research Excellence Framework and replaced the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) in 2014. The REF is a tool to assess the government’s return on investment in research and to decide how to allocate central government funding for subsequent periods. It seems a reasonable idea; every five to six years, on one census date, all universities are judged on their research output and impact on the world and funded accordingly. It checks that universities are doing what they are meant to, that research and surrounding activities are supported, and that staff can undertake research in a conducive environment.

It is kind of the University equivalent of Ofsted and we’ve all seen how wrong that has gone! As a system it has become gamified and created an environment in which REF scores and the potential for financial gain are driving the strategies and developments in research rather than the other way around. It means there is no space for failure, for very niche research without an obvious international interest, for discovery that may not become useful for a century, for research that cannot be commodified and measured and quantified in pounds and pence. It has reversed the whole concept of the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake as a central tenet of our society.

The REF has become the main player in a game it should just be adjudicating.

The Senedd can’t help you

 In the case of Cardiff, I have seen shock and dismay at the decisions to cut music and nursing. It seems perverse to cut music in the land of song and nursing when we have a crisis in the health sector due to lack of nurses. Universities in Wales had been linked by differing funding structures for Welsh students, and so evolved around student availability.

Naturally, locals have turned to their MSs and the Senedd, but the Senedd cannot really help, because while HE is devolved, it is expected to play a game where all the rules are set by Westminster and Research England. Sound familiar to anyone else in Wales?

The finances and number of student places in Wales is managed by Medr (formerly HEFCW) who do lots of exciting statistical magic to decide which institution gets what funding. Universities in Wales work together with Medr on this. But total the amount MEDR have to distribute is decided by Research England and a large part of that is dependent on how a university does in the REF. As an extra kicker, I have seen issues in the way REF scores research undertaken in Wales as research on Welsh subjects is often classed as ‘regional’ while research on an English subject it is scored as ‘national’ or ‘international’.

I personally have worked with academics to remove any reference to Wales or Welsh from applications for funding to avoid this bias. So, while we may look to the Senedd for support, their hands are tied by a financial situation very similar to that of the Barnett formula and consequentials. If we do not score well enough by English standards, the English government will not fund Welsh universities. Wales cannot access its own tax income to make decisions about funding universities in Wales.

Wales can only be the land of song if England will send us the sheet music.

Cardiff has lost course(s)

 As a former student of the CU School of Music and employee of Cardiff University, and as a Cardiff resident, I’d like to take a moment to focus on the decisions being made in Cardiff specifically, why they’re wrong, and why they think they are right.

Music as a subject has a very low, if not negative, return on investment. Music has been integral to learning since it was included in the Quatrivium of the ancients alongside arithmetic, astrology and geometry, as key grounding for the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic. For centuries it was seen as essential for any person of standing, including royalty, to have a knowledge of music (history, theory and performance).

It is a key aspect of logic and understanding our world, but as any musician will tell you it does not make money; in fact it is a very expensive pursuit.

Cardiff University must maintain a full pipe organ, concert hall, numerous Steinways and a raft of specialist electronic music equipment, as well pay specialist staff to look after it all, and that’s before you even include research or teaching staff. Although Music was once a desirable degree for employers as it required a wide variety of skills and created well rounded graduates, music students do not study music to become rich. There are not billions of pounds available to conduct music research. And no amount of music research, no matter how brilliant, is ever going to stop climate change or cure cancer. So, it is evident that, assuming a university is now a business, a decision has been made to cut off a costly arm of that business. However, this is very naïve.

Music is a discipline of standing. It has been central to learning for centuries. It is part of what makes a university a university as much as any Students Union is. Universities need university choirs and orchestras and concert series to attract students and staff who want a full university experience. Their value to a university, and to knowledge, cannot be quantified. And that value is the inherent value of centres of learning. They should not be judged on their perceived return on investment.

Project completion bias

I recently read about the concept of ‘project completion bias’. This is a concept that explains how projects can go wrong when they miss the purpose of the project, and rather just focus on completing it. Lots of alterations are made when project completion looks to be at risk, but these alterations slowly move away from the purpose of the project leading to ultimate project failure. The project in this case is to cut costs at a university.

But the dogged adherence to REF and making universities function as businesses has caused senior management to make a series of decisions that would see that succeed, but they have forgotten the real purpose of a university. They are saving the business aspect by cutting off the central concept of generating knowledge, and without generating knowledge they have no university at all! They might save money in the short term, but in the long term they will have abandoned a millennium old purpose.

Where to make the cuts to save Welsh HE

 Welsh HE can only survive if it is willing to make radical cuts, but cutting academic courses and departments and making hundreds of research staff redundant is not the cut it needs. It needs to cut itself free from the tyranny of REF, of Research England and of the neoliberal requirement for everything to be a business that can demonstrate return on investment. Bloated institutions can then cut costs by releasing the vast numbers of managerial and admin staff it employs purely to feed the beast that is REF, and release them to employers who are businesses, where their skills and knowledge can be used to create financial gain where it is appropriate.

Financial gain that can be taxed accordingly, and that tax then fed into key public institutions such as universities. Welsh HE can only survive if it is empowered to make decisions based on what is best for knowledge creation in Wales, for students in Wales or who want to come to Wales, for academics in Wales and who want to work in Wales. HE in Wales can only survive if it returns to the basic ideals that have made universities one of the most successful and long-lasting institutional models in the world. We can have another millennium of universities if we remember what they are for and stop trying to solve problems that are the problems of business, not the problems of universities.