What's wrong with universities?

Robin McAlpine

The Herald has been running a series all week on the future of universities in Scotland. As someone who was the chief political lobbyist for the university sector for more than a decade I read the various articles with interest. Sadly it didn't take things very far forward, partly because it didn't actually explain what the problem was beyond needing more money.

I want to explain why it is that this issue appears so complicated. It's because its been made complicated by managerialism (would you be surprised to hear), but also because it really was deprioritised over the last ten years in government. But there are solutions that aren't being set out, and questions that aren't being asked.

First, to explain why this debate often doesn't make sense to a lay person, let me give you a taster. In the university sector research funding has been extremely formulaic for a long time. Research funding is what pays for boffins in labs or philosophers in dusty rooms, engaged primarily not in teaching but in creating new knowledge.

For the longest time this highly complex, long-term work was given a rating out of five stars (seriously) and funded only for getting four or five stars. This was an imposition of managerialism. It is yet another case of 'the finance manager doesn't understand quantum physics so doesn't know who is any good and should be funded, so crude metrics are needed'. 

It is the usual pattern in Scotland – managers managing things they don't understand so creating simultaneously complex and reductively-blunt performance indicators by imposing enormous bureaucracy on the people doing the actually-valuable work. 

For universities it was the only game in town; they knew it was stupid but had no option. (As one leading university principal who had been a microbiologist told me, if Crick and Watson had been working in modern Scotland, they would never have discovered DNA. Because no-one gets funded for a decade to muck about in labs poking at something that turns out to be a double helix DNA strand. It's publish-or-die, year after year.)

And of course in time the management class wanted to do the same for teaching. This was driven by a right-wing former corporate boss who used to be Chairman of Rangers Football Club and was one of those people who just cropped up on every public quango, board or ministerial review.

Except he didn't have a clue what he was doing. He wanted a 'funding poll tax' – that every subject would get the same funding. The staff at the quango that distributes university funding explained to him that this would kill every medical school in Scotland stone dead overnight. So there were to be two bands. Then the staff explained that it would also kill engineering and lab-based science...

The long and short of it was that we were told there would be four bands but we (the universities) had to come up with a simple performance indicator to 'prove' how much teaching costs. I was on the group that produced these indicators. And I can't tell you how farcical it is, a farcical situation everyone on the group knew was farcical.

Let me give you an example; take an economics lecture. What does it cost? Well, it costs the time of the lecturer, the cost of the lecture room, the cost of the lobby to get into the lecture room, the cost of administering the department, the cost of student recruitment and so on.

Except how much of the student recruitment budget (a PR department in a completely different part of the university, largely targeting overseas students) should be allocated? How much time does it take an economics lecturer to prepare the lecture? Is it more than or less than a medieval historian? Do we just average it?

How much admin is enough admin? How much of that is admin to cover the production of the performance indicators imposed on the department? But to really get how daft this is, try this; if you move the lecture upstairs to a first floor lecture room, the class becomes more expensive. Why? Because now you have to factor in the cost of the lift and an extra lobby.

Just to be clear, some of these buildings are hundreds of years old and must be maintained no matter what. So you've already paid for the building which means if a funding model was realistic it would be about the maintenance cost of the lecture theatre. But that's not how it works; they create a theoretical rental cost for the lecture theatre and a theoretical model to decide how much of a circulation area a student takes up, and a theoretical cost for a journey in a lift, presuming no-one uses the stairs (except lots of people use the stairs).

So when someone says in one of the articles 'we don't even know how much it costs to teach a student' my response is 'nope, obviously because the question is wrong'. The question isn't how much it costs to teach an economics student but how much it takes to sustain an economics department resourced and capable of teaching students.

Let's therefore take a step back. This 'funding crisis in universities' has never not been something universities go on about (except in 2004-2008 when a campaign I led got us an 18 per cent real-terms rise in funding which was significant). So let's just ask 'OK, so to replace funding lost since 2014 how much money is needed?'.

Basically the answer to that is roughly £160 million. There are about 120,000 Scottish undergraduates so that's about £1,300 per head. Meanwhile English undergraduates are paying £9,000 and yet the English system is arguably in a worse financial crisis than the Scottish universities are. Why?

This is the crucial part; the logic of the paths universities set themselves on is fundamentally inflationary. This is how it goes; introduce fees and remove the student numbers cap and create an institutional strategy wholly reliant on overseas students and you do two things. First, you increase your marketing budget very much indeed. Second, you convince yourself that only shiny new super-campuses are capable of attracting students.

So you spend like hell to build empires that look great in brochures – and then you have to pay for them. Half the role of universities now is property development. The one mantra that was universal from toward the end of my time with the universities was that they weren't really universities at all, they were 'global businesses'.

Except if that is true then they're clearly failing global businesses. Whatever they're doing in their imaginary free market, it isn't working. They'd take £160 million in funding now, reversing cuts from the last decade. But would that sort them out? I very much doubt it.

Don't misunderstand me, it is a stupid nation that cuts its higher education funding. The Scottish Government found that much money to throw around for a counterproductive and needless Council Tax freeze and they should find if for the universities now.

But this is the reality; a group of self-important planners and financial managers and senior admin teams took total control of the universities. They abolished old means of governance and centralised control. They started treating academics as service staff to be time-and-motioned and students as 'cost units' or 'revenue units'. They more or less pick their own governors.

So no-one is to blame for the state of the universities in Scotland except them, the Scottish Government and market forces. They really, really want fees, but you shouldn't for a second imagine that extra fees will improve teaching. It didn't in England; it just subsidises the marketing department and pays off those university mortgages they convinced themselves were crucial.

What isn't justified is the argument that the cost of teaching has increased faster than inflation because it hasn't in most subjects (there can be some unusual inflations in departments which need highly-specialist and expensive equipment). Economics is still someone standing at the front of a room and talking. That didn't get more expensive, unless the university decided to do a marketing-friendly makeover of the lecture theatre.

Our health is getting worse and our social care issues are skyrocketing. Demand and burdens on the health service and local authority are rising sharply in real terms. They are facing new challenges. In teaching, universities are doing what they have done for hundreds of years. If it is becoming more expensive, that is down to university managers.

If we want a future for universities we need to put the university community back in charge. That means students and academics, not finance managers and admin staff. Admin functions need to return to working for staff, not the other way round. A university is not an Amazon warehouse. It isn't a variation on an Amazon warehouse. Yet it is managed in exactly the same way.

An inspiring man once told me a story. He was an Africa educationalist and he recounted that the best classroom he ever saw was a tree. A village with no school had set one up without a building. All they needed was some shade and a good teacher. That's the truth about a lot of education.

There is very much a funding crisis in higher education. Fees won't sort it any more than it did in England. What will sort it is some adequate funding from government and a hard return to what universities really are – collections of learners and thinkers who must be left alone to learn and think, not managed like burger flippers.