(In the June Socialist Standard a correspondent who is also a university lecturer reported on the financial cuts being planned for universities by the government’s University Grants Committee (UGC). The measures have now been announced and our correspondent looks at their effects.)
The statistics have already had detailed coverage in the media. Roughly they add up to the loss of 3,000 lecturing jobs and 20,0000 student places over the next three to four years. The Association of University Teachers (AUT) said the government had tried to give “academic respectability to a savage cut”. The National Union of Students called the measures “crude educational vandalism”. The pro-Vice Chancellor of one of the worst hit institutions, Salford University, said: “We are shocked, appalled and dismayed”.
In my own university we are still unclear on precisely what is going to happen. Our overall reduction in grant is smaller than most of us expected, but some departments, including my own, have been recommended for “concentration” with corresponding departments in other nearby institutions. Talks among the authorities of these institutions and my own will decide in which university each subject will be concentrated and whether “concentration” will mean losing jobs or just moving house for those of us whose subjects are_transferred.
The local AUT’s view is that the university will take the course that it sees as being in its best overall interest and that we must therefore be prepared to resist if necessary. What has appeared to make Union resistance more possible now than it seemed before is that the UGC had a last-minute change of heart and, instead of telling universities in precise detailed terms how to achieve their economies, simply issued figures of percentage cuts for each institution and told each one in only very general terms as to where its cuts should be operated. The AUT claims that its own representations to the UGC were responsible for this change of emphasis and that Union pressure can also therefore bring unhoped for changes of emphasis (from individual universities). This may be so, but it’s still hard to see how saving one lecturer’s job in one subject will not automatically result in another lecturer’s job being lost in another subject. No matter how much juggling is done, money will only be there for a certain number of salaries. What the UGC have not yielded on is the cuts themselves. They are allowing individual universities more flexibility in distributing their share of the cuts but have made it quite clear that, whatever the attitude of the Union and the universities, the cuts will have to be made.
What surprised most people was not the extent of the grant reductions but the way in which they were spread. A minority of institutions have been particularly hard hit, while the majority are suffering rather less than expected. The Sunday Times (5/7/81) explained this by pointing out that “what really lay behind the UGC’s decision was . . . cost-effectiveness”. In other words the main factor in assessing where the axe should fall was the cheapness with which universities had shown themselves capable of operating their courses. Those whose unit costs were expensive were most heavily penalised. Those whose cost per student was low came off best. As the Vice-Chancellor of the least affected university of all, Bath, was proud to point out: “We’re getting better results for a lower investment” (Sunday Times 5/7/81).
For a number of years now both Labour and Tory governments have talked about the need to make universities more receptive to the “needs of society”. For, although education has grown up in response to the ever increasing needs of the profit system for an increasing number of educated intellectually flexible wage slaves (which is what politicians mean by the “needs of society”), the university sector, because of its traditional “independence”, has been more difficult to mould to capitalism’s requirements and has developed in a more willy-nilly and more expensive fashion than the rest. Governments now want to bring the universities into line, to make them respond more efficiently and more cheaply to the economic needs of capitalism. And what better time than in a period of depression when cuts in so-called “public expenditure” seem especially justified and when so many people in other occupations are losing their jobs.
It’s possible of course that the government is being short-sighted and that, if the depression doesn’t last, employers in Britain will soon find themselves short of the skills of university graduates and will find it difficult to compete in producing and selling their goods on an expanding world market. But capitalism is nothing if not unpredictable and governments committed to running it have to take chances—even if this means wasting human talents and energies on a large scale and having, as a possible end result, increased economic chaos.
The cuts also highlight another kind of wastage of talents and energies that has arisen out of capitalism’s unmanageability. During the 70s universities throughout the country were told that the only way to keep their staff was to increase student numbers. With competition from the polytechnics and a decreasing number of 18-year-olds in the population it was assumed that universities would not be able to do this and that the government would be able to point to this as a reason for making cuts in finance. But a different thing happened. Instead of waiting for students to come to them, (as in the past) universities started to recruit vigorously. Academics put an enormous amount of time, energy and ingenuity into finding ways of attracting new students, and many students were found where before they seemed not to exist. Then came 1979 and a UGC visit to universities told the academics that they’d been finding too many students and they would have to cut down. Now in 1981 they’re being told even more forcefully that all that time, energy and ingenuity has been wasted and that they should have been looking for ways of saving government money not spending more.
The UGC’s letter to universities announcing the cuts said: “Reductions in resources are being imposed at a time when demand for university educations is still rising”. And this was an unwitting admission of the kind of society we live in—a society in which goods and services, including education, are not there to satisfy people’s needs but are only available when the needs of the profit system decree they will be available. The highly educated people at our “centres of academic excellence” should think hard on this and ponder on whether there isn’t a less irrational more harmonious way of organising human affairs.
Howard Moss
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