A prominent philosopher in the UK emails to tell me that he has had enough and that he’s looking for employment in the US. The proximate cause of his frustration is the ridiculously complicated process that the Arts and Humanities Research Board (soon to be Council) imposes on us as a condition for distributing the pitiful funding that is available for research students. Increasingly, universities have to demonstrate that they are providing all kinds of “training” in order to access this money and this is part of a wider trend where government (or its arms-length agencies like the AHRB, HEFCE etc) seeks to regulate and micromanage activity within higher education by such conditionalization of funding. My correspondent draws attention to the recent review of “Business-University Collaboration” undertaken by former FT-editor Richard Lambert at Gordon Brown’s behest. Suprisingly, given Brown’s predilection for micromanagement and control across the public sector, one section of the report offers a trenchant exposition of the mess that the government has made as it has tried to subject higher education in the UK to its will.
The entire report “can be downloaded from HM Treasury’s website here”:http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/consultations_and_legislation/lambert/consult_lambert_index.cfm
Some excerpts:
A BREAKDOWN OF TRUST
7.29 A side effect of a modern university’s far-reaching role and breadth of activities is the increased number of stakeholders who hold the institution to account. The result is an uncoordinated and often unnecessarily burdensome system of accountability and regulation. Two independent reports have highlighted the need to reduce the accountability burden on universities. While a number of the recommendations from the Better Regulation Task Force report have been implemented, progress has been slow.
7.30 At the same time, there has been a marked increase in the Government’s use of hypothecated funding to achieve its strategic objectives, creating more regulatory pressures and accusations from the sector of micro-management. HEFCE, for example, is currently running between 40 and 50 separate funding initiatives on behalf of government departments.
7.31 Universities in the UK are operating on the margin — of 131 institutions in England, for example, 47 ran operating deficits in 2002, with the remaining 84 averaging only a 2.2 per cent surplus on revenue. This puts pressure on universities to chase every available pound of funding. With each new funding stream comes new regulatory burdens. In 2003, HEFCE is budgeting to channel 14 per cent of its funds through hypothecated schemes. About half of these funding initiatives were “top-sliced”: that is, the cash to fund them originally came from a reduction in core funding, rather than from additional government funds. In such cases, universities are often required to apply and account for money that had previously been delivered to them through the core grant. The unintended consequence of central government initiatives is that the sector is in a defensive mood and feels micro-managed.
7.32 In Scotland, the Scottish Executive, through the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, makes less use of hypothecated funding, and this is one factor contributing to a much closer, more respectful relationship between the funders and Scotland’s universities. The other perhaps more important factor is that with only a relatively small number of institutions, it is easier to build close and trusting relationships. Similar considerations apply in Wales and Northern Ireland.
7.33 Public funding needs to be carefully supervised and institutions held to account. But the level of burden is often disproportionate to the money involved, and policies can be untargeted. In many cases, initiatives are designed around the lowest common denominator and all universities, however well-managed, are treated in the same way. The constant layering of new initiatives on top of old, often uncoordinated across government departments and agencies, creates an overly complicated regime.
7.34 The overarching problem, however, comes down to a matter of trust. The Government does not seem to have enough confidence in the way that universities run themselves to give them extra funding without strings attached. Some of this is justified – the sector has in the past suffered from poor management and a lack of strategic thinking. Yet if universities are to become more creative and play their full part in regional and national economies, then ways must be found to give them more room to develop a strategic vision and take entrepreneurial risks.
Recommendation 7.4
The Review recommends that the Government and all funders should minimise the use of hypothecated funding streams.
• Funders should continue to consolidate individual funding into larger streams, more proportionate to the necessary level of bureaucracy and regulation.
• Smaller hypothecated funding streams should, where possible, be allocated on a metrics or formulaic basis, rather than by bidding.
• Funders should minimise audit requirements on hypothecated funding streams.
• “Top-sliced” funding streams should have a limited life of no more than three years, after which they should be rolled back into core funding, unless policy is explicitly renewed.
{ 27 comments }
MFB 04.23.04 at 10:36 am
Sadly, this is nothing new. Government in Britain has been progressively trashing university education since the middle Thatcher years.
Incidentally, New Labour SMSed every academic in Britain just before the last election promising a) an end to this system, and b) an end to pub licensing hours.
They lied.
MFB 04.23.04 at 10:38 am
Sadly, this is nothing new. Government in Britain has been progressively trashing university education since the middle Thatcher years.
Incidentally, New Labour SMSed every academic in Britain just before the last election promising a) an end to this system, and b) an end to pub licensing hours.
They lied.
Barry 04.23.04 at 12:12 pm
Have that ‘prominent philosopher’ read the blog Invisible Adjunct, to get an idea of what US university life is like.
And what UK university life will almost certainly be like.
Barry 04.23.04 at 12:12 pm
Have that ‘prominent philosopher’ read the blog Invisible Adjunct, to get an idea of what US university life is like.
And what UK university life will almost certainly be like.
Barry 04.23.04 at 12:12 pm
Have that ‘prominent philosopher’ read the blog Invisible Adjunct, to get an idea of what US university life is like.
And what UK university life will almost certainly be like.
Ghost of a flea 04.23.04 at 2:10 pm
There has been a marked increase in the Government’s use of hypothecated funding to achieve its strategic objectives? Shocking! How can we ever convince stakeholders to reduce higher education sector accountability burdens?
Ghost of a flea 04.23.04 at 2:11 pm
There has been a marked increase in the Government’s use of hypothecated funding to achieve its strategic objectives? Shocking! How can we ever convince stakeholders to reduce higher education sector accountability burdens?
Amardeep Singh 04.23.04 at 2:11 pm
Semantic question:
I’m not sure what is meant by ‘hypothecate’ in the report. My dictionary has “To pledge (personal property) as security for debt without transfer of possession.”
Is this a way of saying they want to make their investment in the universities contingent on profitability?
Amardeep Singh 04.23.04 at 2:12 pm
Semantic question:
I’m not sure what is meant by ‘hypothecate’ in the report. My dictionary has “To pledge (personal property) as security for debt without transfer of possession.”
Is this a way of saying they want to make their investment in the universities contingent on profitability?
peter ramus 04.23.04 at 2:26 pm
Thank you for the word “hypothecated,” though, which from its multiple drumbeat in the excerpt seems to be a well-worn term of art over there in British political thought. It’s pleasant to have a new word rise up here before the sun does.
On reflection I’d say that lower education here in the U.S. has been getting the bejeebus hypothecated out of it by the recent No Child Left Behind law, which not only attaches the strings to its funding, but also then declines to provide the funds by which schools might hope to meet its hypothecating requirements, which, nevertheless, remain.
As to the battle between “hypothecating” and “conditionalization” for the same spot in common usage, I can see the recommended wisdom in sparing use of either.
Will 04.23.04 at 2:45 pm
As Robert Stevens points out in “University to Uni: The politics of higher education in England since 1945”, this is only the very latest trend in the massive growth of central government control over universities, and one which is much less related to “trust” than a constitutional system which concentrates all meaningful political power in the executive, encouraging continual expansion of regulation and loss of autonomy by other parts of civil society. A report, however well-meaning or insightful, cannot change this trend, and no one shd expect it to.
As I understand it, both from Stevens’s book, and conversations with UK academics, the reason that leading British universities do not go private, solving their micro-management and funding problems both at once, is the threat that science research funding (a very large part of total university income) would – so the government has threatened – be withheld in retaliation. Perhaps the LSE, which gets very little government research funding as a non-science university, might be persuaded to jump off the cliff first…
Keith 04.23.04 at 2:50 pm
And he thinks it’s better in the US? Arts and Humanities departments here are having their budgets cut and funding suspended. Two professors in the A&H department at my University are being let go at the end of the semester and the ongoing projects in that department are being weedled down to next to nothing. Your friend might have more luck in Canada.
Will 04.23.04 at 2:51 pm
As Robert Stevens points out in “University to Uni: The politics of higher education in England since 1945”, this is only the very latest trend in the massive growth of central government control over universities, and one which is much less related to “trust” than a constitutional system which concentrates all meaningful political power in the executive, encouraging continual expansion of regulation and loss of autonomy by other parts of civil society. A report, however well-meaning or insightful, cannot change this trend, and no one shd expect it to.
As I understand it, both from Stevens’s book, and conversations with UK academics, the reason that leading British universities do not go private, solving their micro-management and funding problems both at once, is the threat that science research funding (a very large part of total university income) would – so the government has threatened – be withheld in retaliation. Perhaps the LSE, which gets very little government research funding as a non-science university, might be persuaded to jump off the cliff first…
On a separate point, one income loss for UK universities is that tuition fees must be the same for all EU students, i.e. fees for French students studying in the UK must be low like for UK students, not high like American students studying in the UK. This is a big income loss, and unnecessary – in the US out-of-state students pay higher fees than in-state students for state universities, who benefit from state taxpayers’ support. This small change would increase UK universities income quite a lot – maybe now that the government needs support in the upcoming EU constitutional referendum, a protocol to the treaty can be put in to change this. After all, the government will need all the friends it can get in the run-up to the vote.
Will 04.23.04 at 2:55 pm
Oops! Apologies for multiple postings. The site kept reporting error messages when I tried to post.
P O'Neill 04.23.04 at 3:58 pm
More on this question of whether things would better in US — a US academic colleague sent me a memo he had just received from the dean. The dean, perhaps advised by lawyers, said that having professors recommend particular students for internships, RA positions etc (something profs do all the time) could result in the professor being deemed an “employment agency” and therefore the whole apparatus of equal opportunity regulations should apply, even when it’s just someone on the phone asking for a few names for an internship position.
harry 04.23.04 at 4:08 pm
Just to say, not being rude or anything, but Keith and Barry simply have NO IDEA what they are talking about. Not to say its good here in the US, but it is a different world. The prominent philosophy Chris alludes to knows both systems well, having worked in both (in privileged positions in both) and there is, simply, no comparison. My colleagues at Wisconsin complain endlessly about our University… and I do not suppress my smiles, having experienced academic life at what is probably a more elite institution in Britain. At each tier of academia life is so much more difficult in the UK. You would not believe it. Really.
Colin Farrelly 04.23.04 at 5:07 pm
I agree with Harry’s comments. I taught in the UK for 4 years before I left last year for a job in Canada. Things are not perfect in Canada either, but the growing bureaucracy in higher education in the UK was a major reason for my leaving one UK institution and was a reason (though not the main reason) why I left the UK for Canada.
DJW 04.23.04 at 6:37 pm
Well, the British don’t rely on scandalously lowly paid adjunct labor to teach a significant portion of undergraduate coures, right? They just pay their full-timers scandalously low wages instead :)
I have no doubt that it’s much, much better to be a full time tenure track academic in the US than the UK, but I also suspect that full time jobs in the UK are better than your typical part-time and temporary appointments in the US, which is becoming an increasingly large percentage of us here.
Natacha 04.23.04 at 7:25 pm
The Alliance for Justice has launched a new website urging Justice Scalia to recuse himself from the Cheney energy case! Check it out: http://www.ChooseToRecuse.org Scalia can recuse himself anytime before the Supreme Court renders its decision.
There is a great flash animation that goes with it too. You have to see “Quid Pro Quack” http://www.allianceforjustice.org/action/scalia/flash.htm Duck’em!
Natacha 04.23.04 at 7:26 pm
The Alliance for Justice has launched a new website urging Justice Scalia to recuse himself from the Cheney energy case! Check it out: http://www.ChooseToRecuse.org Scalia can recuse himself anytime before the Supreme Court renders its decision.
There is a great flash animation that goes with it too. You have to see “Quid Pro Quack” http://www.allianceforjustice.org/action/scalia/flash.htm Duck’em!
Selma "Friedrich" Hayek 04.24.04 at 9:29 am
“The Government does not seem to have enough confidence in the way that universities run themselves to give them extra funding without strings attached.”
Without any strings at all? It’s money taken from the public; if it has been handed over for years without anyone asking any questions, then _that in itself_ was a strange state of affairs. People are naturally interested in why the money is so urgently needed that it has to be taken by government act, instead of being freely exchanged for something of visible value. In a country of docile sheep, you can get away with this indefinitely; otherwise, you will have to explain what the money will be spent on.
“As Robert Stevens points out… this is only the very latest trend in the massive growth of central government control over universities… encouraging continual expansion of regulation and loss of autonomy by other parts of civil society.”
So are academic institutions asserting their natural right to spend a certain proportion of everyone else’s earnings, collected by the government, no questions asked, on the basis of individual liberty? To reiterate, government funding is taken from citizens who stand to be imprisoned if they don’t pay. To assert the right to do this on the grounds that “autonomy” is desirable is… well, you’re ‘avin’ a laugh, ain’tcha?
“As I understand it… the reason that leading British universities do not go private, solving their micro-management and funding problems both at once, is the threat that science research funding (a very large part of total university income) would – so the government has threatened – be withheld in retaliation.”
Could you explain that part? How can it make sense to say that “going private” would solve their funding problem at once if they are utterly dependent on government support? Do you mean that *in theory*, if they provided a valuable service, they could go private? I quite agree. The fact that they cannot do this implies that they do not provide a valuable service. The government is quite reasonably wondering “What do we pay you for?” Is it impertinent to ask such questions?
Surely “going private” would mean that clients of the service would be free to choose which supplier they spend their money on. The government would not be withholding anything “in retaliation”; if the government wanted some research done, they’d have to pay someone to do it. The government would only withhold funding for research it _didn’t need_ – bravo.
Michael Otsuka 04.24.04 at 10:07 am
S F Hayek is being inconsistently libertarian. A more consistent line would be outrage that the government not only has the gall to tax people for the sake of providing higher education, but that it should then squander this money on an absurd scheme of centralized regulation. Strange that a libertarian should suddenly have such confidence in central planning in this instance.
Selma "Friedrich" Hayek 04.24.04 at 3:04 pm
“Strange that a libertarian should suddenly have such confidence in central planning in this instance.”
Only cynically: I have some confidence that they will succeed in compelling a few sensible academics to liberate themselves from government accountability. The government’s actions are a perfect demonstration of how central planning and micro-management is generally ham-fisted, controversial and ineffective.
Central planning is an _inevitable consequence_ of central funding; at the very minimum, the government (on behalf of the electorate) ought to take an interest in where public money is going. The apparent alternative is that the plebs should buckle down and stop questioning those who know best how to spend everyone else’s money.
If you instead decide to really find out how valuable your work is, and sell your talents to people who genuinely want them, the nation (or that part of it that is supposed to be benefiting from your activities) can reach its own conclusions freely. Wouldn’t this be more honest and respectable than trying to continue quietly hoodwinking the tax-payer? The successful academics would at least know that they had some satisfied customers – students, industry, whoever was freely choosing to pay for the service.
(As it happens, I am not a libertarian, as I _do not own a gun_.)
Michael Otsuka 04.24.04 at 4:23 pm
Since, S F Hayek, you don’t own a gun you probably think it’s okay for the state to force people to pay taxes to fund a police force. And I don’t think you’d want to insist that an inane scheme of regulation akin to that which is inflicted on UK universities is an inevitable consequence of public funding of the police. In fact, the police in Britain are also enmeshed in red tape. According to a Home Office study, police officers need to devote so much time to filling in forms that they end up spending 43% of their time in the police station (e.g., filling out an arrested person’s name 27 times, as in Warwickshire) and just 17% on patrol. Even the Home Secretary admits that “many of these forms are repetitive, too long and even redundantâ€. These pointless absurdities are not an inevitable consequence of public funding, as there is nothing on this scale in the case of publicly funded state universities and polices forces in the United States.
Will 04.24.04 at 8:10 pm
I would rather think that S F Hayek and Robert Stevens would agree that centralising funding and tend to go together. That is Stevens’ complaint about centralised funding. He would, I believe, like some of the universities to charge their own fees, and forgo government tuition payments.
Hayek asks, re. threat to remove science funding:
“Could you explain that part? How can it make sense to say that “going private†would solve their funding problem at once if they are utterly dependent on government support? Do you mean that in theory, if they provided a valuable service, they could go private? I quite agree. The fact that they cannot do this implies that they do not provide a valuable service. The government is quite reasonably wondering “What do we pay you for?†Is it impertinent to ask such questions?””
The answer to this question, if I understand it right, is that Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL are confident that they could charge a reasonable fee for the valuable service of undergraduate education. The fact that they cannot do this reflects not the fact that they do not provide a valuable teaching service, for which many would be willing to pay, but that the government has said, repeatedly, that if they were to charge for undergraduate education, the government would withhold research funding for science projects, which is both a large sum of money in itself, and makes many natural scientists at these universities wary of change. Note that, on these lines, the government’s question “what do we pay you for” is answered by the government not only “we pay you for science research for medical advances, economic benefits, etc”, but “we pay you for science research in order to control your undergraduate education policies”.
Selma "Friedrich" Hayek 04.25.04 at 9:10 am
“Since, S F Hayek, you don’t own a gun you probably think it’s okay for the state to force people to pay taxes to fund a police force…”
Yes, I believe this is covered on page one of my copy of _Classical Liberalism_ (Ladybird Books Ltd.) You need a legal system to enforce formal property and so you cannot privatise the police. These things will always be the essential basis of the public sector, and they will always be controversial, seeding arguments about funding, regulation and so on. Depending on how we run it, the police force is either a centre of corruption or the basis of our freedom, or some mixture of the two. The US hardly has this perfected, suffering as they do from widespread police corruption.
Could this not serve as a warning to other sectors that public funding is best avoided where not absolutely essential?
I don’t disagree with your underlying assertion that this government couldn’t run a bath, let alone a public service.
“We pay you for science research in order to control your undergraduate education policies…”
This doesn’t explain why they don’t call the government’s bluff. If the prestigious universities can prosper without the funding, then why not leap at the chance to run their own business and get out of a corrupt situation?
Perhaps it’s all because they have the standard attitude toward commercialism. Running a _business_? How terribly vulgar. We don’t want to be providing service to customers! We want to be appointed the rulers of a domain of government – the domain of cleverness. The best domain of the lot!
anon 04.25.04 at 2:54 pm
None of you have commented on the deep strain of anti-intellectualism in the Labour movement, which continues to infect government dealings with higher ed. My first meeting with Blunkett when he was Education Secretary concerned a wide range of issues in secondary schooling, and he, to my horror, expressed his contempt for university lecturers in the sciences. He had recently met with a group of representatives of researchers in the hard sciences and had proposed to them that they should each spend a day a week in secondary schools tutoring schoolkids. He was genuinely angered that they dismissed the suggestions, which revealed a staggering level of ignorance about 1) the conditions in unviersities 2) what it takes to do scientific research and 3) the possibility that the skills and characteristics of practicising scientists may not transfer well into the secondary classroom.
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