The university crisis is very real; the story you are hearing may not be
Common Weal is developing a project on the future of universities in Scotland, an 'Alternative University Commission'. In working through the structure of that project, we have been in touch with a number of university staff groups fighting the cuts at various universities. The picture is deeply concerning, and the government's response looks more like back-covering than anything.
We hear the news today that Dundee University will be insolvent in two years if there are no more widespread redundancies. This news is being promoted by the institutional leaders, but that only means it needs to be read in two different ways. On the one hand, it shows that the financial prospects of the university do indeed look troubling.
But it also means that the university is running a PR campaign to justify more cuts. What is happening in the university sector at the moment is that the space for actions that would actually save our university sector lies between these two ways of reading the news.
On the one hand, there is the status quo, running the university sector the way its current managers have been running the university sector. That is deemed no longer sustainable. The other is to run the university sector in the same way its current managers have been running the university, but with fewer staff to pay.
What is not being considered by current university leadership or by the Scottish Government is that universities might be run in any way other than the current model. That model is a model where Scotland's establishment class runs universities in their own image, with high salaries, centralised control, constantly-proliferating management-driven bureaucracy and monitoring, deskilling of staff, and undermining of terms and conditions, all connected to property speculation.
So what does 'Scotland's establishment' look like? It looks like the membership of the Commission that has been set up by the Scottish Government to 'save' Scotland's universities. That consists of five current university managers, three senior civil servants, two commercial lobbyists (for financial services and private energy interests), one private sector consultant, and one economic think tank head.
Of the 12, only one representative of academic staff, one representative of non-academic staff, and one representative of the student body are included. There is no representation from the arts or culture sector, from the medical sector, from the humanities or sciences, or from any other purpose universities serve other than for lobbyists.
More to the point, there is no role represented in this list which is not one which has been deeply involved in the running of universities over the last 20 years. This is the people who drove the universities into this position, marking their own homework.
It looks like little more than an attempt to make sure no awkward questions are asked. Those who might ask why the Scottish Government has effectively cut teaching funding every year for 15 years (it has been frozen in cash terms since 2010). Why did the university sector accept this? One quarter of this commission is there to make sure that question isn't asked.
How did university management manage to bankrupt universities that have been financially sustainable since the 16th century? Is the largess in spending on new buildings culpable? Is it a poor management practice more generally? Is it a reckless gamble on overseas students that eventually failed? Nearly half of the members of the Commission are there to make sure no one asks.
And what of the actual nature and purpose of universities? What are they for, what should they be, what is their relationship to Scottish society? Inexplicably, the only 'civic' organisations there will make sure the only answers to that are extreme neoliberalism linked to financial market ideology.
Is Dundee in such dire financial peril? Most certainly. Does that mean we should take university management at its word? No, it most certainly does not. The reality is that university management has failed in quite unprecedented ways across multiple universities for the same reasons and at the same time, and every effort is being made to cover their tracks (at times through outrageous secrecy).
The Scottish Government is also culpable and is covering its tracks. This looks like the response to the 2008 financial crisis, where those responsible for the crisis were bailed out and their positions saved – and the cost of doing so was transferred directly to people who bore no culpability at all.
It is hard to feel that Scotland’s universities are safe in their current hands. There is certainly no effort to ask any difficult questions, which would produce answers that would embarrass the management classes or the government.
Which means Common Weal will be left to ask those questions ourselves.