Students want more power – so who has it now?

Students at Glasgow University are now reaching a point of rebellion over the voice they are given in the university. This is only one example of a question which is raising its head all over the university sector just now – our universities are being lacerated and converted into very different types of institution, but in whose name are these changes being made?

The students at Glasgow raise a number of issues they're not happy about. They are unhappy that Glasgow is one of the universities which has signed up to an alliance of universities and military bodies to work on military issues. They are angry about cuts to postgraduate teaching.

But perhaps fundamentally they are unhappy about a business model at the university which is predicated on perpetual growth. Unless the university can attract more and more in fee-paying student income, its financial projections don't work.

They would argue that the university was distorted into a new shape to accommodate this new business model and is now being distorted into yet another shape to attempt to counter the effects of the failure of this business model.

In the article in today's Herald one student representative argues that “decisions over budget cuts and the university’s relationship to the arms trade are being made without any consultation of the university community because management knows that they are unpopular”.

This is a good example of Tony Benn's 'five questions about power', specifically four of them, because we know the answer to 'what power have you got?', which is 'all of it'. The pertinent questions are from where is that power derived, in whose interests it is wielded, to whom is this power accountable and – fundamentally – how can those over whom this power is wielded remove those who have the power?

We also know the power broadly derives from the Further and Higher Education (Scotland) Act 1992 which effectively devolves power to a quango which in turn devolves that power to university managers and governors. A key question is with what legitimacy that second devolution of power takes place?

At the time of the 1992 Act it was still normal practices that universities were generally governed democratically, or at least collegiately. Devolving power to that democratic institution appears to be the intent of the 1992 Act. But what happens if that body is surreptitiously de-democratised? Does the 'chain of command' still meet the intent of the Act?

If so it means that we have designated something close to a hereditary system. University governors are university governors because they are, and that then confers total power to them to pick their successors, indefinitely. This is not the spirit of public service.

They appear to wield that power in the interests of a corporate vision of the university only they have bought into. They do not seem answerable on this vision to staff, students, stakeholders, neighbours or anyone else affected by their work, only to a quango which in turn answers only to a government minister who in turn does not seem to have any alternative vision.

What the wider university community cannot do is remove the people in power. Universities are no longer a democracy. As we saw at Dundee University, recklessness and frankly incompetence went unchallenged precisely because there is not accountability, no checks and balances and no ability to remove people from power.

None of the resulting crisis in universities is the fault of staff or students. They are the victims. Those responsible are the management class, the quango class and the politicians, and the best interpretation of what is happening just now is that the three groups culpable for destroying Scottish higher education are closing ranks round each precisely to make sure that it is staff and students who pay the price, not them.

Student politics can at times raise the eyebrow of the most liberally-minded observer. Students sometimes tend to extremes. But they tend to the opposite extreme to the corporate extreme of the existing managers. That is the balance that saves institutions from veering badly off course. The removal of that balance has driven universities so far from their path it is existential.

The students are right. There is more chance of them saving the university through their participation than the management class have through the exclusion of students. Power relations in universities must be changed if they are to survive.