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Abstract

Keywords

Neoliberalism Thatcher higher education Marxism ‘an alternative: “student as producer”’Social Science Centre

Introduction

In this article, we provide a critical explanation and critique of neoliberalism. We attempt an innovative focus ranging from the wider contemporary political and ideological shifts, to the way in which neoliberal policy specifically influences higher education and the consequences thereof. We do this in three parts, first, by briefly introducing the genesis of neoliberalism, tracing its development in Chile and subsequent globalization via Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership in the UK and Ronald Reagan’s presidency of the US. This first part is a preamble for the second part of the article, where we focus on the way in which neoliberal principles have informed the structure and practices of higher education (HE) in general, and the particular ways in which the UK government’s most recent reforms and proposals as part of the Green Paper¹ are likely to impact on public universities and academics in England. In the third part of the article, we discuss an alternative to the neoliberal university in England, focusing specifically on the struggle against the neoliberalization of the university represented by the Student as Producer model at the University of Lincoln and the associated Social Science Centre (SSC). Here, we explain the SSC as one current and ongoing (despite many struggles) material and flourishing example of an institution that is based on the principle that a university should be a place for learning and teaching as a shared experience, not one where the concern of excellence is determined by spurious metrics. We conclude by suggesting that, while the deepening of neoliberalism constructs a consciousness of there being no alternative, the resurfacing of the argument about the role, purpose and function of Europe, the success of the SSC, should be an impetus to continue and strengthen the explanation and critique of neoliberalism, and not least significant counter-hegemonic challenges in 2017 from a Left Labour Party.

Part one

Neoliberalism and its basic principles

The first experiment in applied neoliberal ideology began on 11 September 1973 in Chile when a US-backed military coup resulted in the death of democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende and his replacement by the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Within a five-year period (1970–1975), the Chilean economy shifted from a command economy (where the State is in control of major industries) to neoliberalism, thereby introducing market forces, self-interest and laissez faire principles to governance (Maisuria, 2014). As Jonathan Barton explains, the military junta was crucial in this process, with harsh repression and the banning of trade unions, making labour power very flexible with respect to wages and discipline (1999: 66, cited in Lawton, 2012). As such, Chile became a haven for multinationals, and wealth disparities between rich and poor increased. As Thomas G. Clark (2012) explains, after the ‘success’ of the Chilean neoliberal experiment, the installation and economic support of right-wing military dictatorships to impose neoliberal economic reforms became unofficial US foreign policy. The first of the democratically elected neoliberals were Margaret Thatcher in the UK, herself a friend and proponent of Pinochet who in 1999 thanked him for bringing ‘democracy to Chile’ (BBC, 1999²), and Ronald Reagan in the US. Both Thatcher and Reagan set about introducing ideologically driven neoliberal reforms, such as the complete withdrawal of capital controls instigated by UK Tory Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, and the deregulation of the US financial markets. By 1989, the ideology of neoliberalism was enshrined as the economic orthodoxy of the world as undemocratic Washington-based institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF),³ the World Bank and the US Department of the Treasury, signed up to a 10-point economic plan. This plan epitomized neoliberal ideology and, in-line with this, included trade liberalization, privatization, financial sector deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy (Clark, 2012). As Clark concludes, ‘this agreement between anti-democratic organisations is misleadingly referred to as “The Washington Consensus”’ (Clark, 2012 [emphasis added]). The signing of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in 1994 gave global neoliberalism a major boost by removing any restrictions and internal government regulations in the area of service delivery that were considered ‘barriers to trade’ (GATS, 1994). The word neoliberal itself, however, did not enter the common vocabulary until November 1999 with the momentous protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle meaning that Thatcher and Reagan’ were not known by the electorate as neoliberals, nor were they associated with Chile. As Chris Harman (2008) points out, it is not to be found in earlier works dealing with the same phenomenon, such as David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey, 1989), or Harman’s own book Economics of the Madhouse: Capitalism and the Market Today (Harman, 1995). Martinez and García (2000) have identified five defining features of the global neoliberalism:

1. THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating “free” enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the State) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers’ rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say “an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone.” It’s like Reagan’s “supply-side” and “trickle-down” economics – but somehow the wealth didn’t trickle down very much.

2. CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply – again in the name of reducing government’s role. Of course, they don’t oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business.

3. DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminsh profits, including protecting the environmentand safety on the job.

4. PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water. Although usually done in the name of greater efficiency, which is often needed, privatization has mainly had the effect of concentrating wealth even more in a few hands and making the public pay even more for its needs.

6. ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF “THE PUBLIC GOOD” or “COMMUNITY” and replacing it with “individual responsibility.” Pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education and social security all by themselves – then blaming them, if they fail, as “lazy.”

Part two

Neoliberalism and HE in England

As David Harvie (2000: 104) (not to be confused with David Harvey referred to immediately above) points out that the integration of HE into the neoliberal capitalist economy has been long recognized by socialist thinkers, both non-Marxist, such as Thorstein Veblen (1918), who referred to universities functioning as business enterprises, operating in competition with each other at the expense of scholarship, and Marxist analyses focusing on schools and universities (re)creating labour power (e.g. Tronti, 1973), marketization and the rise of (neo)managerialism (Hill et al., 2015), and the proletarianization of academics (Hill et al., 2015). What is significant about more recent developments is the explication by capitalists and capitalist politicians alike that the main role of universities is to contribute to the economic productivity of the country, which means being, as the Gordon Brown administration encouraged, ‘business-facing’. This policy agenda is openly and explicitly demanding that universities develop specific capacities in the next generation of workers, such as entrepreneurialism and a competitive spirit, to reproduce neoliberal capitalist relations of production and an ideological agenda for and in education (i.e. ‘for’ education to be a neoliberalism enterprise in its operation and outlook, including the possibility of it being fully privatized, and ‘in’ education to prepare workers for neoliberalism). This was not even dared to be interpellated during the Thatcher years – generally viewed to be the most right-wing, anti-public sector and pro-market political moment in history.

Quality assurance

While the HE policy agenda is becoming more explicitly neoliberal, the enmeshing of neoliberalism in education over the last three decades has been so deep, intensive and all-encompassing it has become almost natural (Harvey, 2007: 24) in that the neoliberal agenda has normalized the narrative that defines HE. As such, the neoliberal model of HE both sways and perverts public opinion as to the purposes, functions and aims of HE. Moreover, trying to identify where and how neoliberal policies have taken root is a difficult task. This point is made eloquently by Blacker (2013: 6), who notes that neoliberalism ‘runs smoothest when it’s not noticed as such; this state of being taken for granted, being “assumed”, is where ideology exists at its purest’. However, it is to the task of denaturalizing neoliberalism that we now turn in this article and we initially do this by articulating the regime of quality assurance (QA) in HE, with the most recent policy agenda relating to what will be the historic expansion of markets into HE. As a preamble, it is necessary to say that QA has historically been the responsibility of the State, and it has been promoted by successive UK governments as protocols designed to benchmark, maintain standards, and create parity across the HE sector (QAA, 2015). However, during the last three decades, QA has been gradually reconfigured so that, as a consequence of deregulation, it is left to market forces. Its purpose has also become ambiguous by its synonymization with ‘excellence’. This reconfiguration can be explicated as part of a sequence of education policy proposals in the UK for universities in England.

To begin a critique of QA we can look to the well-known critic of neoliberalism David Graeber, who describes the necessity for neoliberalism to invent ‘bullshit jobs’ (cited in Semley, 2014). These are what he calls occupational positions that are created ‘just for the sake of keeping us working’ (cited in Semley, 2014). In the HE sector such jobs are white collar, professional managerial positions that assume ambiguous titles, such as quality assurance officer or student experience manager. While these ‘pointless jobs’ do little other than create protocols to justify their own existences, as Graeber puts it, importantly, they create pointless practices for academics. The labour that is required in these practices imbibes a moral virtue – it’s for the good of the students. In other words, neoliberalism has created the conditions for QA protocols to be axiomatic rendering them almost unquestionable. These practices involve creating data to produce numerical metrics that are used as a proxy for quality and high standards. For critics such as Graeber, QA is almost always reduced to metrics (cited in Semley, 2014). Blunt quantitative measures take precedence over any qualitative experiences, feelings and interactions, where personalized, meaningful, rich and transformational journeys cannot be easily captured. Statistics are important as ‘proof’ of the fact that something is worthwhile. Such ‘proof’, for the neoliberals, facilitates competition by creating the appearance of choice between varying degrees of ‘quality’. This merely comes down to reputational advantage, which for the newer institutions is about marketing strategies usually consisting of very expensive PR consultant firms, a further sign of the businessification of education. The appearance of choice enables people to act as consumers and make decisions about where they want to invest their capital. The notion of investment for personal flourishing is central to the UK government’s consultation with regard to radical reforms extending and accelerating neoliberalism in the English HE system.

Marketization

The neoliberal policy of marketization, which demands that universities act like businesses and private sector corporations, is now at the front and centre of the government’s agenda, and the old rhetoric of social justice has now disappeared to a large extent (Maisuria, 2010). The fact that UK universities are now part of the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (our emphasis), suggests that HE is subsumed under a broader remit beyond education for education’s sake. The UK government’s consultation Green Paper for HE reforms, entitled Fulfilling Our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice, marked a significant official policy moment for leaving QA to market forces. At the centre of these reforms is the basic idea that if higher education institutions (HEIs) do not present themselves as delivering high standards, then they will lose customers and, therefore, revenue, ultimately leading to the competitive market being closed to them. Interestingly, the Conservative government under David Cameron removed the student numbers cap, meaning that universities can now enrol as many students as they can attract. They did this to apparently allow more students entry into HE, suggesting this is an act of social justice. However, the real purpose is more likely: (i) the expansion of the market to have a greater number of consumers; and linked to this, (ii) the fact that individual providers of HE are pitted more directly in competition in a dog-eat-dog environment where, in the conditions of reduced government funding, the losers that fail to attract ever increasing numbers of students will be susceptible to closure. It is worth noting that having more students does not necessarily mean more funding to increase resources concomitantly, numbers of teaching staff, for example. In times of public sector funding cutbacks, the reality is a shift in the cost burden to some extent, to individual students rather than the State, and tuition fees from more students simply allow HEIs to sustain their operational costs. Hence, accepting more students at a university does not mean more money spent on resources for a higher quality of provision.

QA as ‘excellence’

To provide a more specific critique of QA, we now focus on specific proposals in the game-changing 2015 consultation paper. In this, there was a move to refer to QA as ‘excellence’. The semantics are important to denote the highest standards, rather than simply assurance of mediocrity or just satisfactory standards. However, ‘excellence’ is at best a problematic and ambiguous term; indeed the government recognizes this and, for the first time, attempted to clarify its position in documentation, stating (BIS, 2015: 21):

There is no one broadly accepted definition of ‘teaching excellence’. In practice it has many interpretations and there are likely to be different ways of measuring it. The Government does not intend to stifle innovation in the sector or restrict institutions’ freedom to choose what is in the best interests of their students. But we do think there is a need to provide greater clarity about what we are looking for and how we intend to measure it in relation to the TEF. Our thinking has been informed by the following principles:

excellence must incorporate and reflect the diversity of the sector, disciplines and missions – not all students will achieve their best within the same model of teaching;

excellence is the sum of many factors – focussing on metrics gives an overview, but not the whole picture;

perceptions of excellence vary between students, institutions and employers;

excellence is not something achieved easily or without focus, time, challenge and change.

There are two issues that the then government considered as being at stake: (i) devising a standardized measure to enable comparability; and (ii) ensuring that this standardization did not stifle innovation, enterprise and creativity, which are themselves important neoliberal buzzwords. The statement above attempts to provide a remit and parameters for these two things to happen and to clarify ‘excellence’. However, rather than providing clarity, the statement seems to further mystify what excellence is and how it can be maintained, even enhanced. The statement above argues for excellence by defining what it is not and how it is a diverse and varying concept. It seems that a muddled articulation was created by the attempt to define how to measure the unmeasurable. Indeed, the definition sets-out the difficulty of this task by providing a convincing immanent critique: ‘not all students will achieve their best within the same model of teaching’ and excellence measures will not give ‘the whole picture’. Many questions regarding conceptualization of ‘excellence’ remain. For example, will benchmarks be framed against some internationally recognised norms or against certain criteria, or both? Who will establish these criteria and how? These are basic and crucial questions given the high-stakes, including the very existence of some university’s.

The 2015 consultation paper cited above made it clear that if a HEI does not demonstrate excellence and high standards according to some standardized metrics, then it will be susceptible to ‘dissolving’ out of existence. In what seems like a worrying development, a HEI will also be given the power to ‘transfer its assets’ (BIS, 2015: 67), encouraging the type of practices seen in the private sector, the banking industry and speculative commodity trading markets, where asset stripping became normal after the 2008 economic crisis. Under the heading ‘further deregulation’, it becomes apparent that HE is being even more transformed from a public good into a commodity that trades, and where market forces determine its potential for survival based on its ability to ‘respond to business opportunities’ (BIS, 2015: 66). This is a major historical and political moment that will see universities changing radically and, according to Martin Wolf writing in the Financial Times, this will be marked by a shift from a university being what it should be:

A special institution: a community of teachers and scholars. Its purpose is to generate and impart understanding, from generation to generation. The university is a glory of our civilisation. It is neither a business nor a training school.

Of all this, Wolf continues, ‘the discussion document shows little inkling’. ‘Abusing a label may not matter so much’ he concludes, ‘not recognising the role of universities does’ (Wolf, 2016).

Marketization and privatization

It is worth remembering that the Latin term universitas means ‘fuller’ and ‘wholeness’ to describe a process that broadens horizons, and this definition gave rise to the modern university’s role, function and purpose. In the 2015 consultation Green Paper, the government overtly proposed a redefinition of what a university is. By giving ‘greater flexibility’ and removing ‘statutory requirements on instrument and articles of government’, private sector providers with the stated aim of profit-making were being permitted to install a stark competitive market dynamic to HE provision. One way in which this was proposed was through getting rid of the role of both the Privy Council and the Charity Commission with regard to universities. These are historic institutions designed to regulate the public sector and protect the appropriate use of taxpayers’ monies, for example against private greed and misuse. This move, crucially, makes public universities operate with self-regulation, leading to the promotion of self-interest, thus, ultimately, eroding their primary function as being a public service good. In such a climate, which resembles the dog-eat-dog ruthless ethos in the Hollywood blockbuster The Hunger Games, QA and excellence are subsumed into the operation of the market, which assumes that success will enable individualized sustainability and self-flourishing. It is worth remembering that in the 1980s Thatcher similarly instated irreversible de-regulation giving unfettered freedoms to the banks. This was called the ‘Big Bang’ of financial regulation, which ultimately led in 2008 to the spectacular crash, coming as it did after years of speculative trading and casino-style gambling with large sums of capital resulting in disastrous social consequences (Maisuria, 2015). In years to come we may be writing something similar about the education system.

The proposed reforms in 2015 were building on the momentum created by the 2011 HE White Paper entitled Putting Students at the Heart of Higher Education. This policy document (BIS, 2011) stated that it intended to

enable a wider range of providers to join the sector to offer more choice for students… [and] [p]romise less regulation and bureaucracy for universities’, this was ‘part of the wider government agenda to put more power in the hands of the consumer.

The 2011 White Paper reforms were further expanded in the 2015 Green Paper, including more freedom, competition, and marketization. The deepening of the neoliberalization agenda in the Green Paper is especially a cause for concern given recent evidence that has come to light suggesting that, rather than improving the performance of universities, the 2011 reforms have created the possibility for a waste of taxpayers’ money and poor quality provision. The 2011 White Paper crucially allowed private colleges to use public funds to recruit students, thereby competing with established universities. The London School of Science and Technology (LSST), run by the entrepreneurial Zaidi family, is one of these colleges which benefited from the sum of £6.5 million in public money, initially recruiting around 1500 students with reduced tuition fees by May 2014 (Malik et al., 2014). According to its website, it has recruited a total of 20,000 students since its inception in 2003. The website advertises its ‘quality of teaching’, stating that (LSST, 2016):

Our course teams contain both academics and practicing professionals.… unlike many other institutions, our tutors maintain high levels of class contact and offer support to help ensure you are learning throughout your time at LSST.… we have an intimate and friendly atmosphere and our staff are able to get to know our students personally.

The LSST has expanded with campuses in London, Luton and Birmingham and their degrees are accredited by the University of West London, who they claim is ‘one of the best universities in the UK’, a clear statement of quality. With the 2015 consultation paper, the LSST would be able to expand further and also award its own degrees, for which it would control its own quality and standards (LSST, 2016).

However, in early 2014 it became apparent that the college was engaging in unscrupulous practices using public funds. Academics, including leading critic Andrew McGettigan, found that the college was recruiting poorly qualified students, who would then get government funding of up to £11,000 per annum, with the college then charging them fees of £6000 (Malik et al., 2014). The college, dubbed as ‘the ATM’ and ‘Cashpoint College’, seemingly did not always require students to attend classes. Malik et al. (2014) report one student who said ‘If you want to take the [student loan] money and not come in, they [the college] are getting paid, so they don’t give a fuck’. These revelations prompted a wider official enquiry into private colleges by the National Audit Office (2014: 5) who subsequently stated:

EU students at some alternative providers have claimed or attempted to claim student support they were not entitled to. Between September 2013 and May 2014, the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) and the Student Loans Company (SLC) investigated whether 11,191 EU students applying for maintenance support met residency requirements. 5,548 applicants (50%) were either unable or chose not to provide evidence that they were eligible for the support; of these, 83% were applying to just 16 alternative providers. The SLC established that, as at the end of October 2014, 992 ineligible students had already received £5.4 million of support before payments were suspended.

Despite the £5.4 million of public funds wasted, the government seeks to relax regulation even more for private sector colleges to further entrench competition among HEIs, which will supposedly increase quality of teaching. The laissez-faire approach to regulation of student loan applications will also mean that scandals such as with the SLC will remain possible. Wolf (2016) makes this point strongly:

The government will fund the fees, regardless [of the level of qualification of the applicant]. If students fail, taxpayers bear the losses. Particularly in the absence of tough minimum standards for entrants to courses or any limit on numbers, such providers would have a powerful incentive to maximise numbers of students, regardless of the outcomes for them.

The Teaching Excellence Framework and the National Student Survey

Furthermore, as part of the 2015 consultation, the government was proposing that all HEIs be allowed to charge higher fees. The surpassing of the current limit of £9000 would be contingent on demonstration of metrics of excellence, which will be benchmarked as part of the 2017 Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

One of the three ways that excellence as part of the TEF would be evidenced is student evaluation questionnaires, particularly the National Student Survey (NSS). The NSS is (voluntarily) undertaken by all final undergraduates in public universities and the results are then published online by Unistats where courses can be compared using Key Information Set (KIS) data, such as employment prospects after the course and satisfaction. On the face of it, while it may seem plausible and reasonable to make the connection between teaching quality and standards, and the level of tuition fees, there are several extremely problematic consequences attached to such a move. One such consequence could be grade inflation. The experience of the NSS for many academics is that ‘awarding’ students 2:1 or first class grades⁴ reaps more positive responses on evaluations of student satisfaction and quality. Equally, academics will anecdotally reveal that even if students have had a deeply enriching, interesting and insightful learning experience, they will still express dissatisfaction (perhaps even considering litigation, see below) if they do not get a 2:1 or a first. As well as the learning experience being reduced to outcomes, i.e. whether or not a first or 2:1 is the award, evaluations are sometimes more indicative of the academic’s personality and/or character, rather than excellence of teaching and learning. Academics who are approachable and flexible (perhaps open to reading several drafts of work and extending deadlines) even entertaining and funny (rather than, perhaps, insightful, serious and well-read) are more likely to satisfy students and would score more highly in judgements of excellence. The point here is that student evaluations, such as the NSS, are at best spurious measures of excellence but, in spite of this, they give rise to serious concern given the high stakes introduced to the HE policy agenda in the 2015 Green Paper.

The consumerist attitude created in students, especially due to the 2011 White Paper entitled Putting Students at the Heart of Higher Education (discussed earlier) and initiated during the Blair years (see Hill et al., 2009; Maisuria, 2010, 2014, 2015), has created a classroom ethos that a degree award is the result of an exchange of money, not ideas, and anything less than a 2:1 grade or a first is ‘not value for money’ (a phrase that appears 26 times in the 2015 Green Paper) and a poor ‘investment’ (16 appearances), rendering it in essence a commodity with poor interest. Students in English universities are no longer reading for a degree, they are buying a degree and this is now enshrined to the point of being law. Students in English universities are (financially) protected by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which lays out consumer rights in relation to purchasing a degree, rendering a university learning experience and qualification no different to choosing from which supermarket to buy a product. With these consumer rights comes the possibility of students filing litigation charges against universities (it is unclear how individual lecturers are implicated in such cases). With the policy agenda increasingly commodifying the university learning experience and qualification, universities are becoming concerned with consumer law to the extent that they are training academics in their legal duty as part of the consumer contract. The policy agenda is radically deepening the neoliberalization of the once-public university and the nature of the learning and teaching experience.

For the second TEF metric, excellence will be measured on retention of students and continuation rates (this is assumed to mean the number of students who pass their modules/year/course of study and, ultimately, complete their programme at the first attempt). Here again, there will be pressure on academics to pass students rather than award deserving fails. Widening participation universities will be implicated the most. These universities attract non-traditional students who are almost always from working-class backgrounds and will not necessarily start university with the academic skill set needed to progress at the first attempt. In addition, these students may often have additional personal and private challenges to deal with that affect their academic performance, for example coping with the consequences of austerity (food poverty, homelessness), which may mean that they have to leave university to simply stabilize their life. The point is that the stakes are high for academics, who will be pressurized to: (i) award higher than deserved grades to high quality academic work; and, (ii) pass academically poor quality work that is borderline fail to maximize the potential for a good score on student evaluations of excellence. In this scenario, it will be risky for the academics to award 2:2 classifications.

In the same way that we have argued that the NSS, and retention of students and continuation are highly problematic indicators of excellence, the University and College Union, which protects the professionalism of academics, claims that ‘manipulation of statistics may be the name of the game, rather than bolstering the student experience’ (UCU, 2015). UCU have been involved in industrial action that seeks to put pressure on the government to protect and raise funding, which they link to quality and excellence: ‘We believe properly funding our institutions is what drives quality – not raising tuition fees and pitting providers against each other.’ Union members will be further concerned by another metric to be used in the demonstration of excellence and subsequent raising of tuition fees – graduate destination.

The third proposed metric that contributes to the TEF is what graduates go on to do after leaving university (graduate employment and destination). Once again, the issue of grade inflation arises, whereby a graduate with a 2:1 or a first is much more likely to get a ‘good’ job. Like the NSS metric, again, academics will be pressurized to award 2:1 and first class degrees to improve their university’s capacity to charge a higher fee and be more marketable in terms of being able to recruit a larger number of students. The TEF will induce grade inflation, which, in turn, will likely test the professional integrity of academics. The major issue with using employment and destination as indicators of excellence and their subsequent importance, is that there are a multiplicity of factors at play after the student leaves university, and the university has little influence on these. For example, the university has little/no influence on the jobs that are available, what processes are part of the application and interview procedure, and which jobs the individual will apply for. Yet, these factors are to be used to measure excellence.

The government at the time claimed that the three metrics critiqued above (NSS, retention and continuation, and graduate destination) have been developed ‘[a]fter informal discussions with the sector’ (BIS, 2015: 33) though it was never made clear who had been involved in these. It is very concerning that the 2015 Green Paper (BIS, 2015: 33) went on to state that:

As TEF develops we will incorporate new common metrics on engagement with study (including teaching intensity) and learning gain, once they are sufficiently robust and available on a comparable basis. We are also conscious that there are other possible proxies of teaching excellence. Metrics proposed by the sector and others so far include:

Student commitment to learning, including appropriate pedagogical approaches,

Training and employment of staff – measures might include proportion of staff on permanent contracts, and

Teaching intensity – measures might include time spent studying, as measured in the UK Engagement Surveys and proportion of total staff time spent on teaching.

The concern is that the Conservative government seemed intent on not even entertaining the notions that: (i) metrics could be problematic and damage the purpose of universities; and (ii) metrics like the ones proposed in the TEF may be spurious measures of excellence, which in itself is a highly ambiguous term (as argued above). There is no space allowed to even evaluate the impact of the metrics proposals in the 2015 Green Paper before going on to introduce ‘new’ ones based on the presupposition of the effectiveness and appropriateness of metrics and the concept of excellence. Based on the critique that we have provided in this part of the article, we can foresee a time when TEF metrics, or something like them, will be included as part of the performance reviews of individual academics. It seems inevitable that questions about how individual academics contribute to the NSS and the retention/continuation and employment/destination metrics will become more explicitly a judgement of the performance of individuals and that this will be despite institutional/sectoral/structural limitations, such as resources. The final blow that will mark a significant moment for the neoliberalization of the university will be when TEF-type benchmarks are actually linked to the pay of academics. Performance-related pay is already part of teaching contracts in schools and colleges, and if this becomes the case in HE then grade inflation will become an inevitability. The proposals in the 2015 consultation paper present a worrying trend, historically and also geographically, but there have been moves to counter the neoliberalization agenda.

Part three

Envisaging an alternative to neoliberalizing HE: The student as producer

In other writing we have both looked at systems and models of progressive HE in other countries: Cole in Venezuela (e.g. Cole, 2015; McLaren and Cole, 2014, 2015); and Maisuria in Sweden (Maisuria, 2016) and Cuba (Maisuria, 2016b). In this section of the article, we now report a descriptive analysis of an alternative model and approach to HE in the UK, which is in stark contrast to and actively and openly subversive to the neoliberal model and the agenda in successive education policy papers since Thatcher, as discussed in the sections above.

The ‘Student as Producer’ model of HE at the University of Lincoln was adopted by the university in 2010 and written up as a core component of its Teaching and Learning Plan 2011–2016. As one of the founders of the project, Professor Mike Neary, put it, in his collaboration with lecturer and collaborator in alternative education Gary Saunders (Neary and Saunders, 2016: 2):

‘Student as Producer’ is an act of resistance to the current policy framework being imposed on universities in England and around the world and, as such, is a critical response to attempts by national governments to create and consolidate a consumerist culture and impose high levels of debt among undergraduate students.

‘Student as Producer’, they continue, ‘emerged from this double crisis: a socio-economic crisis and an associated crisis over the meaning and purpose of higher education’, and ‘identifies strongly with the academic and student movement of protests against fees and cuts to funding in higher education and other social and welfare services’ (Neary and Saunders, 2016: 2).

Countering the increasingly dominant hegemony of the neoliberal modelling of the university, Student as Producer – taking its title from Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer, in which he argues that not only should intellectual authors produce revolutionary publications, they should also seek to transform the social relations of production for a communist society⁵ – ‘is framed around the practices and principles of critical pedagogy, popular education and Marxist theory’. With respect to Marxist theory, in addition to the inspiration coming from Benjamin, Neary and Saunders (2016: 2) refer to Thomas Mathiesen’s notion of the ‘politics of abolition’ and his underpinning concept of ‘the unfinished’ (Mathiesen, 1974, cited in Neary and Saunders, 2016: 3). This negative attitude understands capitalist repression as related to the domination of the labour theory of value (it is the labour of the worker that creates value, and surplus value is appropriated from workers by capitalists in the act of production, hence capitalism is inherently exploitative), and its institutional forms of regulation: money and the State (Clarke, 1991; Postone, 1993, cited in Neary and Saunders, 2016: 3). In this way, ‘revolutionary knowledge is understood as something that is constituted through class-struggle, co-operation and radical practice, where the crisis of the capitalist university becomes a field of radical research to be reconstituted as a form of subversive “living knowledge”’ (Roggero, 2011: 8, cited in Neary and Saunders, 2016: 3).

Neary and Saunders do not offer explanations of what they mean by either ‘critical pedagogy’ or ‘popular education’. Our perspective on the former has been recently articulated by Peter McLaren, arguably its leading exponent. For McLaren (2015: 27), critical pedagogy

locates the production of critical knowledges leading to praxis in its social, spatial and geopolitical contexts, and reveals the workings of the production process and how it operates intertextually alongside and upon other discourses, but it does so with a particular political project in mind – an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-democratic and emancipatory struggle.

To McLaren’s project, we would add discrimination, as this is related to the other equality issues of age, disability, religion and belief, pregnancy and maternity, marriage and civil partnership, sexual orientation and gender reassignment. As McLaren (2015: 27–28) continues, critical pedagogy works against what Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis (2000) call the ‘coloniality of power’. Hence ‘a critical pedagogy serves to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar’. Finally,

it attempts to bring out the pedagogical dimensions of the political and political dimensions of the pedagogical and to convert these activities to a larger, more sustained and focused project of building alternative and oppositional forms of sustainable environments, of learning environments, of revolutionary political environments.

Important to critical pedagogy is developing ‘popular education’. With respect to ‘popular education’, we believe that in order to move forward, it is necessary to look to the past, and we would argue that the essence of popular education is exemplified in Richard Johnson’s (1979) analysis of four of its aspects enacted in the UK in the period 1790–1848, a time when at least sections of the working class were engaged in radical educational pursuits. For the radicals of the time, the primary purpose of knowledge was its ‘use value’ to the working class to build class organization for resistance, rather than exploited labour for surplus value for the ruling class. The four aspects: a critique of the existing system; alternative educational goals; education to change the world; and education for all seem broadly aligned to what we understand is the purpose and practice in the Student as Producer model at the University of Lincoln.

Eighteenth- and 19th-century radicals first conducted a running critique of all forms of ‘provided’ education. This included the whole gamut of schools, from clerically dominated Anglican Sunday schools to State-aided (usually Anglican) day schools (Johnson, 1979: 76). Second, they were involved in the development of alternative educational goals, involving notions of how ‘educational utopias’ could actually be achieved and a definition of ‘really useful knowledge’, and incorporating a radical content – a sense of what it was really important to know for class formation in order to build class struggle. This included ‘a theory of economic exploitation, a theory of the class character of the state, and a theory of social and cultural domination’ (Johnson, 1979: 88). Third, radicalism incorporated an important internal debate about education as a political strategy as a means of changing the world. Finally, radical movements developed a vigorous and varied educational practice, which was concerned with informing comprehensive understandings of the education of all citizens as members of a more just social order (Johnson, 1979: 76–77).

Student as Producer is based on Marx’s early writings, promoting conditions where students can recognize themselves in a world of their own design (Neary and Saunders, 2016: 11). However, as Neary and Saunders (2016: 3–4) stress, despite the recognition of Student as Producer by the University of Lincoln, that university remains a neoliberal institution, ‘existing within an increasingly marketised system, committed to the way academic values are being defined with the current higher education context’. This is in the context of the intensification of neoliberalism, which, as we shall shortly see, led to a group of academics at Lincoln taking the radical principles that underpin Student as Producer outside the university to establish an autonomous critical pedagogical project, the Social Science Centre (SSC), which is part of a broader ‘popular education’ movement.

Student as Producer exists both in and against the university, and also in and against the neoliberal state, and one major way in which it differs from the popular education outlined by Johnson is its refusal to privilege the working class as the only revolutionary agents of change within capitalist social relations (Neary and Saunders, 2016: 7; see also Holloway, 2002; Larsen et al., 2014; Postone, 1993). As they put it, ‘forms of revolutionary subjectivity are derived from antagonisms to capitalist work and non-work inside and outside of the capitalist factory and other forms of repressive institutional life, including the university’ (Neary and Saunders, 2016: 8). Therefore, revolutionaries consist not only of industrial workers at work, but also domestic workers, the unemployed, migrants and others who are struggling against exploitation and alienation in capitalism. Importantly, this includes students and academics inside the Edu-factory, who are being forced to commodify learning and build the university in the mould of an exchangeable commodity (Edu-factory Collective, 2009, cited in Neary and Saunders, 2016: 8), all of which we argue above is part of the neoliberal political agenda. The potentially revolutionary working class includes a wider range of workers. The working class is defined as a large proportion of people who need to work and produce value in the neoliberal mode of production; if they did not work they would struggle to survive and live, and would have little possibility of flourishing. Therefore, even highly paid workers, perhaps in professional positions such as academics, are still workers, albeit with a greater share of expendable income than traditional blue-collar and service sector workers. This definition of the working class also includes those who are out of, or in flexible, employment – they need to work, and when they do not, they serve the function of a reserve army of labour. The reserve army of labour are those people who are surviving precariously, and used by the neoliberals, implicitly and explicitly, to threaten all those in work with replacement if their demands are not met (usually more for less).

Working-class consciousness and class struggle ought to be part of an educative experience, and Student as Producer can be seen as ‘an act of collaboration between students and academics in the making of practical-critical knowledge’ (Neary and Saunders, 2016: 9). It could be described as a form of ongoing participatory action research with a militant tendency that started in 2007 when marginalized and disenfranchised academic workers, students and staff were contacted to celebrate radical pedagogical practices (Neary and Saunders, 2016: 9). However, by 2011, Neary and Saunders (2016: 14) felt that the processes put in place to maintain the dissensual incorporation of Student as Producer ‘appeared to have turned into just another bureaucratic management procedure’ and, faced with what appeared to be defeat, in that year a group of staff from the University of Lincoln set-up the SSC (Neary and Saunders, 2016: 15), which has no formal relationship with the university.

In its own words (Social Science Centre, 2016), and drawing upon socialist principles, the

Social Science Centre offers opportunities to engage in a co-operative experience of higher education. Run as a not-for-profit co-operative, the SSC is organised on the basis of democratic, non-hierarchical principles, with all members having equal involvement in the life and work of the SSC. Staff and students at the centre study themes that draw on the core subjects in social science: sociology, politics and philosophy, as well as psychology, economics, journalism and photography. The Centre organises study and research at all levels including undergraduate, Masters and Doctorates in Philosophy.

The co-operative principles that guide the organisation of the SSC also extend to the ways in which they design and run their courses. All classes are participative and collaborative in order to ground inquiry in the experiences and knowledges of the participants. Student-scholars and teacher-scholars have opportunities to design courses together, and those new to teaching and independent learning are offered generous support from others. All members are able to work with academics and other experienced researchers on research projects, and to publish their own writings through the SSC. One key guiding principle of the Centre is that ‘teachers’ and ‘students’ have much to learn from each other.

Whereas the government’s agenda is aggressively dismantling the public university that once had a common good ethos and forming instead a privatized investment for personal self-interest as discussed earlier, the SSC is an antidote to neoliberalization. The SSC is working within a neoliberal dominant hegemony, in respect to both: (i) existing legally within a neoliberal government and opposing the very nature of what this stands for and imposes; and (ii) existing alongside the neoliberal University of Lincoln, with which it has informal relationships. But, in addition to working, existing and thriving within neoliberalism, crucially, the centre is against that neoliberalism system and it demonstrates the possibility and actuality of an alternative being feasible.

Conclusion

In this article, we began by outlining a brief history and the defining characteristics of neoliberalism. We went on to look at neoliberalism and HE in England, focusing on an extensive critique of the specific proposals set-out in the UK government’s consultation Green Paper for HE in England, Fulfilling Our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice. We argued that this Paper represents a general deepening and extending of neoliberalism in universities in England with significant consequences for the university as a public service for the common good. We concluded with a discussion of an existing alternative model of HE that practises some Marxist and democratic socialist principles and which openly challenges neoliberalism while working within it.

Anti-neoliberal centre-left journalist Will Hutton (2016: 40) has argued that, despite its significant financial resources, the right (both in the UK and the elsewhere) is in deepening crisis. In the UK, he evidences a refusal to let the steel industry further disappear to ‘market forces’ (so transparently rigged), a lack of belief that trusts in offshore tax havens can be ‘private matters’ and a lack of willingness to connive in lowering the living standards of the disabled to drive up those of the upper middle class. If Hutton is right that ‘the 30-year rise of the Right is over’, then could it be that alternatives such as Student as Producer may not be just feasible possibilities but actually proliferating in reality? Could it also be true that they are beginning to mount a serious challenge to the neoliberal university and, more generally, along with progressive forces, that they are doing this both within and outside a Left-led Labour Party. Could we be at a moment in history where a class formation coalesces and builds the impetus to struggle against neoliberalism itself?

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the suggestions made by the two anonymous referees because we believe these have sharpened our arguments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Alpesh Maisuria is a senior lecturer in Education Studies at the University of East London, UK. He is also the Deputy Chief Editor for Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS). He has published widely on education matters using Marxism that draws upon Critical Realism.

Mike Cole is a professor of Education at the University of East London, UK. His latest books are Racism: A Critical Analysis (2016); Critical Race Theory and Education: A Marxist Response, Revised Second Edition (2017) and New Developments in Critical Race Theory and Education: Revisiting Racialized Capitalism and Socialism in Austerity (2017).

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The neoliberalization of higher education in England: An alternative is possible *

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Part one

Neoliberalism and its basic principles

Part two

Neoliberalism and HE in England

Quality assurance

Marketization

QA as ‘excellence’

Marketization and privatization

The Teaching Excellence Framework and the National Student Survey

Part three

Envisaging an alternative to neoliberalizing HE: The student as producer

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Notes

References