”comrades!”

Last week’s Policy Exchange pamphlet Tarnished Towers was a hefty intervention from the political right to the debate on wither English higher education given its current predicaments.

And whatever one thinks about its analysis and future recommendations, it’s a contribution that needs to be engaged rather more seriously and thoughtfully than has been the case in significant parts of the mainstream press (£).

While there has been a little kneejerk reaction to the pamphlet from within the sector, there has been much more serious and thoughtful and engagement. One of the pieces that particularly resonated with me was Jim Dickinson’s post on WonkHE, with its central insight that Tarnished Towers re-presented (the hyphen is deliberate, not a typo) an agenda that had been pushed to some, but ultimately modest, effect during the Conservative governments of 2010-24.

For me, Tarnished Towers is an agenda of nostalgic, centralised declinism reflecting the growing movement on the right to develop and assert state power in order to roll back what it sees as the wrong turn that the country took in 1997; human rights, Public Sector Equality Duty, expanding and widening access to higher education etc.

to the barricades …

Much of that perspective comes through in the WonkHE post, but there was one section that struck a particular chord of recollection with me:

It wants universities to restore academic authority, but then mistrusts academic judgement at almost every point where it matters. Admissions should be externally constrained, foundation years should largely go, classifications should be capped, degrees should be supplemented by a national exit exam, quality should be inspected, and the balance of provision should be centrally squeezed. The academic voice is apparently to be strengthened in governance, just not trusted to decide who to admit, what to teach, how to assess, or how many students a course can responsibly take.

In short, an important element of Tarnished Towers is academic populism: claiming to give a voice to the ‘left behind’ in the sector (the academics), betrayed by its leadership (both institutional, and national); but doing so by taking more authority higher up the system into a revised regulatory approach under a new government. Tighter control in the name of greater freedom.

The reason it struck a chord was that it reminded of a much milder instance of academic populism at a university at which I used to work.

a cautionary tale

At all the universities that have employed me there has always been some tension about aspects of the way that academic colleagues feel that institutional policies, processes etc. limit their freedom of action or prevent them delivering what they view as the core of their role. Sometimes this is well-founded; other times it isn’t.

It can lead to interesting internal dynamics for university executives (who are responsible for these institutional policies and processes) to negotiate, which is normally done in good faith. At one university at which I worked, though, the executive indulged itself in a type of academic populism not dissimilar to Tarnished Towers.

Under pressure from the academic population for a number of reasons, the executive would occasionally but repeatedly throw the middle of the organisation under a bus.

They understood, accepted even agreed with the complaints from their academic colleagues. They were academics as well. They understood. But they weren’t the problem.

The problem wasn’t senior leadership but middle managers (academic and professional services), who were both implementing the decisions of senior leaders the wrong way as well as creating (away from the gaze of senior leaders) unnecessary obstacles to academic colleagues. Obstacles that senior leaders were shocked, shocked I say, to see present in their establishment.

So what needed to change was the middle layers of the organisation.

And reader, you may be surprised to hear that such claims went down well with elements of the academic community. They knew there was a problem, felt heard and were promised action.

But funnily enough this tended end in decisions being drawn up to the senior layer, in ways that disempowered the middle layers but also tended towards more directive approaches determined by the executive to which academic staff now needed to align. The promise of academic populism had not led to the destination promised.

this has all happened before; will it happen again?

One can only hope that at a sector level, the attempt by the right to rally academic support for the type of reforms set out in Tarnished Towers is less successful. The populist call to rally to the cause too often leads to a realisation of the bad faith in which the call is made …