Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

British universities and globalisation

Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

British universities, long regarded as among the world's finest, are discovering that aspects of globalisation can damage them, for reasons as much domestic as anything else.

THERE CAN be no doubt that British universities have deserved their reputation. Setting high standards for admission, trusting staff and postgraduates to teach and research in substantial freedom, and packing huge amounts of undergraduate work into short, intense terms, they have consistently attracted staff and students from all over the world. One American lecturer, whose career has been pursued almost exclusively in the United Kingdom, has called British universities very efficient forcing-houses; dropout rates too are lower than they are in continental Europe and the United States.

Following a major policy decision in the 1960s, British universities have been funded by the state, which continues to pay for infrastructure and salaries, and which until 1997 awarded maintenance grants to almost every British student admitted. The grants were never generous, but they played a significant part in the rapid transformation of British society, lifting substantial proportions of school-leavers from the working classes to the professional ranks in under a generation, and demonstrating, as many sociologists note, that a good education system is one of the biggest social levellers in the modern state, levelling upwards rather than downwards.

Those days now seem very distant, despite the expansion in the number of accredited universities and the large increase in the proportion — now about 43 per cent (in Scotland specifically, 50 per cent) — of school-leavers now entering U.K. higher education. First, since Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher intensified the process in 1979, British universities have endured sustained infrastructural attack. Staff salaries have been restricted, and, for all but a few stars, a career in academe is now poorly paid; furthermore, state research funding — except possibly in military-related work — has been deeply cut, and the abolition of maintenance grants, together with the imposition of tuition fees, currently £3000 per undergraduate a year, means that new graduates typically leave university owing banks and other lenders £15,000, more for longer courses like medicine.

The universities have attempted to obtain private sector funding, but this tends not to provide infrastructural money, is apparently directed more towards short-term results in applied sciences, and has given rise to publicly expressed concerns about censorship in the form of pressure from funders not to publish adverse or inconclusive findings.

Fourthly, postgraduate applications from British students are declining, partly because students already heavily in debt do not want further debts and partly because a career in academe, in addition to the low pay, is now heavily burdened by oppressive bureaucracy and state-driven external monitoring.

The consequences are serious. The decline in the recruitment of U.K. postgraduates means that the very resource that made British universities famous is under threat; redemption of the decay in the knowledge base could take decades. Further, several British universities have responded by relying on full-cost fees paid by students from outside the European Union, and marketing and recruitment campaigns have been mounted with varying success in face of competition from other regions of the world. Overseas student enrolment now brings British universities some £2 billion a year, with one projection mentioning £20 billion by 2020. Some universities have even modelled their financial strategy around overseas recruitment, and in 2004-05 one in three postgraduates at a U.K. university was from overseas.

Simultaneously, however, this overseas recruitment faces serious threats. One problem is that for overseas students the U.K. is publicly noted as the most expensive place to study, as living costs are proportionately higher than in competitor countries.

Another set of problems lies in the quality of overseas students' lives in the U.K. Privately, some express considerable disappointment with the apparent indifference of university administrations to their concerns and with the lack of collegiality in their departments, not to mention the quality of campus facilities (for example, one top-ten British university has no hot food available on any of its campuses after 4 p.m. — quite a problem in an academic culture in which postgraduates often work on campus into the evenings and nights).

Thirdly, persistent and sometimes very public reports circulate of racist violence by locals against foreign students in the U.K. The risks of these are unsurprising in a culture with a long imperial history and legacy, and in which there is a documented connection between sensationalist media coverage and the frequency of racist attacks. The nature of U.K. media coverage since 9/11 and the fact that students in U.K. universities often live in poorer neighbourhoods, both contribute to the risk and fact of racist attacks on — particularly non-white — students.

British universities' responses to racist attacks have also left much to be desired, and have been motivated mainly by the fear of publicity. Two victims at one university were so angry about the lack of support from their university that they left their courses, returned home, and denounced the university in their regional press. An eminent novelist on a postgraduate course was so aggrieved by his university's lack of support for him after he had suffered a racist attack on campus that he returned home and went public in the written and broadcast media. The student's family have copied to this writer their acerbic correspondence with the university administration over the matter. At another university, a senior official told the national press that the university had received no reports of racist attacks — but it then turned out that the university's security office had, unbidden, kept records thereof, and a correction was issued to the press; in this case, both the security office and the local police had acted in exemplary fashion. At the same university, a foreign postgraduate needed facial stitches after an attack and was even accused by the teenage attacker of assault and battery — but the student had contacted the police before the attacker managed to do so.

Other changes to the possible support systems have not helped, as several students' unions — which in the U.K. organise student activities, including sports, and provide often high-quality advice services — have disaffiliated from the National Union of Students (NUS) and cannot therefore consult NUS staff for advice and help over attacks on students.

It is not only British universities that emerge from such episodes in a poor light. Several states now fund students to study in the U.K., and one of the biggest such funders has shown no inclination to press U.K. universities or the British government over the safety of their nationals. It may be significant that the state concerned is not a democracy; the relevant government may consider that the millions to be gained in future trade deals outweigh the harm suffered by the student victims of racist attacks.

In states where students can make their own decisions on where to study, destinations such as Australia have been proving more popular (it might be unsporting to cite other countries' climatic advantages over the U.K). More seriously, relatives of this writer's have sent one of their sons to Australia, rather than — as they said — risk his life in the post-9/11 social climate in the U.S. or the U.K.

The British government, unsurprisingly, remains loudly silent. The current Labour leadership, probably facing a sharp fall in the core vote in poorer constituencies, is as pusillanimous over this issue as its predecessors were in 1968; the then Labour government, under intense pressure from the police, exempted all public services as well as working men's clubs from the requirements of the 1968 Race Relations Act, which made racial discrimination an offence. The public service exemption was ended only by an amendment act in 2000.

Within British universities there are signs of tension among administrations. One senior officer has apparently expressed formal — though not yet public — disquiet over the university's commitment to recruiting and retaining overseas students as a key source of income. With home students, the university will at least be sure of the income. If overseas recruitment falls by even a moderate amount, several universities' financial strategies could disintegrate, and some even seem to have no alternative plan.

British universities, on the evidence to date, are therefore unprepared for the issues arising from their dependence on overseas student recruitment, or rather, on overseas fee income. The short-term fix of grabbing at a volatile international market is no remedy for the sustained infrastructural damage the U.K. has inflicted on its universities. Globalisation, as it has done elsewhere, is reducing First World institutions to a Third World condition.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

No room for chauvinism
Horrifying mess
British universities and globalisation
A fading cotton bumper crop
Caste atrocities in Karnataka
India and Venezuela: a success story
Corrections and Clarifications
Sarkozy under fire
Mullaperiyar row
Hu Jintao's visit
MPs' rhetoric

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu