Some context to this HPC struggle - The state of British Higher Education

My thanks to colleagues who pass links on to me. This one was received last night (Simon Head, The Grim Threat To British Universities, January 2011), and is a grim reminder of the context of problems we are struggling with here. The HPC is one particular manifestation of an ideology set in motion decades ago and which has wide reaching and multiplying effects. Richard Gombrich's speech in Tokyo 2000 was one of the earliest accounts of the structural shifts playing a part in today's drama. The transcript of his talk has been mentioned here before, but is always worth a re-read, and can be found by following this link here.

Prof Gombrich was one of the dons referred to early in Head's article (click here for link to full article) who moved against giving Mrs Thatcher an honorary doctorate. Here is the paragraph from Head's NYRB article:

"In the UK this system has been gathering strength for over twenty years, which helps explain why Oxford and Cambridge dons, and the British academy in general, have never taken a clear stand against it. Like much that is dysfunctional in contemporary Britain, the imposition of bureaucratic control on the academy goes back to the Thatcher era and its heroine. A memorable event in this melancholy history took place in Oxford on January 29, 1985, when the university’s Congregation, its governing parliament, denied Mrs. Thatcher an honorary Oxford degree by a vote of 738–319. It did so on the grounds that “Mrs. Thatcher’s Government has done deep and systematic damage to the whole public education system in Britain, from the provision for the youngest child up to the most advanced research programmes."

Other recent articles on this theme include Stefan Collini's 'Browne's Gamble' in the London Review of Books Nov 2010 (click here), Terry Eagleton in the Guardian 17 Dec 2010: The Death of Universities, and Stanley Fish 'The Value of Higher Education made Literal" New York Times, 13 Dec 2010, which begins like this:

"A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before them had he not been the beneficiary, as a working-class youth in England, of a government policy to provide a free university education to the children of British citizens. He walked into the university with little knowledge of the great texts that inform modern democracy and he walked out an expert in those very same texts."

Simon Head's article, like that of Richard Gombrich, Conrad Russell (Academic Freedom, Routledge 1993), Max Travers (The New Bureaucracy, Policy Press 2007), Marilyn Strathern (Audit Cultures, Routledge 2000), and Michael Power (The Audit Explosion, Demos 1994), to name but a few, all point to the particular mode of administration that is used in this new wave, and the vacuum that it creates. The collapse of the system comes a few decades down the line by which time no-one is in any position to know what caused it. The creation of a muddle is one of proliferating the effects of the wave. It abandons the field of explanation to currents of less enlightened action. The HPC is modelled on just such a 'particular mode of administration' with signs of just such a vacuum in the making.