From the University to the Edu-Factory: Understanding the Crisis of Higher Education

It is a truism that academia is in crisis, in the UK as much as in many other countries around the world. In the UK, the long-term underfunding of higher education has precipitated a dramatic financial crisis among many if not most universities, while a management culture that is as problematic as it is entrenched has deepened this crisis and may entail a ‘great resignation’ of academics from academia. Meanwhile, in the US, the re-election of Donald Trump bodes ill for universities, which the past-and-future president seems to identify with a ‘radical left’ he deplores. Other examples of this crisis are not hard to come by.

This crisis merits closer scrutiny, as its features already hint at what might become of universities in the future. In particular, the woes of British universities are instructive, given how far their de-funding, de facto privatization, and commercialization has already gone and how far they might go yet. Many recent critiques of higher education have documented these changes over the past 20 years. However, a common assumption of these critiques is that, beneath managerialism and commercialization, the university as an institution fundamentally dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge remains intact. Universities are still universities, and as such they are engaged in the pursuit of an important public good (1, 2). This is not so anymore, I suggest – at least not in British higher education. Privatization, commercialization, and authoritarian managerialism have morphed the university into a new and different kind of institution.

So, what has become of the university, and what might be an appropriate term for its new form?

The issue of student attendance and engagement offers interesting answers to these questions. For some time now, I have been concerned about the fact that most of my students either do not attend my classes regularly or do not come at all. Every semester now, there are many students who are absent from the beginning of the semester, who do not respond to my e-mails, and whom I only encounter through the coursework they submit online. It does not make a difference whether I record my lectures or not; one way or another, the students in question typically do not come to class. My concern about the effectiveness of my teaching methods quickly made way for the realization that colleagues, at my university and across British academia, face the same problem, with little certainty as to its causes and remedies.

A piece in The Guardian by Jedidajah Otte, published earlier this year, offers insights into students’ experiences of absence and disengagement. In line with my own assessment, it describes the problem as endemic. It draws on students’ first-hand accounts to map out a number of explanations, such as the need to prioritize work and income-generation, the assumption that coming to and engaging with classes first-hand makes no difference to academic performance and degree results, a COVID-induced preference for online teaching, and a campus environment in which absence has become normalized to the point of driving away those who still wish to come.

This article is insightful, in that it begins to lay bare the scale of the problem and the extent to which its initial explanations defy longstanding assumptions in academic debates about and strategies for student engagement. At the same time, though, it only offers a surface-level assessment of what is wrong on Britain’s abandoned campuses, and it glosses over deeper issues that might help explain endemic and profound student disengagement. Specifically, it lacks an account of how British universities have changed in recent years and how changing institutional conditions might participate in producing student disengagement.

The point, I think, is this: While UK universities still routinely profess to a ‘civic mission’, this has become narrow in its remit and secondary to these universities’ commercial operations, such as the lucrative recruitment of international students, and the pursuit of bureaucratic goals, typically in the form of positive evaluations in this or that audit. In public discourse, universities are now an ‘industry’ that operates in a ‘market’ for students. Such commercial language pervades higher education policy, public discourse, and the ways in which academics, managers, and academic bureaucrats speak to each other about their academic labour. Scholarly language has taken leave from UK campuses, outside, perhaps the efforts of some increasingly isolated academics whose vision of academia has remained wedded to a kind of university that is no more.

In British higher education, managerialese (think ‘line manager’, ‘key performance indicator’, or the ubiquitous ‘team’) is now the language that organizes our understanding of the institution we work in, its objectives, and the work we do. Managerialese offers few, if any anchors, to think about the university as an institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Instead, we chase the profits and tick the boxes. (‘Box ticking’ is my favorite new English word that I have learned since I came back to the UK. It says ever so much.) If you would like to understand how profit-chasing and box-ticking have come to be the be-all of British higher education, look back a few decades to debates about the ‘conservative backlash’ against progressive universities and the rise of the ‘entrepreneurial university’. British higher education in its current form is what happens when the conservative backlash has been really, really successful.

All this does not just mean anymore that higher education is an institution in crisis. It means, I suggest, that, in the UK, the university, as an institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivations of citizenship, is quite conclusively a thing of the past. What has emerged from the ruins of the university, after four decades of relentless reform efforts by governments, policy makers, and academic managers, might instead be usefully termed the ‘edu-factory’. The institutional imperatives of the edu-factory differ quite notable from that of the university. In so far as edu-factories pursue knowledge, in must be of a kind that has immediate applications for business, socio-economic development, and the generation of commercial profit. In so far as edu-factories teach students, it is not to educate them, but to equip them with a degree certificate and train them, narrowly, in certain vocational skills. ‘Employability’ is thus the bureaucratic term that defines what it means to be a student in the UK of the 2020s.

In such an environment, it does not make much sense to regularly come to class. The contents of a given course (‘module’, if you like your managerialese) typically exceed quite considerably what any student would need to know to complete assessed coursework and pass. Engagement with these contents would therefore require some sort of intellectual curiosity – wanting to know and learn, just for the sake of it. However, the edu-factory and the public discourses that sustain it encourage the opposite, that is to say a narrowly instrumental narrative of learning that is motivated by ‘learning to the test’ and box-ticking in pursuit of a graduation certificate. It is therefore unsurprising that previously fundamental elements of student labor (‘teaching and learning’, if you like your managerialese) have fallen by the wayside. Remember how students were expected to read before class and how class discussions used to be grounded in the assumption that you had read sometimes numerous and complicated academic texts? The fact that university students in the UK emphatically do not read and that few academics would expect them to is a symptom of this narrow instrumentalism. Not coming to class is simply the logical next step onwards from there, apart from those few students who manage to remain intellectually curious in an education system that does it best to discourage this.

The truly interesting question is where the edu-factory will go from here. The loss of reading could still be compensated for with teaching strategies built around extensive spoon-feeding. When academics start to lecture and run seminar discussions with rows of empty chairs, the realities of the edu-factory truly start to bite. I have been taken aback at the number of outstanding, highly accomplished colleagues, from universities around the UK, who have left academia in recent years, sometimes onwards into exciting new occupations, but sometimes just into worklessness, out of sheer disappointment with the state of higher education in the UK. Many more have withdrawn into an inner exile of sorts, working mostly from home, communicating only when necessary, and avoiding as much as possible any engagement with an increasingly dispiriting institutional reality. More likely than not, at least some of your colleagues and academic acquaintances have done the same. What will the edu-factories of the future look like when the students have vanished and the academics have quit?