Patrick Leigh-Pemberton: On serious talk about serious matters

It is not often that I choose to write about a serious matter, and when I do, it is rare that I should choose to discuss it in a serious way, but this week I think we should look at the Student Experience, and what our Government is doing about it. The current coalition’s approach to Universities is one that I find very confusing. The whole idea would appear to be that a free market approach is a healthy thing, and so Universities should begin to think of themselves as businesses, rather than the institutions of social importance and history that they really are. This might make sense, but the thing that you forget is that the relationship between Student and University is not one that can be simply defined as that between vendor and consumer. In fact, I don’t think that in my 500 words I could really define that relationship, as there are so many aspects to a contractual understanding, bid to last between 3 and 7 years,  that it would be impossible.

And yet, this is an idea that many Universities are buying into. There is talk of streamlining, of sharing resources (FX between Falmouth and Exeter, which last year had to make cuts of hundreds of thousands of pounds, and the only benefit of which seems to be that the Universities become less reliant on the consensus of their student bodies), and dangerously optimistic expansions. All of this is led by an increasingly large body of professional educational bureaucrats who flit between executive office and executive office, claiming salaries higher than any of the academics that make Universities prestigious, simply because they are very good at shutting unions and ignoring students. Whilst St Andrews has by and large avoided this terror, there are instances of short-sightedness that seem to point toward the development of such a dangerously unsustainable approach to things. A good example of this is the sale of Hamilton Hall (before my time, probably before yours too), at the price of £20m, which whilst lucrative and useful, has just created another influx of holiday homes that inflate the market of this town beyond reasonable levels, whilst losing the University a very prestigious piece of its real estate. As I say, instances like this are rare, and I really had to stretch my outrage filter to get cross about it, but if this university chooses to go the way of the others, and ignore the people that make this so famous, so fun and so worthwhile, there is nothing but bad on the horizon.

This is why, even if it threatens your graduation, your internship, your job offer, or indeed financial support, you should support the academics should they choose to strike. Their wages, which have always been pretty scanty, are in no way attractive, and the profession in Britain is losing many great prospective teachers and thinkers to the corporate private sectors. If we don’t stop this happening, the next generation will genuinely have a worse education than us, in an age where their voice will no longer count for anything…which would be an act of selfishness that would make everyone think that we all agree with idiots like David Willets, and the private sector hawks that travel on his shoulders.