George Monbiot offers a caustic critique of the way in which publicly funded research is exploited for profit by large journal publishers. Much academic research is paid for by taxpayers. Journal editing and peer reviewing are labours of love conducted by academics for little financial reward. Yet the research publications that result are often not freely available, but are locked behind paywalls:

Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.

Of course, if you are lucky enough to work for a good university, you can access these via your institution. But for the university, the costs are huge, and squeeze other library resources such as IT facilities or book funds:

The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I've seen, Elsevier's Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy.

It is not surprising, then, that journal publishers and their shareholders are doing very nicely indeed: 

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

Clearly, much is morally and economically wrong with this model. Monbiot offers some characteristically liberal solutions:

In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating – along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität – a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.

One might justifiably ask why change has not happened already. For good and bad, from Wikileaks to Open Government, from Piratebay to Flickr, the internet has seen data and creative ideas circulating freely. It has similarly enabled the creation of numerous open-access journals, which are published online without any of the overheads of print publications. Whereas paid-for journals need to appeal to a broad audience within a discipline, open-access journals can be narrowly focused for a particular subject group, and thus can achieve high visibility with those peers who are most relevant in an academic's field. On the other hand, rather than being accessible only by those with university subscriptions to the journal, anyone can in principle view open-access articles. And, typically, open-access journals do not tie their authors into long-term copyright agreements, so that they can freely republish their research on their own websites, in edited books, or in public and university databases, again giving it potentially greater scope and influence.

Since academics do not get paid by the publishers for submitting their research in paid-for journals, why then do they not readily submit their research to open-access publications?

One answer within UK universities lies in something called the Research Excellence Framework (formerly known as the Research Assessment Exercise) which allocates research budgets to institutions according to the quality of their academics' work. One key judgement of quality is the citation index - the number of times a researcher's paper has been referenced by his or her peers. The assumption is that the better or more ground-breaking a paper, the more often other researchers will want or need to build upon it (think how many times Einstein's special theory of relativity must have been mentioned by physicists over the years). Established, paid-for journals such as Nature have a high visibility in the academic world. If your article gets into Nature, the chances are that more of your peers will see it, will be influenced by it, and will cite it. Thus academics are encouraged by their institutions to set their sights on publishing in well-known journals with good citation ratings, even though their own libraries will then be extorted to access them.

This market ideology equates prestige with cost. Paradoxically, the more expensive a journal is, the more it is perceived to count when research gets published there: the thinking goes that such journals and their articles must be good if institutions and academics still want or need to access them despite their seemingly prohibitive costs. Further, many subscription journals continue to be published in paper form as well as digitally, whereas online-only, open-access journals can have issues of theoretically limitless length. Paid-for journals thus need to exercise greater editorial exclusivity in order both to sustain paper publication, and to justify the high price of their product - hence why more articles are rejected from paid-for journals than from open-access ones. For an academic to publish in an open-access journal can look suspiciously like an admission that his or her research is only second-rate.

It is not hard to see why, in this circumstance, large publishers have been doing well out of academia. Publishers have indeed fallen over themselves to help the Research Excellence Framework assessments by handing over citation data for their journals, whilst open-access journals can struggle to offer the quantitative indicators of impact (price of the journal, number of citations) that Whitehall number-crunchers like.

However, much as it riles that corporations like Elsevier can make profits from publicly funded research, market determinants do have some role to play in academic publishing. Monbiot imagines a world where we have a single global archive of academic literature and data. But we already have a similar sort of place. It is called the internet - and it is anarchic. Trying to separate out top research from less ground-breaking or flawed research that happens to appear at the top of a Google search is a nightmare for everyone in academia, from students to professors. Unless their editors happen to be outstanding at search engine optimisation, results for open-access journals are similarly jumbled amongst the noise. Although their articles are still rigorously peer-reviewed, they are the same one click away as trivial public commentary. So when in my Google search I spot a result locked behind Modern Fiction Studies, I make the extra effort to follow this result, even though this means going circuitously via my library to logon. Subscription journals, which have a vested financial interest in being selective as to what they publish, do at least ensure a fine-grained filtering of their material, even if what passes through is then locked behind a paywall.

Paid-for journals can also do a better job of publicising research than open-access journals or a single, vast public database could do. The media offices of Elvesier or Springer have a hotline to the science editors of news outlets: just consider the number of stories that appear based on innovative research published in the likes of Nature (a quick search on BBC News turns up 1500 reports). This ensures that high-quality research gets high-quality coverage both with other researchers who can build upon it, but also with the public who have the right to understand how the research they fund is influencing their lives.

Finally, by bundling together lots of different journal titles within their databases, publishing conglomerates have undoubtedly created an efficient, electronic ecosystem in which to conduct research. Articles are often tagged and hyperlinked to give easy access to similar research topics in comparable journals; publishers' archival functions allow researchers easily to call up back issues when once they would have needed to scour dusty library shelves.

But all these positives do not mean the situation as it stands is satisfactory. Monbiot cites a Deutsche Bank study that suggests that publishers do not offer enough of the above forms of added value to justify their 40% profit margins. We certainly need some changes.

We could start by reconsidering the Research Excellence Framework and its too-simplistic linkage between citations, journal value (whether value is assessed as its price or prestige) and research quality. Perhaps especially in the humanities, groundbreaking or thought-provoking research might not be that which is read and cited by a few scholars, but that which influences a more general public. Publications in blogs, websites, public databases and open-access journals ought to count as having an impact by virtue of the large audience they can potentially reach.

Secondly, copyright laws need to be revisited to encourage the portability of research. At present, I am technically breaking the law every time I copy music from one of my CDs onto my MP3 player. This aspect of nineteenth-century copyright law is soon to be changed to allow for the transfer of creative data, and we need to create a similar kind of multimedia environment for publicly-funded research. In its immediate moment, top research might still be best published in a high-visibility journal. If the research is groundbreaking enough, it will have its impact there and then; to protect the value that paid-for publications can bring by making such research highly visible to the academic and wider community, there does need to be some copyright restriction on it. There is, though, a law of diminishing returns, with research being less significant as subsequent research builds on the old. I am sure that few contemporary physicists would now bother citing Newton's Principia. As research diminishes in its immediate influence, so it ought to be liberated back to the sphere of the public which originally funded it, and placed in the sort of central repository Monbiot envisages. The government should ensure that no publicly funded research is locked into an arcane 75 year copyright held by the journal which happens to be the first to publish data or ideas; such research ought to be automatically released after a set period (five years, say) in a rights-free, digital form to be redistributed by national copyright libraries.

Finally, academics should be offered development opportunities to educate them about the diverse publication media now available, from blogging to open-access publishing. Academics themselves should recognise the power of open models, as well as the limitations. Research published freely online can easily get lost amongst the detritus. But flag up that research to one's close academic community through the likes of Twitter or Academia.edu, and suddenly that research can have more of an impact with both selected peers and the general public than it could if locked in a subscription journal. Once academics themselves start to take the initiative, to set up their own open-access journals rather than simply peer reviewing for wealthy publishers, to promote the free circulation of ideas rather than happily editing journals which lock research under prohibitive copyright, then the big publishers themselves will have to revisit their current, exploitative model.

Over at the New York Times, Geoff Dyer has been wondering about what readers do to books:

There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books). I don’t mean on the reputations or royalties of the authors who wrote the books but on the actual physical objects themselves.

Once a book is finished, readers will have absorbed into their own minds the information that the book alone once held. But the process of reading is not just a mental one, but a physical one, with readers marking a text as they go. They fold down corners, crease and buckle pages, spill coffee and tea, tear covers, and annotate in the margins. These are the archaeological imprints that turn any one book from being a collection of textual characters - one is reprinted identically in thousands of different editions or in a digital form - to being a unique object that is possessed by one particular reader. George Steiner wrote that an intellectual is someone who can’t read a book without a pencil in his or her hand. One can only truly know the contents of a book by engaging in a dialogue with it, marking its pages as one turns.

So does this mean that I am not an intellectual? Because ever since I have been studying literature professionally, I have rarely marked my books. I hardly ever annotate the margins, and at most I might fold down a page or put a sticky note to bookmark a relevant passage. On the face of it, it might seem as if I am a book fetishist. I respect the integrity of a book, and cherish it like a precious china tea set that can only be used once before being put away forever for safekeeping. So books sit neatly on my shelves, spines slightly broken from one reading, but otherwise unsullied by their encounter with me.

And yet precisely the opposite is the case: far from fetishising books, I treat them as mere tools of my trade.

I live in a small house. The only places I can store books are in two small two bookshelves and two boxes that can slip under my bed. My collection of books is limited to around 250 at any one time (I know this, because I diligently catalogue them using Endnote). My collection is thus less like a permanent record of my reading, and more like a transitional library reflecting my interests and needs at any one time. Many of the books on my shelves, for example, are those that I am teaching, or those that I need to read imminently. Once I read a book, if I do not think I will need it again I will pass it on to a charity shop, or take it to a book exchange. Books have a provisional status in my life. I may buy a particular text one day, but unless it assumes an unusual or practical significance, I will let it drift out of my house without giving it a second thought.

I rarely mark my texts, then, because they feel to me less like possessions and more like lent tools, temporarily passing through my hands so that I can borrow the words from the page, before the object itself journeys elsewhere. Always conscious that I might one day need to resell or donate my book to a new reader, I do not want to influence their first experience by requiring them to look at my marginal commentaries. As Jeff Dyer observes, whilst he is happy to mark books, he will never buy a book if it has been previously annotated.

But what of those books I choose to keep, and do not want to pass on? Besides those books I need for teaching, another factor that determines if I will keep a book is if it has been especially influential on me, taking a place in my affections or intellect such that I think I might want to read it again. Once I have given it a permanent place on my shelves, the elected book becomes a canonical giant in my necessarily small collection. Why not mark even these books? I think it is because I like the sense of secondary surprise that re-opening a once-read book entails. To mark a book the first time around (when of course I do not know whether I will ultimately decide to keep it or not) would be to risk conditioning my reading experience for any potential second reading. My adult self, re-reading Wuthering Heights ten years hence, might not want to remember my teenage self's hormonal identification with Heathcliff. My mature self reading Moby Dick for pleasure is not interested in the psychoanalytic insights my naive undergraduate eyes spotted the first time around. Marginal comments can distort the delicious uncanny that comes from re-reading a cherished book, its sense of familiarity but also newness, of things once seen dimly now seen in a different light.

Given the nature of my reading experience, the fact that I read books but rarely interact with them, one might imagine that I would be happy to venture into the world of e-books. If, for me, books as printed objects are transitional, then books as digital texts would be usefully ephemeral. They ghost freely through the internet or are beamed onto a Kindle, but can then be deleted as soon as their purpose is served. They do not need to take up any space on my shelves. I can digitally annotate a text as much as I like, whilst still having access to a clean copy. However, as yet I have been unwilling to get an e-reader.

This is partly for the practical reasons of my profession. Since many of my physical books are those I need to teach, and since students are asked to buy print editions, I need to keep hold of the same copies as they will be using. I could certainly use an e-book, but I would still need to own the hard copy as well.

The price of e-books is also a deterrent. Once you accept that you will only keep a book temporarily, rather than preserving it on your shelves for years to come, you become quite happy to buy whatever tattered, third-hand edition happens to lurk in Oxfam. You do not feel the need to splurge on a pristine £15 hardback because you know that you will want to archive it forever. And one needs to buy an awful lot of 99 pence paperbacks to make the economies work in favour of a £100 e-reader.

And, in part, I resist digital books because I take some pride in pruning my library. I have academic colleagues who have offices stacked with thousands of books. These unruly tumbles represent the fertile gardens through which their minds have roamed over many decades. But I guess as an intellectual I am neater, more selective. I own fewer books, but those books I do possess are the ones that I need to own. My small, neat bookshelves are an extension of my mind, trim and focused rather than wild and abundant. Every time I choose to send a book to a charity shop, I put a neat, privet hedge around an area of research or a writer that I do not want to pursue further, and this clarifies those areas and writers who I do want to survey some more. To look at my shelves is to reflect on my own direction and purpose, much as a writer's selected prose or poems summarise their literary life. But if I were to keep my collection digitally - with the unlimited storage of the internet - I would never need to do any of this sort of weeding.

So contrary to George Steiner, to read a book without a pencil in one's hand can also be a mark of intellect. Every time I take an uncut book from my shelves, I know that its ultimate fate will see it sent it to a charity shop, or archived in my selected canon. By not annotating as I go, I keep either option open: I can pass it on to a fresh reader, or will preserve the original text so that I can encounter it with clear judgement second time around. This process of evaluation is a serious one, a cutting Solomon's choice. I may not take in as much information as I would do if I was an active reader, marking and commenting in the margins as I go. But this misses the point. If a book is worthwhile, it surely does not just deserve momentary commenting - it deserves a complete re-reading, to absorb its ideas and characters for a second time, and in full.

I blogged recently about some of the cosmetic changes I've made to The Pequod over the summer. However, one of the more significant changes is that I am no longer publishing here under a pseudonym. My real identity, Alistair Brown, now graces the banner of every page.

When I first started The Pequod, I was a fresh-faced graduate. The site began as a whimsical little project to try to sustain my writing skills whilst I did a "normal" job for a year, before returning to study. I was conscious that much of the material that was on here was what literary historians might classify as "juvenalia," the early jottings and experiments of a young writer, before they enter the adult world of paper publication. Thus it seemed right to publish under the pseudonym Ishmael, in keeping with the site's general Moby Dick theme, in order to acknowledge - partly to others, more importantly to myself - that nothing here represented my writing as I wanted it to be remembered. Work that would once have been kept in dusty boxes in the attic might in the twenty-first century be made publically available on the internet, but it should still be somewhat concealed by a pen name.

As I later became a postgraduate, first taught and then researching for a PhD, this distinction between my real self and my Pequod self became even more important. Partly I wanted my real self to be judged as an aspiring academic only on the basis of work that was my best (such as my thesis or journal articles) not anything I happened to churn out on a whim. Even at that not-so-distant time, academic bloggers were a rarity, with most forms of online publishing seen as a diversion from "proper" academic work which was published in paper journals. To present a carefully researched paper at a conference, and then to have an esteemed professor read about my views on fish and chips in Whitby, might have been counterproductive.

Additionally, as I took on some teaching duties, and began to blog about my early experiences as a way of reflecting on my development, I was conscious of the need to maintain a barrier between myself and my students. One controversial statement about a student (even if not named) that they subsequently found and complained about, could have had serious consequences for my fledgling career.

However, as time has passed and The Pequod has expanded, these two have become less significant issues. 

Firstly, much of the work that is now on here has been previously published elsewhere, in academic journals or on edited review sites. Rather than being an attic of juvenalia, The Pequod is now more of an academic archive. Whilst respecting copyright principles, it seems logical that I should use this site to collect together anything I have published, along with material that may be not quite in publishable form, but still worthy of distributing amongst the academic community.

Secondly, on reflection, most of my posts on teaching and higher education are not in any way controversial or scandalous. As my recent posts on the tuition fees issue show, I hold very strong and forthright views - but these are views with which the majority of my academic colleagues would probably agree. Recently, the Open University, for which I work part-time, updated its terms of employment to include its lecturers' usage of social networks. The contract explicitly states that:

You are free to publish material in any space which is not related to the OU and does not bring the OU into disrepute 

And that:

You are free to post your thoughts or comments about the OU. However you should take care to avoid activity that enables or promotes plagiarism, infringes another person's privacy (e.g. by posting their contact details without permission), makes untrue statements about the OU or OU material, infringes the OU's copyright or intellectual property.

Looking back on the various blog posts I have published about my OU and other university experiences, I am happy that nothing I have said in the past breaks the OU's own guidance. Most of it is, in fact, highly complimentary, both about the OU itself and its (my) students.

To hide behind my pseudonym therefore seems to suggest that I have no conviction in the legitimacy of my own views, arguments and ideas - which seems entirely anathema to the way in which an academic should work and behave.

The final thing which caused me to come out into the open was the advent of Twitter. Of all the social networks, it is Twitter that has most radically changed the ways in which public voices channel their private views. Politicians express opinions on Twitter with a forthrightness that would be unbecoming if heard within the chambers of Parliament. BBC correspondents are happy to tweet their own attitudes on current affairs, whilst retaining their impartiality in their formal reports under the institutional banner. There is a growing chorus of academics on Twitter who complain about their students or make fiery statements that they would temper if lecturing within the university walls. Most make clear on their online profiles that their ephemeral tweets are wholly personal, and that they do not necessarily reflect the views of their institutions. And, a few high-profile cases aside, most readers seem able to understand that the voice of someone on Twitter is not necessarily identical to their voice when they put on the suit of the newsreader or the gown of the don.

When I joined Twitter, I decided to tweet under my own name rather than my pseudonym. Partly, this is because many of my Twitter friends are colleagues and acquaintances who are relevant to my research and teaching. For them to receive Tweets from some Ishmael from a novel would have been confusing and affected. Partly, using Twitter to post links and updates related to my work, higher education and, yes, to trivial issues about what I had for breakfast, might help to boost my profile amongst the milieu of academics also on there. 

I also decided that as tweeting is a form of regular but abbreviated blogging, it made sense to link this blog to my Twitter account and vice versa, through posting my Twitter feed in the sidebar of The Pequod. This led to the bizarre scenario in which some of my tweets under my own name linked back to my blog posts which were published pseudonymously, whilst anyone happening upon my pseudonym on my website could easily find my real identity by following me on Twitter.

It has become a cliché that the internet is changing the ecosystem of publishing in rapid and unanticipated ways. When I started publishing The Pequod, it seemed that relatively few academics bothered with blogging or tweeting. Today, though, the virtual ivory towers ring with tweets and blogs, opinions and ideas, inane chatter and informed comment. Indeed, publishers have come to expect that academics will have some form of online presence and that they will be willing to build their book-buying audience through social networks. 

As The Pequod rides this turbulent sea, with its captain hoping to arrive at the destination of a full-time academic job and book deal, it therefore seems antiquated and foolhardy not to toss Ishmael overboard, and to let Alistair Brown take the helm.

On the day that students hope to pass their A-Levels, let us remember that today also marks the failure of Higher Education in the UK, as the next cohort of A-Level students will be the first to pay for their university education under the new tuition fee regime. I have blogged many times about why the government's plans for universities are flawed, so I will largely hand over to Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books, who provides an acute dissection of the bloody mess that is the Higher Education White Paper. Each of the "subjects" below were the originally intentions behind the Browne review proposals. Each of them, though, has failed in its implementation. The quotes are Collini's.

Subject: Decreasing costs for taxpayer. Grade: Fail.

The original intention of the Browne Review was to find a way to square a circle: allow more students to attend university, whilst decreasing the cost to the taxpayer. We will come to the former issue in a moment. But with respect to the latter, it seems clear that the immediate costs to the taxpayer will actually increase. As Collini points out, it is strange that the supposedly independent Browne review managed to recommend slashing public spending on universities just before the coalition announced its own spending plans. But it is a disaster that, ultimately, the government's reforms will actually increase public spending:

We now know that when the decision was taken to replace the block grant with a loan system, the Treasury (presumably the real driving force behind the change) calculated that the initial expenditure on loans would more or less match current expenditure on the teaching grant if the average fee were no higher than £7500. But the Treasury had assumed that the Office for Fair Access (Offa), which oversees universities’ admissions policies, had the legal power to dictate how much a given university could charge, ensuring that fees would be kept down to the desired average level. But Offa has no such legal power, as its director was obliged to ‘remind’ the government. A great many universities were setting fees of £9000 (as anyone could have told the government they would). It slowly dawned on the government that not only was the scheme not going to reduce expenditure; it was actually going to be a lot more expensive than the present system. Whether one is broadly in favour of the new fee regime or not, there can be no denying that the policy-making process in the last eight months has been a shambles.

Subject: Increasing university funding. Grade: Fail.

The above would be just about acceptable if it were to mean that universities would be better resourced than they can be through the public purse. Although there are problems with the government's fixation on world university rankings - and especially the American model - in its interpretation of what UK universities can achieve after they are effectively privatised, nevertheless any increased income to universities can only be a good thing. Except this will not happen. The government has claimed that the new regime will see university income increase by 10% by 2015. This seems unlike, as Collini points out:

Willetts has proudly maintained that this policy does not represent a cut to universities, but a boost to their income of around 10 per cent by 2015. It’s just that from now on, he says, the money will be ‘channelled’ through students. But by 2015 the Treasury won’t have recouped a penny of the money it will have given out in loans since 2012, so that this 10 per cent rise must therefore be an increase in government expenditure on higher education above the cost of maintaining the present block grant (even though a loan is an asset not a cost in accountancy terms). After 2015, some students will start to pay some of their loans back, at varying rates, when they start to earn more than £21,000. On the most optimistic figures, it will take 30 years for the Treasury to recoup 70 per cent, at most, of what it provides in loans each year (other economic analysts think the government will never recover more than 50-55 per cent of the amount loaned). And the official figures are based on the Treasury’s assumption that the average fee would be £7500, which even the government must now realise will not be the case. Whatever else is said in favour of this policy, it cannot be maintained that it represents a saving in public expenditure in the short or medium term, even though in the longer term it does amount to a significant shift from public to private funding.

Subject: Increasing access for students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds. Grade: Fail.


As a consequence of the increase in the up-front cost to the treasury, the government had to row back on its plans to allow universities to accept unlimited numbers of fee-paying students. Rather than lifting the cap on the total number of students able to go to any one university, the government has actually had to maintain it, only allowing some flexibility at the "margins." At one margin, universities which set significantly lower fees will be allowed to take more students. At the other, universities will be able to take any number of students with top A-Level grades, so-called "gold dust" consumers. Collini states the consequences of this rigged-market approach very well:

In keeping with its wholly phantasmal conception of competition, the White Paper declares confidently that the new system ‘should allow greater competition for places on the more selective courses and create the opportunity for more students to go to their first-choice institution if that university wishes to take them’. But the two parts of this assertion must be in contradiction: if there really will be more competition for the most sought-after places, then by definition opportunities for applicants to get their first-choice places will be reduced, not increased. The actual effect of the changes will be to make the distribution of resources for institutions match more closely the distribution of A-level scores. Just on fee income alone, students at institutions with an AAB offer or better will be better resourced, by quite a long way, than students at institutions with lower entry requirements. This is a naked example of the use of state power to entrench hierarchy in the name of ‘market principles’. By effectively ruling that a large number of universities must charge considerably less than the level it has legally permitted institutions to charge, the government is constructing a system that is bound to reinforce existing social inequalities.

Subject: Allowing universities autonomy. Grade: Fail


Universities have long cherished their autonomy from government policy, being the one public space where research and discourse can be conducted free from the requirement that they give immediate returns on investment. Collini speculates that this is why the government has been so keen to bring universities to heel, as it dislikes the idea of the funding public institutions which do not necessarily have a direct or quantifiable impact on the economic wellbeing of the nation (as if economic wellbeing is the same thing as being of social value). This autonomy looks set to be removed, as government will be able to set recruitment priorities and access requirements, despite the fact that it is primarily students who will be paying for higher education in the long term.

This plan is designed to produce a rigged market in which the ‘top providers’ will do well and there will be the usual race to the bottom at the lower end. The government has introduced de facto price controls, laying bare the hypocrisy in its proud affirmations that universities are ‘autonomous’, that admissions are ‘a matter between the student and the university’, that the government cannot dictate what fees universities set and so on. And it has done this after universities have already set their fee levels for 2012. Universities believed the system would operate by one set of rules, but now they have been told the rules have changed, and that some of them will be punished for decisions they were forced to make by the government’s own rushed timetable.

Subject: Exam Preparation. Grade: Fail


It is worth noting that most of the government's failure in the test of university reform derives from its lack of careful revision. Revision, that is, of the Browne Review.

The usual way for government reviews to work their way into government policy and then into legislation is this: the initial review will outline the general scope of what needs to be improved and the government will announce a consultation period based on its findings; Parliament and other interested parties (such as universities and students) will have an opportunity to make their comments heard, which will then result in a White Paper being set before Parliament, for further discussion; Parliament and the House of Lords will then draft and redraft legislation, putting the White Paper into practice.

However, the government decided to ignore this usual revision timetable. The government announced that it "accepted" the recommendations of the Browne Review, then legislated for its recommendations to be put into practice, telling universities to set their fees under the new proposal; only six months later did it publish the White Paper which contained the fine discussion of the legislation long since announced. Except it turned out that the White Paper did not just formalise a process that had already started. Instead, it quite radically changed its direction. As the government realised that universities were setting more or less maximum fees in an attempt to recoup their cut in central funding, the White Paper added all sorts of qualifications and provisos, such as effectively reinstating a cap on student numbers - something the new marketplace in tuition fees was originally going to see lifted. This led to universities setting fees and putting in proposals to maintain access, without knowing how the final scheme would work.

The government - led by "two-brains Willetts" - seems a bit like a student who has sat up all night cramming for one exam, only to realise the next morning that the exam in front of them is not the one they were expecting to sit. The government intended its reforms to facilitate a free market in higher education, which, they dogmatically assumed, would automatically entail increased quality and value in teaching as students were enabled as "consumers." But in the final test, they have set a policy which is anything but a free market, which restricts student numbers and sets the burden of payment not primarily on students (though they will be impacted in the long run) but on the public purse. The government has failed, ultimately, to realise that some things - such as education - simply are not marketplaces, but need to be publicly funded.

I was interested to read today that a leading neuropsychologist, Dorothy Bishop, has criticised her fellow Oxford professor, Susan Greenfield, after the latter claimed that the rise in internet use has led to an increase in cases of autism. In an open letter to Greenfield, published in New Scientist, Bishop said she was "dismayed by the way in which your public communications have moved away from science." Bishop suggested that her views depended on a fundamental (perhaps deliberate?) misreading of the evidence, since the rise in cases actually precedes the widespread adoption of the internet, and is best accounted for by a change in diagnostic techniques.

Greenfield's skewing of the evidence to make a point seems to tally with what I felt in my review of Greenfield's ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. So many of the arguments in this book seemed to be unsubstantiated, deriving from her ideological opposition to new technology, rather than from careful scrutiny of the scientific and social data.

We often bemoan the state of science reporting in the mass media. It does not help when scientists like Greenfield seek to become the story themselves by making lavish and apocalyptic pronouncements about the way in which games, social media and so on can affect the health of children.

The outgoing head of Universities UK, Steve Smith, has suggested that universities will try to "buy" top-performing students in an effort to increase recruitment. Such students will be "gold dust" as universities will be allowed to accept them in unlimited numbers.

When it implemented the Browne review recommendations, the government envisaged that the market in tuition fees would enable universities to expand and to accept as many students as they could attract (in contrast to the current situation, where each university is allocated a fixed number of government-funded student places). However, the government naively underestimated the number of universities that would choose to charge the top £9000 tuition fee, in order to compensate for drastic cuts in central funding. This fees benchmark would be unsustainable for the treasury, which has to pay tuition fees up front, and so the government is likely to be forced to reduce student numbers below the current cap, leading to the worst of both worlds: a higher cost to the taxpayer, with fewer student places. The one caveat is that in order not to deter the brightest students, universities will be allowed to take as many top-grade AAB students as they like; such students would be what Smith refers to as "gold dust."

This would be fine for elite universities charging the full £9000, which currently accept and receive a high proportion of applications from such students. But Smith predicts that middle-ranked universities that would usually not expect AAB quality applicants will start to dangle generous bursaries or reduced tuition fees in order to fish students from this uncapped pool. The government has responded by celebrating the fact that "Universities need to meet tough new criteria for attracting the brightest students from lower income backgrounds, including offering fee waivers and bursaries. These additional scholarships will help universities to attract the brightest and the best students."

However, this is where the government's shambles of a policy on access to higher education is exposed. Consider the case of two students, both predicted top AAB grades at A-Level.

Student A (let's call him Gordon) attends a decent but unspectacular state sixth form college. His AAB grades are significantly above the average for his peers. He comes from a comparatively poor background, and will be the first of his family to attend university. His careers adviser tells him that with these grades, he could get in at a top university - York or Durham, maybe Oxbridge. But these are all charging £9000, and he would need to live away from home. Alternatively, he could go to a middle-ranking university that will offer him half-price fees, because he represents a "gold dust" uncapped place; he could commute there on the train, and save himself living costs. His family, naturally, encourage him to opt for this place. 

Student B (let's call him Cameron) attends a good private school and sixth form college. His AAB grades are clearly very good, but many students from this college are coached into earning these top marks. Both his parents went to university, and it is naturally expected that he will attend a "red brick" like them. His parents, being comparatively wealthy, have saved enough to pay some of his fees up front, meaning the £9000 charge from a top university is not too much of a deterrent. There is never any thought, or reason, for Cameron to go to his local university, despite the temptation of cut-price fees. He will go to the university that is best for him, given his underlying abilities and educational credentials.

Gordon attends his good university, which offers him a decent experience. OK, he has to sit in some remedial classes for his first year (because most of his fellow students are there on C grades, and are not quite up to the required standard in his subject). Staff-student ratios are high; there are few tutorials or seminars, and mostly he is taught through lectures by hard-working academics, who are not quite leading names in their field. He comes out with a good degree, though having been surrounded by those just looking to achieve solid 2:1 degrees he has perhaps not been pushed by his peers or his teachers to achieve the First Class result he was capable of. He looks for work, although not having attended an especially well-known university he has to work hard to explain to employers the value of his degree, compared to that from a brand name institution. 

Cameron, meanwhile, has been to his top university, surrounded by equally bright peers and taught by leading academics; he has been pushed intellectually and achieved a very good degree, perhaps a First. He has cultivated skills in debate and gained confidence by the small group teaching that is more prominent at this leading university. His university is also a well known name in the graduate employment world, with the likes of KPMG and Accenture eager to pluck students like Cameron clutching their degrees and to take them into a well-paid career. On the other hand, his university is also a research-led institution, and keen to offer postgraduate places and bursaries to entice its best students to stay on for further study.

Both of the above scenarios are, of course, caricatures, although league tables make some of this sketch legitimate: some of the key markers between top and middle universities are their staff-student ratios, proportion of students with Firsts, small group teaching, and employability prospects. For the record, the student I most resembled back in my day is Cameron (though I never wanted to become a corporate clone at the end), and one of the universities I now work at pitches itself in exactly this league. I know from personal experience how the system entrenches privilege, taking a high proportion of students from excellent family and educational backgrounds, and sending them out to work for high powered, high paid companies, or enabling them to pursue further research (as happened to me). None of this is Cameron's fault. He certainly has every right to attend a top university with his grades, regardless of the good fortune of his private education. But there is an evident problem in the fact that Gordon's choices were governed not by which university would be best for him academically, but by that which offered the best value financially.

The government has been working hard to explain to students how the system of bursaries, and up-front payment of tuition fees, will mean that they should have a free choice as to their university, and should be able to access the institution that is best for them. However well-meaning, though, the lifting of the cap on top-performing students will actually serve to limit - or at least determine - student choices so that they are made for financial rather than academic reasons. No student, especially no student coming from a weaker educational background, should have their aspirations halted by the ceiling of debt; no top student should be encouraged by the promise of a cut price to attend a university of a lower overall quality (no matter how good that institution is for less academically capable students). Yet this is the prospect that Steve Smith raises.