The Postmodern University? The Loss of Purpose in British Universities

Abstract

There seems to be widespread agreement about empirical trends in British (and far beyond) higher education. I do not think, for instance, that the following would be very much disputed amongst commentators:

• There has been a sustained increase in student numbers since the early 1960s, and a dramatic leap since 1988, to such a degree that we speak now of a mass (as opposed to élite) system in which more than one in three school leavers goes on to university.

• There has been an associated decline in the unit of resource allocated to each student, such that universities nowadays are teaching many more students on much less income than hitherto (the measurement of this increase in productivity varies from between 25 per cent and 40 per cent over the past decade or so).

• The number of institutions carrying the title ‘university’ has also grown enormously: in 1960 there were only twenty or so universities in the UK, but today over one hundred organizations carry the word, a development radically assisted by the transformation in 1992 of the former polytechnics into universities.

• Academic tenure has been abandoned for those employed since the late 1980s, and new university staff have come more and more to be employed on part-time and temporary contracts. Relatedly, salaries have declined comparative to other professions and they have become more differentiated internally, most markedly at the senior levels.

• There has been a marked push towards making universities better connected to the outside world — a move signalled in terms such as vocationalism and practicality.

• Universities have become significantly more cosmopolitan, a trend evident in changes in student composition, overseas study programmes, as well as employment of foreign nationals.