by Anonymous

Published on: May 20th, 2026

I am a full professor and current head of department at a small university in the UK. My day-to-day work life is shaped by the following forces:

1. The Repetition Compulsion

Restructuring academic departments and schools as well as professional and IT services has become the norm in UK Higher Education. Entering its third restructure in less than a decade my university serves as an illustrative example. The initial restructuring programme six years ago was meant to solve the financial shortfall due to declining student numbers. As was the subsequent restructure implemented two years ago. And lo and behold, the latest restructuring is also being justified as the only solution to the university’s financial shortfall due to declining student numbers. But it is not just the supposed problem (financial crisis) and the proposed solution (restructuring) that repeats itself again and again across the sector. It is also the (failed) strategic logic: increasing ‘efficiency’ through staff redundancies and the consolidation of departmental-specific administrative services within centralised, de-personalised, and already under-staffed professional service ‘teams’.

These restructures have not solved a thing. Instead, they have wrought havoc, leading to additional declines in student numbers as well as the demoralization of an overworked and exhausted workforce—all while the real (or manufactured) financial crisis persists. But unlike other sectors that learn from past mistakes—and sometimes even hold those who make disastrous decisions accountable—senior management teams in UK universities respond by introducing yet another round of restructuring. These managers are never held to account and, in fact, are often promoted for cutting jobs and creating chaos. The story of the Vice Chancellor who devastated one university only to be hired to devastate another is also part of the compulsion to repeat.

Alas, the repetition compulsion extends to conversations with senior management. Staff make the same (convincing) arguments about why we don’t need another restructure; why more change will cause further disruption and dysfunction, hampering not helping recruitment; why we need to use in-house expertise rather than the exorbitantly expensive consultants who have little to no knowledge of higher education; why the university should not be run like a business; and why ensuring staff well-being and building trust are essential for good governance and student recruitment. Senior management respond with the same (unconvincing) mantras: the university is in financial deficit; we cannot afford not to cut costs; restructuring cuts costs; and cutting costs is the only way to save the university. These conversations almost always conclude with staff insistence that we cannot ‘cut’ our way out of the crisis, and that there is a logical fallacy in the claim that cutting jobs will save jobs. Though, mysteriously, restructures and cost cutting do seem to save senior management’s jobs and their six figure salaries.

2. The Rubber Stamp + Infantalisation

Academics’ authority and autonomy as educators have been eroding for some time, while research time, once a pillar of university life in higher education institutions, is becoming a luxury. Increasingly, academic staff are simply given directives and told what to do—often under a pretence of ‘consultation’ and requests for staff input, which are time consuming but are, more often than not, simply ignored. On one level, we are being transformed into ‘rubber stamps’, while on a deeper level we are witnessing the infantilisation of the academic workforce.

Exemplary in this regard is Academic Senate, the body supposed to have the ultimate authority on all matters academic and pedagogical—matters that should be debated and determined by those with experience and expertise: namely, academic staff. At most UK universities, however, these bodies have become little more than rubber stamps for various top-down senior management initiatives, where people with little if any teaching or research experience put forth proposals, produce ‘systems’, and introduce one-size-fits-all moulds for teaching and assessment, and where any disagreement or energetic debate is frowned upon.

Senate members frequently receive hundreds of pages containing proposals for significant policy changes and other initiatives that impact the day-to-day operations of the university less than a week before the meeting. Members are then expected to approve all of these reports and policies within the span of a few hours. Questioning and criticising these different policies are, at best, deemed ‘wasting time’, and, at worst, insubordination.

The neoliberalization and managerialization of UK universities, where we are expected to rubber stamp top-down initiatives, have led to our infantilisation. These processes have undoubtedly played a key role in the erosion of the universities’ academic community and intellectual life, undermining scholarly authority. But the demise of academic authority also has to do with the fact that there are fewer white men with grey hair among academic staff these days. The Rubber Stamp approach and the infantilisation of staff seem to have become increasingly dominant in exact proportion to the numbers of women and racialised staff and students entering the university. University leadership, not surprisingly, remains mostly white, male and grey haired.

3. The Shared Mailbox (with a little help from AI)

Given that the number of dedicated professional staff has been systematically cut and most administrative services have been centralised and de-personalised through restructures, academic staff now spend a lot of time filling in online forms—from IT support to reserving rooms for events. The time consumed by these tasks is considerable because there is often a duplication of labour. We first fill in the form and then, as instructed on the website, we send it to a shared generic mailbox. We then wait. And wait some more. The shared mailbox often becomes a black hole. So, in order to ensure that we receive a reply, we also need to send a request to the person responsible for the specific task. But to find the specific person’s name and personal email takes serious detective work. When we do eventually find the right person and tell them that we have sent the form to the shared address, we are often asked to fill out the form again and send it directly to them.

Managers say these ‘systems’ merely need fine tuning. But the real reason for this duplication of labour is that professional staff are under resourced and so overburdened that they simply do not have capacity to monitor and respond to everything sent to the shared mailbox. The turnover is huge in professional services, and there are often multiple part-time staff who work on alternate days.

Frequently the shared mailbox is the first contact prospective students have with the university. One cannot help but wonder how students feel when they either a) simply do not receive a response or, b) are directed to the university’s student AI systems. Shared mailboxes and AI are paradigmatic of the ‘systems’ and ‘efficiency’ senior managers praise. In reality, they epitomise what Hannah Arendt called ‘the rule by Nobody’; the new management model in the sector, a form of impersonal, technocratic domination where accountability vanishes.

4. Talk Back and Take Back

Many of us have a good idea of what initial steps need to be taken in order ‘to fix’ our sector—to begin with: a return to public funding (British government spends less than half the average of OECD countries on higher education), student caps, reinstating and expanding democratic processes within universities rather than the ever more managerial and bureaucratic top-down corporate model. This takes us full circle, back to the compulsion to repeat.

As UK universities face their worse crisis in modern history, we need to repeat the perennial question of how we can collectively take back the university so that it serves us, our students, the public, and future generations. But we need to repeat this question differently.

First, through a combination of effective industrial action, collective refusal to take part in rubber stamping exercises, and holding campus assemblies to create coalitions between students and staff, alongside social media campaigns to expose and even embarrass the hell out our institutions, we need to continue to resist the processes that are making us redundant, literally and figuratively. We need to talk back and take back.

Second, but just as importantly, we have to confront head-on the changing role of Higher Education in the 21^st century. Reimagining the university will have to be part of the strategy of repeating differently. With information (and dis/misinformation) at students’ fingertips, when AI can now write essays (and mark them!), and when disciplinary borders—once much clearer—are collapsing, pedagogy and research are not only being altered but are also undergoing an identity crisis. We need the time and space to ask questions about what we are training our students to become. Managers speak exclusively about employability, completely discounting the university’s crucial role in helping to cultivate informed and engaged democratic citizens. Maybe—just maybe—we need to radically transform our conception of higher education—pivoting away from the idealization of knowledge and truth toward developing young people’s conceptual, critical, affective and practical capabilities that better equip them to nurture rather than destroy human and non-human life and the planet.

The most difficult challenge is translating what we know needs to be done—resisting and collectively reimagining—so that we get to where we need to go. This translation is increasingly urgent and may well be the only way we can disrupt what seems to be the sector’s death drive.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by James Brackley

Published on: May 20th, 2026

After decades of reform, UK higher education is now among the most aggressively marketized higher education systems in the world. As this system visibly crumbles around us, with mass course closures and redundancies, it is time for the proponents of marketisation to take ownership of the crisis UK HE now finds itself in. And, more importantly, it is time for the government to start taking the alternatives to marketisation seriously.

To many in the sector watching this slow but seemingly inevitable crisis unfold, these conclusions may seem almost self-evident. But let us introduce the case. The term marketisation is often used loosely, however, in this context we refer to the architecture of rules, regulation, metrics, rankings, performance measures, and audit rituals that reconstitute ‘education’ and ‘research’ into commodities that can be priced, traded, or exchanged. Crucially, this hard fought process of commodification of education and research allows for competition between institutions for research funding and student numbers. In the sterile, imagined world presented in most introductory economics textbooks this competition achieves the wonderful trick of both improving quality while reducing prices. Asserting this supposed truism, Lord Browne of the 2010 Browne review on the future of funding UK Higher Education, confidently claims in his foreword that “competition generally raises quality”.

The problem with this claim, however, is that the current HE system in the UK fails to achieve several of the necessary assumptions made in economics textbooks. For home tuition fees, for instance, we have a broken pricing mechanism under which almost all institutions in England charge the maximum possible fees. Students, when they apply for courses, are routinely swamped with metrics based sales pitches that, at best, only reinforce already dysfunctional measures of educational quality. Moreover, the cost of living crisis and exploitative rents often price students out of university education outside of their hometowns. Research income, meanwhile, operates almost exclusively as a quasi-market, with complex, bureaucratic, and systemically biased evaluation exercises standing in for consumer choice.

Despite these (rather obvious) issues, the marketisation of UK higher education, and the shift towards a predominantly fee based system, has ground on for decades. Research from the early 2000s already documents the negative effects of an extensive commercialisation of degree programmes. Meanwhile, elaborate performance management and surveillance systems, a growing reliance on competitive grant capture, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessors have only been further extended by the more recent exercises such as the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), the Knowledge Excellence Framework (KEF), and the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (MEF). Not to mention the growing emphasis on the various university rankings and league tables. Market proponents do love an acronym.

For more than two decades, various studies have shown this to have been a highly costly and often dysfunctional obsession with audit and measurement – with studies finding that this regime produces standardised ‘safe’ research, undermines academic freedom, encourages careerist approaches to research, causes stress and job insecurity, and is variously discriminatoryunder equalities legislation. Under the leadership of a business-minded managerial class, such practices also impose a strict economisation of almost every aspect of university life, by which we mean that at almost every moment students and staff are encouraged to evaluate the value of their work in terms of measurable outputs that deliver economic returns to the institution.

This subjectivisation of staff and students, to this performance obsessed market culture, is important as it provides the unspoken rationale for a narrowing of accountability and a foreclosure of debate over how institutions are run.

This brings us to some of the more recent aspects of marketisation that have built upon this architecture of performance measurement to precipitate the current crisis. Following the Browne review, the UK government tripled home fees in England in 2012 to £9,000 while correspondingly cutting direct teaching grants. In 2015 they would then remove ‘student number controls’, freeing institutions to recruit uncapped numbers onto low-cost high-fee courses, before opening the sector to a ‘new wave’ of private providers under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017.

Meanwhile, the lack of a cap on the fees that could be charged to international students meant the universities could leverage the prestige and history of UK HE to charge often exorbitant fees to international students. Marketing relatively low-cost courses across Business, Management, Computer Science, Politics and Law, among others, universities aimed to maximise profits at the expense of their students.

This opening-up of the market did lead to an intensification of competition, but not on the basis of the quality of education provided in any meaningful sense. Instead, universities aggressively invested in their physical estates, grew their marketing budgets, engaged consultants, increased the pay of their executives, casualised the workforce on increasingly precarious employment contracts, and opened speculative new overseas campuses. Flush with cash as student fees more than offset cuts to direct government funding, universities leaders then bet the lecture hall (literally) on these good times continuing. Between 2010/11 and 2020/21, UK universities almost trebled their debt, from £5.57 billion to £15.17 billion, often with risky debt covenants attached. They adopted ‘lean’ treasury management strategies, entered into revolving credit facilities, outsourced international recruitment to growing private companies such as KAPLAN and INTO, and subsidiarised their activities into increasingly complex group structures.

Ironically, this business-like group think among university leaders saw universities become much riskier institutions during the financial good times, leaving universities with a risk exposure that would, for many, become untenable when those good times came to an end.

This more or less brings us to our present position. The massification of education that took place under the post-2010 fee based system meant that almost all UK universities adopted a ‘business model’ in which heavily internationalised low-cost high-margin courses were cross subsidising newly ‘loss making’ subjects and research. In the financial good times this was overlooked, but as the international student market tightens, as home fees remain largely frozen, and with the traditional block grant a fraction of what it once was, institutions across the country are making ‘difficult decisions’. On the hook as they are for ambitious debt covenants (effectively financial performance targets) that are no longer achievable.

Perhaps most depressing in all of this is that the proponents of this free market experiment – what Andrew McGeettigan rightly referred to in 2013 as ‘the great university gamble’ – still seem to think they got it right. Via various eugenicist and classist metaphors, mass course closures are reframed as the market filtering out the weak and failing (often post-‘92) institutions are discussed in light of more (presumably working class) students needing to focus on apprenticeships. We need to question, so we are told, what and who a university education is really for.

Aside from the moral, political, and social objections we could make to such arguments, they also simply don’t stand up when analysed through the lens of marketisation itself. Marketisation, we were told in the 2000s, was to fund widening participation. Marketisation, we were told in the 2010s, would bring untold riches to the UK economy. But the reality, and the legacy, is one in which the historic diversity of UK education and scholarship that made it so attractive on the world stage in the first place is now under existential threat. UK universities are sliding down international rankings. Student-staff ratios are rising. Courses are closing. Meanwhile, many lower and middle ranking institutions (often with a much better record of serving their local communities than the Russell Group institution across town) face break up or closure.

The solution? We don’t need higher fees, we need to break the UK Higher Education market. We need to fund, plan, run and assess UK institutions democratically, for the public good. What that looks like is where the real conversation needs to start.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by Glen O’Hara

Published on: May 5th, 2026

Universities’ distress, and more-than-shaky future, are now taken for granted. They are also likely here to stay. Less attention has been given to where we’re going, an important oversight or silence given that the country is by default choosing to completely revolutionise its Higher Education offer.

That’s a critical lapse. Without looking ahead to our likely endpoint, we can’t really see what we’re doing. Blundering around in the dark, while making benighted decision after befuddled mistake that makes our destination, which would be obvious if you just switched on the lights for a moment, is no substitute for a clear-eyed view of the near future. Especially because universities’ day-after-tomorrow is rapidly taking shape.

Here’s how our present winner-takes-all race to the bottom is going to shake out, mainly because universities have been ‘set free’ to seize each other warmly by the throat. A small elite will emerge, probably in two groups. The first will be an ‘international’ class of global universities, which attract most of their students from a world market and which aren’t really part of any Higher Education ‘system’, or indeed Britain, at all. There will be a lot of scrambling to get into this group, and a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when most don’t make it, but really only Oxbridge and a tiny number of others can or will clear the many hoops of reputation and reach involved.

Underneath that gold or platinum level, most big Russell Group universities will thrum away in the Championship below the Premier League of the ‘international’ group. These ‘national’ universities, for the most part famous nineteenth century redbricks in big provincial cities, will look for the most part like they always did. They’ll continue to offer an all-in experience, with students going away to halls and shared houses to perhaps even study Arts and Humanities subjects. These large players may become more and more friendly with regional and city mayors, England’s new regional administrations and the Welsh and Scottish governments, though the situation in those two latter countries will continue to get worse than it is in England, and more quickly.

Academics in those two constellations will likely protest about the imposition of a balkanised, divided university sector. But in reality they have very little say and even less power, their authority having long ago been stripped away by central university bureaucracies. They will also be acutely aware of just how lucky they are, and the potential penalties for making a fuss. Just as some continue to jet around the world to conferences like David Lodge’s fictional professors during the 1970s, all the while professing to support the environment, the planet and alternative economics, they will offer professions of solidarity without really being able to do anything.

On the other hand, a whole middle-ranking tier of ‘regional’ universities is going to be ripped to shreds and then either dumped in a hole or put back together in atrociously careless ways. By the end of that grim experiment, the majority of the sector, and most of the institutions students actually attend, will look like a Frankenstein’s Monster that doesn’t even make it to that august level of autonomy. Here there will be a mix of local and national students, and some remnants of the old university idea: a scattering of Arts, Humanities and Political Science departments will survive in this part of universityworld.

Lower down the old-fashioned scale of authority and prestige, post-‘92 universities who don’t make it into the ‘regional’ group will either become local colleges of HE (if they’re fairly successful and solvent) or be rammed together in a load of cut-and-shut shotgun marriages masquerading as ‘mergers’. These won’t actually be mergers. They will be nothing more or less than buckets of the dying smaller fry, dredged up from the bottom of the ocean and slopped around into mud sculptures on sunny beaches – all the better to dry out and crack up.

No doubt successive governments have thought all this pretty clever. This way, they get to make the whole sector smaller with little political pain on their part. They can dump responsibility on bad managers, risk-taking, too much borrowing. The dark side of Higher Education’s pain and toxicity will dribble out on the local and regional news, all the better for voters not to join the dots. The rundown will look piecemeal, disorganised, random.

There’s some method to that madness. It was probably an error that we tried to pretend that all universities could do everything, all the same, all the time. The coming demographic bust of the 2030s will make it even harder for most universities to struggle on. They have to be downsized in some manner, and the present move towards an ‘international’, ‘national’, ‘regional’ and ‘local’ split is one way to do that. It’s not as rational as a planned reorganisation, but then politics isn’t rational. If it wants to duck responsibility no government can possibly be explicit about its intentions until the process is irreversible. Who really wants to take the blame?

It would, however, probably be better to take a more systematic approach to Higher Education – at least if we look at this from a public policy rather than a political point of view. Where should our universities be sited? How many people should go to what type? What subjects should stay in or go to each part of the country, to make sure everyone can study them? These are fundamental questions that should not be left to hasty and piecemeal decisions in each separate university.

The strategy of deflection will not be entirely successful in any case, even on its own terms. We’re talking tens of thousands of jobs here, and many universities are either in or next to Labour seats such as Uxbridge (majority 587), Loughborough (majority 4,960), Newcastle-under-Lyme (majority 5,069) and Lancaster (majority 9,253). The economies and social lives of those seats are profoundly intertwined with the mass university system New Labour in office helped to build. The fallout from downsizing or failure won’t fall entirely on Labour and its supporters, but the debris will give them a light dusting anyway.

Most people won’t be happy with this outcome. You won’t be able to take many subjects, from Music to Chemistry, across huge swathes of the ‘regional’ and ‘local’ universities. That will mean many poorer Britons can’t study them at all. Taxpayers will wonder where on earth their money is going, as the government spends untold billions every year on a what was once a shiny and exciting ideas machine but which is for the most part being ripped up and swapped out for an unconvincing scarecrow with a sign saying ‘university’ swinging from its neck. Creative industries, design, theatre, the arts, cinema: all will be noticeably smaller, and sadder. Many parts of traditionally ‘Labour’ parts of the country will suffer badly, further locking that party into a spiral of decline.

But on the other hand, most voters never experience Higher Education. Like most of us, the majority have only a dim memory of it as something fun when they were young or a quick insight from Open Days for – and visits to – their children. No doubt politicians in London, Cardiff and Edinburgh can for now get away with the Great Inequity of “world-class education for you, ‘uni’ for you, college for you, training for you”. But far more importantly, something about the country, its contract with young people, indeed a sense of place and our potential shared futures will have been lost: something wonderful.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by Lorna Finlayson

Published on: April 24th, 2026

Academic and professional services staff at the University of Essex were on strike in March, as part of a second wave of local industrial action over management proposals to cut 400 jobs and to shut down its Southend Campus. A strike in these circumstances is better than no strike, certainly. One of the few ways the situation facing Essex and many other UK universities – which differ only in being at different stages in the same process of terminal decline – could be even worse than it is, is if there were no resistance at all from students and staff.

But another strike is also another opportunity to observe academics behaving badly, and they rarely disappoint. There is the full-on, full-bodied scabbing, of course. Rates of unionisation are higher than ever, but many paid-up union members think nothing of crossing picket lines (presumably regarding union membership mainly as a cheap source of legal advice). There are the cyber-scabs: those who see a strike as an opportunity to catch up on work emails. And then there are the pay-as-you-go strikers – a large proportion of union members, it seems – who like to keep a foot on either side: strike one day, scab the next. That way, you can keep the docking of pay to a symbolic snip, and still bask in the warm glow of solidarity, knowing that you have done your bit for the collective. This is a bit like feeling virtuous for only cheating on your spouse two days a week – but then academics are not exactly known for their marital fidelity, either.

It doesn’t end there, though. Scabbing is an art like everything else, and as always, academics are determined to excel. Enter the ‘scaboteur’. Why be a common scab, when you can go one better and stop a strike before it starts? The tactics of the academic scaboteur are the same every time. A bold but common opening move is to say (as loudly as possible): “I can’t afford to strike!” This claim would be most plausible if made by precarious, fixed-term academics or graduate students, but as I’ve noted before, they are not the ones most likely to be heard making it. There is a kind of inverted ‘scabs’ triangle’ at work here, whereby the people crying poverty are found disproportionately among the ranks of the permanent and (even after years of pay-erosion) relatively well-remunerated. Sure, most academics may not be among the 1%, but you do have to wonder where their salary is going if striking for a week or two has become an unaffordable luxury. Do they have undisclosed coke habits? Fabergé egg addictions?

In any case, as the academics in question are frequently reminded, there is a strike fund (which, unlike funds for students in financial need, operates on the basis of trust). No good, apparently: the strike fund takes WEEKS to come through – by which time these unfortunate colleagues and their children will surely have starved. It’s considered bad form to pry into people’s financial affairs – unless those people are really poor, or young, or both, in which case it’s de rigueur (benefits claimants and applicants for student hardship funds can expect to have their bank statements scrutinised). So the scaboteur’s bluff is unlikely to be called, but it’s hard not to suspect that some of our esteemed colleagues are simply fibbing.

Even supposing for sake of argument that there are some genuine cases, academics who, due to whatever combination of circumstances, have found themselves in too tight a spot to be able to take even a short-term hit without intolerable hardship and who therefore see no alternative but to scab, then the least they could do is to scab quietly. That, however, is the last thing on the scaboteur’s mind. The objective is to leverage hardship, real or imagined, against striking in general. On this argument, striking is not only detrimental but elitist, actually, because some people can’t afford to go without pay. Well, you know what else means not getting paid, for a lot longer than a few days? Being made redundant. But in the meantime, the scaboteur’s logic is that if not everyone can or will strike, nobody should. This logic reaches its inventive acme in the argument that for some to strike – or to strike too hard or too long – is for them to make scabs of others. “I would have to cross a picket line,” as one union member put it ominously, “and I would never want to do that.” We would, as you might say, have scabs on our hands.

If a strike cannot be delayed or prevented altogether, the scaboteur’s tactics move toward mitigation. The argument from economic necessity looms large here too: people may be able to afford to strike for one week, but not two (how the miners managed, we can only imagine). Here, the argument is often supplemented with another, subtler one. “I personally would love to vote for an all-out, indefinite strike,” goes this line, “but we need to take people along with us.” In other words: I am radical; they are not. It’s an argument all too familiar from recent political history at the national level. “I would love to vote for a left-wing party, but the public won’t support it” is – we should all know by now – code for: “I hate it with every ounce of my being and will do everything in my power to make sure that the public do not have the opportunity to support it or anything like it.”

Still, in the context of the university, it’s an argument with a kernel of truth. The academics who don’t go to union meetings are typically even more spineless than those who do. But as with the argument that “elections are won from the centre” (or lately, that they are won by pandering to the racist right), it rests on a completely unevidenced assumption. In the university case, the assumption is that those who are reluctant to engage in industrial action can be brought on side if only we water it down enough – and that the increase of ‘density’ will be sufficient to make up for the loss of volume (a one-day strike with a really good turnout is worth more than a week-long strike with worse participation). It was on the basis of an argument of this sort that a meeting of Essex UCU in advance of the March strikes voted overwhelmingly in favour of the most moderate of the proposed options: “pulsed waves of targeted action”. It sounds like an electric toothbrush and is about as threatening to management. All signs are that the redundancies will go ahead as planned.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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