The University of Aberdeen – our university – has reached a crossroads, along with the rest of the higher education sector. While there are many questions that can be asked about the place of universities in the modern world, they are secondary to the practical question of basic finance. No-one who has been in this sector for any length of time can pretend this is an isolated perturbation: rather, this is a problem that has been growing in increasingly intensive waves since the 1980s. If we want to escape from the growing policy nihilism that surrounds universities, we need to understand how we got here.
Forty years ago, Margaret Thatcher’s government drew up a new social and financial covenant for universities. Out went the old model of autonomous, self governing academic communities whose administrations were dedicated to raising funds in support of their institution’s charitable goal of education and research. In came “management teams” whose job was to control and remould the academic community so its staff would more efficiently produce educational commodities for the student customer, and its students would simultaneously become more employable workers. It was assumed that such a management-driven and consumer-oriented model, while unpopular among the academic community, would be financially efficient and generate enough surplus to replace dwindling contributions from the state. Academics themselves have long bemoaned the effects of this model on scholarly and scientific life and standards, but few concern themselves with what is generally dismissed as idealistic bleating. What really matters is that the model has proven a financial catastrophe for universities themselves, while simultaneously undermining graduate employability. As social and economic experiments go, this one has proven a complete failure.
This is not a question of the conservative or obstructionist nature of academic communities and their obstinate refusal to modernise. Academics have generally done their best to work with new policies, innovated teaching and research and complied with regulations. The problem is that these innovations are simply not working, and trying to ‘make them work harder’ will only exacerbate the problem.
These policies are not working because they refuse to come to terms with two brutal economic realities. First: even though advanced education is nationally vital, the current student marketplace is almost completely saturated and cannot be relied upon in itself to generate financial sustainability for universities. Second: even though knowledge intensity is essential to the modern economic world, information in the new digital economy is rapidly losing its viability as a marketable commodity. This is the conundrum of the new knowledge economy where information is like air – we all need it, but it just doesn’t sell. If we want to support universities as the bedrock of that economy, we need to think wider.
What Must Be Done?
These problems are not new. Academic life has almost never proven financially self-sufficient in commercial terms. Knowledge is too expensive to produce, too fugitive to control, too contested to formally price – all of which are needed for commercial viability. Economists have recognised this reality for two centuries, and universities in a more implicit way for a millennium. As part of their life as charities, universities traditionally used a wide panoply of income sources – state support, land grants, alumni legacies, fundraising drives, investment income, graduate merchandising, even the odd shop no less – to make ends meet and support their core activity of teaching and research. This kind of mixed economy and contingency planning have granted universities longevity and stability far beyond that of the commercial sector. If we seek financial sustainability, we must return to fully embracing the charitable business model in fact and practice, not simply in word.
Unfortunately, the economic surpluses of the last fifty years allowed UK universities to jettison much of that richly mixed economy, and Aberdeen was no exception. Of course, this means that quick fixes are not on the cards, but also that opportunities lie all around us; indeed, the University represents the missing jigsaw piece in the cultural and economic uplift of the region.
- Promote the Value of Knowledge, not Information. Information and knowledge are not the same thing: the first is organised data, the second the basis upon which we plan action and live meaningful lives. The first traverses the world by broadband, the second is built on relations of trust with people that have proved themselves worthy of that trust. In a world of AI images, misinformation, hacking and deep fakes, the first is omnipresent, the second increasingly rare and valuable. While the commercialisation, automation and mass production of information was a twentieth-century project, its very success has made the human pursuit of valid knowledge and truth the defining project of the twenty-first. Only universities can do this, and only an effective and diligent academic senate can guarantee its reputation.
- Focus on People, Community and Place. The vital importance of knowledge in the new economy means that people, community and place are our primary assets. These are not anchored in an abstract transnational brand, but a reputation and a reality that depends on the personal, the face-to-face and the local. These aspects were eroded in recent years by the pandemic and our failure to rebuild the academic community in its wake, and are part of a larger pattern of universities’ narrowing usefulness over recent decades. The sector’s recruitment concentration on the post-16 age cohort made sense in the 1960s, but in the twenty-first Aberdeen University needs to be useful to the entire age demographic. This involves the traditional degree, but also consultancy, external research agreements, conference hosting, continuing professional development, evening classes and lectures. We need to be genuinely “open to all”, but also useful to all. Most of all, we must be proud of who and where we are.
- Use the Campus as an Inclusive Civic Space. To supplement the presently unstable income from teaching and research, the university campus must be rendered vastly more available to tourists and the public, particularly during the comparatively fallow summer months. This applies most substantially to the Kings College campus and Marischal College, our principal but now unused footfall within the city. This is not just for the cruise ship parties that wander Kings campus; we need to invite the general civic population of Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Scotland to develop a sense of collegiality and proprietorship with the institution. We need to create synergies and collaborations with local craft industries, tourism, museum, hospitality and heritage sites as well as industrial corporations. In all of these, we must do more than business – we must help one another.
It sounds like a lot of work, and of course it is, but it is work that can be shared with others. Variants of these activities were once part of the standard fund-raising repertoire of a healthy functioning university. In these straitened times, we need to return to that model.
