A political puzzle

Higher education, we are always told in the run-up to elections, is not a vote winner.

It is low on the list of priorities for most voters, and unless the issue of tuition fees is blowing up, lower priority still for most political candidates.

But take note of the increasing pressure being put on UK higher education, and it’s obvious that the idea that it is some sort of political dead zone is inaccurate.

Universities have been the battleground of choice for culture wars, reaching a peak during Liz Truss’ brief premiership when Dame Andrea Jenkyns denounced “Harry Potter degrees” in one of her only acts as skills minister.

Under Rishi Sunak’s tenure as prime minister, there have been some positive steps in important areas, such as agreeing UK involvement in Horizon Europe.

But that does not mean that higher education has moved out of the political line of fire.

As well as Sunak’s high-profile attacks on “rip-off degrees”, recent interventions include the announcement by science secretary Michelle Donelan that she intends to “kick woke ideology out of science”.

Donelan returned to this theme during the controversy of the past fortnight over UK Research and Innovation’s now-suspended equality committee.

The row was about social media posts relating to the Israel-Hamas conflict, but Donelan widened her attack, accusing UKRI of “going beyond the requirements of equality law” in ways that hindered science.

The combined impression is that viewing universities as a sort of collective opposition – particularly to Conservative ways of thinking – is now firmly ingrained in our politics.

This perspective should be seen as part of a broader debate: whether we now have too much higher education, or whether the growth of recent decades should continue.

Two very different perspectives are explored in this week’s Times Higher Education: our news pages offer an analysis of the UK’s attitude to expansion, while our features pages focus on what is happening in Australia.

There, with a centre-left Labor government digesting the findings of the Universities Accord review, the discussion is focused on a need for growth (one vice-chancellor suggests that Australia will need an additional 900,000 domestic university places in the years ahead).

In the UK, by contrast, Sunak recently denounced a decades-old ambition for 50 per cent university participation as one of the “great mistakes of the last 30 years”.

The divergent approaches reflect, among other things, the extent to which politicians believe that universities, and a growing pipeline of graduates, are part of the answer or part of the problem when it comes to economic growth, productivity and innovation.

But our analysis also considers whether more reductive and self-serving political motives might be playing a significant role: if graduates are more likely to vote for left-leaning parties, then an ever-growing graduate population poses a grave threat to governments of other stripes.

Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, suggests that while this is an “obvious” political motivation for the “more is less” crowd, it is ultimately doomed to fail as older generations with fewer graduates are replaced by younger, more highly educated cohorts.

This, he suggested, made any aspiration to suppress the number of graduate voters akin to “Canute declaring war on the sea”.

If overall student numbers are a key point of contention (and it is worth adding that Matt Western, the Labour shadow higher education minister, has said that he would regard reimposing number controls as “unconscionable”), then funding is another.

As the UK begins to gear up for a general election likely to be held in a year’s time, there is little sign that any party will be setting out a coherent, credible funding plan for higher education.

But it will not be possible for this to be put off indefinitely.

In an interview to mark the start of her term as president of Universities UK, Dame Sally Mapstone tells us that the current position of universities minister Robert Halfon – that a tuition fee rise is “not going to happen in a million years” – cannot be “the end of the conversation”.

But she warns that the idea of yet another review, which could take several years, is also problematic.

Whatever the solution, Mapstone’s view is that it will come about by “building relationships and having conversations” with the next government, and will ultimately involve “looking at the relationship between what the individual pays, what the government pays and potentially what employers contribute”.

Put like that, it sounds straightforward. The politics of higher education is never that.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com