A New Strategy for Higher Education
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1576 ... March 26, 2018
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A New Strategy for Higher Education
Hugo Radice
In the British Labour Party’s 2017 election manifesto, the pledges to abolish university tuition fees and reintroduce maintenance grants were widely seen as vote winners, but that was the extent of the party’s policy commitments toward the sector. Since the election, Labour has supported staff and students in challenging the yawning gap between highly-paid vice-chancellors and principals on the one hand, and part-time academic staff whose work is extremely insecure and poorly paid; and it has supported the industrial action that academic and administrative staff in UCU have taken in defence of their pension rights.
Important though these issues are, Labour’s policies need to be based on a much more comprehensive analysis of the problems in... the sector, framed by the ways in which higher education fits in to our wider economy and society. In short, Labour needs a new strategy for higher education. In what follows, I set out key elements of such a strategy, looking in turn at:
- the overall purpose of higher education (HE);
- management control and the erosion of collegial culture;
- growing differentials in pay and job security; and
- the withering away of part-time and adult education in HE.
