The Multiple Crises of Higher Education

Join us for an event on the multiple crises that are currently affecting UK Higher Education, emerging from efforts to reorganise the sector around a market for education. The event takes place at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and is hosted by the Accounting and Accountability Research Group (AARG) and the Mile End Institute (MEI).

Speakers include:

James Brackley (University of Sheffield)

David Harvie 

Steve Jones (University of Manchester)

Natalie Fenton (Goldsmiths University)

Jana Bacevic (Durham University)

Rose Stephenson (HEPI)

The University system is being rocked by a systemic but variegated set of financial crises, leading to continuous and widespread restructurings, redundancies and closures across the sector. The sustainability of the sector’s fees-based funding model has long been in question and is generating a competitive scramble for students as well as widespread financial risk and crisis for universities. That cuts are also being announced at elite institutions with healthy financial reserves points to contradictions in the business and accounting logics of university management. Crises of representative governance and accountability that were highlighted across recent years of industrial action remain a feature of the latest disputes between management and staff. The professional work and context of teaching, research and administration in the university has been profoundly affected by these trends. Alongside the effects of a tightening crisis for university staff, students have endured the dislocation of education under lockdown, the cost-of-living crisis and face the prospect of further indebtedness as calls for higher fees are made, the last of which international students already endure.

These multiple crises are producing a sense of recession and even existential threat in the sector. This event brings together academic and policy experts to unpick the issues of accounting and accountability in UK Higher Education to explore some of the causes and consequences of, and connections between, these crises.

Questions for consideration include:

• How do we make sense of financial ‘crisis’ in the sector, given both the scale of the issue but also the diversity of institutions affected?
• What are the cultures and logics of governance that accompany the multiple crises in UK HE? How are they, and might they, be contested and changed?
• Where do students fit within our analysis of these multiple crises? How are they affected and how are expectations of (and from) students evolving within this crisis landscape?
• What do these multiple crises imply for our understanding of the meaning of higher education, as a public good and social right?