Students are trapped between consumerism and safetyism

Some of our most illustrious universities now look more like juvenile detention centres, all in the name of stopping the spread of Covid-19. This last week has seen police raids and strict lockdowns on students’ lives, many of whom will have been leaving home for the first time. Young people compare their campuses to prisons, complaining of illegal detention and displaying only half-joking distress messages in their windows — which university authorities have then ordered them to remove. Even where infections are absent, students are stuck in their rooms, attending classes online, which they could have done from home. One’s heart goes out to these young people, caught as they are between the pernicious forces of university marketisation and the cult of safety at all costs.

On the one side, students are enduring the consequences of marketisation in British higher education, as Philip Cunliffe and I set out in a recent report for the think tank Cieo. Stripped of public funding, universities have been made overwhelmingly reliant on student fees. They have also become dependent on other ‘revenue streams’ including inflated rents from student residences, with many now heavily indebted by their quest to attract student-customers with luxury accommodation. Accordingly, no students on campus equals financial ruin.

With the government providing no support for universities beyond a little extra research funding and a highly unattractive restructuring regime for those facing bankruptcy, university managers have been compelled to tempt students to return to campus. Many essentially mis-sold their educational offer, promising a ‘blended learning’ model that exaggerated the amount of in-person teaching being planned in order to avoid mass drop-outs or deferrals and to lure students back into halls. It’s not because they are necessarily bad people (though some certainly are) — it’s more because the market forces them to behave unethically.

In any decent, publicly-funded higher education system, universities would be empowered to do what is right for students, rather than worrying about bankruptcy or restructuring. Elsewhere in Europe, funding persists even if students do not attend. Canada has provided CA$9 billion (£5.2 billion) of extra funding for its universities, even giving students CA$1,250 per month (£725) over the summer to compensate for lost employment.

But does doing what is right for students mean shuttering universities entirely? The University and College Union (UCU) thinks so, demanding that all teaching be moved immediately online. But if managers have sacrificed educational quality (as well as students’ liberties) in the name of money, UCU is also willing to degrade education in the name of safety.

It is hard to argue against safety, but the lockdown’s disastrous economic and health consequences show what happens when it is elevated unquestioningly above all other values. The lockdown left has taken a deeply unrealistic position throughout the pandemic, asserting that no deaths are acceptable (when some are inevitable) and that any restrictions, however costly, must be tolerated. Risk, rather than being managed, must be entirely suppressed.

Coupled with scientists’ caution and government ineptitude, this has produced incredibly crude policy: either everyone is subject to restrictions or no one is. Regional variation — whether minor tweaks from the devolved nations or local lockdowns — is as sophisticated as it gets. Schools are the only exception, given the overwhelming evidence of the minimal risk Covid-19 poses to children. But even here the lockdown left resisted, thwarting the government’s attempt to reopen schools before the summer vacation.

UCU and others stress that the infection rate is now rising fastest among 17-to-22-year-olds. But we also know that this age group overwhelmingly experiences only mild symptoms or none at all. Nearly 90 per cent of Covid-19 deaths in the UK have occurred among over-65s. The disease has killed fewer than 600 people under 45. If you are young and healthy, Covid-19 does not pose a serious risk. UCU’s claim that universities will be the ‘care homes of a second wave’ is therefore nonsense — their prediction of 50,000 deaths was instantly discredited.

A sophisticated policy framework would have recognised this variable vulnerability to Covid-19. It would have focused on shielding the vulnerable while allowing those at lesser risk to get on with their lives with sensible precautions. On university campuses, that might have meant online teaching for students and staff unable or unwilling to participate in person, either because they or someone they live with are vulnerable, with in-person teaching for others. Most universities could also have developed their own testing labs, using routine mass testing to help quash outbreaks. Yes, there would always be the risk of students passing the virus to others. But, as administrators and police are now discovering, it is arguably far easier to segregate the young from the old and at-risk than it is to segregate the young from each other.

Of course, such a fine-grained strategy would have required a political and bureaucratic establishment far more competent than the one we have. It would also have required university managers to genuinely consult and partner with unions to design safe parallel provision — rather than, as so often, dictating policy from on high, engaging in only the bare minimum of dialogue required to avoid prosecution.

But it would also have required a belief in the value of traditional university education, such that it should not be casually abandoned in the face of a pandemic. That managers sacrifice these things to prioritise financial survival is hardly surprising. More disturbing is academics’ reluctance to defend their pedagogical mission and practices. On the contrary, UCU’s general-secretary decries the ‘fetishisation of face-to-face teaching’, demanding that campuses be shut down to ‘guarantee safety’ for staff and students.

This unthinking valorisation of ‘safety’, to the exclusion of any other value or notion of vocation or responsibility, recalls parliament’s decision to dissolve itself at the height of the pandemic. The very idea that MPs might have a higher duty than their personal safety — to somehow find a way to keep representing citizens and hold government to account — was apparently alien to them. Now, the main body representing university lecturers says that nothing they do is so important that it cannot be done online.

This is despite extensive research showing that online learning decreases student attainment and increases drop-out rates, with disadvantaged students suffering most. Contrary to what ‘edutech’ fanatics preach, when mediated through technology, the human relationships at the heart of good teaching become stilted and awkward, undermining normal classroom interaction and learning. Many things simply cannot be taught online effectively, or even at all, from conducting experiments and medical operations to acting and film-making. And how can poorer students flourish when living in noisy, overcrowded households with limited computer and internet access? This is not to mention the impact of prolonged isolation on young people, with mental health conditions surging. Prioritising risk-eradication above all else entails serious costs for students.

It also undermines the union itself. Perversely, denying the importance of face-to-face teaching brings UCU into line with neoliberal managers who have long dreamed of expanding online teaching, which allows them to outsource instruction and even design courses for private companies and staff on more precarious contracts. Many were already moving in this direction before Covid-19 hit. Having failed to defend the superiority of traditional teaching, how can UCU now resist the inevitable job losses this trajectory entails?

The struggles over campus lockdowns thus symbolise a higher education system that has lost its sense of purpose and value. The government has abandoned the sector to market forces, forcing universities to behave like cut-throat businesses. The academic profession has lost control to managers who would sooner sack thousands of staff and deceive students than campaign among the public for solidarity and aid. And their union, reeling and demoralised from defeats over pay and conditions, would rather withdraw academic labour than defend its importance. The inevitable consumerist campaign for fee refunds will complete the miserable picture. The need to rebuild higher education for the public good has never been greater.