The UCU Left is a national organisation of University and College Union activists. It is committed to ensuring that the new union has a democratic structure through which members can determine policy, and elected officers and professional officials can be held accountable. It seeks to defend educational equality, and to oppose the consequences of neo-liberal marketisation. It is opposed to all forms of racism, sexism, oppression and imperialism.

Review of Universities in a Neoliberal World, by Alex Callinicos

Extract of review by Tom Hickey (UCU NEC Member)

In the last quarter century, universities in the UK have been transformed beyond recognition. The Robbins expansion of the 1960s was about shifting these institutions from elite intellectual finishing schools for the future patrician administrators of the social order into sites for the preparation and training of ‘high level manpower’, as the literature of the day called it. The recent expansions under Conservative and New Labour administrations since the 1980s were about creating a mass HE system. If Robbins almost doubled the participation rate of each generation from 7% to 12%, the recent expansions have doubled it again. Today 30%, or two and a quarter million, of 18 and 19 year-olds go to university.

The consequences of this have been dramatic. With no expansion of resources to match the growth in student numbers, the nature of the experience of higher education for students has deteriorated sharply, and the conditions of academic staff have declined in proportion. Indeed, the nature of being a student and being an academic have changed. These social roles are no longer the same.

These are the issues addressed by Professor Callinicos in his pamphlet. He places the recent expansion in its economic, international and historical contexts; he looks at the drive for the rationalisation and concentration of university research; he addresses the consequences for staff and for students. All are addressed as elements of an over-arching neo-liberal agenda whose central agency domestically is the New Labour Government, and whose ‘inspiration’ was the ‘modernising project’ of Brown and Blair.

The final chapter of the text registers our resources of hope in this situation. Firstly, the evidence from France, from March and April 2006, that such policies in education can be arrested by determined and imaginative resistance. Secondly, the evidence from around the world of a growing resistance to neo-liberalism in general. Thirdly, the evidence from the UK of a growing militancy inside higher education from both the existence and the ambitions of the UCU.

Prefaced by the remarks of Paul Mackney, Joint General Secretary of the UCU, this pamphlet provides the beginning of an argument that will come to characterise the experience of the next decade in British higher education.

Read Tom's full review - available here (pdf)

Copyright © UCU Left
Webmaster: Mark Campbell