English tertiary education requires another major review, “even more ambitious” than the 1997 Dearing Report, according to Sir David Eastwood, who, at the end of his long leadership career, challenged “unreasonable criticism” by declaring that he has “never met anybody who cares more about higher education than I do”.
Sir David, who retired as University of Birmingham vice-chancellor last month after 12 years in charge, has been one of the sector’s most influential leaders and political operators, having also been chief executive of the former Higher Education Funding Council for England and a panel member on Lord Browne’s 2010 review of higher education funding.
As chair of trustees for the Universities Superannuation Scheme during ongoing pensions acrimony, as well as one of the sector’s highest-paid leaders and grandest of grandees at a time when universities were exposed to a damaging media and political storm over vice-chancellors’ salaries, he has been fiercely criticised by some academics.
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Sir David told Times Higher Education that the biggest future issue for the sector is that “we have never fully addressed the funding challenge…the questions of who pays, what do they pay for, and how is that funded”.
He said that if the £9,250 tuition fee cap “doesn’t move in this Parliament, and I’m sure it won’t move in this Parliament, then in real terms the value of the tuition fee will have fallen…probably somewhere between 20 and 25 per cent” on 2017 levels. But, he continued, “I don’t think we’ve yet got anything like a consensus in the sector, still less in government, as to how that should be addressed. Meanwhile…the student experience is eroded [by the fee cap freeze] and…you continue to tax students for access and participation [via their fees] in a way I don’t think is legitimate.”
Theresa May’s government set up the Augar review of post-18 education, which recommended a £7,500 fee cap in its May 2019 report. The Boris Johnson government is still to offer a final response to Augar.
Sir David argued that yet another, wider review was needed. Highlighting a “fractured” landscape at pre-tertiary Level 3 qualifications, he called for an examination of the “totality” of education through ages 16 to 23, examining “what young people need and what the country needs” rather than which institutions “get what from the funding trough”.
“I do think we need a review,” said Sir David. “I think we need something that’s even more ambitious than Dearing was,” he added, referencing Lord Dearing’s report to the government, which paved the way for increased higher education funding via tuition fees and for further expansion.
On vice-chancellors’ pay, one figure in government described it as hard to overstate the anger against universities still generated in government by that issue. Does Sir David, whose pay and pension package reached £460,000 last year, think he or universities more widely could have done things differently?
“It was an issue that was deliberately politicised,” he said. “And it was politicised to weaken the sector and weaken the position of the sector.”
The debate on vice-chancellors’ pay had seen an “inappropriate calibration” with the prime minister’s salary take root, rather than considering what appropriate benchmarks for universities of greatly varying size and turnover might be, he argued.
Sir David continued: “I was responsible at Birmingham, on the London Economics calculation, for one in 50 jobs in the city, or my university was. How do you want to evaluate that, and what kind of quality of people do you want?”
He added: “If you’re a vice-chancellor as I was a vice-chancellor, you have no other life.”
During his time at Birmingham, he said, the institution had gone “from being a good university which was quite traditional, quite risk-averse, to being a university which was, I think, more confident, bolder”, innovating in features such as being “still the only university to run our own 11-to-18 school”, the “first Russell Group university to take over a further education college” and moving to “being a civic university with a global footprint” before that positioning “became fashionable”.
Sir David, a former University of East Anglia vice-chancellor and Arts and Humanities Research Board chief executive, who will now chair the board of INTO University Partnerships, also said: “If you’ve had the career I’ve had, you just have to harden yourself to unreasonable criticism. That’s very sad. Because I’ve never met anybody who cares more about higher education than I do.
“I’ve met quite a lot of people who care as much about higher education as I do; I haven’t met anybody who cares more about it, and I haven’t met anybody who’s given more of their life to it.
“The lack of generosity we now have in the sector towards those who give everything for the sector – it doesn’t speak well.”
POSTSCRIPT:
Print headline: ‘I have never met anybody who cares more about HE than I do’
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