Regulator should protect university finances, says academy head

UK higher education needs a new regulator charged with protecting the financial resilience of universities, according to the president of the British Academy.

Writing on the academy’s website, Julia Black, a former interim director of the London School of Economics, contrasts the Westminster government’s creation of a football regulator – which will have a duty to “protect and promote financial sustainability of individual clubs” – with perceived inaction on the funding crisis facing higher education institutions.

As reported in Times Higher Education, more than 50 UK universities are now making redundancies and course closures are putting the “health of individual disciplines” at risk, Professor Black warns. Concerns persist that the unsustainable funding model – undermined by frozen tuition fees and public funding, and instability over international recruitment – could lead to institutions going bust.

“Government likes to claim that the UK is a ‘science superpower’…But the ‘superpower’ rhetoric masks the fact that our higher education system is in crisis. The public funding model for both teaching and research is under severe strain, if not broken,” Professor Black writes.

Professor Black, now LSE’s strategic director of innovation and a professor of law, says that universities are “significantly impacted by government terms around the funding of both teaching and research, and increasingly on their operations”, but with responsibility for the sector split between the Department for Education and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, “there isn’t one part of government which looks at our higher education system as just that, a system, or which is responsible for the cumulative impacts of its often divergent policies”.

“The main regulator in England, the Office for Students (OfS), regulates universities’ teaching provision and increasingly other aspects of life on campus, like new provisions on free speech. Yet, notwithstanding their clear public benefit, the OfS, unlike the new football regulator, has no responsibility to ‘promote and protect’ the financial resilience of the university system; nor does any other part of government,” Professor Black says.

“We need an urgent review and thorough overhaul of the way government engages with universities, including a robust, independent regulator responsible for the system as a whole – both teaching and research.”

Professor Black says that universities need “coherent” policies from the government, including on immigration and security, “which recognises that the key to the strength of our universities is their international character”.

“If we are at all interested in maintaining the health and viability of universities, let alone hope it retains the globally strong position it still has, then the UK government needs to start to take the survival of our research and higher education system as seriously as it seems to be taking football. It’s more than a game,” Professor Black concludes.

chris.havergal@timeshighereducation.com