Memorandum submitted by Don Starr, Head,
Department of East Asian Studies, University of Durham, and President,
British Association for Chinese Studies
The opinions below are my personal views and
should not be taken as representing the views of Durham University
or the British Association for Chinese Studies.
Two trends in Higher Education over recent years
have been the downgrading of teaching relative to research and
the general abandonment of national planning in subject teaching
provision. Applicants are regarded as consumers free to choose
whatever they want from the market-place and universities are
encouraged to respond to the consumer market by withdrawing less
popular lines and replacing them with more popular products. More
prestigious universities do not need to cut less popular courses:
they can fill all their places on all their courses, provided
they are willing to see a marginal lowering of grades for less
popular subjects. However, they are often reluctant to do this.
Other stake-holders, such as employers and the state, have been
squeezed out of skills provision planning, except in medicine.
The system has adopted contrasting attitudes
towards research and teaching. Market forces do not intrude on
publicly-funded research decisions, which are based purely on
an academic assessment of the quality of the project as provided
by other researchers. Yet, teaching is all about market forces,
defined almost exclusively by applicant demand and played out
in a market whose terms are fixed by HEFCE. National employment
needs scarcely figure in this, in spite of the fact that the state
funds much of the provision for "home" students. Both
research and teaching are essential features of the HE sector,
but there is an issue of balance between them. Prestigious research-led
universities now regard their primary function as research rather
than teaching, even in arts and humanities subjects. Hence, for
example, lecturers are being told to spend 60% of their time on
research, and 40% on teaching and administration. The needs of
the employment market are not seen by individual universities
as relevant in planning teaching provision.
The aims of universities have become much more
explicit in recent years. In the past they were defined in generalities,
reflecting national goals. Now they are defined by specific key
performance indicators, often revolving around a certain league
table position, an obsession of vice-chancellors. As elsewhere
the difficulty with such targets is the way they skew priorities
towards measurable goals and away from unmeasurable, or unmeasured,
ones.
Changes taking place in the HE sector over the
past twenty years have impacted on the ability, or willingness,
of universities to support courses that require intensive teaching.
This has advantaged methodology-based subjects where teaching
loads can be very light, and disadvantaged knowledge / skills-based
subjects where greater contact hours are required to ensure that
students graduate with a level of competence acceptable to employers
and sufficient to meet professional recognition criteria. Twenty
years ago students in sciences typically had up to 30 contact
hours per week, including laboratory sessions, and language students
up to 20 hours per week. Much of this teaching took place in relatively
small groups; for example in "hard" language teaching,
such as Chinese and Japanese, interactive language classes require
small numbers, ideally 8-10 maximum, to be successful. "Library-based"
subjects, such as history, English, philosophy or politics, typically
have much lower teaching loads of around eight contact hours per
week, sometimes down to one or two hours per week for final year
students. Much of this contact consists of lectures in large groups
of up to 200 students. The economics of these two types of course
are totally different, but this is not reflected in HEFCE's funding
regime.
HEFCE has never paid universities according
to the actual costs of teaching the subjects concerned, but has
taken a "broad brush" approach of roughly banding subjects
into four basic fee bands. Until the late 1990s HEFCE protected
subjects by linking the fees to specific subjects in a quota system.
Universities could close subjects down, but they would then lose
the student quota. In the late 1990s, as a result of pressure
from vice-chancellors for greater flexibility in responding to
changing student demand for subjects, HEFCE agreed to de-link
fees from specific subjects: as long as universities maintained
broadly the same mix of courses they would continue to receive
the same level of payment. This removed any protection for individual
subjects. The background to this was rapidly declining per capita
student fee income: in the decade from 1989 to 1998 public funding
per student fell from a starting index of 100 to 63. Universities
were told to make efficiency gains; these consisted of falling
staffing ratios (it is not unusual for the staff : student ratio
in library-based subjects to be 1: 30-40, double secondary school
levels), reduced library and IT provision and building maintenance,
and, of course, falling staff salaries. When it was impossible
to go further with these "efficiency" gains, HEFCE was
forced to agree to universities switching out of higher cost subjects.
At the same time universities were being encouraged
to devolve finances to departmental level to bring in the discipline
of the market. Departments were credited with what HEFCE paid
for the students they taught. This made transparent previously
opaque levels of cross-subsidisation. It became very clear that
teaching history or English was much more profitable than teaching
Chinese or Japanese. Under HEFCE's funding regime it was easy
to achieve "contribution rates" (profits) of 50% for
the former, but 30% was good for the latter. The fact that graduates
in Chinese and Japanese were almost twice as employable as graduates
in history and English (according THES figures) was irrelevant
to the universities and to HEFCE, but not to the country and the
national economy.
At the same time changes in corporate governance
encouraged by HEFCE increased the power of the executive in universities,
and the power of patronage of vice-chancellors. The mantra of
responding to the market has given university executives wide
scope for reforming their institutions in their own images.
What has happened to my own department illustrates
these processes at work. It was originally set up in the late
1940s as a result of the Scarborough Report into the provision
of strategically important languages, following intelligence deficiencies
during the 1939-45 war. This resulted in a government decision
to fund such languages at a small number of centres. Military
intelligence was the original priority, but later reports, the
Hayter Report of 1961 and the Parker Report of the 1986, emphasised
diplomatic and business needs. HEFCE in 1998 provided further
support for Chinese studies in a five year initiative under its
strategic and vulnerable subject funding, and in 2006 a further
five year initiative began. Durham's capacity in East Asian and
Middle Eastern languages was supported under a succession of vice-chancellors
from the late 1940s until 2003 when a committee chaired by the
vice-chancellor, Sir Kenneth Calman, recommended closing the department
of East Asian studies in autumn 2007. This was in spite of student
applications rising at 10% a year and the department meeting the
University's research and teaching performance criteria. It was
also in spite of it fulfilling its original planned role of providing
skilled specialist graduates. The Vice-Chancellor was reportedly
told by GCHQ that they had recruited over two dozen skilled linguists
from the department. Graduates also occupy important positions
in the wider East Asian world: the British consul-general in Shanghai
until December 2006, the current Beijing correspondent of The
Times and the chief interpreter to the EU ambassador in Beijing
are some of the many graduates of Durham's Department of East
Asian Studies using their specialist skills to work in East Asia.
We would argue this is to the benefit of Britain.
As a result of past planning Durham now has
50,000 volumes on East Asia in its library collection, 400 runs
of periodicals, a further 30,000 volumes on Japan provided by
a Japanese university, a large collection of teaching materials
in the department, and a specialist oriental museum. The library
collections will now atrophy as funding dries up (it is tied to
student numbers), the departmental library and teaching materials
will be disposed of and the staff will be made redundant. Student
demand for East Asian studies is meantime dramatically increasing.
So why did Durham's Vice-Chancellor decide to recommend this closure?
A primary reason given for this was that it was: "not core
to the University and not part of Durham's `brand'", in spite
of its 50 year history. However, behind this decision lurks the
national policy issues discussed above. In my view this was an
erroneous decision from a national perspective, and even from
a local one; the higher value of graduates in strategic subjects
needs to receive greater recognition. HEFCE offers short-term
initiatives but does not provide adequate long-term core funding.
It takes the view that provision will develop elsewhere if there
is sufficient demand, and there is some truth in this, but this
is dependent on sympathetic vice-chancellors. Abandoning fifty
years of investment in one place to build up the subject elsewhere
is an extremely wasteful and inefficient process, and one which
could be avoided by just a small element of planning.
Since there are many difficult issues and vested
interests here one can see why successive governments, and other
parties involved, have preferred to use the mantra of market forces
rather than take planned action. Presently only overseas students
constitute a real market; the home student "market"
depends on HEFCE's payment system. This has recently been changed
to the advantage of "library-based" subjects, arguably
moving in the wrong direction. Producing graduates with the right
skills is important for the national economy, and an element of
planning is necessary to do this. This is recognised in the case
of medicine, but not for other subjects. Although HEFCE's primary
role is the funding of teaching (on a ratio of 3:1) it is the
research tail that wags the teaching dog, especially at RAE time.
There may be an argument for separating these two functions to
produce a funding body fully committed to teaching.
March 2007
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