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People’s academics for people’s universities? Adult educators in the mass higher education system
Chris Duke, University of Warwick
This paper invites academic and academic-related professional staff in university continuing education to contemplate the following paradox. Continuing education within the new British postbinary mass higher education system brings the university adult continuing educator in from the cold, at just the time when a chill antiprofessional political wind is blowing still colder through the enlarged system.
Adult educators in the ‘old university’ tradition, who were at times themselves stridently antiprofessional and took pride in a superior distinctiveness from ‘internal’ colleagues, are being normalised into the rest of the academic profession as it becomes deprofessionalised, or as some would have it, proletarianised.
There is poignancy in this: those who would have served the proletariat from the extramural community join an enlarged and unified, though not necessarily homogenised, university system which is itself now charged with serving, if not ‘the proletariat’ for that term has become problematic in the socio-economic and employment scenario of the nineties, then at least a much larger part of the school-leaving and older population.
Moreover, there is every prospect that the unification of the higher education system will be followed by post-secondary unification as Further and Higher Funding Councils coalesce into what might be called Tertiary Education Councils. It will be important for the enlarged system and for society what form internal differentiation takes. And it will be an interesting test of our own ‘academic community’, in this event, with what enthusiasm we welcome this further democratisation - and proletarianisation.
The remainder of the paper:
1.discusses briefly the crisis facing the academic profession generally
2.discusses the impact upon continuing educators (of various persuasions) within universities (of various complexions)
3.speculates about the future for universities and academics from this perspective, and for university continuing education and its practitioners
4.remarks briefly on the directions of causation implied in the Conference theme as seen from the perspective of this paper.
Farewell to donnish dominion
Halsey[1], doyen for many years of the liberal left, examined the predicament of the British academic profession (which he couched in the plural), beginning by reference to the senior common room, which itself sounds quaint and donnish to many a contemporary academic ear outside the ancient universities. Like Altbach[2], and by comparison also with the earlier Halsey and Trow study[3], he notes the sense of crisis in British higher education, which he credits to the structure of the system itself and to the idea of a university in this country, rather than merely to government hostility: ‘Britain is the most extreme case of expansion of universities in terms of what a university is and should be’; ‘mass higher education still strikes the British academic ear as a self-contradictory absurdity’[4]. According to Altbach, taking a comparative perspective from an American viewpoint, ‘the British academic profession has suffered the most severe set of crises and reverses of any in the industrialised world.’[5]
The sense of crisis, loss of certainty and loss of status is echoed in much contemporary comment in the educational press, and can be discerned in many quarters of diverse political persuasion and professional interest. Robertson[6] finds a radical-romantic (alias innovative-conservative) distinction more useful than left-right. Elton[7], who refers to ‘the deficiencies of traditional collegiality’, thereby distancing himself from the traditionalists, promulgates the need for new forms of staff training and development to meet new circumstances: declining resources, increased numbers, preoccupations with quality and with external interventions to assure it, and the new managerialism under which academics labour in many universities.
The former editor of Marxism Today suggests that ‘the universities have been beached; they are institutions in search of a role’; and that ‘academics have become marooned, isolated from the most dynamic areas of society’ such as those engaged with environmentalism, feminism, sexuality and human rights[8]. In academics’ main trade journal, Angela Crum Ewing[9] asks ‘what has happened to the ideal of the community of scholar’. She identifies post-Jarratt managerialism, the concept of market forces and competition, along with ‘relentless reduction in government funding coupled with demand for rapid growth in student numbers, and continual pressure to improve research ratings and attract external fundings’, and devolved budgeting within universities, as threatening an AUT ideal of a community of scholars which was not a reality even pre-Jarratt. Central to the purposes of the new AUT Secretary is professionalisation via charter status for the union - which in turn looks depressingly distant, and distancing, from a further education perspective[10].
Space precludes serious discussion of the causes of this crisis, but it is important to the purposes of this paper that the dual character of the crisis is noted: a crisis of the university in terms of vision and mission (or, simply, idea); and a crisis for its core workers, the academic staff who feel their working autonomy threatened, not by the blue pencil of the censor but by changing work conditions exacerbated by diminished social standing and financial reward. One need not be overly conspiratorial in deducing causes. Political barbarism apart, the sheer growth in numbers of what Elton calls the last remaining cottage industry must count. Halsey notes an expansion from 19,000 British academics in 1964 to 46,000 in universities in 1989, as well as 17,000 in polytechnics, ignoring the increasing numbers of part-time or casualised university teachers. In an era of down-sizing and out-sourcing, an occupational group which relies on public funds when public sector borrowing is excessive and the economy uncertain, and which has done little to increase productivity in the way that producers of artefacts have generally achieved, cannot expect to hold the same privileged status that was enjoyed by a handful of dons of post-war years. Scarcity value has gone. Value for money has displaced deference.
Changing continuing educators
How does this look from the viewpoint of the university continuing educator? What kind of university does she or he see, value and want; feel committed to and able to engage with? What of the character and soul, too, of SCUTREA and of UACE, each of which carries the word ‘university’ in its title?
We can no longer talk compellingly of the extramural adult educator. When I moved from a polytechnic to teach extramurally at Leeds in the sixties it was clear, at least with hindsight, what I was doing. I was leaving the lower status and poorer resourced sector of higher education, where I taught mainly ‘the disadvantaged’: second chance adults taking a degree at night, black and other overseas students on the London external, school drop-outs having another go as young adults in a non-paternalistic environment. I left a people’s university to which Crosland had denied the much-craved title of university, where every student was an adult and many were working concurrently, to join an elite university (worth the one third drop in salary to escape up and out); but to join what proved to be a proudly different culture, as it seemed, and not merely a sub-culture in the extramural subsystem of the main university. The adults I now taught were of, but not really at, a real university; the paper awards they earned after three years’ dedicated intellectual labour were a ticket to nowhere, not worth entry even to the first year of a Leeds undergraduate degree.[11]
Goodbye to all that. The continuing educator in the (as yet only so-called) mass higher education system is, especially following Circular 3/94[12], a regular academic - or as it may be, rather, a regular administrative or academic-related, ‘mainstreamed’ member of the university. They - we - are all in universities, give or take a Bolton or two. Some who work with colleges of further education, where higher education also takes place, feel uneasy about the new binary divide. A few are pushing to integrate FE and HE funding and accreditation methodologies, and looking to the day when, with Scotland and Wales as possible pointers, FE and HE will merge administratively and conceptually into an undivided open-lattice accessible system[13].
At one level there are grounds for celebration. Instead of teaching citizens ‘off-shore’ for nothing beyond intrinsic gain, we see a greatly enlarged university system. Notwithstanding the present freeze on expansion administered through the latest administrative creation, the MASN, the system is opening up increasingly to all with the interest and apparent ability to study at this level, with adults in the majority. The difficulty is that the move towards a learning society is not obviously accompanied by transformation of universities into learning organisations. Academics’ conditions of service, dominated by quality exercises for teaching as well as for research, and the constraints of growth and the market place, are less appealing, even in sectors which are not embattled over new contracts and conditions of service.
The future of the ‘university CE community’
It is a long step from the workload of four three-year extramural classes of the Leeds lecturer of the sixties to the wheeling and dealing of the modern CE catalyst in ‘new’ and increasingly too in the ‘old’ universities. Here life is a constant round of lobby and manoeuvre over modularisation and credit rating, access partnerships and WBL equivalencies, as well as timetables, contracts, teaching schedules, and the tension engendered by research selectivity. Teaching is a luxurious relief and research an unattainable ideal for many in the new-style change units (often not called CE, much less Adult Education) which many of our peculiar ‘academic community’ now occupy.
Can we stomach the often dramatic change of professional identity which this implies for ourselves and our successors? Does the victory of mass over elite higher education compensate for the loss of distinctiveness and the freedom of lifestyle of the old extramural tutor?
As Elton and Crum Ewing point out apropos the old days in academe generally, it was not all rosy in the former extramural garden. UCAE, transmuted through UCACE into postbinary UACE, was fairly castigated as an old boys’ club, just as the academic profession in western industrialised societies remains heavily white and male in character. The 1994 UACE Conference by centring attention on women showed how powerful a female CE community there is in the universities. One challenge for the university CE profession is to sustain its distinctive values, and to infiltrate and perpetuate these into the heartlands of the different universities across the spectrum with which it is now inextricably interwoven. Of course, if you prefer privilege and patriarchy, it is easy not to get enthusiastic about what all in all will prove to be the democratisation of British higher education.
The future for CE professionals is therefore increasingly entangled with the future of academics in general. We share a common destiny: a massively expanded, essentially unreformed (i.e. ‘inefficient’), labour force whose aspirations or pretensions ill match the suspicion in which it is held by government and the dominant and popular media. We are much divided, as an academic community or profession, by forces external to the university, which have been internalised by different groups or value-sets within. We face the prospect, on the one hand of the FE-HE divide being eroded or erased, on the other hand of a hierarchy of universities firming up into a quasi-caste system, based on research reputation but underpinned by increasing resource differentiation.
People’s universities for the mass, and a new elite division for the wealthy, lucky and clever? The character, quality and social functions of British higher education may depend in some measure on the extent to which higher continuing educators
(a)clarify and reinforce their own inherited and evolving value system or professional ethic
(b)succeed in permeating their university colleagues with these values and purposes
(c)are able to tap and inject into the universities some of the values and energies represented by the important social movements into which future-oriented idealism has apparently drained, from its location at least in part within the universities of the sixties.
On causation
To conclude with the briefest of words on the direction of causality. Conference title notwithstanding - ‘Practices, Contexts and Identities’- the dominant direction of causation, in an admittedly interactive and spiralling process, is Contexts è Practices è Identities. The identity of the archetypal British adult educator may perhaps have ‘spontaneously generated’ out of his [sic] valuing of equity, opportunity and socio-political reform (values è mission è identity?). However, the dominant form of higher adult education in which UCACE and later SCUTREA were born and formed their initial identities was one of marginality within the micro-context of the elite university, and the broader environment of a selective and class-structured social system. Professional identity made a virtue of difference (radical) from the dominant academic profession (conservative), and even rejected the very idea of the professional. For better for worse, we are all mainstream professionals and (quasi?-)academics now, and we had better be reflective as well as active about it.
This paper has explored some implications of these trends for the identity of the continuing educator in higher education, as the changing context demands new rationales and new rationalisations. New contexts demand new practices, and from these, buttressed no doubt by elegant rationalisations, grow new identities. How far will we, and the larger army of people’s academics with whom we share the modern (but not postmodernist?) university, create and adhere to a new yet old ethic? When will we formulate and take our Socratic oath?
Other references
R Fieldhouse (1993) Optimism and joyful irreverence. The sixties culture and its influence on British University Adult Education and the WEA. Leicester: NIACE
P Scott (1984) The crisis of the university. London: Croom Helm
[1] A H Halsey (1992) Decline of the donnish dominion. Oxford: Clarendon
[2] P G Altbach (1989)The academic profession: style