Sphinx

Every crisis is an opportunity, and the idea of creative disruption – shaking up the system to create space for innovation and profit – is so much easier if something else has already done the shaking up for you. This is as true for universities as for everything else at the moment. The immediate and understandable response of most has been to wonder how to restore the pre-plague status quo as quickly as possible, or to worry about how far some things may already be broken beyond repair (a business model based on ever-increasing numbers of overseas students, and devil take the disciplines that can’t recruit them, for example). Some – like me – have quietly welcomed the sudden acceptance that take-home papers and other ‘alternative’ forms of assessment are actually fine and dandy. But it doesn’t take too much imagination to hear the hand-rubbing and gleeful cackling of people whom we should generally prefer to be subdued and miserable; just think of the most cynical approach to higher education you can, and almost certainly someone is already planning it…

(1) Shrinking the wage bill. For some university managers, the answer to every problem is to reduce the portion of turnover spent on employing people to deliver teaching and research, and so a burst of austerity for which they cannot possibly be blamed is manna from heaven. Already, some down-sizing and voluntary severance schemes in response to the expected fall in fee income have been announced with such efficiency that one might almost imagine that had already been drawn up. Who’s going to do all the teaching that would have been delivered by these staff (and the numerous short-term and casually employed people whose contracts won’t be renewed), given that putting everything online is definitely a lot more work? Well, this REF period is very nearly up, and hardly anyone is still going to be working on outputs for it, even if the deadline gets moved by six months – so we just need to shift the time allowance for research over to teaching! Maybe there will never be another REF, so no need to restore that time in future (at least not for humanities and social sciences), but in any case the investment now in online provision will make it easy to manage with far fewer staff in future…

(2) Why, as has already been remarked on social media, do we need so many universities giving separate lectures on the same topics? This ridiculous level of inefficiency has been sustained hitherto by the social capital and socialising opportunities afforded by actual attendance at a university, but the shift to online learning undermines that whole anti-competitive-established-provider thing. Now there’s a serious chance to grab some market share! After all, who really wants to be lectured by Dr Annabelle Earlycareer when they have the chance to be lectured by Professor Tellydon or Bloke Whose Books Are Sold In W.H. Smith? Universities may, if they really want to, find an appropriate niche in providing ancillary support and marking services for the online provider, though it will probably be cheaper to stick with casually-employed PhD students…

Further dystopian thoughts may be added as they occur to me…