In more than 30 years’ experience of UK higher education, I cannot recall a period in which universities have been under such strong and sustained public and media attack.

The present wave of attacks began before Christmas with government criticism of the universities for doing too little to protect freedom of speech on campus. They continued with criticism of the vice-chancellors’ (presidents’) levels of remuneration, with the highest-paid vice-chancellor (Dame Glynis Breakwell at the University of Bath) earning more than three times the prime minister’s salary.

Then there was a television programme drawing on Freedom of Information requests about vice-chancellors’ expenses. This estimated that vice-chancellors and their most senior colleagues had claimed almost £8 million (US$11 million) over the past two years.

Individual cases included one vice-chancellor who had claimed £5,187 for flights and accommodation at a five-star hotel in Singapore and another who had run up a bill of £3,107 for a five-night stay at another five-star hotel there. There was even a payment of £1,600 for the cost of relocating an incoming vice-chancellor’s dog from Australia.

Doubtless glad of any diversion from the thankless task of trying to concoct an agreed government position on Brexit, the Prime Minister Theresa May on 20 February weighed in with a speech criticising the cost of university tuition in England and announcing a review of university funding (the Labour opposition has already committed itself to abolishing tuition fees if it wins the next election).

Finally, for the moment, the older universities are locked in a bitter dispute with their lecturers about increasing lecturers’ contributions to their pensions, a dispute where there appears to be some public sympathy for the striking staff.

Decades in the making

Two questions arise from this brief tour d’horizon: are these problems purely transitory or do they have deeper underlying causes and are there any common factors between them?

On the first, it is not hard to see the current complaints against universities as emblematic of the deeper fissures in British society disclosed by the Brexit vote. It is well established that the best predictor of a ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ vote was the voter’s level of education. Areas with large concentrations of universities or graduates were among the strongest ‘Remainers’.

With large numbers of staff and students from abroad, universities are clearly the ‘citizens of nowhere’ vilified in one of Mrs May’s earlier speeches. They also embody the ‘experts’ castigated by the arch-Leaver Michael Gove (and more recently the chief secretary to the treasury), and indeed are responsible for training most of them.

So it is hard not to conclude that while there is a strong synthetic quality to the current attacks – not least, the government doing all it can to distract voters from the highest tuition fees anywhere outside the elite United States system – this is very unlikely to be a passing phase; it could indeed get worse as the ‘Leavers’ seek scapegoats for the almost inevitable gap between the post-Brexit Britain they would like to see and the messy (and impoverished) outcome that looks increasingly likely.

Common factors

This conclusion is reinforced by the answer to the second question, whether there is anything to link the various criticisms. There are in fact three ‘common factors’.

The first is globalisation. As everyone knows, there has over the past 30 years or so been a huge increase in the volume and proportion of goods and services traded across national frontiers. Higher education – which has always had something of an international character – has been an outstanding example.

Millions of students and staff now study and work outside their home country and Britain has been one of the leading destinations. UK universities have led the way in establishing links and partnerships with universities and colleges overseas, even to the extent of establishing campuses and study centres there. The substantial income from all this activity helps to offset the historic underfunding of both teaching and research. This takes us to the second common factor, privatisation.

Starting in the 1980s with the withdrawal of the subsidy to overseas students’ fees – something which some of the Scandinavian countries still have – successive British governments have progressively sought to transfer the costs of university tuition onto the ‘user’, the student or graduate.

As a result of the decisions of a quite recent government of which the prime minister was a senior member, England is now almost alone in having a system where virtually the entire cost of university teaching is met by the tuition fee, a ‘voucher’ system of the kind strongly advocated by the doyen of Neoclassical economists, Milton Friedman, but generally regarded as unworkable and undesirable.

The government has also encouraged the entry into the market of private colleges and, now, universities. It is true that the government continues to subsidise the loans associated with the fee but the direction of travel away from state support is clear (and, probably, irreversible).

Finally, to enable universities to cope with these challenges of increased competition and privatisation, the government has encouraged them to adopt corporate methods of governance and management, beginning with the 1985 Jarratt Report.

In the early 2000s the vice-chancellors of the universities in the South East were bidden to talk to the local Regional Development Agency (RDA) about opportunities to obtain subsidies for development projects with the private sector. Whatever the project suggested, and whoever the vice-chancellor who responded to it, the answer was always: ‘That sounds very interesting, what’s in it for my university?’

The senior representative of the RDA, a lady I knew well from my time as a civil servant, was clearly shocked by these responses and remarked: “These vice-chancellors, they’re far more commercial than the business people we meet.” That policy at least has been a success.

Professor Roger Brown is the former vice-chancellor of Southampton Solent University, United Kingdom. He has been a professor or visiting professor at 10 other universities and held other senior posts in higher education. Before that, he was a senior civil servant at the Department of Trade and Industry and an administrator with the Inner London Education Authority.