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Representing 30 years of higher

education change: UK universities and
the Times Higher
a a
Sharon Gewirtz & Alan Cribb
a
Centre for Public Policy Research , King's College London ,
London , UK
Published online: 15 Nov 2012.
To cite this article: Sharon Gewirtz & Alan Cribb (2013) Representing 30 years of higher education
change: UK universities and the Times Higher , Journal of Educational Administration and History,
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Journal of Educational Administration and History, 2013
Vol. 45, No. 1, 58–83, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2013.730505
Representing 30 years of higher education change: UK universities

and the Times Higher
Sharon Gewirtz∗ and Alan Cribb
Downloaded by [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries] at 07:12 01 November 2013
Centre for Public Policy Research, King’s College London, London, UK
This paper argues that the Times Higher provides a powerful tool for
understanding the changing character of UK higher education (HE) and
can usefully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of
that changing character. Drawing on an analysis of a sample of stories
from the Times Higher, it documents the changing policy climate of UK
HE from 1979 to 2010. It offers a broadly chronological account of
themes that have emerged as prominent at different times during this
period, pointing, inter alia, to fears about threats to the humanities, the
rise of various forms of instrumentalism and the incorporation of HE
institutions and agencies into a common mindset characterised by a
preoccupation with marketing and corporate success. The last of these is
embodied in the changing format of the newspaper itself and in its own
activities as a key player in the HE sector, notably as a sponsor of
university rankings and awards. Whilst being sensitive to countervailing
tendencies, the authors suggest that the growing instrumentalisation of
HE and related cultural shifts represent a changed ‘structure of feeling’ in
UK HE. They conclude that the university rankings, awards and other
image commodities that are a key part of this changed structure of feeling
now play such a substantial role in the cultural life of universities that the
norms of both rationality and professional ethics which tended to prevail
in deliberations about university strategy 30 years ago may no longer be
taken for granted.
Keywords: higher education; Times Higher; policy trends; privatisation;
marketisation; spin
1. Introduction
There is a growing body of critical work on contemporary HE that describes and
laments the rise of the university as a neoliberal institution and the various ways
in which the organisational structures, cultures and values of HE across a range
of national contexts have been reconfigured by the twin forces of managerialism
and marketisation.1 In many respects, this paper can be located within this genre
∗
Corresponding author. Email: sharon.gewirtz@kcl.ac.uk
1
See, for example, Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics,
Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
Journal of Educational Administration and History 59
of work. However, it is also fuelled by a concern to attend to some important

sceptical currents that have questioned the use or, more accurately, the
neglect of history in these accounts. In particular, these sceptical voices have
argued that the past operates in such ‘narratives of loss’ in an essentially mythi-
cal way, such that actual history is not investigated and does not figure signifi-
cantly in the critiques of neoliberalism but imagined histories are simply
mobilised to make points about current complaints.2 With these valuable scep-
tical qualifications in mind, in this paper, we want to review some of the specific
processes, mechanisms and features of change that have occurred in the recent
past in UK HE and that might provide some historical substance to otherwise

vague laments about neoliberal change. More specifically, we want to trace
the processes that have made possible the rise of a culture of ‘spin’, making
impression management an increasingly central organising principle of insti-
tutional policymaking, culture and values. As is well known, ‘image’ and
‘branding’ are important components of neoliberal cultures, but in order to
understand how they have also become part of the raison d’etre of UK univer-
sities, it is necessary to look at the changes in forms of regulation and the con-
comitant cultural changes that have created fertile conditions for this shift in
what would previously have seemed the rather sterile and unpromising soil
of the academy.
The recent history of UK HE has been told in a number of ways but in this
paper we want to offer a distinctive version based upon analysis of stories
Press, 1997); Cris Shore and Susan Wright, ‘Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neo-
liberalism in British Higher Education’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
5, no. 4 (1999): 557–75; Marilyn Strathern, ed., Audit Cultures: Anthropological
Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000); Lew
Zipin and Marie Brennan, ‘The Suppression of Ethical Dispositions Through Manage-
rial Governmentality: A Habitus Crisis in Australian Higher Education’, International
Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice 6, no. 4 (2002): 351–70;
Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Edu-
cation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Erica McWilliam, ‘Changing
the Academic Subject’, Studies in Higher Education 29, no. 2 (2004): 151–63; John
Beck and Michael Young, ‘The Assault on the Professions and the Restructuring of
Academic and Professional Identities: A Bernsteinian Analysis’, British Journal of
Sociology of Education 26, no. 2 (2005): 183–97; Bronwyn Davies and Eva Peterson,
‘Neo-liberal Discourse in the Academy: The Forestalling of (Collective) Resistance’,
Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences 2, no. 2 (2005): 77–98; Sue Clegg, ‘Aca-
demic Identities Under Threat?’, British Educational Research Journal 34, no. 3
(2008): 329–45; Jill Blackmore, ‘Academic Pedagogies, Quality Logics and Performa-
tive Universities: Evaluating Teaching and What Students Want’, Studies in Higher
Education 34, no. 8 (2009): 857–72.
2
Kerry Holden, ‘Lamenting the Golden Age: Love, Labour and Loss in the Collective
Memory of Scientists’ (unpublished paper, King’s College London, 2011); Mark
Murphy, ‘Troubled by the Past: History, Identity and the University’, Journal of
Higher Education Policy and Management 33, no. 5 (2011): 509–17.
60 S. Gewirtz and A. Cribb
drawn from the Times Higher Education (THE) and its predecessor, the Times
Higher Education Supplement (THES), a weekly publication, originally part of
The Times newspaper group, which has been reporting on UK HE news since
1971. We have chosen this approach because we would suggest the Times
Higher has been relatively under-used in contemporary HE historiography
and because we want to argue that in some respects the publication itself sym-
bolises, and has been an active participant in, some of the key transformations in
recent UK HE. Overall, we want to suggest that the Times Higher provides a
powerful tool for understanding the changing character of UK HE and can use-
fully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of that changing

character.
Our methodology and analytical lens evolved as we proceeded. We began
by picking one issue per year for the 30-year period from 1979 to 2010,
taken from the same week in November, chosen partly because it often reported
on the Treasury’s annual spending plans and partly for pragmatic reasons (in the
first year sampled, there had been a strike which restricted the number of weeks
available to choose from).3 We then read and coded all the main news stories
and editorials but also made notes on the commentary sections, the classified
advertisements, the letters pages and Laurie Taylor’s weekly column.4 From
our codes and notes, we generated analytical themes, and finally attempted to
organise our analytical framework into broadly ‘characteristic’ themes; that
is, themes that emerged from the analysis as being prominent at different
times since 1979. This device of identifying ‘characteristic’ themes and associ-
ated periods is obviously a simplifying one. We are not suggesting that the
themes and stories we have selected are wholly representative of the period
they are taken from or that themes that were particularly prominent at one
time were not also present in other periods.
In the first instance, our focus was solely on universities themselves and the
ways in which they were being affected by change, but as the analysis pro-
ceeded we became increasingly conscious of and interested in the Times
Higher itself, both as an agent in the HE sector and in the way that it ‘stands
for’ the sector. This additional layer of interest not only helped to inform the
themes that emerged but also slightly redirected our methods in that we
began to pay more attention to the Times Higher as an object of analysis in
its own right and also conducted three off-the-record informal interviews
3
We had some concerns that sampling approximately one-fiftieth of the issues from the
same point in the year might be inadequate to capture the full range of key themes. For
that reason, we picked three years at random and chose to look at several other issues
for those years. This exercise persuaded us that the sampling frame was adequate for
our broad purpose. The reasons for this are (a) the large number of stories per issue,
and (b) the fact that major stories tend to persist over many weeks and months.
4
Run since 1978 and written in the form of a report from the fictional University of Pop-
pleton, this column provides a close-to-the-bone parody of university life.
with current THE employees to help further ground and ‘test’ elements of our
analysis.
We would suggest that the Times Higher has some advantages as a data
source relative to those more usually relied upon in the analysis of the
history and politics of UK HE.5 In particular, it gives direct access to a wider
range of voices and perspectives than can be gleaned from contemporaneous
official documentation and helps to provide a more immediate sense of the
cut and thrust of policy contestations as they were played out in ‘real time’
than can be garnered from retrospective interviews with policy actors.
However, the account that emerged from our analysis, as we have just noted,
does not simply treat the Times Higher as a data source. It treats it as a valuable
resource, symbolically as well as literally, for understanding linkages between
key policy trends in HE and cultural changes, particularly what we will go on to
discuss as the rise of the culture of spin. In brief, the Times Higher can be seen
to have relevance in three ways: as a historical data source; as an important actor
in the HE sector in its own right; and in various respects as symbolising UK HE.
Of course, these dimensions co-exist simultaneously and cannot be neatly
disentangled.
The paper is organised around a broadly chronological account of the
themes that emerged from our analysis: cuts and protest; interventionism and
loss of independence; new managerial practices; private sector values, privati-
sation and institutional competition; the marginalisation and incorporation of
the humanities and social sciences; widening access; business links and spin-
offs; the new professionals; marketing for corporate success; and awards and
prizes. These 10 themes have been clustered into 3 periodised sections –
retrenchment and the management of change (roughly covering the period
from 1979 to the mid-1980s), new faces and emphases (spanning the mid-
1980s to late 1990s period), and gloss and spin (roughly covering the years
from the late 1990s to the present). These headings were chosen both for pre-
sentational purposes and to indicate some underlying patterns.
Broadly speaking, the first section traces some of the broad system-level and
organisational changes that laid the groundwork for and produced the manage-
rialisation and marketisation of HE; the second section reviews some of the
changes to institutional populations, lives and cultures accompanying these
system-level changes; and the third focuses in on what could be seen as
5
Previous work on HE policy and politics has tended to draw primarily on survey data
and personal experience, for example: A.H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992/1995); interviews, for example: Maurice
Kogan and Stephen Hanney, Reforming Higher Education (London: Jessica Kingsley,
2000); or official documentation, for example: Brian Salter and Ted Tapper, Education,
Politics and the State (London: Grant McIntyre, 1994); Ted Tapper, The State and
Higher Education (Ilford: Woburn Press, 2007), with the Times Higher used more
occasionally as a supplementary source.
some of the surface effects of these processes, but which we suggest might be
better seen as a continuation and deepening of them, namely, a growing preoc-
cupation with image and ‘image-brokering’ which we will go on to suggest has
produced a new ‘structure of feeling’ in HE. In this third section, and in order to
explicate and illustrate the nature and significance of this new structure of
feeling, we will explicitly focus on the Times Higher itself as well as on the uni-
versity sector. Our suggestion will be that there are both parallels and conver-
gences between the Times Higher and universities that help to capture key
aspects of the cumulative changes reviewed. Indeed, what we are saying was
anticipated in 1996 by Peter Scott, a former editor of the Times Higher,

when he wrote:
[T]he fates of the THES and higher education have been curiously bound up. But
there is a still deeper sense in which their fates are entwined. A quarter of a
century ago newspapers were an archaic, inward industry and universities were
grand donnish institutions. They belonged to different worlds. Today the bound-
aries between the media and higher education are breaking down.6
2. Retrenchment and the management of change

2.1. Cuts and protest
We begin at the start of the period under consideration here with the headline
story of the 16 November 1979 issue:
More than a dozen vice-chancellors were meeting in London today to discuss the
deepening financial crisis in the universities. All universities have been asked to
tell the University Grants Committee [UGC]7 by the end of the month how they
will respond to cuts in income of anything between 12 and 18 per cent over the
next four years. One university – Keele – has already indicated that it will
refuse to submit plans for a 5 per cent cut, and in a letter to heads of schools
the vice-chancellor of London University, Lord Annan, says the Government
appears to want to force the university to make staff redundant.8
The article went on to explain that the UGC had asked the universities to
provide three different financial projections for the four years from 1980/
1981 – 1983/1984 based on three hypotheses – 2% growth, level funding, 5%
reduction. This had followed the publication of the 1979 Conservative admin-
istration’s Expenditure White Paper two weeks previously which had
announced drastic cuts across the board in education on the grounds that
6
‘Times Past, Times Future, Times Higher’, THES, October 18, 1996.
7
The University Grants Committee (UGC) was the quango responsible for advising the
government on the allocation of funds to British universities.
8
‘Universities Resist UGC Cuts Plan’, THES, November 16, 1979.
‘public spending is at the heart of Britain’s present economic difficulties’.9

There were two aspects to the cuts being proposed: a reduction in student
intake numbers and a cut in the overseas student subsidy. This event heralded
a major shift in the construction of public spending in official policy discourse
from an investment to be welcomed to an economic drain and a threat to
national competitiveness. It also marks a shift in the UGC’s role, which was
becoming increasingly interventionist vis-à-vis the universities.
University managers, lecturers and students were united in their opposition.
Even the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) is reported to
have, ‘uncharacteristically taken the offensive . . ., warming the hearts of the

universities’.10 The second front-page story of the same issue announced
that, ‘Students are to mount a national strike . . . as the latest weapon in a cam-
paign which has already seen occupations at about 70 institutions’,11 and on the
inside pages it was reported that:
In a unique display of university and student opposition to the education cut backs
and the proposals on overseas fees Lancaster agreed to hold a joint teach in.
A spokesman for the university said that the sit in of the Senate Chamber had
the full cooperation of [the] acting vice-chancellor, as a means of showing
a united front against the cuts.12
Speaking of the abolition of the overseas student subsidy, Professor Dahrendorf,

Director of the London School of Economics (LSE), accused the government of
parochialism and a lowering of standards: ‘I say this with tears in my eyes . . . We
will have to accept some people who have the money but not the quality’; whilst
the Glasgow University Court predicted that the proposals might prove to be,
‘the blue print on how to become an academically under developed country
within the . . . lifetime of a university student’. And the Rector at Imperial
College lamented ‘[t]his distasteful discrimination’ which ‘removes opportu-
nities for postgraduate work from the poorer students of the third world’.13
In the face of such impassioned criticisms, Rhodes Boyson, Under Secretary
for Education, mounted a staunch defence of the cuts on the grounds that a uni-
versity education should be the preserve of an academic elite:
The more universities expand the more they have to remember what academic
excellence is. They must make sure expansion does not threaten academic excel-
lence by packing in too many workhorses, as against the really academically gifted.
9
HM Treasury, The Government’s Expenditure Plans 1980–1981 (London: HMSO,
1979).
10
‘CVCP Prepares to Fight Cuts Under New Leader’, THES, November 16, 1979.
11
‘Students Plan a National Strike’, THES, November 16, 1979.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
And seeming to lend substance to Dahrendorf’s accusations of parochialism,

speaking of the overseas student subsidy, Boyson commented:
Two out of five overseas students are from Iran and Nigeria. We do not seem to
have gained much advantage from Iran, nor from Nigeria, who nationalised our
oil without paying for it. If that is investment it seems to be the worst we ever
made.14
The united front that brought together students, academics and their
unions with vice-chancellors in a way that is unimaginable today continued
into the 1980s. For example, in November 1981, the paper reported on a
demonstration:
staged by ten campus universities representing 100,000 staff and more than
250,000 students, [which] was one of the biggest ever on the issue. . . . Up to
20 university vice-chancellors were believed to be present and the [CVCP] sent
a telegram of support stating it fully shared the ‘dismay and indignation’ at the
Government’s calamitous policies.15
A final point to note about this episode, one that we return to below, is that the
cuts did not effect all curriculum areas evenly but were part of a deliberate
attempt ‘to adjust the university system in favour of science and
engineering’.16,17
14
‘The Doctor’s Prescription for Cuts’, THES, November 16, 1979.
15
‘Unions Muscle in on Debate’, THES, November 20, 1981. 1981 saw the first staff
redundancies and course closures resulting from reduced government expenditure on
HE: Kogan and Hanney, Reforming Higher Education.
16
‘Unions Muscle in on Debate’, THES, November 20, 1981. Those institutions that
were predominantly arts and social science focused, for example, Keele, were hit par-
ticularly hard by the cuts: W.A.C. Stewart, Higher Education in Postwar Britain
(London: Macmillan, 1989).
17
In 2010, after a long period of relative quietude, protests were once again to
feature prominently in the pages of the Times Higher following the government’s
decision to reduce the HE budget by 40%, raise the fee cap from just over £3000
to £9000 and further ‘rebalance’ the sector in favour of Science, Technology,
Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects (Rebecca Attwood, ‘Thousands
March as Students and Staff Join Forces Against University Cuts’, THE, Novem-
ber 10, 2011). However, whilst there were some striking parallels between the
1981 and 2010 protests, there were also some notable differences, including
the fact that vice-chancellors were this time on the other side of the dispute
from students and lecturers, with many vice-chancellors having supported the
fee rise and some actively lobbying for a total removal of the fee cap (Russell
Group, ‘Russell Group Response to the Browne Review of University Funding’,
http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/russell-group-latest-news/121-2010/4544-russell-
group-response-to-the-browne-review-of-university-funding/) (accessed November
22, 2011).
2.2. Interventionism and loss of independence

Cuts were quickly followed by an acceleration of interventionism on the part of
the UGC. Previously ‘a buffer’ between the universities and the state18 – ‘the
guardian of [universities’] liberties’19 – from the late 1970s onwards the UGC
had increasingly come to be seen as an ‘agent of the state’.20 The headline story
of the 14 November 1980 issue explained that the UGC was:
planning to intervene more closely in the work of the universities to help them
cope with a new round of Government expenditure cuts [and] to begin a major
review of the strengths and weaknesses of individual university departments

[paving] the way for possible rationalisation.21
What was being proposed here was a kind of proto-Research Assessment Exer-
cise (RAE) which had already been set in train earlier that year.22 In what the
THES described as a ‘candid’ speech to the CVCP, Dr Parkes, UGC chair, is
quoted as saying:
We want everyone to be good at some things, but we want you to concentrate on

your strengths, and not support pallid growths which are never likely to reach
maturity. The excision of these feeble limbs is something where the committee
can help, even it if is only to lend you a financial pruning knife . . . .
. . . Although he was not against public debate and dissent on genuine issues, ‘I am
opposed to a mulish opposition to any form of change based upon a sterile appli-
cation of the concept of academic freedom which may be the surest way to its
destruction’.23
Here was a not too thinly veiled warning that if the universities were to protest
in the face of change they would be cast out of the decision-making arena
altogether. However, the protests continued unabated. For example, a year
later Sir William Taylor, Director of the Institute of Education, commented
on the damage that the requirement for universities to make cuts was doing:
There are many kinds of damage being done to higher education by the policies of
the present government. Not least important is the undermining of collegial
18
UGC, University Development 1962–1967 (London: HMSO, 1968).
19
Kogan and Hanney, Reforming Higher Education, 144.
20
Claus Moser, ‘The Robbins Report 25 Years After’, THES, November 20, 1987.
21
‘UGC Plans Interventionist Policy to Cope with Spending Cuts’, THES, November
14, 1980.
22
Although arguments for greater selectivity and the concentration of research funding
into fewer centres of excellence can be traced back even further. For example, see
Council for Scientific Policy, Second Report on Science Policy (London: HMSO,
1967); Science Research Council, Selectivity and Concentration in the Support of
Research (London: SRC, 1970).
23
‘UGC will Intervene’, THES, November 14, 1980.
governance and the destruction of relationships and understandings which under-

pin many of the essential qualities of the academic enterprise. Such understand-
ings have taken generations to develop and to be disseminated [and] the speed
at which we are being forced to move may inflict wounds on the character of aca-
demic life.24
In the same issue, there is a report about the Campaign for HE – ‘a group of social-
ists in HE and Parliament’ – criticising what it saw as, ‘a growing centralisation of
control [with] the complicity of university administrators and the dismantling of
democratic management of curriculum and finance’. Their prognosis was
‘nothing less than the end of the liberal tradition in English education’.25
2.3. New managerial practices

The ‘proto-RAE’ introduced in 1980 was the first of a series of new managerial
technologies that are now a taken-for-granted means of regulating academic
life. This more formal approach to quality assurance was advocated by one
of the THES leader writers in 1983 who argued that it was needed ‘not so
much to punish the mediocre but to protect the best’:
In the 1960s and 1970s . . . [i]n an expanding system islands of mediocrity could
be regarded with tolerant complacency. . . . This will have to change in the 1980s
and indeed is already changing . . . Quality assurance in the university
system . . . remains an informal business.26
The 1980s also saw the introduction of appraisal for academics via a scheme
that was introduced in the summer of 1986 with the agreement of the Associ-
ation of University Teachers (AUT) but not the Association of Scientific, Tech-
nical and Managerial Staffs:
Dismissing the scheme as a recipe for unimaginative conformity among junior

staff and endless bureaucratic duties for their senior colleagues, ASTMS says:
‘we find it wholly regrettable that the vice chancellors (presumably under political
pressure) have suggested a scheme of this type, and incomprehensible that the
24
‘Academic Life in Peril’, THES, November 20, 1981.
25
‘Hard Right and Soft Left’, THES, November 20, 1981.
26
‘Never Mind the Width’, THES, November 18, 1983. The formalisation of
approaches to quality assurance of the kind being advocated here began in earnest
from the mid-1980s onwards via the establishment of the RAE, codes of practice for
external examining and postgraduate training, teaching quality assessments, the Gradu-
ate Standards Programme and the Higher Education Quality Council (which became
the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in 1997): Reynolds Report, Aca-
demic Standards in Universities (London: CVCP, 1986); DES, Higher Education:
A New Framework (London: HMSO, 1991); Ron Barnett, with G. Parry, R. Cox, C.
Loder, and G. Williams, Assessment of the Quality of Higher Education (London:
Centre for Higher Education Studies, 1994).
AUT should have accepted it, particularly in the absence of any relevant debate
among academic and related staff at large’.27
2.4. Private sector values, privatisation and institutional competition

Institutional assessment and individual appraisal are managerial practices bor-
rowed from the private sector. They were emblematic of a new preoccupation
with questions of productivity that had begun to surface in Government and uni-
versity circles in the 1980s. This preoccupation was heavily reinforced by the
Jarratt Committee study of the efficiency of universities, set up by the CVCP

at the behest of the government in 1984. Jarratt promoted the idea of univer-
sities as corporate enterprises, criticising:
large and powerful academic departments together with individual academics

who sometimes see their academic discipline as more important than the long-
term well-being of the university that houses them.28
Calling for a recasting of the role of the vice-chancellor from ‘leading scholar’
to ‘chief executive’, the Jarratt Report paved the way for the emergence of a
whole new generation of ‘corporatised’ vice-chancellors, the increasing use
of performance management instruments borrowed from the private sector
and, in the eyes of many academics, a concomitant erosion of spaces for demo-
cratic debate and decision-making at institutional level.29
In 1985– 1986, the first RAE ‘proper’ was introduced. This involved ranking
individual departments and allocating funds according to judgements of
research quality and thereby actively promoted institutional competition. The
27
‘Unions Clash over Appraisal’, THES, November 21, 1986.
28
Jarratt Report, Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities
(London: CVCP, 1985), par. 3.41.
29
For example, see Henkel, Academic Identities and Policy Change in Higher Edu-
cation (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000). The Jarratt Report was followed by the
Croham Inquiry which recommended a reconfiguration of the UGC, and a year later,
under the Education Reform Act (1988), the UGC became the the Universities
Funding Council (UFC) at the same time as the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding
Council was established: Croham Report, Review of the UGC (London: HMSO,
1987). Whilst for the polytechnics this represented a move out of local authority
control and hence was perceived as conferring upon them, ‘a new level of
freedom . . . [f]or the universities it signified the end of a system based on personal
relationships, trust and a shared belief in the value of academic self-regulation’:
Henkel, Academic Identities, 40. The UFC had a greater representation of industrial
and business interests and institutional managers and a smaller representation of aca-
demics than its predecessor. This change also marked the end of the ‘block grant’
system and the inauguration of a ‘contract culture’ which carried with it the expectation
that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) should see public funding less as an entitle-
ment and more as something to be earned in return for providing a service: Kogan and
Hanney, Reforming Higher Education, 155–6.
exercise was hotly contested by academics, not least because the rankings were
considered unreliable. For example, Bath University Senate overturned its
decision to close its physics, materials science and applied biology departments
(now being referred to as ‘cost centres’) because ‘much of the information on
which the UGC rankings were based was found to be out of date’.30 One of
the most contested judgements was the assessment of Glasgow’s sociology
department as underperforming. Anthony Giddens from Cambridge, whose
sociology department had been rated ‘outstanding’, Robert Burgess from
Warwick, Stuart Hall from the Open University and Ray Pahl from Kent, a
member of the assessment committee, all spoke out in defence of Glasgow.

The THES reported speculation that the Glasgow grading had been political –
a response to the department’s Media Group which was perceived as Marxist:31
‘One must ask the question whether this isn’t a kind of subtle repayment for the
department having been too big for its boots,’ says Stuart Hall.
‘How can I say?’ says Prof Eldridge [HoD, Glasgow sociology.] ‘Nobody has
been called to account. I assume the assessors are fellow academics, but I don’t
actually know. It’s all shrouded in a kind of secrecy which permits suspicion
and promotes discontent’.32
The introduction of private sector values and practices into HE was

accompanied by an enhanced role for private enterprises. Nalgo, the white-
collar union, was ‘deeply suspicious of the Jarratt efficiency study’, seeing it
as ‘an attempt to prepare the ground for privatisation’:
The union has been told of an ‘increasing’ number of universities . . . attempting to
contract out campus services such as catering, computing and cleaning. It believes
the Jarratt inquiry may accelerate this process.
The [union] believes this ‘will lead to poorer quality, loss of effective control of
standards of service, lost jobs and poorer pay and conditions’.33
And at a time when the polytechnics were about to be removed from local auth-
ority control under arrangements set out in the 1987 Education Reform Bill, the
THES reported on ‘a new growth industry’ in management, finance and infor-
mation systems consultancy in HE:
Consultants, advisors and salespeople from organisations such as Coopers and
Lybrand, Peat Marwick McLintock and Prime Computers have approached insti-
tutions, sometimes by organizing conferences and seminars.
30
‘Rankings Campaign Prompts Bath to Reconsider Cuts’, THES, November 21, 1986.
31
The suggestion that the institutionalisation of research assessment might penalise
ideological dissent has continued to rear its head from time to time. For example,
see Henkel, Academic Identities.
32
‘Dissension in the Ranks’, THES, November 21, 1986.
33
‘Efficiency Study Warning’, THES, November 16, 1984.
It is expected that more private companies will realize the existence of a new
market and will try to win contracts from directorates which will need expertise
in management, finance and information systems.34
The same issue reported the Government’s planned ‘prestigious launch . . . of

Project Enterprise’, which was ‘to offer every undergraduate the chance to
learn business skills’.35 This was the first of several initiatives designed to
better prepare students for employment and can be seen as part of a larger
attempt to release HE from what key actors within the Conservative governments
of the 1980s and 1990s saw as the dominance of an elitist, anti-business huma-
nities mindset that was detrimental to national economic competitiveness.36
3. New faces and emphases

Although we signalled earlier that the dominant theme of the previous section
was system-level and organisational change, the account summarised there has
also begun to indicate some of the associated cultural changes, not least the
level of consternation and the often concerted reactions and forms of resistance
to reforms that were typically presented and experienced as an assault on tra-
ditional academic values and collegial forms of governance. The stories
included in this section focus on some of the other aspects of cultural change
that occurred from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s and also the changing demo-
graphics of the sector.
3.1. The marginalisation and incorporation of humanities and social

sciences
As noted earlier, the cuts of the early 1980s had in part been designed ‘to adjust
the university system in favour of science and engineering’. They were
designed, in other words, to ‘modernise’ the disciplinary demography of the
university sector. The ensuing ‘adjustments’ prompted a series of protests, as
reflected in the following stories:
Cuts threat prompts protest

Members of the Association of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences are to
protest to the National Advisory Board37 and the [UGC’s] Social Science Com-
mittee against the treatment of social science in the Government’s Green Paper
on the Future of Higher Education and the UGC and NAB’s plans for the
34
‘Management Firms Besiege Freed Colleges’, THES, November 20, 1987.
35
‘Big Plug for Student Share in GB Ltd’, THES, November 20, 1987.
36
This perspective received intellectual ‘nourishment’ from Martin Wiener’s English
Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981) and Correlli Barnett’s The Audit of War (London: Macmillan, 1986).
37
The body established in 1981 to advise the government on academic provision in, and
the allocation of resources amongst, the maintained sector HEIs.
protection of science, engineering and business subjects at the expense of social

science.38
Cambridge slams science shift

Cambridge University will not accept a further shift in resources in favour of
science and engineering if it is at the expense of student numbers in arts and
humanities.39
English ‘reduced to footnote’

Heads of English at polytechnics and colleges fear that their institutions consider
them at best peripheral and at worst expendable, according to a survey carried out
by their association.40
Classics closures on the way

12 university classics departments will be closed down if a report by UGC is
carried out.
. . . Meanwhile university historians are preparing a submission to . . . the Sec-

retary of State . . ., outlining the decline of history provision.41
The new anti-humanities policy orthodoxy was resisted not only from within
the universities but also from within the ranks of the Conservative Government.
In an article based on a speech to the Tory Reform Group, George Walden,
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Education and
Science (DES), called for:
more emphasis on intellectual achievement in the humanities, not less, both for
itself, and for sound vocational reasons too. Latinists make good in the City, phi-
losophers move easily from Kant to the . . . arts . . .
An intellectual culture is not a luxury, but a practical economic and political

necessity.42
As well as a redistribution of funds, the ‘adjustment’ in favour of science and

engineering involved moves to restructure the humanities and social sciences
according to what for shorthand purposes we call here a science and technology
‘research and development’ (STRD) model in which research is tied more
closely to economic and technical imperatives. The broader utilitarian turn
that this shift represented was rejected both by humanities and social science
scholars and by key figures within the science community who complained
that more applied, strategic science was being privileged by the new discourses
38
THES, November 15, 1985.
39
Ibid.
40
41
42
‘The Flight from Philistinism’, THES, November 21, 1986.
of economic and social relevance.43 The shift to an STRD model for the huma-
nities was represented in the creation of the Arts and Humanities Board in 1998,
a move described by one leader writer, when the idea had first been mooted, as
possibly representing a ‘capitulation to an inappropriate natural science model
of the management of research’.44
The incorporation of humanities and social sciences into an STRD model is
currently reflected in the requirement by the Economic and Social Research
Council (ESRC), the AHRC and the Research Excellence Framework (REF)
(the successor to the RAE) that researchers demonstrate the social and econ-
omic impact of their work, but the start of the impact assessment movement
can be traced back to 1997 when the ESRC invited tenders for ‘pilot studies
of research impact assessment techniques’:
The pilot studies will test a number of possible approaches with the aim of iden-
tifying practical and affordable techniques which can be applied across the ESRC
research portfolio. . . . [T]he successful bidder will demonstrate an innovative and
flexible approach to this challenging area of evaluation practice.45
Another manifestation of the shift away from a more liberal conception of the
university and the rise of the STRD model is the growing emphasis in HE cur-
ricula on the teaching of generic and transferable skills, a trend that was heavily
criticised by, amongst others, the HE scholar Ron Barnett who, in a paper
reported in the 17 November 1989 issue, deplored the narrow and limiting
nature of this kind of approach, arguing that a curriculum founded ‘purely on
the technical and instrumental requirements of graduates . . . cannot be a
genuine course of higher education’.46
43
‘Basic Work in Danger’, THES, November 20, 1987. This was a view also articulated
by some of the science academics interviewed by Henkel a decade later: Henkel, Aca-
demic Identities.
44
‘Research in the Humanities’, THES, November 17, 1989. The same has also been
said of the RAE, and its replacement, the ‘Research Excellence Framework’, which,
like the research council model of managing research, rewards more collective
modes of academic engagement, and a continuous ‘production line’ approach to pub-
lication in which ‘outputs’, usually in the form of journal articles, are produced at
regular intervals over the course of one’s career. Such pressures make traditional huma-
nities norms, and also traditional norms within certain science disciplines (like theoreti-
cal physics), harder to sustain: Henkel, Academic Identities, 133–9; Strathern, Audit
Cultures. In a parallel set of developments over the same period, graduate study has
also been gradually reconceived to privilege an STRD model: Henkel, Academic Iden-
tities; Alan Cribb and Sharon Gewirtz, ‘Doctoral Student Supervision in a Managerial
Age’, International Studies in Sociology of Education 16, no. 3 (2006): 223–36.
45
‘Evaluation of Research Impacts on Non-Academic Audiences’, THES, November
21, 1997.
46
‘The Value of Higher Education in the Modern World’, THES, November 17, 1989.
This emphasis on generic competencies was to become increasingly evident across the
full spectrum of HE programmes, including at doctoral level. For example, see RCUK,
Joint Statement of the UK Research Councils’ Training Requirements for Research
3.2. Widening access

Following several years of HE retrenchment post-1979, a more expansive phase
of HE policymaking began in 1986,47 marked in the THES by the front-page
story:
Baker48 U-turn on student demand forecast
Ministers conceded officially for the first time yesterday that demand for higher
education may slacken little, if at all, for the rest of the century. . . .
A more optimistic view of future demand for higher education is based on a series
of new assumptions.49
These assumptions included a rise in the number of students with two A levels and
increased demand from women, mature and part-time students. The picture of HE
being painted here is in stark contrast to the exclusivist one painted by Boyson seven
years previously. The expansion of the sector to include a wider range of non-tra-
ditional students was now once again, as in the pre-1979 ‘Robbins era’,50 con-
structed as something to be encouraged and positively embraced. For example,
Baker is quoted as saying of HE expansion that, ‘it is a not unworthy aspiration
both from the point of view of the economy, and from the point of view of our
wish for an educated society full of Disraeli’s light, liberty and learning’.51
Around this time, stories began to appear which reflected a growing insti-
tutional interest in widening access52 for hitherto underrepresented groups:
Plan to waive entry rules

Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities are to admit 90 students without normal
entry qualifications.53
Shortages hit blacks in social work

. . . Racism, possibly unconscious and unintended, but personally destructive is
making it difficult for many black students to get good quality placements. Col-
leges and agencies must give this their urgent attention.54
Students, Vitae, http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/RCUK-Joint-Skills-State-

ment-2001.pdf (accessed July 14, 2010).
47
After three years of declining student enrolment, numbers began to rise again in 1985/
1986: Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion, 93.
48
Kenneth Baker, Secretary of State for Education and Science, 1986–1989.
49
November 21, 1986.
50
I.e. the era guided by the principle enshrined in the Robbins Report, Report of the
Committee on Higher Education (London: HMSO, 1963), that HE should be available
to anyone able to benefit from it.
51
‘Baker U-turn on Student Demand Forecast’, THES, November 21, 1986.
52
Although it should be noted that not all who supported widening access did so on
equality grounds: Kogan and Hanney, Reforming Higher Education, 74–5.
53
54
A qualification in working must count

The MSC55 has warned higher education that it must accept students without
orthodox academic qualifications or be left out in the cold.56
PCAS57 to monitor origins

PCAS . . . is to introduce ethnic monitoring from the 1990 admissions
cycle . . .. [in response to the concern that] . . . women, black people and
members of other ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities and men
from certain socio-economic groups are using the system in disproportionately
low numbers.58
CVCP backs full access against ‘cheap’ system

University vice chancellors have made it clear that they will not accept any
changes to the way institutions are funded which deter a wider range of students
from applying.59
This shift was increasingly accompanied by a new emphasis on how

traditional university teaching may have been disadvantaging non-traditional
students. For example, the 17 November 1989 issue reported on research
being conducted at North London Polytechnic into, ‘the hypothesis that
higher education itself is the main barrier to access, because the institutions
are guilty of concentrating too much on developing subjects and too little on
developing people’.60
3.3. Business links and spin-offs

Since the mid-1990s, an increasing number of stories have appeared relating to
the expansion of HE– business links. For example:
Billionaire backer for India study

Cambridge University received £1m from [an] Indian billionaire
businessman . . . to establish the first research institute in Europe dedicated to
study of India’s religio-cultural and scientific traditions.61
By the end of the 1990s, Higher Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE) and the Government had strengthened their emphasis on business
links:
55
Manpower Services Commission (1973–1987) – a quango, with representation from
industry, the trade unions, local government and the education sector, responsible for
coordinating UK education and training provision.
56
57
Polytechnics Central Admissions Service.
58
59
Ibid.
60
Alison Utley, ‘Take Us as You Find Us’, THES, November 17, 1989.
61
The Higher Education Funding Council for England . . . has commissioned

research into how the RAE could be broadened to recognise the increasing impor-
tance of the exploitation of research.62
Industry link needs cash carrot

Government and education officials are making a concerted effort to create an
annual £100 million stream of funding for universities to help strengthen their
links with industry . . .
. . . A DTI source said that . . . wealth creation and enterprise should be seen as a
challenge for all disciplines.63
And in Scotland in 2001 a ‘one-stop ideas shop’ was ‘unveiled’:
The Scottish Higher Education Funding Council will publicly launch a pioneering
national website on research expertise at a knowledge-transfer conference later
this month . . . arguing that more effective exploitation of academic research is
needed for Scotland’s economic development.64
3.4. The new professionals

Another more recent feature of the changing HE landscape is the
emergence of several new professional groupings allied to university manage-
ment.65 For example, it is now fairly commonplace to see advertisements for
research, business, knowledge exchange and quality assurance managers,
ethics panel administrators and fund raisers/development officers. Such
new posts began to appear in the late 1990s, as reflected in the following
article:
How to get a job in research policy

If research is getting you down and you believe it could be better organized,
maybe a career in research policy is the answer. . . .
The largest number of opportunities for this type of work are in science policy,
working for places such as the research councils, the Wellcome Trust and the
Charities that award research monies. But opportunities are also coming up in
the research awards department of the AHRB.66
62
Alison Goddard, ‘DTI to Reward Cooperation’, THES, November 19, 1999.
63
Kam Patel, THES, November 19, 1999.
64
Olga Wojtas, THES, November 16, 2001.
65
Celia Whitchurch, ‘Shifting Identities and Blurring Boundaries: The Emergence of
Third Space Professionals in UK Higher Education’, Higher Education Quarterly
62, no. 4 (2008): 377–96.
66
From a brief survey of recent appointment pages, it would seem that these kinds
of posts have been rapidly growing in number67 and becoming increasingly
specialised, reflected in job titles such as ‘business development/industry
relationship executive’, ‘entrepreneurship development manager’ and
‘company support executive’.
Over this period, the demographics and cultural milieu of UK universities
changed in ways that resonate with one another. To use May’s ideal type,
this was a period which saw the partial ascendancy of the ‘twentieth-century
positivist university’;68 that is, an institution that is larger in scale than its
‘liberal arts’ predecessor, open to more people, more orientated towards an

STRD model of knowledge production and dissemination and is one that
not only provides suitably prepared employees to service economic demands
but also to some extent can itself be seen as a business-facing corporatised
entity.
4. Gloss and spin

So far, in this paper, we have been using the Times Higher largely as a data
source. But as we indicated in the introduction, we also want to suggest that
the Times Higher can in itself be seen as in some ways representative of the
UK HE sector. At roughly the same time that universities were being encour-
aged to be more entrepreneurial and diversify their traditional role, similar
transformations were underway at the Times Higher and its parent company
Times Supplements Ltd (TSL). Since 1998 when TSL (then part of News Cor-
poration) acquired Nursery World and its associated exhibitions, the company
has continued to expand its portfolio of activities such that it now incorporates a
plethora of educational products and services, including what its website adver-
tises as ‘the UK’s leading online recruitment platform’.69 The take over of TSL
by private equity companies Exponent in 2005 and Charterhouse Capital Part-
ners in 2007 further underscored the TSL’s status as a portfolio of assets. Thus,
it is not only in the rapidly shifting feel of the appointments pages or in other
changes to content that the Times Higher signals the changed character of the
UK university. In the last 30 years, the look and feel of the Times Higher
67
Indeed, according to an analysis of Higher Education Statistics Agency data carried
out by the Financial Times, the numbers of managers employed in UK universities
increased by 33% between 2003/2004 and 2008/2009 compared with a 10% rise in
the number of academics: David Turner, ‘University Managers Outpace Academics’,
Financial Times, February 22, 2010, http://cachef.ft.com/cms/s/0/82a755b0-1fe8-
11df-8deb-00144feab49a.html#axzz1ej0iChOE (accessed November 25, 2011).
68
William May, Beleaguered Rulers: The Public Obligation of the Professional (Louis-
ville, Westminster: John Knox Press, 2001).
69
TSL, ‘Company Profile’, http://www.tsleducation.com/company_profile.asp
(accessed May 27, 2011).
have also changed quite dramatically. The early issues had the appearance of
the old Times – densely printed black-and-white columns of type interspersed
with the occasional cartoon or black-and-white mug-shot depicting the faces of
the mainly middle-aged white male figures who featured in the stories. Over
these years, the pages have become gradually more colourful and the typogra-
phy more varied. In 2008, following the take over of its parent company TSL by
Charterhouse Capital, the THES re-branded itself, adopting a new glossy maga-
zine format and appearing under a new name – THE. Such apparently surface
features are freighted with substantial significance and, in particular, reflect and
reproduce many of the trends discussed above.

The ‘glossification’ of the paper corresponds, we suggest, to the glossifica-
tion of the university, which can be seen as both the culmination, and next
phase, of the modernising, marketising and privatising trends discussed thus
far. For that reason, these changes in ‘presentation’, whether at the Times
Higher or within universities, are at least as important as any changes in ‘sub-
stance’. Indeed such presentational changes and the values that surround them,
as we will go on to suggest, themselves amount to a major substantive change,
because they represent the cultural and affective face of the success of modern-
isation and attendant processes. It is in any case difficult to make a firm distinc-
tion between presentation and substance, and the change in format from a
newspaper to a magazine, as those two terms suggest, arguably represented a
reorientation of the function of the Times Higher. Specifically, the balance
between the critical and celebratory functions of the publication shifted
towards the latter. Indeed, the shift in emphasis was at least in part fuelled by
a deliberate market strategy both to address falling sales and to avoid alienating
powerful players in the sector (who are also of course the principal source of
advertising revenue) by placing too much emphasis on scandal and critique.70
This balancing act (between critique and celebration) and these processes of
adaptation have been a constant feature of life at the Times Higher, but the
move to magazine format can be seen as a culmination of the shift that Reisz
describes, from ‘a certain stuffy high-mindedness’ to a more laid back,
popular and even celebrity-oriented ‘feel’ to the publication.71
In the remainder of this section, we will consider how the balance between
the substantive and public relations dimensions of universities has also shifted
in an analogous way such that there is an ever less distinct line between these
dimensions, and we will reflect on the ways in which the Times Higher is itself
bound up with this shift.
70
This account of the shift in emphasis and indeed the whole passage on the recent
history of the Times Higher is informed by informal interviews we conducted with
three current employees of the Times Higher in November 2011.
71
Matthew Reisz, ‘On the Shoulders of Giants’, THE, October 13, 2011.
4.1. Marketing for corporate success

Post Jarratt, the corporatisation and commercialisation of HE proceeded apace
with universities increasingly employing teams of public relations experts and a
range of strategies to enhance their competitive edge in the international mar-
ketplace for student custom, private sector investment and highly prized inter-
national inter-institutional links. The Times Higher played a key role in
promoting competition in the sector via its annual publication of the ‘Times
Higher Education-Thomson-Reuters World University Rankings’ (formerly
the ‘THE-QS rankings’) that ranks the ‘Top 200 World Universities’.
The following stories illustrate the rise of the contemporary preoccupation
with spin at both institutional and sector levels:
Graduation day is a marketing machine

Staff at Middlesex University who were sent a memo on how to behave at gradu-
ation ceremonies at first thought it was a spoof worthy of Laurie Taylor’s Univer-
sity of Poppleton.72 But it was signed by Chris Wright, the business school’s head
of external relations.
Mr Wright explained that graduation ceremonies ‘will cement a relationship with

our alumni’ and ‘showcase the work of the business school’. Brothers and sisters
of graduates will be there, and some may be considering university. Parents will
‘take the opportunity to appraise the staff and the institution’.
‘In other words,’ Mr Wright said, ‘graduation ceremonies are the biggest market-
ing events of the year’.
Instructions on ‘working the tables’ were spelt out. ‘Carry out a coordinated
sweep so that every table is visited ... At each table, introduce yourself to the
mums and dads first. Say what a pleasure it is to see so many relatives and
friends, acknowledge that it is a great day for them and, incidentally, for you’.
For those cynics reluctant to cooperate, there was a warning. ‘We should not miss
opportunities. I will be prowling about and helping target individual staff to indi-
vidual tables. Especially professors. By the end of the day, we should all be tired,
happy and run off our feet’.73
Cover-up claims over debt research

University vice-chancellors were accused this week of suppressing vital research
on student debt during the run-up to the May 2005 general election in order to
avoid criticism of the Government’s higher education policies.
Documents released to The Times Higher under the Freedom of Information Act
reveal that Universities UK [UUK], the vice-chancellors’ umbrella body, ordered
sweeping cuts of ‘politically contentious’ sections of a study it had commissioned
on students’ attitudes to debt and the negative impact of term-time employment.
72
See note 4.
73
THES, October 1, 1999.
UUK, a strong supporter of the Government’s top-up fees policy, insisted that
publication be delayed until next week – nearly two years after the report was
submitted – to ‘minimise negative publicity’ and to prevent ‘bad news’ emerging
during the annual student recruitment round for 2006.74
What these two stories illustrate is the risk of universities’ more traditional
scholarly concerns with truth and authenticity being displaced by a new set
of concerns that prioritise market positioning, image and profit. The last story
in particular seems to suggest that when image and profit are at risk, truth
may need to be sacrificed.

A final illustration of this theme comes from a Laurie Taylor column.
Although invented, like all of Taylor’s cameos it gains its force from its plausi-
bility. The story is of a telephone conversation between one of Taylor’s regular
cast of characters, Gordon Lapping, and Charles, an external examiner of a doc-
toral thesis. The external tells Lapping that he is unwilling to pass the thesis
because it is unintelligible. Lapping protests and after an extended conversation
in which he mounts various arguments designed to persuade Charles that it
would be wrong to withhold the award of a degree, including the fact that
the candidate had ‘paid good money – very good money – to spend three
years writing a dissertation’, he offers some advice:
Look, Charles. I’ve got an idea. Why not forget all that business about the doctoral
certificate?... I’ll tell you how to make it easier for yourself. Just imagine that what
you’re handing over is not so much a university degree. Think of it more – how
can I put this? – yes – think of it less as a degree, and more as a receipt.75
We feel sure that some real UK academics will identify with the frustrations felt
by the fictional Charles, and, although many will rightly object to the impli-
cation that degrees are simply being sold, this implication is understandable
in a context where universities are operating as corporations competing
for profit in an international market place and where public relations
imperatives are pervasively in tension with the demands of academic rigour
as a result.
4.2. Awards and prizes

The final theme concerns a related feature of the HE landscape that has become
increasingly prominent in recent years, the proliferation of awards and prizes –
for books, for teachers and researchers, for individuals and institutions, for man-
agement and for leadership. Institutional websites, RAE submissions and, in
some cases, individual CVs are now peppered with references to them.
74
75
As with the world-rankings of universities, the Times Higher has played a

major role in creating and promoting the awards culture. In 2005, it established
its own glitzy Oscar-style annual awards ceremony. This development reflects
an exponential growth in the awards industry which now constitutes a recog-
nised plank of national and international business and which has successfully
translated the primary school practice of awarding gold stars to encourage
small children into a business taken seriously by grown men and women.
The THE awards represent a marketing opportunity not only for the Times
Higher, for whom it is a lucrative source of advertising revenue, but also for
the companies and quangos which sponsor the event (e.g. in 2010, the sponsors
included Santander, the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship and
Elsevier), for the universities who can celebrate their successes, for the govern-
ment and even the lecturers’ union, the UCU, all of whom seem happy to bathe
in the reflected glory of the annual ceremony. This all-round seemingly unqua-
lified endorsement of the awards culture was evident, for example, in the Times
Higher’s report of the 2006 ceremony:
This week’s Times Higher Awards were hailed by government and university
leaders as a valuable celebration of the very best higher education has to offer.
Tributes to the winners and nominees were led by Bill Rammell, the Higher
Education Minister, who presented the Institution of the Year Award to Notting-
ham University at Wednesday’s ceremony held at the London Hilton on Park
Lane.
Baroness Warwick, chief executive of Universities UK, said: ‘Higher education is

a major social, cultural and economic asset for our country. The Times Higher
awards are a wonderful way to recognise and celebrate the world-class achieve-
ments of our institutions and the academics working in them. I hope they
become a firm fixture in the higher education calendar’.
Sally Hunt, joint general secretary of the University and College Union, said: ‘The
professionalism and dedication of staff in higher education, often against con-
siderable odds, never ceases to amaze me. I am pleased to support this event,
which reminds the employers, the public and Government about the extraordinary
work our people do’.
Research Councils UK sponsored the award for Outstanding Support for Early
Career Researchers. Iain Cameron, head of the RCUK’s Research Careers and
Diversity Unit, said: ‘These awards provide an opportunity to highlight and cele-
brate some of the excellent work being done’.76
The titles of the awards deserve analysis in their own right. They reflect several
of the themes described above. For example, one of the three new awards
announced in 2009 was the ‘Serendipity Award’, ‘designed to recognise the
76
‘Brilliance of Academe Celebrated’, THES, November 17, 2006.
entrepreneurial spirit within universities and reward researchers who seized the
opportunities for economic impact arising from research’.77 And in the same
year the Leadership and Management awards – or THELMAs – were intro-
duced to celebrate the successes of those occupying the new professional
roles we referred to earlier:
The UK’s higher education institutions are increasingly complex multimillion
pound organisations with a battery of functions. At their hearts sit the core mis-
sions of teaching and research, but keeping them beating are managers and pro-
fessional staff. . . . From estates through finance to human resources, our
universities’ professional staff display superb business and management skills

that have until now gone largely unrewarded.78
5. Conclusion
This paper has analysed 30 years of UK HE change through the lens of the
Times Higher and also discussed the Times Higher as both an agent and a
symbol of that change. These changes can be boiled down to a series of
trends, arguably all spurred on by massification and accountability pressures:
a growing interventionism on the part of the state and a concomitant decline
in sector autonomy; a rise in the prevalence of managerial and private sector
practices and a decline of democratic governance and institutional checks and
balances;79 an increasing concern with diversity and widening access; an
increasing domination of an STRD model of research and research manage-
ment; and a values drift – whereby protest and the role of the university as a
critical social agent are apparently being eclipsed by a growing instrumentalisa-
tion. We are conscious that our reading was partly motivated by the desire to
interrogate critiques of the contemporary university as neoliberal and this has
77
‘The Shortlist for Times Higher Education’s Fifth Awards Ceremony Has Been
Unveiled’, THE, September 10, 2009.
78
Ann Mroz, ‘Awards 2009: THE Leadership & Management’, THE, www.
timeshighereducation.co.uk/Journals/.../THELMA%20WINNERS%20SUPP%
20JUNE%2009low.pdf (accessed July 14, 2010).
79
As an increasing number of agendas are set by external accountability demands – for
example, the RAE, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), the THE/Thomson Reuters
world university ranking criteria – there are few decisions left for institutions to make,
beyond the decision of how best to jump through the accountability hoops associated
with these demands, and hence the autonomy of individual institutions, agencies and
the sector as a whole is becoming effectively obsolete. Given that the policy priorities
of each HE institution are largely determined by these external accountability demands,
it makes comparatively little sense, and may even be counter-productive, to allow
democratic processes of governance. This arguably adds up to an erosion of the inde-
pendence of, and the checks and balances provided by, distinct HE actors and agencies
(e.g. Universities UK and HEFCE), which have increasingly been incorporated into a
common mindset.
inevitably shaped our selection of material and analysis. Furthermore, we are

aware of the danger of having given insufficient space to some of the arguably
more progressive elements of university change, not least the move to mass
access and the entrenchment of widening participation discourses. Nonetheless,
we would suggest that the stories reviewed have pointed to enough indicators of
system-level and cultural change to warrant the claim that there have been some
genuine ‘losses’ upon which to ground ‘narratives of loss’ and to counter the
claim that all references to the past, by critics of neoliberalism, amount to no
more than the invocation of a convenient myth.
In the last section of the paper, we have looked at the instrumentalisation of

the sector under the heading of gloss and spin in the hope of representing
aspects of change that are not easily captured by factual accounts of institutional
restructuring or changes in governance regimes. What we have been hoping to
indicate is the way in which the ‘structure of feeling’ within UK universities has
shifted and how the now glossy form of the Times Higher can be treated synec-
dochically, i.e. as potently representative of the wider body of UK HE. The
Times Higher ‘stands for’ the sector of which it is a part in a number of inter-
linked ways that coalesce in the process of glossification. Both the Times
Higher and UK universities are increasingly concerned with the business of
image. And both for the Times Higher and for the sector as a whole, changes
in governance, especially in a hypercapitalist political-economic context,80
have made them much more conspicuously business oriented both in the
sense of a preoccupation with corporate agendas and values and in the sense
of an expansion of the portfolio away from what had previously been seen as
the core of business. The preoccupations with business and with image manage-
ment are by no means separate. Indeed UK HE now can be seen in many
respects as in the business of image brokering or the trading in images. In
the case of the Times Higher, the image brokering is quite clear-cut with its
sponsorship of league tables and awards. But these precise commodities and
other image commodities now play a substantial role in the cultural life of
the universities which in turn continually invest effort in building and trading
in their brands as they compete for economic and social resources, not least
the critical resource of ‘prestige’. The diversification of function and of business
links that characterises the Times Higher is now a commonplace in the univer-
sity sector where teaching and research are no longer seen as enough unless they
are tied in with spin-off companies, think tank aspirations, green credentials or
other economic and civic roles. Indeed, in many respects, the Times Higher and
UK universities occupy, and are constituted by, the same marketplace of organ-
isations, such as those who sponsor Times Higher events and provide business,
professional and information services to universities. Peter Scott, the editor of
80
Phil Graham, Hypercapitalism: New Media, Language, and Social Perceptions of
Value (New York: Peter Lang, 2006).
the THES from 1976 to 1992, who moved on to senior roles in universities, wit-
nessed the parallels and convergence between the Times Higher and the univer-
sities at first hand and went on to write, ‘[e]ditors and professors are now in the
same industry, almost the same game’, making reference to, ‘the Technology
Foresight exercise [which] lumped [the media and higher education] into a
single sector – leisure and learning – responsible for generating 13 per cent
of Britain’s GNP’.81
On some strongly sceptical or critical readings, the business of image trading
could be seen to have become definitive of the contemporary university, which
exists on these readings as ‘spectacle’ in a climate of illusions where the ques-

tion of what looks good settles the question of what is good.82
For those wishing to anticipate or plan for a post-UK university sector, an
understanding of all of the elements that have been briefly reviewed here is
essential. However, we would suggest that an understanding of the changed
structure of feeling is most important. The reason for this is that the linked
image-management and commercial orientation that is central to this structure
of feeling has a constitutive effect on the daily processes and practices of HE in
such a way that the norms of both rationality and professional ethics which
tended to prevail in deliberations about university strategy 30 years ago may
now no longer be taken for granted.
There is of course a serious danger of exaggerating the extent to which the
character of the UK university has changed. We certainly would not want to
imply that the university of 30 years ago was constructed from some pure
form of rationality and ethics which has since been dissolved, or that there is
no home for rationality and ethics in the contemporary UK university. The
history recorded here concerns more of a shift in the centre of gravity in the uni-
versity sector and a reconfiguration of norms rather than a wholesale transform-
ation. We have already suggested, for example, that the high-profile forms of
solidarity shown by senior university managers in the protests of the late
1970s and early 1980s had become almost unthinkable by the time the protests
of 2010 occurred and we would also suggest that the hard-line marketing tactics
of recent years illustrated here would have been barely intelligible to the univer-
sity staff of 30 years ago. Nonetheless, there are also seeming continuities.
Today’s universities, just like the Times Higher, provide a space that includes
many voices, including both seriously scholarly and radical voices, and there
are plenty of other signs of health in the sector. The struggle for the soul of
the university is definitely not over. However, we would argue that the
81
‘Times Past, Times Future, Times Higher’, THE, October 18, 1996.
82
See, for example, Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion in which university practices are
analysed through this lens alongside professional wrestling and the pornographic film
industry (New York: Nation Books, 2009).
cumulative trends we have discussed, not least the recent ascendancy of the
culture of spin, underline the importance of this struggle.
Acknowledgements
We thank Duna Sabri and the anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on
an earlier version of this paper.
Notes on contributors
Sharon Gewirtz is Professor of Education in the Centre for Public Policy Research and
Head of the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s College
London. She is a sociologist with an interest in the critical analysis of policy processes
and effects, in particular the implications of policy change for the culture and values of
public sector work.
Alan Cribb is Professor of Bioethics and Education in the Centre for Public Policy
Research, King’s College London. His research interests are in applied philosophy
and policy analysis. Recent publications include Health and the Good Society
(Oxford University Press, 2008) and Understanding Education (co-authored with
Sharon Gewirtz, Polity Press, 2009).

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries]

On: 01 November 2013, At: 07:12

Journal of Educational Administration

Representing 30 years of higher

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2013.730505

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Representing 30 years of higher education change: UK universities

Centre for Public Policy Research, King’s College London, London, UK

of work. However, it is also fuelled by a concern to attend to some important

past in UK HE and that might provide some historical substance to otherwise

fully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of that changing

anticipated in 1996 by Peter Scott, a former editor of the Times Higher,

2. Retrenchment and the management of change

‘public spending is at the heart of Britain’s present economic difficulties’.9

have, ‘uncharacteristically taken the offensive . . ., warming the hearts of the

Speaking of the abolition of the overseas student subsidy, Professor Dahrendorf,

And seeming to lend substance to Dahrendorf’s accusations of parochialism,

2.2. Interventionism and loss of independence

review of the strengths and weaknesses of individual university departments

We want everyone to be good at some things, but we want you to concentrate on

governance and the destruction of relationships and understandings which under-

2.3. New managerial practices

Dismissing the scheme as a recipe for unimaginative conformity among junior

2.4. Private sector values, privatisation and institutional competition

Jarratt Committee study of the efficiency of universities, set up by the CVCP

large and powerful academic departments together with individual academics

member of the assessment committee, all spoke out in defence of Glasgow.

The introduction of private sector values and practices into HE was

The same issue reported the Government’s planned ‘prestigious launch . . . of

3. New faces and emphases

3.1. The marginalisation and incorporation of humanities and social

Cuts threat prompts protest

protection of science, engineering and business subjects at the expense of social

Cambridge slams science shift

English ‘reduced to footnote’

Classics closures on the way

. . . Meanwhile university historians are preparing a submission to . . . the Sec-

An intellectual culture is not a luxury, but a practical economic and political

As well as a redistribution of funds, the ‘adjustment’ in favour of science and

3.2. Widening access

Plan to waive entry rules

Shortages hit blacks in social work

Students, Vitae, http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/RCUK-Joint-Skills-State-

A qualification in working must count

PCAS57 to monitor origins

CVCP backs full access against ‘cheap’ system

This shift was increasingly accompanied by a new emphasis on how

3.3. Business links and spin-offs

Billionaire backer for India study

The Higher Education Funding Council for England . . . has commissioned

Industry link needs cash carrot

challenge for all disciplines.63

And in Scotland in 2001 a ‘one-stop ideas shop’ was ‘unveiled’:

3.4. The new professionals

How to get a job in research policy

‘liberal arts’ predecessor, open to more people, more orientated towards an

4. Gloss and spin

reproduce many of the trends discussed above.

4.1. Marketing for corporate success

Graduation day is a marketing machine

Mr Wright explained that graduation ceremonies ‘will cement a relationship with

Cover-up claims over debt research

may need to be sacrificed.