The changes which the current government is introducing to the system of funding Universities in the UK have proved highly politically contentious. They involve a significant reduction in directly supplied state funding, and a sharp increase in the level of fees that Universities can charge students. Critics see this as a wholesale shift towards marketisation, which has been engendered by the abandonment by the current administration of the idea that Higher Education is a public good.
This paper would open up different lines of enquiry in relation to this episode, and would, in particular:
• Consider the importance of broader ideational shifts within the UK’s political culture over the last half century, and the recalibration of ideas about market, state and citizen that these have engendered;
• Evaluate how shifts in patterns of political thinking about public services and citizens, since the 1980s, have spilled over into expectations about the character of, and rationale for, HE;
• Develop a wide-ranging analytical argument about the role and implications of ideational changes in relation to the shifting pattern of expectations and assumptions held by citizens, politician and bureaucrats, which have in combination framed the ‘common sense’ that has been integral to the introduction of market-based reforms in areas of public provision where these have been widely regarded as immune from such influences.
More specifically, the paper will explore the rise to prominence of one of the most important sources of such thinking in post-war politics – the economic liberalism propounded by clusters of New Right intellectuals, commentators and politicians from the late 1950s to the 1990s. It draws attention to the internal tensions and contingences affecting this ideological paradigm, and points to the rival perspectives, associated with social democracy and conservatism, which it struggled, over several decades, to displace.
It would focus in particular upon the ability of New Right intellectuals and commentators to transpose some of the ideas about markets, citizens and governance that became ascendant in public discourse in the 1980s and 1990s into public and policy debates about Universities. And it would illustrate how an emerging dissensus within the national policy community about the rationale for Higher Education enabled radical new ideas -- which framed students as consumers and Universities as conservative ‘producers’ – to gain a foothold in mainstream policy circles, from the 1960s onwards.
Finally, the paper would reflect upon how this focus upon long-range ideational changes might be incorporated within the existing analytical frameworks shaping our understanding of the changing relations between users, citizens and services.
