We Don't Need No Education? The Case of the London Met

In the wake of a cash crisis and resulting round of savage job cuts, London Metropolitan University has been left reeling, but still standing. Mute spoke to a long-term member of staff who taught at London Guildhall University before it was merged with North London University to create the London Met. The generally apathetic response to the recent blood-letting, he claims, is an effect of a strongly hierarchical management structure and cavalier approach to educational culture

Mute: How would you describe the atmosphere among students and staff around London Metropolitan University? Is it fatalistic, defiant or something else?

It’s complicated in relation to staff. There is, especially at the old Guildhall [merged with the University of North London in 2002 to form London Met], a real anger at the way things have gone since the merger, and the incompetence of the management, running things down into this funding crisis. At the same time, you can find people who have this fatalist attitude: ‘oh dear, what can you do? It’s all going to close.’ Sometimes that’s very difficult to deal with.

The students were always a bit slow to see there was something to be fighting for. Things became more centralised and rigid and they didn’t like that, but there wasn’t anything to fight really. The student union has been on the verge of death.

Recently there has been more agitation from the students, partially from the proposals for changing courses, to get rid of the four units per semester down to three, and course closures of various sorts. Particularly with the reputation damage the university has suffered, they confronted lecturers who were frankly pissed off and students did start agitating a bit more.

There was an occupation at Commercial Road by arts students [in August 2008]. Because there’s an intensity of requirement for staff, and staff and support staff were being got rid of, it has an immediate effect on students. For the students, when you’re in a lecture room with 60, 80, 100 students, you can get by on it maybe. Maybe you just don’t see your lecturer as much as you’d like to. But when you’re an arts student, making something or involved in construction or furniture making, you need someone there to literally show you. So they might have been more angry. I don’t know if it achieved much, but it was good to see. That group of students was also involved in a series of events we had around the funding issue and really livened up those events. Other students would see that and ask what it was about. It’s mind boggling sometimes how ignorant they were.

Mute: What gains have been secured or losses prevented due to UCU coordinated strike action and the student occupations in 2009?

UCU and the staff body, particularly on the academic side, have been in some kind of struggle for eight years, since the contract dispute [after the merger] and then a whole series of disputes. The contract dispute went on for years. Then it was sort of resolved. Not really resolved, but sort of resolved. Undoubtedly the union action was very important, and that did mean taking strikes at different times and various actions. I’ve taken too many actions over the years to remember, or remember what they were specifically about. So UCU was important, especially in lobbying parliament and ministers etc.

What actions required was the academic staff doing something, then getting some support from UCU as a central union. So in the end it was the staff themselves taking action. And in this case, there was a definite fatalism, resignation, even opportunism, that I detected among people up North [i.e. the former University of North London].

Mute: It has been part of the university’s strategy to offer voluntary redundancy. How effective has this been at dividing the workforce and how voluntary is voluntary redundancy?

Well, it’s not voluntary, of course. I do know people who took advantage of it because they got fed up, because of the culture of the crunch. And they were maybe near to retirement, so it was an opportunity to get out, get a spot of money on top of it, but just get the hell out and be shot of it. The whole atmosphere is just vile because of the way decisions are made.

I don’t really think it’s the case that voluntary redundancies divide the workforce. Part of the reason is the workforce was divided already in various ways. The people who were already fighting were prepared to fight, and more people wanted to fight because of the redundancies. There was an element of fatalism about it, as slowly people realised that a lot of money had effectively gone missing. They knew that somehow or another this had to be accounted for. Most of the people who took redundancies, if you went to interview them, will tell you they had no choice. It was part of the university’s calculations. People were forced by events to accept the redundancies. Their aim was 400 but they may not get that number; we’ll see if they carry on with redundancies.

Mute: How avoidable was the cash crisis at London Met? Has London Met been punished for having one of the poorest student bodies in the country? As we understand it, Hefce counted a lot of students as having dropped off courses, and alleged on that basis that the university had falsely claimed funding for unfilled places. But isn’t the reality that poorer students are more likely to need to defer taking exams to the following semester, or to need to retake altogether?

In my opinion it was avoidable. This issue about the nature of the students is dealt with under the topic, or frame, of Widening Participation. It was certainly the argument of the then vice-chancellor that because of this, the university be treated in a special way with regards to funding. He used this to play chicken with the funding body on funding students. There are issues in that we have a very diverse student body, who will take units and then stop for some reason and then carry on, and that can raise problems for funding. What the funding body said, and it was a strict rule, was that a ‘student’ was somebody who took all units of assessment – not passed, just took all units of assessments, plus any reassessments in that year. What the university did was claim for people who just passed a certain number of units – someone who passed six would move on, and they would be funded. In fact it seems they claimed for more than that even. There’s a grey area in what other kinds of students were claimed perhaps, but the university knew what it was doing was wrong. Certainly Hefce, when they got the auditors in, didn’t like the way Met was doing that.

Mute: What role did the merger of London Guildhall and North London Universities into the London Metropolitan University play in the cash crisis?

A lot. The idea of the merger, supposedly, was to cut down on costs, in the typical logic of mergers. But it was a very badly considered merger – it was a merger between universities in very different parts of London, so there’s no common student body. If you look into the roots of the two universities, they’re completely different. So in that sense it could never be a true merger.

There was a vote on the merger at the old London Guildhall University, which was based in the City and East End, and our vote was 98 percent against. And on that basis the governors went ahead. This raises the issue, by the way, of governance of education. We were 100 percent failed by the governors from the beginning; from the moment we were merged leading up to the crisis.

But there were two different cultures. The culture of the North London University was top-down and ‘charismatic’ in the worst possible sense. The leader, a man called Brian Roper, was basically the boss. Decisions would go to him. So when we first merged, we’d have a meeting with people, and we would think we made an agreement, but then we realised that they, the North London people, couldn’t agree because they had to check with their boss. They had no authority. Or they had authority, but they couldn’t exercise it, because they were always worried about what would happen further up the line. This charismatic leadership essentially took place in a pub near the university where Roper would hold his court and say ‘we’ll do this, we’ll do that’ with lots of enthusiasm but with a limited idea of what a university is. So his first act after the merger was to sack all the staff from Guildhall, all the academic staff. They were then offered what was called a ‘preferred contract’ – an Orwellian phrase. What it all comes down to, if you read it properly, is that the staff are incompetent and that they need a highly directive contract. Rather than the idea of self-regulated work, they have regulated work. You need permission to do things. This is part of the culture of top-down and non-supervision from below of all that happens. Consultation, when they did it, would be an email dead drop with no response. You would answer the consultation and they didn’t like it, so nothing would come of it. But, consultation: box ticked.

The preferred contract required that you be at your desk from nine to five. You can go off teaching but when you’re not teaching you must be at your desk. For people doing research or preparation or any kind of scholarship you go into an office which you share, in my case, at that point, I was sharing with two others. There’s no room to put all my books, no room to put the things that I need. The people up North said not to worry, that they wouldn’t enforce it, that they would hold a sword over your head and not drop it. For us that isn’t good enough.

It just gives scope to management for no purpose. The whole problem is the ability of management to tell you what you can and can’t do, but they aren’t competent to do so. They do you a favour by not enforcing the contract. They don’t need you to be at the desk. It’s feudal and backward, in my opinion.

Academia is essentially a self-organised activity. I teach what I know and I found out what I know. What you’ve got there is a problem with the way higher education is managed. The deadly problem across all institutions is with the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). What that does is separate the idea of research from teaching and education – teaching becomes residual activity. Certainly I know of cases in research-centred universities where people do all they can to avoid teaching because they’ve essentially learnt that it’s not important. This is a result of the exercise. In my view there is no essential difference between teaching and research, and academia stretches across all outside education and across all institutions. There’s a combined process of learning and teaching. These are not things to be separated out into these different areas.

Mute: Does this impose a rate of production on research as well? A Neo-Taylorisation of research?

It depends on what areas are being assessed. In economics, we’re advised not to write books. What you have to do is produce your RAE articles. It used to be you had to produce four every seven or eight years. And then the issue wasn’t the number, but also the quality of them, so the journals you publish in were also rated. These ratings were all unofficial, except everybody used them and consulted them. And we would simply sit round an Excel spreadsheet telling you which articles are rated in what way and then say go for this or go for that. In some institutions they tell you go for top rated journals only. I’ve heard of cases where people have done the articles but in the wrong journals, so they get summoned in and made redundant. Not because of the research, but by how the journals are assessed. Because of this an orthodoxy prevails, conventionality is easier to publish.

The nature of the organisation is that it creates its own acolytes. It does this partially by creating its own bureaucratic structure and partially because people are attracted to these charismatic leaders. If you’re worried about where things are going to go, you look to your leader in some way to sort you out. To me, this is a recipe for incompetence. They’re training more and more people to be incompetent at their job, more and more people to look up at some kind of firmament. The bureaucratic process has developed as well. We had a whole new layer created called ‘Academic Leaders’ which no other university that I know of has. And it’s just bureaucratised academics. They do things like course organising, getting course literature, course committees, dealing with problems of the students, probably being on the standard boards and things like that – and all these things have changed.

In a way, these were already specialist roles, in that they were done by a principal lecturer who took on more of the bureaucratic stuff that does need to get done and did less of the teaching. They would be in more, to deal with this kind of stuff. What happens to them, particularly in these small, central, course-holding kind of roles is they get put on these new contracts under the heading of ‘Academic Leaders’ and the only change is that they find it more difficult to say ‘no’. Their pay goes up, but their contract is much more directive. They see their money and they see their career and they’re worried about the way things are going and just fit in. They are immediately removed in a way from the normal run of the mill sort of lecturers, even walking through picket lines. Not all of them, I have to say. There’s so many picket lines, I couldn’t tell you. But there’s anecdotal evidence to suggest that is the tendency.

Mute: Do you think there’ll be a national strike as a result of the cuts? How do you assess UCU’s role so far?

I don’t know if there’ll be a national strike, but I wouldn’t be surprised, in the form of a day here and a day there. Assessing UCU’s role: good in parts, I think the lobbying process is quite good. I don’t think there had been sufficient realisation that the central issue is changing the culture around education. There’s been a focus on redundancies, but in my view, the redundancies are a symptom of the ineptitude around this whole thing. It took a long time for the union to realise we had to get rid of these people, the board of governors, all the executive group and a whole load of people just below that. To many it was immediately obvious. Yes, you have to fight redundancies, but we should be fighting for the removal of all these people. They have come round to that now.

Mute: What has become of Labour’s plan to get 50 percent of young people into higher education by 2010?

Well, they haven’t got there yet, but I can see why they want to do it. In this country, we’re still behind on the numbers, in terms of percentages, but in reputation we’re still quite high. We’ve still been fighting in individual ways to keep things reasonable with students. We still have seminars. In some places on the continent, you have lectures and that’s it. In Italy, for example. You pay for it here, but you get the attention. There are potentially good things going on.

London Met is one of those places that’s supposed to carry the Widening Participation agenda, but I hate that because it diverts from the fact we do education and education isn’t just teaching, it’s research and scholarship. And then if we do education properly we can do Widening Participation. But it got turned around and the union still thinks in that way; they still think primarily in terms of Widening Participation. It doesn’t make a sufficient break with the previous regime which always thought in that way and always used Widening Participation to justify their bureaucracy and their treatment of staff. Various things are justified, like bringing in more students who maybe aren’t ready to deal with higher education. A few are completely unmotivated, actually. The way Hefce talks about it, they want Oxford to take in people from more varied backgrounds, they want top universities to take on more people. What they don’t want is an institution to take on Widening Participation and that’s all it does, because the message to students is ‘you didn’t get in anywhere else, so you get the Widening Participation places’. These students deserve an education they can be proud of and the people around me I know are certainly motivated in that way. Morale is the starting point and end of education – our management in all its layers is utterly ignorant of this.

I haven’t got into it, but I suspect the key thing is skills. This is in a situation where you’re not going to get a huge increase in manufacturing production and even if you do it could be jobless as we’ve seen recently in the North-West manufacturing recovery. And in order for there to be a sustainable society, there’s got to be productive labour, skilled labour doing something or other, whether in the arts or computer programming or service in the city.

It’s not necessarily just a joke among academics that we’re taking people off the streets, off Jobseekers’ Allowance. What would they be doing for those three years? You’d have to find jobs for these people. How easy is that? In a way, you do find jobs for them. They keep the cafés and things going with part time work. And it’s incredible, the amount of debt they have to take on at a time when the basic problem of the British economy is too much personal debt, which is enormous. You’re generating a culture of debt on the back of a crass market fundamentalism. Obviously, they hope the jobs will be there, and if they aren’t, you don’t have to pay it back. But you can’t avoid it, unless you spend your whole life not working. I don’t know how all that will work out. It’s relatively all new. £3,000 a year, before you’ve paid rent, had a bite to eat, bought your books and all the other living expenses. There’s a cleft stick from the point of government. Do you want to generate more debt? No. Do you want more students? Yes. You can’t talk to people about a better world, when a ‘better world’ is lower and lower waged jobs.