Neoliberal Challenges To Higher Education
R Ramakumar
The political challenge that we face in India today is two-fold. We are fighting a regime in which the disorder of the market is fused with the bigotry of Hindutva. We are facing the challenge of neoliberalism on the one hand, and the onslaught of Hindutva nationalism on the other. In higher education too, then, the challenge is two-fold. On the one hand, higher education is being choked of resources. The very idea of a university as a public good and as a site of critical learning is under threat. On the other hand, Hindutva nationalism is attempting to refashion higher education based on a rejection of rational thought. Myths are replacing facts in history. These two challenges are no longer different compartments; today, the market and Hindutva appear to complement each other.
I would like to begin with a short narration of the history of neoliberalism in higher education. Across the world, the rise of free market ideologies after the 1970s led to a weakening of public higher education. Public higher educational institutions were established on a mass scale in the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK) on the premise that higher education constituted a public good.
In the USA, establishment of public universities and colleges date back to the 1860s, when the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 was passed. Federal property was allocated to start colleges that would teach agriculture and engineering. From the 1860s till the 1920s, a large number of junior colleges, women’s colleges, community colleges and urban service-oriented universities were instituted. After the WW2, the GI Bill allowed large numbers of war returnees to attend colleges and universities free of cost. It were these policy initiatives that gave higher education in the USA a mass character. By 1947, about 50 per cent of the new college students were war returnees. By the time the original GI Bill expired in 1956, about 76 lakh Americans had utilized the programme.
Of course, all of this was led by capitalism’s need for more engineers and scientists during the cold war. But even the above-mentioned measures were found to be insufficient by the early 1960s. So, Lyndon Johnson introduced the Higher Education Act of 1965. This provided grant and scholarships to students on a wide scale, as well as provided guarantee for student loans. Between 1960 and 1970, while the US population grew by 12 or 13 per cent, the number of adults with 4-year degrees grew by 67 per cent; among non-white adults, this grew by 200 per cent. School education rates also rose sharply. The most well-known and successful higher education institution was the University of California, where the tuition fee was close to zero.
In the UK, at the eve of WW2, the major universities were few in number – dominated by the Oxford and Cambridge universities – as well as small in size and catering to the elite. Higher education in UK was not truly mass even by the early-1960s. A few policy shifts in the early-1960s changed the scene drastically. The Education Act of 1962 ensured that the government paid all tuition fees for students who secured a university seat in addition to a maintenance grant. The submission of the Lionel Robbins report in 1963 further eased the process of opening of new public universities: Sussex, Keele, East Anglia, York, Lancaster, Essex, Kent, Warwick, Salford, Ulster, to name a few. About 10 technical institutions were converted into universities: Aston, City University of London and Cardiff, to name a few.
The attack on public higher education began in the USA by the late-1960s. As Ronald Reagan took over as the Governor of California in 1967, he made the famous statement: “the state should not subsidize the intellectual curiosity of its citizens”. Over the period of his Governorship, he cut the budget for higher education by 50 per cent and ended free tuition. He did the same as President too. Today, the tuition fee at the University of California is more than $13,000 with an additional $14000 for room and board.
Similarly, in the UK, Margaret Thatcher had, in her first avatar as the Minister for Education, begun by stopping free supply of milk for school children. Later, as Prime Minister, she cut the budget for higher education by 20 per cent and 6000 university teachers were “released”. The idea of tenure track was undermined and the University Grants Committee (UGC) was abolished. It was replaced by the University Funding Council, which was to have a pool of funds, of which 50 per cent would come from business and industry. The Council was to make individual contracts with each university, based on which the grants would be released conditional on it meeting certain “outputs”. A league table that showed rankings of each department in the country was prepared. One of the first results was that many departments of philosophy were shut down. Tuition fees were raised, maintenance grants were frozen and for the remaining expenses of students, an education loan system was introduced.
These examples of neoliberal assault on higher education were also mirrored the world over. Some of the common features of this assault are listed below. Education came to be seen as a commodity. The public university was increasingly seen as a public firm. Presidents of universities were no more academic leaders of distinction, but the best fund-raisers (may be even Wall Street veterans). As public funding declined, the university campuses were transformed into revenue-generating spaces. Universities became spaces for brand naming, as corporate interests financed the construction of buildings or institution of professorial chairs in their own name. Each department was seen as a cost-centre, which should raise enough funds to meet faculty costs. Faculty salaries were linked to performance. Permanent posts were cut down and more part-time faculty took their place as the new underclass of higher education. Business representatives sat on faculty committees to decide on how research funds were distributed and spent. All new programmes were to be totally self-financed. Professional leaderships in universities were replaced with executives. Registrars were not any more administrative leaders, but auditors. Academic goals were replaced with financial targets. As corporate interests funded more research projects, their ability to influence, even censor, results was the tendency. Generation of knowledge was replaced with quantitative targets and higher rankings. The quality of teaching was to be assessed by how best the university fed the job market.
A striking tendency was also that departments or projects that were unable to attract funding were slowly closed down or choked for funds. Examples cited by scholars are: critical theory, literature, feminism, ethics, heterodox economics, philosophy and sociology. Another tendency is the initiation of more and more online courses; here, universal knowledge was copyrighted and protected behind pay walls of the university. Students were burdened with higher and higher fees, and education loans – the neoliberal solution to fee hikes – converted them into “indentured scholars”, bonded to some corporate job for years to repay their loans.
In sum, student loans have become an enormously powerful capitalist tool of disciplining the students and the workforce in the West today. Take the case of Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae) in the USA. Sallie Mae was instituted in 1972. It began as a government sponsored entity to manage the federal loan programs created by the Higher Education Act of 1965. This was Sallie Mae’s role till 1997 when the cycle of privatisation began; after a few years of incremental privatisation, Sallie Mae was fully privatised by 2004. Over this period of shift, its stance vis-a-vis student loans became harsher. Normal bankruptcy provisions came to be denied to students. Consumer protection facilities available to the students earlier were also ended. As a result, repayment proceedings became extremely harsh. At the same time, the profits of the company soared. In 2013, Sallie Mae became a new company called Navient Corporation. It spend millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign finance. Today, 1 in 4 borrowers of student loans in the USA are defaulting in their payments and about 80 lakh borrowers are in debt. Two-third of the indebted are women.
It is no wonder, then, that the popularity of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in the USA and the UK are linked to their promise to protect the universities from conservative onslaughts. Corbyn’s Labour Party has offered a very important pledge on higher education for the United Kingdom. The promise is that they will reverse neoliberal policies in schooling and higher education. Like the famous National Health Service (NHS), they are promising to create a National Education System (NES), with free schooling and free higher education. If achieved, this will be truly historic.
Coming to India, it is important to note at the outset that the squeeze of education as a sector runs back to the post-independence years. We never had any golden era of higher education, as in the West. Our colleges and universities were always under-staffed and with poor infrastructure. Even when liberalization began, we had one of the lowest public expenditures per student. When the gross enrolment rate of the world in higher education was 24 per cent, our gross enrolment ratio was just 10 per cent.
The key policy shifts in higher education begin with the New Policy on Education in 1986 and then the submission of the Punnayya Committee in 1993. The 1986 policy had suggested mobilizing of donations and increase in fees as solutions to shortage of funds. Constituted by the UGC, The Punnayya Committee suggested that the own-resources of universities should constitute 15 to 25 per cent of recurring expenditure. In other words, this was to constitute a 25 per cent decline in funding of universities. The WTO agreement was signed in 1994 – under GATS. Here, the effort of the central government was to consider higher education as a non-merit good, which might come under the strictures of subsidy reduction. The Ambani-Birla report came in 2000. These great “scholars” stated that the government should take care of primary education and leave higher and professional education to the private sector. Government should progressively reduce funding for higher education and make universities self-sufficient. Full cost recovery through higher fees was recommended. If fees rise, the government should encourage a credit market for education. Private universities should be encouraged. FDI in education should be allowed. The UGC, thus, came out with a model act for education in 2003, which again emphasized self-sufficiency of universities. Later, as per the Foreign Universities Bill of 2010, the attempt was made to allow 100 per cent FDI in high education and allow them outside the ambit of UGC/AICTE under the Section 25 of the Companies Act.
But all these efforts were either attempts or implemented only halfheartedly. The true neoliberal shift came during Kapil Sibal’s tenure as the Union Minister for Human Resources Development between 2009 and 2012 under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Sibal’s effort was to start a 50 per cent cut in the funds allotted to higher educational institutions over a specified time frame. The assassination of India’s University Grants Commission (UGC) began during the UPA-2 government. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by Narendra Modi has continued this neoliberal onslaught. It continued the fund cut begun by the UPA and also completed the assassination of the UGC by replacing it with the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI). We are together here in the resistance against HECI. It is notable that for the first time in history, all the three scientific academies of India – Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Indian Academy of Sciences (IASc) and National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI) – joined in the protest and wrote to the government asking it to retain and strengthen the UGC “with full functional autonomy and with substantial augmentation of finances”. The idea of creating 14 world-class universities (“universities of innovation”) was of Sibal. This task of creating islands of excellence in the midst of poverty has come to be completed by the Modi government. The Jio model of “excellence” is only too well-known.
In the last 25 years, and in particular the last 10 years, we have seen a significant deterioration in the quality of higher education in India. The effort, slowly, has been to restructure Indian higher education in the American way. We already have a situation where about half of the posts of Professors, Readers and Lecturers are vacant across the country. About 40 per cent of our college teachers are temporary. Part-time teachers are appointed in colleges at Rs 10,000 per month where as the starting salary of a teacher should be at least Rs 50,000. It has been found that 48 per cent of the universities and 69 per cent of the colleges have deficient infrastructure and poor libraries. According to one study I read recently, when you have an average of 9 books per student in universities, you have 53 books per student in the IITs. Just assume the situation when fund cuts become more drastic. Is this the future we want to build for our students?
The humanities are going to be the most acutely affected in this neoliberal restructuring. Most branches of humanities are not created for applied research and are thus systemically not-for-profit. They yield results slowly and indirectly. But when the instant “value of the market” rules, branches of humanities are forced to surrender as “value-less” subjects. Humanities are also deeply “political” subjects, and hence are anathema to neoliberalism. So, the humanities departments in our universities should not be allowed to grow as, to follow Noam Chomsky, “subversive to the establishment”. Reagan’s problem with University of California students was that they protested too much; he called them a “small minority of hippies, radicals and filthy speech advocates” who should “be taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown off campus – permanently”. And our current Indian government’s problems with the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) are also similar: they protest too much, and hence this “tukde tukde gang” should be eliminated.
Let me conclude. We do not need our Professors as academic entrepreneurs. We want them as creators of knowledge. We do not want knowledge as a form of venture capital or be the source of instant profit. We want knowledge to be public, free, rational and for the people. We do not want the morality of the market in our universities. We want the political sovereignty of critical thinking in our universities. Let us join hands to strengthen this struggle to save higher education.
R. Ramakumar is a development economist and professor at the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. He has extensive research experience in agrarian studies, agricultural economics, and rural banking.