Fundamental restructuring must happen, along with an honest debate about what – and who – higher education is really for
Imagine a beach before the tsunami. Out at sea, the wave is gathering force, yet on the sand people are still sunbathing, blissfully unaware. That’s how it feels, one professor tells me, to be working in higher education. Academics by their nature don’t look outwards much, he argues, so not all have registered the risk to their profession. “But something absolutely dreadful is coming.”
As a scientist working in cancer research at a top British university, he’s not the kind of academic I expected to be worried about the recent nationwide flurry of threatened redundancies in higher education, the scrapping of what, so far, are mainly arts and language courses, or shrill political attacks on supposedly “woke” campus culture. But lately almost everyone in higher education seems jumpy.
