The present Conservative Government, like the Coalition Government that preceded it, has an ideological predisposition towards the market and its supposed benefits to consumers, but appears to have no vision of Higher Education and its benefits to students and to the whole of society.
These wider societal benefits can be summarised under three aspects:
- educating the next generation of the population
- carrying out research to address social and scientific challenges
- maintaining an independent platform for research into society and science to facilitate democratic debate.
The last of these, sometimes drawn under the umbrella of ‘academic freedom’, is the basis of the historic contract between Universities and the State. We contend, following the UNESCO Recommendation (1997), that academic freedom must be sufficient to guarantee the independence of scientific inquiry, commentary and teaching. Pressures from funding agencies and the state are usually cited as the principal threats to academic independence. The last decade has seen the rise of a third threat, namely an increasing managerial interference in academic life deriving from the introduction of market imperatives.
Continue reading “Introduction to the Alternative White Paper”
The Convention for Higher Education 