by Rob Cuthbert
In SRHE News and Blog a series of posts is chronicling, decade by decade, the progress of SRHE since its foundation 60 years ago in 1965. As always, our memories are supported by some music of the times (which had improved somewhat after the nadir of 1975).
In 1985 Ronald Reagan became the US President, which seemed improbable at the time, but post-Trump now appears positively conventional – that joke isn’t funny any more. Reaganomics fuelled the present US multi-$trillion national debt; it was the era of supply-side economics. President Reagan was of course popular with UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She was by then at her peak after the 1982 Falklands War restored her own popularity, helping her in 1985 to bring an end to the miners’ strike and to ride out riots in Handsworth in Birmingham and Broadwater Farm in London.
Vodafone enabled the first commercial mobile phone call in the UK; the BBC micro was the computer of choice for schools. Beverley Hills Cop was one of the top movies in 1985, with Eddie Murphy featured by the Pointer Sisters as they sang “I don’t wanna take it any more”, a 1980s theme song for some in universities. Globalism was in vogue; everybody wants to rule the world. International pop stars came together to sing We are the world in January and then perform at the Live Aid concert at Wembley in July with Queen’s legendary showstopping performance. Nintendo prepared to conquer the world with the launch of Super Mario, but global multinationals took a hit with one of the biggest marketing blunders ever, as Coca-Cola changed its formula, released New Coke in April, then went back to the original less than three months later.
Higher education in 1985
Global HE had its own marketing and governance issues after what Guy Neave (then UCL, now Twente) described as a period of consolidation from 1975 to 1985:
“ … it was during this decade … that these systems assumed the level of dealing with mass higher education … By the late 1980s or 1990s … there are certain countries which anticipate participation rates in higher education of over 30% (Neave, 1984a). Highest amongst them are Denmark and Finland with 40% of the appropriate age group, the Federal Republic with 35% and France with 33%. … In effect, transition to mass higher education gave rise to additional bodies to control, monitor and hold accountable a sector of increasing significance in government social expenditure. Such intermediary agencies stand as a response to the advent of mass higher education, not an anticipation of it.”
This was prescient: who’s gonna tell you things aren’t so great? Later Paul Windolf (Heidelberg) would take a very long view in his comparative analysis of Cycles of expansion in higher education 1870-1985 in Higher Education (1992:23, 3-19): “For most countries the data confirm the theory of ‘status competition’ (perverse effects): universities expand particularly fast during times of an economic recession … The human capital theory is not confirmed by this longitudinal analysis.” However human capital theory dominated policy thinking in many parts of the world, especially the UK, as Adam Matthews (Birmingham) argued in his blog for Wonkhe on 12 June 2024:
“Despite so much adversarial and ideologically polarised politics in the 1980s domestically and internationally, we do find consensus around higher education and universities. Growth was still on the agenda. As the country found itself economically struggling, teaching and research was seen as the solution rather than the problem, particularly around research findings being applied to real world issues.”
UK HE in 1985: a ferment of planning
In that decade of consolidation after 1975, in the UK no new universities were created until the 1980s. By 1985 there were just two: the University of Buckingham and the University of Ulster. Expansion of UK HE in the 1980s was driven by the polytechnics, especially after the UGC’s unevenly distributed and dramatic financial cuts of 1981. The universities and UGC had tried and failed to protect the so-called ‘unit of resource’, the level of funding per full-time equivalent (FTE) undergraduate student, and the UGC’s established pattern of quinquennial funding had been reluctantly abandoned. Neave noted that:
“Strictly speaking, university finance in the United Kingdom did not involve change to the basic unit of resource, an issue raised only under dire economic pressure in the period following the 1981 reductions in university budgets. Nor was the abandonment of quinquennial funding a response to mass higher education per se, so much as to the country’s parlous economic status.”
The UK economy and HE were in Dire Straits: there was no money for nothing. The rapid expansion of the polytechnics, driving down costs, was the dominant influence on policy. A National Advisory Body for Local Authority Higher Education (NAB) had been set up on 1 February 1982 to advise the Secretary of State for Education and Science on matters relating to academic provision and the approval of advanced courses, reconstituted as the National Advisory Body for Public Sector Higher Education (PSHE) from 1 February 1985. In 1985 there were 503,000 students in PSHE in Great Britain, of whom 214,000 were part-time. Universities had 291,000 full-time and 114,000 part-time students. PSHE in England included 29 polytechnics, 30 major colleges, 21 voluntary colleges, and 300 others. In Wales there was one polytechnic, 7 major colleges and 16 others. The Further Education Act 1985 gave more powers to local authorities, who still governed the whole of PSHE, to supply goods and services, especially teaching and research, through educational institutions.
Clive Booth, principal private secretary to the Secretary of State for Education and Science since 1975, later to become Director of Oxford Polytechnic, foretold government policy in 1987, reviewing HE planning since 1965 in Higher Education Quarterly:
“The development of a planning body for public sector higher education in England has created the potentiality for an integrated planning approach to university and non-university higher education.”
Booth had been involved in the production of a series of significant DES papers: the 1978 Report of the Working Group on the Management of Higher Education in the Maintained Sector (the Oakes Report); in 1981 Higher Education in England outside the Universities: Policy, Funding and Management, a consultative document; and finally the 1985 Green Paper The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s. We saw the present, he saw the whole of the Moon.
The Green Paper followed the notorious Jarratt Report of 1985, which sent shock waves through the university sector. Paul Greatrix (Nottingham), a long-serving Registrar and Secretary, wrote on his Wonderful (and Frightening) World of HE blogmuch later that:
“Looking back from 2015, some of these observations and recommendations do seem quite tentative. But in 1985 they were dynamite. After the extraordinary and unprecedented cuts of 1981 and Keith Joseph’s unsuccessful approach to introduce fees in 1984 this seemed like another attack on universities.”
The widespread view in UK HE at the time was, in the words of the Style Council, “You don’t have to take this crap”, but the policy walls did not come tumbling down. Greatrix cited Geoffrey Alderman’s acerbic review of Malcolm Tight’s 2009 book Higher education in the United Kingdom since 1945 for Times Higher Education:
“… to my mind one of the most damaging inquiries into higher education over the last half-century was the Jarratt report … a mischievous and malevolent investigation (which, inter alia, popularised if it did not invent the notion that students are “customers”, which foisted on the sector the delusion that factory-floor “performance indicators” are entirely suited to a higher-education setting, and which led to the abolition of academic tenure and the concomitant triumph of managerialism in the academy) … Jarratt was self-inflicted. The inquiry was not a government creation. It was established by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals. … Jarratt was betrayal from within.”
For Greatrix:
“Looking back these do not look like the proposals filled with malevolence or mischief. Many of these changes were inevitable, most were long overdue, a lot would have happened in any case. … From today’s viewpoint it looks more like that what Jarratt offered were some pointers and directions in this strange new terrain.”
With the benefit of hindsight it can be argued that in 1985 UK universities were unduly concerned, perhaps even obsessed, with what might have been lost from a supposed ‘golden age’ of autonomy. But nothing is so good it lasts eternally. The wreckage of the Titanic was finally located in 1985, another lost cause once assumed unsinkable. Universities were, like Bonnie Tyler, holding out for a hero, but Tina Turner was right, after the 1981 cuts: “Out of the ruins, out from the wreckage, can’t make the same mistake this time”.
The Green Paper, still Green and not White, announced by Secretary of State Keith Joseph in May 1985, came as the preliminary conclusion to this ferment of planning. He said in Parliament that “… it is vital for our higher education to contribute more effectively to the improvement of the performance of the economy. This is not because the Government place a low value on the general cultural benefits of education and research or on study of the humanities.” But HE mostly heard only the first sentence, and thought we were on the road to nowhere, rather than seeing the opportunities. The Thatcher White Paper Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge would not appear until 1987, and NAB and the UGC would survive only until 1988. REO Speedwagon captured the mood: Can’t fight this feeling any more.
SRHE and research into higher education in 1985
The chairs of SRHE from 1975-1985 included some great names: Lewis Elton (Surrey) 1977-78, Gareth Williams (Lancaster, later London Institute of Education) 1978-80 (and 1986-88), Donald Bligh (Exeter) 1980-82, David Warren-Piper (London Institute of Education) 1982-84, and Michael Shattock (Warwick, later London Institute of Education/UCL) 1984-86. The outstanding highlight of the decade was a major review into higher education organised by the Society. As Gareth Williams wrote:
“With the help of a substantial grant from the Leverhulme Trust, the Society for Research into Higher Education set up a comprehensive programme of study into the future of higher education which I directed. The aim of the programme was not to undertake new research but rather to focus recent research findings and the views of informed people on the major strategic options likely to be available to higher education institutions and policy making bodies in the 1980s and 1990s.”
The programme ran from 1980 to 1983 and led to nine themed reports, an overall review and a final report. SRHE had, in Michael Shattock’s words:
“… established itself as an important voice in policy. It was addressed by higher education Ministers (William Waldegrave 1982, Peter Brooke 1983), at an SRHE/THES Conference on the Green Paper by Sir Keith Joseph the Secretary of State, in 1985. Most unusually it received a visit from the former Prime Minister, Edward Heath, in February 1983 who wished to seek the Society’s advice about higher education.”
SRHE might have hoped like Madonna to be Into the Groove policywise, but the Prime Minister had a list of questions which were more about living in a material world:
- To what extent (if any) has the balance between disciplines been inappropriate for Britain’s economic needs?
- How far should the labour market determine the shape of higher education?
- Are research and teaching indivisible in higher education if standards are to be maintained?
- Is it better to have a few research institutions or many, given financial constraints?
- Is the binary line appropriate?
- Are the links between HE and industry poor by comparison with other major countries?
- What are the merits of shorter courses – two years liberal arts followed by two years vocational?”
“The interest of these questions is both the extent to which the issues were addressed and answered in the Leverhulme Programme and the fact that their underlying assumptions formed the basis of the 1985 Green Paper. It was clear that the Society was at the sharp end of discussions about the future policy.”
The Leverhulme findings were perhaps just too balanced for the times – can’t get there from here. Shattock as SRHE chair initiated an Enquiry on ‘Questions of Quality’ which became the theme of SRHE’s 1985 annual conference, and one of SRHE’s founders, Graeme Moodie (York), edited a 1986 bookStandards and Criteria in Higher Education. Shattock also established the influential SRHE Policy Forum, a seminar involving leading academics, civil servants and HE managers which met five times a year under the alternate chairmanship of Michael Shattock and Gareth Williams.
Nevertheless it was not long after 1985 that a special meeting of SRHE’s Council at the FE Staff College received a report, probably from its administrator Rowland Eustace, saying: “general knowledge and understanding of the Society remains relatively low in higher education despite attempts over recent years to give the Society a higher profile”. Perhaps still a little out of touch, hoping for glory days, still running up that hill, hoping or even believing that things can only get better.
Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email [email protected]. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert.