The University-Charity (Book Review)

This book asks a very unusual question about universities: Are they charities and if they are (and are subject to charity law), what does that mean for the way they are run and their relations with the state?

If a university is, in law, a charity, then those who run it have, by law, “an overriding duty to act in the best interests of the charity”. But, in law, that doesn’t mean acting in the best interests of the institution, by, for example, maximising student numbers and income, or rising up the league table; nor does it mean acting in the best interests of its students, considered as something like customers. It means furthering the institution’s charitable purpose, as stated in its founding document, typically something along the lines of “to advance education, learning and research for the public benefit”. It is an additional hallmark of a charity that it is independent of the state and not its job to further government policies (however charitable).

Mary Synge’s starting point is that there is a growing body of literature expressing deep dissatisfaction with what has been happening in universities in the last half-century or so.

They have expanded enormously: the number of institutions, students, teachers and even subjects. It couldn’t fail to have transformed their character. No longer the preserve of an elite, part intellectual, part social, they have been democratised (and re-named ‘uni’). When they were much fewer and much smaller, they were run by the academics who taught in them. They did also employ a sort of servant class, in the Bursary, but its business was to carry out and facilitate the rule of the academics. They didn’t behave like commercial enterprises and their students—undergraduates—weren’t customers; they were junior members, junior to their teachers but equally members. Universities didn’t think of themselves as there to carry out the policies of Government either. The state might, to one degree or another, pay for them but they, in very large measure, retained, and were jealous of, the dignity belonging to independent and self-governing bodies of scholars, junior and senior.

But all that has changed, changed utterly. Not only have they expanded but the scope and authority of what was the Bursary and has become the Management has expanded too, at the expense, of course, of the scope and authority of the academics, now reduced to mere employees and sometimes described as “disenfranchised”. On top of that, there has been created a new sub-class of teaching staff on part-time, fixed-term and teaching-only contracts. Such a change, as might be guessed, has been accompanied by another (each part cause, part effect of the other): universities do now, in very considerable measure, think of themselves, and behave like, big businesses, with V-Cs who are more like, and get paid much more like, CEOs (between about £300,000 and £500,000) than mere senior scholars. And what were junior members have become something very like customers.

Along with those changes, has come another: that the universities have come to think themselves responsible to Government and instruments of Government policy. What university doesn’t now think it its principal purpose to fit students for employment and, by doing so, to make the nation more competitive in the great global economic competition while, along the way, advancing the causes of Social Mobility (upward), Equality, Diversity and Inclusiveness?

One, and not the least, cause of dissatisfaction is the widespread belief that as grades have gone up-and-up, standards have gone down-and-down; another is the indisputable fact, which helps to gives rise to that belief, that the more the students not—as you might expect—the worse their results, but the very much better. Now, when about 15 times or more go to university than went 60 years ago, the percentage who get Firsts has gone up 4 times! And that, when the staff:student ratio has gone down from about 1:8 to about 1:20! More and more (if you can believe it) has meant better and better. The lower the bar set for getting into university the higher the bar leapt, with less and less coaching, on the way out. What miracles the modern democratic mass university performs. What prodigies of sows’ ears it turns into silk purses!

And if standards have dropped. it isn’t difficult to see why. If universities are set up in competition with one another like businesses, run not by academics but by managers, have to please student-customers (especially from uneducated backgrounds) and can be rated on criteria that can be measured and published in ‘league tables’, a drop in standards is pretty well guaranteed. How better to attract students—and income—than to lower entry standards, give higher marks and have a higher retention rate than your rivals? Such practices take you higher up the ‘league table’ and become a ‘virtuous cycle’. Success breeds success (and high salaries for the managers who bring it about).

Research is similarly influenced by perverse incentives. It is rewarded in a way that makes market success more important than intrinsic value. The quality of research (and researchers) is judged by “two inadequate, and arguably misplaced, proxies”, the REF rating and the money brought in by grants. The financial importance to universities of their REF rating makes it inevitable that they devote resources to it that would be better spent on research, and the research itself gets determined by what is likely to earn it a high ranking. Similarly with the need for researchers to bring in grant money from outside. Such influences discourage “free and disinterested intellectual enquiry” and “corrupt, corrode, and distort” research.

Do British universities, as they are presently run, ‘advance education, learning and research’ for the ‘public benefit’, as required by charity law? Do the high salaries paid to CEO-like Vice-Chancellors? If not, then what? Mary Synge has an answer: “If a university is a charity, it is as much a charity as any other and must comply with the full reach of charity law” and if it behaves in a way that is not “in the best interests” of its charitable purpose “charity law makes the basis for a challenge.”

You can find more information on Mary Synge’s book, or order a copy here.

Review by Duke Maskell, whose Substack can be found here.