https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/irreversible
Lorna Finlayson
29 May 2026 Society

The British university is dying, and it seems that almost nobody cares. It may also be true that many people do not know. News coverage of recent cuts, redundancies and closures has been notably sparse. In any case, academics have been reporting the imminent death of the university, or of the humanities (whatever those are), for so long that they might now be suspected of exaggeration. Privileged professors, whining again.

Yet this is a not a case of crying wolf. As with the climate catastrophe, warnings of the coming crisis of higher education have been true for some time. And we are now entering a critical stage. Almost every academic I know is facing the threat of redundancy. Some have already been forced out; some have received their formal ‘at risk’ letters from management; others have just survived the latest round of cuts; others still have been offered ‘voluntary severance’ – presented as a means to avoid compulsory redundancies, yet followed by them as reliably as night follows day (thus making the ‘voluntary’ something of a misnomer: many view it as a chance to jump before you are pushed). There has long been a problem of ‘casualization’ in academia, and a shortage of permanent jobs. Now the problem is that even the so-called ‘permanent’ jobs are in practice no more permanent than the one- or two-year ‘fixed term’ positions. Nobody can be confident of still having a job in five years’ time. Universities are not just downsizing. Many are at risk of going under altogether. A few are unlikely to last the year.

Some academics may still believe that it is possible to weather this storm. Certainly, this belief is encouraged by university managers, who promise blue skies on the other side of every new spree of culling and cutting, mergers and ‘re-structures’ (the Vice-Chancellor of my university tells us that we are sailing towards ‘financial sustainability with soul’). But this is not a storm that will eventually pass. Short of some drastic and unexpected intervention, divine or otherwise, it will be a permanent change in the climate. And short of the arrival of some kind of Noah’s Ark, the British university as we know it is destined for extinction sooner rather than later.

This is because the funding model of higher education is fundamentally broken, and has been since at least 2011, which saw the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees and the simultaneous removal of most of the government funding. This was the beginning of the end, but for reasons which might not be immediately obvious. The high fees did not, at least initially, put students off going to university, even those from lower-income backgrounds. Students were able to take out government loans on – again, at least initially – quite favourable terms; repayments would not begin until a certain income threshold was reached and would be written off after thirty years. But whereas previously universities had received money directly from the government, now the money would come from student fees (borrowed, of course, from the government). From the university’s point of view, at least, it might be hard to see why this should make much difference.

In fact, it makes all the difference. The reason is boring but crucial. Simplifying slightly: under the old system, there were separate ‘pots’ for research and teaching – some money for research; some money for each student you had to teach. Under the new system, there is no pot for research (at least for the arts and humanities): the money must come out of student fees. This transforms the operations of the university – and much for the worse. While in the old system, there was no particular incentive to increase your student numbers (and, in fact, an incentive for the government to limit them), under the new one, there is an incentive and even necessity to attract as many as possible. So whereas in the past universities could concentrate on teaching and research, now they spend a huge amount of their time and resources on a perpetual scramble for students. This competition has only grown more cut-throat since the cap on student numbers was lifted, which meant that more prestigious universities could hoover up more, leaving others to fight over the shrinking remainder.

Meanwhile, tuition fees – which, though high enough to burden students with unrepayable debt, have not risen in line with inflation and have therefore declined in value – are simply not enough to plug the gap in universities’ finances left by the withdrawal of central funding. The answer cannot be higher fees; undergraduate numbers are already declining, as increasing numbers of young people judge that university is not worth it, so it is unlikely that they would be willing to pay even more. The system has been kept afloat only by the higher fees paid by international students. Brexit and successive governments’ hostile immigration policies did for that – and anyway, the reputation of British higher education, and hence its ability to attract foreign students, is now in a well-deserved decline. In short: a perfect storm, long brewing.

Still, many will find it hard to care. Does it matter if a few universities go bust? Do we really need so many? Haven’t some universities anyway overdone the ‘growth’ strategy and expanded to an unsustainable size? What is happening might look like a bit of much-needed pruning: some short-term pain in exchange for a healthier future. It’s true that over-expansion is part of what has brought universities to the present juncture, though it has served not mass higher education but private profit. University managers have pursued extravagant capital investment projects, haemorrhaging money into the hands of private companies and consultants in doomed attempts to lure enough of the dwindling pool of willing eighteen-year-olds to cover costs. Cities have been taken over by a mushrooming of unaffordable and unsightly private student accommodation.

The process now in train, however, will not halt or reverse this – the profit-making activities will likely continue in the hollowed-out husk of the university long after its educational ones have withered away. Nor will it leave room for the flourishing of even a scaled-back version of the university as we have known it. Not every university will go bust, but those that remain will not be – already are not – what they were. First to go, as current events make abundantly clear, will be a large proportion of the teaching and administrative staff (not, of course, the higher-level management), followed by the (costly and not-directly-profitable) ‘research’ element of the job descriptions of the academics who remain, whose teaching loads will then be increased to the point where they barely recognize their own students (many have reached this point already). All that will be left outside of Oxbridge (which is well-insulated from the financial pressures on other universities, though far from immune to the temptations of expansionism, casualization and under-valuing of staff) will be a scattering of AI-infested hubs for the accelerated production of hyper-indebted ‘graduates’.

All of this is a colossal and entirely avoidable act of self-harm on the part of a country whose higher education sector has until recently been one of the few things it had going for it. A system of public higher education is not obviously unaffordable (the positioning of fees as ‘anti-elitist’ was always a cynical fraud), and would probably be less expensive than the present system of loans which students cannot repay and the government (for this reason) cannot sell. But the government has no intention of being diverted from its current course, and has made it clear that it will not intervene to rescue struggling institutions from the fate which it and previous administrations have prepared for them. This should come as little surprise. ‘Market exit’ – the closure of universities or their takeover by private providers – was always part of the plan, as the 2010 Browne Review which ushered in the present system made clear.

This process is not reversible. Apart from anything else, we are close to the point where there will be no-one left in higher education who is in a position to fight for it; everyone is busy fighting for their jobs, and often losing. Once ejected, people will retrain and move on. Soon enough, there will be no memory of the university as it was – just as there is already no memory of free higher education among today’s students, who find the idea scarcely imaginable.

That the government doesn’t care if the university dies – and is in fact working actively to hasten its demise – is clear. The same might be said of its relationship toward the National Health Service. The difference is that most people do care about the NHS – even if they have few effective levers to do anything about it. The university, by contrast, is a singularly unloved institution in Britain (mainland Europe is different in this respect). The public can see the point of healthcare and continues to hold its workers in fairly high esteem, despite the best efforts of politicians who have tried to demonize striking nurses and doctors. Far fewer have sympathy with the plight of academics. That is not only due to a perception that academics are privileged (a perception that applies to doctors, too), but also to a general sense that what goes on in universities is a luxury or worse: an expensive waste of time.

This is where I find myself in a slightly awkward position. I don’t unequivocally love the university either – and not only because it is not what it used to be. I don’t buy the idea of a lost ‘golden age’ (although I can say from personal experience that things were far better even one decade ago than they are now). Nor can I take seriously the image of academics in general – either now or in some hallowed past – as noble truth-seekers chipping away at the coalface of enquiry, or brave truth-speakers to power. Much of what academics do is pointless or worse – pretentious or pernicious (or both). I’m far from confident, much of the time, that what I do has much positive value to anybody. So, why save the university? One reason is simply that there are numerous exceptions to every rule. A lot of academic work might be bad and useless, but even I don’t think that all of it is bad and useless all of the time. That might sound a feeble defence, but it’s actually not at all. Most films might not be good. Most scientific experiments might not work. Most people you meet will not become your friends. But making or seeing no films (or cutting funding for independent film-making), conducting no experiments or meeting no people, is a sure way to guarantee that none of the good that comes of these things (even if only exceptionally) ever happens. There is a huge – technically infinite – difference between something and nothing.

If there is a grain of truth in the self-congratulatory notion, sometimes voiced by academic defenders of the university, that attacks on higher education (and on the arts and ‘humanities’ in particular) are evidence that our leaders are afraid of us, it is that those with power in society are deeply intolerant of any space in which exceptions are possible, in which something could happen. The drive to control and eliminate such spaces belongs to a long history of attacks on perceived inefficiency or ‘idleness’, the latter regarded not merely as a vice in itself but as dangerous because it provides the conditions under which various other vices (in particular, subversive or insubordinate behaviour) might breed – a history that runs from Victorian efforts to get children off the streets and into schools, through Thatcherite assaults on the unemployed and on a supposedly inefficient and ‘wasteful’ public sector. It’s as if there is a determination to eliminate any pocket of air in which it might be possible to draw a breath. I’m never quite sure whether the zeal with which such spaces are presently being attacked is a sign of weakness on the part of the system or of the near totality of its triumph – I suspect that in some sense, it is both.

What makes universities particularly valuable as a ‘space for exceptions’ is the same thing that makes people hate them. The perception is that students and academics do nothing all day but doss around and mull over the meaning of life. It’s not really true – academics work on average far more than their contracted hours, while many students have developed concerningly puritanical tendencies – but, in my view, things were better when it was truer: people not only had a better time, but probably did better and more interesting work, when they were less pressured and given more slack. Even within the instrumental logic of capitalism, it is at least sometimes recognized that giving people adequate time and resources, and a measure of freedom from the obligation constantly to justify their existence – leaving them alone, basically – can be beneficial to their performance or ‘productivity’. On the other hand, there are those who would like to eliminate all slack from the system. The objective is a world in which we are seamlessly shuttled from one managed (and, ideally, exploitable) activity to the next – with no break or chance to look around us – from cradle to grave. The death of the university will bring that world a step closer.