For Conrad.
I sometimes wonder whether we are a little too eager to blame the present generation for the current state of higher education in the UK. At some institutions, particularly those now struggling, much of what we are seeing has a longer history.
Twenty or thirty years ago, you could already see the direction of travel.
I call some of the people involved the transactionists.
I don't mean everyone who became a professor, dean or senior manager. Nor am I suggesting that universities were wonderful places before managerialism arrived. They weren't. Academia has always had its hierarchies, patronage, internal politics and assorted varieties of unpleasantness.
I'm talking about something rather more specific: the gradual elevation of a particular kind of academic behaviour.
The empire builders. The fluent speakers of corporate and MBA language. Those who seemed remarkably comfortable turning almost anything into a target, KPI, league-table position or line on a spreadsheet.
And, importantly, people who became rather good at it.
When the measurable becomes the valuable
None of this means measurement is inherently bad.
Universities are large organisations spending substantial amounts of public and private money. They should be accountable. Students deserve to know whether courses are good, whether students complete them and what happens afterwards. The Teaching Excellence Framework, for example, doesn't rely simply on a spreadsheet: its assessment draws on numerical indicators alongside written evidence and expert judgement. [1]
The problem comes when the relationship is reversed.
Instead of asking how can we measure some aspects of what we value?, institutions begin asking what can we value because we can measure it?
That is quite a different proposition.
Stephen Ball was writing about educational “performativity” more than twenty years ago: professionals increasingly organising themselves in response to targets, indicators and evaluations. [2] Kathleen Lynch later examined the role of rankings and numerical measures in new managerialism, including the rather seductive impression that what matters in education can be numerically ordered and judged. [3]
There is an obvious echo here of what has become known as Goodhart's Law. Marilyn Strathern made the connection particularly neatly when writing about the growth of audit within British universities in the 1990s. [4]
I think universities have spent years discovering the problem the hard way.
Trying to metricate qualia
There are things about education that resist this process.
How do you measure encountering an extraordinary teacher?
Or somebody noticing that a student hasn't quite understood something and spending another twenty minutes talking to them?
How do you quantify the moment a student becomes fascinated by a subject they previously couldn't have cared less about?
What is the KPI for walking out of a room thinking differently from when you walked in?
At the extreme, we seem to have tried to metricate something approaching qualia: the subjective experience of education itself.
We can measure proxies around it, certainly. Student experience. Continuation. Completion. Progression. The Office for Students produces precisely these kinds of measures. [5]
Some are useful.
But a proxy remains a proxy.
My worry is what happened to the people whose contribution didn't translate particularly well into those things institutions learnt to count.
Some were quiet. Some were awkward. Some were brilliant teachers with very little interest in empire building. One such person was a close friend of mine who was buried earlier this year, which perhaps explains why this part of the argument doesn't feel entirely abstract to me.
Others spent their time with students rather than accumulating titles, committees, strategic initiatives or territory.
Meanwhile, those who understood the changing game had an advantage.
That doesn't mean they were bad people.
It means they understood the game.
This wasn't simply done to universities
It would be far too convenient to blame all of this on academics.
Government policy matters enormously. Changes to funding, tuition fees and the development of a more explicitly competitive higher-education market altered the environment in which universities operated. The 2010 Browne Review is an obvious landmark in that history. [6]
Nor is the commercialisation of university life some peculiar theory of mine. Slaughter and Leslie were writing about “academic capitalism” in the 1990s, examining changing relationships between universities, academics, governments and markets across countries including the UK. Slaughter and Rhoades subsequently developed the idea further. [7,8]
Government policy changed the environment. Markets mattered. Regulation mattered. Mass higher education mattered.
But something bothers me about the way managerialism is sometimes discussed within universities, as though it were something entirely done to us by people outside the gates.
It wasn't.
Academics participated in it.
Some resisted it. Some tolerated it. And some became extremely good at it.
The transactionists
These are the people I think of as the transactionists.
Not because earning money is wrong. Not because ambition is wrong. Not because getting promoted somehow invalidates an academic career.
The interesting question is what institutions chose to reward.
Imagine, twenty years ago, two academics.
One is an exceptional teacher. Intellectually generous, perhaps slightly awkward, generous with students and colleagues, but largely uninterested in institutional politics.
The other learns that visibility matters. Grant capture matters. Programme expansion matters. Committees matter. Strategic initiatives matter. Being able to speak the developing language of institutional priorities matters.
Neither person needs to be a villain.
But fast-forward twenty years.
Which one is more likely to be sitting around the table deciding what the university values?
That is the question I find much more interesting.
What on earth have we been rewarding?
Because organisations select.
Not necessarily deliberately, and certainly not through some grand conspiracy. They select through promotion criteria, appointments, restructures, praise, status, workload allocation and access to decision-making.
People notice.
Younger academics notice what gets somebody promoted. They notice who gets invited onto the important committee. They notice which achievements receive an email from senior management and which disappear without comment.
Eventually people adapt.
And that is where my criticism becomes less about individuals and more about institutional culture.
If you repeatedly reward certain behaviours, the upper reaches of an organisation may eventually contain more people who possess those characteristics, or who have become particularly accomplished at performing them.
Then those people become selectors themselves.
The language survives. The criteria survive. Another generation learns what works.
I have previously used the word “acolytes” for this, but I don't mean disciples or members of some academic cabal. I mean something much more mundane: the inheritors of an institutional culture.
People learn what their organisation rewards.
Twenty years later, some of those people are themselves calling the shots.
Which leaves me wondering:
What on earth have we been rewarding?
When sharp elbows become something else
There is another part of this that makes me uncomfortable, and it concerns institutional power.
I use “sharp elbows” somewhat flippantly, but concerns about bullying and workplace culture in higher education are hardly new. That doesn't mean every allegation is true, nor does it mean that forceful or successful academics are bullies. It does mean that the relationship between career progression, institutional power and behaviour is worth examining.
One controversy at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2012 is interesting in this respect. A professor of psychology was suspended after questioning recruitment procedures in his capacity as a UCU representative. Contemporary reporting described supporters as raising concerns about academic freedom and what they alleged was a wider “culture of bullying”. Manchester Metropolitan University rejected allegations of bullying. [9]
The dispute travelled well beyond Manchester. A petition reportedly attracted around 3,000 signatures and a protest letter was signed by 75 academics, including Noam Chomsky. [9]
I mention this carefully. I am not in a position to determine whether the allegations made at the time were true, and I don't use the episode as evidence that Manchester Metropolitan University had a culture of bullying. Nor does one dispute establish anything about British higher education as a whole.
What interests me is the question it raises.
What happens when the characteristics that help somebody acquire institutional power are confused with the characteristics required to exercise that power well?
They aren't necessarily the same thing.
That question extends far beyond any individual or institution.
If an organisation rewards visibility, expansion, assertiveness, success in internal competition and the ability to speak its preferred managerial language, it seems reasonable to ask what sort of organisational culture those incentives eventually produce.
This isn't an argument that successful academics are bullies. It isn't an allegation that people were promoted because they bullied others. And it isn't an argument that there was some organised network passing power from one generation to another.
Something much more mundane would be sufficient.
People learn what their organisation rewards.
They watch who progresses. They learn the language. They see which activities attract recognition and which largely disappear from view. Behaviours associated with success are copied and, eventually, some of the people who learnt those behaviours become the people making the decisions.
Again, what on earth have we been rewarding?
Watching from retirement
There is an uncomfortable coda to all this.
Some of those who occupied influential positions during this transformation have now retired.
That isn't an accusation of wrongdoing, nor does it mean they didn't work hard or believe in the changes they supported. Many will sincerely believe that they left their institutions stronger than they found them.
But some of those involved in shaping that institutional culture are no longer professionally exposed to its longer-term consequences.
And what is happening now is difficult to ignore.
In its 2026 assessment of the financial sustainability of English higher education, the Office for Students reported that 35.8 per cent of providers had recorded a deficit in 2024–25. It also warned that improvements at sector level masked substantial differences between institutions and continuing financial pressures. [10]
So when I find myself thinking of Rome burning, I'm not suggesting that a generation of ambitious academics caused the present financial problems in higher education.
That would be ridiculous.
The causes are structural, political, demographic, economic and institutional.
My point is different.
I wonder whether some of the ways universities responded to those pressures gradually weakened their ability to recognise forms of academic value that didn't fit comfortably on a dashboard.
And there is an irony in watching the consequences unfold after some of the people involved in that transformation have left the stage.
Fiddling while Rome burns is far too simple.
But watching Rome burn from retirement is an uncomfortable image nonetheless.
This isn't an argument against success
The obvious response to all this is that it sounds like sour grapes.
A successful academic might reasonably say: I worked bloody hard to get where I am.
I'm sure many did.
But effort and institutional value aren't quite the same thing.
My argument isn't that successful academics didn't deserve their careers. Nor is it that quiet academics are automatically virtuous while ambitious ones are somehow corrupt. Both would be absurd.
It is about selection.
What characteristics did our universities reward?
What did they make easier?
What did they make harder?
Who rose through those systems?
And, perhaps most importantly, who learnt from them?
Because institutional cultures reproduce themselves.
What you reward today has a habit of becoming the leadership culture of tomorrow.
That is why I think blaming the latest vice-chancellor, dean, government, regulator or restructuring exercise is too easy.
The more uncomfortable question reaches further back.
Perhaps universities spent several decades constructing a selection environment and are now surprised by what they selected.
The transactionists didn't create the present crisis in higher education. That would be far too simple an explanation.
But I think we are entitled to ask whether the behaviours universities rewarded over several decades helped create the institutional culture through which that crisis is now being managed.
And that leaves me with the same question.
What on earth have we been rewarding?
References
Office for Students. About the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Office for Students.
Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093022000043065
Lynch, K. (2015). Control by numbers: new managerialism and ranking in higher education. Critical Studies in Education, 56(2), 190–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2014.949811
Strathern, M. (1997). ‘Improving ratings’: audit in the British University system. European Review, 5(3), 305–321. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1234-981X(199707)5:3%3C305::AID-EURO184%3E3.0.CO;2-4
Office for Students. Student outcome and experience measures. Office for Students.
Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance. (2010). Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Legge, J. (2012, 24 October). Manchester Metropolitan: ‘Bullying’ university bans world-renowned professor who spoke out. The Independent.
Office for Students. (2026). Financial sustainability of higher education providers in England 2026. Office for Students.