Richard Gombrich: British Higher Education Policy (2000)

The blog heading (above) is linked to the text of a talk given by Richard Gombrich in Tokyo, 2000: British Higher Education in the last 20 years: the murder of a profession. I came across it last year whilst looking for facts and figures on the changing context of British higher education - the enormous increase in numbers of students now attending universities, the simultaneous reduction in library funding, the shift to contract work for staff, and the rise of the RAE and QAA. Such major changes cannot help but have consequences for a country, and I found this talk enormously useful for gathering together the major factors that have altered the structure of higher education. It was also extremely interesting for the anecdotal evidence it provides about on the fictional nature of the RAE. Michael Power (see below) has written consistently on this and has steadily uncovered the structural impossibility within the logic of the audit function. Richard's talk includes some examples of the way that this pressure forces a fabrication into existence whilst also insisting it is treated with the weight of a fact.