What would you change about modern society?

There are many answers to the question above. One simple yet important change we can make is the following: stop running universities, and higher education generally, as profit-hungry hedge funds. Universities are there to provide education, but since the 1990s, they are being run as business enterprises answerable to hedge fund shareholders.

Astra Taylor, writing in The Nation magazine in 2016, relates a joke about Harvard University. Have you heard the latest? Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached. A light hearted observation, but this subject has a dark underbelly. Decades of neoliberalism have hollowed out universities, turning them into profit maximisation institutions, undermining the quality and role of higher education.

It is not just The Nation magazine writing about this issue. Let’s have a look at one of the Long Reads in The Guardian.

Since the introduction of neoliberal logic into the higher education sector, students have been turned into consumers, courses are marketable products, and university deans are transformed into corporate managers.

William Davies, writing about the deterioration of universities in Britain throughout the fourteen years of Tory government (2010 – 2024), states that “Political insistence that higher education must operate like a market has led to many of the worst pathologies of market societies.” As he explained in his article, the dilapidated state of public services, the increasing number of local government bankruptcies, and cuts in funding for arts are part of a society-wide assault on the public provision of services by governments.

Universities have been swept up in this neoliberal logic – everyone is a user, and users should pay. Fair enough, but governments have an obligation to provide taxpayer funded higher education to produce an educated citizenry. Engineering, mathematics, law, medicine – all these pursuits are equally important. So are the social sciences and humanities, because these provide the foundation for tackling the wider socioeconomic and political issues.

Universities are not bastions of politically correct and dogmatic ‘wokeism.’ Right wing commentators and Tory party policymakers deliberately pushed the marketisation of universities as the antidote to these supposedly bloated overarching institutions dependent on the public purse. The culture wars, overlaying the economic attacks on the public sector, have created a constituency that devalues sociology, politics and the humanities generally.

The power of the market grows, not because of a shrinking state sector. The state, through its laws and regulations, cedes power to market forces in areas of society where public participation is highest, such as healthcare and education. The state and market grow simultaneously, with state expenditures on police, surveillance, intelligence gathering and dissent suppression growing exponentially.

By cynically positioning themselves as defenders of higher education against politically charged ‘wokeism’ and loony leftie dogma, the Tory governments, and their right wing counterparts in the United States, have cancelled opposition to public education cuts by splitting the working class voters along educational lines. Why should solid blue-collar types care about universities that teach undergraduates irrelevant ‘Mickey mouse’ courses such as medieval Icelandic poetry?

By importing the MAGA style cultural attacks into British politics, the Tories proceeded to implement an economic programme of commercialising universities begun by Tony Blair’s New Labour. It was New Labour that introduced tuition fees, importing international students (and then allowing anti-immigration cultural anxieties about ‘too many foreigners’ in Britain to flourish), and increasing the numbers of casual/temporary adjunct staff to teach at universities.

Adjunct faculty make up an increasingly precarious section of academia. Long hours, temporary contracts, growing workloads, while vice-chancellors pocket huge pay checks; it is no wonder that militancy is growing among the adjunct staff.

Mae Losasso, writing in Jacobin magazine, observes that opposition to turning universities into knowledge factories is nothing new. Decades ago, American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929) denounced the push to convert universities into factories of merchantable knowledge. The intrusion of corporate interests into higher education, Veblen warned, would result in the overturning of intellectual ideals.

Britain’s universities have declined precipitously in the years of neoliberal globalisation. However, the elite universities are doing just fine. Oxford, Cambridge – these institutions are still ranked among the top ten universities in Europe.

However, the vast majority of Britain’s universities and colleges are struggling for funds, and have had to cut back courses. Sheffield University, renowned throughout the world for its archaeology course, has proposed abolishing the archaeology department altogether.

It is not just me highlighting the role of universities as gigantic profit-hungry hedge funds. Law professor Victor Fleischer, back in 2015, lambasted Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Texas universities for hoarding money. While tuition fees for students increase, and saddled with huge debts once they graduate, these institutions have hundreds of millions of dollars in private endowments and shareholding portfolios.

Fleischer asks the pertinent question; what purpose do these endorsements serve? Do they help to sustain an educational institution through financial crises, and help in the provision of education? Or are they there to increase profits for ultrawealthy hedge fund owners?

It is more than high time to stop running universities as bloated hedge funds, and get them back into public education.