King's College London: world leaders in business nonsense
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Version 0 of 1. Last November a letter appeared in the London Review of Books that should be carved into stone. It recalled a reception held in the early 90s at the British embassy in Tokyo, where some attache was guffing on about how the dreaming spires of Albion were going to become centres of enterprise – just like the private sector. On hearing this, a normally "polite and reserved" Japanese professor felt moved to protest: "Your universities – they will follow British business model? But British business is … I am sorry … it is not well. It is dead, and your universities are famous and respected. They are not dead." Not yet, sensei – but we're working on it, with a succession of reforming blows and improving cuts. The latest assault is taking place on the Strand, in the centre of the capital, at one of the most renowned universities in the UK. The phrase "university in crisis" does not bring to mind King's College London. Established in 1829, it has worldwide renown, along with well over £1bn in assets, endowments, investments and cash. Yet in the past couple of months it has become the setting for a farce – an especially odd farce, mind, that winds up making you furious. In May, university managers announced that 120 scientists would lose their jobs. Just like that: no warning, no testing of the waters to see who might go for voluntary redundancies. Nor any budgetary emergency: the most recent accounts begin with "The college is in a strong financial position", and last year it had income of £587m. Yet managers claim more cash is needed to fund expansion – especially to buy and maintain buildings. We'll come back to that point. But first put yourself in the loafers of an executive at King's, looking to make mass redundancies. How to choose who should go? Perhaps, I can hear you venturing, perhaps let go of the less able, or the ones pursuing less vital lines of inquiry? Ah, how naive. The axe-wielders at King's have set two primary criteria for which health researchers get to keep their jobs: either they are already teaching students for a minimum number of hours, or they are bringing in lots of grant money. According to a confidential college "consultation document", a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry is expected to be making his college £200,000 in grant funding. Every year. The paper makes no mention of the quality of the research, nor of its independence from commercial interests. Going by these criteria, a psychiatry professor taking 200 grand from Nando's to prove that grilled chicken engenders wellbeing would be golden; his colleague looking into schizophrenia in the prison system on half that amount would be for the chop. You may think this boneheaded; you haven't heard the half of it. After the Times Higher Education published a criticism of the cuts by the Oxford psychology professor Dorothy Bishop, King's representatives went below her online article to announce that they'd changed their mind on the cuts announced just six weeks earlier – there would be only half the layoffs. The new sum of 57 was described as the "result of a robust and thorough review". You may justifiably ask if that meant the earlier review had been done just for laughs. You may, with even more justification, ask what kind of employer informs its staff whether or not they'll be keeping their jobs through an internet comments thread. But this is King's – an institute of higher education ever keen to mimic whatever nonsense it sees as businesslike practice. This is the college where IT staff have to fill in performance appraisals asking if they've "delighted our customers"; where executives have previously told students not to worry about cuts to teaching staff, because they'll have better Wi-Fi to compensate; where the outgoing college principal, Rick Trainor, recently justified his £321,000 annual pay package by saying: "If you want the best, you have to pay the best." If anyone has a claim to be among the best, it's the health researchers at King's. Over the past century college alumni have won 12 Nobel prizes, for work including the development of beta-blockers, a vaccine for yellow fever and mapping DNA. Just last week staff at one of the threatened schools were all over the papers for having discovered a blood test that makes it easier to detect Alzheimer's disease. Why do King's bosses want to trash this? It's not for financial security: the credit-rating agency S&P warned managers last year that "pressure to maintain academic and non-academic service standards will weigh on ability to cut costs further". Partly it's so that the college, which already has one of the most valuable property portfolios in Britain, can keep buying buildings – as if real estate lay at the core of the academic ideal. But it also reflects a bigger trend in our universities, which are increasingly beset by league-table watching and groupthink. In their plans, King's managers make much of their hopes of being just below Imperial and Oxbridge. Asked which league table they were looking at, senior management replied: "As a single measure of league table ranking, we use income or research income." In other words: forget about academic quality – feel my wad. That Japanese professor was right: pushed into a marketplace, the managers of higher education don't really know how to act. So they ape each other, pass off what they are doing to what's left of the staff as the new wisdom – and pay themselves vast sums for wrecking one of the few sectors in which Britain leads the world. The result in all its strategic confusion and grasping anxiety is the university version of The Thick of It: from bean to cup, those HE bosses fuck up. Twitter: @chakrabortty |