Shifting power

This was written for Grafik (formerly Graphics International)  in response to political policies that were causing enormous damage to the higher education sector – and specifically design. I was Head of Graphic Design at the time and it is a bit of a rant – almost a call-to-arms – but its editor, Caroline Roberts, didn’t cut a word. 
 

The problems currently faced by design lecturers in higher education arise from the fact that successive governments have imposed mass accessibility upon a system whose internal values remain elitist. 

Mass accessibility has resulted in increased student numbers – a good thing if it were not accompanied by severe financial cuts resulting in almost halving the number of hours students are taught, hitting hardest, but by no means exclusively, the part-time lecturer input. It naturally follows that the ‘elitist’ values, by which I mean lecturers simply being able to talk to individual students, are under severe strain. Those of us involved in the education process would like to maintain this close contact with students – nurturing individual lines of enquiry and offering appropriate technical support – and, surprisingly, so do the consecutive governments who have imposed mass accessibility. 

In fact, everyone; students, parents, and government, want the same thing from higher education, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the prospectuses which colleges’ marketing departments are distributing at this time of year. In these, you will find statements constantly referring to ‘family’ and ‘community’ and photographs portraying a similar, benevolent relationship between staff and students. Whilst colleges understand the mass nature of the education currently experienced by students, they recognise that what in fact, everyone wants is the opposite, and so continue to sell the close contact and individual attention experienced by previous generations of design students. This puts lecturers in an impossible position. As colleges have been swept up into the competitive and entrepreneurial environment, marketing has become a self-legitimising force which runs dangerously close to undermining the fundamental purposes of education. 

Litigation is already a problem, especially since colleges do not have the funds either to defend themselves or to pay costs and/or damages, and it will get worse as students, not unreasonably, compare what was promised with the reality they experience. What is the reality? Most courses now consist of approximately eighteen ‘taught’ hours per week, although final-year students often receive less, usually fifteen hours. Of these fifteen, eight hours will be studio-based, that is, time spent on current design projects with a lecturer present. Apart from any group discussion about work in hand, or if a lecture or demonstration is considered necessary, teaching will normally be in tutorial form. With an average size group of thirty-five students, this works out at about fifteen minutes with each student, or a popular alternative is to work in groups of four or five to increase student-lecturer contact. Another five hours will be in a specialist workshop, for graphic design students this often means the computer suite. This period is ‘tutor supported’ but is essentially to provide the third-year students with priority access to specialist equipment. Obviously, there are not enough computers for every graphics student, in fact, there will probably not even be enough for all of one year group. Finally, two hours for complimentary studies, usually delivered as a programme of lectures to three or four specialist groups at a time ensuring the lecture theatre is filled to capacity. Fifteen hours is two and a half days of standard college time. The paucity of tutor contact will be justified to students as ‘time to reflect’ or to encourage ‘self-management skills’. Not surprisingly, those students who can afford it will buy their own computer and work at home on all days except studio and complimentary studies time. It is not unusual for students to arrive in time for a tutorial and then immediately disappear once the session is finished. Since ‘hot-desking’ was introduced students do not have their own workspace any more and so there is no incentive to look upon the studio as their working base. In fact, the studio is now more like a classroom; as one year group leaves another comes in and the limited access to the computer suite and the pre-booking system for machines with specific facilities makes it difficult to justify spending money to get into college if a student has a computer at home. 

Part-time work is now an essential part of student life and often makes attendance outside their nominated fifteen hours (for guest lectures, meetings or group trips to exhibitions and events) impossible for many. In the early 1990s government funding for higher education in the UK was not ungenerous by international standards. Such comparisons are always problematic but figures produced by the DES in 1991 showed that UK higher Education expenditure fell into the middle range of the thirteen industrialised countries which were compared. However, a more detailed look at the figures reveals that whilst the UK had the highest expenditure on student support and welfare, (ie maintenance grants) it had the lowest expenditure per ‘qualifier’– that is; lecturers, technicians, support staff, buildings, equipment, libraries etc. Since these figures were published student enrolments have increased by more than 40% and yet support (qualifier) costs have continued to be cut yearly. Perhaps, in an attempt to redress the balance, UK governments in the last three years have made substantial (real) cuts to the student maintenance grant of 10% per annum and the current government has stated that it intends to abolish the maintenance grant completely. This year the government also introduced the policy that all higher education students must pay £1,000 towards the fees for each year of study. This is means-tested but there is no additional ‘student bank-loan’ provision to help with this. 

There has not been a significant drop in the number of applicants to higher education courses since the government introduced student payment of fees. The hurried introduction was unimaginative and crude but, in time, parents will learn to save for their children’s education just as they do in most other countries. Should we be concerned that we have lost what ‘most other countries’ have envied for so long? Since the 1960’s going on to higher education, has been, at least financially, an easy, almost natural progression. The ethos was one of fairness and equality. In the 1990s however, the competitive market for students, the development of consumerism and government charters, of students’ awareness of themselves as ‘purchasers’ of higher education and of their value to university budgets is beginning to encourage demands for ‘value for money’ from students. But not, or so it seems, from the design industry it serves. 

David Pocknell, currently something at the RSA and formally President of the CSD is very angry at what he has seen happening to design education, ‘In this country, students have a bloody awful time’. He is particularly concerned about the lack of industrial contact now that part-time lecturers no longer exist, ‘Courses are in danger of becoming ever more emersed in academia and as the paperwork to evidence the mechanics of courses increases it is hard to see where the remaining full-time lecturers, coping with huge increases in students, can find the time to keep in touch with what is happening outside education. I have heard judges at the RSA Bursaries exclaim, “Where are the tutors, who is leading these students?”’. Pocknell is currently an external assessor at Dundee College and has been associated with a number of colleges over the years so, fortunately, is aware of what is happening. He is also in no doubt that standards have dropped, ‘Particularly during the last three years’. Course leaders hesitate to complain about the loss of part-time staff (or the enforced increase in student numbers) for fear that it might stigmatise their own course and damage the future prospects of their students. But it is a fact that whilst the best students remain as good as ever (and of course, these are the ones that win the prizes and generate praise-worthy PR copy for higher education) course leaders are aware that the overall standards are being forced down. It is the average and below average students, those who need more attention and encouragement – the very students courses are forced to recruit in order to hit specified (increased) targets – who are suffering as a result of the recent government intervention. 

So why isn’t the RSA or the CSD protesting about this situation? Pocknell explains that the government has been steering a wide birth of the industry-bodies knowing full well they could not support their policies. With incorporation (independent status) came the green light for all colleges to set up their own HE courses. Of course, there were quality controls to be satisfied and adhered to, but in my own experience of being on validation panels, whilst assurances have been sought of academic rigour and course management, the course team’s general knowledge, understanding and personal experience of design and genuine contact with the professional design industry appears to be less of a priority. More than a hundred additional HE courses in graphic design have been set up, but whilst the number of students attending foundation and advanced GNVQ courses has also increased it certainly has not kept pace with the huge increase in places available at HE level. Despite graphic design and graphic media courses being among the most popular specialist subjects there can be very few FE ‘graphics’ students left without an offer of a place by the beginning of the academic year. 

In these circumstances, there are many in education who suspect that educational institutions have been building courses to make money rather than to serve either a local or national need. As the influence of executive-class administrators grows it appears to lecturers, who are expected to deliver the course as promised, that their role has become considerably more subservient and the particular needs of their specialist area of study are often ignored. Many believe that the result of this preference for executive hierarchy has led to the end of education-based decision-making, in fact, few design lecturers now regard their colleges or universities as being education-led any more. 

The last major expansion of higher education was in the sixties. Then, administrators had influence but not power. Their aim was to maintain the delicate balance of being responsive to local (college and community) needs but responsible to a local or regional authority to balance the books. Heads of departments held a great deal of influence because they were deemed suitably close to the lecturing staff and the students, often with teaching duties built into their timetable, but who also had a direct route to the highest administrative levels. The emphasis of administration was then on a low-key, informal, personal service. However, in the nineties, the unprecedented demand for data by government bodies led to the creation of bureaucracies within universities who, with control of information and its distribution have delusions of competence along with the undoubted power they now wield, consequently the managerial style has changed from consensual to tactical. 

New ideas such as students paying supplementary fees in order to gain access to privatised, specified levels of provision within libraries, computer facilities, careers and counselling services, have been aired, but so far with little response from potential providers. Perhaps administrative services could also be privatised and contracts developed for services such as finance, legal advice, ‘customer’ analysis, market research etc. To anyone teaching in higher education would be nothing fantastic about any of these suggestions, indeed we already have supermarket elements reflected in prospectuses as catalogues, home delivery in distance learning, consumer guides such as Which Degree? and telesales. If the entrepreneurial university can do better than its ivory-towered predecessor in exploiting the potential for synergy in higher education then I am all in favour. Indeed, if students contributing to the payment of their fees meant a stop to further cuts in the quality of the product they are ‘buying’ perhaps they would be in favour also. However, those in positions of power seem to have forgotten what we are all in education for, and as a result students, despite paying a high price for their courses, are beginning to feel distinctly irrelevant. 

What are the dangers of current government policies regarding higher education? The cutting of student support and payment of fees, certainly in the short-term, will be that full-time enrolments will fall, the hardest hit being mature students seeking part-time access. Whilst a few art colleges, probably based in London, will be able to charge significant ‘top-up’ fees, generating income which will create a premier league of colleges for the few students who can afford it, the majority of colleges, particularly if government view the payment of fees by students as an opportunity to cut yet more expenditure to higher education, will find themselves in a further downward spiral of resources, narrower student intake; increasingly local, desperately trying to maintain quality, lacking the capacity or resources to innovate. They will be compared, unfairly yet unfavourably, with the performance of the more expensive and truly (in the financial sense) elitist colleges. Many courses will close. Opportunities for full-time higher education away from home will be restricted to those students with parents in the upper-income groups. This is already happening as a result of the cuts to student maintenance grants and the trend will be exacerbated by the introduction of higher education on a fee-paying basis. It follows that HE courses will be encouraged to offer programmes of study that are more generalist in nature in order to cater for an essentially local student intake. More specialist design courses, such as typography, which need to recruit nationally, will find it progressively more difficult to find sufficient students of the right calibre. 

If the previous ten years have been about the advent of mass higher education in quantitive terms, the prime concern of the next ten years will be about coming to terms with the qualitative consequences. On the whole, design education has not failed. Yet. Our commitment to intellectual rigour, technical dexterity, and relevance to industrial needs has not been lost as most are still doing what we did before the reforms of the 1990s; perhaps not as effectively, and probably not to the overall standards we might previously have attained. But there appears to be little support from outside and most design course teams are feeling distinctly isolated and certainly vulnerable to further ‘efficiency’ measures. However, support might yet come, and from a source that has been remarkably quiet during this period of change. 

In the last ten years, power has moved away from the lecturers and their departmental heads and towards the administrators. Now, with the government’s introduction of fee-paying students there has been another fundamental shift of power. There has been little effect so far, just a few isolated examples of litigation, low rumblings in the student refectories. However, in Paris, during the sixties, violent protests were ignited because tuition-paying students could not see their tutors often enough, could not attend lectures due to lack of space, and could not use essential equipment because there was insufficient access and technical support. This air of revolt also took hold in the UK, more specifically at Hornsey, Guildford and Brighton Colleges of Art, but these actions never became as intense as those witnessed in Paris, and why should they, the sixties were a time of comparatively generous funding for higher education in the UK. This has now all changed. Students have been remarkably indifferent to the state of higher education during this recent period of intense cuts. Perhaps now, having to pay for what they receive will awaken them from their stupor.