UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance

Universities in the UK are in crisis. Job cuts in the sector are reaching ‘cataclysmic’ levels, with an estimated 10,000 already lost and many more at risk. Just days before Christmas, Coventry University confirmed shocking plans to make nearly 100 redundancies while transferring remaining staff to a subsidiary company on poorer terms and conditions. Such cuts harm the faculty and staff leaving the higher-education system as well as the diminished departments and institutions that remain. Downsizing higher education in the name of corporate efficiency squanders the collective expertise and experience in which immense public resources have been invested. This manufactured crisis, however, is far from inevitable. The time has come to revitalise higher education funding in the UK by extending what Cornell legal scholars Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova call ‘the finance franchise’ to universities.