Lorna Finlayson, Irreversible — Sidecar

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https://doi.org/10.64590/q68Irreversible<br>Lorna Finlayson<br>29 May 2026Society

The British university is dying, and it seems that almost nobody cares. It may also be true that many people do not know. News coverage of recent cuts, redundancies and closures has been notably sparse. In any case, academics have been reporting the imminent death of the university, or of the humanities (whatever those are), for so long that they might now be suspected of exaggeration. Privileged professors, whining again.

Yet this is a not a case of crying wolf. As with the climate catastrophe, warnings of the coming crisis of higher education have been true for some time. And we are now entering a critical stage. Almost every academic I know is facing the threat of redundancy. Some have already been forced out; some have received their formal ‘at risk’ letters from management; others have just survived the latest round of cuts; others still have been offered ‘voluntary severance’ – presented as a means to avoid compulsory redundancies, yet followed by them as reliably as night follows day (thus making the ‘voluntary’ something of a misnomer: many view it as a chance to jump before you are pushed). There has long been a problem of ‘casualization’ in academia, and a shortage of permanent jobs. Now the problem is that even the so-called ‘permanent’ jobs are in practice no more permanent than the one- or two-year ‘fixed term’ positions. Nobody can be confident of still having a job in five years’ time. Universities are not just downsizing. Many are at risk of going under altogether. A few are unlikely to last the year.

Some academics may still believe that it is possible to weather this storm. Certainly, this belief is encouraged by university managers, who promise blue skies on the other side of every new spree of culling and cutting, mergers and ‘re-structures’ (the Vice-Chancellor of my university tells us that we are sailing towards ‘financial sustainability with soul’). But this is not a storm that will eventually pass. Short of some drastic and unexpected intervention, divine or otherwise, it will be a permanent change in the climate. And short of the arrival of some kind of Noah’s Ark, the British university as we know it is destined for extinction sooner rather than later.

This is because the funding model of higher education is fundamentally broken, and has been since at least 2011, which saw the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees and the simultaneous removal of most of the government funding. This was the beginning of the end, but for reasons which might not be immediately obvious. The high fees did not, at least initially, put students off going to university, even those from lower-income backgrounds. Students were able to take out government loans on – again, at least initially – quite favourable terms; repayments would not begin until a certain income threshold was reached and would be written off after thirty years. But whereas previously universities had received money directly from the government, now the money would come from student fees (borrowed, of course, from the government). From the university’s point of view, at least, it might be hard to see why this should make much difference.

In fact, it makes all the difference. The reason is boring but crucial. Simplifying slightly: under the old system, there were separate ‘pots’ for research and teaching – some money for research; some money for each student you had to teach. Under the new system, there is no pot for research (at least for the arts and humanities): the money must come out of student fees. This transforms the operations of the university – and much for the worse. While in the old system, there was no particular incentive to increase your student numbers (and, in fact, an incentive for the government to limit them), under the new one, there is an incentive and even necessity to attract as many as possible. So whereas in the past universities could concentrate on teaching and research, now they spend a huge amount of their time and resources on a perpetual scramble for students. This competition has only grown more cut-throat since the cap on student numbers was lifted, which meant that more prestigious universities could hoover up more, leaving others to fight over the shrinking remainder.

Meanwhile, tuition fees – which, though high enough to burden students with unrepayable debt, have not risen in line with inflation and have therefore declined in value – are simply not enough to plug the gap in universities’ finances left by the withdrawal of central funding. The answer cannot be higher fees; undergraduate numbers are already declining, as increasing numbers of young people judge that university is not worth it, so it is unlikely that they would be willing to pay even more. The system has been kept afloat only by the higher fees paid by international students. Brexit and...