Academic freedom, autonomy and accountability in British universities

ABSTRACT This paper argues that, using Eric Ashby's earlier writing on academic freedom and autonomy and Burton Clark's more recent essay on the different modes of co-ordination, the current British Government has unnecessarily terminated the University Grants Committee and in its overreliance on market forces in higher education is threatening the future academic integrity of British universities. (The public sector is not dealt with in this paper.) Ashby sees academic freedom as an “internationally recognized and unambiguous privilege of university teachers˚d which must be protected whenever and however challenged. In contrast, “the question as to what constitutes autonomy in universities is anything but unambiguous, and the patterns of autonomy which satisfy academics are very diverse˚d. In exploring autonomy issues, it is helpful to know whether the Government is intervening in procedural or substantive matters. The former (e.g. pre-audits, controls over purchasing, personnel, capital construction) can be an enormous bother to academe and sometimes even counter-productive to efficiency, but still do not usually prevent universities from ultimately achieving their goals. In contrast, Governmental actions that affect substantive goals affect the heart of academe. What is needed in this sensitive area, then, is a suitably sensitive buffer mechanism which can reconcile the Government's legitimate need for accountability and the universities' vital need for maximum autonomy consonant with that accountability. Burton Clark points out that there are in fact four major modes of co-ordination: political, bureaucratic, academic and market-driven; and that most systems of higher education partake of all four of these modes, though in differing amounts in different times and places. On the basis of Clark's categories, I judge that the widely-heralded success of the University Grants Committee from its establishment in 1919 into the early 1970s rested mainly on its strong ability to tap the academic modes of co-ordination; but that it could be faulted for inadequate sensitivity to market forces. The current Government reforms, however, in terminating the UGC and creating a Universities' Funding Council which is supposed to operate more on contracts than grants, are an over-reaction to the earlier problems. Competition without heavy doses of what Edward Shils has termed the “academic ethic˚d may lead to piecemeal fragmentation of the academic integrity of British universities.