The universities of this Realm are among its most ancient and most honourable institutions. They were old before the Reformation; the Conquest is scarcely older than the elder of them. For many centuries they served as the chief nursery of clerks and lawyers, of physicians and divines, and of such men of affairs as required true learning before they assumed the burden of office. I sent more than one young man to Cambridge in my own time, and I should not have done so had I thought the place a mere dispenser of pieces of paper. That the universities of England have been brought to their present condition — bloated in number, diminished in purpose, sustained by the fees of foreign scholars, and increasingly hostile to the free contest of ideas upon which all true learning dependeth — is a matter that demandeth remedy without further delay.
The disorder hath two authors. The first is the Act of 1992, whereby the polytechnics — institutions of honest and practical purpose — were converted into universities not to elevate them but to flatter them, and the very name was thereby debased. The second is the great expansion of the Blair years, which flooded a weakened system with students who would have been better served elsewhere, saddling them with debts they shall never repay in exchange for degrees that have not served them. That near half of all graduates will never earn sufficient to discharge their loans is not a footnote but an indictment. The state hath been complicit in a mis-selling on a scale to make a Cheapside huckster blush.
A university worthy of the name doth three things at once. It produceth original learning of the highest order. It teacheth the young rigorously and selectively, refusing those who cannot meet its standard. And it sustaineth a place of genuine intellectual contest, wherein minds may be changed by argument and not protected from it. An institution that cannot do all three is something else — a college, a technical school, a place of professional training, all of them honourable callings — but it is not a university, and it ought not to be called one.
What followeth is a proposal to restore to the universities what they once possessed, and to relieve them of what they have wrongly assumed: to concentrate funding upon the few institutions that have earned the name across centuries, to honour the vocational estate as the proper preparation for the greater part of the working life of the Realm, and to dismantle the conformity of thought that hath made these places less free than they were in my own day. The remedy is not gentle. It will not need to be.
I. The Case for Reform
Two acts of policy, taken in the language of opportunity, that have done lasting damage to the higher learning of the country.
Two policy decisions shape the present system. The first is the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, which converted the polytechnics into universities. The polytechnics had a clear purpose — applied, vocational and technical education at the higher level — and they performed it well. Conversion did not improve them. It changed their mission and prompted a generation of institutions to reshape themselves for a role they were not built for.
The second is the Blair-era expansion, which set a target of fifty per cent participation and brought large numbers of students into the system for whom university was not the best route. The result is a sector in which the same title now covers institutions of very different kinds, from world-leading research universities to teaching-focused providers whose graduates see limited returns.
The system is also financially exposed. A growing share of university income depends on overseas student fees, concentrated in a handful of source countries. Disruption to that flow — through visa policy, geopolitical shift or competition from other destinations — would leave many institutions unable to cover their costs from domestic income alone. A funding model that relies on sustained demand from specific foreign markets is not a stable basis for long-term planning.
II. Numbers & Concentration
Fewer institutions, stronger institutions, and a market disciplined by outcomes rather than expansion targets.
A university, in the sense used here, combines three functions: original research of high quality, selective and rigorous teaching and an environment in which contested ideas can be examined openly. Institutions that do not combine all three are doing something else — which may be valuable — but they are not universities in the full sense, and policy should not treat them as if they were.
The sector has expanded beyond the number of institutions that can sustain all three functions at a high standard. The practical implication is contraction. Participation should return to something closer to pre-expansion levels — around one in three of young people rather than one in two. Funding should be concentrated in a smaller number of stronger universities. Institutions that cannot meet that standard should become vocational colleges, technical institutions or specialist schools. These are valuable roles in their own right, and the country needs more of them, not fewer.
The role of age and track record
No institution has a guaranteed right to survive. Age and track record are relevant as evidence of sustained performance, and an institution that has maintained rigour over a long period carries a presumption that a newly chartered body does not. The test is not age in itself but whether an institution has combined rigorous research, selective admissions and high standards over time. Where it has, the presumption favours continuity. Where it has not, age alone does not carry weight.
Market within constraints
Much of this can be achieved through market mechanisms operating within clear rules set by the state. Three reforms matter most. Degree-awarding powers should be restricted and more rigorously enforced, so that the threshold for becoming and remaining a university is high and properly monitored. Failing institutions should not be bailed out; an orderly exit from the sector should be treated as a normal outcome rather than a crisis. And course funding should follow graduate outcome data, so that public money tracks the actual returns students receive from different courses.
Tuition fees should be freed to rise. The current cap suppresses differentiation and leads strong institutions to cross-subsidise weaker ones, including through overseas recruitment. A free fee market, combined with restored maintenance grants for students from low-income households and a stricter loan repayment regime, would allow stronger institutions to price accordingly and leave weaker ones exposed to the real economics of their offer.
III. Access & the Vocational Estate
Lowering the barriers of background and poverty while preserving the barriers of academic standard.
Nothing in this argument implies that students from low-income backgrounds should be excluded from selective universities. Barriers of background and poverty should be lowered through every available means: restored maintenance grants, outreach into schools that rarely send students to selective institutions and contextual admissions that distinguish a strong candidate from a weak school from a coasting candidate from a strong one. The aim is to widen the pool from which the most able are drawn, not to lower the standard at which they are admitted.
Academic standards themselves should not be lowered. Entry to a university should be decided on academic ability. A student from a challenging background who meets that test should be welcomed. One who does not should be supported, with equal respect and equal public investment, into the vocational route.
The vocational route
A significant task for policy is to make the vocational route properly respected in practice as well as in principle. Apprenticeships, technical colleges, higher technical qualifications and professional certificates are the appropriate preparation for a large share of working life, and they should be funded, designed and valued on that basis.
This requires more than statements of intent. It requires public investment in technical institutions comparable to what universities receive. It requires employers to be involved in the design and delivery of qualifications. And it requires the state to discuss technicians and skilled tradespeople with the same seriousness currently reserved for graduates. Attitudes toward these routes have improved but remain uneven, and policy can do more to close the gap.
IV. The Freedom of Inquiry
A problem that no reform of numbers or funding can fix on its own.
There is a problem in the universities that reforms to numbers or funding will not on their own resolve. Over a generation, through a gradual process rather than a single decision, the range of views that can be expressed on campus without professional or social cost has narrowed. Students who encounter uncomfortable ideas are often encouraged to seek protection from them rather than engage with them. Academics holding minority views find silence to be the less costly option. Speakers whose arguments are unwelcome are sometimes uninvited, no-platformed or shouted down.
This matters because engaging with challenging ideas is central to what a university is for. A student whose prior views have not been tested, whose thinking has not been stretched and who has had little practice in answering disagreement has not received the full value of a university education, whatever the final classification. The purpose of higher education is to develop better thinkers, which requires exposure to ideas students may find wrong or uncomfortable and the opportunity to respond to them with argument.
Formal incidents — no-platforming, cancelled events, disinvited speakers — are the visible face of the problem and the easier aspect to address through clear rules and sanctions. The harder and more significant issue is the cultural pattern that produces those incidents: the narrow range of views represented in hiring and promotion, the social cost attached to dissent and the self-censorship that operates long before any formal sanction is needed. Both need to be tackled, but the second is the more important.
V. Inspection & Enforcement
A formal inspectorate to examine the intellectual health of the universities, with real powers to act on what it finds.
The appropriate mechanism is independent inspection. A new inspectorate, modelled on His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services, should assess the intellectual health of universities. Its remit would cover hiring practices and the range of opinion represented in academic appointments, speaker policies and the handling of contested events, the treatment of academics holding minority views, formal and informal mechanisms of self-censorship, and students' experience of intellectual challenge across the curriculum.
Inspection reports would be published in full. Institutions with identified weaknesses would be named, the findings set out plainly and a defined period given for response and remedy.
Powers of the Secretary of State
The Education Secretary should have the power to act on the inspectorate's findings. Available actions should include varying the terms of a university's charter, suspending its degree-awarding powers in whole or in part, withdrawing public funding from specified courses or departments, and in the most serious cases removing the right to use the title of university.
University autonomy is granted on the understanding that it will be used in the service of free inquiry. Where it is used to restrict inquiry instead, the case for that autonomy weakens. The aim of the inspectorate is to support genuine academic freedom, not to limit it.
VI. Curricula & Standards
Universities determining their own teaching, but answerable for the standard at which it is delivered.
Universities should continue to set their own curricula, as they always have. The state should not prescribe what is taught or by whom. The closure of departments and the discontinuation of subjects for financial reasons should, however, be reviewed by the inspectorate and reported on publicly, so that the choices institutions are making about their academic priorities are visible to the public that funds them.
No subject is inherently unsuitable for university study. The test is the standard at which it is taught. A course taught rigorously, grounded in real scholarship and delivered to students of demonstrated ability is a university course. The same subject offered mainly to fill places and generate fees is not. The distinction is not always straightforward, but it is available to inspection and should be made explicitly rather than left unexamined.
VII. The Reformed Universities
What higher education looks like under this settlement.
The reformed system would be smaller and more concentrated. Fewer institutions would carry the title of university, and those that did would meet a consistent standard. They would conduct research of international standing, admit students selectively on academic merit and sustain a culture in which contested ideas could be examined openly. The vocational sector — colleges, technical institutions, professional bodies — would be properly resourced and would carry a significantly larger share of post-18 education than it does today. Public funding would be better matched to the outcomes students actually receive.
Reform on this scale is unlikely to come from the universities themselves. They have had a long period in which to adjust, and the direction of change has largely been toward expansion and standardisation rather than concentration and differentiation. The framework has to be set externally — not to manage the universities directly, which would create its own problems, but to define the conditions within which they operate and retain their autonomy.