As regular readers will know, I have been a little preoccupied of late so I learned rather late that the British prime minister Gordon Brown has decided to merge two ministries - the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills which includes responsibility for higher and further education and the existing Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform - to form the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

The logic of the merger is the desire to align education with business’s needs for skills aimed at economic growth. This is how the government describes what the new department will do in relation to adult education:

Assess the changing skills needs of the UK economy, especially the intermediate and high skills vital in a global economy and design policies to meets them through public and privately funded life long training;
Invest in the development of a higher education system committed to widening participation, equipping people with the skills and knowledge to compete in a global economy and securing and enhancing Britain’s existing world class research base;
Continue to invest in the UK’s world class science base and develop strategies for commercialising more of that science;
Continue to invest in skills through the Further Education system to help people through the downturn and to prepare Britain for the future

My gripe with this (actually I left an impression of my balding pate on the ceiling) is that education serves a broader purpose than nurturing market participants.

Apparently I’m not alone. The editorial in Times Higher Education was scathing:

“There have been widespread fears for some time about the corrupting effects of commerce on the academy: graduates have been encouraged by the Government to think not of the personal and civilising benefits of a university education, but only in terms of the extra cash they will earn...

With this move, the Government has gone the whole hog: it appears to have delivered higher education into the arms of Mammon, or at least into the hands of Lord Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary and First Secretary. Its zeal for higher education supporting the pursuit of a knowledge-based economy has led to the creation of a department that takes its inspiration from entrepreneurial reality-TV shows.”

Even Margaret Thatcher’s former secretary of state for education, Lord Baker, remarked in the House of Lords:

"Universities are not basically about improving competitiveness or building industrial strategy. They are essentially custodians of scholarship, intellectual rigour and world class teaching.”

Lord Mandelson justifies the merger arguing that it is crucial in order to sustain a recovery even though the economy appears to be on the road to recovery without it.

He goes on to suggest that “it is possible to further boost the role of universities in generating our economic growth without in any way compromising the place of fundamental science or curiosity-driven research in their mix.” But can he and his ministry be trusted to do so?

While attempting to reassure universities that their autonomy and independence from government will be preserved, he warns that:

“There is a need to make sure we set the right overall strategic direction in the UK in terms of some of the key skills and specialist knowledge that we will need to excel in a global economy”

That strategic direction will be set by a ministry whose primary focus is serving business, a department which before the merger the environmentalist George Monbiot surmised “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest”.

We can already begin to see how this will pan out. An emergency plan to create another 10,000 places for university students this autumn is to be restricted to those applying for science-related courses.

Lord Mandelson demonstrates himself repeatedly to be a man of singular impulse. He recently urged the European Parliament – the lower house of the European Community’s bicameral legislature - to be "Europe's economic conscience", pushing European member states to work together to rebuild Europe's economic strength. I’m not sure what economic strength has to do with conscience but presumably throwing them together into one phrase was meant to soften a request that boils down to abandoning the non-competitiveness aspects of Parliament’s legislative remit including healthcare, research, environment, social policy and immigration policy.

The issue here is not whether “business” is good and can be trusted with adult education; it is whether in principle responsibility for educational policy should be placed in a department whose interest in education is so entirely instrumental and narrow.
 

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