Introduction

In this chapter, we analyse how British Higher Education policy documents construct particular ideas about students, academics and their relationship with the University and with each other. Although policy documents focus on the institutions of Higher Education, laying out changes to organisation, funding and regulation, the University is not merely an institution. It is a community of people and a network of relationships, which operate according to distinct norms and values. In a centralised system such as that in Britain, where the vast majority of Higher Education institutions are funded by the state, shifts in policy can have a rapid and direct effect on the type and nature of the provision offered. This has been particularly stark since the 1980s, as market pressures have intensified, the principles of professional and institutional autonomy have waned, and Higher Education has been subjected to an unprecedented amount and scope of reform according to the logic of neoliberal discourses (Berdahl, 1990; Molesworth et al, 2011).

This chapter will reveal how processes of marketisation, financialisation, massification and politicisation map onto the ethos and the understanding of the University. Through charting the development of Higher Education policy from the post-war Robbins Report to the present day, we show how the ‘student-as-consumer’ and the ‘academic as service provider’ have been constructed, to the point where the imperative to higher study is predominantly presented as an individual transaction, necessary for a student's career and future earnings: in contrast to previous statements of the importance of Higher Education as a public good. This change in purpose frames generational experiences, expectations and accounts of working and studying in Higher Education, revealed throughout the book. We suggest that this policy churn is implicated in the emergence of a state of hysteresis (Bourdieu, 1988), where the academic field has transformed, and is contradictory and uncertain. These tensions, to do with the current purpose and meaning of the University, are experienced by academics and students alike.

The introduction of tuition fees has explicitly positioned students as consumers, who receive Higher Education not as something they have earned through academic study, or as something society wants them to do, but as a product or service that they have chosen and purchased for their own personal benefit.