Under new government plans, scientists in the UK will have to pay £2,000 per article to have their research published in privately-owned academic journals.

These plans, spearheaded by universities and science minister David Willetts, are in response to a report by Dame Janet Finch which recommended “gold open access” for all scientific research published in this country. The idea is that publicly-funded research should be freely available for anyone to view, but the large subscription fees demanded by the journals place scholarly work behind an insurmountable pay-wall. Journals charge extortionate fees given what they actually do; services like typesetting, formatting and peer-review are all handled by the academic community itself, with the journals acting merely as third parties that facilitate these services. Many academics have already taken action against the hefty profits that the major journals extract out of universities; as of January 2013 a global boycott of publishing company Elsevier had 13,000 signatories. Despite this, British universities currently pay £200m a year in subscription fees to journals.

Given this, the prospect of open access looks attractive. But this is where the Finch Report comes in. “Gold” open access proposes to keep the publishing industry satisfied whilst simultaneously providing free access to scholarly articles. How? By taking the money out of the UK research budget and making the academics pay. Specifically, a researcher wishing to have their work peer-reviewed and made open-access will have to fork out “article processing charges” of £2,000 per article, to be paid out of the science research budget.

The plans disregard the alternative “green open access” favoured by many academics. In this model, articles are submitted to journals the same way as they are now, but in addition are also published on a free open access website. Such a model has already proved highly successful in several branches of science, and is an attractive low-cost solution to the open access problem.

The proposed plans put the interests of the publishing industry before those of UK scientific research. The government has shown a clear bias to the needs of large for-profit private companies, a bias in keeping with the current climate of increasing private influence in higher education and research, and a bias that can only be countered by local, organized resistance.

It’s that time of year again. Posters have started to appear on college and faculty notice boards encouraging third-year undergraduates to fill in the National Student Survey. Kitschy images of student radicalism are pusillanimously appropriated – a megaphone here, a raised arm there – in order to hold out the false promise of participation. The bureaucrats and the administrators want desperately to measure your ‘student experience’. But why? And to what end? Perhaps to improve your teaching and learning environment (TLE), or to open legitimate channels of ‘feedback’? Don’t believe a word of it.

The NSS is a blunt instrument. Think about it: can the full totality of your ‘student experience’ really be measured by choosing a number between one and five? Quite simply, it is a bad quantitative metric. To make matters worse, the results are fed into a national database by which different universities can measured against one another. The NSS is part of the ongoing drive to marketise higher education. It provides the statistics with which management will decide who to make redundant. Moreover, it is ridiculous on its own terms: how can a student’s experience in Cambridge be meaningfully measured against that of a student in, say, Newcastle or Brighton, given that these differing experiences will be unique and unrepeatable. A four in Cambridge means nothing when set against a three in Edinburgh, because the two different ‘quantities’ of experience are incomparable in a more fundamental, qualitative manner than the NSS administrators are prepared to countenance.

The hypocrisy of asking students to fill in ‘satisfaction questionnaires’ and to complete surveys which aim to quantitatively measure the ‘student experience’ – however vacuously or broadly the category might be defined – is that the current crop of students have no benchmark against which to measure their own experience. The empirical survey runs up against its own unperceived limits as soon as one tries to reach beyond the narrow horizon of the continuous present.

Students’ unions, including the NUS, must find their own workable means of providing students a forum in which to air their views and provide thoughtful criticism of their teachers in a constructive manner. The results should not be shared with those who might want to use such statistics as a means of disciplining the labour force with threats of redundancy.

Save yourself some time: don’t fill in the NSS.

When we say that capitalism has failed, I don’t just mean as an economic system; I’m talking about ‘capitalism’ as a state of mind, a way of thinking and feeling and relating to your fellow humans. It’s a system where opportunity is promised to all but only available to the few; which turns people into commodities, and makes us think about the measure of our lives in terms of the profit and the loss.

How else can we really explain the potential demise of the public education and health care systems, unless it is seen through a lens which shows humans’ relations to knowledge and health as not something to be valued in and of themselves, but reduced to cold cash payment only?

By what parameters has capitalism failed by? If we are to judge it by its own, it has, in some senses, never failed. Around us today, we only see its inevitable consequences, the entirely predictable end product of system based around greed and exploitation.

Ha-Joon Chang – by far one of the most interesting economists of our day – suggests that since the end of WWII, implicit social contracts have been held between a state and its people: “In these contracts, renewed legitimacy was bestowed on the capitalist system, once totally discredited following the great depression. In return it provided a welfare state that guarantees minimum provision for all those burdens that most citizens have to contend with throughout their lives – childcare, education, health, unemployment, disability and old age.”

He goes onto suggest that cuts – motivated by organisations like the IMF in a mad attempt to keep capitalism afloat – are rewriting social contracts by the back door, forcing people onto the streets to guard their livelihoods. Chang emphasises that economic change forces a political change which, he argues, threatens the make up of a democratic state.

Chang’s writing is food for thought, and I would agree that austerity is anti-democratic. But I would take things further; Chang, like many, leaves open the possibility of a ‘responsible capitalism’ of the type Ed Miliband seems so obsessed with. How can such a system be possible? It makes about as much senses as a ‘more equal ableism’ or a ‘less sexist misogyny’.

The problem may be less immediate, less obvious – in the case of the globalised economy, the wage slaves are just shuffled off to sweatshops in other countries – and it becomes similar to the way in which our society responds to sexism. It is not ‘misogyny’ to sexually objectify a woman; it is ‘banter’. It is not hateful towards women to encourage them to expose themselves and hold their sexuality up to a male gaze for approval and dismissal; it is popular culture.

Obviously, the issue of women’s rights and female emancipation cannot be directly held equivalent to capitalism, but the same principle of internalisation will apply on under ‘responsible capitalism’. We can pat ourselves on the back, congratulate us on our humanity, before going back to the same cycle of exploitation and misery, which has simply become the norm. Capitalism has not failed itself; it has failed us – to that end, it should be done away with.

TCS and the Sunday Times report that the Vice-Chancellor, known as
Boris to his friends, has been discussing how to privatise Cambridge
University. A new shining option lies on the table for the
administrators of Higher Education’s downward slide into the mudflats
of mediocrity: actual separation from state funding and control.

Making such a move would be difficult for our dear administrators. It
would involve a rewriting of charity law, as well as inventing a
mechanism by which Cambridge students could no longer apply to the
Student Loans Company, but instead would apply to the university’s own
fund – this is, after all, a large fraction of what state support really means.

Cambridge’s priorities must be met however, and that priority is
research. This is for the simple reason that Cambridge has two assets
on which it can draw: its reputation, and its endowment funds, newly
bolstered through the 800 campaign. Severance from state regulation
would mean that the University could charge fees higher than £9k -
indeed, because of its reputation, the University knows it can charge
fees up to the American level, or just below, and still reel in the
student numbers, as the rising costs of some postgraduate courses
show.

High fees would allow more funds to be siphoned into STEM research
(Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine), the real root of the
University’s survival plan, or what the Wilson Report on
Business-University Collaboration calls the ‘London-Cambridge pharma
corridor’. STEM research is costly, and if the University is to
continue to rake in the government rewards/incentives for
internationally cited research, then it needs to have the cash beyond
the five year plan of hiring University Council has already
recommended. High fees would supply the constant capital the
University needs to reproduce its machines.

That supply of money is, at root, extracted from human labour. The
high fees the new wave of students would pay wil themselves be
extracted from the wealth of the few, a wealth which can only be built
on the back of cheap and exploitative labour. And here’s the crux:
those people, the ones who will produce that wealth, are the model
citizens produced by the universities themselves.
This is a process which works within our University as much as between
other universities. If we look at the average humanities graduate,
you’ll see that they perform badly paid or often free labour in order
to further their job prospects. The same applies to a vast amount of
STEM graduates as well. That free and cheap labour they perform is
entirely contributive to any economic productivity which will allow
for the constant capital which the university machine requires. On
top, the labour performed *in* the university is itself wholly
underpaid: a vast quantity of staff in the university receive less
than a wage for the reproduction of their own 21st century lives (the
cambridge living wage), and that’s not even to bring in the manner in
which postgraduate teachers are relied on for underpaid labour time
which nonetheless provides the backbone for the ‘unique cambridge
experience’.

That experience is central to Boris’ plan. The Universiy knows it can
eat into its reservaes for some years in order to beat other
universities in the hiring game; but it also knows that there are
other universities willing to sell out more to companies in order to
bring in the private funding. Brunel and Cardiff can provide courses
in GlaxoSmithManagement, courses which might face
some resistance from the ivory-tower minds of Cambridge. So as long as
the students keep coming, Leszek knows that he can raise the fees on
them – and that means separating from the state regulations.

Separation from regulation is wonderous for Leszek potentially, but
bodes ill times of students, for with the maligned ‘interference’ of
the state comes the still occasionally visible  aspiration of the
university to be a public institution. This is what, at heart, allows
students the rhetoric of democracy and equality in the university -
not the ancient statutes of the medieval foundation.
Without the illumination of a discourse of public rights and duties,
the call for democracy,. transparency and fairness within Cambridge
would fade to a whisper, without any political
concordance. Given over to private finance, why should any university
bureaucrat – or even members of the sacred Public – give any heed to
what the wider social interest may be? Once the remit of the
university is so patently given over to the joint-stock company, the
principle drivers become the owners of that stock, not their customers
the students, and the driver of those share-holders would be – indeed,
legally is obliged to be – profit.

The mind of VC Boris is most likely still in the agonies of balance
sheets and development office conundrums – but the limit of his
cerebal function is clear: sell sell sell! Buy buy buy! All within the
safe, soft peddling language of the trusted university official, Boris
plans from his desk in Old Schools the rise of the machines – and with
it, the managed decline of democracy.