A Time of Contradiction

This is part two of a six-part series on this topic.

There is a question that almost nobody in UK higher education dares to asks aloud, even though the answer to it shapes everything about how universities respond to the disruptions now bearing down on them: what are universities actually for? Not what their mission statements say, not what vice-chancellors tell parliamentary select committees, but what they are genuinely, operationally, in practice doing with the three or four years of a young person's life that passes through their hands. Because the honest answer to that question is rather different from the official one, and the gap between those two answers is, at this moment, one of the most consequential unacknowledged facts in British public life.

For most of their thousand-year history, universities had a reasonably coherent answer to that question. They existed to form scholars: people who would master the accumulated knowledge of a discipline, contribute to its extension through original research, and transmit what they knew to the next generation of scholars who would do the same. That was a minority pursuit by design, available to a small elite and premised on the idea that deep disciplinary expertise was itself the point, not a means to any other end. Then, within a single generation, that changed entirely. Tony Blair's government set its fifty per cent participation target in 1999, and universities responded by tripling student numbers, expanding campuses, and multiplying programmes at a pace that would have been unrecognisable to any previous generation of academic leadership. What did not change, or changed far more slowly and far more reluctantly, was the story universities told about what they were doing and why.

The institutional self-narrative remained anchored in the scholarly tradition even as the lived reality of higher education moved steadily away from it. Careers services expanded into substantial operations with dedicated professional staff and significant resource allocation. Employability metrics entered the performance frameworks against which universities were assessed and funded. Work placements were embedded into degree structures as standard components rather than optional extras. Graduate outcome data became a central element of institutional accountability, with the question of whether graduates found well-paid employment within a defined period after graduation carrying real consequences for institutional reputation and student recruitment. All of this happened whilst universities continued to insist, in their public communications and in the self-understanding of most of their academic staff, that the core function remained the pursuit and transmission of knowledge for its own sake.

The result is an institution with two identities that it has never fully reconciled. In research-intensive universities in particular, most academics still understand their primary role as disciplinary scholarship, with teaching treated as an obligation to be discharged rather than a craft to be developed, and skills formation regarded as someone else's responsibility, the province of careers teams and placement coordinators rather than of the academic community itself. The profession's incentive structures reinforce this at every level. Promotion depends on research output and revenue generation rather than on the quality of what graduates go on to become and the league tables and ranking systems by which universities measure and advertise their excellence have sophisticated metrics for research performance but nothing meaningful for the quality of the human beings their degrees produce. Every signal the institution sends to its academic staff points in the same direction, and that direction is not toward the formation of genuinely capable, innovative, critically engaged graduates.

This internal contradiction matters far beyond its implications for institutional coherence or staff satisfaction. It matters because resolving it is the necessary first step toward the kind of transformation that this historic moment requires. Universities that are willing to ask honestly what they have become, and what they could deliberately choose to become next, will find that the distance between their current reality and the institution the world needs is smaller than it might appear, precisely because the shift toward graduate formation and real-world capability is already happening in practice, even if the language and the incentive structures have not yet caught up. The change that is needed is not only a change of programme or curriculum or assessment, though all of those things will need to follow. It is a change of institutional self-understanding, and the universities that make that change first, that find the language to describe what they are genuinely for in this new context, will be the ones that define what higher education looks like for the next generation.

Key sources:

Department for Education. (2025). Post-16 education and skills white paper. HMSO.

UK Government. (2025). Curriculum and assessment review: Final report and government response. HMSO. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report-government-response

Francis, B. (2025). Curriculum and assessment review: Interim report. Department for Education. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6821d69eced319d02c9060e3/Curriculum_and_Assessment_Review_interim_report.pdf

Blair, T. (1999, February 1). Speech on education. Labour Party Conference. [Referenced in historical policy context]