6 August 2026 - 7:00am
With the news of Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s resignation dominating the public debate around universities, it is easy to overlook the fact that the pressures facing the higher education sector are deep and structural. These would exist even without the much-maligned scourge of DEI bureaucracy and ideology.
Some of these overlooked themes surfaced in a recent interview given to the Financial Times by Larry Kramer, president and vice-chancellor of LSE. It is a shame that Kramer’s views have been overshadowed by the Arday scandal, as he points to problems that go far beyond dodgy promotion of specific individuals. Debating Kramer’s views would allow for more searching scrutiny of the problems confronting Britain’s universities.
Especially striking is Kramer’s claim that the Labour Government’s mismanagement of British universities is now on a par with Trump’s mauling of higher education in the US. He points to the compounding effects of increased regulatory burdens and employer tax rises, which universities cannot offset because of restrictions on domestic tuition fees and levies on international recruitment, introduced in response to public concerns over migration. Kramer also speaks for a sector increasingly anxious about successive governments’ growing emphasis on vocational training — a shift that could eat into the growth in student numbers needed to keep the higher education system afloat. The strain is already becoming apparent: more than 12,000 redundancies have been announced across the sector over the past year.
Kramer is right that Labour’s handling of the sector is as bad as Trump’s — but not for the reasons he gives. Indeed, the solutions implied by Kramer reflect a vision of the university that is distinctly Labourite. In particular, he cites the prioritisation of higher education over vocational and technical training; the elevation of universities as bastions of international mobility and entry points for the movement of transnational labour; and a complex structure of regulations that keeps the sector suspended aloft. All of these propositions were core to the New Labour vision for universities reaching all the way back to the mid-Nineties. The problem is that this vision belongs to the world prior to the Great Recession of 2008. It is in the over-extension of the university sector that Labour’s mismanagement lies, not in its efforts to shrink it.
Universities were always crucial to the pre-crash era of globalisation that New Labour sought to harness. By embracing this role, they took on the unfulfilled promises of that entire era. As factory jobs moved to China, universities were expected to cushion the shock by transforming the workforce into credentialed, white-collar knowledge workers. They were also tasked with addressing regional inequalities, as campuses expanded into post-industrial cities and smaller regional towns; developing new technologies to boost national productivity; and internationalising the workforce by absorbing students from abroad.
It was inevitable that universities would sink under the burden of such high hopes when those global trade winds shifted. Tackling the issues identified by Kramer would offer a temporary reprieve at best. Ultimately, there is no policy any British government could come up with that would restore the world of 2007. Kramer’s intervention is welcome for stimulating a much-needed public debate, but as Global Britain fades away, fixing Britain’s universities will require a much wider vision of how they can serve the national interest.
Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently: The National Interest: Politics after Globalization.
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