An object of university loathing ...

Set up a year ago to check on standards in higher education, the Quality Assurance Agency has achieved the difficult feat of uniting universitie s in their opposition to it. Lucy Hodges on the latest row in academe

Universities don't often make the headlines. Their concerns are usually too rarefied and hedged with caveats. But in recent weeks there has been uproar about the activities of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), the body charged with maintaining and improving standards.

The traditional universities - the elite grouping of institutions with medical schools - have joined forces with the '94 group (small, smart places such as Essex and Durham) to oppose proposals for a cadre of registered external examiners, whose job would be to monitor the standards of degrees against a set of quality benchmarks for each subject and report back to the centre. This smacks of state control of higher education, they said. It threatens university autonomy and raises the spectre of a national curriculum and Ofsted-style inspectors. To cap it all, it holds out the prospect of yet more mind-numbing bureaucracy.

Leading the attack is Sir Stewart Sutherland, Edinburgh University's principal, supported by James Wright, vice chancellor of Newcastle University. But other higher education experts have quickly joined the fray. Many question whether a QAA is needed at all. A substantial number of universities have been in business for a century or more. "If they can't be trusted, who can?" asks Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Brunel University. And Ted Wragg, Professor of Education at Exeter University, believes the whole quality industry has got out of hand. There was one year when his department was audited 10 times by people wanting different sets of papers. "Because there are now so many auditing bodies, they have become the problem not the solution," he says. "I would close the lot down. Proliferation becomes the enemy of quality because it sucks away so much time and effort."

The summer council meeting of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) was alive with talk of QAA bossiness. A motion from Glasgow University condemned its "unworkable and divisive" proposals and called for the current external examiner system to be protected. In his speech to the meeting, AUT general secretary David Triesman, complained that the agency had excluded practising academics from its top tier. It was being run by people whose experience of teaching was either non-existent "or should be exhibited on the Antiques Road Show," he said.

The problem really is that the business of assessing degree standards is horrendously complicated, particularly in a system which contains Oxford and Cambridge universities at one end and Luton and Derby at the other. As Ian Graham-Bryce, principal of Dundee University, put it: "It's not simple, so it's not surprising there has been a period of fairly intense debate. And it's not over yet."

When the QAA was set up last year - ironically on the initiative of the committee of vice chancellors and principals - it was agreed that the old systems of teaching quality assessments (whereby outsiders checked up on teaching) and audit (whereby universities are audited to ensure they have quality mechanisms in place) would be brought together. However, nobody had thought about how that was to be done.

Then Lord Dearing came along with his report questioning the quality of higher education and recommending threshold standards. The QAA took his proposal for a beefed-up army of external examiners and said it should report to the agency. That appeared as the most worked-out option in the consultation document. But that part of Dearing had always raised hackles. When universities saw it again the uproar began. They worried that they would get something even worse than the current teaching quality assessments which are seen as overly bureaucratic.

"People have had enough experience of things that don't seem to work, maybe that's part of it," says Joanna de Groot, who chairs the AUT education policy committee and teaches history at York University. "And the speed of consultation has probably been a bit too fast. There is a sense that this is being rushed. So that raises the question in people's minds: 'What is really being pushed through?'."

There is concern that behind the QAA lurk some bigger tigers: the higher education funding councils which talk about linking funding to performance in teaching quality assessments; and the Department for Education and Employment which wants more accountability in higher eduction.

But the outcry produced results. For some weeks now, the QAA has been busy modifying its position. It has backtracked on examiners, dropping the proposal that registered external examiners would have to report to the agency, and has made it clear that it will put more emphasis on universities assessing themselves and on the QAA monitoring that process rather than intervening directly. "The outcome is likely to be an approach which we would feel much happier with, which would be less bureaucratic and intrusive," says Paul Cottrell, AUT assistant general secretary.

The vice chancellors' committee, the people behind the setting up of the QAA, are adopting a similarly conciliatory tone. According to policy adviser David Young , the agency is moving in the right direction. "Its consultation is genuinely open-ended, and we see encouraging signs of progression and movement in their thinking."

The QAA's chief executive John Randall explains that he's now working quite closely with Edinburgh University's Sir Stewart Sutherland. People have misunderstood the nature of the exercise that has been taking place, he says. The proposals put forward by the QAA were only ever options. "There's now a convergence of thinking about what a future model should look like," he says. "I shall be writing a further version in the light of the initial analysis of the responses we have had in."

Moreover, Randall thinks the academics were wrong to worry about a national curriculum for higher education emerging from the agency's work on benchmarking. That work is looking at intellectual skills and aptitudes, not content, he emphasises. It is examining what skills and attributes a person should have developed when they graduate in a given subject, not laying down the content of what should be taught.

Is all the hoo-hah the sound of higher education being pulled screaming and struggling into the modern world? Certainly Randall thinks some of it is. We now live in a much less deferential and better educated society. The traditional deference to professional priesthoods has gone. "Whether the professional priesthood is solicitors or university teachers they're having to account for themselves to a wider world that won't just accept received wisdom uncritically," says Randall.

"That means that higher education is going through some of the changes that some of the professions went through over the last 10 to 15 years." And that makes for a rocky ride.