Education: View From Here - Academics are despised as time-wasting, over-holidayed, arrogant gits

THERE SEEMS to be a lot of anxiety around in higher education right now, much of it financial. Nobody has a very clear picture about the extent to which global recessions are affecting overseas student numbers, nobody knows what the full impact of the pounds 1,000 every home student is now paying will be long term. Applications for places have held steady, but there are alarming stories about the increasing number of students who drop out, often for financial reasons. Will that number go on rising, as the cost of studying curves steeply upwards? A recent assessment of the realistic cost of going to university came up with a figure on the other side of pounds 7,000 a year, and that's before the pounds 1,000 kicks in. We'll end up with T-shirts, like those sold in the US. "My education cost mom $100,000."

Until British universities expanded, we were a disgrace internationally, with minuscule numbers continuing to study over the age of 16 compared to other countries. But you don't need a degree to understand that you can't expand anything and maintain standards if you fail to fund the expansion and if, in real terms, the money allocated to higher education is worth less every year. To compensate, universities have become more entrepreneurial. Overnight, in some institutions, you needed not only a PhD in your subject but some ability in running a small business. Then, because so many academics were obviously engaged in the hard grind of making institutional ends meet, the public needed reassurance that standards would not slip. Hence bodies like the Quality Assurance Agency and the interminable assessments of quality of teaching, quality of research, quality of student provision. quality of loo paper.

I don't know anyone who isn't in agreement with public accountability. But likewise, I don't know anyone who believes that the mechanisms for ensuring its effectiveness actually work. On the contrary, because they are so clumsy, bureaucratic and time-consuming, they cause a great deal of damage to higher education.

But let's try for a moment to defend that object of so many people's loathing, the QAA. Why is it there? To find the answer, we have to face up to the unpalatable truth: it is there to mediate between the universities and the baying hounds of the Treasury on the one hand and the hostile public on the other. For make no mistake, universities have few friends in the world outside their walls. Academics are despised as time-wasting, over-holidayed, arrogant gits, only one stage better than the loathsome long-haired, drunken, over-holidayed students they supervise.

This state of affairs didn't happen suddenly. There is a long anti intellectual tradition in English life. Where some countries see students in the forefront of the fight for democracy, the English see our intellectuals as a waste of space. The tabloids bang on about "the chattering classes", as though there were no connection. Right and left are united in their antagonism to universities and their occupants; whether out of envy or ignorance it is hard to tell. But a lot of blame must be attached to the universities themselves. They were content for decades to sit back and refuse to account for themselves, defending archaic practices and sneering at anyone who questioned how they were run. Failure to acknowledge the depth of Treasury loathing of intellectuals and failure to build bridges with the public have led to all this quality control that is now being imposed so cack- handedly.

Universities need to set their houses in order themselves and begin the hard slog of winning over the public.Wider access is bound to help, and as more people study longer, the plight of cash-starved universities will become better known. Once the universities have public support the need for puppet bodies like the QAA will cease to exist, and we'll be able to defend our own case. We have to start now, before the cost of higher education frightens future generations off .

The writer is pro vice-chancellor of the University of Warwick