Carnage in the rear-view mirror

If time passes more quickly as you get older, it also seems that change takes place more quickly with every passing year. We live, as the curse goes, in interesting times.

Looking back to this time last year, events were still heavily dominated by Covid – just as we thought we were out, Omicron pulled us back in.

Twelve months on, we have finally prised off Covid’s grip on daily life, but any hopes that this would lead to sunlit uplands, to coin a phrase, have proved misplaced.

The longer-term impact of the pandemic continues, for example, in the form of ongoing concern about mental health among students and young people. That years of uncertainty and isolation have exacerbated an existing problem is hardly a surprise, but that does not make it any easier to resolve.

Another hangover is to be found in the classroom, with reports of lectures delivered to empty rooms. While modes of delivery were evolving anyway, the pandemic seems to have led to a significant downturn in attendance, which is hard to align with the insistence from politicians (and, apparently, students) that face-to-face teaching remains the top pedagogical priority.

Where the really big ongoing impact is felt, though, is in the unholy combination of a Covid hangover and the dominant event of 2022: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This is most true, obviously, in Ukraine itself, where millions of people have had lives and livelihoods disrupted and destroyed (the Council for At-Risk Academics has reported a close to tenfold increase in applications for resettlement this year).

In our “Faces of 2022” list, this hardship and bravery is embodied by a scholar who signed up to fight Russia on the first day of the invasion and has continued to teach classes from the front line.

The impact of Covid followed by war has also had wide ramifications for universities further afield.

One of those is inflation, which has run riot through many economies, including that of the UK.

For universities in England, frozen domestic tuition fees are now calculated to be worth about £6,500 at 2012 prices, and with inflation running in double digits the pinch is only going to get worse.

At the same time, industrial action has culminated in a national strike in the UK, reflecting the financial pressure (among other things) facing higher education staff.

Universities face other pressures, too, such as energy price rises, and the risk to international student income as a result of unstable geopolitics and unhelpful newspaper headlines (The Times mooted a “foreign student ban” last month, in what must surely take the prize for own goal of the year).

Are there any positives among all this gloom? From a UK perspective, one might be that the fall in the value of the pound makes studying in the country a relative bargain for international students. Another was the surprisingly robust support shown for R&D expenditure in the Autumn Statement delivered by the chancellor last month, when most budget lines that could be cut were cut.

But it would be hard to make the case that there have been many high points, and at times there has been a sense of something close to chaos in the national politics (including an education secretary who lasted just a single day before resigning), and of despair about some of its international partnerships, with the question of Horizon Europe association still uncertain.

Hopes for next year must surely rest on a return to some stability and sense both at home and abroad; an understanding that international links matter more, not less, when the world is so unstable; that science and research offer the only answers to many of the problems underpinning that instability; and that the arts and humanities, and universities’ broader role at the heart of communities and as engines of local as well as national prosperity, must be supported.

That includes sustainable and long-term solutions to their funding problems, but it also means support in the broadest sense, including winning back trust and a respect for truth and evidence.

It will not be enough to put that on the list for Santa; it will take hard work, patience and resolve – and, if we’re honest, a whole lot else that is not under anyone’s immediate control.

But universities have thrived and put themselves at the centre of society for hundreds of years, so challenges notwithstanding there is every reason to think that that will continue.

How that centuries-long story will continue in 2023 is a question we will return to with our annual new year predictions in the next issue. Until then, from everyone at Times Higher Education, we hope you have a deserved break, and wish you a very happy Christmas.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com