ABSTRACT
James Vernon (2011), in a memorable phrase, argues that the UK has a good claim to be the ‘canary in the coal mine’ – i.e., at the forefront of a global experiment in the re-formation of higher education (HE). We believe him to be broadly correct and in this chapter hope to show why this is so. Our argument will be that it is in Britain that a revised version of the NPM template used earlier to modernize the civil service has been systematically applied since the early 1980s to make the university system more entrepreneurial. Furthermore, Britain has been the launch pad for the dissemination of this template across the European continent. In proposing our reading of the way in which the process of reform has unfolded decade upon decade, we shall add several qualifications to the arguments used by Vernon to justify his claim. First, as already explained in the previous chapter, many of the building blocks used to assemble the NPM template were not made in Britain, nor did they have a genuinely neoliberal pedigree. More than a decade earlier we find Marginson and Considine making a similar claim for a different part of the globe: ‘it is almost as if public policies in Australia, New Zealand and similar nations have been fashioned as zones of neo-liberal experiment, testing economic outcomes and political reactions before the application of these policies to the global metropolises of the United States and Europe’ (2000: 55). Britain has however been the country where the NPM fruit machine has been persistently spun until the right combinations of privatization, liberalization, and marketization were deployed and made operative. Moreover, Britain makes it evident that the ultimate objective has never been to create a free market in HE nor to engender neoliberal visions of market society, but rather to bring the HE sector under the control of central government. Finally, Britain has provided an example that other European countries have been eager to emulate, and one which bequeathed the NPM template to future generations by uploading it onto policy platforms tailored, as we shall show in the next chapter, to local context and available to all.
