Article in the Daily Telegraph 13 January 2004, by Prof. Anthony King of Essex University.

More and more undergraduates are being taught less and less

Universities are underfunded." That phrase falls trippingly off the tongue of every university vice-chancellor, but what does it mean in practical terms? The truth is that most people outside universities have no idea how far the whole of British higher education has been degraded in recent years, and the reason they have no idea is that every teacher at every British university - from the vice-chancellor down is engaged in a conspiracy of silence. They have no desire to engage in such a conspiracy but they have no choice, because to say publicly what is wrong at their own university is to run the risk of damaging that university, even though conditions may be worse elsewhere.

So we cover up. We moan, but we refrain from revealing a fraction of what we know. British higher education has become highly competitive. Most of us are loyal to our own university. We do not wish to harm it, let alone give a competitive advantage to other institutions. We therefore remain silent - and the public are thereby deceived. Britain's universities still have areas of tremendous strength but they increasingly resemble those elegant mansions in the American South that one sees in films, with imposing facades in front but decay and ruin concealed behind.

I am one of the lucky few. I am a refugee from Oxford, having decided in the mid-1960s that Oxford was too inward-looking, insufficiently "hungry". I moved to the new University of Essex and have been there ever since. I am happy there, surrounded by first-rate colleagues, and have no intention of moving. Essex is proving more successful in maintaining standards than many universities, including more famous ones. But across the system all is not well, and it is time somebody said so. The statistics are gloomy but convey little. It is what is happening on the ground that is really disturbing.

Consider the following twin pressures. One is the pressure to conduct research, to think, write and publish. I favour such pressure: university teachers should do research and publish their findings. That is a large part of what they are paid for. One reason I left Oxford was that too many "dons" were layabouts, probably conscientious as teachers, but otherwise idle.

The other pressure arises out of vastly increased student numbers unaccompanied by any pro rata increase in funding. The student- staff ratio in recent decades has fallen from nine-to-one across the system to 19-to-one. In the most popular subjects, it has fallen even further. A few years ago, I asked an old friend how many students he thought a university teacher should have - "have" in the sense of knowing their names, teaching them in small groups and being responsible for overseeing their written work. He replied: "Ten or a dozen." I informed him that my students answering that description currently numbered 77. He was amazed.

How have universities responded to these twin pressures? The answer is easy - but is also one of the best kept secrets in Britain. They respond in the only way they can: by teaching less. Pressure to be research-active combined with the pressure that arises from a doubling of student numbers results in a powerful downward pressure on the time and energy universities can devote to teaching. There is no alternative.

When I first arrived at Essex, each student in my department took five courses throughout each academic year. Each student was required, in connection with each course, to submit five substantial essays - a total of 25 such essays each year. In addition, third-year students wrote a short dissertation or "project". Students were taught in smallish groups and were taught for at least 25 weeks each year.

Now students take only four courses and write only three essays in each of them - a total of 12 compared with the previous 25. The compulsory third-year project has been abandoned, students are taught in far larger groups, and there is now intense pressure to reduce the length of the teaching year from 25 weeks to 20 - roughly the length of a single US semester. The position at less favoured universities, including some of the best known, is even less satisfactory. Students in Britain are thus being systematically short-changed.

Why? Not because university teachers are lazy. Far from it: most of us have no secretaries or other personal back-up and are grossly overworked. We find ourselves teaching less not because we want to but because the twin pressures just described give us no choice.

But there is also a third pressure, just as insidious as the pressure to teach more and more students. It is the growing pressure of what we euphemistically call "administration" but which Americans, more graphically, call "crud" - the junk-work equivalent of junk mail: assessments, audits, feedback, the full apparatus of "accountability" data protection, students' rights, fear of lawsuits - the familiar litany that affects every institution in Britain, universities not least. People used to suggest that teaching and research were opposed.

Now the enemy of both teaching and research is bureaucratic regulation and harassment. I used to spend about five per cent of my time on administration. I reckon I now spend 30-40 per cent. Again, it is the students who are short-changed.

Other features of life behind the elegant but deceptive facade of British higher education are better known: the squeeze on libraries, laboratories and teaching space, the continued haemorrhaging of valuable talent to other countries and professions and universities' heavy reliance on graduate teaching assistants (mostly enthusiastic and capable but also wholly inexperienced). But one additional consequence should not be overlooked. Undergraduates at British universities do not work remotely hard enough. Indeed they work very little - probably, on average, not more than 20 hours a week.

Why so little? The answer, again, is easy: because we, their teachers, have neither the time nor energy to make them work harder. If my department reverted to requiring our students to write 25 essays a year, my colleagues and I would simply buckle under the strain. University teachers thus work far harder than in the past and university students work much less hard - and as a result emerge from university less well educated. That, in practice, is what underfunding really means.

Anthony King is professor of government at Essex University