–Priyamvada Gopal is a University Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of English and Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. The opinions expressed are her own.–

The once highly-regarded British public university is not quite dead but it is in terminal care. After half a century of global success on public funding that amounted to less than 1.5% of Britain’s GDP, in the space of two years we’ve seen the partial withdrawal of the state from the sector, and it is expected that this is a precursor to full withdrawal followed by extensive privatisation.

With the overnight tripling of tuition fees in 2010 (in the face of widespread protests) and with further rises in the offing, the student has been reframed as a consumer buying private goods in the form of a degree. Combine this with a mortgage and you have a large number of citizens who are unlikely to be debt-free at any point in their life.

Formerly known as a university, the service provider of higher education is now to sink or swim in response to the pressures of competition, as degree-awarding corporations rather than sites of inquiry and learning. Ironically, however, it turns out that the new fees regime which David Willetts, the Universities Minister, keeps bizarrely insisting is fairer than the previous one, is actually costing the exchequer more, through the rising costs of subsidising student loans.

Undermining access to higher education, now seen simply as a means to better income, is creating a desperately stratified society. Why has this not been subjected to more challenge despite those massive student protests in 2010 and sporadic action since? Partly because, following the swingeing attacks on the idea of higher education as a public good which should be available to all, we’ve been invited to look upon the sustained assault on higher education as lower down in the pecking order of pain that has been imposed upon a larger landscape of huge deprivation. Millions will enter the workplace without an education to find repetitive, brain-deadening, alienating, precarious and low-waged employment. Universities are themselves outsourcing services like cleaning and catering to the profit-making companies that create these conditions. Meanwhile casualisation extends to academic jobs, where more than 30% of teaching positions are temporary, fixed term contracts and many others are hourly-paid.

All here are victims of perhaps the most dangerous extremism of our times: market fundamentalism. Here the market is literally a god – a providential mechanism that will determine the futures of both individuals and institutions.

Extremisms can usually be identified by the extent to which they are prepared to use violence. The suppression of young peoples’ dissent has been a striking feature of the changes being pushed through in the university sector. There have been startlingly authoritarian attempts to prevent and hinder students organising, with methods including injunctions against demos, police infiltrating student groups and recruiting informers, and arrests, including for offences as minor as scribbling graffiti.

Universities now routinely issue legal notices, evictions, fines, suspensions, expulsions and use private security to rough up protesters. At a time when academic salaries have fallen 13% in real terms with employers intransigent on salary negotiations, the University of Sussex somehow found £100,000 to spend on disciplining students. “University managements across the country are calling the police in because they’ve lost the substantive argument”, says president of the University of London Union, Michael Chessum, who was arrested after a demonstration.

The message that is persistently being sent out is that democratically engaged, educated, assertive and committed young people are not ideal citizens; they are demonised as dangerous, liable to erupt at any time unless monitored constantly and prevented from asserting themselves. This should worry anyone who has an investment in meaningful democracy rather than one reduced to consumer choice.

As for their teachers, while there has been a great deal of grumbling within the confines of common rooms and some thundering polemics in specialist outlets, academics have not, on the whole, mounted strong collective resistance to what most of them see as detrimental changes in the provision of higher education. There has been a striking absence of powerful and united collective dissent.

The overall response, despite the efforts of a small number of campaigners across the sector and some modest union action by the Universities and Colleges Union, has been to keep heads down and somehow be pragmatic and play the game. A handful who have been co-opted by the bloated managements (another feature of our corporate present) can plan on retiring after six-figure salaries lead to substantial pensions. While pleading lack of funds to provide academics with a modest rise, Vice-Chancellors have just been awarded an average rise of 8.1%, about £20,000 each on pay packets which already average a quarter of a million pounds.

The sad truth is that despite pockets of resistance and some concerted union action, British academics have acquiesced to harm. Contrast this to the successes of the 3Cosas Campaign at the University of London where outsourced workers, in conjunction with students, were successful in winning concessions from employers. They remembered, as academics appear to have forgotten, Frederick Douglass’s famous words that bear constant repetition: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”.