Last month saw British industry once again repeat its all-too-frequent demand that the form and content of higher education in the UK be assimilated to the needs of business. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), in essence the union for bosses, launched a new task force along with the vice-chancellors of Bath and Coventry universities, as well as the principal of Kings College London, that aims to explore “what business wants from higher education, how business and universities can best work together and how the sector should be funded”. At a time of pervasive insecurity throughout the British economy and rampant levels of personal debt amongst students, one of their first suggestions was to call for the lifting of the cap on tuition fees.

The perverse timing of this intervention, as governments and central banks around the world struggle to repair an ailing financial system, demands critical scrutiny. The director of the CBI, Richard Lambert, while recognising that “the role of universities is broader than just business” argues that “as a significant funder, user and customer of higher education, it is only right that business sets out what it needs”. Surely this seems reasonable? It would be were it the case that the CBI merely intended to set out the ‘needs’ of business yet the launch of the task force purposively coincides with the review of higher educational policy by the main three parties and its ambitions extend far beyond simply giving voice to the desires of its members.

As the President and CEO of McDonalds, a member of the CBI’s task force, puts it, “It’s absolutely essential that universities and businesses work effectively together to maximise the benefit this delivers for the UK economy and ensure we remain competitive – the rest of the world certainly isn’t standing still”. The CBI is demanding that universities be made ‘competitive‘, as the harsh realities of the modern global economy are seen to necessitate that universities, not to mention wider society, reorganize themselves to meet the needs of the British economy. And who is best placed to articulate the needs of the UK economy? Well the CBI of course. Obviously business makes an important contribution to the national economy. Given we live in a market-based system, something would be seriously and confusingly amiss were this not the case. Even so, the recognition of this contribution doesn’t entail that what’s good for business is necessarily good for the UK economy.

The recent crisis in Anglo-American capitalism graphically illustrates how the unrestricted and short-termist accumulation of private profit, leading in this case to a largely unprecedented boom time for business (particularly the financial sector) and the super-rich, ultimately comes to erode the social relations that make wealth generation possible. As the economic commentator Will Hutton argues, “without trust and fairness, capitalism risks its own sustainability”. The rampant pursuit of short-term competitive advantage by individual businesses undermines precisely the sort of rational planning and investment that produces the social and intellectual capital that these business rely on for their long-term profitability.

The CBI, as well as private economic interests more generally, shouldn’t have influence over higher-education not simply because it’s wrong and undemocratic, relying on a utterly false conflation of the interests of business with the interests of the UK economy more widely, but also because it simply doesn’t work. The myopic subordination of all other concerns to the short-term demands of the market place undermine the sort of creativity and innovation which the UK needs if it’s to succeed in a global market place which is, as the CBI argues, genuinely competitive. If profitability, efficiency and immediate usefulness to business come to dictate higher educational priorities then everyone will, in the long run, be worse off. If universities are geared towards the needs of business than departments like English, Sociology and History will lose out yet the cultural value of these disciplines extends far beyond anything that can be quantified in narrow financial terms. Universities are not in existence to further the market economy or promote business but to allow the development of thought and knowledge. These goals may often coincide, particularly so in what has been called the UK’s modern ‘information economy’, yet where they do not the integrity of the university is something it is worth fighting to preserve.