University debtscapes? Financial restructuring and real estate investment in UK higher education

Keywords: debtscapes, financialisation, higher education, real estate, UK
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 64

Abstract

UK higher education is, it is now widely remarked, in crisis. A combination of dramatically reduced public funding, acute regulatory uncertainty, and growing public scrutiny concerning universities’ contributions to their regional economies has, in recent years, rendered the foundations of the UK’s ivory towers decidedly fragile. In seeking to understand the roots and significance of this crisis in explicitly spatial terms, this paper charts the emergence of a higher education funding settlement in the UK undergirded not just by debt, but by multiple forms of financial experimentation—and considers its implications for the spaces in which higher education institutions are embedded. By drawing on an ongoing study of financial restructuring at two major UK universities, the paper advances two core arguments. First, it shows how both institutions have, over the past two decades, enacted multiple rounds of finance-led growth and real estate speculation in a bid to generate ever-enlarging revenues and secure their futures within a hypercompetitive global marketplace. The paper thus argues that the financial restructuring of higher education institutions and their urban landscapes are fundamentally interlinked and mutually reinforcing processes. Second, by detailing how both universities have financed their growth strategies, it interrogates the value to UK higher education of the “debtscape” heuristic itself. Specifically, it argues that financial restructuring in higher education is ultimately about much more than ballooning institutional debt per se; rather, it is about the complex, strategically nuanced and spatially contingent ways particular institutions, as differentially capable financial actors, respond to multiple overlapping crises.