The Annual General Meeting for 2026 of the Council for the Defence of British Universities will take place online via Zoom on Wednesday 22 July at 3pm.
The meeting is open to members and non-members but only members have voting rights. Non-members are encouraged to fill out the membership application form on the website. The AGM will be followed by three presentations:
David M. Berry (Sussex)
How Not to Run a University
Abstract: British universities have learned to speak the language of missions, visions and values while actually dismantling the education underneath them. This talk attempts to set the present wave of cuts, redundancies, course closures and shrinking humanities and sciences against their corporate claims. What was built as a public HE system is now run as a marketing operation in glossy prospectus (although now more often expensively designed websites) whilst too often the teaching behind is being hollowed out. Is this the enshittification, to borrow Doctorow’s term, of British universities? Taking the gap between what universities say and what they do as a starting point, it asks what does this discontinuity signal about the current state of HE, and what a defence of the university might now require.
Aisha Qadi (Imperial College)
A Seat at the Table, A Voice in the Room? Exploring Stakeholder Voice in UK HE Governance
Abstract: Universities often include students in governance, but inclusion on paper does not always translate into influence in practice. This talk draws on early findings from an ongoing PhD study at Imperial College London exploring the conditions that shape stakeholder voice, particularly student voice, across London higher education institutions. The research examines how governance professionals and board actors understand what enables or constrains meaningful student participation, including topics such as board culture, procedural fairness, participation barriers, and where and when student involvement is considered legitimate. It also looks at how accessible governance is to students more broadly, including those not in formal representative roles, and whether most students have any meaningful sense of how their institution is run or who makes decisions on their behalf. Drawing on early data collection from Stage 1 of the study, which focuses on the perspectives of governance professionals and board actors, this talk shares emerging themes and reflects on what this could mean for inclusive governance practice, sector-level reform, and the relationship between student participation and institutional legitimacy. Student perspectives will be explored in a subsequent stage of the research, informed by what Stage 1 reveals. At a time when university governance is under increasing scrutiny, understanding whose voice shapes decisions, and whose does not, feels more urgent than ever.
Martin Mills (Aberdeen)
The Future of Knowledge Institutions: AI, Universities and the Human Question
The parlous current financial situation of British universities is not something unique to the UK, and we cannot resolve our present crisis unless we come to terms with the fact that similar problems are being experienced across Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. Even then, remarkably similar difficulties are being experienced by other knowledge-producing sectors, most especially journalism. Many of the difficulties can be sourced to two problems which need to be addressed urgently in the public sphere. The first of these is the assumption – one that has bedevilled public life since the dawn of the Digital Revolution in the 1950s – that digital information is not qualitatively different from human knowledge and can effectively and more efficiently replace it. The second problem is much longer in the tooth, and that is the failure of economics as a discipline to come up with an effective “knowledge economics” to understand and help organise the new technologies that constitute the bulk of the modern Knowledge Economy. As a consequence of these two problems, politicians, policymakers and administrators are in effect driving the world economy along the wrong road and without a map. Unless we address these (admittedly rather deep) problems with urgency, we face the prospect not simply of the collapse of the UK higher education sector, but a deeper crisis of the knowledge economy as a whole.
To register and receive the Zoom link, please email: cdbuchair@gmail.com