UK higher education must overcome a ¡°relentless campaign¡± of negativity by the?¡°anti-woke¡± media to win back the support of the public, according to?a?vice-chancellor whose university has become embroiled in the ¡°culture wars¡±.

University of Sussex leader Sasha Roseneil said she felt opposition to higher education was often grounded in an explicit rejection of the expansion of access that has taken place in recent decades.

Speaking at a Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) event at the Labour Party conference, Roseneil said this was ¡°steeped in the nostalgia of the good old days¡± when higher education was the preserve of the elite.

¡°The idea that universities have lost public support¡­comes from the media, from a cacophony of newspaper journalists who fill papers with a daily diet of anti-university stories, circulating and recirculating the same stories.

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¡°There is a cadre of journalists who have been on a long and relentless campaign against universities as the generators of woke ideology, which is the biggest social problem of our time, and as a source of blame for the reduction of the graduate premium.¡±

Roseneil said almost all of these commentators went to a limited range of universities themselves and expect their descendants to as well ¨C viewing other people¡¯s children as ¡°the problem¡±.

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She also placed some of the blame at the door of the regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), which earlier this year imposed a record fine on Sussex over its handling of the resignation of gender critical professor Kathleen Stock.

Roseneil said the watchdog was ¡°binding universities in an ever-tightening wrapper of legislation and systematically fanning the flames of the culture wars and, until very recently, completely ignored the financial plight of the sector¡±.

¡°The regulator and the media are both providing cover, not deliberately¡­as a distraction for a government which has still not come up with a plan for the unprecedented financial crisis.¡±

Chris Day, vice-chancellor of Newcastle University, said there was a ¡°paradox¡± between the hard evidence of the benefits of universities to the economy and the negative press it received.

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He urged the sector to use its allies ¨C both in other sectors and in local areas ¨C to advance its positive narrative rather than relying on ¡°naysaying journalists¡±.

But speaking elsewhere on the fringe, Duncan Ivison, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, said that universities had to go further than just complaining about the media ¡°telling bad stories¡± about them.

With migration ¡°one of the most toxic issues of contemporary politics¡±, he told delegates that it was vitally important how the sector engaged with this.

¡°International students are not themselves, I think, the object necessarily of the resentment and anger emerging around migration, but they could be, and I think that¡¯s something we need to really be thinking through and proactively engaging with.

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¡°We¡¯re going to have to engage, tell our stories more effectively, connect our international students with our core mission, and continue to think hard about the implications of the way geopolitics is reshaping our sector.¡±

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com