Why should academics in English take an interest in the funding of their discipline? The answer may be obvious. But in practice, even at quite senior level, I've observed, few follow matters to any depth. This is perhaps understandable as little effort is generally made to make this sort of information widely or accessibly known while, as a whole, we make little effort to follow it. As a result, headline issues such as student fees, or limited postgraduate funding, or ‘marketised’ higher education, consume our attention, sometimes separating them from broader patterns. The deep political and ethical resonance of such issues is naturally more interesting than quotidian income and expenditure. I have strongly held views about some of these high-level issues, which I will come to, but with the encouragement of the editors I want first to consider the bare bones of HE funding in a discipline like English.

Though different disciplines have them in different ratios, and some (such as medicine) have supplementary sources, university departments have essentially three sources of funding: from teaching, research and other. I will reflect on each. The first is generally called ‘T’-stream funding. This derives from undergraduate and postgraduate teaching for which a fee is charged. The UK and EU undergraduate fee is notionally variable, and universities could discount it from the capped maximum (currently £9,250 in England) to reflect actual costs or gain market advantage by competing on price. In reality, however, fees cluster in thunderous numbers at the maximum. Past attempts by a small number of publicly funded universities to offer courses at a lower fee to attract more students (thus offsetting lower unit price by larger volume) failed.

Committed to ‘driving value’ (so-called) into the provision, recent administrations have been keen to introduce ‘private’ (for-profit) providers into competition with ‘public’ (not for profit) institutions, hence establishing the market that didn't materialise voluntarily for reasons I will give below. The argument is that this will disrupt what is in effect a cartel at £9,250, thereby lowering costs for students and forcing universities to ‘drive up’ quality to compete.

Things are often ‘driven’ in this theory, but, so far, journey times are slow with little impact except as a theoretical (and ideological) challenge.