Something fierce. What Essex tells us about the fate of the plate glass universities

The 1960s plate glass universities were born restless.

Sussex, Essex, York, Lancaster, East Anglia, Kent, Warwick – they were meant to be different, experimental, and challenging, in both research and teaching.

They rejected Oxbridge’s dreaming spires and redbrick’s civic solidity for something rawer – brutalist concrete, interdisciplinary ambition, a self-conscious radicalism.

Sixty years on, that generation of institutions faces an identity crisis. Squeezed between Russell Group prestige and the post-92s’ vocational focus, buffeted by the same funding pressures and demographic headwinds hitting everyone, they’re struggling to articulate what makes them distinctive – and whether distinctiveness alone can pay the bills.

Essex’s recent troubles – financial crisis, UKVI action plan, the closure of its Southend campus, hundreds of redundancies – are but one example. Essex isn’t an outlier – it’s a warning.

And having spent a decade on its Council, latterly as a pro-chancellor, I want to offer an insider’s account of how a founding vision can curdle, and what other plate glass institutions might learn before it’s too late.

The graffitied desk

On the fourth floor of the University of Essex’s Albert Sloman Library, there is a desk that is covered with graffiti. Thankfully, it isn’t full of the silly, rude messages we might see scrawled over desks at secondary schools or cubicles in pub toilets. Every single message is positive and motivational:

Don’t be discouraged, you can do it!”, “You matter to me”, “We’ve got your back”

After meetings of University Council, I’d often find myself climbing the flights of concrete steps, the wind howling through the grates in the wall, to go and sit at the desk and look out on Wivenhoe Park. Sometimes I’d really need those motivational messages – being an external member of Council wasn’t easy. Towards the end of my term, while a pro-chancellor, it was, at times, torrid.

When I left Council this summer, Essex was struggling. Its financial troubles were already public knowledge, its problems with UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) – known only to a handful at the time – soon would be. I could see what was coming. The numbers weren’t adding up – neither student numbers nor financials. When Essex announced the closure of its Southend campus and hundreds of job losses, I was saddened, but I wasn’t surprised.

In his recent piece on the failure of place-based planning, Wonkhe’s Jim Dickinson laid out the wider policy landscape that sent Essex into the red and forced its hand with Southend. I have sympathy for his view that we shouldn’t “blame universities for shutting down campuses that they can’t sustain in a market-led model”. After all, I have spent the good part of fifteen years lambasting the marketisation agenda.

But that’s only half the story. To leave it there is to deny that universities and their leaders have some degree of agency to make choices, good or bad. Universities may all be responding to the market or to government policy, but they do not respond uniformly. As Marina Warner, a former professor at Essex, wrote back in 2014:

What is happening at Essex reflects on the one hand the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business – one advantageous to administrators and punitive to teachers and scholars – and on the other reveals a particular, local interpretation of the national policy.

Essex is a cautionary tale of how a vision which began in the 1960s became turbocharged in the 2010s, only to burn out so disastrously in the 2020s. It’s a story that will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who knows the other universities wrestling with the same contradictions.

The Robbins generation’s impossible promise

In 2024, Essex’s long-serving vice chancellor, Anthony Forster, retired. He had joined the university in 2012, the same year I left it to go work at the National Union of Students.

It was also the same year that the university’s founding vice chancellor, Albert Sloman – from whom the brutalist library gets its name – passed away. This felt somewhat prophetic, as if the university was entering some new phase of existence.

When Forster retired, he said:

We rightly celebrate the truly ground-breaking vision and values on which the University was founded 60 years ago, but we are also a community of staff and students relentlessly focused on shaping the world we live in now.

Vision and values is a phrase that could serve as an epitaph for the entire plate glass project.

Forster’s vision for Essex, as I understood it, was to challenge the Russell Group with a larger institution which would gain advantage over its competitors by maintaining the dual-intensity of high quality teaching and research.

The primary strategy for achieving this vision was to grow the university to 20,000+ students, while finding ways to improve key student satisfaction metrics and increase overall research power.

The idea of dual-intensity was built into the DNA of Essex, as it was with many of the plate glass universities, and it exemplifies its founding values of being a “freer, daring, more experimental” space for knowledge and ideas to flourish.

Essex was proud of its challenger mindset, always driven by purpose over convention and conformity. This is what drove me to study there in the first place.

But that same tension between intimacy and scale was baked into the plate glass model from the start. These weren’t just universities – they were utopian experiments. Sloman envisioned 20,000 students at Essex. The original plans were for twenty-eight of the looming, dark brick accommodation blocks to be dotted around Wivenhoe Park – only six were ever built.

He wanted a strong intellectually-stimulating community for high quality research and teaching, but he also wanted it to be big.

These are contradictory aims – and they weren’t unique to Essex. Across the plate glass cohort, founding vice chancellors promised intimate, radical intellectual communities that would also grow to rival the established institutions. But communities work better when they are smaller – there is a certain cognitive limit to stable social relationships.

The larger a community becomes, the more it will struggle to maintain cohesion and functionality, and the harder it will be to foster a shared set of values or common purpose. A university of 20,000 students – and at least 2-3,000 staff – is a community the size of a small town, not a close-knit campus.

Sloman also wanted a community that was built around that challenger mentality of being “freer, more daring, more experimental.” A smaller community might be able to find enough resources and come to a shared agreement on how to do this collectively, but a larger community would suffer from a lack of space and resources to foster creativity, and it would either fragment and dissolve, or be reduced to dull conformity just to stay together.

I think Sloman’s vision, far from being an embodiment of his own founding values, was ultimately in contradiction with some of them. The same could be said of the plate glass project more broadly – institutions founded on distinctiveness pursuing growth strategies that inevitably dilute what made them distinctive.

So when Forster brought that failed vision back and Essex attempted rapid growth in the 2010s, Essex once again found the shared values of its community stretched and warped. The things that made Essex so unique began to get lost in the ambition to grow.

Growing pains

As Rachel Reeves is finding out the hard way, pegging all your hopes and dreams on growth in difficult and uncertain times is risky at best – others would say it’s plainly foolish.

Forster was more engaging and resolute than Reeves is, and that is probably why his executive team and University Council backed his vision of a much larger dual-intensive university, adopting a strategy of increasing the size of the university to 20,000 students.

But it is telling that when Forster retired – less than a year before the abrupt and severe downsizing began with a voluntary severance scheme – seven of the eight “notable milestones” cited as happening under his leadership were related to growth in students, staff, turnover, and facilities, and the only one that wasn’t was the success of the university’s basketball and volleyball teams. Go Rebels!

In 2015, Forster and I sat together on a widening participation working group at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and it was there where he encouraged me to consider applying to be on Council. Forster carried an austere, no-nonsense nature about him, probably from his time in the Army. At a time when so many vice chancellors seemed caught in the shiny, hubristic Universities UK bubble, Forster would moan about the vanity projects and performative gestures of his peers. I won’t hesitate to say that I liked that about him.

Anyone trying to peg him as just another careerist, or as but a cog in the neoliberal machine, does a disservice. His willingness to go against the sectoral grain on matters as diverse as pay and pensions, course closures, and students’ union funding made him quite the black sheep. His substance and contrarianism gave his ambitious plans for the university some credibility, and seemed to fit with the plate glass rebellious spirit.

But whatever the good intentions of Forster’s vision, the growth ambition was flawed, just like Sloman’s was 60 years ago – and just like similar ambitions proved flawed at institutions across the plate glass cohort that convinced themselves scale was the answer to an increasingly hostile funding environment.

Essex’s main selling point was its ability to make people feel part of a cosy, insulated intellectual community. The Colchester campus was designed to foster social interactions, creative collisions, between students and staff in its five “squares”. There was something deeply communitarian about the whole project.

As a student, I’d sometimes find the renowned political scientist Anthony King wandering around corridors unable to find a seminar room. Even then, the best and brightest could get physically lost, but there would always be someone to help you find your way, and have an interesting conversation with you in the process.

But as the university began to grow, people started getting lost both physically and metaphysically – not only did it become harder to navigate the burgeoning campus, it also became harder to feel a sense of belonging or attachment to it.

Dual-intensive universities are already at a disadvantage of having to try to synchronise the spinning of two plates at similar speeds. As a university grows, the plates themselves grow bigger and more unwieldy, requiring more effort to spin them fast enough, and more dexterity to keep them spinning at the same speed.

By the spring of 2020, the plates were already wobbling – then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Covid-19 was a black swan event that changed the game for many institutions, and it was the moment when vision and reality were most obviously decoupled. Cracks in the growth plan became structural rather than cosmetic.

The Russell Group was scooping up more students than ever before, hostility towards international students was growing, and post-Brexit uncertainties over research funding remained.

But perhaps above all, both academic and professional staff were exhausted from the perfect storm of the pandemic, the relentless fatigue of trying to deliver ballooning minimum entry targets in an increasingly difficult market, and to chase research funding and Research Excellence Framework results in a bitterly competitive battle with the big research intensives.

As acceptances began to plateau and start to fall, the university’s larger size soon became its central weakness. New privately-built accommodation became hard to fill with new students – the older, university-owned towers started to be mothballed.

Falling staff-student ratios may have helped in the league tables, but not the balance sheet. Rather than reeling in overseas students on strong, dependable lines, the trawler net was dropped to the seabed, and – fairly or not – the university was slapped on an action plan by UKVI, adding to its woes.

The pandemic crisis of 2020 had been the moment to reassess the vision and to realign it with the university’s values. It was a missed opportunity to acknowledge the need to shift direction, to consolidate, to preserve the virtues of being smaller, more cohesive, unique, and nimble.

But the growth obsession – the fervent belief that in the long run it could solve all the other problems – drove a poisoned wedge between the small cadre of ideologues committed to the vision and the increasingly disgruntled and disillusioned ranks on the outside.

When I finished my term on Council last summer, Essex wasn’t just struggling financially – its struggle was ontological. Essex wasn’t really sure what kind of university it wanted to be, what it stood for anymore, whether it had a future. With its very existence threatened, it needed desperately to find itself again before it was too late.

Behind the blinds

As the Colchester campus expanded, a new teaching centre was built at the edge of the lake that John Constable once immortalised in his Wivenhoe Park landscape. Council meetings moved into the Lakeview Room, with its panoramic views of the campus. But we were rarely blessed with the views. The room faced south, into the sun for most of the day, meaning the blinds were usually drawn.

When the blinds came down, the room gave off the vibe of a Ken Adam film set, with its smooth concrete and wood panelling – some days it felt more Goldfinger, others more Dr Strangelove.

It recently came to me that the Lakeview Room was a perfect metaphor for the trouble that university councils – no doubt not just at Essex – have in connecting vision with values. It serves as a further layer to the problem of how university leadership and governance work together, which has contributed to the crisis at Essex.

To those on the outside, a university council seems like a black box – that’s often the analogy I hear. But I think it is more accurate to think of council as an actual room – like the Lakeview Room – with windows looking out onto the university’s shop floor, except most of the time the windows have their blinds tightly closed.

Those outside the room cannot open the blinds themselves – only those inside can do so. For most of my time on Council, the executive team chose very carefully which blinds to open and when. Heaven forbid our strategic focus get blinded by the sunlight of everyday operations! That sort of behaviour is by no means unique to Essex – that just tends to be how university governance works. I suspect if you wandered into the equivalent rooms at Sussex, Lancaster, or Kent, you’d find similar blinds drawn against similar uncomfortable truths.

When the right blinds were opened at the right time, however, Council could make good decisions based on the institution’s core values. Council sided with staff in the Universities Superannuation Scheme pensions fiasco, supporting higher employer contributions to protect the scheme and its benefits. Council approved support for struggling departments several times, keeping them open while other institutions were making short-sighted cuts and closures.

We resisted urges to aggressively raise entry tariffs to cynically improve our league table position, maintaining our commitment to widening participation. We agreed vast improvements to the status of postgraduate research students in teaching posts, something I was particularly invested in, having co-written the first Postgraduate Employment Charter with the University and College Union. These were people-centred decisions, Essex decisions, and I’m proud to have been a part of them.

But to lead a strategic vision, you can’t just open the blind on one window every so often – more blinds need to be open most of the time. Council and executive need to get a grasp of feeling on the ground, to embed local knowledge, and the community needs to be able to see in, to engender trust and confidence through transparency and accountability.

Having been both a student and an employee of the university, I knew the institution and many of the people better than most external members. I often didn’t wait for the blinds to open. Instead, I went out and mingled with those on the shop floor. Outside the boardroom, I could mainly just listen, as what went on in Council still had to remain behind the blinds, confidential. But my knowledge of the university and its people meant that I was in a position to meet staff and student union representatives as often as possible to get a sense of what things were like on the ground.

As the years went by, these informal chats over coffee – and perhaps the occasional beer in the postgrad bar – built up for me two crucial insights. The first was that people were trying their hardest to embody those Essex values I mentioned earlier, and it was these shared values that made people feel part of a community worth striving for.

The second insight was that despite strong belief in these values, many had lost faith in the university’s vision, and over time felt that values and vision were at odds. On Council, I saw this in the tension between those people-focused, values-driven decisions for the sake of the Essex community, and what had become a somewhat impersonal and rather instrumentalist vision of growing the size of the university in order to meet certain financial and reputational goals.

Other external members seemed unaware of the growing tensions. I did my best to bring them to their attention. It often put me at odds with the leadership. And my second-hand insights were always going to be less convincing than if members looked through the boardroom windows to see for themselves. Transparency is key to avoiding strategic mistakes, to building trust and consent, and to utilising critical thinking to avoid crises or overcome them more effectively.

What other councils should ask

We are where we are. Essex’s new management under the leadership of Frances Bowen has, with Council’s approval, implemented a package of cuts, including the closure of Southend campus. I’m sure it was a move that nobody wanted to make, and it wouldn’t have been done lightly. But as we learnt from the Covid pandemic, first comes the ‘hammer’ and then comes the ‘dance’ when dealing with crises. Using the hammer and cutting hard and fast will hopefully prevent a slow and painful death by a thousand cuts. The hammer is blunt and brutal, but it’s decisive.

Were there other options? I don’t know – I’m no longer privy to that sort of privileged information anymore. Regardless, the decision has been made, and the thoughts and prayers of local MPs – and local parish priests – won’t change that.

But for councils at other plate glass institutions watching Essex’s travails, now is the moment to ask uncomfortable questions. Is your institution’s growth strategy actually compatible with the values that make it distinctive? Are the blinds in your boardroom open wide enough? Do you have lay members who know the shop floor well enough to challenge executive assumptions? When did you last hear directly from staff and students about whether vision and values still align?

What matters now for these universities is the dance – how do they stabilise, recover, and then renew themselves? The dance must return to core values, the ones that brought many of the staff and students to their concrete campuses.

In Colchester, the campus’s original architect, Kenneth Capon, said he wanted to build “something fierce to let them work within”. A smaller, leaner university can also be fiercer, bolder, but also more cohesive and supportive. The dance must be powerful, contemporary, while simultaneously inclusive and collaborative.

In my last meeting as a Council member, I was left heartened by a presentation that the SU made. They had gathered views of students and the overwhelming message was that they wanted to build a stronger and more supportive community. I watched as Frances, the incoming vice chancellor, made detailed notes with that word “community” circled at the centre. It’s moments like these, where staff and students sit together sharing what it means to be a university, that reveal the true strength and resilience of the wonderful people who make these universities special.

The plate glass generation was founded on the belief that universities could be different – more human, more experimental, more community-minded. Sixty years on, that belief is being tested to destruction. Essex’s story suggests the answer isn’t to abandon those values in pursuit of scale, but to double down on them. Whether the sector – and the funding model that shapes it – will allow that is another question entirely.

Good luck, Essex. You matter to me.

Adam Wright served as a member of Council and pro-chancellor at the University of Essex. He works in public policy. All views in this article are his own.