Aberystwyth is a town of many faces. At one end of the promenade, a funicular railway winds its way up Craig-glais to the world’s largest camera obscura. Known as Constitution Hill in English, Craig-glais is an icon of Victoriania on the distant Welsh shore. On the far end of town, too, Pen Dinas recalls both the ancient and recent past. Hewn into its slopes are the earthworks of an Iron Age hillfort, and above stands a plinth, 59 feet tall and in the shape of an upturned cannon. Local folklore claims it was erected to raise a statue of the Duke of Wellington — until the funding ran out. It’s a fitting metaphor, I think, for a town which has a complex relationship with identity, one where a performative Britishness is underlaid, and undermined, by an ambivalent brand of Welshness. And if this conflict is played out in the fluidity of place names, and in half-finished statues to long-dead heroes, it also features in Aberystwyth’s institutions.
Emblematic here is Aberystwyth University, both a foothold of the Anglophone world and a bastion of Welsh culture and language. As an employer, only a handful of the academic staff will have been through the local schools. Yet it is the linchpin of the local economy, both for the many jobs it offers, and the custom it provides to countless local businesses. That matters, for the university’s survival is arguably a bulwark against the type of economic decline that Reform, that most radical expression of political Britishness, capitalises on elsewhere in Wales. In this part of the country, where Labour has lacked a historical industrial base, and where Welsh identity translates into votes for Plaid Cymru, Rhun ap Iorwerth is surely right in assuming that Aberystwyth will take a strong lead in backing the party he lately positioned as “the main anti-Reform force in Wales”.
In fact, there’s a strong argument to suggest that, without its university, Aberystwyth would have gone the way of other coastal conurbations on the trainline from the English Midlands: picturesque rural outposts, dependent on seasonal tourism, and thoroughly Anglicised. Established in 1872, the university was the first in Wales, and came four-and-a-half centuries after Owain Glyndŵr had promised one in the north and one in the south. Though Glyndŵr’s revolt for a free Wales would ultimately be crushed in 1415, his commitment reflects the centrality of education to any national culture. Initiated by the London Welsh, this 19th-century fight for the University of Wales soon went national. That, in turn, reflected a dynamic and changing Wales: industrialised, politically progressive, and driven to a large degree by nonconformist faith. Chapel, here, was a hegemonic cultural force opposed to the Church of England, and expressed politically through a soft liberal nationalism that had its own ambiguous relationship with broader British identity.
In 2022, a book celebrating the 150th anniversary of Aberystwyth University’s founding was entitled The People’s Pennies, in reference to the money working-class families across the country contributed to its founding. Over time, it came to define the nature of Aberystwyth, growing from around two dozen to 8,000 students, and now encompassing over half the town’s population. The National Library was established here in 1907, and in 2009 Welsh government offices were opened as part of an effort to distribute its bureaucracy across the country. Together with the Arts Centre and the hospital, this ensures Aberystwyth and its environs retain a comparatively cosmopolitan character, with its swarms of cafés and bars.
At the same time, the University helped establish the town’s reputation as a hotbed of Welsh nationalism. That’s clear enough in the founding of Cymdeithas yr Iaith — the Welsh Language Society — and prevails in the animated politics of a town enlivened by its Welsh-language halls of residence. In a broader sense, meanwhile, this town-and-gown dynamic has helped instil a particular civic pride among Aber’s population, one reflective of Wales’s historic self-respect in its educational aspirations. Rather than the tensions that can typify this dynamic elsewhere in Britain, students and staff in Aberystwyth often do — and crucially are felt to — enrich community life, from sports teams to the amateur music scene.
Yet amid the cultural buoyancy, the university’s future is far from settled. That’s clear enough in the numbers. In May 2024, Aberystwyth’s administrators announced the prospect of 200 job cuts, declaring an £8.1 million deficit in its latest annual report. Other Welsh universities are in a similarly precarious state. Trinity St David’s has announced the closure of its Lampeter campus, while at Cardiff University over 150 staff have left since the start of the year, with 69 posts still slated for the axe. No wonder there are rising warnings in the Senedd of several institutions collapsing altogether.
“No wonder there are rising warnings in the Senedd of several institutions collapsing altogether.”
That, of course, begs the question of causes. And here, Welsh universities share much with their kin across Britain. With fees stagnant, and international students increasingly discouraged by government from coming, bursars nationwide are struggling. What you hear less often from vice-chancellors — primarily appointed to try and ensure the financial stability of Britain’s higher education — are the attendant issues: which together raise other questions about the long-term viability of the sector. Despite the emphasis on student satisfaction, for instance, student-staff ratios are rising. All the while, managers have pumped money into new buildings and marketing, even as academia becomes increasingly unattractive to the next generation of overworked and underpaid scholars.
These complaints — common, too, at Aberystwyth — are undoubtedly emblematic of the broad crisis in higher education, one which has its roots not only in the dramatic hike in fees in 2010, but also in the shifted costs from the state to students. Important, too, is New Labour’s expansion of higher education. Among other things, this encouraged entrepreneurial behaviours from universities, prompting the proliferation of financially unstable private colleges. Aberystwyth’s vulnerability reveals the wider truth of the local economic dependence on higher education, a state of affairs mirrored elsewhere across the UK. Theirs is a vital role in sustaining both the material and culture conditions of many towns and cities. In Aber, certainly, it would be difficult for its people to imagine life without that seminal town-and-gown dynamic. That’s particular true when other institutions, like the council, are dwarfed by it.
This picture naturally leads us to a more basic truth about the role of higher education: the dependency of modern society in general on our universities. Somehow, somewhere, we have lost sight of this. The entire education sector helps create the teachers, doctors and engineers of the future, but in the case of universities they have devolved into individualisation and atomisation, so emblematic of contemporary capitalism. Universities are perceived straightforwardly as places for people to gain a qualification for their career and personal advancement — completely ignoring their role as a public good and as the linchpin of civilised society.
In this regard, notable by its absence is the suggestion that government should offer greater support to the sector, and shift the cost back from students onto the state. There has not been a whisper in Westminster about such a change since Corbyn. But given the current crisis, and the importance of universities to the UK’s overall economic health, that appears perverse.
To be fair, not every corner of the UK is equal here. For example, the Scottish government has recognised the sector’s value in relation to state-building and equalising access, ensuring student fees for local students are low if they attend one of their native universities. Despite the funding formula denying the Welsh Parliament a more equitable budget, a similar arrangement may nonetheless have been possible. Yet this has been hamstrung by the attitudes of Labourism, which kowtows to Westminster both in its obsession with individual choice and its ambivalence towards the Welsh national project.
Eluned Morgan has now had a year as First Minister of Wales. My bet is that, as she reflects on her first 12 months in the job, universities will be far from her mind, despite education being one of the small number of key policy areas within her power. This partly reflects the reality of a Welsh political class that has, for a decade or more, been happy to pay mere lip service to the sector. The failure to embrace higher education as a key strategic sector, however, is a manifestation of Welsh Labour’s thorough embrace of neoliberalism, arguably reflected in the startling decline of Welsh-domiciled students applying to university.
At a more existential level, the Aber saga is the perfect example of how, in spite of its avowed Welshness, Labour in practice is an embodiment of the duality and paradoxes inherent in balancing its Britishness. Far more timid than its 19th-century precursors, and lacking anything close to their spiritual commitment, it has relinquished our universities to the forces of Anglo-American consumerism — rather than embracing them as potential powerhouses for the benefit of individual communities and the nation as a whole.
With polling for the Senedd indicating that Labour’s days at the helm are numbered, Welsh higher education may soon face some more stark choices. While Welsh Labour’s fall from grace reflects Starmer’s struggles, in Wales there is the added issue of negotiating the national question, with the contenders for next year’s election representing rather more defined responses to the conundrum of Welsh identity. Plaid Cymru’s nationalism at least acknowledges the importance of our universities, even if their exact approach needs further elaboration.
Reform’s blend of turbo-charged Britishness and neoliberalism is somewhat less ambiguous in its consequences: a continuing struggle on the margins of an ever-more competitive market. Either way, Aberystwyth and its sister universities will need a lot more than the people’s pennies to flourish.
