Hundreds of academics have launched a damning attack on the Coalition Government’s program of higher education reform, branding it misguided, ideologically motivated and a catalyst for moral decline.

A working party of academics and students released an alternative white paper aiming to expose the “serious threat to social, political and cultural life” that they fear is a consequence of the government’s approach to education.

The group includes the Campaign for the Public University and the Cambridge Academic Campaign for Higher Education (CACHE) who last year came out in vocal support of the occupation at Senate House.

The paper ‘In Defence of Higher Education’ accuses the current administration of “having no vision” for higher education and of relentlessly pursuing its commodification at the expense of the public good.  Universities themselves, the Russell Group and the 1994 Group, also draw fire for their “lack of leadership” and “defensive approach” towards the cuts.

In the wake of the London riots the paper insists that impending changes will only intensify the “slow-motion moral decline” that David Cameron pledged to reverse.

The paper argues that he is “responsible for pushing forward rapid changes to higher education that will put the market at the heart of the system. These changes will encourage students to think of themselves as consumers, investing only in their own personal human capital with a view to reaping high financial rewards.”

Simon Szreter, a Cambridge professor of History and Public Policy who worked on the paper added: “It is illogical that a financial crisis brought about by market failure should be used by government as the occasion for the marketisation of our system of public higher education, a system which has hitherto successfully served both the market and wider society.”

The paper also suggests its own vision for universities, setting out nine propositions about the wider social benefits that come from a publically funded higher education system. These include the idea that universities are needed to maintain public debate, that similar courses need to be funded at similar levels, that a university education is about more than just training, and that a university has a responsible to regional and local interests as well as international ones.

Together these propositions represent an all-out assault on current government policy that the paper concluded will strip away the public benefits of higher education without making any savings. Campaigners hope the report will be a springboard for a proper debate on higher education, the very kind of debate for which they believe universities are so crucial.