The department for higher education in the UK has been dismantled, and integrated into a new “mega-department,” prompting many to doubt the government’s commitment to higher education.

In the new department “student issues” will become the responsibility of Lord Young of Norwood Green: minister for postal affairs and employment relations.

The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), set up less two years ago at a cost of millions, had previously overseen the government’s policy on higher education.

Since the cabinet reshuffle however, a new Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has been frankensteined from the spare parts of the DIUS and the equally short-lived Department for Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform.

BIS purports that it will put: “the UK’s Further Education system and universities closer to the heart of government thinking about building now for the upturn.”

But the fledging department has already attracted its share of critics.

UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: “UCU is very concerned that his merger seems to signal that further and higher education are no longer considered important enough to have a department of their own.

“The fact they have been lumped in with business appears to be a clear signal of how the government views colleges and universities and their main roles in this country.”

In a debate in the House of Lords, peers seemed equally vexed by what they saw as the absorption of universities into a business-centric department.

Lord Hunt of Wirral asked of Lord Mandelson, who leads the new Department: “Does he agree that it is a shameful and retrograde development that further and higher education have been subsumed in this way, to be judged not worthy even of a single letter in the new departmental acronym?”

The BIS has been challenged on practical as well as ideological grounds. Civil servants questioned the cost and bureaucracy the department would create.

General Secretary Jonathan Baume, of the senior public servant’s union, FDA, said: “More than £7 million of taxpayers’ money has been wasted so far in setting up the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and then abolishing it 20 months later.

“It is time and money diverted from helping those in need of education and training at the very time when this is needed most.”

MP’s were also unconvinced by the functionality of the burgeoning department. The IUSS, the Parliamentary select committee which had been linked with the now deceased DIUS, recently released a paper noting that: “it has proved difficult to balance the scrutiny of the expenditure, administration and policy of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills with the demands of examining the use of science across government.

“Looking forward, attempting to do this same balancing act with an even larger department which also covers business, enterprise and regulation will prove impossible for the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee.”

But Malcolm Grant, Provost of UCL said: “The new Department offers the advantage of bringing universities together with the nation’s other major productive enterprises, and ensuring that Britain continues to maintain a global competitive advantage through its outstanding universities.

“We need equally to ensure, however, that the distinct values of those universities, of intellectual inquiry and of education for its own sake, are understood as essential contributors to Britain’s long-term economic future and do not become subordinated to short-term economic goals.”

In a reference to Lord Mandelson’s leadership of the new BIS, Grant told the BBC that universities needed: “a strong and leading politician who gets the big picture.”

Mandelson celebrated the creation of BIS, musing: “We have a new phoenix in this department.”

But after the disbanding of the DIUS in less than two years, and substantial criticism already directed at BIS, students and staff alike must hope that Mandalson’s analogy is not entirely apt – the phoenix may well be famous for its triumphant rebirth, but it was also condemned to an endless cycle of death and renewal.

In which case it will be a matter of when, and not if, the BIS too is made defunct.