The number of universities cutting jobs and slashing courses has long passed 50, with many more tightening belts to gastric-band levels. This week alone has seen the creation of the UK’s first “Super-University”: which, in its blending of cash-strapped Kent with Greenwich, is surely more marketing than Marvel. And worse will probably follow. As the Office for Students found, 42.7% of English institutions are forecast to end 2025-6 in deficit, while the once-reliable cash-cow of overseas students has soured too. Non-UK entrants fell by 7.7% in 2024-5, some 9% below what universities themselves had forecast.

As an hourly lecturer working at an English university, these struggles are deeply personal. Never heard of us? No, of course not — we “Hourlies” are the best-kept secret in the gig economy. Our precarious positions are scarcely mentioned in glossy prospectuses, and we tend not to be invited to take the stage come graduation day, for fear new graduates might cringe at the sight of our tattered, custard-stained gowns. Or, perhaps, it’s because vice chancellors are scared we’ll scream out the grim truth: that we earn less than the average Deliveroo driver, yet are regularly relied upon for over a quarter of all higher-education teaching.

What happened? I’m frequently asked that by ashen-faced boomers, whose comprehension of all things university seems to have stopped at caps, gowns, brandy in wingbacks, and seminars thick with cig smoke.

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Don’t let grifters kill the university

By Mary Harrington

Is it, perhaps, that these once-great halls of knowledge have, in recent years, been reduced to mere political beach balls, palmed back and forth by warring sides — one saying that everybody should sack off academia and become a plumber instead, the other that every child who shows an aptitude for plumbing should study it to degree level?

Or is it simply that the veil has finally dropped: that Britain’s universities have been flogging impossible debts to unwitting young people, all while degrading the working conditions of their lowest-paid workers? Well, it’s not for this anonymous writer to judge. Of course, I already have. I just cannot say so publicly, for fear, to misquote Scrooge, of “losing my situation”. Either way, take my cowardice as some evidence of the malign power structures now dominating these degraded institutions.

And degraded they are. A Deliveroo driver can make around £29,120 a year. Factor in our own student debts, and training costs to lecture in the first place, and that doesn’t stack up well against my own meager £21,000, especially when you consider that so-called “substantive” lecturers — a weird, widely used term somehow implying we’re in-substantial — earn considerably more, for doing, in my place at least, close to the exact same job. Yes, the driver’s figure is full-time and mine is not: but that is rather the point. Our hours are capped, our summers unpaid, and part-time is not quite part-time if the University is shut half the year. We can’t earn more even if we wanted to, making the unregulated subterranea of a Deliveroo driver seem, at least through our current lens of desperation, somewhat appealing.

Yet if there are perhaps 90,000 of us Hourlies — representing some 36% of all part-time academic staff — no one can say quite how much teaching we actually do deliver: tacitly suggesting that someone would rather it went uncounted. Back in 2018, when the UCU asked institutions to disclose the proportion of teaching hours delivered by hourly-paid staff, almost 100 failed to answer: 36 ignored the request outright, while 60 said that they either did not hold the information, or that digging it out would take too long.

Almost a decade on — and a decade that has, incidentally, run parallel to the rise of the gig economy — we Hourlies have only been leaned upon harder, often way above our job descriptions. I myself am designing curriculums; consulting on course structures; and dealing with pastoral care — all on top of teaching. Now, I’m sure senior management jobs are difficult too. But it’s worth noting here that a vice chancellor earns roughly 12 times what I do, and around six times what a “substantive” lecturer does. It surely begs the question: is it that their talent is so preternatural, so once-in-an-eon, that such a pay-gap is justified in times of fiscal ruin? Or that the ship is sinking and they’re going for the gold? Despite heavy deficits, meanwhile, and with students forever complaining about a lack of contact hours, my institution lately introduced yet another tier of bureaucratic middle management, only adding to its teetering, top-heavy structure.

The general cultural disregard for gig workers rubs off on us too. Some months back, a senior program manager, a professor, greeted me by saying: “Got yourself a full-time job yet?” Though meant half-jokingly, it struck me as somewhat tone-deaf when you consider the pay and power disparity between us, let alone the fact that the road to promotion, with or without a PhD, no longer really exists. The fumes we were living off — fumes of a once-respected profession — have now totally evaporated.

All this is heightened by the job’s seasonality. Unlike the Deliveroo driver’s incessant pedaling come rain or shine, we Hourlies are hemmed into short, money-making windows before lengthy stretches of unpaid “vacation” or ever-extended study leave, which even students are starting to see as a waste of their heady loans. In practice, the consequences here can be absurd. One close colleague — a fine tutor with a PhD — is regularly maxing out credit cards just to pay the rent. Come the long, dry summers, they take shifts in a coffee shop to make ends meet.

Bottlenecked periods of potential teaching hours turns the whole thing into a feeding frenzy come term time. It’s a stark contrast with our Deliveroo comrades, whose working culture is fairly linear: order comes in on the app; restaurant prepares and dispatches; driver delivers. In the working culture of the hourly lecturer, however, this process is far more convoluted, leaving ample scope for machinations.

Almost all of my hours are dictated by individual line managers, whose preferences, timetables, and yes, personal taste — bias, both conscious and unconscious — play a significant part in who gets work and when. For these reasons, cronyism abounds: I know at least two colleagues whose partners or relatives were employed shortly after they were. Naturally, paranoia and conspiracy are rife. At times, my place can feel more like The Sopranos than Stanford.

Superiors must be, on some level, aware that they’ve got us up against a wall. I’ve therefore learned that it’s prudent to forgo any kind of professional critique, dissent or healthy debate for fear of putting noses out of joint. Much of my time, I’ve noticed, is spent stunting my own intellectual instincts to avoid embarrassing some bewildered superior, overworked and as fearful as the rest of us of being ousted come the next cull. It increasingly feels, anyway, that what modern universities really want from their staff is not curiosity or dynamism or enthusiasm —  but to act as wadding for a holey timetable. After this, it’s pretense they’re after, followed by submission, just as I imagine Deliveroo drivers are hardly encouraged to question the culinary skill of the kebab house they’re collecting from. For both driver and lecturer, it’s a case of turn up, pick up, fuck off.

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The Great Dumb-Down is here

By Paul Sagar

So, might anything change? Sadly, in my experience, Britain’s universities — left to fester in stale pipe-smoke and hubris for decades now — still seem to be concerned only with status games and paychecks.

On the humiliations go. A while back, a colleague, at the start of the year, opened their laptop to find their hours had been decimated overnight, their financial security annihilated in a single click of the calendar. The word in the staff canteen was that the cut had been timed to land weeks before the beginning of term. Naturally, if they’d been informed any earlier, said colleague may well have had time to source work elsewhere. Yet with two weeks to go, they were once again up against a wall, with nowhere else to turn. Then, just recently, the same exact thing happened to me. Cue a frantic few days spent clawing back hours from gatekeepers, in what’s now become a yearly ritual of self-preservation. And though redundancies of full-time staff are, of course, happening — with some predicting around 10,000 job cuts a year if trends persist — it’s us Hourlies who’ll be the first to go, becoming, as the grim jargon would have it, “financial shock absorbers”.

Are there any alternatives? One solution — which dovetails well with the rise of AI in the education sector  — would be to return to the values of communication, intellectual curiosity, and pastoral presence in higher education: as opposed to seeing higher education as mere content delivery. And don’t take this old crone’s word for it: it’s what I hear from my students daily. What they want are challenging, engaging tutors, not calcified ones who’ve barely left their desk in decades. There’s even a world where a different kind of Hourly could provide just that, not least given most of us juggle regular jobs alongside our teaching commitments. Just please respect our contribution, secure our roles, or else pay us more. After all, even Deliveroo gives you a chance to tip the driver.

Once upon a time, there was a very poor family who didn’t have enough food to eat. All the children of the family went hungry. One day, they all heard the sound of a big car outside their house. What could it be? It was their dad. He had just passed The Knowledge and he had driven home in his black cab. From that day on, the family always had enough to eat, and they all lived happily ever after.

The story was loosely based on my grandfather. He had grown up very poor in the East End in the Thirties. He did The Knowledge in 1947 and drove a black cab for the next 50 years — and as a result, his family never went hungry.

Why am I writing about this now? Because my grandmother was telling me a fairy story where the hero was, in effect, a vocational qualification.

“The Knowledge” is the famously demanding test that London’s black-cab drivers must pass, requiring them to memorize thousands of streets and routes across the capital. It is so tough that, in 2011, researchers found that studying for it significantly changes the structure of your brain.

And while it might seem a bit odd to make up a story about the Knowledge, my grandmother’s respect for it was not unusual. It had a semi-mythic status in East London, when I was growing up, as a tough course that gave you a great standard of living. It’s a good example of a vocational qualification that enjoys incredibly high status and esteem.

There are other examples. My mum and dad both have City & Guilds qualifications in hairdressing and electrical installation. I have a PGCE. Qualifications like these don’t just give you earning power; they also give you status, self-worth, and a sense of competence. Even when you’re not using them to make a living, they are useful life skills. My mum still cuts my dad’s hair, my dad fitted a new fuse box in the first flat I bought, and friends still ask me for advice about how to teach their children to read.

I think vocational qualifications are great, I think we should have more of them, and I think in many cases they are more rigorous and challenging than university degrees. People might be surprised to hear me make this argument, as I have a reputation for favoring a traditional, knowledge-based education. But I don’t think there is any contradiction. In fact, I think there are a lot of overlaps between quality vocational education and knowledge-based teaching and assessment. It is really striking, after all, that The Knowledge is called “The Knowledge” — not “The Skill”!

But that doesn’t mean we need more vocational qualifications at 14. Given how positive I am about vocational qualifications, you might expect me to be very positive about the Government’s new proposal to introduce more vocational qualifications at age 14. As Andy Burnham put it: “From today, Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap.” But I can’t find much enthusiasm.

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In fact, I think the scheme is a bad idea. There is a world of difference between what you can achieve by taking a City & Guilds or a degree apprenticeship or The Knowledge, and what it is possible to do in our current school system at ages 14 to 16.

There are a number of specific structural reasons that make it really hard to deliver high-quality vocational training at scale in comprehensive schools to 14-year-olds, and I will explain them shortly. But what is more powerful than any explanation is that we have very recent evidence of the education system trying to do this — and failing badly.

Starting from about 2000, the English school system went all-in on a particular interpretation of school-aged vocational education, which caused a lot of problems. Between 2004 and 2010, the number of vocational qualifications taken in schools up to age 16 increased nearly 40 times: from 15,000 a year to 575,000 a year. If doing more vocational qualifications makes you better prepared for work, then by 2010 England should have had the most work-ready generation in its history. But there is no evidence that it did, because a lot of these newer vocational qualifications didn’t have the same labor market value of the qualifications I discussed above. 

Though there were these big differences in labor market value between different qualifications, the Government attempted to enforce equivalence by fiat using “equivalence tables”, which declared that very different qualifications were worth the same for the purposes of school league tables.

This caused some huge distortions. In perhaps the most egregious case, about 20% of students ended up taking the European Computer Driving Licence, a vocational qualification that was equivalent to a GCSE but that could be completed in three days.

It’s also worth noting that the big increases in vocational courses did not include what many people think of as the classic vocational GCSE: design and technology. Across the same 2004-2010 period that vocational courses in general exploded, the numbers taking DT GCSEs fell by about a third (from about 450,000 to 290,000). One possible reason for this is that DT GCSEs are expensive to deliver and hard to scale. Schools ended up choosing courses which could be taught to large mixed-ability groups in a classroom with limited specialist equipment: courses like the ASDAN Certificate of Personal Effectiveness and the OCR National First Certificate in ICT.

My view is that the underlying error which caused a lot of these problems was that policymakers were never completely clear about the purpose of vocational school education. Was it to provide a clear pathway to the 15-20% of jobs in technical sectors for the 15-20% of students with the most interest and aptitude for those jobs? Or was it to provide an alternative to GCSEs for the 30-40% of students struggling to get five good GCSEs?

A lot of the time, policymakers would assume that these two purposes were basically the same. Their thought process seemed to be as follows: students who struggle with academic learning will be “good with their hands”. So we can therefore get the 30-40% of students struggling to get five good GCSEs to do vocational courses instead. We’ve then conveniently solved two problems: we’ve solved the problem of disaffected teens turned off by academic learning, and we’ve created a pipeline of future technical specialists.

The problem is that there is not a one-to-one match between these two cohorts. Of course, we can all think of a student who hates the classroom but comes alive in the workshop. But that is an anecdote, not data, and to the extent we have relevant data, it suggests that academic aptitude and being good with your hands have a modest positive correlation, not a negative one.

And a lot of the most valuable vocational courses have quite challenging academic demands: the electrical installation course requires knowledge of algebra and trigonometry, plus mastery of a wiring regulations handbook that is twice as long as Pride and Prejudice. Of course, there will always be individual exceptions, but it is difficult to imagine many students with grade 2s in English & Maths thriving on such a course.

So the problem is this: if vocational courses are conceived of as an alternative for students with low academic attainment, that makes it harder to run the kinds of vocational courses that have the greatest labor market value. You also won’t help the low-attaining students: in many cases, they might benefit more from stronger support in the English, math and science GCSEs that underpin vocational success.

What I am describing above is not a hypothetical prediction of how “vocational at 14” might go wrong. It is exactly how the system went wrong within very recent memory. So if you are advocating for vocational qualifications at 14, I think it is incumbent upon you to explain how you will stop all these problems happening again.

The detail on what the Government is proposing is thin on the ground, but there are already some worrying signs that they could be about to repeat the mistakes of the past. Andy Burnham has said “I want an education system based on parity between academic and technical”, suggesting that equivalences could be making a comeback. Lucy Powell has said “we must recognise that an over‑focus on academic outcomes has left too many young people behind”, reinforcing the idea that vocational qualifications are for students struggling with GCSEs. There have also been briefings about new qualifications like a GCSE in AI, which again worries me, because it suggests we are going down the route of cheap classroom-based courses.

The general principle of more vocational courses appeals to a public who are growing more skeptical of the value of a university degree, and who would like to see qualifications which guarantee a job at the end. But that would suggest reforming the post-16 and post-18 systems — and most of these plans are about 14-16 qualifications, where establishing links with employers will inevitably be much harder.

Are there any ways we could make vocational courses at age 14 work? It is going to be very hard for some big structural reasons. High-quality vocational courses require specialist teachers, expensive equipment and deep employer connections. Establishing these three things is not just about cost; it’s about scale. It’s not realistic to expect 3,000 comprehensive schools to build and staff a trainee nail bar for the one student every three years who wants to be a nail technician.

Further education (FE) colleges have the scale to do this because they are much bigger institutions than schools, and are able to specialize in certain areas. Given the structural challenges, I think we’d be better off getting FE colleges to focus on vocational qualifications, and schools to focus on teaching a relatively traditional slate of GCSEs.

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Why exams are good for you

By Poppy Sowerby

GCSEs are often referred to as “academic” courses, but I think that is misleading. GCSEs — in English, math, science, history and geography — are not academic in the way a degree in English literature is academic. I think they are better thought of as foundational qualifications that provide students with skills and knowledge that help them understand the world, and that provide the basis for more advanced academic and vocational study. That is why broadly similar foundational subjects appear in the compulsory curriculums of many countries.

And we diminish them at our peril. The only way I think you could make vocational at 14 work at scale is if you completely restructured our system, so that everyone took their GCSEs aged 14, secondary schools became 11-14, and FE colleges expanded to 14-19. That is an enormous amount of upheaval! By all means advocate for that if you want to, but would the benefits really justify the upheaval? Would we not be better off working within our current system, to help both schools and FE colleges get even better at their primary purposes?

So what about parity of esteem, then? As I’ve said, I have some sympathy with the idea that a lot of vocational qualifications are more challenging and valuable than a lot of degree courses. So maybe in that sense, we do have a problem in that some vocational courses don’t get the full credit they deserve, and some degrees get more credit than they deserve.

However, where I find the “parity of esteem” phrase misleading is that it assumes all vocational courses are the same. I don’t actually want The Knowledge and the European Computer Driving Licence to have parity of esteem: because one of them deserves more esteem than the other.

We shouldn’t give a course esteem just because it is badged as vocational, just as we shouldn’t give a course esteem just because it is badged as academic. But high-quality vocational courses and pathways deserve esteem. And while they might not get as much esteem as many people would like, they do still get some esteem. The Knowledge is esteemed. City & Guilds Electrical Installation is esteemed. The PGCE is esteemed. Medicine is esteemed. The Rolls-Royce apprenticeship is esteemed. Securing a place in a Premier League academy is esteemed. Qualifications and pathways which deliver negative wage returns are just not going to be esteemed in the same way, whether they are vocational or academic.

It is completely legitimate to want education to provide students with good job opportunities. But will new qualifications and pathways at 14 achieve that? My challenge to Andy Burnham, and to the people who will end up developing these new qualifications, is as follows. The Knowledge is a vocational qualification that is so esteemed people made up fairy stories about it for their grandchildren. The European Computer Driving Licence ended up being the punchline in jokes about dumbing down. What are you going to do to make these qualifications more like the former — and less like the latter?

***

This essay was adapted from Daisy Christodoulou’s Substack, No More Marking.

It seems likely to be an incredible read. In various interviews, Arday has claimed to have completed his PhD with a brain tumor; to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days; to have raised millions for charity; to have played both snooker and football at professional levels. And now there is a new chapter in this gripping life story: outright allegations of plagiarism in his academic writing and muttered suspicions of fraud. There are magical-sounding transformations here, arduous journeys, and noble heroes battling it out with dastardly villains. But who exactly are we supposed to root for, and what is the moral of the story?

For some, the obvious baddie is Arday’s recent accuser, Nathan Cofnas, who has alleged several instances of plagiarism on his Substack. Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent, is best known for his controversial research on racially based IQ differences, and for taking a Cambridge college to court, claiming it had discriminated against him on the grounds of his “anti-woke” beliefs. It is as if the most stereotypically problematic of academics had escaped from a university HR manager’s cheese dream and taken fleshly shape. Predictably, then, commentators who have based their careers on divining institutional racism have been quick to take advantage of the caricatural optics. Cambridge itself says that Arday has been cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications”, and is a “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”.

But serious concerns about Arday’s work have been circulating for at least three years, voiced by scholars who have no interest in hereditarianism; and it is hard to see how Cambridge could have dismissed them so lightly. In 2023, Professor Dave Harris, an emeritus sociologist, started documenting concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and some other journal articles on his own website. Along with another sociologist, Professor Martyn Hammersley, Harris also tried doggedly to raise the matter with journal editors, university authorities, and Arday himself.

Harris sent me his correspondence. To his polite inquiries, Arday insisted he would consider future contact from Harris as bullying and harassment. Cambridge’s Head of Policy told Harris that, since the alleged issues preceded Arday’s time at Cambridge, it was not within the university’s remit to investigate — a bizarrely relaxed attitude to the possibility that a star academic had committed research malpractice. Last year, Times Higher staff reporter Jack Grove looked into the case in great depth, drawing in part upon evidence from Harris and Hammersley, but his editors spiked the piece after legal letters from Carter-Ruck.

It is clear, then, that more reputations are at stake here than Arday’s own. When he was first appointed as a Professorial Chair, Cambridge made huge capital out of the moment, stressing the significance not just of their new hire’s ethnicity but his “neurodiversity” too. The well-known theory of intersectionality has it that a black or brown ethnicity, plus a disability, equals the likelihood of exponential discrimination. Alongside this dogma runs a shadow logic for progressive employers, whispering that two protected characteristics in a prominent employee are even better than one; three, if you count Arday’s origins on a deprived council estate. Or as the University press release put it at the time: “parts of [Arday’s] story… epitomize the significant barriers that neurodivergent individuals, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people face when trying to build careers in the sector”. But not at Cambridge, they might as well have smugly added.

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Throughout his career, Arday himself has highlighted his disabilities just as much as his race. He has said he only learned to eat for himself aged seven, and that he spent “thousands of hours in speech therapy… six days a week” from the age of three. He has claimed that the aforementioned brain tumor was surgically removed only two weeks before his PhD viva. Last year, he co-authored a book with Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis entitled We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity, published by the elite Princeton University Press. Its subject is how “neurotypical hegemony reproduces a culture of exclusion”. The authors wax lyrical to their presumed neurodiverse readers: “Not only do you still deserve love, you deserve for your creativity to flourish and be nurtured. You still deserve ordinariness, even if you struggle to communicate your passions.”

As this suggests, the book is an extremely weird mix of academic jargon and chatty informality. Each chapter starts with a song lyric. Chapter Seven, for instance, begins with the Blur lyric “hold on for tomorrow”, then explains: “For neurodivergent people, who are often holding on to the coattails of neurotypicals, there is a need for the neuromajority population to be more accommodating and understanding in this process… and hold on for tomorrow.” There is also a lot of breathless metacommentary, as if the authors were fascinated with their own creative process — a feature often found in student essays, but not so much in work by senior academics. In Chapter Three, for instance, you get: “it will come as no surprise to many of our sociologist peers that this third chapter was one of the last we put together”; and “[a]s we returned to Durkheim’s analysis when writing this book, a sense of sadness and frustration often entered our conversations about neurotypical hegemony”. In Chapter Seven: “As we began to round up our reflections and the rationale of the book, we spoke a lot about the concept of time and our general sense of getting through the day.”

Irrespective of the outcome of the plagiarism allegations, it seems to me there is an even more fundamental problem here. Having waded through some of Arday’s books, articles, and talks, it is my strong impression his published outputs would be judged unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible, were it not for the heroic DEI-friendly backstory. As Cofnas has pointed out, his journal articles are full of typos and solecisms, and there is even a rogue apostrophe in his PhD title. His 2019 monograph, Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, is also strikingly garbled, as he uses autoethnography about Britpop in order to pursue “an uncomfortable discourse for melancholic Britain to digest”: that the cool Britannia of the Nineties was actually cruel, racist Britannia instead.

Here, Arday relates how he fell in love with bands like Oasis at a young age, “or at least so it seemed until the veil of innocence and naivete was stripped away through the most pernicious and insidious of discriminatory instruments… racism”. The dramatic pause is his. Other phrases tend to collapse under their own weight: “Significant periods in most individuals’ lives prove to be a point of discovery which can often lead to a sense of belonging that is hard to quantify”; “There are periods historically which capture the mood of a generation and become the soundtrack to a particular type of lived experience”. The book was nominated for a British Sociological Association prize in 2020.

Arday’s academic talks, meanwhile, are rambling and banal, in no way consonant with his elevated rank. In his 2024 British Academy lecture at the University of Bristol, for instance — about “cultural appropriation” in Paul Simon’s album Graceland — he sounds like an enthusiastic sixth-former regurgitating talking points from a rockumentary. At one point he suggests that part of Simon’s “insecurity” and “arrogance” stems from the fact Simon is physically shorter than Art Garfunkel. At another point, he digresses and starts talking about the lack of indigenous actors in Neighbours and Home and Away, observing that “you become a sociologist and start looking at it through a different lens; you start thinking ‘well Australia had an indigenous population… how come none of them are present in the utopia of Summer Bay?’”. And his interest in these two TV soap operas is not merely in passing; in a podcast interview last year, the Professor said he sleeps “probably two hours a night… then in that two hours in between, I fill it with Home and Away and Neighbours”.

There is currently some bafflement on social media about why Cambridge authorities are disclaiming the accusations about Arday with such aggressive, self-satisfied certainty. I have a possible explanation that is only secondarily connected to skin color. Namely: at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well.

Lecturers are now routinely expected to make adjustments to their ordinary critical approach as soon as someone has a diagnosis: to ignore spelling mistakes; mentally rearrange sentences without critical comment; try not to mind paragraphs that go on for days, or seem utterly arbitrary in their shape. I speak from experience. As a marker, you are supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within. Most often, this nonsensical strategy is applied at the level of students; but once the principle was conceded, it was only a matter of time before such accommodations were extended to staff too.

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Primed by his amazing personal history, Cambridge bosses seem to have taken this patronizing approach to the quality of Arday’s outputs, just as other august bodies presumably did before them: Glasgow University, where Arday was also a Professor; the British Sociological Association, where he is a trustee; Routledge and Princeton University Press, the publishers of his books. According to the unspoken norms of these institutions, it doesn’t matter how silly Arday sounds in interviews, or how bad his writing is. It is already priced in. To point out the fact wouldn’t just be rude, it would also be positively discriminatory in a vague sort of way; whereas to ignore the issue is virtuous and noble. Many people have noticed marked inadequacies in Arday’s work over the years, I assume, but very few have said anything. And I also assume that the pressure to stay silent has increased, the higher he has climbed. What’s this? You are pointing out Professor Jason Arday of Cambridge University — a man who has been through so much to get where he is — can’t write coherent sentences, or stay on-topic in his talks? Are you some kind of Nazi?

Cambridge’s stubborn defense of its employee in the light of the plagiarism accusations looks to me like just more of the same. Managers there don’t seem to see the deliberate repetition of other people’s phrases as any kind of vice, in his particular case — it can only be inadvertent and excusable, given his known disabilities, and so perhaps doesn’t count as plagiarism at all. And it seems his race might be being treated as an additional mitigating factor, based on the assumption he routinely undergoes racist treatment which causes him psychological distress.

For instance, in correspondence between Harris and Head of the Cambridge Faculty of Education, Dr Hilary Cremin, Cremin said that when she had asked Arday about Harris’s plagiarism allegations, the former had “spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the… article was being prepared”. She also stressed that her faculty remained “immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking here that Cremin was trying to offer mitigating circumstances for a troubled but promising undergraduate — except that she was talking about someone holding a Professorial Chair. Once a narrative of mental disability is firmly in place, it seems that a presumed experience of racism can just be added to the list, as yet another unfair impediment to intellectual achievement. Minority ethnicity plus disability now equals the suspension of critical judgment.

Ultimately, there are likely to be many losers in this embarrassing debacle: deserving young scholars who were overlooked as Arday was appointed, now lost to the profession; fee-paying students who came to Cambridge or Glasgow to bask in the intellectual glow of world-class academics, and got some waffle about Australian soap operas instead; accomplished black or brown researchers smeared by association, now facing abuse online from hereditarian idiots who assume that Arday’s case is the norm. And ultimately, Cambridge University will be a massive loser, deservedly so. It is a necessary condition of the place’s continuing glamour and prestige that it enforces rigorous academic standards. To be shown not to care about this, in such a public way, is an act of catastrophic institutional self-harm.

But I can’t help thinking another loser is Arday himself, wandering like a modern-day Forrest Gump through various prestigious institutions, treated like a sage for every strange or incomprehensible thing he says. To be radically unsuited to an Oxbridge professorship is scarcely something to be ashamed of. Indeed, these days, in my book, it is practically a badge of honor. There are plenty of decent jobs Arday might have found earlier on, more suited to his skill set, which would not have set him up for such public humiliation later. Yet — whatever pieties university managers spouted at the time of his appointments — ultimately, the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves. Irrespective of the truth about his research techniques, it is obvious Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot. His fairy tale is not yet over; but I think we can already identify some clear villains.

I’m neither an economist nor a computer scientist, and I don’t possess a crystal ball — so like most people, I struggle to know what to make of it all (even if my suspicions tend toward the latter). But I do teach political philosophy in a British university, so I have had to wrestle with the impact of large language models (LLMs) in one small domain: higher education. And here, my conclusion is simple. The threat they pose is existential.

However, the reasons for this are not straightforward. As often, reality is complicated. Still, we can make headway by bracketing out the question of what AI means for university research — which will differ dramatically across fields — and instead focus on teaching. Specifically, students who use LLMs to complete their coursework assignments. Ask anybody lecturing in a university today and they will tell you the same: the impact has been dramatic.

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The most obvious change is that whereas plagiarism software was previously very good at catching students passing off copied work as their own, LLMs evade this entirely. Programs like ChatGPT generate wholly original text based on the prompts you feed them, making plagiarism software useless. (It’s cheating, Jim, but not as we knew it.)

Likewise, software which claims to be able to detect AI-generated text is of no help, yielding false results in both directions. Students know this. I can only speak directly to the effect on essay-based subjects, but I can’t imagine the situation is any better in the sciences. In turn, we academics are painfully aware that at least some students are using the technology, and hence we are sometimes giving out grades for work spat out by machines, but fraudulently presented as human.

Shouldn’t we, the certified experts, be able to tell the difference between undergraduate work and LLM slop? Well kind of — but it’s tricky. A little while ago I was confidently pronouncing on my ability to spot AI-generated work in my field. When it comes to political philosophy, there is a certain tone of arch confidence — a panoramic control of the wider discipline — that it takes years of reading, writing, and thinking to pull off. No undergraduate has been studying the subject anywhere near long enough to be able to write with that level of control and authority. Hence when I find this tone in student work, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got an LLM-cheat.

As a colleague pointed out to me, however, this runs straight into the “toupée fallacy”. Imagine I confidently proclaim that men who wear toupées always look bad, and would be better off just going bald. After all, we can all tell they are wearing wigs! The problem here is that I’m assuming I can always spot a toupée. The good toupées are precisely the ones I don’t spot. Just because I can spot some toupées (the bad ones) doesn’t mean I can spot all toupées — indeed, the good ones are precisely the ones I miss, in turn feeding my mistaken confidence that I can spot them all. The same goes for student use of LLMs. Those who are effective at using the technology to cheat are precisely the ones getting away with it.

And even when I spot the coursework equivalent of a toupée, there’s usually nothing I can do about it anyway. My gut instinct that coursework feels like AI is, reasonably enough, insufficient proof to fail a submission. Unless the student is daft enough to have included a hallucinated bibliography of made-up AI references (and yes, this does happen), they always have plausible deniability. Their word, against my gut instinct. Unprincipled offenders win every time. After all, for a student willing to cheat on submitted assignments, a bit of extra lying isn’t much of a leap.

Yet it’s not just the problem of brazen cheating. In some ways, the more insidious threat LLMs pose to undergraduate learning is the promise of instant shortcuts. Why struggle through that difficult article, why read that complicated book, why force yourself through the problem set, when the internet can just summarize it for you?

The answer to which is: because it is only through the struggle, the forcing, the wrestling with ideas for yourself, over the course of years, that you can truly train and develop your mind. Indeed, this is the reason university humanities degrees put such a high premium on writing. Writing is thinking. Until you have tried to put your ideas on the page, you never really know if you understand them and have them under control.

Unfortunately, the truth of these facts only becomes apparent with experience — which is exactly what undergraduates lack. You may also be surprised to hear that people in their late teens and early twenties tend not to be good at putting off immediate pleasure in exchange for distant reward. Traditionally, one thing that universities were good at was teaching young people this skill by forcing them to acquire it. (One learns by doing.) LLMs, however, pose a direct threat to this entire process. They are a quick-fix drug dangled before students’ noses whose true effects appear to be the stunting of intellectual development.

What I would give to demolish the Silicon Valley cartels foisting this corrosive digital narcotic upon my students! Move fast and break things? How I wish I could return the favor.

By this point, it is abundantly clear that the only pedagogically robust response to LLMs in universities is at least a partial return to traditional methods. Reliance on online coursework has to be reduced; a significant return to paper and pen is required. This is the only way we can guarantee that students are not cheating in (all) their submissions. It is only by demanding that they prove their knowledge directly, in person, that we can incentivize them to go away and learn properly in their own time. Everybody in higher education knows this already.

But not everybody will admit it. University administrators in particular don’t want to admit it. This is not just because they’ve already invested huge amounts of money in online systems amid the headlong race to “embrace” AI and enter into hefty contracts with companies like Microsoft Copilot to teach students how to use AI tools. (As if middle-aged people like me are the ones who need to teach the kids how to use technology.) More than this, it is also the result of the sheer scale of modern university operations.

Although some institutions have already moved to integrate pen and paper exams, places like King’s College London, where I work, are trying to run away from the reality. This is in part because we have more students enrolled than we could possibly fit into exam rooms during a finite exam period. This is presumably why, at a meeting with our university “AI Lead” last year, my department was told that a return to having majority exam-based assessments was straightforwardly not an option.

Instead, my colleagues and I were told that the university AI policy is that we as teachers must strive to become so inspirational that our students will not want to use LLMs in any nefarious capacity. In this scenario, they will only use it to “enhance their learning” (whatever that means).

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Now listen, I’m not completely against this line of thought. In fact, I try to do this anyway. But can we please stop with the willful naivety? Students today arrive at university having been raised in a culture, and an education system, that hammers into them the mantra that the main reason you go to university is to get a classification on a piece of paper (preferably 2:1 or above), the major function of which is to be a ticket on the job market.

Some of my students see their degree as more than that: an opportunity to learn, explore ideas, expand their mental horizons through structured education where the only path to genuine reward is hard work. But let’s get real — they are the exception, the minority. Most are not like that. And who can really blame them? They are taking on tens of thousands in debt on the assurance that this is a necessary financial transaction undertaken to secure future earning potential. They are the customers, we are the retailers. UK universities have been fundamentally rigged this way for the last 20 years. And now you say that it’s my job to inspire a love of learning so deep that all of those factors can be overcome? That somehow my charisma in the lecture hall can compete with the narcotics of Silicon Valley? Please.

Yet this is precisely where the wider pieces start coming together and the threat becomes existential.

UK universities today are expected to operate like businesses. If we cannot attract sufficient numbers of students, and bring in the fees that they pay, then we cannot expect to stay open. Student fees effectively haven’t increased since they were hiked by the coalition government, meaning their value has fallen in real terms by about 30%. Until recently, the main strategy for dealing with this was massive increases in Master’s degrees, with a very deliberate focus on attracting international students, who pay much higher fees. Which in practice largely meant: the Chinese.

Who cares that rampant fraud has been committed as a result? UK degrees are now routinely awarded to students unable to send three sentences of coherent English in an email, who never say a word in class, and are manifestly cheating on coursework (many were relying on commercial online essay farms even before the arrival of LLMs). University teachers like me have tried to kick up a fuss — and are promptly told by administrators to pipe down and get on with despoiling our vocation. After all, who did we think was paying our salaries?

But about two years ago, the magic money tree started to shrivel. The story is complicated, but, in effect, Beijing started to tighten the taps, while the racist riots of summer 2024 rather put off international students from coming to our delightful shores. Universities panicked and are now pivoting away from an emphasis on Master’s degrees towards massively increasing undergraduate numbers.

The problem is that there are only a limited number of undergraduates across the sector. So now we have competitive cannibalization. The Russell Group, for example, is in a dog-eat-dog contest where some universities (like mine) massively increase undergraduate cohorts — at the direct expense of smaller, more provincial institutions. For now my job is safe – less so colleagues at the University of York, an equally venerable institution, but which last year was trying to shed 20% of its staff. And of course, this contest is simply being passed along, jeopardizing less prestigious institutions in turn. Many British universities are now facing financial collapse as a result.

These dogs, however, may also be in a race to the bottom. The entire contest is predicated on the assumption that undergraduates will still want to bother to come to university at all. Yet graduate recruiting is down, and there are emerging signs that this is a direct response to the rise of LLMs. Why hire 100 graduate trainees when you can just get one and ask Claude to do the rest of the work at a fraction of the cost and 1,000 times as fast? And equally, why take on £50k of debt to get a degree, if a degree no longer gets you a job anyway? As tech chiefs publicly predict the end of white collar work within the next two years, you can forgive the next generation for choosing to sit things out.

If LLMs gut the graduate workforce, it won’t just be the undergraduate essay that they put out of business. It will be the British university sector as a whole – which is easily big enough to take the rest of the economy with it. The chickens are coming home to roost. And when they land not just the shed, but the entire farm, may yet crumble under their weight.

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, capitalizes 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”.

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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 Anglicized. 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: industrialized, 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 instill 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 senior management 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.

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 behaviors 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 individualization and atomization, 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 civilized 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 recognized the sector’s value in relation to state-building and equalizing 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.

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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.

Bradbury’s novel about radical politics and its discontents skewered the post-1968 zeitgeist, that age of blazing up and making out. Set in 1972, it follows the Machiavellian villain Howard Kirk, a “radical sociologist” at the University of Watermouth who can “explain anything” with “a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social history”. A Left-wing ideologue, all Kirk needs to hear is “an apparently casual remark about one’s schoolboy stamp collection, or a literary reference to the metaphoric significance of color” before he denounces you publicly for your insipid “bourgeois materialism” or racism.

Kirk is a “theoretician of sociability”, so between teaching seminars on the difference between “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft” and marking student essays with comments like “pure fascism” and “reactionary crap”, he hosts parties, arranges protests, and pursues younger women. The character Bradbury created is a comic distortion — he doesn’t exist — and yet Kirk embodies a recognizable set of social and intellectual anxieties.

Today, the British university is dramatically different: academics spend more time in redundancy pools than seminar rooms, and students use ChatGPT to summarize everything from Shakespeare soliloquies to departmental emails. And yet half a century on, Howard Kirk still has plenty to teach us about class, intellectuals, and the real importance of a university education.

Watermouth is a fictional plate-glass institution, with concrete buildings, Perspex domes, and an interdisciplinary program. It’s a radical place with something for everyone, and “a zealous equality prevails in the air”. In the campus auditorium, actors perform a communist adaptation of King Lear one week and a capitalist version of The Good Woman of Szechwan the next. On the walls, we find notices for events like “Gaysoc Elizabethan Evening: With Madrigals” and “Women’s Lib Nude Encounter Group”. There is even a “multi-denominational” chapel named, to avoid offense, the Contemplation Center.

In this time and place, the opportunistic Kirk is thriving. He receives generous royalty checks for his fashionable books — titled The Coming of the New Sex and The Defeat of Privacy — and he regularly travels to London to appear on television and opine on current affairs. Meanwhile, his wife Barbara, smarter than her husband but intellectually and emotionally unfulfilled, is begrudgingly relegated to keeping house. For everybody else, university expansion in England is on the wane, and the Watermouth campus is in decline. “The concrete has stained,” writes Bradbury, “the glass grown dirty, the services diminished.”

It’s difficult to appreciate the sense of decline felt by Bradbury and his colleagues in the new universities without realizing the original promise (and betrayal) that these institutions represented. The early Sixties saw seven “new” universities built in the English provinces, beginning with Sussex in 1961, then UEA and York in 1963, Essex and Lancaster in 1964, and finally Kent and Warwick in 1965. This expansion had been the result of a rapid increase in student numbers in the late Fifties, which continued for the next two decades. UEA, for instance, had grown from just 113 students in 1963 to 1,724 in 1967. By 1971, it had surpassed 2,600. In part, this rise was due to the baby-boomer generation’s coming-of-age, but it was also a consequence of Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act: by removing fees from grammar schools, the Butler Act enabled children from poorer families to attend grammar school and from there go on to university.

Bradbury himself benefited from this change: born to a lower-middle-class family in Sheffield in 1932, he attended West Bridgford Grammar School in Nottingham. His closest friends, colleagues and collaborators were also children of the Butler Act, foremost Lorna Sage and David Lodge. In The History Man, we see how a life could be shaped by learning: as Bradbury puts it, Howard and Barbara Kirk “had had their sights lifted by a grammar school and university education”.

No wonder, then, that this generation thought of education as a form of training, rather than a leisure pursuit or a chance to accrue cultural capital. In 1956, Bradbury published a short article for The Antioch Review entitled “The Rise of Provincials”, in which he praised “a rigorous training in discrimination” in provincial universities like Leicester, Leeds and Hull. Bradbury saw this new education as far superior to the “Good Taste” associated with Oxford dons or with Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.

This, then, was the intellectual origin of the “new” universities: a genuine alternative to the leisurely and complacent gentlemen’s scholarship of Oxbridge. The new universities were self-consciously novel: UEA’s founding motto, taken from an old Norfolk phrase, was “do different”. Subjects were divided not into departments but rather interdisciplinary schools. “English Studies”, for instance, combined history and literature, while “European Studies” blended languages with history.

There were other innovations too. In 1963, when Ian Watt was hired from Berkeley to be UEA’s first dean of English Studies, he brought with him the idea of teaching seminar groups of eight to 10 students. At the time, this was a West Coast idea, influenced by new developments in group therapy and the fashion for “encounter groups” (in which participants would meet to express themselves and experiment with wacky group interactions like sleep deprivation or being nude). Before then, academics either held an Oxbridge-style Socratic dialogue with one or two students, or else delivered a civic-style lecture to hundreds. (In the end, Watt himself lasted only a year at UEA before he returned to California; according to Lorna Sage, the weather in Norwich disagreed with his pet boa constrictor.)

By the end of the Sixties, the excitement about progressive teaching methods had given way to anxieties about a drop in standards, from primary schooling to postgraduate research. The Labour government had plans to replace grammar schools with comprehensives, and the May 1968 protests in France had led to a series of diminutive copycat rebellions in Britain. As Paris burned, there was a peaceful sit-in at the LSE, while at Essex bricks were chucked through windows. When Princess Margaret visited UEA in May 1968, students planned to burn a Union Jack. But struggling to find one, they decided to make their own. In the end, they were reduced to drawing one on a paper shopping bag. The makeshift flag wouldn’t catch alight, so the would-be revolutionaries just stomped on it instead.

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Later, in 1971, a 10-day sit-in was held at UEA to protest the expulsion of an American undergraduate who had received a police caution for smoking marijuana. Bradbury’s own office was trashed — the basis, perhaps, for the destruction of timorous Henry Beamish’s office in the novel. Unlike Kirk, who capitalizes on these antics for his own gain, Bradbury and his cohort of grammar school-educated provincial academics were appalled by these developments and demonstrations, which represented for them a churlish rejection of the serious-minded liberalism and free debate of the postwar university. Today, the professors are less offended: after all, it was their generation who invented student politics.

In 1969, Bradbury’s friends Brian Cox and Tony Dyson published a special issue of their journal Critical Survey titled “Fight for Education”, in which they sought to make the case against progressive education and student protest. The first of their so-called “Black Papers” (a play on government white papers), the issue carried contributions by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest (“Kingers and Conkers”, as Christopher Hitchens remembers them), and opened with a letter to MPs in which the authors claimed that anarchy “is becoming fashionable”. In a panicked tone, they wrote that university students were now “claiming the right to control syllabuses, to abolish examinations, and even to become involved in appointing their own teachers”. In one new university, students apparently objected to history or science, instead demanding to “be taught LIFE”.

The most prescient essay in the first Black Paper is “Decline and Fall of the University Idea”. Written by the pseudonymous “B”, the article lays the blame for the failure of the universities not only on student extremists, but also on university management and government policy, “with its highly rationalistic view of society and the economy”. “These are not particularly comfortable or happy times for the campus,” writes B, “and the signs are all that they will get more and more uncomfortable — especially if we end up with alienating, culturally destructive forms of rationalization that are being canvassed in some quarters, like the four-term year or other versions of the shift-system.”

As Cox wrote in his 1992 memoir, suitably titled The Great Betrayal, “Decline and Fall of the University Idea” had been published under a pseudonym because the author “so feared student reprisals that he dare not reveal his name”. This was hardly necessary, as the piece is written in Bradbury’s recognizably droll style. At one point, he quips that “governmental pressure is increasingly toward making all universities the Bowden Institute of Technology” — B.V. Bowden had been Minister for Education and Science for a short period in 1965 — whereas “student pressure is increasingly toward making them all the Che Guevara Institute of Strategic Studies”.

Looking back at The History Man, we therefore see it is as much a novel about bureaucracy and mismanagement as about radical politics. Kirk manipulates departmental meetings, moving deftly from “document A” to “document L” to “document Y”, and raising a constitutional point to ensure Professor Mangel’s visit to Watermouth goes ahead (and in doing so ensure maximum student disruption). Kirk is, deep down, a master bureaucrat: in a 1998 piece, Bradbury speculated that an older Kirk “would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University”.

The woke students and canceled academics of The History Man may well seem familiar to readers in 2025, but really the novel is a period piece. Students today are less interested in reading or protesting than they are in mindlessly scrolling TikTok, and the young academics who teach them are precariously employed, paid by the hour to navigate Zoom calls and “virtual learning environments”. Kirk, by contrast, lands a permanent job straight after his PhD, and his monograph The Coming of the New Sex is a commercial success that generates enough royalties to renovate his house. The Howard Kirks of today are still Left-wing, but too busy editing their CVs or scrubbing mold from the walls of their tiny rented flats to even begin starting a plan for a protest.

And yet The History Man goes on being relevant. Why? Because what it can teach us — if we want to learn — is the damage that’s done to our institutions when they are hijacked by opportunists, charlatans, grifters and wreckers. The basic promise of England’s new universities has been betrayed time and again by the avaricious cost-cutting of opportunistic bureaucrats and university managers. Will we ever learn?

Universities urgently need reform. Henry Adams, who graduated from tiny Harvard College in 1858, wrote that his alma mater left the mind “open”, “supple”, and “ready to receive knowledge”. Few would say that today about any elite American university or liberal arts college. The top schools, and many lower-ranked ones as well, have become grim centres of cancellation, progressivist indoctrination, and self-censorship.

To understand how higher education reached this deplorable state, we must return to the 19th century.

Back in 1874, Nietzsche wrote that universities must be quiet enclosures where the young, protected from the noise of the day, can become “finished, ripe and harmonious personalities”. But he perceived that the primary objective of the modern research university — which was born in Germany, and came into its own in the US at the turn of the 20th century — was social utility, not individual growth and ripeness. The young, Nietzsche lamented in his On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, were “to be trained for the purpose of the age and to lend a hand as soon as possible”.

The world wars of the 20th century only exacerbated this narrow intellectual presentism. In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “there is no such thing as keeping out of politics”, and the university was no exception. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe was focused on repairing its ruined infrastructure and economy, and these tasks — to say nothing of the rapidly expanding US military-industrial complex — called for technical expertise. The result was what German philosopher Josef Pieper decried as an industrial model of education, in which teaching and learning were judged exclusively by the criterion of “social service”.

Pressed by an increasingly complex age’s demand for specialists, universities eventually lost whatever integral vision of education still animated their faculties. As Wendell Berry observed in his 1984 essay “The Loss of the University”, the faculty no longer understood that “the thing being made in a university is humanity”. Academics had ceased to speak or teach the “common tongue” that for millennia had formed “responsible heirs and members of culture”. For Berry, while liberal education resembled the trunk of a tree from which it is possible to branch out — a tree of life — the contemporary academy was “a loose collection of lopped branches waving about randomly in the air”.

By the mid-Eighties, something new — or rather, something as old and stale as a secret policeman’s office — was in the air. Universities had come to understand service to society not just in economic terms, but in ideological ones too. The activist seeds of the Sixties — in particular Herbert Marcuse’s call for “intolerance against movements from the Right” — had been blowing in the wind for decades, and were taking root well beyond campus walls.

Marcuse, who combined (and in the process deformed) the thought of Marx and Freud, fathered the so-called New Left. He inspired generations of radical activists and professors, including Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, and laid the foundations of what is today known as critical theory. Marcuse rejected the basic traditions of American political life, including free speech. Tolerance, he wrote in 1965, “cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation”. Channeling the Sixties’ “Make Love, Not War” vibe, he aimed to liberate our erotic nature from social constraints, but ignored Freud’s warnings that the monsters in the basement of the psyche must be kept behind locked doors.

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How universities killed the academic

By Kathleen Stock

With the release of aggressive and nihilistic resentment, ever more ground had to be cleared in the university curriculum for new growths of political activism. In 1987, Jesse Jackson led 500 students at Stanford in chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”. In 1989, Stanford’s “Western Culture” humanities programme, mandatory for all undergraduates, was replaced by one that featured “more inclusive works on race, class, and gender”.

Some tried to fight back, but their attempts were futile. In 1991, Yale alumnus Lee Bass gave $20 million to his alma mater to fund a Western Civilisation curriculum. The curriculum was never implemented, and in 1995 Yale returned the money.

These developments were not limited to esteemed institutions such as Stanford and Yale: elite universities have a huge impact on the composition of the professoriate at every level, from community college to research university. One decade-long study published in 2022 showed that the most prestigious PhD-granting departments (those in the top 20%) train 80% of American professors in any given field. That includes schools and departments of education, which generally attract faculty and graduate teachers and future administrators who are steeped in identity politics.

Unsurprisingly, while liberals have significantly outnumbered conservatives and moderates in the professoriate since at least 1960, the percentage of those who identify as liberal and far-Left has skyrocketed in recent decades. A 2018 survey of 8,688 tenure track, PhD–holding professors from top liberal arts colleges in the United States found that the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans in the field of history was 17.4 to 1, in philosophy 17.5 to 1, in English 48.3 to 1, and in religion 70 to 1. This imbalance — present in every one of the 24 academic subjects surveyed — is likely higher today, as professors have moved further Left along with the Democratic Party.

In 2024, little remains of the great hard oak of the West in university curricula — and what does is often pulped and strained through a steel mesh of criticism so as to extract object lessons in inequality and injustice. Universities still pay lip service to the goal of graduating well-formed human beings, but far too many punish independent thought and reward ideological conformity. Applicants to elite institutions, many coached by expensive consultants, have for decades been evaluated according to largely non-academic measures. This explains the decreasing percentage of Asian and Jewish students in the Ivy Leagues and other top-tier schools. If you want to be admitted to these universities, or for that matter to win a Rhodes Scholarship or any other highly prestigious award, it helps enormously to be a member of a favoured minority who can speak the language of DEI, critical race theory, intersectionality, and settler colonialism.

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By Jacob Howland

All of which raises Lenin’s favourite question: “What is to be done?” In Hope Against Hope, a memoir of life under Stalin, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote of Soviet leaders who, “ensconced in their ivory towers”, thought that they could “build the present out of the bricks of the future”. Today we find ourselves in a similar predicament. We do not need social engineers. We need leaders and citizens who can think for themselves: who understand the conditions of human flourishing, see things whole, and exercise sound judgment.

The good news is that most Americans seem to agree. There were many reasons for Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the presidential election, including inflation, open borders, and a feckless foreign policy. But voters were also fed up with elites who use their power as platforms for ideological scolding and radical activism.

Trump has vowed to eliminate “Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats”. That includes dismissing the current national higher education accrediting agencies, only six of which are authorised to accredit four-year colleges and universities. One agency requires that “the institution defines and acts with intention to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in all its activities”. Another explains that “an equity framework should permeate… all levels of institutions.” A third obliges institutions to “focus on equity”. New, non-ideological entrants into the accreditation space are sorely needed.

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It's time to abolish the university

By Terry Eagleton

Even with control of both house of Congress, how much Trump and McMahon can accomplish in the face of Democratic opposition and widespread hostility among federal employees remains to be seen. But if they want to Make Education Great Again, they need to make it easier to start new universities. Regulatory capture is the rule in higher education, even in red states. When the University of Austin (where I am provost) received state authorisation in 2023 to open its doors to students, it was the first new secular institution to do so in Texas in over 60 years. And although our first class of freshmen matriculated this September, these students can receive no federal financial aid until we are accredited, which cannot occur before they graduate. Nor can their parents use popular 529 education savings plans to pay their tuition.

Yet ours is a model whose time has come —as a CBS News feature makes clear. Like rowers, future builders, leaders, and founders need to look back to the past in order to move into the future. Our curriculum turns on the civilisationally productive tensions between tradition and innovation, reason and revelation, authority and freedom, the individual and society. We introduce students to the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors, compel them to apply those lessons to today’s pressing challenges, and equip them with the 21st-century skills they need in order to do so — all in an atmosphere of open inquiry and civil discourse. For the next four years, at least, institutions that want to try similar pedagogical experiments will have fresh wind in their sails.

Since Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” at Stanford in 1987, elite universities have progressively gutted core liberal studies programmes that introduced students to the vital civilisational inheritance of knowledge and wisdom rooted in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. For the past two decades, they’ve judged applicants for admission as much by their devotion to community service and activism as by their academic potential. Activist students, in turn, began to demand that universities advance any number of causes under the umbrella of social justice.

The ideological invasion of the Ivory Tower has had predictably bad results. Much of higher education today effectively consists of giving students a handful of Post-it notes and teaching them how to apply them to the images that are projected onto their smartphones. People of colour who are evidently miserable and poor, such as the Palestinians of Gaza, are labelled “victims”, whose innocence is not only assumed but unchallengeable on campus. White, well-off, educated people, especially if they have a strong national identity, are identified as “colonisers” and “oppressors”. Should we really be shocked that students who’ve been taught this crude intellectual game, one that unfolds in the immediate present with no depth of breadth of understanding, would welcome the chance to celebrate Hamas’s demonstration that “decolonisation” is not just “an abstract academic theory” but a “tangible event”?

Bret Stephens has written that Americans are on the road to a second Kristallnacht. This is not a figure of speech. Since the Hamas pogrom of October 7, Jews have been attacked on the streets of American cities, and Jewish-owned stores are vandalised every day. To their shame, universities have been on the cutting edge of this intellectually-fuelled explosion of antisemitism, as they were in Nazi Germany.

Americans have taken notice. The US Department of Education recently opened investigations of possible discrimination based on ancestry or ethnicity at more than a half-dozen institutions. Summoned by Congress to explain why they have allowed antisemitism to fester on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT all refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment. Would these university leaders say the same about calls for the genocide of Palestinians, gays, or African Americans? The question answers itself. Even the Biden administration, which has aggressively pushed social justice imperatives, felt compelled to condemn their evasions.

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Hamas has unleashed the West's monsters

By Jacob Howland

The president and chairman of the board of trustees of Penn resigned in the aftermath of the congressional hearing, and many are calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign as well. These blood-sacrifices make for good theatre, but don’t address the problem. Lopping off the head of a rotten fish does little good: the foul thing still stinks to high heaven. The deeper problem is that the intellectual formation of large numbers of faculty and administrators at American universities supports acts of violence so appalling that to call them barbaric would be an insult to barbarians.

The genocidal logic of Post-it note ideology was recently made clear at Hillcrest High School in Queens. Students discovered that a teacher had attended a rally in support of Israel. As one told the New York Post: “A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.” (“Exposure” has been a primary weapon of nihilists and revolutionaries for almost two centuries.) “School administrators and the NYPD… got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door,” the paper reported. Students waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Free Palestine!” rampaged for hours, vandalising bathrooms and other property.

Here’s the kicker: the students called the teacher they tried to hunt down a “cracker ass bitch”. The kids may be ignorant, but they are not stupid. They’ve somehow learned that social justice licences the expression of hateful attitudes, including racism and misogyny as well as antisemitism. Did the mob pursue their quarry because she is a female teacher, or a Jew, or because she is a “cracker”? It doesn’t matter: an oppressor is an oppressor. A document on intersectionality distributed by the sociology department at my old university explained that oppressors include those who are “white”, “European”, “credentialed”, “upper and upper-middle class”, “anglophones”, and “pale”. Most Jews in the United States tick all these boxes. How could they not be oppressors, if they fit the profile?

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The civilisational threat posed by this ideological activism in American higher education recalls the invaluable intellectual support German academics gave Nazism during the Third Reich. Theologians worked to fashion a new myth of Jesus as a forerunner of Nazism, presenting him as a spirited Christian warrior who strove heroically to destroy Judaism. They purged all Jewish content from a revised publication of the New Testament, depicted Nazi ideology as the fulfilment of the original Christianity of Jesus, and elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ. Today, few academics would see Christ as an Aryan. Yet many embrace identity politics and the religion of humanity with a distinctly religious fervour.

The German theologians were not alone. The philosopher Martin Heidegger played a leading role in clothing the Nazi Party with academic respectability. In “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, a speech he gave when he assumed the Rectorship of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger aggressively positioned the academy at the forefront of Hitlerism. His speech anticipated many of the attitudes now popular on American campuses. He decried what he called Germany’s “moribund semblance of a culture”, and he called for the expulsion of academic freedom from the university. He also characterised the revolutionary work of students and professors as a “battle” — music to the ears of academic social justice warriors.

Most important, Heidegger applauded the mobilisation of students under the Führerprinzip, the suspension of written law on the basis that the word of Adolph Hitler is the law for Germans. History repeats itself, except that the Führer — the “driver” — is now social justice. After 2020, critical race theory became mandatory in law schools, and many universities are now arguably ignoring the law for ideological reasons. Hamas is a federally designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), and federal law makes it a crime to provide “material support or resources” to an FTO. Yet students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has over 200 active chapters on American campuses, has emphatically claimed to be “a PART of this [Hamas] movement”.

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Many state laws also forbid support for terrorism. If SJP receives any financial or logistical support from a university — a share of student activity fees, photocopying, or anything else — that university is arguably involved in criminal activity based on federal law. These are ample grounds for excluding them from campus. Yet only three private schools, Brandeis, Columbia, and George Washington, have so far suspended SJP, and Florida, the only state that has tried to do so, recently backed down in the face of a lawsuit.

The Nazis engaged in what was called Gleichschaltung, political equalisation or coordination. A Schaltung is a circuit. Gleichschaltung in an organisation makes it possible to run a charge through it as efficiently as possible. It turns an institution into a conduit of ideological power. This, too, harmonises with the functional reality of much of American higher education.

The rot in higher education is far too deep to be fixed by resignations, lawsuits, and congressional hearings. Nothing less than a systematic and widespread effort at something like de-Nazification will do. Short of such drastic measures, I fear, the American university will continue to be an activist institution that advances a totalising ideology. And it will drag society down with it.

The problem is that the Government isn’t going far enough. There are lots of respectable academic subjects which could easily be dumped with no discernible loss to the nation. Take history, for example, which someone once described as a set of events which should never have happened. From the An Shun civil war of 8th-century China, which resulted in some 429 million deaths, to the extermination of native Americans, which outdid Mao Zedong’s massacres by a ratio of two to one, history has been, for the most part, a saga of bloodshed and brutality. Peace and justice have never reigned over any considerable part of the globe for any considerable length of time. What kindness and compassion have flourished have been largely confined to the private or civic sphere. Most men and women have lived lives of hard labour for the benefit of a few.

To set our students loose on this chronicle of hacking and gouging is rash in the extreme. Many of them are pretty fragile already, and opening a history book can only deepen their anxiety. We need bright-eyed, forward-looking citizens, not depressive types overwhelmed by the nightmare of history. As the Victorians knew, there is a well-trodden path from dejection to political disaffection, which is why what we read should cheer us up, rather than cast us down. Most civilisations are the fruit of invasion, occupation or extermination; but, as Edmund Burke points out, they thrive by repressing this original sin and coming gradually to forget it. If we are to succeed at all, then, we must jettison the past. Oblivion is the basis of achievement.

Much the same goes for the study of literature. Before Thomas Hardy came to write in the late 19th century, there was scarcely a novelist in Britain whose work concluded on a downbeat note. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is one of the few bold exceptions. From Henry Fielding to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, happy endings are more or less obligatory. Why? Because there has to be somewhere in the world where the virtuous reap their reward and the wicked get their comeuppance, and this place is known as a novel. The more predatory and rapacious society grows, the less you will find such justice outside fiction. The fewer happy endings there are in real life, however, the more obtrusive and implausible they became in fiction, so that the typical end of a 20th-century novel is bleak and irresolute.

“After a while, I left the room and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain,” reads the final sentence of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, after the protagonist’s young partner has died before his eyes. So literature, too, is bad for morale. Rather than turning you hopefully towards the practical world, it plunges you morbidly into your own innards. Reading poetry is also bad for your spiritual health. As for plays and novels, there’s something peculiarly pointless about spending years, even a whole lifetime, studying people and events that never existed.

At least history has the edge over literature in that respect. Nobody has ever come up with a watertight definition of literature, which suggests how vacuous the whole project really is. Let’s hope the same isn’t true of aeronautical engineering. Besides, you don’t need to be a university student to read poems, plays and novels. Many people do it anyway, in their spare time. They also enjoy a pint occasionally, but they don’t see the need to take a degree in it.

Geography is palpably a non-subject. I was once a fellow of an Oxford college where there were two geographers, one of whom studied the demography of Asian communities in the Midlands. The other was an expert on sand dunes. What kind of coherent discipline is that? A lot of Americans seem to get on perfectly well without knowing where anything is in the world, except when they need to bomb it, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do the same. In any case, maps give away our location to immigrants and terrorists. They also distort reality, showing Russia and China as imposing tracts of land and the UK as a mere smudge. What this belies is the infinite distance between Russian barbarism and British civility.

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By Alwyn Turner

There is less need for geography now that we’re out of the EU, and the same applies to modern languages. “Why should I travel?” asked a woman who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I’m here already.” We British might say the same, being fortunate enough to live in the birthplace of industry, empire, modernity, liberalism and the world’s greatest playwright. It’s true that the British go abroad for the sun, but climate change ought to abolish this custom in the future, as temperatures here climb to Sicilian levels.

One of the few benefits of climate catastrophe is that we’ll be able to stay at home. There will be no need for continental holidays, and no possibility of them either. It’s true that we’ll die of heat at home instead, but better to pass away in the bosom of your own folk than among people who have never heard of Katie Price.

Theology, meanwhile is a subject without an object. It’s on a level with Ufology and Loch Ness Monster studies. Classics involves highly unpleasant people like Nero and Caligula and at least one former prime minister. Sociology is just a way of dressing up Left-wing ideology in spuriously scientific garb. Politics is a career, not a seminar for eggheads. As for art, you don’t need to know about Raphael and Rembrandt in order to churn out marketable stuff. You don’t even need to have heard of them. Philosophy is a subject for pedants who think they can save people from suicide by pointing out that the grammar of “nothing matters” differs from that of “nothing chatters”. Those bits of science with practical applications are worth preserving, but not those bits that don’t, such as inquiries into quarks, black holes and the lower bowel of the aardvark.

Medicine has its uses, but one wonders how much of it would really be necessary if we overhauled our attitude to life. A little more pride in ourselves, a mite less grousing and negativity, and watch those tumours disappear. Some people make a case for the importance of law; but law is basically a matter of right and wrong actions, and you don’t need to pore over a bunch of mouldy statutes and precedents to know about that. You should have learnt it already from the moral values instilled in you by your parents. What matters is the family hearth, not the lecture hall.

The fact is that all we really need are business schools. Apart from the odd laboratory here and there, we could abolish universities altogether and save ourselves a stupendous amount of money. It’s true that this might leave hordes of young people with time on their hands, but this was never a problem in the days of National Service. In any case, universities are flagrantly self-contradictory institutions. Having being dragged out of the Middle Ages and forced to become efficient, they now look more like Tesco’s head office rather than ivory towers.

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They have senior management, formerly known as “professors”, plenty of consumers (once called “students”), an eminently saleable commodity (so-called “knowledge”) and will soon be pricing ideas according to their importance, allowing consumers to decide which ones they can afford. If a course on metaphysics isn’t pulling in the punters, they can launch one on Gambling for Beginners instead. At least one British university discourages academics from keeping books in their offices, given that paper in an electronic age is ridiculously passé. They might as well have parchment and quills.

It’s all very admirable as far as it goes — yet, absurdly, these places don’t have shareholders, and haven’t been able to escape the chill clutches of the state. It’s true that there are one or two private universities around the place, but nobody knows where they are. They should stop hiding away and have the courage of their convictions. Allow the state to have a hand in education and before you know where you are, Keir Starmer will be deciding on the most plausible interpretation of Hamlet, and woe to those who lecture out of line!

Universities have had their day. Let’s stop pretending that some academic courses are garbage while others are worthwhile. Just cut the whole bloody lot of them.

When I wasn’t giving attendance-optional history lectures to hundreds of undergraduates — who’d sit there watching the latest episode of Breaking Bad — I was inveighing against the university’s debased standards: writing in The Atlantic and going on National Public Radio to explain that I didn’t even bother to grade most of these sad, ill-informed consumers who were going into debt for a degree worth less than the paper on which it was printed. By the time I departed in 2016, I was arguing that this mediocre school, and other lesser universities like it, should be taken apart brick by brick. UT-Arlington was doing a disservice to most of its students and defrauding taxpayers along the way.

Now, Republican politicians around the country are taking aim at state higher education institutions. But their reasons differ greatly from my own: they seek control of what is being taught, rather than an overhaul of the system. Most notably, Florida Governor and hopeful Presidential nominee Ron DeSantis has made it his mission to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes at all state-subsidised universities overseen by his administration. He is also advocating for governor-appointed trustees to have the power to eliminate majors in certain subjects.

In January, DeSantis replaced six of the 13 members on the New College of Florida’s board with trusted supporters, including Christopher Rufo, who has spearheaded the nationwide push to restrict critical race theory (CRT) in public-school curricula. Other big-state GOP governors are making similar moves in their states, with Greg Abbott of Texas going after CRT, and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia appointing conservative trustees at the Virginia Military Institute.

DeSantis’s stated reason for taking over New College was that it was no longer serving the students of the state, citing an enrolment decline of 27% between 2016 and 2021, which he attributed to the school’s emphasis on race and gender theory (while conveniently omitting the fact that the incoming class for fall 2022 was the largest in New College’s history). New College doesn’t grade its students, but rather encourages them to explore a variety of liberal arts subjects — though its faculty, student body and course offerings lean far to the Left. The Florida Governor appears to be proposing to turn an offbeat hippie college into an offbeat “Great Books”-inspired college. Critics of DeSantis argue that he is attempting to turn New College into “Hillsdale South” — referencing the influential Right-affiliated college in Michigan where a number of eminent conservative thinkers have taught or been educated.

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Behind DeSantis’s focus on this tiny school — which currently has a total of 700 students — is a bigger project: his move is supposedly the first in a series, per Chris Rufo, that will allow conservatives to effect their own “long march” to reclaim these institutions.

But while his rhetoric is grabbing headlines, DeSantis’s battle for ideological control of curricula is merely a distraction from the much greater crisis in education — the one that troubled me during my own time in academia. Instead of kvetching about CRT and bathroom access, our governors ought to be completely restructuring the country’s lower-tier state universities, which, aside from one or two flagships per state, are generally third-rate operations. Nationwide college enrolment has declined by 9.4% in the past two years, and these schools have been hit especially hard. State-funded universities are having their budgets slashed and adjuncts are even more overworked and underpaid; there is more focus on ineffective online classes, and worse learning outcomes for students who have been paying to watch ill-run Zoom courses in their cramped dorm rooms.

DeSantis’s own state is a textbook example of academic bloat. The State University System of Florida consists of 12 public universities, with 341,000 enrolled students, of which only four are engaged in what the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education refers to as “very high research activity”. The rest of these institutions, such as the enormous Florida Atlantic University, are vast and shabby post-secondary “student warehouses”, similar to UT-Arlington.

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It is these universities, not the tiny New College of Florida, that constitute the real threat to public education — and not because they are “woke”, but because their retention and graduation rates are horrific. They are enrolling students, taking their federally-subsidised student loans, and barely graduating around 50% of them. The students, mostly commuters unsure of what to do with themselves but unable or unwilling to enter the workforce after high school, drift in and either drop out immediately, pocketing their first helping of financial aid, or linger forever, accumulating vast amounts of debt for a degree in a vague, meaningless subject like “Communications” or, as at UT-Arlington, “University Studies”.

The more complicated the system becomes, the more difficult it will be to reform it. America’s public post-secondary education depends on a welter of separate and sometimes overlapping budgets, but to be eligible to get a cut of the all-important $235 billion pool of federal financial aid, colleges have to meet Kafkaesque accreditation standards. Each state works with a cartel-like private accreditor, subjecting all universities to its review, regardless of the ambitions or capabilities of their student bodies. Typically, the result is a report that numbers hundreds of pages with innumerable recommendations, which creates absurd amounts of work for administrators and often drives excessive spending increases in order to meet supposed shortfalls in facility or faculty quality.

DeSantis, like other Republican governors, has little to say about this vast system that serves almost no one and does nearly nothing. He just wants to turn a silly boutique Left-wing school into a silly boutique Right-wing school. If he had genuine vision, befitting a potential president, he’d look to scupper the ageing hulks in his university fleet, sinking the likes of Florida Atlantic University to the bottom of that ocean, and starting from the ground up. Not every university needs to be a research-driven “multiversity” intended to be a “prime instrument of national purpose”, of the sort envisioned by former University of California president Clark Kerr in 1963. What the nation needs more of are small, single-subject institutes of the sort that propelled American higher education forward in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The single-building Litchfield Law School founded by Tapping Reeve in 1774, set the standard for American legal education, educating everyone from Vice President Aaron Burr to Supreme Court Justice Henry Baldwin, before closing in 1833. Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, also confined to a single building, was the centre of Jewish Studies in America, training luminaries such as Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion until its closure in 1986.

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In other words, DeSantis — indeed, governors of all stripes — should be figuring out how to radically shrink higher education. College must be more than an open-to-all holding cell for twenty-somethings. Community colleges, consistently the best value throughout the US when it comes to technical certifications, can pick up the pre-professional slack, as can trade union training centres and apprenticeships. And focused, single-subject institutes will offer far better training for those with specialised skills. Law school should no longer require a degree for admission — an onerous and stupid prerequisite that sets the US apart from other Anglophone countries — and should also accept far fewer students overall, in order to increase the wages and job opportunities of those who graduate. (At the moment America, a nation of 332 million people, has 1.3 million lawyers.) Meanwhile, American students with talent in specific areas, such as computer science or drama, could be directed to small state institutes that offer rigorous, focused training.

That’s not to say all flagships should be eliminated. Students seeking a wider curriculum, and the attendant rah-rah sporting events and beer-saturated Greek life, should be catered for. The same goes for students who prefer institutions with a certain ideology. There is nothing inherently wrong with a college having a political leaning, as long as it’s not the only option. Left-leaning states such as California should open their own state-subsidised far-Left version of the Hillsdale model. What harm would that cause, provided the state supports a few institutes representative of the Right’s vision of liberal arts?

The structure of American higher education has been deeply informed by politics for centuries, but it has not been informed by much, if any, innovation since Clark Kerr outlined his grand, all-encompassing vision for the “multiversity” five decades ago. Ron DeSantis has awkwardly stumbled upon a solution, but he and his team can’t see the wood for the trees: they want to win votes and donations for a single political slap fight over a 700-student college, at a time when the fate of higher education — and the accompanying $1.75 trillion debt load carried by current and former students — hangs in the balance. The solution, to borrow a phrase of Kafka’s, is nothing short of a “guillotine, just as heavy, just as light”. A courageous politician would let the guillotine drop, taking as many of the higher-ed hydra’s heads with it as it possibly can.

Thirty years later, the tables have turned. I am now a tenured professor at Claremont McKenna College, an elite institution that aggressively markets itself as the number-one ranked college for promoting freedom of speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. I don’t blame FIRE. But the administration here has built a Potemkin village. My real job today is to re-introduce something of the spirit of Ukraine into American education.

How did this come to happen on my own and other campuses in the United States? The responsibility of a Dean of Students office used to be to handle student discipline. Today it seems to maintain student comfort by disciplining faculty who threaten their repose. Gadflies, out; massage chairs and comfort puppies, in. There are also institutional structures for climate control. On my campus there is a programme called CMCListens, the tip of an enormous bureaucracy to eliminate any student unease. It encourages them to submit anonymous reports “to senior staff” about anything “they find troubling at CMC in just a few easy steps”. The programme sets a tone that conditions students to think of themselves as minders and informants, not students. The effect in the classroom is to destroy the possibility of education.

On October, 4, 2021, discussion in my “Introduction to Political Philosophy” class was devoted to Book III of Plato’s Republic and his views about the necessity for censorship in political communities. A very intelligent student objected that Plato was mistaken, a point proven by the fact that in the United States there is no censorship. Someone brought up the example of Huckleberry Finn. She replied, quite correctly, that removing a book from curriculums doesn’t constitute censorship.

I suggested that the case of Huckleberry Finn was perhaps more complicated. The book had also been removed from libraries and published in expurgated editions. At this point, an international student who had never even heard of Huckleberry Finn asked me why the book had been banned. I told her, in plain English, using the precise term written by the author.

This caused the first student, somewhat grudgingly but honestly, to acknowledge that censorship did exist in America. Far from being harmed by the discussion, she was benefitted. It shocked her into seeing something about her own society that she had missed. She also understood that Plato’s views were not simply outdated or wrong, but perhaps merited more serious consideration. This liberation from her initial prejudice bore fruit. Later in the semester she raised a very thoughtful question about Socrates’ criticisms of the poets and the strange role they play in the Allegory of the Cave: “But isn’t Plato himself a poet?” Her world was no longer flat. This is what good books can do. A rare success.

Another student, well-trained as an informant, reported me to the Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion. An associate dean then requested a meeting to discuss “serious concerns raised about one of your courses”. I requested to be informed of the concerns in writing. The associate dean refused. I insisted. This went on for a couple of weeks. Finally, the dean of faculty emailed a summary of the informant’s (inaccurate) account and demanded to know “why it was important to use the n* expressly as contrasted with simply saying the ‘n-word?’” What could possibly be the “pedagogic rationale” that justified my approach?

This was my reply:

“I do think that when a student asks me a direct question that I am able to answer, good “pedagogy” requires that I tell him the truth. Do you disagree? Similarly, when a student makes a false statement, I think my job requires me to confront that student with facts that contradict him. Do you think I am wrong to do so? I also hold the view that before criticizing or praising an author, one should first attempt to understand that author as he understood himself, something that requires reading and discussing exactly what he wrote. Do you think I am mistaken in this approach?”

The dean never responded, at least not with an argument. Sometime after I failed to toe the line by later reading aloud in a different class from Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — its most powerful passage contains the n-word — she undertook to ban me from teaching future introductory classes. She did this without any investigation into the accuracy of student complaints, without following formal procedures, and even without the courtesy of informing me what she had done.

By chance, I discovered my case was not unique. This spring, an untenured adjunct, Eva Revesz, read aloud and asked students to discuss a passage from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple that contained the n-word. They complained. The dean’s office summoned the adjunct. She apologised and agreed to undergo the recommended counseling. She met the dean. She submitted to re-education and on-line training in critical race theory. Despite all this — and a glowing recommendation by the faculty member who observed and evaluated her teaching — Ms Revesz’s contract was not renewed.

The college knows the stigma attached to these kinds of complaints and the near impossibility of an academic finding a job with a scarlet “N” branded on their forehead. But if they counted on this to ensure Ms Revesz’s quiet departure, they misjudged her character. She went public, turning the tables on Claremont McKenna’s puritans. Perhaps some other college will enrich their institution and its students by hiring her. But I’m not holding my breath. Ms Revesz’s courage makes her my hero. She deserves to be yours.

A third case exists. Professor Robert Faggen, friendly with the CMC’s president and well-connected to its Board of Trustees, assigned Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”, a poem that contains the n-word. When he played a recording in class of Lowell himself reading the poem, a student exploded, excoriating both author and teacher as “old white dudes”. Now there’s a good “argument” for you. The Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion informed the professor by telephone, not in writing, that he was in the clear because he had not himself read the forbidden word aloud in class. A narrow escape based on an arbitrary distinction that the administration could and likely will deny ever having made. Ms Revesz was not so lucky.

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I discussed my situation with several colleagues. This was disheartening. Almost all counseled submission. I’m just a guy sitting in a stuffy backroom of his house with a few sheets of paper and a pen, up against an institution with an endowment of $1.2 billion dollars (market value in June of 2020), lawyers by the bushel, and the ability to comb through all my emails for the past 15 years. One colleague warned me, “If you go public with this, the administration will smear you head to foot.” Another, who thought my actions just but likely imprudent, asked, “Is this really the hill you want to die on?” They had a point. They were correct.

After I published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal detailing the College’s attempts to suppress speech in my and other classrooms, the president, Hiram Chodosh, replied by circulating a statement to the media and publishing a lengthy reply in the same newspaper. Rather than take the opportunity of a national audience to discuss an important issue on his and many other campuses, he leveled an ad hominem attack on me for being the bearer of bad news.

President Chodosh claimed that my op-ed contained damning and relevant omissions that explained my plight. “Low enrollment in his electives had a detrimental effect on his department. His upper-level elective fall course resulted in no students enrolled, and there is only one student enrolled in his major-required course this fall.”

In fact, the cancelled course was listed by the administration without consulting me at 8:10 am. No other elective course in political philosophy has ever been assigned this hour, and with good reason. It’s not good for enrollment. As for the required course with just one student, President Chodosh omitted the fact that it had been listed only at the end of this July, three months after registration had closed and before students were back on campus. Once students were actually in a position to sign up, enrollment was just fine. And discussion lively.

A fish rots from the head. In November of 2015, Mary Spellman, then Dean of Students at Claremont McKenna, was forced to resign over protests by minority students over her alleged lack of sensitivity for having emailed a Hispanic student that she would work hard to help those “who don’t fit the CMC mold”. Ms Spellman’s sincere and decent offer to help a struggling student was met with this response, “How dare you say we don’t fit the mold?” That was her crime. She resigned.

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While this immediately affected the way Faculty dealt with the president, I failed to realise the effect this incident would have on students. I received a text this week from an intelligent, self-possessed and assertive woman, a CMC student here at the time of the Spellman fiasco. She feared I might now be next for the undercarriage and confessed, “I remember feeling quite scared to come out then as someone who even questioned what happened there.” Afraid to come out. Afraid. Even to question. I had no idea.

The situation of students today is bad. As many others have noted, they live in a world without much depth, dominated by digital communication and social media consumed on a flat screen that makes sustained reading difficult. They fear, and not without good cause, that any misstep will be engraved on the internet forever. They live under conditions of mob-rule. No one should blame them for being cautious.

Yet it is less the internet than the over-valuing of the genuine democratic virtues of kindness and sensitivity that poses the greater threat to education today. The lively exchange of view-points is discouraged in elementary and high schools as likely to injure someone’s feelings. The habit of arguing falls into disuse. Students are miserable at it, not for want of intelligence, but from lack of practice. This inability to argue makes them distrustful of reason. This distrust turns into a belief that reason gives no guidance at all on any important question. The principle of equality assures them that everyone else is in the same boat. Contentious issues can therefore be determined only by authority.

Upset by something spoken in a classroom? Don’t make an argument. Run to the dean to make it stop. Someone, not themselves, needs to make and enforce the rules. The dean listens. It is stopped. This confirms in their minds that this is the way to get results, but without them even noticing the full extent and deepening of their dependence and the growth in the dean’s power. This is a school for politics, not, however, of a healthy democratic kind.

Fear and timidity, especially by those with university positions, are also a large part of the problem. Conformity is in all times and places a special danger to intellectuals. What is the point of assigning Frederick Douglass when those with tenure lack the courage even to read in class what is on the page? The liberating power of books, particularly those written in times and places distant from our own, is destroyed when they are bowdlerised and filtered through the sieve of contemporary sensibilities.

Foot soldiers rarely get to choose the hill on which they are stationed. They must deal with the concrete circumstances in which they find themselves. Frederick Douglass defended free speech over the course of his long career as a freeman. He had no choice. He understood that the cause of liberty for millions of blacks required unfettered discussion and criticism of slave power, the US Constitution, and even his fellow abolitionists. “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.” He risked his life and liberty to write his Narrative. I stand for the original genius of his book, exactly as he published it. Frederick Douglass deserves that, and much, much more.  

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Huck Finn wavered between winning praise as an informant or suffering social opprobrium and eternal damnation for helping to liberate a fellow man from slavery. Lacking the benefit of Claremont McKenna College training, he chose to tear up his letter to Miss Watson informing her of Jim’s whereabouts. “All right, then,” he concluded, “I’ll go to hell.” No wonder the reading and discussion of Mark Twain’s book is discouraged by authorities.

I owe a debt to Frederick Douglass and to Mark Twain for taking the trouble to educate me, or, at least, for having tried. So I lodged a formal grievance against the dean and went public. The grievance has yet to run its course. I can, however, report that two weeks after filing it, when it also became apparent to the administration that my, and other similar cases at Claremont McKenna, would be made public, the dean decided to allow me to teach Introduction to Political Philosophy this fall, a course I have offered 19 times in the past 15 years, and one that had originally been on my department’s master schedule.

To date, my success has been partial. The editor of a campus paper recently interviewed students from my courses. He found critics, but many more who profited from and appreciated my approach. Yet not one of the latter would go on the record. I’d like to think they are mistaken. But I’m not sure.

When I left Ukraine in 1994, I was pessimistic about the future of political liberty there. The people as a whole were so atomised and enervated by the Soviet system that it was hard to imagine them engaging in any collective action to defend their rights and liberties. But the young people I taught at Kyiv-Mohyla had not yet had their spirits crushed. Somehow, despite the horrific economic and political corruption of the Nineties, Ukraine avoided the descent into one-party, one-man rule. In the moment of greatest peril, my former students’ university became an important point of resistance to the puppet regime in 2014. Their generation went to the streets and overthrew a corrupt government during the Maidan Revolution. Their courage then and now leaves me shamefaced both for myself and my fellow academics who can no longer even stand up for reading historical texts as written.

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I am much more pessimistic about the fate of liberal education in America than I ever was about political liberty in Ukraine. Many, perhaps most, professors and students oppose free speech and free inquiry as an obstacle to the creation of a more equitable world. Ukrainians know how that ends. Others favour free speech and free inquiry, but give increased devotion to conformity, too cowed and cowardly to secure their blessings. I hope I am as much mistaken about America as I was about Ukraine.

A classroom is not a public space, it does not have the same purposes and responsibilities as a political community. It therefore requires different rules to govern and preserve it, among the most important is civility. I am not a free speech absolutist. In the course that first got me in trouble, I tried to help a student see the power of Plato’s case for censorship. How then could I have come to utter the forbidden “n-word” in a class knowing full well the distress it might cause in some, or even most, of my students?

Civility in the classroom is not the end but a means that makes the discovery of truth more likely. Liberation from falsehoods and the discovery of truth is the most important purpose of any classroom, indeed, the highest end of liberal education — not comfort and safety. College is not a resort hotel. When the means obstruct the end, reason allows their modification.

If liberal education, that is, an education that makes us worthy of being free, is to have a future, it can only be secured by a movement from below, not by corrupt administrators who profit from and manipulate the current situation. As teachers, we need to take back our classrooms. We need to fight on whatever hill we find ourselves.

For if these universities were or are racist, their self-knowledge must be low, lower than one might expect from institutions founded to promote it. But if they are not racist institutions, how can they explain their willingness to be so falsely charged?

The Vice-Chancellor of my student days at Sussex University was the historian Asa Briggs. At 21, he went to work at Bletchley Park where he spent three years deciphering Nazi codes. We can presume he knew what real racism sounded like. We can presume too that the thought that Sussex could be a racist institution (coloniser or colony?) would be, for him, a sign of utter madness. I don’t know whether Sussex has declared its intention to ‘decolonize’ or not. I hardly dare look.

In the 1960s and 70s Sussex University was special. I got off the bus at Falmer and the first thing I saw was a low grey slab declaring this be the University of Concrete Modernism. This is it, I thought. This is me. After a particularly poor interview (got stuck on the world price of copper) I patted the slab for luck on the way out.

Then one lovely October morning I got off the bus again to be handed a leaflet denouncing the university as a form of ‘oblique state repression’. I didn’t know what that meant. In those days, nobody talked about the British ‘state’. If we had a state at all it was a ‘welfare state’. The concrete slab spoke of modernism, welfare, and social democracy. If this was repression, bring it on.

Sussex University was an astonishing example of the hope and aspiration of post-war British social democracy. At the time, only about 5% of school leavers went to university. A mere twenty years since working-class children had started going to secondary schools, let alone universities, the vast majority of students came from middle-class homes. But all that was changing. At 15, I could have left school and followed my father into the shipyards. At 18, here I was walking into what promised to be the finest education money could buy (but I didn’t have to).

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First of the ‘new’ universities, Sussex saw itself as modern but scientific as well. Even the Soccer Club promised “a modern approach to the science of soccer”. We took IQ tests designed to measure our brain power against Oxford freshers doing the same test at the same time on the same day. I copied from the lad sitting next to me, a fresh-faced Scouser who let me look.

If Oxford was olden and golden, Sussex was planned down to the last red brick — planned, in fact, to be like Oxford but not Oxford. Sussex ‘schools’ of study were intended to operate like colleges. Most teaching was done in tutorials rather than in mass lectures. While I was happily chatting away with my tutors, supping their coffee, at Manchester my wife (not yet) was shuffling into vast lecture halls un-noticed and unheard.

Sussex arts students did some science and Sussex science students did some arts – a nice idea but friendships have a life of their own. We mixed in Brighton flats and guest houses and in that vast range of Union clubs and societies that made the university swing. Experiences differed according to subject. My two flatmates read English and hardly had the time to look up from the 19c novel. One chose Jane Austen as his special subject not because she was good but because she only wrote six. I chose Human Genetics for my science module because I thought it might have something to do with, er…

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Instead of beautiful old buildings, we had Basil Spence’s beautiful new ones, and instead of crumbling quads, we had a ‘Great Court’ that reached out east and west to the very edge of our lives. In winter, when the wind lashed and the rain blew, we leaned across it like figures from a Lowry.

Sussex was planned, but the idea was to be natural, as if the university was itself a feature of the park it sat in, free to grow, but part of everything around it. There was no bureaucracy. Essex House was up in the corner and far away. The only office I ever saw administered my grant: in about three minutes. I once had to attend a disciplinary committee where I was fined 10 shillings by Macan, the Union president.

There were guys in ties and suits, but by and large they were the lecturers. The Vice Chancellor took classes, walked the campus, debated the Union, and could be seen Sunday mornings on his knees in prayer in a ring of light in the University Meeting House. The Student Left wanted to pick a fight with the university administration, and did so, but our hearts weren’t in it. We knew Asa Briggs was not the enemy.

Told from the start that “the University in the main expects students to run their own lives”, this was what we wanted, that was why we came. But when it came to the task in hand, I think too often we mistook weak teachers for liberal teaching, modular choice for intellectual diversity. If there were any conservative aspects to being human, or thoughtful, they weren’t taught.

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Sussex was a university that wanted us to find out, but lacked any collective sense of what we needed to know. And because we were not in a position to know what we needed to know…well, you can see the problem. Arts and social science lectures should have been compulsory. Briggs and J P Corbett (two of the main planners) understood how lectures provided a common ‘framework’ or ‘narrative’, but they underestimated how important that was in a system based on module choice. In any case, lecturing is a rare talent. I had to wait years before witnessing brilliance in the lecture hall. Still, at their best, Sussex’s teachers had a wonderful capacity for getting intellectually close.

Sussex was planned, but the outcomes could not be. Wordsworth talks in The Prelude about “Remembering how she felt, but what she felt remembering not” — and so it was on finding myself standing next to Jimi Hendrix in the gents, or being dropped off in Penge (ah! so this is London), or seeing my first art film (The Bofors Gun). We in Social Studies were so used to cause, pattern and effect, it was easy to miss what could be learnt on the wing.

Sussex in the Sixties sang that we came not so much for the S-u-s but more for the S-e-x (tune: British Grenadiers) but that apart, what the university really enjoyed, on the wing, was self-belief. It believed in itself to the extent that it believed in us and we, by and large, had no difficulty in believing in ourselves. You might think that sitting in a tutorial while the tutor bought an oil painting over the phone – long corduroy legs stretching out to a pair of desert boots – was a waste of our time, if not his. Not at all. It was great. Keith Middlemas was doing his thing (in the jargon), we were learning to buy an oil painting over the phone, and the tutorial wasn’t too bad either. I was learning to fly but had no wings. Coming down was the hardest thing.

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Universities have come a long way since 1970. With over 45% of the school population preparing to go, they have never looked so open. And yet, they have never looked so brashly corporate and market-greedy either, and not only have (some) sullied their reputation, they cost a great deal of money, incur a great deal of debt, and suffer from a great deal of grade inflation both on the way in and on the way out. The number of firsts has risen by 90% in eight years. Eighty per cent of degrees are firsts and upper seconds.

In my lifetime, going to university has gone from the unthinkable, to a rare privilege, to a middle-class right-of-passage, to something that well over half the post-school population can look forward to. In 1964, John Fulton, first Vice Chancellor of Sussex, asked two questions of the new universities. First, he wondered how much of the nation’s youth talent they should monopolise. Second, he wondered how much of the country’s resources they should share with other “post-school institutions”.

Fulton’s questions need to be addressed all over again. Adult education is self-evidently a multi-tasking power for good, and an effective levelling agent. Part-time degrees cost less and probably mean more. Life on the wing does not have to happen only to the itinerant young. Communities sustain a full cultural life by retaining people who are not only educated but resident, and not only resident but rooted. If adult education could be said to have a strategic plan, this is it.

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As for further and technical education, having already grievously misjudged our polytechnics, we should look to German models. If De Montfort University, which has recently woken to the fact that it is named after a medieval war lord, wants to cancel its eponymous hero, ‘Leicester College of Art and Technology’ sounds great to me.

If we don’t re-think our universities, others will. Circling above are private business ventures like Euan Blair’s ‘Multiverse’ — companies that sell themselves as alternatives to university. On the one hand, now that Sussex has declared its intention to appoint a new Vice Chancellor not by trusting to its own legacy but by hiring a firm of consultants that specialises in “appointing world-class leaders”, and on the other hand, now that De Montfort’s new Vice Chancellor has just delivered an inaugural address devoted to “how can we reset public perception of the usefulness of universities”, this seems like as good a time as any to turn and think again.

Isaiah Berlin’s two freedoms — freedom from and freedom to — only work when mixed together and thrown in the air. Sussex in 1970 looks better and better because it trusted itself to make the mix and trusted us to do most of the throwing. It planned itself to be schooled. It unplanned itself to be free. It believed in both. Nine years after I graduated, Pink Floyd taught some kids to sing we don’t want no education. Which was handy because they’d already had one.

Robert Colls is author of This Sporting Life. Sport and liberty in England (OUP)

My young life was a travellator up that mountain. I come from precisely that generation for whom attending university was a no-brainer for those in the brains game. And I come from a place in which where you would go to university wasn’t something you ever had to think about. There were only two full universities within a 400-mile radius — and one of those taught in Afrikaans.

The tyranny of choice, the terror of UCAS, the holy mysteries of “clearing”, all passed me by. As did the English “university experience”. When your university is a twenty-minute drive from your family home, you live in that family home. The upside of this model is that you can enter adulthood without much debt. The downside is that university becomes a kind of superannuated school experience: all the same friendship cliques re-establishing themselves. It can easily become a flatpack, wipe-clean lifestyle, notably low in personality formation, windswept romance and regrettable fumbling. Home by half past three. Dinner on the table at half seven. A time of bland stasis, at exactly the moment when everything from Brideshead Revisited to The Young Ones has promised you a rite of passage, adulthood and “freedom”.

These days, having lived in the country for over a decade, I can bluff Englishness easily: I’m odourless, flavourless, practically indistinguishable. But when it comes to that military service for the middle classes, The University Experience — that particular confection of shoe-vomiting on cobbled stones, of WKD-saturated student unions, of “blowing your grant on pills and Beefa then subsisting on baked beans for two months”, all the clichés — I know it only through careful study of BBC3 sitcoms and mid-period Adrian Mole.

Back then, this rankled — so much that one year into a degree, I dropped out, hopped a plane to England and spent 15 months emptying drip trays in a series of bad pubs and worse hotels, in search of a life less ordinary. Up above the bars, in scabby live-in rooms, I scanned various kinds of .gov.uk bumpf, searching for a way to join the English University Experience, until I managed to piece together that it would cost £12,000 per year excluding accommodation, no loans available. I binned the dream, and eventually returned home, thereby performing the uncommon feat of dropping-back-in.

This was still the Mbeki era, when the nation’s farcical political successes of the 90s hadn’t quite dimmed, and a sense of collective purpose still spanned from black to white. In South Africa, the key problem of student politics was “student apathy” — the student paper would run endless pointless pieces on it. A few years later, the storm clouds of Rhodes Must Fall would herald a prickly new world, but at that moment, university was positively prelapsarian. Identity politics was already inside the seminar rooms, but not yet beyond them. Cancellation was unheard of. One winter, a charity I was involved with staged a Big Brother-style live-in contest in a fake squatter camp on the main plaza. Coceka, the girl who won, did so with the slogan: “Keep the black in the shack”.

The university experience, such as it was, was a reflection of the city from which it emerged: suburban, laid-back, jocky, mildly anti-intellectual. The campus was dominated by the Commerce faculty — the eccentric if admirable British insistence on studying impractical subjects, like Spanish, Classics, or History, being largely absent. In a country with no social safety net and stonking unemployment, the wonderfully genteel mentality that leads to so many Brits spending three years studying History of Art is either for the high bourgeoisie or the terminally insane. The system of post-undergrad conversion courses and the graduate fast-tracks is a rather backwards-engineered First World bauble.

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In recent years, my position has come full circle. Ever more, I feel sorry for the English. I feel sorry for the rampant grade inflation in their school system, such that every fresh year requires another wheelbarrow full of A*s to buy a simple 2:1 from Leicester de Montfort. I feel sorry for the firewall of clichés that bound their experience. Most of all, I feel sorry for the oppressively hierarchical nature of the system — the tyranny of the eternal CV distinction between Imperial and King’s, between Bristol and Durham, Nottingham and Nottingham Trent.

And that hierarchy maps onto the job market, too, when you finally get into it. I recently worked with someone who beat out 5000 applicants to a BBC traineeship. The list of fillips you need on your CV to do that these days is mind-boggling. When people talk of “late stage capitalism”, this may be what they mean: a level of competition that turns the humans underneath it into mere abstractions of tendencies.

On the rare occasions employers have been made to scan my resumé, the Higher Education section has likely only baffled and annoyed them. Where exactly does this guy stand in the great horse race of British society — is he more Manchester or is he, you know, a bit Bournemouth?

The truth is that UCT was both and neither: South Africa is simply not the scale of higher education universe that can sustain twenty different words for “upper management material”. At the school on the hill, you got some world class profs, but you also got proper dimbos. It’s neither clubbable nomenklatura nor cultural wasteland. Some of the people I met went on to real greatness. From time to time, I look up the student paper’s chief sub, now a professor at Cornell publishing things like: “Quantum-dot spin-photon entanglement via frequency downconversion to telecom wavelength”. But then you also got the same loping C students who’d been along for the ride since high school. Throw into that the kids from township schools, who slogged through remedial years on lower grades, and you’ve got a fairly balanced pool of talents, all centred around the geography of the city itself. It made for a world that felt human in scale.

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By contrast, the rigidly stratified British model seems to involve taking every BBB in the country, and disinterring them to one market town in the Midlands. On this lunar landscape, the colonists will never meet anyone from outside of their IQ standard-deviation. Even the Left-wing interest in social mixing ends at the eleven-plus. A very smart friend completely mucked up his A Levels, and ended up at a lower-tier university. He describes being treated as vaguely godlike by his peers and tutors in the seminar rooms: The Guy Who Seemed To Know What Derrida Was On About. It was perhaps awkward for each party to become aware of that gulf — and of quite what it was each wasn’t getting.

But whatever they lacked, they were getting their latter-day equivalent of the Grand Tour. In the era of Massive Open Online Courses, the price of knowledge is fast approaching zero. And the price of credentialism — of having the piece of paper that pushes you through the recruiter’s door — is finally in recession, as employers get wise to years of academic hyperinflation. In a society that has mislaid many of its rituals, one consumerised Rite Of Passage seems more popular than ever. The eternal desire of kids is to escape their parental homes and go ape — the Cameron reforms simply succeeded in opening the system up to working class kids also eyeing up the same domestic tourism bargain as the middle classes. But post-Covid, it does seem that the long-awaited reckoning on the value of higher education might be about to take place. It is no longer a no brainer.

I was desperate to get out of the provincialism of the New World. But as I look back, I doubt that swimming among Oxbridge super-achievers would have given me nearly as much imaginative scope. Hothousing can be the whetstone to greatness, but it’s also a good recipe for over-narrow specialisation. When I dropped back in, I realised that everything I wanted had been there all along, if I just threw myself into it. Competition for places on the student paper was thin. You could muck about, write what you liked, build fiefdoms, get weird. I did, and it was the making of me.

Perhaps, far from the Oxbridges of the world, the platonic ideal of a university was always much closer than I’d imagined. 9-5, in the Colonies. If you’re going to dream on a spire, you want to have a sense that you’re Sebastian Flyte lounging on a lawn, not hyper-ventilating in a library.

For my first English literature class, I read Things Fall Apart cover to cover in one evening. I felt liberated: I’d actually enjoyed reading something I’d imagined was outside my comfort zone. With the other students on the Access Course, all of whom had also been to terrible schools and faced massive barriers to learning, I was able to laugh at my lack of general knowledge and poor historical and geographical facts, rather than attempting to cover them up.

Students from the course were guaranteed a place at the Polytechnic of North London (PNL) if we passed. I did, and when I started my degree in Film Studies and Discourse, I was in my element: I had a decade of feminist activism under my belt and there is nothing that cannot be studied through the lens of patriarchy. I was used to watching a film I had seen BF (Before Feminism) and howling at the misogyny in it, which I had once simply accepted and absorbed. My final thesis focused on men in gangs and, within that, the prevalence of sexual violence and abuse against women and girls. It was based on Grease.

The discourse part was less fun. Full of Derrida and Foucault and other incomprehensible philosophers and queer theorists, it flew in the face of my grassroots feminism. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity had just been published, and I recall being told by one of the lecturers that patriarchy was “performance”. I informed him that rape, domestic violence and other forms of male violence are rooted in the material reality of women’s oppression in relation to men. He responded by saying that perhaps “old-school feminism” needed a revamp.

A seasoned activist, I was used to defending my corner. But it felt like some of the lecturers found it threatening or uncomfortable to teach anyone who was used to engaging with ideas, theories and critical analysis. The staff at PNL were great when it came to class, but not so great at being corrected about feminism. The most amusing example happened during a class taught by the brilliant feminist sociologist Professor Sue Lees, who I believed had misrepresented a feminist law reform campaign I had co-founded the previous year. When I raised my hand to challenge her, explaining who I was, Sue shouted: “No, you are not!” We later became friends and would laugh about it.

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One of the male lecturers was a bit trickier. When I quoted Andrea Dworkin in an essay critiquing the male libertarian view of pornography, he was almost frothing at the mouth. He said Dworkin was “monstrous” and, in front of the entire class, accused me of taking a “moralist, anti-sex” approach. I asked if he thought it was a healthy sexual response to masturbate to women being gagged and raped. He declined to answer.

And I remember very clearly, in a class on the so-called feminist sex wars, a debate about sexuality and sexual practice that took in pornography, sadomasochism, and commercial sexual exploitation. On the one hand, there with libertarian “feminists” arguing that all sex is good sex; on the other, anti-male-violence feminist such as myself that ascribed significant meaning to the eroticisation of female subordination, and campaigned to end the sex trade.

“Here we have tension between the pro-sex feminists and the anti-sex neo-feminists,” proclaimed the male lecturer. Glancing down at the suggested reading for the module I saw not one actual feminist text but a load of stuff in praise of pornography.

“It is not ‘anti-sex’ to critique the sex trade,” I told the lecturer. “Making money from women’s pain and humiliation is surely open to criticism?”

At that point, the lecturer began to quote Foucault in French. Today’s universities preach an updated version of this anti-feminism, for example by promoting the view that prostitution is a fine way to earn money, and that speaking out against extreme transgender ideology and commercial sexual exploitation is “White Feminism”.

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Meanwhile, in my film studies class, I would often seethe with resentment at being told that depictions of horrific violence against women in Alfred Hitchcock films were merely “symbolic” of men’s fear of female sexuality and that feminists often “missed the point” about “meaning”. Silly girls!

These lecturers probably preferred to work with a clean slate than a person who could express opinions as opposed to simply form them from scratch.

And there were lots of people at PNL who just didn’t care that much. A number of posh kids swanked around, pleased with themselves for rebelling against their parents by not going to Oxbridge. Most of these entitled, arrogant teenagers had flounced around the global south on a gap year before embarking on three years at university. How disappointed their families must have been that they ended up in some grotty polytechnic rather than a redbrick. How proud mine were that I was doing something no one else in the family had been able to.

Still, I would fanaticise about being at a redbrick, channelling Julie Walters in Educating Rita. I wanted to sit in a ramshackle room full of bookshelves and whiskey decanters, with a don wearing a tweed jacket who gave me loads of attention and took my ideas seriously. What I got was a monthly seminar with 19 other students in a room with the paint peeling off the walls. I had always imagined university to be so much more glamourous.

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Cancel Culture has captured campus

By Eric Kaufmann

I was at university to get a degree, nothing more, because I thought it might give me more options in the job market. I wasn’t engaged in any social events or clubs because I already had my own tribe, although I once went to the student bar with a friend who promised it would be “a right laugh”. A couple of members of the Socialist Workers Party tried to recruit me, telling me that feminism was a “bourgeois movement” and that if, capitalism was destroyed, women would be liberated.

In 1993, I got what I had come for: a degree. But my battle with those who took exception to my prior knowledge was not over. Two of my final-year essays — a feminist critique of heterosexuality and an analysis of misogyny in the movies — were marked very low. They’d been so heavily edited with red pen that they looked as though a vein had been opened over the pages. I knew they deserved better. My work was externally reviewed and the marks shot up for both pieces. The reviewer commented that the tutors appeared to have marked me down because they disagreed with rather than because I failed to substantiate my arguments.

When I look back on the good things about my three years at university, I think about the working-class single mothers who somehow managed to fit a degree into their hellishly busy and stressful lives. I recall the way in which these women spoke about wanting to feel more confident in the world and get some qualifications that would give them options in the workplace. Like me, they considered education to be a privilege as well as a right.

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What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

Polytechnics catered to their communities, offering vocational qualifications, but, during the time I was there, changes to the labour market meant academic qualifications were seen as the best route to a good job, and the government began to turn polytechnics into “new universities”.

And as the number of universities has increased, the focus has shifted even more towards the postmodern horror story known as “discourse”, where the abstract “floating signifiers” are given precedence over scholarship that can be used to make a material difference to the lives of oppressed people. Universities should take a lesson from the now defunct polytechnics, and focus on making higher education accessible to those oppressed people, not just a privileged few.

The rampant elitism endemic within today’s universities has led to “feminist” societies being taken over by dudes sporting man-buns who dictate what feminism actually is to young women. It is no wonder that working-class single mothers in universities have become almost extinct as dinosaurs. Universities need to get back to reality. And it would help if feminism, in its true form, was put back on the curriculum.

At an airfield outside Delhi, I was shepherded onto a Russian Antonov troop carrier with a few other journalists. It had no seats. The journey took hours and at one point a pilot appeared and started walking down the row of reporters, asking each person something. It was very loud so there was no way of hearing his question until he got to me. “Do you have a guidebook for the Maldives? We don’t know which Island the airport is on.”

I did. The pilot beamed. He returned to the cockpit, and the plane changed direction, doubling back on itself. I’d spent long hours in the library with Hayek and Schumpeter, but in the end I was saved by Berlitz. We landed safely in the Maldives — only to find the coup had fizzled out. The pirates who had cackhandedly attempted to overthrow the government set sail and never came back. This was the beginning of my career.

Since then, it has included wars, revolutions, errors of judgement, stomach-turning fear, blood-spattered sights, narrow scrapes, changes of heart and mind. And that’s just inside Broadcasting House. Could all of this — should all of this — have been achieved without an education provided at the taxpayers’ expense in the years 1980 to 1983 at the London School of Economics?

Almost certainly. My father Peter Woods had no degree when he threw himself out of an aircraft for his first and last parachute jump in order to report on the Suez crisis for the Daily Mirror. Martha Gellhorn had no degree when she became the world’s most celebrated and intrepid reporter and author. Nor did another force of nature, the great John Humphrys, whose alma mater is The Penarth Times.

But John’s hopped it to Classic FM and we are left, on the Today Programme, in a fusty senior common room impervious to cheeky lads and lasses from South Wales — unless they’ve spent years looking at books. The current presenters’ roster boasts two Oxford graduates, two from Cambridge, and me. It is unlikely that another non-graduate like John will present it any time soon and we are reduced as a result. Our perspectives are less diverse. The BBC, to its credit, is upping the number of recruits from non-degree backgrounds, suggesting that it understands that three years punting on the Cam is not the only pathway to success.

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Perhaps that’s because the Corporation sees the wider picture. Death by professionalisation. It’s not elite over-production that worries me so much as the quality of the elite that is being over-produced. University these days encourages a way of thinking about the world that is homogenous. Those who go — even those who have seen hardship and adversity — are smoothed around the edges. They don’t question the establishment because they (alright, we) are the establishment.

At its worst, all this leads to a deadening. A weeding out of the kind of prickly cussed characters who bring vivacity to any line of work — and have made British journalism what it is.

Take the late great Brian Barron, a former BBC war correspondent. He came across an ITN crew broken down in the desert in the first Gulf war he gave them water and passed on their co-ordinates to the military so that they could be rescued, but he refused to take their tape back to base to be broadcast. Brian was once described by Jon Snow (who competed with him in Africa for ITN) as, “the most tenacious, even ruthless, correspondent I have ever worked against — the ultimate, objective professional.” That word, “professional,” is used here — was once always used — to describe ability rather than status.

Because Brian did not go to university. I seriously believe if he had he would have taken the tape for the stranded crew. He would have been professional in our modern sense — polished and polite — but unprofessional in Snow’s terms.

Snow, though he went, never graduated, and has also been professional without being, well, a professional. In their pomp these people found things out, asked simple direct questions, never let anyone get away with waffle. Their minds were uncluttered. They respected themselves and their craft. They thought they knew the difference between up and down, right and wrong, good and bad, male and female. They were not befuddled by questions asked for the sake of asking. Thoughts had for the sake of thinking.

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Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

And yet even as I write this, I know my heart is not in it. I learned nothing of much use to me at the LSE and yet, in truth, I learned everything. Crucially, I learned that I didn’t matter as much as I assumed I did. On a Saturday afternoon, sitting in the hugeness of the light-filled library and realising, courtesy of Eileen Barker’s moral philosophy course, that humans might not have free will. Rushing in on the tube for an early class with George Jones, doyen of politics professors, who hated what select committees were doing to the House of Commons. Bill Letwin (father of Oliver) who seemed to me to be impossibly Right-wing because he thought governments needed to be wary of involving themselves in economic life. David Starkey on how every other historian of his period was an idiot and a charlatan.

Here is the first lesson they all taught: they don’t care about you. For the first time in my life I was on my own. Of course, there are schoolteachers who don’t care about you either, but they had to pretend. At university in the 80s, they didn’t pretend. David Starkey was a good example, on the up in those days and with bigger fish to fry. And because of that: an electrifying teacher. I loved the idea that this was an opportunity I could feast on or pass up: the choice, for the first time ever, was mine.

So while I am sympathetic to the “too much education” school, I can’t in all honesty join it. University, done right, sorts your mind out. Confronts you with your own insignificance.

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By Mary Harrington

Of course, the education has to be real. Meaning lecturers must lecture and students must listen. Although the LSE in the 80s had its share of protesters and no-platformers and shouters about this and that, most of us understood that the trick was to listen. Humility is not much in fashion in the age of Twitter but it’s a good thing to have at university.

Perhaps that’s an argument for paying for the whole thing from general taxation again: we never thought we had ‘rights’ because we were not consumers. We were privileged — all of us at university in the pre-fees and pre-mass attendance age — and we knew it. This may have allowed those who taught us more space to be better at what they did, which was thinking more than teaching.

Nobody had to worry about being cancelled because they’d committed a micro-aggression. And this in turn encouraged eccentricity, intellectual heterodoxy, adventure. Most of the academics and most of the students actually believed in freedom. One of my lecturers was a supporter of the Cambodian mass murderer Pol Pot. Another (the wonderful Kurt Klappholz) had  been in a Nazi Concentration camp. Neither of them prepared me to cover a coup, but they taught me to look twice.

No punting of course in Aldwych, no misty memories of dawn after the May Ball. But halcyon days. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Even if it’d made me a better journalist.

Instead of knuckling down in a Big Four consulting firm like much of my graduating year, I spent most of my twenties flip-flopping between temp work and jobs I hated in industries that filled me with cynical despair, living in sketchy house-shares while pursuing trendy but unremunerative activities such as avant-garde writing, conceptual art and political activism.

In the course of this I met many anti-capitalists, the forerunners of today’s Antifa militants, the far-left radicals behind much of the violence in the United States.

But then of course, because of America’s extreme polarisation, many believe it’s not Antifa fanning the flames of riot in the US, but neofascist accelerationists. Rumours are swirling about provocateur involvement in the rioting by hard-left groups, as well as white supremacists.

Depending on your filter bubble, it could be white nationalists seeking, as Gavin Haynes put it in these pages last week, to give the system “just one final heave-ho before it crumbles” in favour of a new racist utopia. Or if you follow different blue-ticks on Twitter, it’s Antifa creating mayhem in order to bring down Donald Trump.

To muddle things further, far-right activists may be posing as Antifa in order to heighten both these narratives. Trump himself has come down firmly on one side of the partisan divide by designating Antifa a terrorist group.

Between hyper-partisan reporting and confused messages from the front lines, perhaps there is no making sense of US events — certainly not from this side of the pond. But if we step back from trying to pinpoint one ‘side’ as ‘goodies’ and the other as ‘baddies’, and see both Antifa and the alt-right as two sides of the same phenomenon — alt-right and alt-left in fact — there are plenty of warnings here for British politics.

Both alt-left and alt-right have a presence in Britain, though their antagonism doesn’t (yet) approach the running battles that now regularly occur in the United States. Plenty has been written about the constellation of beliefs on both alt-right and alt-left. But — demographically speaking — who are they?

The fact that the radical fringes are often less than keen to have their real identities known makes it difficult to find reliable data on the demographics of these groups today. But a look at past studies offers some clues. First, Ukip: though many ‘Kippers would be offended to be described as ‘alt-right’, the 2018  three notorious alt-right social media figures joining the party in 2018 does little to dispel the sense of at least some relationship. And 2017 YouGov data shows Ukip members be typically less educated and heavily concentrated in the lowest income brackets.

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By Mary Harrington

Over the pond, 2018 research from the US-based Institute of Family Studies supports the contention that adherents of the kind of white identitarian politics common on the ‘alt-right’ is associated with lower education levels, lower earnings and higher unemployment.

This is complicated somewhat by recent reports suggesting that far-right groups such as Generation Identity are focusing their recruitment efforts on young graduates. But the longer-term picture suggests the stereotypical alt-righter is male, working- or lower-middle-class, without a degree, frustrated by stagnation in economic opportunities and liable to blame his problems on immigrants and the ‘globalist elite’.

In contrast, the alt-left are seen as being far higher up the social scale, and in the war of words between Left and Right, figures such as Carl Benjamin and Brendan O’Neill accuse Antifa of being pampered middle-class leftists playing at activism. But from my own recollections, I don’t think it’s that simple. Rather, I think the new alt-left is deadly serious — just pointing the wrong way.

My overwhelming recollection of the movement was a mixture of middle-class culture with economic precarity: people with serious smarts and groaning bookshelves working jobs in bars to fund activism, while complaining about The System that excluded them. (I include myself in this description, in case you think I’m sneering.)

I argued recently that the massive expansion of higher education is creating a new ‘Everywhere precariat’. This group comprises graduates who’ve absorbed a worldview that trains them for ‘metropolitan elite’ job types that turn out to be far scarcer than the graduates competing for them.

The result is a frustrated would-be middle class, treading water in what the writer Venkatesh Rao has called ‘premium mediocre’ lifestyles, a rented simulacrum of a genuinely prosperous existence designed to signal preparedness for the day when, by luck or application, they make it into the dwindling numbers of the real bourgeoisie.

These graduate left-behinds are then stuck in a holding pattern, in precarious housing and employment, as opportunities to take the big steps into adult life — traditionally home ownership, coupledom and kids – recede ever further into the distance. A recent Pew report showed 30% of millennials living with a spouse and child, a fall of 10% on Generation X and a whopping 40% drop on the 1968 generation. That’s America, but ONS datashows the age of first child climbing relentlessly in Britain too — while the birth rate is falling in all cohorts save the over-40s.

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

Ed West argued back in 2016 that the disappointed also-rans in the graduate-job Ponzi scheme were increasingly turning to far-left political figures. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, who proved popular especially with 18-30 voters (if not to anyone else) have made heavy use of words such as ‘rigged’. A 2017 NBC interview with an American Antifa student at an elite Bay Area university expresses this sense of a receding dream:

“These false promises we’ve been told throughout our lives that we just have to follow the American dream of working hard and things will be all right. We’ll get a middle class existence with house, lawn and the picket fence,” Daniel said. “This promise, this future has never materialised, and we kind of realized that the system’s rigged against us and we need to do something about it.”

Seen from this angle, the principal distinction between supporters of the alt-right and alt-left is not, contra Carl Benjamin and his ilk, social class. Rather, it’s between different types of ‘left-behind’. Many on the alt-left aren’t really privileged young people playing at radicalism before settling into steady jobs.

Perhaps that’s how they planned it; but the steady jobs they were banking on settling into after a stretch moonlighting as an activist have evaporated, leaving a bleak economic future distinguished from the alt-right version chiefly by different taste in music, coffee and radical aesthetics.

This is supported by a 2017 European Union Politics paper that studied support for radical-right and radical-left parties. While ‘alt’ and ‘radical’ versions of Left and Right may not be quite the same, the paper’s conclusions are suggestive. It showed that in bare economic terms, radical-left and radical-right supporters don’t differ a great deal but where they do — significantly — is on education. That is, both are heavily drawn from economically precarious groups, but for radical leftists these economic grievances are overlaid with cosmopolitan values inculcated via higher education.

Both radical Left and Right are, the authors suggest, “different segments of the same pool of losers of globalization”. The left-behind bottom rungs of the new graduate precariat mix cosmopolitan style identity politics with a simmering anger at a system that feels rigged against them, and a demand for economic redistribution — in other words, the Corbyn/Sanders formula.

Meanwhile, adherents of the alt-right face similarly left-behind economic prospects, just without the graduate worldview. So the main mode is the same anger at a rigged system, just overlaid with the mirror-image of the cosmopolitan worldview: nativist identity politics. We might call this the Tommy Robinson formula.

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Will there be a second Covid wave?

By Tom Chivers

The urbanist Joel Kotkin has argued recently that developed economies are heading for a form of neo-feudalism. A tiny class of oligarchs, he warns, is emerging in conjunction with a ‘clerisy’ comprising universities, media and culture that propagates its values. These two classes are in the process of stripping wealth, property and influence from pretty much every other sector of society.

In Kotkin’s terms, we could see both alt-right and alt-left as different subsets of the ‘Third Estate’ losers of this hollowing-out. They may be a militant subset right now, but as we exit lockdown into the teeth of a brutal recession, the precariat is going to get bigger. It’s also likely to get angrier: coronavirus is strengthening the hand of finance, big tech and the biggest corporations, even as it’s eviscerating the middle class. In other words, the pandemic has accelerated many of the trends contributing to the twin radicalisms of alt-right and alt-left.

From the point of view of effecting political change, then, the tragedy of the alts is that they should waste their energy quarrelling among themselves. Alt-left and alt-right represent different subsets of an ever-swelling precariat, watching in real time as the last of the twentieth century social contract goes up in smoke. Right now they largely see the enemy as one another. Should that change, though, we could see our faltering political settlement shaken to its core.

When the coronavirus hit higher education, it encountered an institution with serious pre-existing conditions. Many universities were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. A lingering dispute over pensions had corroded morale. The over-emphasis on research, imposed largely by the government, had warped priorities, leading to a decline in teaching quality everywhere. Mounting student debt led many young people to question whether the ‘ivory tower experience’ is worth the investment.

The virus is ruthless: it exposes and punishes those weaknesses. Over the long term, some institutions might be forced to close, while others will have to radically transform the product they offer.

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By Gerard Degroot

In the short term, universities responded impressively to the lockdown. Fortunately, the crisis struck around the term break, giving lecturers time to adjust to teaching online. I heard the usual grumbling among former colleagues but they improvised remarkably well.

The challenges were immense. Take my son, who’s currently in his third year of a drama course at the University of the Highlands and Islands. At first, it seemed impossible to do acting online from home. He, however, dutifully showed up to Zoom classes, performing movement and voice in front of his Apple Mac. An assignment in a directing module was completed with his mother in the starring role.

Higher education has changed more in four weeks than it did during the four decades I taught. When I asked friends how they’ve coped, they described nuisances familiar to almost anyone who has been working at home. One friend told about trying to conduct an online seminar while a neighbour next door was noisily building a shed. Cats walked over keyboards, dogs barked and kids made demands. Most common of all were the challenges of dealing with new technology and dodgy wifi. “One of the biggest learning curves I’ve found”, a colleague wrote, “is embracing change as a set of new perspectives rather than a series of threats.”

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The problems staff have encountered are mere nuisances; those students have had to endure are more serious, and will become more so, if the crisis continues into a new academic year. The virus, far from being a great leveller, brutally exposed inequalities among students. Some have to share laptops with family members; others don’t have a reliable internet connection, or even a simple desk. One student worked from an ironing board. They nevertheless adjusted quickly and with resilience. Courses were completed without too much loss of content.

But let’s not get complacent. One reason online teaching worked better than expected is because it happened in the middle of the semester, when classes had already met face-to-face and formed personal bonds. A bunker spirit arose, fortified by an assumption that the crisis would be temporary. Creating a group dynamic with students who have never met one another and who have endured months of lockdown and uncertainty is a much greater challenge. And that’s what lies ahead.

Universities are flying blind. Among my friends, anxiety is high; there’s a repeated refrain of “the worst is yet to come”. Colleagues are frantically planning for scenarios they can’t predict. When will the lockdown be lifted? When will social distancing no longer apply? Will travel restrictions prevent the arrival of international students who contribute massively to income? Universities have responded by anticipating every contingency. They are offering teaching both in person and online, with students allowed to choose which is best for them.

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Is it safe to reopen schools?

By Tom Chivers

This seems a sensible solution, but uncertainties proliferate. It’s not clear whether in-person and online classes can take place simultaneously. If not, the workload for lecturers will immediately double. Students opting for the online version will inevitably suffer a qualitative difference in provision that might be reflected in performance. As for those who opt for in-person teaching, will it be safe by September to pack 300 students into a lecture hall or squeeze eight of them into a small office for a tutorial? Yesterday, Cambridge announced that there will be no face-to-face lectures in the coming academic year and in person small group teaching will be conducted only where social distancing allows. Other universities will certainly follow. And what of all the other aspects of campus life – dances, sports, societies, carousing and casual sex?  There’s great risk of universities becoming hotspots in the second wave of the virus.

Now look at that scenario from the student’s perspective. Some will inevitably decide that it’s not worth spending £9,000 in fees for an experience diminished both educationally and socially. Many prospective first years will opt instead to defer their place. Some students in mid-course will decide to take a year off; some may never return. My son is seriously considering whether doing drama in the age of self-isolation is really worth the effort. He’s not sure he’ll go back. Universities have promised to be flexible when it comes to those choosing to defer, but this will inevitably lead to a massive logjam at the clearing stage in the summer of 2021.

I’m certain that universities will respond well to these uncertainties, just as they have so far done.  My former colleagues, for the most part, take pride in what they do; they don’t want the quality of higher education to suffer. Most of them will therefore spend the summer improving the online versions of their classes, by looking creatively at how best to exploit the existing technology. One thing is certain: online classes will be much better come September than they were back in April.

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By Mary Harrington

That, however, raises another problem, one which brings to mind turkeys voting for an early Christmas. The preferred method of teaching at universities hasn’t changed much since Plato gathered acolytes together under the Grecian sun. Seminars and tutorials teach students more than English or Philosophy or History: they foster the development of life skills like reasoning, listening, discourse and argument that are applicable to any subsequent profession.

The individual develops and matures in the hothouse of the seminar room in ways that go beyond the mere imparting of knowledge. For this reason, academics have long argued that the computer can never replace the classroom. Successful examples of distance learning, like the Open University, are still seen as second-best alternatives.

If my former colleagues work hard to make the coming academic year a success, the effect might be to undermine that cherished assumption that in-person contact is essential to learning. In other words, there’s great danger in doing the job well. Universities have always sold a life-changing experience — the degree represents a level of expertise but also a rich journey in attaining it. In the post-Covid environment of austerity, that experience might look even more like a middle-class indulgence than it already does.

The ancient universities will undoubtedly continue to do what they’ve always done and will find students willing to pay for the full ivory tower experience.  They will, however, suffer in the short term.  The University of Edinburgh announced last week that its annual income will drop by £150 million due to the Coronavirus, in particular because students from outside Europe, who pay high fees, are likely to stay away.  That will be a common problem among the elite institutions.

It is, however, the less-prestigious institutions that face a really bleak future. They can’t rely on idyllic surroundings or a distinguished reputation to attract undergraduates. These institutions depend upon their ability to pack students in to large lecture courses, taught by low paid, often adjunct, lecturers.  The competition for applicants among them was already fierce and some were in dire financial trouble.  In the post-Covid future, some might decide that survival lies in developing cheap distance-learning degrees.  Cash-strapped students might opt pragmatically for that alternative — a degree without the frills delivered online and without the expense of living on campus.

Higher education has always been sold as a great leveller — a ladder of social mobility. Intelligent youths from underprivileged backgrounds, it was thought, would develop their full potential through the experience of going away to university. That ideal was already undermined by the introduction of fees in 1998 and their crippling increase in 2010. It would be weakened further if online courses proliferate.

Higher education would be divided into two unequal sectors which would reflect the characteristics of the cohort they attract. The ancient universities would continue to offer the in-person tutorial experience, with the important personal and social development that goes with it. The other sector would offer online degrees without frills — an option attractive to those whose low income necessitates a utilitarian approach to education. The latter would learn a subject, but would miss out on the personal growth. Out would go that ideal of levelling; instead of erasing class differences, universities would magnify them.

This is true across the country, but its impact is especially noticeable in post-industrial regions. According to a 2017 report, the University of Liverpool alone contributed £652m in gross value added to the Liverpool city region in 2015/16, and supported one in 57 jobs in the region.

Some 11,000 jobs are either directly funded or supported by spending associated with the university — and the University of Liverpool is only one of 5 or more institutions (depending how much of the area you count) offering graduate and post-graduate courses in the Liverpool area, meaning the total sum is even greater.

As well as generating jobs and supporting whole industries catering to student life — from nightclubs and cafes to housing rentals – higher education is shaping the very landscape of the cities in which it thrives. As this 2015 report from UCL’s Urban Laboratory shows, universities are increasingly actors in urban development:

“Driven by competition (for reputation, staff and students) in an international marketplace, and released from financial constraints by the lifting of the cap on student fees, [universities] produce locally embedded variants of global higher education models. These assume physical and spatial form within the parameters of distinct, but increasingly similar, city planning and urban regeneration contexts defined by an ‘assemblage of expertise and resources from elsewhere’.”

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

Some of the money that flows into and through universities and out into local economies of course comes from overseas students, endowments and the like. But to a great extent, these dependent industries, revamped urban landscapes, former factories converted to student accommodation, ancillary services and so on are funded either directly — via government subsidies to higher education — or indirectly, via government-backed student loans.

Though academic research is still heavily subsidised by government via the UK Research and Innovation body, the proportion of direct funding to students has shrunk even as that taken on by students as loans has grown. A January 2019 research briefing from the House of Commons Library stated that the cash value of higher education loans is estimated to be around £20bn by 2023-24. The report also acknowledged that only about half of the money borrowed will ever be repaid, estimating that “The ultimate cost to the public sector is currently thought to be around 47% of the face value of these loans”.

The total cost to the public sector, the report continues, is roughly the same as it was before the funding model changed to scrap maintenance grants and increase tuition fees. That is to say, as the proportion of direct government funding to higher education has been reduced, there has been a corresponding rise in the amount of student debt that will never be repaid and which the government will eventually have to cover.

This money is in all but name a form of government subsidy, funded by government borrowing. But it is counted differently. The briefing notes in passing that “This subsidy element of loans is not currently included in the Government’s main measure of public spending on services and hence does not count towards the fiscal deficit.”

That is to say, billions of pounds are being borrowed by government for disbursement in the higher education sector, and the government already knows much of this will never be paid back. But the money is no longer counted toward the fiscal deficit, as it has been nominally privatised in the form of loans to individual young people.

One might argue that this is unimportant provided the higher education sector is delivering value to those who are nominally its customers — the students. But in 2018, the ONS reported that only 57% of young graduates were in high-skilled employment, a decline over the decade since the 2008 crash of 4.3 percentage points.  The ONS speculates that this could reflect “the limited number of high-skilled employment opportunities available to younger individuals and the potential difficulties they face matching into relevant jobs early in their careers”.

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Could national service save higher education?

By Mary Harrington

Nay-sayers pointed out, when Blair first introduced the tuition fees and the 50% graduate target, that the law of supply and demand suggests employers’ willingness to pay a “graduate premium” in wages as graduates become more plentiful. In 1950 only 17,500 youung people graduated from university; but when 1.4 million of them do so, as reported by the House of Commons this year, can they really hope for the same graduate premium?

Results so far suggest that many of them cannot. In a hard-hitting article last August in the New Statesman, Harry Lambert spelled out further the way in which the marketisation of higher education under the Blair rubric has also incentivised grade inflation.

Cui bono, then? Arguably less the students, graduating in ever greater numbers with ever less valuable degrees, than the cities in which they live for three or four years to study, and which have in many cases experienced a renaissance due in large part to the post-Blair expansion of higher education.

In 1981, after the Toxteth riots, Lord Howe advised Margaret Thatcher to abandon the entire city to “managed decline”. In a letter only made available to the National Archives in 2011, following the 30-year rule, Howe wrote:

“We do not want to find ourselves concentrating all the limited cash that may have to be made available into Liverpool and having nothing left for possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands or, even, the North East. […] I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether.”

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By Eric Kaufmann

Today, Howe’s words remain only as a bitter memory: the regenerated Liverpool city centre hums with tourists, students and shoppers. The Albert Dock area, reimagined from shipping and warehouses to office buildings, shops and leisure, is beautiful, vibrant and popular.

Much of this regeneration has come via the higher education boom. In Liverpool and elsewhere, successive governments have used the higher education sector more or less explicitly as an instrument of regeneration. In effect, government-backed student loans have become part of this: an off the books subsidy for depressed post-industrial areas, that have thus been partially rescued from the threat of Thatcherite “managed decline” and reinvented as hubs of the “knowledge economy”, all funded by government debt.

But a conflict of interest lurks beneath this picture. If we work on the assumption that the main beneficiaries of the higher education industry are supposed to be students, then it follows that institutions delivering shoddy teaching and useless degrees should be allowed to fail, as word spreads and students go elsewhere. But what if the main beneficiaries of this industry are in fact the cities regenerated with the borrowed money those students spend there?

In that case, from a policy perspective, the quality of the courses delivered will be less important than that the students continuing to arrive in their thousands, bringing their borrowed money to the region and spending it on accommodation, lattes, printer paper, fancy dress hire and all the other essentials of student life.

If the aim were indeed less the introduction of market forces than the use of students as a covert form of subsidy, we would surely see market distortions. In order to head off the threat of young people abandoning poor quality higher education, and entice them into shouldering their allotted portion of off-the-books government borrowing, the “graduate premium” would have to be maintained.

And indeed, since Blair’s student attendance target was first introduced, we can see that instead of using market forces to drive up quality the government has conspired with employers to cartelise the world of work. A growing number of roles that were once accessible via on-the-job training have — by government fiat if necessary — been rendered degree-only. Nursing is the classic example, but in 2016 this was even expanded to include the police,  a move so unwelcome in the force that this year Lincolnshire Police Force launched a judicial review against the policy. 

The victims in this situation are the students, who have come of age at a time when to have any hope of snagging a job they are more or less forced to leave their families and shoulder an enormous debt burden — over £50,000 each on average according to the IFS.  They must do so to acquire a degree whose value for money is declining, but which they cannot do without in a cartelised employment climate in which higher education is obligatory even as the grades it confers count for ever less. 

Not only is the government paying for today’s elderly care (and banker bailouts) with borrowing that will fall on tomorrow’s taxpayers, but young people are also being forced to take on huge personal loans to fund degrees; degrees that are less useful as preparations for adult life than as a conduit for indirect subsidies for regional regeneration.

To make matters worse, the government knows that much of this borrowing will never be repaid, which will leave tomorrow’s taxpayer on the hook for yet more billions. It is an accounting fiddle on a gigantic scale, which penalises young people by first saddling them with loans, then devaluing their education, and finally by hiding government borrowing that future taxpayers will somehow have to meet.

Young people already live with the suspicion that overall public sector borrowing is running up a tab today that will be their burden tomorrow. The situation is far worse than they think.

On top of that, the soaring cost of tuition places a disproportionate debt burden on poorer students, who are less likely to have help with living expenses from family; they graduate £57,000 in debt, compared with the £42,000 debt of their better-off peers.

We need a new approach. One that will reduce the total number of graduates to better fit the UK’s employment requirements, while levelling the economic playing field between rich and poor and improving the quality, attitude and employability of new graduates.

By the same author

Why liberal feminists don't care

By Mary Harrington

My radical policy would make university degrees fully government-funded, including living expenses, but make them contingent — for the entire UK student body — on prior successful completion of two years’ public service, either in the military or (for conscientious objectors) the NHS.

To make it work, we would need to widen the definition of military service beyond the frontline. After basic training, young people might drive minibuses on unprofitable public transport routes in rural locations, help fill in potholes, or provide Meals on Wheels to the elderly. It would be important to provide accommodation — as much for esprit de corps as to act as a social leveller — as well as food and a small stipend. There should be no impediment to public service on grounds of economic background.

For egalitarian reasons, it would be essential to ensure service tasks were assigned rather than chosen, as a precaution against the sharp-elbowed middle classes pulling strings to ensure their offspring received a cushy posting. And the scheme would need to offer roles compatible with mobility issues or other access requirements, for young people with disabilities.

Suggested reading

Slaying dragons: Britain's world-leading universities

By James Kirkup

Why do it? As things stand, academics describe a student cohort that has been so over-praised by parents and teachers that they believe themselves automatically entitled to good grades. They approach education as paying customers, which feeds the entitlement, and drives grade inflation. Eliminating the consumer dynamic would be the first step in getting higher education back on track.

The MoD’s Army Leadership Code describes its values as “Courage, Discipline, Respect for Others, Integrity, Loyalty and Selfless Commitment”: two years spent internalising these values, while rising early and doing as you’re told would be good preparation for taking undergraduate life seriously. And a little practice in the art of temporarily subordinating personal desires in pursuit of the public good might not hurt either.

It would put some off applying. This is no bad thing. It would be a quick and easy way of reducing our surplus of graduates. Filtering out those young people without the character to complete two years’ public service would also raise the calibre of those graduates, ensuring they’re ready for the challenging world of work.

Suggested reading

How university re-establishes hierarchy

By Peter Franklin

The policy might also improve access to top universities for the less well-off, by deterring their more highly-strung and overparented middle-class peers from applying. Research has linked helicopter parenting — a distinctly middle- and upper-class behaviour — to increased neediness and lack of self-reliance in students. Requiring young people to commit two years to communitarian service would either reduce the number of fragile middle-class university students in favour of their more self-reliant, working-class peers — or else cure them of their fragility. Either outcome would be a net benefit to universities, which are currently experiencing a crisis of mental health issues as well as student entitlement.

The policy would doubtless cause outrage. But an inverted version of it already exists in the UK, in the form of the Army Undergraduate Bursary — which offers up to £24,000 paid throughout your degree, conditional on completing a subsequent year at Sandhurst and three years’ service as an officer. Similar schemes to the UK army bursary operate in many countries, including Turkey and the USA.

Objectors might also complain that housing, feeding and paying two million young people for an extra two years, on top of funding their university education, would be prohibitively expensive. But the outlay needed to facilitate two million young people performing public service would hardly be money wasted.

In any case, higher education is subsidised by the taxpayer even now to the tune of nearly £4bn. If we take into account the fact that only 17% of students are ever forecast to pay back their full student loan, this figure is much higher. The government is just keeping that £100bn of mostly bad debt off the books. Why not re-route it?

Suggested reading

Why 'separate but equal' is a fraud

By Polly Mackenzie

At present, the system of tuition positions higher education as a transactional good, sold to student consumers on the basis that the ‘graduate premium’ outweighs the cost of loan repayment and as such is worth the investment. This approach has been justified on the basis that it has improved access. But so far, marketising higher education has neither improved the quality of degrees — quite the opposite — nor done much for young people’s employment prospects apart from raising the bar for the ‘graduate premium’.

Restoring full funding for university education in exchange for civic participation would level the socioeconomic playing field for applicants, and also reintroduce an older understanding of education not as a consumer good but as a public good that benefits all of us. It would also underline the fact that the purpose of higher education is not personal enrichment but to train the future leaders of society for a lifetime of service.

Those wishing to embark on a life of leadership and public service should see no hardship in performing some of this upfront, while those seeking only their own selfish advancement would be welcome to study overseas, at their own expense.

This is not an argument that can be made today. “Critical thinking” has become a cluster of progressive dogmas, which are handed down as if they were self-evident truths. Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.

They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.

Suggested reading

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

The decline of the humanities is one of the defining facts of the age. Yet there has not been a great deal of serious discussion of its causes. In the Eighties and Nineties, an influential critique argued that universities had been co-opted by “tenured radicals”—the title of a provocative book published by the American art critic Roger Kimball in 1990.

As Kimball saw it, an academic nomenklatura controlled sectors of higher education and used its position to attack the values of the societies that funded it. Any version of a western canon was discredited, and its origins in classical philosophy and Jewish and Christian religion disparaged.

There is some truth in this critique. Though they remain ineffably redolent of the bourgeoisie at their most sanctimonious and self-deceiving, academic radicals define themselves by their opposition to the bourgeois civilisation that produced and now supports them. Kimball’s critique also identifies a key feature of tenured radicalism: it is self-reproducing. Through their powers of patronage, the nomenklatura decide the prospects of new entrants, and exclude anyone who deviates from the party line. No young scholar who fails to genuflect to it has any prospect of a future in academic life.

What this analysis fails to explain is the appeal of the ideology this class has adopted. Marx may be worth re-reading in a time when capitalism is entering another of its recurrent crises. But how could a turgid mishmash of Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan have gained such a stranglehold on institutions of higher learning?

Suggested reading

How the woke inquisition broke Cambridge

By Eric Kaufmann

The metamorphosis in liberalism that has occurred over the past generation has played a role. From being a philosophy of tolerance aiming at peaceful coexistence among divergent world-views, it has become a persecutory orthodoxy that tolerates no view of the world other than its own. If the contemporary academy is hostile to liberal values as they used to be understood, one reason is the rise of a new liberalism that dismisses these values as phoney and repressive. But this only pushes the question one step back. Why has illiberal liberalism become so popular?

Part of the answer may be found in a short, strange and inexhaustibly interesting volume that was published nearly a century and a half ago. The chief subject of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), is the nature of Greek tragedy, which he interpreted as an art-form that overcame the lack of meaning in human life by reframing it as an aesthetic spectacle.

The most celebrated aspect of Nietzsche’s interpretation is his claim that Greek drama turns on an interaction between an Apollonian striving after reason and order, and a Dionysian yearning for chaos and frenzy. But the most important section of the book, to my mind, comes when he applies his account of Greek tragedy to the secular faith of modern times, which he calls “Socratism” — the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth.

“Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist,” Nietzsche writes, “who in his faith in the explicability of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil.” Later in the book, Nietzsche asks the reader to imagine “abstract man, without the guidance of myth — abstract education, abstract morality, abstract justice, the abstract state…then we have our present age, the product of that Socratism bent on the destruction of myth”.

Suggested reading

How Cambridge flunked the Peterson test

By Douglas Murray

The end-result of Socratism for the West is “a resolute process of secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its previous existence”. In turn, the triumph of Socratism leads to a violent rebirth of mythic thinking, inspiring the frenzied totalitarian movements that Nietzsche saw coming and which, ironically, he was blamed for inspiring.

Writing when Europe’s high bourgeois civilisation seemed unshakably secure, Nietzsche foresaw the present crisis of the humanities. Deconstruction is Socratism in an extravagant form, an all-out effort to subvert the myths and metaphysics that underpinned western civilisation — not least Socrates’s own faith in reason. At crucial moments, as Nietzsche notes, Socrates turned to his daimonion — a “divine voice” that enabled him to be a true philosopher — for guidance. (In 1952, the great Irish classicist E.R. Dodds presented a similar view in The Greeks and the Irrational, where the founder of western philosophy is presented as an heir to Greek shamanism.)

Like Plato, Socrates was the mouthpiece of a mystical faith. It was this—not any process of ratiocination—that allowed him to assert that the true and the good were one and the same. The ideology of deconstruction aims to demystify this Socratic faith, along with everything else. As Nietzsche understood, once Socratism knocks away its metaphysical foundations it becomes a type of nihilism.

If Nietzsche’s diagnosis is even half-way sound, some awkward conclusions follow for the future of the humanities. Many lament the collapse of standards of truth and evidence in higher education. But what is their remedy? To restore rationality, no doubt. It seems not to have occurred to them that this may not be possible. For the most part, those who lament the condition of the humanities are evangelists for the Socratism that has led the humanities to where they are now. For these latter-day exponents of ‘Enlightenment liberal values’, rationality can be restored by an act of will. If enough people make a commitment to being reasonable, all will be well.

Suggested reading

Could Mill's model mend capitalism?

By Polly Mackenzie

Liberals of this kind remind one of J.M. Keynes’s comment on the “thin rationalism” of his friend Bertrand Russell. In an elegiac talk to a Bloomsbury Group audience, in 1938, published after his death as My Early Beliefs, Keynes observed: “Bertie sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that human affairs are carried on in a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was carry them on rationally.”

Keynes thought Russell’s rationalism shallow because it skated over the passions that are the deciding forces in human events. Having been an official at the Versailles Peace Conference where the future of Europe after the First World War was supposed to be determined, he knew how emotions of resentment and revenge could overwhelm reasoned policy-making. But there is a deeper reason why rationality cannot be regained by reinstating the intellectual standards of the past.

The Enlightenment faith in reason to which many critics of the humanities would like to return was based on the belief that, once it had discarded myth, humankind would devote itself to the pursuit of knowledge through science. This was the “theoretical optimism” that Nietzsche discerned at the bottom of Europe’s bourgeois civilisation.

But “abstract man” proved to be an illusion, and during the 20th century, science became a vehicle for myths that made mass extermination seem rational. Turning to science as a panacea for evil today means turning a blind eye to the horrendous ends for which science has been deployed. If Nietzsche did nothing else, he predicted Steven Pinker.

Suggested reading

Can academia be saved from the mob?

By Debra Soh

The discomforting truth is that the crisis of the humanities can’t be fixed, for it is part of a much larger malady. The ideology that has captured universities is only an inflated version of that which animates society at large. In both, the myths that sustained civilisation in the past are sacrificed to an idea of progress that is devoid of meaning.

The classical liberal economist F.A. Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty (1960): “Progress is movement for movement’s sake, for it is in the process of learning, and in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gift of his intelligence.” But what is it that is learnt in the course of this purposeless process? Admirable for the clarity and honesty with which it is stated, Hayek’s idea of progress is as much an expression of nihilism as Derrida’s project of deconstruction.

Nietzsche found no way out from the condition he diagnosed, and it may well be that there is none. The decline of the humanities may be no more than an episode in the decline of the West. The idea that a solution can be found in the academy is silly. A cultural malady that goes all the way back to Socrates is not going to be remedied by anything that is done in floundering 21^st-century universities.

Suggested reading

Why aren't illiberal universities challenged?

By Nigel Biggar

It would be better to admit that the battle there has been lost, and advise young people to get to know the canon by themselves. It will not cost them tens of thousands of pounds to buy a copy of Montaigne’s essays, Emily Dickinson’s poems, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, for example. If they want to move beyond western traditions, they can read Dostoevsky’s apocalyptic and hilariously funny Demons, the delightful Chuang-Tzu and dozens of other world classics.

The condition of the humanities has many of the qualities of black comedy. There is currently a campaign underway to have Camille Paglia sacked from the teaching position she has held for 30 years at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia because she has voiced what are considered to be incorrect opinions on a number of currently toxic issues.

As she once playfully boasted, Paglia is “one of the smartest people in the humanities in the world”. She is also one of the most original. Making her own use of Nietzsche’s dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, she has dug into the most fundamental sources of the West’s cultural disorder. The power of her analysis is illustrated by the clamour against her, and she may not be surprised at the attempt to unseat her. Nietzsche believed the modern mind has become incapable of recognising tragedy. The same may be true of farce.

Why the humanities can't be saved

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Make no mistake, Weinstein is a sexual predator who deserves a long spell behind bars. Biden, however, is something different. He seems to be a man who punctuates his emotions with physical contact. He probably needs to rein it in, and he definitely needs to apologise to those who found his gestures unwelcome. But I doubt there’s anything inherently evil in his behaviour. I suspect Biden is a victim of his own empathy.

“Joe has a deep desire to share in the lives of others – their grief, pain, and joy” the former Missouri Senator Jean Carnahan recently tweeted. She had experienced the therapeutic power of Biden’s empathy after she lost her husband and son in a plane crash. “He reaches out… to connect and express … feelings. … it’s part of who he is. Like everything else about his big, Irish personality, he expresses those feelings with exuberance and sincerity.”

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Who takes advantage of disadvantage?

By Jenny McCartney

And that worries me. Carnahan’s description of Biden sounds a little bit like me. I’m certainly far more restrained when it comes to physicality, but I do sometimes express emotions with contact – a tap to the forearm for instance. I, too, convey feelings with exuberance and I involve myself in the lives of others.

Let’s make it clear: I’m not talking about touch – the sort of thing that got Biden into trouble. I’m talking about connectedness: I open myself emotionally to people and welcome it when they open themselves to me. Compassion is a two-way street. This, for me, is simple humanity, something devoid of sexual intent and applied equally to men and women.

But I’m worried now. Standards of acceptable behaviour seem suddenly to have shifted. Empathy – with or without that touch on the arm – is hazardous.

Suggested reading

The righteous anger of youth

By Gerry de Groot

My worries are compounded by the fact that empathy plays a large part in my profession – or at least it should. I’m a university teacher. I prefer that description to ‘professor’, which connotes an aloofness detrimental to compassion. For many of my colleagues, that aloofness offers a safe haven that doesn’t require emotional commitment to one’s students.

Yet many students seek such commitment from their teachers. They’re alone in a stressful world, away from parents. Yes, they have friends, but sometimes they need someone else – someone older, not necessarily a friend, but a person they can trust.

We’re now officially advised, though, that we should not try to help students with emotional problems, and should instead pass them on to the ‘professionals’ at Student Support. I suppose that’s because the dangers of giving wrong advice are too high. We’re no longer trusted to help, no longer trusted with human compassion.

Suggested reading

Who let the thought police invade our universities?

By Julie Bindel

Yet, if only professionals are allowed to help, that can institutionalise a problem or give it a stigma with which the student is uncomfortable. It can escalate that problem to a level the student doesn’t want.

So I ignore that advice; I respect the student’s decision to seek out me. Lots of students – of both sexes – end up crying in my office. I’ve had colleagues do the same. For me, it’s part of the job and a reflection of who I am. I’m not formally trained to deal with these problems, but I do have experience – 35 years of it.

I’m painfully aware that my profession carries significant dangers. Students are often emotionally vulnerable. We see them in private with doors closed so that they feel comfortable about being candid. Taken together, these circumstances constitute a ticking time bomb.

Lecturers and professors have enormous power over students; some use that power for sexual favour. Over a long career, I’ve heard plenty of stories of despicable behaviour – many were probably true. Long ago, a colleague was so notoriously predatory that female students avoided going to his office alone. Keen to avoid a scandal, his university quietly encouraged him to take a job elsewhere. Otherwise, nothing was done, no sanctions imposed. Theoretically, gross moral turpitude – having sex with a student – was the only acceptable grounds for firing an academic. Yet in all my years in universities, I’ve never seen anyone fired. Some should have been.

Suggested reading

The media's sins of omission

By Damian Thompson

But they were the predators. Nowadays, I’m worried about the empathisers – people like me, who let students in to pour out their hearts. In the past, I might have expressed compassion for a student with a pat on the shoulder, but I would no longer do so. Some time ago, a young colleague broke down in my office after male students had been unkind to her – something that happens all the time. She was a vulnerable wreck in need of compassion. That situation now frightens me because it carries so many risks.

A prominent female academic, faced with a similar situation, hugged her colleague. She ended up accused of unsolicited sexual contact, leading to a large out-of-court settlement by her university. Have my fears rendered my empathy less effective? Yes, I think so. I’m certainly more careful, more aware of the hazards of empathy. More guarded.

In my profession, suspicion runs deep; compassion now seems to carry unaffordable risk. We’re so afraid of the potential consequences of intimacy that we’re building walls to prevent its occurrence. Trust has disappeared. Safety lies in a cold heart. Some colleagues in America are no longer allowed to consult students in private because their institutions are deathly afraid of litigation. Extrapolating forward, it’s not inconceivable that future consultations will have to take place with student and teacher divided by a glass barrier, as in prison.

Suggested reading

Can academia be saved from the mob?

By Debra Soh

Almost every one of us has had, in our past, a teacher who changed our life, who put us on course toward where we are now. That connection most likely came through empathy, a personal bond that transcended mere conveyance of knowledge. A teacher who took the time to make an emotional connection with my son turned his life around. He’s now at university only because of her. If we remove empathy from education we might as well turn teaching over to computers.

Is this fear of empathy a problem that extends beyond education? I expect so. We’re all victims in this brave new world. We all lose when compassion is seen as risky and openness a danger. I’d like to be able to offer a solution, a path back to sanity and trust. But I don’t know of one.

The future scares me. I’m glad I’m retiring. I’ve got three weeks of teaching left, three weeks to avoid trouble. I once had the best job in the world, but now it’s gone. Goodbye to all that.

So, why do the details of a person’s college education loom so large in how we perceive ourselves and others? Why should these three or four years influence the next 30 or 40? Why have we gone to so much trouble to expand the university system and burden the young with debt when they should be saving? Why have we turned jobs that were once open to teenage school leavers into graduate-only professions? Why does a country like the UK score so highly on the quality of its universities and yet do so badly on skills and training?

Further reading

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

One could argue that in a knowledge economy, the university system is how employers identify knowledge workers. However, A levels can do that – and across a wider range of subjects. Some people might add that university is about character as well as qualifications – but in my experience, most graduates leave university not only with a piece of paper, but also with a lot of growing up still to do (I certainly did).

Oh, and please don’t tell me this is all to do with instilling a love of learning. In this anti-intellectual, sub-literate age that just won’t wash.

No, I’m afraid the university boom is more to do with the re-establishment of hierarchy. In the 20th century we smashed up the old symbols of status; being innately hierarchical creatures, we’ve found sly ways of creating new ones. The university system provides an ideal medium.

First of all, it is ostensibly meritocratic – while you are sent to school by your parents, you go to university as your own person. Furthermore, which university you are admitted to is supposedly determined by ability rather than by what your family can afford to pay for (more about that later). So unlike any signifiers of status conferred during childhood, any status based on one’s higher education passes the smell test.

The university system is now big enough to include a large and diverse proportion of the population. But at the same time the range of institutions contained within the system is wide enough to produce gradations of status. Best of all, that status once acquired cannot be lost or superseded by one’s less-favoured rivals. The university you went to is a permanent mark upon your CV, it cannot altered by how big or how little an effort you make later in life. Those who get into the ‘right’ university aged 18, will carry that advantage with them throughout their careers (at least among people and organisations that care about such things).

What should be supremely meritocratic often isn’t – especially when the wealthy and well-connected parents go to absurd lengths to get their children into elite institutions. The recent college bribery scandal in the US was a prime example.

However, as Kevin Carey points out in the New York Times, in many cases, ma and pa needn’t have bothered:

“In 2014, the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published an analysis of the benefits of attending a highly selective college. They found that, after statistically controlling for students’ SAT scores, economic background and college ambitions, the long-term financial returns are ‘generally indistinguishable from zero.’ Students who are poised to succeed tend to do so even if they don’t get into the Ivy League.”

That said, the same study found that “students who come from less privileged backgrounds benefit greatly from selective colleges”.

Further reading

How small bureaucratic hurdles can be big barriers for the poor

By Peter Franklin

A separate study found that “while many kinds of colleges can help students move to the top 20% of the income distribution from the bottom 20%, moving to the top 1% from the bottom 20% almost always requires a highly selective institution.”

But is this explained by the quality of the education that these students receive or by the status of an exclusive label and the social networks they can plug into? If it’s more the latter, then we’ve invented a very expensive way of helping a few students, while painting a meritocratic gloss on a system that still serves the interests of the privileged.

Is there not a more productive (and less Faustian) way of helping a greater number of people? Carey cites another study which found that “students who majored in high-demand fields such as engineering at less selective public universities earned more than similar students who chose other majors at more selective universities.”

It’s hard not to conclude that the higher education system is now driving a major misallocation of both public and private resources.

In the UK, a recent study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that “[student] loan write-offs now account for 90% of government spending on HE”. Furthermore, this subsidy is being driven “mechanically” to those subjects and institutions that make the least contribution to students’ future job prospects.

Further reading

How to stop the mis-selling of education

By Peter Franklin

The tuition fee and loan system was supposed to increase the independence of the HE sector and expand opportunity for students – and all in the name of meritocracy, of course. The reality is that a system in which “government can expect to write off around half of loans issued” is still deeply dependent on the state. What has changed, however, is that “the government is much less able to target the money it spends on HE”.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we need politicians willing to admit that the funding of the higher education sector is a mess – not least because our attitude to the status conferred by higher education is messed-up.

If we’re more interested in the reality than the mere appearance of meritocracy, then we need a root-and-branch rethink of the entire system.

The British working class were the subject of intense study for much of the 20th century – before being ignored altogether by the end of it. They went from “salt of the earth” to “scum of the earth” as the Guardian columnist Owen Jones would later write in his book Chavs.

By the 1990s, politicians were proclaiming the abolition of the working class entirely. John Major (Tory; working class) entered Downing Street in 1990 promising to create a “classless society”. He must have made good progress, because shortly before the 1997 General Election, Labour’s deputy leader, John Prescott, proclaimed confidently: “We are all middle class now”. Two years later, prime minister Tony Blair declared the “class war is over”.

The reality, of course, is very different. Class has never disappeared, even if the boundaries between the working and middle classes are more fluid.

Mike Savage, in his 2015 analysis of the British Class Survey, Social Class in the 21st Century, argues that the economic changes that have taken place over recent decades have brought “the end of old-fashioned class politics based on the fundamental cleavage between the working and middle classes which had dominated political mobilisation during the twentieth century”.

Working-class children attend university in far greater numbers than at any time previously. Cultural life too has changed. In books such as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), a sociological look at working class life in Britain between the wars, there existed a distinctive proletarian culture, separate from the middle classes.

Nowadays, on the surface at least, there is a more common culture that spans all social groups. The middle classes listen to popular music while, as Savage notes, through widening university participation, “…forms of culture which used to be restricted to the educated middle classes actually filter down to wider sections of the population” (like ballet, theatre or classical music).

But the seeming fluidity of class boundaries in the 21st century masks more subtle forms of inequality. The chances of going to university – as well as of getting a good degree – closely correlate with family background. The bottom fifth of the population are still 40% less likely to go to university than those from the top fifth. And in recent years, while the proportion of students from poorer backgrounds going to university has risen, the proportion attending one of the Russel Group universities – an elite group of 24, including Oxford and Cambridge – has fallen.

Yet it is these few educational institutions which provide a conveyor belt for the elite. A media studies degree from a former polytechnic college does not carry anything like the same cachet, nor open the same doors as a degree in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) from Oxford.

Contemporary political discourse is also shaping new class inequalities. Turning Britain into a meritocracy is a modern political obsession. This can result in a situation where “privilege is misread as ‘merit’”, as Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison discuss in their new book The Class Ceiling. “We do not dispute that conventional measures of ‘merit’ – skills, qualifications, expertise, effort, experience – are important to career progression in Britain’s elite occupations,” the authors write. “But what our analysis indicates is that people do not necessarily have an equal capacity to ‘cash in’ their ‘merit’ or ‘realise’ their talent.”

Despite popular usage by politicians, the word meritocracy was coined to denote something sinister. In his dystopian novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Michael Young imagined what a fully ‘meritocratic’ society would look like in practice, and it wasn’t pretty. Whereas the old aristocratic order had felt a twinge of responsibility toward the poor, the meritocratic elite felt no such compunction: they had risen based on merit and innate ability; their privileges – as well as the lowly status of those beneath them – were therefore legitimate.

Class is, of course, about much more than occupation – it is deeply personal. As the fashionable identity politics parlance goes, it is a question of ‘lived experience’.

I was born into in the lower middle classes, or the petit bourgeoisie in Marxist terminology. I was the first member of my family to go to university, yet I did not do so until I was 23 years old. Going to university was outside of my reality until one of my friends, from a similar background, went to the University of Bristol as a mature student, at around the same time.

It was only once I started making my way through higher education that the prospect of a professional job – in this case journalism – became something tangible, something within reach. Previously it had not even occurred to me. When I was a child, we didn’t own books, I had to go to the local library to find anything to read. The outlook of those I was with as I grew up might have best been described as parochial, materialistic and conservative. Those in the local community who went to art galleries and the theatre at the weekend were deemed ‘posh’. Once I was at university, though, my prospects changed.

This is a form of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed cultural capital: the things you acquire through being a member of a particular social class; from behaviours and tastes, to skills and material belongings. In my own case, it was the understanding that university was a viable career route.

Humour is something I have noticed too: the middle-class people who predominate in politics and the media have a very different sense of humour to the people I grew up with. Hating the television show Mrs Brown’s Boys is considered a mark of sophistication among the commentariat, with Hugo Rifkind writing in the Times in 2017 that he could not be friends with someone who found the show funny. I suspect this sentiment is widespread among journalists and newspaper columnists: the Independent called it the “worst comedy ever made”. According to YouGov, C2DE Britons make up 52% of those who say they like the programme, while two thirds (67%) of people who don’t like it coming from the ABC1 social demographic. Class expert Sam Friedman evidenced this “comic cultural capital” in a 2011 study.

This all presents an obvious challenge to the Left, but also helps explain why class politics is increasingly fought on the cultural front. At the 2017 General Election, the Conservatives increased their share of C2DE (working class) voters by 12 points. Meanwhile, middle class votes swung to Labour. Cultural concerns – about immigration, Europe and terrorism– took precedence over economic questions.

Economics has always been intertwined with these issues, but as class identity has shifted away from the productive sphere, cultural divisions have become more pertinent. In many of the working-class communities I visited in 2016 for my book, Hired, work was viewed as a means to an end. Their true identity, as they saw it, was derived more from patterns of consumption: from the clothes they wore and the things they did recreationally.

Just how little relevance an individual’s economic position appears to have in defining their class is surprising. The economic disadvantages faced by the young and working class in Britain today are well-documented. Work has become increasingly precarious and property ownership has plummeted. Yet this has not translated into increased levels of class consciousness.

As Mike Savage notes in his book, “those at the bottom of the pile are the least likely to think of themselves as belonging to a class, whilst those with the most advantages are considerably more likely to do so”. Younger respondents are also more resistant to traditional class identities than their older counterparts.

In other words, Marx’s prediction that class consciousness would intensify among the working class has been turned on its head. But even though our perceptions have changed, those ‘working-class’ concerns persist – economic as well as cultural. Indeed, they are contributing to the backlash against mainstream politics. And were we to have an electoral system in Britain that wasn’t so resistant to change, and politicians who listened more closely, we would probably be undergoing a broader political realignment right now to match that ongoing evolution.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

In any usual week, you’ll read news stories that are annoying and some that are disagreeable. Occasionally you’ll come one that is outright reprehensible. At the end of January, one such piece sidled onto the BBC’s website, where it received far less attention than it would have done in any normal season. It was published on the front page of the BBC’s website under the headline: “I’m mixed race, is Cambridge university right for me?”

I had to read the headline a couple of times before it made any sense. My first thought was, “What the hell?” Then: “Why would it not be?” For a nano-second I wondered whether, since my last visit there, Cambridge had perhaps become some kind of infamous racist hellhole?

The piece itself was written by a young woman called Anoushka Mutanda Dougherty. She had been offered a place at the university and was using the article to weigh up the relative merits of the offer. It was, though, the framing, presentation and prominence given to the story by the BBC that I found most appalling.

Introducing the story, the BBC website stated:

“Anoushka Mutanda Dougherty has been offered a place at Cambridge University, but she’s mixed-race and from a state school – and only 3% of students who started at Cambridge in 2017 were black, or mixed-race with black heritage. So is it the best place for her? At this point, she’s not sure.”

It is, first of all, worth noting the casualness of that “but”: “…but she’s mixed race.” As though the latter fact (being mixed race) would negate or significantly throw into question the former (being offered a place at Cambridge). Deployed so provocatively –or carelessly – it undermines years of work by institutions, such as Cambridge University, to improve access to people of all backgrounds. It suggests to young people coming up that a set of such contradictory possibilities must indeed be carefully weighed up.

Only the relatively small proportion of the public who have seen these institutions first-hand will know how misleading this is. There were black and mixed race students at Cambridge, when I used to visit 20 years ago, just as there were at Oxford at the same time. Other than an ongoing push to increase access to people of all backgrounds, there was no problem about any of this.  So what could possibly have changed?

Nothing negative, that is for certain. Over recent decades Oxbridge has spent considerable time and money attempting to ensure that its facilities and world-class tuition are available to the widest possible variety of people. It has significantly reduced the number of people getting into the university from private and public schools, and significantly increased the number of students attending Oxbridge from state schools.

Like every other publicly funded institution in the UK, Oxbridge pursues ‘diversity’ as an objective. More than a decade ago, an admissions tutor at Oxford explained how the top universities have attempted to ensure that students from minorities aren’t underrepresented. As Tom Kemp of St John’s said, there are only three options open to the universities to improve access: to wait for every school in the country to be as good as the top private schools; to have a government-enforced mandate which would mean that universities would have to seriously compromise on quality; or to do what universities like Oxford and Cambridge have been doing for decades now – which is to engage in “positive discrimination in favour of candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds”.

He continued: “I know of no subject tutor in my college, or in my subject university-wide, who would not give the benefit of the doubt to an applicant from an under-privileged background who appeared to have a spark that belied their modest achievements to date.”

There is no evidence that the country’s oldest universities are failing in this ambition. In fact, the percentage of black students at Cambridge University which the BBC piece presents as some outrageous example of under-representation (3%) is almost exactly in line with the number of British citizens who identified as black in the last census.

So does the BBC expect Cambridge to have an over-representation of people of one racial background? If so, then which racial groups would they wish to see under-represented? None of these mitigating facts is included in the piece and none of the follow-on implications is remotely contended with.

In her piece, Mutanda Dougherty did tell us her own back story. She explained that her mother is one of the Ugandan Asians forced by Idi Amin to flee Uganda in the 1970s; she claims that the story of her mother and fellow Ugandan Asians is “largely overlooked” and that there is “little understanding” of the struggles that they faced – and says this is one of the reasons why she would feel nervous attending Cambridge. While this may be true, this it is hard to prove. For while many may be ignorant of the history of Ugandan Asians, many others will not be. Besides which, most people are ignorant of most things, and all of us are ignorant of an awful lot. In the UK, 70% of young people have never heard of Chairman Mao. So perhaps ignorance about what went on in Uganda decades before they were born, while sad, may not be entirely out of the question.

Of course, one way for more people to become aware of what took place would be if a bright young student such as Mutanda Dougherty were to tell people about it – both in her circle of contemporaries and friends, and eventually, perhaps, to some wider audience.  The alternative – seclusion only with people of precisely the same ethnic background and the identical hereditary experience – would be the best way to make sure such history were eventually forgotten.

To their credit, her parents encouraged Mutanda to apply to Cambridge, and it is their daughter who says that she is worried about being among “quite a high proportion of pupils from private schools” in a “majority white and majority posh (!) institution”.

This difference between the generations gets to the heart of why an argument like this, and a piece like it, are so disheartening.  There are any number of ways to write about majority populations and minority access. It can be written about and contemplated in a spirit of imperfect progress, or it can be written about and contemplated in a spirit of ever-renewable grudge.  The opportunity of going to a university such as Cambridge can be written about as something available to anyone who works, and applies themselves, and is then fortunate enough to win a place. Or it can be written about in the weaponised, racialised tone that is contaminating everything at present.

Mutanda Dougherty is not alone in adopting this tone. It has been deployed by a much older and more seasoned practitioner: Polly Toynbee. It is over a decade since Toynbee published her book (with David Walker) Unjust Rewards, in which she accompanied a group of black schoolchildren from Brent to see the colleges of Oxford. Were they there to inspire the students and instil in them the lesson that, with enough hard work and a little bit of luck they might get there too?

No such luck. Toynbee and her co-author took the children to Oxford to flaunt it before them, only to explain that it would never be for them (see Giles Coren’s memorable evisceration of this here. As Toynbee and Walker concluded, “The Brent students will likely find themselves in a rust-stained concrete polytechnic not far from home.”

Such a situation would only be ‘likely’ if students from disadvantaged backgrounds or from any minority group were presented with the idea that the top universities are loaded against them from the start. Toynbee and Walker chose to push that idea 10 years ago. But there can have been few higher profile or more damaging perpetuations of the same demoralising claim than the piece the BBC so prominently published last month. In any other season it would have caused outrage. It should summon a little in this season too.

That is why I simply cannot understand why well-meaning, normally intelligent, people on the Left keep coming back to ‘separate but equal’ as if it were anything but a fraud. The latest proposal is from Lord Adonis, who has proposed tackling the dominance of private-school pupils at Oxbridge by setting up new separate colleges for children from poor backgrounds and state schools. He tells us, in his Guardian article headlined “Oxford and Cambridge must launch new colleges for disadvantaged young people”, that this will be just like previous access efforts for women and “persecuted religious minorities” for whom separate colleges were set up in the past.

Let’s not even try to celebrate how progressive these universities were to set up special colleges for persecuted religious minorities. Until 1854, Oxford kept out anyone who wouldn’t sign the 39 articles of the Protestant faith – and the first Catholic halls were not set up until the 1890s. Those who weren’t members of the Church of England were simply not welcome in our universities for generations, and allowing Catholics to set up a college was a simple way to prevent integration.

The case for women is more complex, because women still have their own colleges at Cambridge, though no longer at Oxford. As it happens, I studied at one – New Hall, now known as Murray Edwards. I know exactly what it’s like to be in a separate but equal institution. These separate institutions are always second class, however noble their founders’ dreams.

Suggested reading

How to stop the mis-selling of education

By Peter Franklin

For starters, there isn’t any money. Unlike the old colleges, the new ones don’t have land and investments dating back centuries to fund the costs of today. Book grants, subsidised food, cheap rent: forget about it. I was student union president and there was student demand for a rent strike over our high bills. The bursar showed me the books. There was no point. The place was permanently cash-strapped.

And no money means the academics are overstretched. They are often underpaid, too, and however dedicated they may be to the cause of women’s education, most have their eye on a more comfortable gig, down the hill, in the town centre, in a nice old building with a quiet courtyard and a little slice of history.

A good friend of mine used to invite girls back to the Trinity College library to see the manuscript copy of Winnie the Pooh held there. He tells me it was a great way to seal the deal; every girl loved it. At New Hall we didn’t have any rare books, and our most famous alumna was either Mel or Sue from Bake Off – I can’t remember which.

Suggested reading

How to introduce a Land Value Tax tactfully

By Peter Franklin

Lord Adonis has a predecessor in his fool’s errand. In the 1870s, educational reformer and clergyman Joseph Paul Brereton tried to set up a college in Oxford for poor children from the county school system. When that failed, he set it up in Cambridge, to be known as Cavendish college. It was a mile out of town. The accommodation was bad. The schools didn’t want to send their pupils to this inferior Cambridge college – they wanted to send their pupils to the proper ones. Cavendish college lasted less than 20 years.

So we already know what would happen if we did as Lord Adonis recommends. He’d take the poorest group of students, with the lowest family resources, and put them into the poorest college, least able to afford book grants or hardship funds, forced to charge market rent to pay the cost of the buildings in which people are housed. These students would be far out of town, the only place cheap enough to buy land for these new colleges, so they’d have commuting costs those town-centre elites could only imagine. They’d probably have to work to make ends meet, putting them at an academic disadvantage against those with low bills, low costs, and independent funding.

The new students would have the same potential but they wouldn’t live it out.

But the most insidious effect would be to take the pressure off the old colleges to reform. Establishing women’s colleges allowed women into Cambridge without the old colleges having to open their doors. It was several more decades before the first colleges went co-educational, and decades again until the last men’s-only college reformed.

When I matriculated at New Hall in 1999, the senior tutor told us to believe – above all – that our college wasn’t second-class, and we were not second-class students. The old colleges, she said, just don’t know what clever women look like. And the sad truth is that the existence of New Hall – and Murray Edwards – means they still don’t need to learn.

Suggested reading

Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

There are probably plenty of fusty old dons in Oxford and Cambridge colleges who would like Lord Adonis’ idea. It would keep the plebs out of their old traditions. It would give them a guilt-free excuse to stop worrying about access for poor children, because someone else (out of sight and out of mind) is worrying about that. In fact, they are the ones who must leave.

The funny thing is, when I first saw the headline for Lord Adonis’ article, I thought the idea was for Oxford and Cambridge to set up new sixth-form colleges, which is a brilliant idea. Hot-house kids with great potential and poor family backgrounds, either for their A-levels, or for a gap-year in between, and you have the best chance to level the playing field with those educated in our most expensive private schools.

So let’s do that instead, and leave the idea of separate-but-equal colleges where it belongs: on the scrap heap.

But actually there’s a third option, that is distinct from either a student loan or a graduate tax.

It’s been proposed in various forms – for instance by the Social Market Foundation and in the 2014 ConservativeHome manifesto – but the basic idea is that, instead of getting paid upfront, the education provider takes a given percentage of a student’s future earnings above a given threshold, with total payments capped at a given amount.

Suggested reading

The east is well-read: Chinese scholars know more about us than we do about them

By Peter Franklin

According to Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times, the idea is being put into practice by “Lambda School, an online learning start-up” with big-name backing from Silicon Valley investors.

The particular funding system is called an “income sharing agreement” and this is how is how it works:

“At Lambda, students pay nothing upfront. But they are required to pay 17 percent of their salary to Lambda for two years if they get a job that pays more than $50,000. (Lambda says 83 percent of its students get a job with a median salary of $70,000 within six months of graduating.) If they don’t get a job, or their salary is lower, they pay nothing. Payments are capped at $30,000, so a highly paid student isn’t penalized for success, and if a student loses a job, the payments pause.”

In principle, this is fairer than a graduate tax because there is a maximum amount payable that is the same for everyone who received the same education. Also, because it isn’t a tax, the money doesn’t go through the grabby, controlling hands of government – important if we believe that our institutions of higher educations should be pillars of civil society, not agencies of the state.

Theoretically, student loans have the same advantages, i.e. financial independence for the education provider and important limits on what the graduate has to pay.

However, the student loan system also has disadvantages. The more lenient the terms for borrowers who don’t benefit from a ‘graduate premium’ to their earnings, the greater the financial burden that’s shifted onto other borrowers or back onto taxpayers (if the state is the ultimate guarantor of the student loans system).

Suggested reading

How small bureaucratic hurdles can be big barriers for the poor

By Peter Franklin

The most serious flaw of both student loans and graduate taxes is one of incentives. If how much – and how fast – education providers get paid bears no relation to the job and wage prospects of their graduates, then they have no direct stake in the long-term relevance of the education they provide.

The Income Share Agreement system, however, ensures that education providers have skin in the game:

“The school is incentivized to only enroll motivated students who won’t drop out; it is incentivized to successfully teach them the skills they will need on the job; it is incentivized to find them a job; and it is incentivized to make sure they are a success once they’re on the job because the school relies on employers to keep hiring its graduates.”

But what about ‘education for its own sake’? Well, I’m all for it. In fact, government should provide financial endowments that allow our finest minds to expand the bounds of human knowledge to the greater glory of civilisation. If more of the small proportion of people capable of making an original contribution to such endeavours have the opportunity to so, that would be great. However, the gifts and interests of most people lie elsewhere – and if they are to go to university at all, it should be to provide them with the foundations of a rewarding career. They too deserve to have their needs met.

Andrew Ross Sorkin worries that an expansion of the Lambda approach “could press programs to ignore a traditional liberal arts education where the earning power is reduced”. However, under the loans-based system, American students are already turning their backs on the humanities. As for fears that “schools may not be willing to take a chance on a promising but higher risk student”, the greater danger is that the misaligned incentives of the status quo are sucking students into a system unsuited to their needs, loading them up with debt and dumping them unprepared into an unforgiving jobs market.

Unless the cost of mis-selling higher education is properly shared among those most responsible, then it will continue.

Suggested reading

What's the point of the humanities?

By Peter Franklin

When it comes to what the Millennial generation are doing with their cash, there’s a lot more than bland commercial interest going on. Indeed, there’s a touchiness to the whole subject – indeed, implications of economic, cultural and political disruption.

This stems from the likelihood that many, if not most, Millennials will be poorer than their parents and already are poorer than their parents were at the same stage in life. It’s an unsettling development for a culture that had taken it for granted that each new generation would be richer than the last.

Suggested reading

The surprising losers of the Great Recession

By Peter Franklin

Another great driver of change is technology – if economic insecurity provides the reason for a radical shift in consumption patterns, then digital goods, services and markets provide the means. Many sectors have been disrupted already, not least the media businesses who publish anguished articles about what young people will and won’t pay for.

With so much at stake – and such obvious tension between the generations – it’s not surprising that silly stories, like the one about Millennials not saving because they spend too much on avocado toast, blow up into major controversies.

But when not being accused of extravagance, Millennials face charges of miserliness – indeed of opting out of previously normal features of adulthood such as buying a house, starting a family and even sex. If the first duty of the capitalist citizen is to consume and produce new consumers, then Millennials are going AWOL.

Writing for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson says there is a reason why 20 and 30-somethings are holding back:

“…the fact that young people are buying fewer houses and cars doesn’t prove that they want fewer houses and cars. It might mean they simply can’t afford them. That latter conclusion is now supported by research from the Federal Reserve.

“Fed economists found that the depressed rate of homeownership among Millennials was entirely about income and affordability… controlling for income and employment wiped out all generational differences.”

Suggested reading

Who's to blame for the 'boomerang' generation?

By Peter Franklin

Let’s start with the most obvious squeeze on Millennial living standards – the cost of housing:

“According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, the typical sale price of an existing single-family home in 2017 was 4.2 times greater than the median household income; that’s 30 percent higher than in 1988. It’s even worse in some cities. “

Over much the same period we’ve also made it much more expensive for them to get an education:

“Millennials are the most educated generation in U.S. history to date. They bought into a social contract that said: Everything will work out, if first you go to college. But as the cost of college increased, millions of young people took on student loans to complete their degree. Graduates under 35 are almost 50 percent more likely than members of Gen X to have student loans, and their median balance is about 40 percent higher than that of the previous generation.

“And what has all that debt gotten them? ‘Lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth,” according to the Federal Reserve paper’s conclusion.’”

How’s that for a double-whammy?

So the reason why Millennials aren’t saving and/or splashing the cash isn’t because they’ve combined the worst habits of the spendthrift and the skinflint, it’s because they’re too busy paying the rent and paying off their student loans.

Noting the markedly Left-wing politics of this generation, Thompson asks “is it any wonder that Millennials are eager to overthrow a system that has duped them into a story of permanent progress, thrown them into debt, depressed their wages, separated them from the trappings of adulthood…?”

An excellent point, but I wonder if there’s that much of a difference between the neo-socialist promise of more free stuff from the state – and what neoliberal politics has offered to older, richer voters.

Think about the huge and lightly-taxed accumulation of property wealth – or the inflation of asset values caused by easy credit policies and quantitative easing. That too is ‘free stuff’ for those old enough and fortunate enough to hold wealth.

Suggested listening

Test article

By Charlie Pickles

The great achievement of neoliberalism, globalisation, automation and all the rest of it has been to lower the costs of production. Stuff has become cheap and a lot of digital stuff is free. Capitalism has produced abundance beyond our ancestors’ dreams. Unfortunately we’ve allowed those who control economic bottlenecks like land and educational accreditation to extract far too much of the value that capitalism creates.

The next generation of consumers have been left with too little to provide the demand that is the essential counterpart to supply.

The book is reviewed by Howard Husock for City Journal. The reviewer is clearly more sceptical of the virtues of the state than is Lewis, but there are many points of agreement. Certainly, one doesn’t need to be a fan of big government to see the importance of competent government.

Husock expresses concern about a particular threat to administrative capability – not the immediate depredations of the Trump incumbency, but the long-term challenge of finding fresh talent:

“Why… is it proving difficult for government to recruit capable successors to retiring baby-boomer bureaucrats, many of whom are the heroes of The Fifth Risk?”

Looking at the institutions from which top civil servants are recruited, he fears that students are no longer interested in the “non-glamorous” calling to public administration:

“…I saw a shift toward graduates choosing careers with non-governmental advocacy organizations, or toward public-sector careers in which they could be ‘policy entrepreneurs.’ This is a long way from an aspiration to run Medicaid in a way to reduce fraud, or analyze how to keep Social Security solvent.”

Further reading

Global English is a force for division – not unity

By Peter Franklin

In an unrelated article for Brookings, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Laurence Steinberg address another problem with the way in which we’re educating the next generation of managers. To put it crudely, a lot of them can’t write:

“Each of us has been teaching and grading undergraduates for more than 35 years… In the past few years, however, something has seemed dramatically different. When they spoke in class, our students were just as knowledgeable as their counterparts a decade ago—perhaps even more so. But the mere thought of a written exam created palpable fear in our classrooms.”

Hirsh-Pasek and Steinberg think it’s a widespread failing:

“When we asked colleagues across the country if they too had noted that their students had trouble writing, they uniformly said, ‘yes.’”

What’s gone wrong? The authors point the finger at No Child Left Behind (NCLB) – the Bush-era back-to-basics education policy. Though they accept that teaching children facts and testing them on their knowledge is important, there are good and bad ways of going about it:

“Those adopted by the states in response to NCLB were largely fill-in-the-blank, one-right-answer tests that never asked students to defend a position or to find different pathways to come to a defensible conclusion.”

Teaching practices are important, but I suspect this goes well beyond the class room. Ours is a culture of diminishing attention spans, of soundbites, social media and immediate gratification. Young minds are formed in a sea of super-abundant, but thoroughly fragmented, information.

To write at length, at least to any useful effect, requires integration not fragmentation. Even a single sentence is a system, with parts that need to relate to one another in some sort of working order.

Further reading

What's the point of the humanities?

By Peter Franklin

From my experience of various UK work environments, including government and journalism, I have to say that the generational decline in writing ability is not limited to US universities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking this. Many graduates, with good degrees and otherwise sharp minds, struggle to compose and structure readable English. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, especially among specialists like speechwriters and journalists, but all graduates ought to be able write clearly and competently – especially those destined to run our country.

I’m not arguing that a good writer necessarily makes a good administrator. While most writers would happily participate in the proverbial brewery-based social event, only a subset could be trusted to organise one. Managing words and managing people are separate skills; someone can be brilliant at the latter and also completely illiterate.

Public administration, however, requires excellence in both. Government, indeed any large organisation, is like the nervous system of an advanced organism – highly complex, but entirely useless if the individual components can’t communicate with one another.

Something of an obsessive, he had an unhealthy relationship with women, often fixating upon a particular romantic attachment. He tried to join the Roman Catholic church twice, but both times he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He loved stray dogs. May he rest in Peace.

My own interest in Wallace was sparked by a brilliant graduation address he gave to students at Kenyon College in 2005, entitled “This is Water: Thoughts delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life.” Two fish meet an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. “Morning boys!” says the older fish, “How’s the water?” The two younger fish swim on, then one turns to the other and asks “What the hell is water?”

Further reading

Consumer greed is making suckers of us all

By Giles Fraser

Water, for Wallace, is the ubiquitous cultural presumptions in which we are all immersed, so all-surrounding as to be invisible. They are the beliefs that we all take for granted, that shape and sustain us. But the purpose of a good liberal arts education, Wallace maintains, is that throughout the boring everydayness of queueing at the supermarket checkout or whatever dulling routine our jobs lead us into, whatever the water in which we swim, it gives us the intellectual tools to take a step back and choose what to make of our circumstances.

“You get to decide what you worship” is how he puts it. “Because … in the day-to-day trenches of adult life there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” And a good reason for worshipping some sort of god is that “pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive”.

What follows is like a preacher on fire:

“If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you… Worship power, you will end up weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, you will always end up feeling stupid, a fraud.”

I was rocked by this address. “The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”

David Foster Wallace was himself a student during the high point of critical theory and post-modern philosophy, a cultural moment that emphasised the need for irony and a kind of self-referential knowingness that looked with suspicion, derision even, at all attempts at moral seriousness. Wallace, though, sought a return to what has come to be called ‘the new sincerity’, an attempt to recapture the sort of “passion, conviction and engagement with deep moral issues that we – here, today – cannot, or do not, permit ourselves”. The sort of moral seriousness that Wallace admired in a writer like Dostoyevsky.

Further reading

John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly Mackenzie

Wallace saw his own culture as being trapped in a sort of feedback loop of knowing nods and winks, like one of those Ferris Bueller asides, when he breaks the fourth wall, looks straight into the camera and (apparently) wryly comments directly to those watching the film at home. In such a world, nothing is real, nothing is solid. Everything is exposed as sort of fiction, lacking true bottom. Those who pretend moral sincerity here become the butt of the joke, the rightly object of parody. Sincerity becomes the object of scorn. A laughable credulity.

In such a culture, we all have to pretend our utterances are tongue-in-cheek, even when we are trying to say something important, even when we are crying for help. For Wallace, “irony and ridicule … are agents of great despair and stasis in US culture.”

Irony, for Wallace, does have an important emergency function; it undermines the hypocrisy of authority. It is a shock tactic but it is not basis for culture as such. Because irony is “singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks”.

Here is the core of Wallace’s assessment of his cultural predicament:

“Even gifted ironists work best in sound-bites. I find them sort-of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but … as for actually driving cross country with a gifted ironist or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty, but also … oppressed.”

The ironist is an expert at destruction, at undermining authority, but offers nothing to replace it. We deliberately smirk at ourselves when why try and say something important or venture weighty things, pretending that we only half mean it. Like Ferris Bueller, we too feel we have to wink at the camera.

Two days after Wallace hanged himself, Lehman Brothers went into administration, an event that became emblematic of the global financial crisis that was to come. Wallace had spent his whole literary career trying to revive a form of moral sincerity that he believed had been hollowed out of American culture by the toxic irony of continual mockery. And he defiantly sought to revive the single entendre of moral seriousness from within a culture dominated by the double entendre of not really meaning it. Because, in such an environment, moral values had struggled to survive.

Further reading

Insincere politicians are cheapening public debate

By Giles Fraser

When some people dared to speak of right and wrong, cultural sophisticates smirked knowingly and chuckled at their naivety. Post-modernism had all but cleared the stage of moral sincerity. Looking back, it seems little surprise that the greedy and the powerful of Wall Street were able to fill their boots.

Our moral consciousness had been sabotaged, and, too busy laughing, we hadn’t really noticed. “This is Water” now reads like a warning. The change in our moral environment had been so thorough, deep and all-pervasive as to be invisible. And millions paid the price as houses were repossessed, savings wiped out, and wages flatlined. Governments bailed out the banks with billions and instituted programmes of austerity for the poor. The joke was well and truly over.

But here’s some other things that they’re less likely to do: English literature, history, philosophy or almost any other humanities degree.

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British universities should disrupt the US model of gated access to higher education

By Peter Franklin

According to Ben Schmidt, American students literally don’t want to know – or, at least, not as much as they used to:

“No matter what baseline you use, virtually every humanities major from big, old ones like English to small, newer ones like gender studies went into significant decline around the time of the 2008 financial crisis.”

Can this be interpreted as a reaction to the financial crisis – with students (and/or their parents) looking less favourably on degree subjects that don’t lead directly to a decent job? Quite possibly, but unlike America’s GDP, the decline in the humanities has continued:

“Rather than recover with the economy, that decline accelerated around 2011-2012. That period constitutes an inflection point for a variety of majors in and out of the humanities. Though it may have slowed a bit in the last few years, there’s little sign that the new post-2011 universe holds signs of a turnaround.”

The expansion of higher education means that there is a larger number of not-so-academic institutions offering a greater variety of courses in technical and vocational subjects. This would suggest a relatively benign explanation: less a decline and more a ‘dilution’ of the humanities. Except that Schmidt presents a wealth of hard data showing that the decline isn’t just relative (i.e. the proportion of student doing humanities degrees), but also absolute (i.e. the numbers of people doing humanities degrees).

In any case, the figures show that the humanities are in decline at the ‘elite’ universities too:

“The elite liberal arts colleges were, until 2011 or so, the only schools where humanities, social sciences, and sciences actually split up the pie evenly: now humanities are down from 35% to 22% of degrees. The drop at elite research universities is similarly steep. (At both, humanities are down to about 70% of their 2008 values.”

Schmidt is disinclined to blame the influence of ‘post-modern’ (i.e. left-wing and politically correct) ideology on course content and teaching. Yet, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to link the decline in viewpoint diversity in academia to a decline in the number of students willing to engage with the subjects most likely to be affected.

What are America’s young people choosing to study instead?

“The big winners in recent years have been health professions, including nursing; computer science and engineering; biological science and to a lesser degree, physical sciences; and what I oddly call “leisure,” which includes things like sports management and exercise studies.”

What all of those have in common is that, right now, they look like good bets for future employment (though some people disagree).

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The jobs that survive computerisation will require a human touch. Are we still teaching that?

By Nigel Cameron

Perhaps the best place to conclude is where I began – with the risk-averse tendencies of the post-millennial generation. Committing four years of your life – plus decades more of indebtedness – to the study of an ‘impractical’ subject is, when you think about it, a crazy thing to do. However, like a lot of crazy things, our civilisation would be all the poorer if no one did do it.