For all that ‘world-leading’ has become a catch phrase for Conservatives in recent years, there aren’t a huge amount of areas in which Britain fits this description. One such area is universities - so naturally the government has declared war on them.
As has been documented by people like Will Davies, the sector is reeling following a decade of near continuous restructuring and assault.
Economically, many universities are teetering on the edge of the financial abyss, having been forced to adopt risky and ill-advised business models as a result of funding reform. Culturally, higher education stands accused by ministers of everything from offering a bad service to students, to representing a threat to our collective liberties. Anecdotally, every academic I know wants to quit.
Why would a government go so far out of its way to undermine and delegitimise one of its prize national assets? Why would do a government do something so… weird?
This blog has long advocated a particular way to approach questions like this. In short, if you want to explain why some part of Britain’s policy landscape is weird in the micro, a good place to start is to think about the ways in which Britain’s policy landscape is weird in the macro.
This blog will explore two big macro-weirdnesses about Britain, and argue that one of them explains why the government would consider destroying universities, and the other explains why it is able to do so.
The object was to change the soul
A large part of the policy conflict over universities boils down to the question of what higher education is for. If you read outputs from the right-wing think-tanks that drive the anti-university agenda, they are clear that the purpose of higher education is to build ‘human capital’.
They adopt this term not in the critical, Pierre Bourdieu-sense, but with complete sincerity. Education is an economic asset – a form of capital. Conceptions of the education as a social good, a personal virtue or simply a matter of curiosity are cast by the wayside. Whether education is ‘rewarding’ is something that is reduced to a simple matter of pounds and pence.
This leads to a fetishisation of particular types of degrees (medicine, engineering, vocational and trade courses etc) that the proponents of this idea of higher education almost never study themselves. Maybe this is a research project someone could undertake, but I strongly suspect the staff of the IEA have a few more history degrees between them than they do ones in nursing or electrical engineering.
But I digress. How does this conception of university relate to a macro-weirdness of the UK? When Margret Thatcher began the monetarist revolution in this country, she famously explained that though “economics is the method, the object is to change the soul”. And since then, Britain has gone much further with the logics of neoliberalism than most other European countries.
We have privatised natural monopolies like the railways, going against what most of the rest of the continent would regard as simple common sense. We have wedded ourselves to a model of internal competition between public service providers, creating a league table culture for schools and hospitals that appears bizarre to other countries that focus on simply making sure that every provider is good. Though these policy decisions, and through the service-based way in which we have structured our economy over recent decades, we have taken Thatcher’s vision further and deeper than almost anywhere else.
And as Margret predicted, that has changed our souls. Thinking about education simply as human capital is not normal. It wouldn’t make sense to a great many populations out there who haven’t been conditioned to think of everything and anything as a market. But it makes sense here. Whilst 16 other countries in Europe offer free tertiary education, we have not only marketised our system, but are now electing governments that celebrate English literature courses closing down because they are failing to deliver for ‘the economy’.
Normalising this way of thinking is a project that has taken decades to realise. It is not common sense.
Centralisation: Britain’s ultimate weirdness
The mood-music of Britain’s chosen form of capitalism allows attacks on one of Britain’s highest performing sectors to seem plausible.
But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a much more fringe set of concerns really driving this agenda forward. A good way to get a sense of this is to read the almost comically bad faith (and methodlogically nonsensical) reports that people like Policy Exchange have written in recent years attacking higher education for things like failing to uphold ‘viewpoint diversity’*.
The animating concerns here – ‘cancel culture’, free speech and the potential of historical research about empire to undermine the cultural fabric of the nation… these are the concerns of cranks. They are not mainstream issues. The vast majority of people have never heard the term cancel culture. Most did not go to university. They are not animated by the crushing resentments that seem to have built up inside a cohort of elite conservative graduates.
But the negative, reactive politics that comes from having classmates laugh at you in seminars is now being allowed to drive national policy. And this, to a large extent, is a result of a macro weirdness of the UK. Cranks can take over parties. This is true everywhere. But what is not true everywhere is that cranks who make their way to the political centre find there the levers to meddle with individual, non-governmental institutions.
When a member of the government can write to Universities demanding to be given the names of people teaching classes on Britain’s relationship to the European Union and to review their syllabuses, you know you have a profoundly broken system. That these kinds of matters may ever be seen as a matter for national politics is a symptom of centralization gone wild.
Politicians have the expectation that when they are in power in Westminster, they really should be at the centre of an ‘elective dictatorship’. They should be able to do whatever they want to do. And if that means ‘regulating’ free speech on campus, or wading in on the interior design decisions of individual Oxbridge MCR’s, then that’s what they’re going to do.
This generation of Conservative politicians are able to go to war with the universities who groomed them for office because we live in a country that gives that power to national politicians.
In most places, this simply would not be an option.
*Note the right’s ingenious ability to use the left’s language against it here
It's all a little disturbing, isn't it? I went to university in Ireland and the UK, and am now back in Ireland - and while we have issues in the 3rd level sector here (and where doesn't?), conversations with my UK colleagues (with a few exceptions) - even in the Russell group universities - pretty consistently indicate a level of unhappiness and disenchantment that is surprising to me.
What seems to me to keep the show on the road is loyalty to colleagues, the ideals of a university, and loyalty to their own institutions.
Imagine a world in which the REF and other exercises in bureaucratic cruelty were simply done away, and academics could concentrate on research and teaching (with a small bit of unavoidable admin on the side).
I've no solutions to offer: there is a broader cultural issue to be addressed regarding the role of the universities in the UK. At the top end, they are truly world-class, and are a significant national asset with considerable international soft power. The sector needs to be recognised as such.