The Mickey-taking in education must stop

Universities should look at themselves; tout yourself as a job centre and you will be judged on that basis

The students are lawyering up: Anglia Ruskin “business strategy” graduate Pok Wong accuses her university of slipping her a “Mickey Mouse” degree. Further up the education tree, even Oxford University has been sued over failing to satisfy a history student’s demands and not providing him with the glittering future he felt he deserved.

The first lesson here is that, if you want guaranteed employment, the law is probably the way to go. The second is that the British university system, whatever Mickeyness lurks in its corridors, has been corrupted by mis-selling – by both universities and politicians, who have tried to use the system for social engineering.

University has always been seen as a springboard for high office. Even in the 19th century, the dreaming spires weren’t all that dreamy. Oxford and Cambridge knocked out professionals; clergymen, teachers, lawyers and men of science.

When I went off to university in the Seventies, however, although there were obviously vocational degrees such as law, and the expectation that many doing humanities would end up as teachers, there was still a sense that you might study something because you were interested in it, not because it gave you a sturdy pension. There was still the idea of intellectual enrichment, of using your mind.

The wholesale university-ing of educational institutes and the transformation of nearly every activity, from painting to hotel management, into degrees, in theory to enrich those on low incomes, has failed. It failed, most simply, because a degree was never a guarantee of a career, let alone a successful career, and if everyone has a degree it no longer marks you out as more intellectually able.

However, if universities start touting themselves as job centres (which many do), then they can’t complain about being assessed on that basis, although how a court is meant to decide about the quality of teaching, or indeed the quality of the student, is unclear.

In the same way, the government’s proposed “gold, silver, bronze” system of rating university courses is unlikely to help anyone but a few foreign students such as Ms Wong (who might have been swayed by the fact that Anglia Ruskin is in Cambridge).

With all respect to the universities hovering around the bottom of the various league tables, whatever merits they have, we know perfectly well they’re not as good as, say, Oxford or Imperial College. Just as we knew that the polytechnics, whatever merits they had, didn’t have the same academic weight as the universities, although it should be said that you can end up in a Mickey-free university and still get unimpressive teaching.

I was lucky. I had a number of dazzling supervisors at Cambridge who really made me think, but there were one or two who were more concerned with amusing themselves than teaching. And there was certainly one who was only fit to organise potato printing at a kindergarten. I suspect most people’s experience of university is a mixed bag.

You can also have the best teachers in the world, but if the students have no interest in the subject or don’t turn up for seminars or spend the seminar on Instagram, erudition has no chance. Despite the much-complained about fees, I was amused to see in my own teaching how rapidly many students worked out the minimum attendance required to get through. The only time you were likely to see a full lecturehall or seminar was in the first two weeks of the first term (or maybe the week before the exams).

And there is no doubt that the lowering of standards to ease as many students as possible into university has done terrible things to the humanities. Essays in history, literature and social sciences are often little more than rants about how evil capitalism, neo-liberalism and white people are, and pleas to do more about climate change and transphobia with a quotation from Michel Foucault or Slavoj Zizek. The Left may have given up on the economy, but it is still firmly entrenched in education.

It’s not an easy task, I accept, but universities should return to the mission of intellectual excellence. We can all see that things aren’t working out well and I doubt that Ms Wong will be the last plaintiff.