Our universities are turning into religious cults

As one orders students to replace clapping with ‘jazz hands’ and another offers tips on prostitution...

THE Conservative Party Conference, Theresa May boasted about Britain’s ‘worldleading’ universities. This has become one of her staple lines – in September she told world leaders that investing in Britain would give them access to the ‘best universities’.

I like Mrs May, but she’s living in an alternate universe – one in which our academic institutions are beacons of intellectual development where students find the cure for cancer over a Pot Noodle. The reality is the complete opposite.

Almost every news story about universities is either depressing or bonkers. But mostly bonkers. Don’t believe me? In one of the craziest examples, the University of Manchester Students’ Union has decided to ban clapping and cheering at union events because it is discriminatory and non-inclusive. Instead, students will have to use ‘jazz hands’ – a wave of both hands in the air.

Union officer Sara Khan says jazz hands would encourage ‘ an environment of respect’. I say Sara needs to get out more.

While clapping has been deemed morally offensive by Manchester, Brighton University has decided prostitution is fine (although, of course, its students would never use that word). So fine, in fact, that it allowed something called the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project to have a stall at its latest Freshers’ Fair.

This event might, for many parents, evoke images of their little darling going to pick up a leaflet about the rugby club, am- dram society or chess group. Forget that at Brighton, where students can go along to weigh up whether to top up their loans by selling their bodies for sex.

I’d like to say these are rare examples of strange things happening, but the truth is Mrs May’s ‘worldleading’ universities have become one of the worst elements of our culture and young people need to think very hard about whether they’re worth bothering with at all. Perhaps the biggest question to ask about universities is: why do so many go in the first place?

One of the main reasons is that it’s expected in our society, as the public still holds on to an oldfashioned view of degrees, believing them to be the great engine of social mobility. These days – except for at the top universities – almost the reverse is true.

A parliamentary report last year showed that 40 per cent of those aged 25 to 34 have degrees but 47 per cent of them work in nongraduate jobs.

A job market awash with overqualified souls is one of Tony Blair’s worst, but lesser-known legacies, courtesy of the arbitrary target he set for 50 per cent of school pupils to go to university.

This nonsensical idea created a massive number of unwanted grad- Students have been told to use ‘jazz hands’ gestures instead of clapping uates when the economy crashed in 2008. Most of them had been armed with theoretical lessons, but no practical ideas of how to get through a recession.

I know – because I was one of them, graduating in 2010. When unemployment is high, people need entrepreneurial nous more than ever, but these skills are in deficit because of the British emphasis on university above apprenticeship.

Today t he economy i s much healthier, but there are still too many graduates for the number of graduate jobs on offer.

There has long been a big disparity between the skills the economy demands, and what undergraduates decide to do at university.

Our system gears up swathes of the young to understand Plato’s philosophical musings, but do they know how to program computers? Or even how to wash their underwear?

Yet computer science graduates earn a whopping five times more t han t hose with arts degrees. Engineering graduates are also in demand, but there is a ‘fingers in ears’ mentality from young people, many of whom continue to take courses that are objectively pointless. Unfortunately, women are the worst offenders, with analysis in the Times Higher Education supplement showing that social studies and creative arts and design are two of their favourite subjects, and computer science and mathematics the least popular.

These choices ultimately hurt women as their average starting salary will be low – £18,000 for creative writing graduates, against a student debt that could be as much as £50,000.

The uptake of artsy degrees is not just an economic problem, but one that increasingly poses threats to our society. This may sound

dramatic, but it is no coincidence that the rise of the ‘snowflake’ culture coincides with more youngsters going to university and taking up softer subjects.

Renowned Canadian professor and psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that the post-modern ideology rife in Western universities is responsible for much of the current global disharmony. Students are taught that there is no objective reality and to view the world with suspicion – as a system stacked against them.

That’s why, Peterson says, so many are uniting against capitalism and every other given Western society knows.

To see what Peterson is talking about, one need only dig around the PhD subject pages on the websites of prominent British universities. On one, there’s a study of ‘gender, class and social stratification’ on golf courses, while another PhD candidate examines ‘social change, and the construction of community’ at a food market.

The truth is, many of our universities have become like religious cults – incubators for a profoundly illiberal form of zealotry, which is why students now apply quasifascistic bans on things as harmless as clapping.

This social engineering, sold as inclusivity, is actually a way to identify non-believers who must be ostracised and punished in the same way that the impure were once singled out by puritanical societies.

There are other symptoms of a new puritanism among students: the rise of consent lessons, for example, at establishments such as Oxford University, where students are certainly clever enough to negotiate the nuances of sex.

These lessons are an overreaction, generally, to a minority of badly behaved men. But they also result in the genders being segregated, just as they are in intolerant religions.

The cultish mindset of students is a product of a toxic combination of reduced teaching hours (my BSc in psychology offered about two hours teaching time a week in my third year), and newage sensibilities.

Because students are left with so much free time by the majority of courses – one of our famous red- brick universities has told politics undergraduates they will be penalised if t heir essays are longer than 1,000 words – they have inordinate periods in which to contemplate the evils of society. It’s a major reason why student culture has become so deranged and censorious.

I do not believe universities are making students cleverer, more interesting or happy.

Mental health problems are on the rise, with the number of firstyear students reporting psychological issues now five times the level of ten years ago – and the number dropping out for these reasons trebling.

In response, the Government has urged universities to prioritise mental health. At Bristol, which has seen ten suicides and sudden deaths in 18 months, the vice-chancellor has promised a team of professionals to provide round-the-clock pastoral care in halls of residence. Other universities will inevitably follow suit.

But I fear that doesn’t address the root cause – that university might be making students feel awful in the first place. Perhaps the dropouts are the ones with the healthiest response.

Of course, the picture is not bleak for every university, and I do not attack them all. Britain has some of the best institutions in the world–Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London offer a path to great careers, and are major enticers of foreign investment.

There is evidence that universities are responding more to the job market, with many introducing a year in industry to gear graduates up to the world of work.

And in 2020, Britain will have its first specialist engineering university, New Model in Technology and Engineering (NMITE) in Hereford. These are exactly the sort of steps we need to take in order to compete with countries such as Japan and China.

But overall I believe we need a much tougher national conversation about our universities.

For every student whose life is enhanced, I suspect there are many others for whom university is little more than an expensive creche where they figure out their life and rack up ruinous debt. Our young people – and our country – deserve better.

For many, uni is little more than a pricey creche