Want to get rid of ‘rip-off’ degrees, Rishi? Try abolishing tuition fees
It was a long time before I understood the phrase “he’ll piss on you and tell you it’s raining” – really understood it, at a gut level. It took 13 years and 10 weeks, to be precise, of successive feckless Conservatives messing everything up and telling us how messed up everything is.
So, having introduced the tuitionfee regime that leaves students with a life-changing amount of debt, and has demoralised and underfunded the sector so that the poverty-paid lecturers at its backbone are always on strike, the party has declared war on “rip-off” degrees. Young people, Rishi Sunak contends, are being sold a false dream, without the prospect of a decent job at the end of it. Well, yes, Rishi, that is called “life in the UK”.
The concept of the “Mickey Mouse” degree has been long cherished on the right as a way to flag their anti-intellectualism, whereby all learning is useless unless it’s physics, while blowing a class-war dog whistle, whereby all universities except Oxbridge are front operations for the loony left. On the evidence of the past five prime ministers, we have bottomed out the usefulness of an Oxford education to the business of running a country and can mark it as zero. But, unfortunately, that doesn’t disprove the fact that students are being sold a false dream.
I got a lightning-quick lesson in that when I interviewed a young guy in Liverpool about a decade ago. It was a weekday lunchtime, back when nobody worked from home, and preBrexit, before the “red wall” and the “left behind” had been invented. There was a sharp sense of austerity-driven decline, but it didn’t yet have a name. Wherever you went, whatever the topic of the vox pop, the real question was: “What are you doing on this deserted high street on a Tuesday?”
This guy’s answer was completely reasonable – and a complete disaster. He had started a business studies course the year before. About halfway through his second term, he couldn’t escape the logic of what he had already learned. The value proposition made no sense: he was paying nine grand a year for lectures that he could get for free online and reading lists that, with a bit of planning and ordering, he could plough through in any library. The only concrete thing he was paying for was the socialising, which was the very thing that ate into his study time.
The employment prospects offered by a degree were opaque, given that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, a world in which the cardinal rule is “don’t waste time”. The tuition fees were only a fraction of the story; the degree was in the south-east, so his rent was crippling.
Anyway, he had dropped out and come home to his parents, only to discover what the business studies modules had not yet mentioned: that a huge part of tertiary education is the invisible value of being carried along by its slipstream. It might not carry you anywhere lucrative, but to be outside it, lumbered with that initial hit of debt, carries you nowhere. It’s the paradox of tuition fees: by monetising the process, the value attached to it became impossible to count. Degrees are sold as qualifications that will boost your earnings, but studying for one is more like a process of social stratification, to mark you out as the kind of person with that kind of degree, who will go on to that kind of life.
So yes, it is a swiz, but not because education isn’t valuable. It’s because it’s sold as something that it isn’t: a working, comprehensible equation, where you pay X pounds for Y knowledge and emerge into the world with that much knowledge to sell and a bustling market full of people who will buy it from you. By the time you realise that is not how it works, it’s too late to step off.
The best way to stop selling false dreams is to axe tuition fees and pool the risk of an unknowable future with that arcane instrument we call “general taxation”.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
A huge part of tertiary education is the invisible value of being carried along by its slipstream
“You had to navigate the violence that accompanied the drug trade, just being in a neighbourhood where people shot and killed each other and being afraid of the sort of random violence. But you also had to navigate then the policing that was applied like a dragnet across your communities.
“A day in the life of a child like me might be getting down on the floor because there are gunshots ringing out during dinner and then making sure that you lock everything up tight at night because you don’t want an addict to break into your house and rob you. And then the next day, going to school, being stopped by police and questioned because you could be a drug addict or a drug dealer.”
America had a glut of cocaine in the early 1980s. The drug was seen as cool, chic and glamorous and people experimented with different ways to consume it. A group of chemistry students at UC Berkeley in California came up with a recipe for freebasing cocaine using water and baking soda. The resulting substance was a highly potent form of cocaine that is smoked rather than snorted, leading to an inexpensive, immediate and intense high. It was short-lived and left the user craving more.
Crack quickly found its way into Black communities at a moment of disaffection and disillusionment in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. “People were without jobs. People were in poor housing and they didn’t see a better life ahead. Any time you have circumstances like that, people want to check out, and they chose this new drug that was still glamorous and that was cheap and super accessible with no idea of all of the devastation that would accompany it.”
An inspiration for Ramsey was The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s masterpiece about the Great Migration of African Americans from the south to cities in the north-east, midwest and west. But those cities suffered factory closures and deindustrialisation, many Black people were left in poverty while whites fled to the suburbs.
“There’s this important context of Black folks leaving the south for more opportunity and getting to these cities and not necessarily getting that opportunity but at least getting a workingclass existence, and then even that being taken away by policy decisions made by the government and then the crack epidemic being something of a fallout from that.”
Richard Nixon had run a “law and order” campaign for president in 1968 and declared “war on drugs” three years later. In between, in a diary entry from 1969, the White House chief of staff, HR Haldeman, paraphrased Nixon’s private view that “the whole problem is really the blacks”, adding: “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
In Ramsey’s telling, another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, latched on to the war on drugs that the Nixon administration was never able to fully operationalise. He signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, mandating a fiveyear minimum prison sentence for the possession of five grams of crack (a sharp disparity with powder cocaine, more associated with celebrities and the middle class).
Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were behind public information initiatives that included special sitcom episodes aiming to frighten children away from drugs – but also pushed misinformation about addiction and demonised entire communities.
Ramsey comments: “The devastation of the crack epidemic was not just the drug use itself but also the government’s response to the drug use. On the policy level, the US government turned a blind eye despite knowing the fact that large quantities of cocaine were being shipped into the US. Coca leaves don’t grow in the ghetto; coca leaves are grown in the Andes, where we happen to have our hands in lots of conflicts.
“The US government wanted to fund the overthrow of governments like the government in Nicaragua and Congress would not approve that kind of meddling in a foreign government. So, very simply, we turned the other way while Nicaraguan rebels distributed cocaine into the United States and, as a result, we saw the crack epidemic really take off. The government, instead of intercepting and interceding in that drug trafficking, decided to criminalise drug possession.”
Conspiracy theorists have proposed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deliberately flooded the inner cities of the US with crack cocaine. Ramsey did not discover evidence to support that claim but found the truth to be no more consoling.
“I was not able to find a direct conspiracy of white guys in a back room saying, let’s destroy the Black community. It was actually more insidious, which is that conspiracy happened hundreds of years ago, that Black people were positioned in American society from very early on to be the Americans closest to harm. When any disaster happens, whether it’s Hurricane Katrina or Covid or crack, we are hit first and we are hit worst.”
Ramsey’s harrowing writing process coincided not only with the coronavirus pandemic but the police murder of George Floyd, an African American man in Minneapolis, and a fresh reckoning over systemic racism in the criminal justice system. Many of those seeds were planted during the crack cocaine epidemic, he argues, and many of the key lessons remain unlearned.
He explains: “There was a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine that was completely arbitrary. That was addressed during the Obama administration but it’s still 18 to 1. Despite all we know about the consequences of it, and about crack being the same substance, there isn’t yet enough political will to completely eliminate that disparity because there’s still so much fear.
“Part of why we have mass incarceration in the US is the policy of mandatory minimum sentences. It takes the discretion away from judges to give time to offenders based on a number of different factors. Instead it says if you do a crime then you have to get a certain sentence and that keeps people locked up. Those are crack-era policies.”
The current American president does not get off the hook. As a senator, Joe Biden sponsored a 1994 crime bill that increased mandatory minimum sentences, applied the death penalty to 60 crimes and provided money to build state prisons and hire an extra 100,000 police officers. Biden’s election as president in 2020 rested on the shoulders of Black voters.
Ramsey comments: “I don’t think the Biden administration has done enough to reverse some of the damage, at least on the federal government level, of the crack era. I don’t think Joe Biden as an individual politician has done enough to address his legacy of spurring mass incarceration and pushing awful ideas about drug addicts. It’s a complete mind fuck that his son Hunter was a crack addict at the same period that Biden was advocating for the death penalty for drug possession.
“He has to answer for that. He’s probably not going to read my book or answer for it until we make him. My hope is not that the politicians read it but that the people read it. The politicians have had their say and we know what they think and what they are prepared to do. The question is, what do we think and what are we prepared to do?”
Now America is wrestling with another drug epidemic: opioid painkillers, pushed by the pharmaceutical industry and responsible for the deaths of more than half a million people over two decades. The scourge is still tearing through rural areas, small towns and urban centres. Overdose deaths from the opioid fentanyl quadrupled between 2016 to 2021. Ramsey detects obvious similarities but also instructive differences.
“I do think the nation at large has more compassion because those drug users are white. They feel more familiar to them for that very silly reason but sadly, despite having more compassion, the people in charge aren’t smarter about what to do because they’re not looking back at the last drug epidemic. They are still allowing race and class to be this false division between people. They think that was something different that happened back then over there to ‘them’ but really it was just addiction.
“It was a generation of people going through addiction and what we should be looking at are the ways that Black and Latino people in particular invested in each other on a community level and pushed, informally, harm reduction. We should say, how can we double down on that now? What we owe the survivors of the crack epidemic is to finally get it right.”
Indeed, for all its traumas, When Crack Was King – dedicated to “the misunderstood, the marginalized and the maligned” – is also a narrative of redemption, telling of the thousands of extraordinary decisions by ordinary people that brought the crack epidemic to an end.
Ramsey reflects: “Ultimately we saved ourselves. The US government didn’t make any great intervention beyond policing and researchers point to not policing as what disrupted the crack epidemic and ultimately led to its decline but choices that young people made to not use crack, to not make cocaine their first drug that they would experiment with.
“Beyond that I point to small actions made by individuals as what kept us alive. It was grandparents taking in their grandchildren while their parents were running the streets. It was churches that did gun buybacks or gave people a roof over their head while they were going through treatment and withdrawal. It was community, even organisations like the Nation of Islam, that shut down the projects and kicked out drug dealers.
“Those weren’t big policy interventions that changed things overnight. But they kept us alive long enough for the storm to pass.”
When Crack Was King is out now
style, only rediscovered and reappreciated decades down the line.
But before then, for a stretch of about two decades, Leyendecker’s vision of a risque masculinity that blended the lines between macho and effeminacy had a freedom that was not seen again until much later in the 20th century. Whether it’s a bizarre 1928 Thanksgiving Day image of a gun-toting pilgrim and a football player staring meaningfully into one another’s eyes, or two well-dressed men suggestively hefting a golf club and lighting a pipe, Leyendecker’s images are absolutely arresting, while also pushing the viewer’s buttons. “It’s interesting to us that these images that seem to our eyes so homoerotic were acceptable in the 20s,” said Albrecht. “That he got away with this is really interesting. There’s one where a man seems to be aroused under a robe. It was an Ivory Soap ad, and Procter & Gamble wouldn’t publish that one, but everything else was publishable.”
Under Cover shows men doing things that they are not usually allowed to: strutting, carefully attending to the minute details of their outfit, exchanging intimate glances, delighting in their own embodiment and enjoying luxurious fabrics. It also often shows them at home within their own, male-dominated spaces, giving a sense of a glimpse into the forbidden. “He had access to those spaces,” said Albrecht. “As a gay man he knew that those spaces were very charged. There could be voyeurism, and there could be sexual activity.”
Leyendecker’s paintings have the carefully posed feeling of a catalog page, yet there is also a sense of subversion – it’s the kind of sly, provocative advertising that is usually associated with the 1990s and beyond, but Under Cover shows it to also be a product of the Roaring Twenties.
It is perhaps this combination of the loudly flamboyant and the subversive that gives these paintings their satisfying subtlety. Although never intended to be high art, Leyendecker’s work rises into the category of icon, giving form to a version of masculinity that has only been allowed to exist in certain times and places. “There are different definitions of masculinity and male behavior, and it’s mutable, it’s not fixed,” said Albrecht. “With Leyendecker, you’re never going to get what Harry Styles does. It’s never that overt. Instead, it’s nuanced and subtle.”
Under Cover seeks to bring museumgoers not just Leyendecker’s art but also the era it so perfectly fit into, including pieces that embody counter-narratives to Leyendecker’s very white, very Anglo universe. These include well-dressed African American men who showed off their style during the Harlem Renaissance, as well as juxtapositions from diverse aspects of the era’s gay culture, such as Broadway drag performances, stage plays starring women loving women, entertainers who pushed the lines of male femininity, and selections of art and poetry from gay creators.
“The challenge of the exhibition was Leyendecker was very white, very Aryan, very Christian, and we wanted to counteract that,” said Albrecht. “We look at the Harlem Renaissance. We also have masculinity in world war
I, where we compare Leyendecker’s heroic soldiers to anti-war posters and magazines.”
Ultimately, Under Cover succeeds in both finding a new angle on the gogo 20s and complicating our picture of the emergence of the LGBT community into mainstream America. It reminds us that, even long before the second world war, gay and lesbian individuals did have spaces to live as themselves and celebrate who they were. “We wanted to reintroduce Leyendecker as a major aesthetic figure,” said Albrecht, “and to show the zeitgeist of sexuality at an earlier age than we largely think. It exactly mirrors Leyendecker’s heyday.”
Under Cover: JC Leyendecker and American Masculinity is on view at the New-York Historical Society until 13 August