Our universities have become indoctrination camps. A reckoning is now long overdue
The Institute for Fiscal Studies recently announced that 13 universities in the UK face “a very real prospect” of going bust. Like all such announcements in the higher education sector, the news was clearly meant to be received with a gasp of fear. Worse, the IFS warned that it is our least prestigious universities that are most at risk.
I don’t know about you, but on reading this news I immediately put my head in my hands and cried: “Oh no. Not our least prestigious universities. Take anything but that.”
There are many oddities about our higher education system. Oddest is the presumption that the more universities there are and the more people go to them, the better our country will be.
Tony Blair was merely the most notorious proponent of this idea. His target of 50 per cent of young people going to university was achieved last year. Is our country noticeably smarter or more successful as a result? Many would say not. In some ways I would say it is noticeably stupider.
One clue as to why lies in the old truth identified by Kingsley Amis. Which is that in certain areas – and universities are the most pronounced – more means worse. You may expand the sector, certainly, but at some liminal point everything you get is worse.
Visit the universities at the bottom of the league tables and you will see this for yourself. Universities in towns you knew had a cathedral but are surprised to learn also have a campus. These are full of students being charged topdollar to learn “international relations” or “journalism” at best. That is to be trained in non-disciplines for careers that barely exist.
There might be some excuse if they were, as a by-product, being trained to be open-minded, perceptive and creative individuals. But for many people university is an indoctrination-camp, not a place for mental stimulation.
Those who attend them are being factory-farmed to have the same boring and malevolent views. For example, you have to have been educated at a British university to go home and inform your parents that “gender is a social construct”. Or that the whole curriculum is “colonial” and needs to be “decolonised”.
Rather than improve British societies, the automatons churned out by our universities are merely clogging up our country with bad thinking which becomes (when the graduates are employed) massive bureaucratic distraction techniques. That British universities expand and make money out of this venture does not endear them to all of us.
And that is before you get to the racket of “international students”. The loss of foreign students in the coming academic year is one of the threats to certain universities that the IFS has identified. But those who warn of this fail to acknowledge what this “threat” reveals.
Certainly there are some universities and courses where the presence of international students is a recognisable boon. Historically it has been a magnificent form of “softpower”, among other things.
Of course the unions and other spokesmen for the university sector rarely talk of it in such terms nowadays. They suggest that their love of foreign students is simply an expression of their personal liberal internationalism.
In fact, for most universities foreign students are a piggy-bank. Their eyes grow beady at the opportunity to charge fees above the cap imposed by the Government on British students.
Nor is this avarice limited to the universities at the bottom of the league tables. Look at the experience given to many postgraduate students at universities like Cambridge and you will hear a familiar story.
Sky-high fees, and the expectation of a full immersion in university life translates into a foreign student being rinsed for cash with the rarest imaginable meetings with a supervisor.
Behind the scenes many university staff are embarrassed by this. But the finance departments and overpaid vice-chancellors love to use the resulting charts to prove that their university is growing.
Many could simply do with contracting, or disappearing altogether. And the era of Covid has put some of this into a newly imaginable perspective. Just as the likely diminishment of foreign students in 2020 has exposed UK universities’ over-reliance on this as an income stream, so the necessity to go online reveals a deep question about the nature of the modern university experience.
Today if you have access to the internet you can follow a university course at any of the great universities of the world. Many of these – including from American Ivy League schools – are free online. Many other lectures – often far more cutting-edge and free-thinking than those found on our increasingly doctrinaire campuses – are free at the click of a button.
Once students begin shelling out fees for a virtual university experience questions will be raised. “Is this really the best education I can buy?” and “Is such an education worth ‘buying’ in the first place?” Traditionally the greatest universities have given an experience which is about so much more than just lectures.
As one retired academic friend said to me recently, the real secret of university education is that the students educate each other. That is one of the ideals of the true, genuinely liberal university system. The lecturers provide the impetus, and the students cogitate among themselves.
But as the universities have become greedy they have also become more cautious. Not just more cautious – indeed reluctant – about academic freedom (see the seemingly endless restrictions on this at Cambridge). They have also become more cautious in every other way about protecting themselves, certain of their employees and specifically their freedom from litigation.
So in their precautionary Covidaversion they are organising virtual freshers’ weeks, support bubbles and more to try to pretend that the class of 2020 will be a normal one. But it won’t be in any of them. And for some it may be the last.
If that is so, then we should not mourn the fact. The problem would not have been that 2020 was the year when the students dried up. The problem would be that 2020 was the year that the students saw through the universities and wondered – like everyone else – whether what they get for the down-payment is returned in any currency of value.
Foreign students are a piggy-bank: an opportunity to charge fees above the cap imposed on British students