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What’s Happened To The University?: A sociological exploration of its infantilisation
The radical transformation that universities are undergoing today is no less far-reaching than the upheavals that it experienced in the 1960s. However today, when almost 50 per cent of young people participate in higher education, what occurs in universities matters directly to the whole of society.
On both sides of the Atlantic curious and disturbing events on campuses has become a matter of concern not just for academics but also for the general public. What is one to make of the growing trend of banning speakers? What’s the meaning of trigger warnings, cultural appropriation, micro-aggression or safe spaces? And why are some students going around arguing that academic freedom is no big deal?
What's Happened To The University? offers an answer to the questions of why campus culture is undergoing such a dramatic transformation and why the term moral quarantine refers to the infantilising project of insulating students from offence and a variety of moral harms.
213 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 17, 2016
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About the author
Frank Furedi
70 books93 followersFrank Furedi is a professor of sociology at the University of Kent, UK.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 28, 2023
Frank Furedi's assessment of the extreme culture of sensitivity and self-censorship in some universities certainly has some elements of truth. Since the mid-2010s, and further back into the 1960s, and again in the 1990s, the culture wars and debates around 'PC' have hit on some serious limitations of universities and the risks to academic freedom. Whilst defunding, anti-intellectualism, and lack of employment rights have lead to self censorship, many in the media instead choose to hyperfixate on their personal cultural gripes, and not the intentional undermining of free speech through legislation and attacks on institutions.
Furedi's book overlaps a lot with this brand of complaining. In fact, much of Furedi's framing of the issues feels quite dishonest at times. He often isolates extreme cases for extended commentary, or simply leaves the details and important context to a footnote (e.g. "a teacher was fired for offending a student" - what student, which teacher, why, how were they fired, etc?). If Furedi feels so strongly in his argument, why leave out the facts that would supposedly prove his point?
Furthermore, whilst Furedi's previous book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? does mention the lack of safety in academic employment, this book doesn't mention it at all. Again, why? Tenure in British universities was abolished in 1987, and tenure-track positions are like gold dust in most countries. Since tenure has often been guaranteed academic freedom, by preventing management from strategically refusing the renewal of contracts to staff based on political, social, or religious disagreement, this is ignored by Furedi. Missing this part of the picture is simply ignorant.
Also, combined with the weakening of university staff's employment rights, is the fundamental change in what entrants demand from a university. A young person now racks up a 5 or 6 figure debt in the hopes that they get a better career, not purely to pursue the opening of the mind. Intellectuals on all sides of the political spectrum (Roger Scruton, Noam Chomsky, Russell Jacoby, etc) have stated this, and if you're reading this I doubt it's a revelation to you. Groomed from a young age to believe that a degree is a shortcut to a middle class career, young people see university as a meal ticket. Therefore, this marketisation of education makes young people infantilised and entitled, because they see themselves as consumers. Complaints against staff are taken seriously first because the staff have few employment rights, and second because the university's are taking the rational response to consumer complaints. With an abundance of PhD's to outsource cheap labour, and a revolving door of thousands of punters, why would a university defend free speech and risk offending students?
Only then, if you understand the two aforementioned points can you understand why the culture of infantilisation has taken been so effective. The medicalisation 'culture' which Furedi has attacked consistently since the 1990s has taken root most strongly in universities, because it has the material basis to do so, not because obscure academic theories force them to do so...
Furedi's book overlaps a lot with this brand of complaining. In fact, much of Furedi's framing of the issues feels quite dishonest at times. He often isolates extreme cases for extended commentary, or simply leaves the details and important context to a footnote (e.g. "a teacher was fired for offending a student" - what student, which teacher, why, how were they fired, etc?). If Furedi feels so strongly in his argument, why leave out the facts that would supposedly prove his point?
Furthermore, whilst Furedi's previous book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? does mention the lack of safety in academic employment, this book doesn't mention it at all. Again, why? Tenure in British universities was abolished in 1987, and tenure-track positions are like gold dust in most countries. Since tenure has often been guaranteed academic freedom, by preventing management from strategically refusing the renewal of contracts to staff based on political, social, or religious disagreement, this is ignored by Furedi. Missing this part of the picture is simply ignorant.
Also, combined with the weakening of university staff's employment rights, is the fundamental change in what entrants demand from a university. A young person now racks up a 5 or 6 figure debt in the hopes that they get a better career, not purely to pursue the opening of the mind. Intellectuals on all sides of the political spectrum (Roger Scruton, Noam Chomsky, Russell Jacoby, etc) have stated this, and if you're reading this I doubt it's a revelation to you. Groomed from a young age to believe that a degree is a shortcut to a middle class career, young people see university as a meal ticket. Therefore, this marketisation of education makes young people infantilised and entitled, because they see themselves as consumers. Complaints against staff are taken seriously first because the staff have few employment rights, and second because the university's are taking the rational response to consumer complaints. With an abundance of PhD's to outsource cheap labour, and a revolving door of thousands of punters, why would a university defend free speech and risk offending students?
Only then, if you understand the two aforementioned points can you understand why the culture of infantilisation has taken been so effective. The medicalisation 'culture' which Furedi has attacked consistently since the 1990s has taken root most strongly in universities, because it has the material basis to do so, not because obscure academic theories force them to do so...
September 30, 2017
What's happened to the university indeed. Anyone reading this book will have seen some of the most controversial incidents coming from college campuses - Yale, Middlebury, Evergreen State, and the like. Furedi's work demonstrates clearly and convincingly that these are not isolated incidents, but are part of an environment that affects all of higher education in the Anglo-American world (Furedi is a sociologist at the University of Kent).
Furedi sees this environment as being shaped from outside the university, in the therapy culture that has grown so pervasive. In the educational environment, this means that students are increasingly seen, treated, and self-identifying, as being "vulnerable" and as needing constant therapeutic management of their condition. This connects with a growing trend of helicopter parenting, and with what has been called elsewhere "the strange return of in loco parentis". This new sense of vulnerability does not emerge, in Furedi's view, from the increasing diversity of college campuses, from the growth in first generation college students, or from any systemic economic issues. Instead, students have internalized a narrative of vulnerability from the therapeutic culture that surrounds them, and that is perpetuated by the educational bureaucracy in which they spend their childhoods. This is only intensified on the college campus, where the therapeutic bureaucracy becomes far more robust, better differentiated, and more self-serving.
This bureaucratized environment in higher education has made it the central battleground in a new culture war that is attempting to reorganize society along lines set by identity politics. Furedi explains the development and implementation on campus of a range of rules, policies, and protocols designed to reinforce the politics of identity. Notions of safe spaces, the juxtaposition of free speech against hate speech, microagressions, and trigger warnings all have as their central goal the establishment of a paternalistic environment on the college campus in which, ideally, all interactions can be sanitized, moralized, monitored, and, if necessary adjudicated. Campus bureaucrats establish a regime of censorship that is so rigorous and ominous that it turns not even willing students and faculty into censors, but also requires unwilling students and faculty to become self-censors. And Furedi notes that, unlike censorship regimes in the past, which sought the status quo, this new censorship regime is at the heart of a moral crusade that, could be said, seeks a thorough rupture of the university's relationship to existing society, and of existing society's relationship to the past. More, it seeks not simply to silence dissent, but to force each individual to accept moral transformation along lines demanded by the crusaders.
Furedi sees this as resulting in the sacrifice of any opportunity for students to learn, grow, and mature; of the ability of academics to explore controversial questions; and of the university as a place where complex issues can be debated. It is a chilling depiction of an environment that has effectively become anti-intellectual, and that explicitly trades off academic freedom and free speech against the goals of its moralistic-therapeutic crusade. Furedi is clearly on the side of academic freedom, but has little to say prescriptively, other than that academics should embrace academic freedom, administrators should understand the true purpose of the university, and students should grow up. Yes, indeed, but it seems unlikely that any of those things will happen without major pressure from outside of higher education.
Furedi sees this environment as being shaped from outside the university, in the therapy culture that has grown so pervasive. In the educational environment, this means that students are increasingly seen, treated, and self-identifying, as being "vulnerable" and as needing constant therapeutic management of their condition. This connects with a growing trend of helicopter parenting, and with what has been called elsewhere "the strange return of in loco parentis". This new sense of vulnerability does not emerge, in Furedi's view, from the increasing diversity of college campuses, from the growth in first generation college students, or from any systemic economic issues. Instead, students have internalized a narrative of vulnerability from the therapeutic culture that surrounds them, and that is perpetuated by the educational bureaucracy in which they spend their childhoods. This is only intensified on the college campus, where the therapeutic bureaucracy becomes far more robust, better differentiated, and more self-serving.
This bureaucratized environment in higher education has made it the central battleground in a new culture war that is attempting to reorganize society along lines set by identity politics. Furedi explains the development and implementation on campus of a range of rules, policies, and protocols designed to reinforce the politics of identity. Notions of safe spaces, the juxtaposition of free speech against hate speech, microagressions, and trigger warnings all have as their central goal the establishment of a paternalistic environment on the college campus in which, ideally, all interactions can be sanitized, moralized, monitored, and, if necessary adjudicated. Campus bureaucrats establish a regime of censorship that is so rigorous and ominous that it turns not even willing students and faculty into censors, but also requires unwilling students and faculty to become self-censors. And Furedi notes that, unlike censorship regimes in the past, which sought the status quo, this new censorship regime is at the heart of a moral crusade that, could be said, seeks a thorough rupture of the university's relationship to existing society, and of existing society's relationship to the past. More, it seeks not simply to silence dissent, but to force each individual to accept moral transformation along lines demanded by the crusaders.
Furedi sees this as resulting in the sacrifice of any opportunity for students to learn, grow, and mature; of the ability of academics to explore controversial questions; and of the university as a place where complex issues can be debated. It is a chilling depiction of an environment that has effectively become anti-intellectual, and that explicitly trades off academic freedom and free speech against the goals of its moralistic-therapeutic crusade. Furedi is clearly on the side of academic freedom, but has little to say prescriptively, other than that academics should embrace academic freedom, administrators should understand the true purpose of the university, and students should grow up. Yes, indeed, but it seems unlikely that any of those things will happen without major pressure from outside of higher education.
October 26, 2020
Frank Furedi is a neoconservative sociology professor who laments how postmodernism, identity politics, and helicopter parenting have inhibited academic freedom and rational thought on college campuses. Whereas his days as a liberal student activist were about challenging authority and making meaningfully progressive change to the world outside the campus, he views today's millennials as being engaged in an insular status contest over who is the bigger victim in need of maternal protection from the state (aka "intersectionality").
Unfortunately, his broadside does not contain the needed nuance that would persuade far-left activists opposed to the freedom of assembly for "hurtful speech" of the error of their ways. This is because Mr. Furedi unreasonably fails to make any concession that the trends he observes have any positive impact on the university, in comparison with the supposed "good old days." For example, one notable benefit of campus administrators becoming enthusiastic about their student-body's physical and emotional safety has been the dramatic reduction in violence and sex crimes against female students on college campuses over the last thirty years. My university's mandatory online sex-assault training course might be tedious to complete and contain politically-correct nostrums, but the training nonetheless has an objective benefit. Identity politics also often gets a roll from my "cishet white male privileged" eye, such as when my school's student newspaper mandated the inclusion of your "gender identity" anytime you get an article published in the paper. But I can acknowledge that this is not (entirely) intended to be part of a smug ideological status contest (what neocons like Furedi are wont to condemn as mere "virtue signaling") but partly a positive sign of a general effort towards greater empathy for others, particularly those who feel marginalized.
A much more persuasive book-length defense of academic freedom and reasoned debate is Jonathan Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, which the legendary defender of these values, Prof. Donald Downs, assigned me to read when I was an undergraduate in his course on the 1st Amendment. Rauch does not hold his opponents in contempt, as Furedi does, but actually seeks to reason with them, and on their own terms.
Unfortunately, his broadside does not contain the needed nuance that would persuade far-left activists opposed to the freedom of assembly for "hurtful speech" of the error of their ways. This is because Mr. Furedi unreasonably fails to make any concession that the trends he observes have any positive impact on the university, in comparison with the supposed "good old days." For example, one notable benefit of campus administrators becoming enthusiastic about their student-body's physical and emotional safety has been the dramatic reduction in violence and sex crimes against female students on college campuses over the last thirty years. My university's mandatory online sex-assault training course might be tedious to complete and contain politically-correct nostrums, but the training nonetheless has an objective benefit. Identity politics also often gets a roll from my "cishet white male privileged" eye, such as when my school's student newspaper mandated the inclusion of your "gender identity" anytime you get an article published in the paper. But I can acknowledge that this is not (entirely) intended to be part of a smug ideological status contest (what neocons like Furedi are wont to condemn as mere "virtue signaling") but partly a positive sign of a general effort towards greater empathy for others, particularly those who feel marginalized.
A much more persuasive book-length defense of academic freedom and reasoned debate is Jonathan Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, which the legendary defender of these values, Prof. Donald Downs, assigned me to read when I was an undergraduate in his course on the 1st Amendment. Rauch does not hold his opponents in contempt, as Furedi does, but actually seeks to reason with them, and on their own terms.
June 1, 2019
Well needed. Felt myself aging as I read this with concern for the future of universities and students.
July 8, 2019
Shocking...
This book puts into stark relief the issues that exist in higher education. It makes one careful about school selection.
This book puts into stark relief the issues that exist in higher education. It makes one careful about school selection.
August 26, 2018
I must say I enjoyed this book on a spiritual level, but not because I agree with everything Furedi is arguing for.
Student-oriented focus in organizing universities (a rather crude way of summarizing a discourse) has been dominating too much to the point that you can barely see any rebuttal making its way to the mainstream literature. This book somehow did.
I have always had reservations about the Western, particularly the American, student. Furedi assisted me in synthesizing them into a comprehensible picture. Thanks!
Student-oriented focus in organizing universities (a rather crude way of summarizing a discourse) has been dominating too much to the point that you can barely see any rebuttal making its way to the mainstream literature. This book somehow did.
I have always had reservations about the Western, particularly the American, student. Furedi assisted me in synthesizing them into a comprehensible picture. Thanks!
November 13, 2021
As Jason Ross stated in his review here:
"Furedi notes that, unlike censorship regimes in the past, which sought the status quo, this new censorship regime is at the heart of a moral crusade that, could be said, seeks a thorough rupture of the university's relationship to existing society, and of existing society's relationship to the past."
"More, it seeks not simply to silence dissent, but to force each individual to accept moral transformation along lines demanded by the crusaders."
"Furedi notes that, unlike censorship regimes in the past, which sought the status quo, this new censorship regime is at the heart of a moral crusade that, could be said, seeks a thorough rupture of the university's relationship to existing society, and of existing society's relationship to the past."
"More, it seeks not simply to silence dissent, but to force each individual to accept moral transformation along lines demanded by the crusaders."
October 23, 2020
Meh. It's ok. He's right about a lot of the extreme elements in the university. But just allowing people to hurt each other because that's just college (especially when it comes to consent), is a questionable solution to the problem.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews