Speaking of Universities

by Stefan Collini

pointing to the damage likely to be done to universities by the proposed applications of business-school models of ‘competing producers’ and ‘demanding consumers’ does not rest on any nostalgic desire to return to the far smaller and more selective higher education system of three or four decades ago. The expansion of the proportion of the age-cohort entering higher education from 6 per cent to 44 per cent is a great democratic gain that this society should not wish to retreat from. Quite to the contrary, we should be seeking to ensure that those now entering universities in still-increasing numbers are not cheated of their legitimate entitlement to an education – not palmed off, in the name of ‘meeting the needs of employers’, with a narrow training that is thought by right-wing policy-formers and Home Counties dinner-party wisdom to be ‘good enough for the likes of them’, while the children of the privileged classes largely get to attend properly resourced universities that can continue to boast of their standing in global league tables. There is nothing fanciful or irresponsible in believing that this great public good of expanded education can and should be largely publicly funded.

Underlying so many aspects of the policies discussed in these two books is the fallacy of uniformly measurable performance. Human life involves many incommensurable forms of value. A parent’s love of a child is not the same kind of thing as a painter’s attempt to capture shape and colour or a scholar’s interpretation of complex sources or a soldier’s act of bravery and so on. The logic of punitive quantification is to reduce all these activities to a common managerial metric. Every other human agent has to justify their activities in the terms used by the businessman (or, to be more exact, an abstracted model of commercial calculation that managers are taught in business schools to use, whether or not actual successful businessmen may have operated according to other more diverse, and sometimes more intuitive, criteria). There are some activities for which these alien metrics only partially distort or fail to represent their true character; and there are others where ‘false metrics’ are ubiquitous. The activities of thinking and understanding are inherently resistant to being adequately characterized by quantitative metrics, which can only ever measure something measurable, and so in this case proxies have to be found for qualitative judgements.

This is part of the explanation for the pervasive sense of malaise, stress and disenchantment within British universities. Some will confidently declare that such reactions merely reflect the necessary jolt to the feelings and self-esteem of a hitherto protected elite as they are brought into ‘the real world’. Like postmen complaining about changes to their work practices or head teachers retiring early in droves, grumbling academics are, it will be said, merely a symptom of the modernization of their industry, always a process that produces squeals. But there is obviously something much deeper at work here. It is the alienation from oneself that is experienced by those who are constantly forced to describe their activities in misleading terms. The managers, by contrast, do not feel this and for good reason, for the terms which suit their activities are the terms which have triumphed: scholars now spend a considerable, and increasing, part of their working day accounting for their activities in the managers’ terms. The true use-value of scholarly labour can seem to have been somehow squeezed out; only the exchange-value of the commodities produced, as measured by the metrics, remains.

Various justifications have been offered for current policies, not always with conscious cynicism: ‘the need to reduce public expenditure’; ‘the need to secure a sustainable financial future for our universities’; ‘the need to make student choice effective’; ‘the need to make students bear some of the expense of their education’. However valid as goals in their own right any of these may be, as justifications for what is being done to higher education at the moment they are simply not persuasive. In reality, the overriding aim is to change the character of universities and make them more closely conform to market ideology. The innocuous phrase ‘private providers’ represents the shark in sheep’s clothing: profit-seeking capital is to be allowed to run higher education in the way that it increasingly runs (ruins?) so many aspects of our common life. Universities must thus be ma...

Future historians, pondering changes in British society from the 1980s onwards, will struggle to account for the following curious fact. Although British business enterprises have an extremely mixed record – frequently posting gigantic losses, mostly failing to match overseas competitors, scarcely benefiting the weaker groups in society – and although various ‘arm’s length’ public institutions such as museums and galleries, the BBC and the universities have by and large a very good record (universally acknowledged creativity, streets ahead of most of their international peers, positive forces for human development and social cohesion), nonetheless the policies and the rhetoric of the past three decades have overwhelmingly emphasized the need for the second category of institutions to be forced to change so that they more closely resemble the first. Some of those future historians may even wonder why at the time there was so little concerted protest at this deeply implausible programme. But they will at least be able to record for posterity the fact that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies. If you still think the time for criticism is over, then perhaps you’d better think again.

Universities are in some ways minor victims of the great mudslide that increasingly sees the vocabulary of exchange-value sweep aside the vocabulary of use-value in almost every area of life. It is becoming difficult to find a language in which to characterize the human worth of various activities, and almost impossible to make such assessments tell in public debate. Instead, contribution to ‘growth’ monopolizes the field. The public case for any proposal has to be couched in terms of the billions it will eventually add to the GNP. Whether the topic under discussion concerns the extension of human understanding or the enjoyment of the aesthetic, the preservation of the countryside or the provision of sports facilities, speculative and often bogus statistics have to be assembled to make the case in purely quantitative economic terms.

Consider, for example, the implicit premise that higher rates of employment among a university’s graduates are evidence of better-quality teaching. Is there any evidence that this is the case? If one leaves aside the effects of home background and social connections, which are very considerable, the main determinants of a graduate’s employment prospects are 1) the perceived standing of the university they attended, 2) their field of study, and 3) (but a distant third) the class of their degree result. The relative standing of universities only changes with glacial slowness and continues to involve elements of pure social snobbery. For employers, the most salient differentiating feature of universities is how difficult they are thought to be to get into: a university’s admission scores are taken to provide prima facie evidence of the general ability level of its graduates.

Until recently, it was not easy for an existing educational institution to become a university and even more difficult for a commercial enterprise to set one up from scratch. There were strict controls on the use of the title; degree-awarding powers were only granted with the approval of the Privy Council; fledgling institutions often had to endure a longish period during which their courses were validated by an established university; and so on. One might have thought that these safeguards had contributed to the generally high reputation of British universities across the board for the greater part of the twentieth century, but now we are told ‘innovation and diversity in higher education provision are crucial to maintain our international reputation’. Moreover, it is axiomatic that increased competition means increased innovation (and provides better value for money). So the Green Paper proposes to do away with many of the existing checks.

If in Scotland some form of block grant for teaching is maintained, as I believe it should be, then after 2013 the Scottish Funding Council will have a more substantial funding role than will HEFCE. But that makes it all the more important to challenge the rather glib phrases in the Green Paper about directing research funding to ‘national priorities’. If Scotland wants high-quality research done in its universities then it must allow the scholars and scientists in those universities to decide what the intellectually interesting and important areas of research are in each field or sub-field. Trying to specify those areas as part of some populist political programme is only likely to direct funds away from the most intellectually fertile projects.

Let me conclude with one final observation. When I was preparing these remarks, I weighed up the risks involved were I to cite George Davie’s classic work from 1961, The Democratic Intellect. One risk is that this is by now a hackneyed and overworked allusion; another is that of seeming to forget that the story Davie had to tell was, as far as nineteenth-century Scottish universities were concerned, a story of decline. But it is not entirely wishful thinking to observe that some version of the tradition to which Davie’s celebrated title has come to refer does still have a resonance in current debate in this country, and in that respect Scotland has at least one crucial advantage over England. South of the border, the intellectual and educational case for the distinctive value of universities is poorly articulated, and as a result it is not a political force with which the government has to reckon. Instead, we get third-hand clichés about promoting economic competitiveness and training an adaptable workforce. Of course, you get a lot of that in Scotland as well, and it is obviously easy to fall into a cheap romanticization of the ‘lad o’pairts’ tradition and all that. Nonetheless, the advantage lies not just in having such a tradition to appeal to, but in the fact that it is a tradition with built-in democratic purchase and appeal. It is very cheering – and, for an Englishman these days, all too rare – to come across a sentence in an official document that declares as round...

Now, it will be immediately clear that universities in Britain had their origins in more than one of these forms, and that they have long been hybrid types, not directly corresponding to any one of these four models. Historically, British universities mostly evolved as self-governing corporations, protected in some ways by their charters, but increasingly reliant in the course of the twentieth century on public funds and hence subject to close oversight and regulation, though some of them also have their own endowments as well. They are not directly state-run, as in France, but nor are they wholly independent charities. If anything, they have been closer to certain other cultural institutions that, though in receipt of substantial public funds, operate on the arm’s length principle as semi-autonomous bodies, such as, say, the British Museum or the BBC. The BBC is emphatically not run by the government, but nor does it depend on commercial transactions with individual customers. Thus, the somewhat complex sense in which we may want to say that Oxford, unlike Harvard, is not a private university may seem quite like the sense in which we say that the BBC is not a private broadcaster.

This is one of the many topics on which it can be helpful to return to the 1963 report on higher education chaired by Lord Robbins. One of the most striking things about the Robbins Report, viewed from our present perspective, is its lack of defensiveness. By this, I don’t mean that it is not careful in its reasoning or alive to the difficulties its proposals might face – it is both of those things. I mean that it is written throughout from an assumption that universities don’t need to apologize for themselves, that they have a value and a role in society that can be argued for and that society by and large recognizes. Clearly, the tone and address of the report owed something to the barely challenged dominance of the values historically associated with a governing elite, even something to the persistence of patterns of cultural deference. But in its general as well as its specific statements, the report was not apologetic or embarrassed about assuming that in ‘developing man’s capacity to understand, to contemplate and to create’, universities served what it repeatedly called ‘the needs of society’. It was not afraid to say that they did so because, not in spite of the fact that, education ‘ministers intimately to ultimate ends’, and because ‘what is taught should be taught in such a way as to promote the general powers of the mind

The fact that in their actual lives most people act in accordance with various values other than that of maximizing economic gain, and the fact that they would in many cases like to see universities as natural homes of some of these other values, then gets squeezed out of public debate altogether. One outcome of this anxiety-driven deferral is that familiar and easily stated practical benefits that are by-products of universities’ central activities are latched onto to serve as substitutes for the unfamiliar and elusive values that are the true purpose of the activities in question. It is the kind of logic that leads us to say that the value of playing Beethoven’s piano sonatas is attested by the way it helps to make us better typists – a logic from which ‘impact’ in its currently required form is not wholly exempt. For similar reasons, we are led to connive in the fiction that an auditable paper-trail is evidence of the presence of the relevant form of quality. Out of the well-intentioned urge to exhibit to society the worth of the universities that society supports come these measures which only succeed in short-circuiting the most fruitful forms of relation between universities and society. In turn, this encourages both defensiveness and bad faith among academics who then attempt to conform to these measures, though they know that the true nature of their activities is thereby misdescribed, and out of this comes the familiar idiom of pious euphemism, the empty register ...

It is also helpful, I think, to remember that our goal should not be confined to the highly ambitious one of changing people’s fundamental convictions – our goals can rightly be more plural as well as less daunting than that. One purpose that can be too easily undervalued is that of sustaining or fortifying those who are sympathetic but dispirited, helping them to get through bad times. Another is that of encouraging people to articulate what they half believe already. And here, too, we shouldn’t be afraid of recognizing that those who work and study in universities are also among our publics. Helping the young temporary lecturer at a post-1992 university feel that there is a worth and dignity to what he or she is trying to do that is not captured by the ‘performance indicators’ against which they are being measured each day is not a negligible purpose, and nor is helping a first-year student not to feel so defenceless in discussions with relatives and peers over his or her choice of a so-called ‘useless’ degree subject.

I have no doubt that an extended critique of the language of an official document does not endear one to the authors of such documents, but that, of course, is not the primary audience in such cases. One of the reasons why we should engage in such critique is precisely because the impoverished language used in those documents expresses and conveys an impoverished conception of the activity they are seeking to regulate, and there are discriminating publics who are perfectly capable of appreciating that fact if the criticisms are effected adroitly enough.

Although, clearly, there is no timeless essence of ‘the university’, I would argue that there is a long history – with roots going back at least to the time of Wilhelm von Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century – of seeing universities as partly-protected spaces in which the extension and deepening of understanding takes priority over any more immediate or instrumental purposes. This idea has been powerful and in some ways resilient.

The statues finally selected to represent this ideal were grouped in threes. On one side were Darwin, Faraday and Watt; on the other were Beethoven, Virgil and Michelangelo; while the central trio comprised Shakespeare flanked by Plato and Newton. It was a clever compromise; science and engineering were represented by Faraday and Watt, both of whom came from the Midlands; the biological sciences by the great Darwin, who came from the neighbouring county of Shropshire, and mathematics and physics by the immortal Newton. And, of course, Shakespeare himself, who came from just down the road at Stratford, was another local boy made good. The Midlands connections of Plato, Beethoven, Virgil and Michelangelo were, it’s true, a little more elusive, but they nonetheless signalled the ambition of the university to be, in Lodge’s words again, not just an institute of applied technology, but a ‘school of general culture in the great European tradition’. There is much more that could be said about this example, but I’m sure you recognize the general point. Universities respond to local needs, but they also partake of a wider inheritance and therefore, I would suggest, also of an open-ended future.

The fatal conceptual error involved in the new university funding system introduced in Britain in 2012 is that it treats the fee as a payment by an individual customer to a single institutional provider for a specific service in the present. By contrast, the proper basis for funding education is a form of social contract whereby each generation contributes to the education of future generations. It cannot be for a specific service because the ‘customer’, in the form of the student, is not in a position to know in advance exactly what benefit they may obtain from a university education. And it cannot really be to a single institutional provider because each university is only part of the world of learning: none of what they provide for their students would exist except for the work of many people over many generations in many other institutions. What we call a ‘fee’ is not really the price of a product: it is an undertaking to contribute to the costs of the system. In this respect it is more like a tax: just as a tax is the tithe which the citizen, as a member of society, pays towards the upkeep of that society, so a university fee is more like the National Insurance contribution in Britain, a recognition of human solidarity in facing the common perils and opportunities of life.

When I was an undergraduate I attended the annual dinner in which final-year students mixed with the academics who were fellows of their college. I was seated across from a much older man whom I had never met before, and in the course of the evening we fell into a discussion about such small topics as what the basis of law is and what the limits of the law’s regulation of individual life should be. As it happened, I had just that week been set to read the classic works on the theory of Utilitarianism by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill for my course in the history of political thought, so, helped by the generous supply of college wine, I found I had many brilliant opinions to express on these topics. I started to argue with this older man, with all the assurance of a twenty-one-year-old who, a few weeks earlier, had never heard of Utilitarianism but who now knew exactly what was wrong with it and why no reasonable person could seriously entertain it for a moment. He argued back, thoughtfully and tactfully but also with some vigour. We must have argued for quite some time because suddenly I was aware that most of the other diners had left and the staff were beginning to clear the tables. My interlocutor graciously said that he had found our discussion very interesting and we went our separate ways. I went to bed extremely pleased with myself for having so triumphantly set him straight about the obvious defects of the shallow theoretical position he had tried to uphold. I...

One of the most striking features of those accumulations of deepened understanding and exact knowledge that we call scholarship and science is how small a proportion of them were created by those who presently hold posts in universities. What a ‘customer’ ‘buys’ from an individual university is not a ‘product’ or ‘service’ that that university has created: it is access to a complex intellectual and cultural inheritance that is only maintained and passed on in the present by the combined efforts of scholars and scientists all over the world, a population that is frequently mobile and constantly being renewed. A single, isolated university is, strictly speaking, a mirage, just as inconceivable and unsustainable as Marx long ago pointed out was the Robinson Crusoe model of ‘economic man’.

nor does it belong to all those catering and support staff who might well say, in Brechtian vein, ‘first there is lunch, then there is studying’. Universities belong as much to those figures represented on the façade at the University of Birmingham as they do to those whom Edmund Burke called ‘the generations yet unborn’, just as this particular university belongs as much to the first-year student who today begins one of the most exciting or most worrying, but anyway most intense, experiences of her life as it does to the shades of Hugo Grotius and Johan Huizinga. If there is any value in reflecting from time to time on the unanswerable question of who the university belongs to, perhaps it lies in this – in reminding us, amid difficult political and financial circumstances, that we are only the trustees for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance that we did not create, and which it is not ours to allow to be destroyed.