In these days of no trust

Students are rightly getting mad, but for the wrong reasons
Photo credit: BillyH

By Neil Patrick

Universities are failing our young people more than ever.

I have always believed that there are some key parts of society where Britain can be proud to rank amongst the very best in the world. Our emergency services. Our armed forces. Our artists and musicians. Our scientists. Our legal system. And our educational establishments.

But, the last few months have not been good for higher education’s reputation in the UK. Recently, Channel 4’s investigative journalism programme Despatches went to town with an exposé of the expenses claimed by university vice chancellors.

The Guardian was not slow to voice its righteous indignation about the expenses claimed by vice chancellors that Channel 4 uncovered from a Freedom of Information Act disclosure:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/feb/24/flowers-drinks-and-a-dog-vice-chancellors-claimed-8m-in-expenses-over-two-years

But expenses are just the latest round in this ongoing reputational crisis. In recent months, as vice chancellors’ pay packets have become public knowledge, universities have been hard at work defending these on the basis that pay is set by independent panels and that these jobs involve the administration of large organisations with multi million pound budgets. Ironically enough, this is the same well-worn argument used by banks to defend their executive pay; that to attract and retain top talent, these people have to be paid huge salaries.

The UK’s higher education institutions are facing a crisis of trust. And for every criticism, come  denials, rebuttals and rationalisations.

But vice chancellors' pay is not why higher education is in crisis…

In the UK, universities have become corporatised and politicised. Higher education is now funded mainly by student debt. It is this debt which has enabled the massive (over) expansion of higher education and salaries for those at the top. This debt is gilt-edged because it is underwritten by the government. But as debt has a tendency to do, it is now spiralling out of control:

Yet universities are still significantly funded from the public purse. This means they are morally accountable to the public. And the public doesn’t like what it sees.

Personally I do not consider that a chauffeured car for a busy vice chancellor is unreasonable. Neither is extensive overseas travel. Nor is entertaining key contacts at top restaurants. Not when we consider the potential gains which can be made. So I think Channel 4 and the Guardian are picking the wrong fight here.

But to students and the public alike, these things reek of self-interest, of corruption, of a loss of moral compass. The problem is not one of defensibility, it is one of perception and trust.

Vice Chancellor’s salaries and expenses are the wrong target…

…because this is not the problem, merely a symptom of it. The real problem is that our higher educational institutions have become more detached than ever before from the very reason for their existence. Rather than facilitating young minds to investigate, question and reason about the world, they have adopted a new raison d’etre, namely the brainwashing of their charges to eliminate ideas which for any reason they find unlikeable or politically unacceptable.

Free speech within university campuses is now actively policed so that only those who support approved ideologies are given a voice. Anyone who might potentially challenge those views is kept out. No platform for them. Worse, if they even set foot on campuses they risk verbal and even physical assault by masked and hooded representatives of the student body, as Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg discovered recently. One of the most articulate, rational, reasonable, courteous and unthreatening MPs you will find, he was jostled about while masked students screamed ‘Bigot’ at him.

Even his political opponents such as Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner, condemned his treatment by the thugs:

Such shenanigans are not new. Students have always tended to the left in their politics. What is new is that universities have built walls to keep out anyone who might challenge their new and incongruous positions as both guardians of knowledge and huge money making machines. Anyone who might engage them in civilised debate. And anyone who might, heaven forbid, question their self-appointed ownership of moral as well as educational authority.

So instead of exposing young minds to diverse thinking about the world, campuses are erecting barriers to some ideas. All ideas should stand or fall on their own merit, not be whitewashed because they are banned. Or because someone might find them offensive for whatever reason.

But all of this is a sideshow. It is an aspect of education; it is not what education should be fundamentally about. Education should be preparing the next generation to embark on successful careers, and by so doing, enriching themselves and the whole of society. The hard truth is that higher education should be pushing our GDP, trade surpluses, and household incomes higher.

Yet the reverse is happening. The output of universities in the form of worried young graduates, is creating a new class of disenfranchised and impoverished young people whose disproven faith in their educational investment has led them not to the beginning of glittering careers, but instead to the hell of internships, zero-hours contracts and low paid service jobs in a gig economy.

So we have more young people than ever questioning quite rationally whether they really want to take on £50k of debt, when they have little confidence that they will find a good job after graduation. We have employers moaning about the low quality of recent graduates. We have current students demoralised by the paucity of tuition hours. We have professors not teaching but spending most of their time working on research and academic papers, while the actual teaching work is sub-contracted to poorly paid visiting staff. And we have highly politicised campuses which tolerate only those with the 'correct' political point of view.

Higher education in the UK displays all the elements of a classic bubble about to burst…over inflated and debt-funded revenues, self-indulgence by those at the top, emerging scepticism about sustainability, denial of the problem.

And most telling of all, the collapsing of trust. This is the real betrayal of our young people’s lives and prospects. Bubbles always burst when trust evaporates. And trust ebbs fastest when denial is strongest.


Update: Just nine days after I wrote this, assuming no-one else felt universities were obstructing free speech, a cross party panel of MPs and peers published a report saying they also think they are. Fear I am unconsciously becoming connected to mainstream group think...;-)