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| Students are rightly getting mad, but for the wrong reasons Photo credit: BillyH |
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:
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.
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...;-)
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...;-)
