Is there a point to the modern university?

Every year, thousands of terrified teenagers sweat at the opening of that dreaded envelope. They arrive at their college, looking out of the windows of their car, wanting to be doing anything else but this! Stuck in the living room watching the lone sex scene in an action film with the parents, going on an uncomfortable date which has quickly gone sideways, or being incredibly sick after our first night out, all would be preferable to this hell from which there is no escape.

There is a reason for this. A-level results are genuinely scary. They are not GCSE results, which, at most, have a small taste of fear- like when you’re 16 and you get a dash of spirit in your lemonade to spice it up. A-level results are the equivalent of a double scotch of fear. They make or break us, or at least in our 18-year-old heads, that is what they do.

Those results decide not only which university we are going to but also what course we’ll be doing. They put us on our first genuine step to our future. Our dreams are suddenly not distant thoughts but are now being acted out concretely. A-level results in many ways act as the first step of the transformation from childhood to adulthood.

Not only is the ritual of opening up results respected every year, so is the flurry of articles and tweets telling those who did well they did not do that well, and if you didn’t do well, not to worry, life will be fine. Jeremy Clarkson, the TV presenter, is perhaps the most famous example of frequently citing his academic underachievement as a hopeful message to those who didn’t get what they hoped for. Fear not, you may one day end up running around the globe in hot sports cars and retiring to a country farm with cute animals all around you.

Unlike many I know, I am not against this kind of messaging. University is not the be-all and end-all of life. It has become the norm in our society to degrade those who did not make the cut or chose a different path. That message does not demean universities and their important role in the economy and society. Rather, it acknowledges, rightfully, that university is not for absolutely everyone. Having spent the last thirteen years of my life at university, either as a teacher or a student, I know the value of it. But, since Covid, I have also seen increasing numbers of young people a little too far out of their depth for comfort. Students in this category often did not choose their course of study because they were passionate about it or loved essay writing, discussion, or learning new things; instead, they felt they had to choose something at a decent university.

This logic is detrimental to both the student and the institution. Three years is a long time, especially when you are 18-21, and I can only imagine the slog of spending that time doing something you do not enjoy. Trust me, your lecturers and seminar tutors know that you’re not interested in the subject and are merely clocking in because you believe you have to. In these cases, it is perhaps best for the student and the institution to recognise that neither is doing either a favour by being there. Instead, we should open up young people’s instincts a little more firmly and be more honest at our open days. Yes, you will have to read books. Yes, you will have to write essays. Yes, you will have to engage in discussion in small seminar groups.

This honesty, though, is distinct from the flurry of articles at this time every year which demand a role reversal for universities. Every August, we bear witness to those who demand that universities must cut, change, and begin their own evisceration. We must reduce the number of students and courses of study, and start selling off assets to cover the costs of our downgrading. In essence, the university needs to learn its place in society as a marginal force, limiting itself to the potential of its economic impact.

Not only does such an argument cut against significant evidence of the economic value of universities, creating an economically illiterate alternative, but it also ignores the vital role universities as institutions have in grounding communities. Institutions such as universities need to be valued, not degraded. They provide the space for friendship, mutual understanding, and tolerance to flourish and grow. At their best, universities provide a harbour for young souls to find their way in the world while reflecting on who they want to be and what they want to do.

(Roger Bootle in The Telegraph)

Conservatism, as the philosopher Matt McManus has detailed, can have a troubled relationship with education on an intellectual level. Given that conservatism is not a utopian idea and is founded upon an experiential form, we perhaps should not be surprised that many conservatives are to some degree distrustful of the university. It is not believed to be a ‘real’ institution, but rather a network of progressive catacombs that are transforming society from the inside out. If only that were true!

This is reflected in many attitudes of academics. Far from being bastions of far-left ideology, the average UK academic is highly conservative in their disposition. Cautious of change, distrustful of the free-market which erases stability and plunges us into unknown territory, and demanding the same standards which they were expected to meet, the average academic is truly more conservative than Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage!

In this world, there is the question of the obligations of the university. To whom are they truly obligated? Is it to the taxpayer? To the student? To the treasury? Or to a higher ideal of thought itself? This multifaceted question is one often presupposed by angry columnists, suggesting the university must serve first and foremost the economy and the treasury. According to this notion, there is a higher good than making good on the student loan and providing jobs for its cohort to pay back the debt they owe. Forget about the moral quandaries of education; the profit motive must take precedence.

But as Joel Feinberg highlights in his Essays on Social Philosophy, locating obligation is a more challenging task. Obligations not only entail a recognition of authority but a deeper moral claim of an act which should be committed, oftentimes an act of contrition or obedience to said authority for a wrong being done to them or another. It is up not only to the authority to decide upon the obligation but also upon the one obligated to recognise their debt. There is certainly a question about to whom we owe such a debt when running the university.

(Simon Jenkins in The Guardian)

Do universities really owe the citizens an obligation of economic productivity regardless of the cost to other dimensions of the institution? Aren’t our obligations wider than this? It is truly bizarre to see conservative commentators fundamentally presume that the obligation is first and foremost an economic one. Indeed, if this line of argument were written before 1975, many conservatives would find this logic nothing more than an empty form of classical liberalism.

Institutions today have adopted mainly the logic of the market and the prevailing sense of fear that affects individuals in other workplaces. We are beset by quotas, time-scales, and constant job insecurity, heightened by the disastrous combination of dwindling budgets and poor management. The very things which columnists such as Roger Bootle rail against- the cramming of classrooms, the reduction of curricula in traditional subjects, and the modernisation of teaching- are the result of the very philosophy people like him subscribe to. The idea of a ‘job for life’ is long gone today; it is looking towards the next year to see if you can make rent, and surely, according to the market, that should increase productivity, capital, investment, and results!

This picture is at odds with the one that many pictures show where universities and those managing them are somehow almighty in their cultural and social power. Many columnists echo Christopher Lasch’s sentiments, in The Revolt of the Elites, that the university undermines equality, creates too many ‘elites’ in positions that cannot be filled and undermines the moral clarity that conservatism claims society demands. But Lasch and the columnists mimicking his sentiment are wrong. Universities have been backed into a corner where these problems inevitably arise.

We also do not live in an era where the university guides public debate and philosophy. Lasch’s somewhat dated book speaks to an era when the university possessed more cultural power than it does now. At best, universities today follow trends rather than set them, and research that could fuel public debate is often relegated to poorly attended conferences. Yes, universities create wealth for the UK, but they are struggling to fulfil their other and, in my opinion, more important obligations to society and students.

Lasch was fundamentally missing at least part of the puzzle precisely because, as Jason Blakely argues in Lost in Ideology, traditions and political cultures are never monolithic nor unitary; they are always fluid and contestable. Thus, universities far from acting as cultural monoliths ride the wave of our cultural changes, which are happening ever more quickly.

Universities should be the very things conservative commentators write about them regularly with disdain. Instead, their current position mimics the role those commentators so desperately want them to play… little more than an economic outpost which is subsumed into the wider economy. If the modern university is to fulfil its true obligations- to their students, to their employees, and to the people, it requires us to do much more!