SOCIETY: What is varsity for?
Drink beer, sleep in, get bored
After Oxford I’ve enjoyed the benefit of teaching [sic] at no less than four of — what only ERO would let me get away with calling — our “provincial universities”. I’ve enjoyed each one (the first as a post-graduate, the remaining three as an academic), much as I enjoyed Oxford before them. When I went up, what joy it was to be an undergraduate. Sure my people had no money, but the state charmingly attended to my basic needs with a maintenance grant, and there was bar work and Blackwells and debt for the rest. And beyond that there was nowt: no tuition fees being merely the least of my freedoms. The world is different now, and every middle class Tory I meet (or read) assures me that it’s going to get a whole lot worse. What lies behind this is the government’s intention to allow universities, provided they admit a sufficiently diverse student body, to now charge up to £3,000 in tuition fees on those undergraduates hailing from families earning more than £30,000 a year. As far as I can make out, Damian Green, in his role as shop steward to the bourgeoisie is against, and shouldn’t we all be? No, of course, is the answer. Like just about every pronouncement the current Tory education spokesman has ever made on anything, he’s wrong on this one too. Yet again it’s a case where all good Conservatives have to be glumly content that the government’s going to get its way in the face of Opposition inanity.
There are generally only three ways for a Conservative to write a column of any sort about tertiary level education. Two are very much in fashion, whilst one has a gamey 1980s retro-flavour to it, and is consequently obscure indeed.
To begin with we have the pundit who will open, much as I did, with a description of how blissful subsidised privilege was, and how it dragged him, or still more shocking, her, out of their pit village/croft/c-o-u-n-c-i-l estate and by dint of three years by the Charwell/Cam turned them into the Congestion zone dwelling winner they are today. Their point thereby being to say, ‘even though it would have hurt me at the time [this is how we measure their ideological sincerity], today we really have to move over to red in tooth and claw funding arrangements, because nothing else makes sense’. I don’t fall into this category partially because I’m foolish enough to live in the sticks and am therefore a loser, but mostly because I don’t agree with the underlying premise that we have, for the taxpayer, a funding crisis as such — what we have is an attendance crisis.
Then we have the second category, and what a deafening shriek it’s become. This is the position that says, as inchoately as you like, ‘my God, I’ve paid all these school fees, you can’t seriously now expect me to pay proper university fees too?’ It is very popular with middle-aged journalists. My three children, all under the age of 11, go to perfectly decent state primary schools at the moment, and frankly if any of them show enough nous to win a scholarship anywhere, off they can go after that. Otherwise it’s the CofE comp for them. So, with characteristic Northern goodwill, I’m unsympathetic to what I take to be the mainspring of the Tory commentariat’s rage. I take it to be financially motivated, as it’s difficult, given the range of Tory pundits who have come out against semi-realistic tuition fees, to reconcile it with any known intellectual stance I’ve seen any of these characters adopt over the years. The free market evidently stops when it starts moving in on those middle class welfare benefits.
Finally we have, or rather we don’t have as far as I’ve seen, Thatcherist revivalism. This always pleasant mode of writing would, in the present crisis, start off much as I, or our category #1 writer does, by detailing how lovely, oh, Oxford in the late seventies and early eighties truly was (and it was you know). The zingy twist would be that the Thatcherite, and oh how much fun this sort of thing was, would shock all around him by proclaiming, ‘and we need to make people pay for university — and I’d benefit from that, so that’s why I want it to happen’. None of your mewling pretence that this was a public policy position based on unalloyed altruism, just naked assertion of privilege-is-good, inequality-happens. I’d like to do that, I really would.
Nothing would make me happier than to sneer at chatter about ‘access’, and just to rest on the proposition that, as with everything else in life, universities should be able to charge whatever their degree courses ‘cost’. Let people pay for them just however it is that they end up paying for everything else in life they decide they want (and obviously the rich are going to have a head start, when don’t they?) More than anything else, I’d like to argue this because I believe, oh so firmly, that University Education is Not a RIGHT. ‘But?’ your lips automatically begin to form as you read — well there is a ‘but . . .’, but it’s not very sensible.
My heart’s not in it because, naturally (one parent family, blah, blah, blah), I wouldn’t have been able to have had those three years of fun. That’s an important consideration to which you might be kind enough say, ‘but good grief man, there would, in this counterfactual, assuredly have been some funding mechanism for a bright fellow like yourself, you’d have got in on merit’. How the words, even as I type them, make me want to vomit: ‘on merit’. Is there any more disgusting pairing in the English language? I think not. For you see, me and exams, not great. When I get the application forms of 17 year olds today, and read of this fabulous notion, ‘GCSE coursework’, there’s something I do think we could have done with in the past. My getting into Oxford was as outrageous, in terms of strict, scientifically absolute merit as any inbred Old Etonian’s entry. But, and here’s the real one, my head’s against mindless monetisation of the good universities too.
Call it dreary pragmatism, but we’re where we are, and rather than proceeding to where we ought always to have been by means of purest theory, we should only change what the state has wrought, once we’ve prepared the people. The dependency culture foisted on middle class Britain has to go, but not before we’ve properly provided for the genuinely needy to get in. I am confident that this can be achieved for the very simple reason that it is precisely the good universities (unlike, I’m afraid, those that I have taught at) which have a vested interest in attracting intellectually able students. There is a well-known correlation between socio-economic status and performance at our better universities, and very simply it’s this: the state school tyros do disproportionately better than their well-taught privately educated peers. Brute numbers also suggest that any institution which has to rest ultimately on the mental abilities of something as transient as a constantly rotating base of 18-22 year olds, will want the good ones, and the bigger a pond you fish in, the more you’re likely to catch. So my belief is that, as in America (well done me, 1200 words before I even mentioned her), it’s the universities themselves that will primarily fund the clever poor, through endowments of course, but chiefly by subsidising their market-set fees with those creamed off the thicker rich. This is as it should be, but my worry, Charles Clarke notwithstanding, is that the only element in British life more wedded to the state in this regard than op-ed hacks at the Telegraph are the dons of Oxford and Cambridge. Bluntly, the universities necessary to make this sort of system work are never going to come into being, run by the current shower in charge at both.
That said, Charles Clarke is the present, clear danger. He’s a danger to what we should all be fighting for, which is the integrated view of university life. The Secretary of State for Education (venal, red, posturing president of the NUS as he was before becoming a Kinnockian careerist) affects to believe that:
Universities are not just “finishing schools” designed to teach people how to live away from home and hold their booze . . . in future, undergraduates may have to be prepared to work their way through college and, if necessary, live at home in order to afford the extra fees.
Sad to say, I suspect too many on the Right agree with this sort of thing. This is the sort of sensible solution too many will advocate: market-set fees are the way forward, so cut your cloth accordingly. There’s more than a tinge of puritan disapproval too. The idea that a university is a community is dismissed, as, in truth, it ought to be outside of the remaining collegiate foundations. Having seen from the inside five universities now, I can tell you: size matters more than anything else, but residential proximity comes a close second. What’s to be done for what’s lost I don’t know, but I do dearly want to hold onto what we still have. Can Oxford and Cambridge resist this vision of university life? Will they be exemplars for the rest? I doubt it. This attitude, mean and crabbed and falsely utilitarian is the mindset of most Oxford and Cambridge academic administrators I’ve met. Should the government allow them, in the name of departmental efficiency, or whatever other bogus cause they have to hand, to further squeeze the life out of the colleges, they’ll do it, and with relish.
Charles Clarke talks so much rubbish it’s hard to know where to start — every child is to be subject to ‘vocational’ educational because, as you full well know, it’s good and improving, and very possibly economically useful. Mind you, if the Right’s going to start defending universities-as-they-should-be, a ground on which to start doing so will be the disavowal of that vile canard, ‘we need universities to compete economically’. It’s been centuries since Oxford and Cambridge have had meaningful European ‘competition’, and you know, they didn’t do us much good in the twentieth century on the whole rising-GDP front. They didn’t because, universities aren’t an adjunct to economic productivity, they’re meant to be an aspect of life being led outside the cash-nexus.
When the Education Secretary went to Cambridge a generation ago, roughly 10% of the country went to university; today well over 40% do, and we are not going to avoid hitting 50%. This is the root cause of all our present discontents, and if making degrees a thing to be paid for does nothing else, I hope it drives away from university those who refuse to seek the pleasures varsity should have. Students bring to an academic community, however it is constituted, its character. The wrong people have been going to university for the wrong reasons for too long now. My prayer for what the ebbing of this tide will mean is that the students of the future will shame those presently placed in loco parentis for them into providing a varsity worth having. A corporate whole, labouring after life for its own sake.
Dr Noel Lackland believes that getting a degree from a university other than Oxford or Cambridge is a perfectly worthwhile thing to do, and that the middle classes ought to jolly well stop blubbering about their rotten children.
Noel Lackland, January 25, 2003 02:47 PM