Covid ruined lives. Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images.

From job losses to course closures, British universities are in meltdown â as panicked institutions are desperately shedding their crumbling 20th century identities. Yet if academics, subjects and even physical buildings all look set to go, with administrators scrambling to be âfit for purposeâ in a new world of metrics and edutainment, the sector seems strangely unwilling to reflect on why the collapse has come.
There are plenty of candidates here. Tuition fees and burgeoning student numbers are two obvious examples, together encouraging universities to compete for an unsustainable market of teenage âcustomersâ. More recent changes havenât helped either, particularly a national insurance hike set to cost higher education some ÂŁ372 million. In the end though, these challenges only became existential after one single event: Covid. Amid all the hand-wringing over the sectorâs current crisis, its failure to rise to the challenge of the pandemic has provoked curiously little attention.
During the first lockdown, universities, like schools, were legally required to treat students as germs on legs. They were first closed down, then subjected to a range of bizarre âsocial distancingâ requirements that made large in-person lectures impossible. But as the months went on, and government guidance promoted the importance of face-to-face teaching, many institutions dragged their feet. Having been forced to push through strategies of emergency remote teaching, it seemed safer and easier to stick with it. Thatâs despite having exhorted a new intake of freshers to move to campus so they could take up (read: pay for) a âstudent experienceâ that effectively meant being locked up in their rooms.
From a hard-nosed business perspective, the desperation to retain students as fee-paying bodies, even while providing an experience that was neither educational nor social, was the logical outcome of a policy approach that sees students primarily as units of funding. It was also, ironically, the outcome of an attitude to university governance that has long prioritised safety and satisfaction over robust education and academic freedom.
Universities have spent so long pandering to the idea that their role is to give the student-consumer âwhat they wantâ â higher grades for less effort; the gamification of learning in place of reading books; safe spaces in which they can be shielded from uncomfortable ideas â that they couldnât compute why bedroom learning was not, in fact, any kind of education at all.
This was not what students wanted. Remember the scenes from the University of Manchester, with angry teenagers tearing down the steel âcagesâ built around their accommodation? Or what about the angry scenes of kids trapped at a party when the fire alarm went off? The door was faulty, but the safety messages reissued by the university emphasised that âillegalâ large gatherings were putting studentsâ health and safety at risk. Nor, of course, was Manchester the only university to turn its campus into a student-funded quarantine camp, even if others showed slightly more flexibility. For my part, I largely taught in person outside of formal lockdowns. The masks, visors and distancing made it very weird, but at least I got to know students by their eyebrows.
For over a year, at any rate, the central purpose of higher education was subsumed beneath a veil of hysterical safetyism, eagerly fuelled by the main academicsâ union. The University and College Union (UCU) set its face against on-campus teaching, warning that asking students back would turn them into the âcare homes of the second waveâ. No less telling, it also briefed its members about the dangers of arguing that âstaff are required to work on campus and/or deliver face-to-face teaching or servicesâ. When your own union claims your job is inessential, you might not be surprised if a wave of redundancies follows â especially when the same union decides that the biggest threat to academicsâ health is freedom of speech.
How else to explain the attacks against anyone who questioned the wisdom of lockdowns, with many academics finding themselves subject to vicious smear campaigns from colleagues and government officials alike? In this time of dangerous uncertainty, when societies were dealing with literal matters of life and death, there was an urgent need for academic collaboration and debate. Instead, debate was stifled, with similar attitudes soon spreading to other corners of the academy. In October 2021, to give one example, philosophy professor Kathleen Stock left her post at the University of Sussex following an intimidation campaign by students and academics opposed to her gender-critical views. Far from supporting their colleague, the local UCU branch called for a university-wide investigation into âtransphobiaâ.
Nor was this mania to die down with Covid. The UCU has continued to dismiss concerns about academic freedom as a âsideshowâ invented by the Right, while also opposing the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, with the union suggesting âthere is no real evidenceâ of a free speech crisis on campus. Tell that to the hundreds of academics who signed an open letter imploring the Government to implement the remaining provisions of the Act, something even Keir Starmer now seems willing to accept.
Not, of course, that this is a purely British problem. Across the world, higher educationâs failure to prioritise academic inquiry during Covid has been a huge blow to its legitimacy. Yet in the UK, where the public has long raised concerns about the status and value of degrees in our massified, financialised system, people are now questioning the worth of university altogether. This not only speaks to how lightly we hold our cultural heritage: it is a terrible shame for the kids. Students and parents continue to be broadly positive about higher education, despite its problems. But when the sector is tearing itself apart, why should the public come to the rescue?
A year ago, Professor Shitij Kapur, vice chancellor of Kingâs College London, argued that UK universities are trapped in a âtriangle of sadnessâ between âaspiring students who feel burdened with debt and uncertain prospects, a stretched government that has allowed tuition fees to fall far behind inflation, and beleaguered university staff who feel caught in the middleâ. To escape this mess, we need an unflinching discussion of a single basic question: what are universities for? To come to an answer, meanwhile, we need people committed to the intellectual and educational purpose of higher education and prepared to acknowledge previous mistakes. Otherwise, weâll be left with the policy fudge we have right now, a consultant-led drive to achieve institutional âsustainabilityâ by cutting back the things that give universities their heart: subjects, academics, and students who are there to broaden their minds.
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SubscribeAll this goes back to two stupid political decisions – by the Conservatives under Major to make the Polytechnics universities (we now have over 140 Higher Education Institutions !) then by New Labour under Blair to try to get half young people to go to university.
Agreed Covid, treating students as “customers”, rampant grade inflation, chasing far eastern students as cash cows, overpaid administrators, and free speech issues have contributed, but it all stems from these two events. The university sector, especially the self-styled Russell Group, have made it worse with their self-satisfied arrogance (my friend calls it “smugplacency”) but it’s all part of a long term trend.
The China Virus is not University’s problem. It’s their leftist-indoctrination culture, which is not only itself destroying the student’s brain but supplants useful courses that might guarantee later employment. That, and academe’s fanatical, estrogen-saturated Social Justice Warrioring, have driven a great many ambitious young men to do what they are doing vis Ă vis dating and mating as well: walking away.
This essay was well written and a fun read. And it did touch – tangentially – on most of the great litany of reasons why our tertiary ‘education’ institutions largely deserve to be treated with contempt – ” higher grades for less effort; the gamification of learning in place of reading books; safe spaces in which they can be shielded from uncomfortable ideas” etc etc etc. But by framing all this within what is essentially an ephemeral side issue (the Covid hysteria time), it ends up seriously underplaying the scale of the civilisation-wrecking disaster that those institutions have become.
By far the greatest ‘political’ error of the post-war era was failing to foresee the long-term consequences of allowing our universities to become colonised by an intelligentsia intent on âcleverlyâ unpicking the threads that once held our Western civilisation together. And the massive late 20th c. expansion of the tertiary sector put this disaster on steroids….. by compounding the existing pervasive Lefty groupthink of the academia intelligentsia with hoards of new ‘students’ wholly unsuited to a life of academic intellectual inquiry.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias: “Most of the craziest outcomes of the West’s post-60s embrace of its âsocial justiceâ religion â the ones that people scratch their heads about in dismay – mostly originated in the groves of academe. Things like white self-loathing-by-proxy, the fetishisation of sexual dysphoria and pseudo-therapeutic psychobabble began as fictions and fixations hatched in its humanities and social science petri-dishes.”
A recovery now of anything that could be called a heathy academic intellectual climate would need a scorched-earth approach to most of its non-STEM faculties. Shrink them by around 70% and basically start again…. wised up to the academic/intellectual disaster that the past 60 years has been.
A few years ago, I came across the claim that the absolute number of STEM students was unchanged from the early nineties in spite of doubling the number of total students. I’ll try and find the source for the claim, although I don’t doubt that it is broadly correct.
This occurred during Blair’s drive for a new high tech “knowledge based” economy. I was young, naive and bought the snake oil*. The “knowledge based” economy really became the higher education sector itself and not the industries it should be supporting with its services.
The lack of discipline in taking students on is really quite damning of the university. The obvious solution in being more liberal in fields with high demand and more discerning in those with low demand was ignored and we got the exact opposite.
And here is the heuristic – if universities provided graduates that benefited the economy to the tune of the cost of their education, there would be no need for fees. The need for fees is a tacit acknowledgement that they are not providing the economic benefits claimed.
*In fairness a computer science degree has been pretty good to me: fees paid up and mortgage paid off.
Whatever universities are “for”, we definitely don’t need so many of them.
My head of humanities in the mid 90’s was pretty hardcore left. I would never have known from his behaviour on campus. Professional through and through, he judged essays on their argumentative coherence, and was brutal when confronted with intellectual short cuts and laziness. He would point out facts outside of your knowledge, quite normal from a 50yo to a teenager, but without prejudicing your capacity to reason, without humiliation, without rancour. He was a bloody good teacher, knew what his mission was, where it began and where it ended.
We have lost something essential since Blair. The same applies to the civil service generally speaking for that matter. We have encouraged people in positions of power to politicise public missions quite openly. They have become a tribe whose existence depend on the very taxpayers whom they openly despise. Their interests are profoundly divergent from the majority feeding them, in my case, very much against my will.
I appreciate the essay but still think that Covid was an accelerator of trends which pre existed long before the crisis, in this matter as in many others.
I think universities have a much bigger illness than institutional long covid. The biggest change they need is to rid themselves, or at least take control, of the disastrous influences of post-modernism and identity politics.
Sneaky little granny killers killing grannies on the exhale. Tru$t the $cience!
Interesting read – sadly the claimed demise of UK’s “universities” is untrue. There are enormous numbers of pseudo graduates with pseudo degrees. The tell-tale is that many can’t read or write in English so could not have attained the degrees my generation worked so hard to achieve. I cannot see that changing anytime soon because it’s a result of the regime’s pseudo-Marxism. I believe this point was made in the recent US election: If you print more money you are not richer. Because the amount of goods and services remains about the same prices simply rise. If you print more diplomas the number of intelligent and dilligent students remains the same. So you simply devalue everyones’ qualifications at a stroke.
Having recently completed an MA course as a mature student: full-time in one year; what struck me most was that universities and tutors have abandoned telling students what to do, in favour (and with catastrophic consequences), of asking them what theyâd like to do. The real world doesnât, or shouldnât function like that and even supposed academic enterprises will crumble on such an unstable premise. What is then taught, or not taught, is a whole other ball of wax.
John Kanefsky, you are so correct! John Major most definitely started the rot with a huge imposition – the conversion of polytechnics into universities. This was a short-sighted blunder by a PM who himself had not attended university. The polytechnics represented a valuable element of higher (i.e. tertiary) education and fulfilled an important role in providing programmes more closely aligned with industry and technical employment. At a stroke the arrogant Major destroyed this valuable educational asset and most of the institutions that became jumped-up universities abandoned their vocational programmes and in their place often adopted non-subjects like womens’ studies, LGBTQ++ studies, racism studies, gender studies, media studies, etc.
And then Blair compounded the crisis by extruding 50% of pupils from their school factories into ‘university’ education. This massively diluted the status of universities and produced a couple of generations of graduates with totally useless degrees in the sorts of subjects highlighted above. These are the generations who have now come to maturity and who have been the vanguard of the Woke madness that has engulfed our world, driven by Gen Z elites from the Oxbridge machine who have understood that Woke is the route to seizing and maintaining power.
Britain used to have an outstanding university sector. No longer. It now instructs students what to think, not teaching students how to think. Even supposedly ‘neutral’ degree like medicine have become infected and corrupted by Woke ideology. I know. I used to be a senior lecturer at one of the older universities in the UK; and both my children did medical degrees.
What has been done to and done by the UK university sector has been shameful and seriously damaging far beyond the empty lecture halls as students study ‘at home’ and their teachers teach from home. ThankGod I was able to retire from the madhouse!
I worked as sessional tutor at a university (in Australia) a number of years ago.
I taught a course (statistics) that had a high failure rate. Unlike other subjects, answers were either right or wrong – you couldnât fudge your way through.
The second semester i taught it, knowing it would be a struggle for many, i spent the first part of the first tutorial running through a 7-8 point guide for students. The message was clear: do these things (stuff like attend all tutorials and lectures, engage during class, do weekly exercises, etc) and youâll pass. Simple.
I wanted to present a positive message, and my feeling was that the students received it well.
Later that day i received a call from the course coordinator. A young adult had attended the class, interpreted my message as âthis is hard, you will failâ, gone home, cried, and had her mum call the university to complain.
Once i explained what happened, the coordinator told me not to worry and that heâd look after it. I believe there was a formal process involving the student union, but it didnât progress far.
I wonder whether universities are only a symptom of a broader societal problem.
The silver lining is that kids like this are likely to be too frightened to ever have sex, so wonât be procreating.