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The greats, James Naughtie and John Humphrys, didn't need an elite education. Credit: Bill Robinson/Radio Times/Getty Images
Fresh out of the London School of Economics, my head full of theories about taming inflation, I was sent to cover a coup in the Maldives.
At an airfield outside Delhi, I was shepherded onto a Russian Antonov troop carrier with a few other journalists. It had no seats. The journey took hours and at one point a pilot appeared and started walking down the row of reporters, asking each person something. It was very loud so there was no way of hearing his question until he got to me. “Do you have a guidebook for the Maldives? We don’t know which Island the airport is on.”
I did. The pilot beamed. He returned to the cockpit, and the plane changed direction, doubling back on itself. I’d spent long hours in the library with Hayek and Schumpeter, but in the end I was saved by Berlitz. We landed safely in the Maldives — only to find the coup had fizzled out. The pirates who had cackhandedly attempted to overthrow the government set sail and never came back. This was the beginning of my career.
Since then, it has included wars, revolutions, errors of judgement, stomach-turning fear, blood-spattered sights, narrow scrapes, changes of heart and mind. And that’s just inside Broadcasting House. Could all of this — should all of this — have been achieved without an education provided at the taxpayers’ expense in the years 1980 to 1983 at the London School of Economics?
Almost certainly. My father Peter Woods had no degree when he threw himself out of an aircraft for his first and last parachute jump in order to report on the Suez crisis for the Daily Mirror. Martha Gellhorn had no degree when she became the world’s most celebrated and intrepid reporter and author. Nor did another force of nature, the great John Humphrys, whose alma mater is The Penarth Times.
But John’s hopped it to Classic FM and we are left, on the Today Programme, in a fusty senior common room impervious to cheeky lads and lasses from South Wales — unless they’ve spent years looking at books. The current presenters’ roster boasts two Oxford graduates, two from Cambridge, and me. It is unlikely that another non-graduate like John will present it any time soon and we are reduced as a result. Our perspectives are less diverse. The BBC, to its credit, is upping the number of recruits from non-degree backgrounds, suggesting that it understands that three years punting on the Cam is not the only pathway to success.
Perhaps that’s because the Corporation sees the wider picture. Death by professionalisation. It’s not elite over-production that worries me so much as the quality of the elite that is being over-produced. University these days encourages a way of thinking about the world that is homogenous. Those who go — even those who have seen hardship and adversity — are smoothed around the edges. They don’t question the establishment because they (alright, we) are the establishment.
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Subscribe“University, done right, sorts your mind out. Confronts you with your own insignificance.”
YES! Absolutely right. That’s why – despite my scepticism in recent years – I have never regretted going to university. What I learned has been useful (although not in the way I expected at the time…) – but the real boon was that it humbled me.
I was always the straight-A, top-of-the-class teacher’s pet at school – the one that was going to go off and do great things. Of course I’d get a place at a top university to do a prestigious degree! I was so entitled.
Once at said top university, I knew on the first day that everything I’d previously thought about my academic abilities was wrong. I wasn’t that clever at all – in fact, I’d describe my university performance as “scaling the heights of mediocrity”. I only did well at school because I had a good memory, not because I really understood anything.
The valuable things I learned were: how to keep swimming even though you feel completely overwhelmed and at sea. How to cope with being buried in a mound of information and sort it out into what’s important and worthy of extra thought and what can be cast by the wayside. That there’s always someone out there far better than you, but that doesn’t matter. You just keep plugging away.
Sure, I could have learned all this in a different way than university but it certainly did prepare me for the rough and tumble of life. After going through the spin cycle of a UCL law and languages degree, I felt able to throw myself into challenging new experiences because I knew that, even though I might get lost, or fail, or chewed up and spat out, I’d get through. All the things I am most proud of having done in my adult life can be traced back to that bit of learning.
I have the same experience as you. I was always top of the class at school but after my first year at university I was almost kicked out; I learned that I actually had to work. This lesson stayed with me and at 21 I realised that I still had a lot to learn before I could do anything useful.
But now this idea is old-fashioned. I know graduates at 21 who immediately set up consultancy companies – their presentations and art work are stupendous and they get work. I also know graduates at 21 who become writers. They may be able to write but they have nothing to say. This, I think, is the problem. Not that a university education is bad but that you have nothing to offer at 21 and you have to do a further apprenticeship in ‘Life’.
I had a different reaction to not doing well – I was already a keen bean, but I worked harder. And harder. And harder. And was upset when no results came. I was basically like a Land Rover, stuck in sand with the wheels spinning. What I needed to do was work smarter…that lesson took a long time to learn and I think I missed out on a lot of fun at university because I was too busy getting my knickers in a twist.
Yes, for me the working smarter bit came after I graduated – the apprenticeship in Life.
That really resonates…
Interesting post. You triggered a very strong memory in me.
In 1986, and in my first year, I was threatened by my college (Worcester, Oxford) with Rustication (being thrown out). I had barely managed more than a term of self indulgent, entitled partying and not seen fit to do anything other than blag my way through engineering tutorials with just three of us in the room. Including the senior tutor. There was no hiding an all nighter in those circumstances.
The disciplinary ritual of being dressed in subfusc, addressed in the third person, and formally sentenced by the college Dean was the punch in the solar plexus I absolutely and totally needed. I was an arrogant little shit and someone needed to get through. They did.
And once I started to shut my mouth and open my ears I realised I was quite the dimmest member of my peer group.
If I had learned nothing else, it was worth this experience.
Quite. University does lift you up, give you confidence and probably arrogance too…but for a lot of us, it gave us the metaphorical box around the ears we sorely needed.
Ah yes. Confidence. After 9 years at boarding school, where no-one really cared for you like your family, entirely crushed my confidence. After being told I was not smart enough to do a degree I scraped into a poly to do a diploma. In my first year a department head thought that I had more potential than had been allowed for, so enabled my path into a full degree course. This gave me a massive confidence boost that I would never have had any other way I suspect. My second degree was in veterinary science. 18 years on and still practicing. University truly saved me. Thank you Mr Richards!
The disciplinary ritual of being dressed in subfusc, addressed in the third person, and formally sentenced by the college Dean was the punch in the solar plexus I absolutely and totally needed. I was an arrogant little shit and someone needed to get through.
Appreciate your candour. Blimey, is that what it’s really like at a ‘top’ university?
I went to a Poly in the late 80’s, did humanities degree and learned all about post modernism and other useful stuff (I’m not being sarcastic) while working in bars and on building sites and meeting people from all over UK. We would not have put up with that public humiliation and it’s got nothing to do with fees.
“ I went to a Poly in the late 80’s, did humanities degree and learned all about post modernism and other useful stuff (I’m not being sarcastic)… ”
Post modernism!! You are being sarcastic but you don’t know it.
I only learned four useful new things really.
One was, as you’ve said, “being buried in a mound of information and sort[ing] it out”. Before university your school did all this for you. Another, ancillary to that, was developing the habit of classifying tasks into Important, Urgent, and Overdue, and managing them accordingly. The third was that, as you were more or less left to your own devices, you had to work out what the scope of work was – this week, this term, this year – and organise your time to deliver it; nobody did this for you because your version of the course was your own. The fourth lesson was that this university minted 3,000 graduates a year substantially like me, and I had better have more than just my degree to talk about, if I wanted a job at the end of it; the degree was the bare minimum expectation. So I got busy with the extra-curricular stuff that marks you out as different.
I’ve used all those throughout my working life. I’ve never needed the actual subject matter.
There is also learning things to be civilized and learning useful things. Later in life I ended up studying a pair of postgrad STEM degrees in computer science and artificial intelligence (useful, and challenging, I rue my younger self for not applying myself in the beautiful mysteries of mathematics). Also a history degree – useless, but back in 2005 there were still a few old school professors hanging on who ensured it made you just a little more civilised, especially as I took to studying Old English and Latin as part of it, and medieval palaeography that requires a level of intellectual discipline and respectful dedication to the past. I also studied a social “science” at the time as “joint honours” which was neither useful nor civilising and was a complete waste of time, not least as they fraudulently used the scienrific method and statistics in crude semi-numeric ways to proffer not very much of anything. Those sort of subjects shouldn’t exist.
Mark Studock, the Sociologist PhD in That Hideous Strength’ by CS Louis was always my image of those social scientists, seeing people through a lens without morality and humanity – but just bad science. I managed to get on a couple archeological digs by being on hand when they wanted someone – so did time with anthropologists, and the Cultural ones are just weirdos, but the technological ones were great.
Hear Hear, couldn’t agree more. In my 10+ years of university (mostly biochemistry/toxicology/physiology), I then “tried” one semester in the “humanities” and was completely appalled at the lack of literacy and critical thinking I saw there, and that was in 1986! I followed up with three semesters in business, which was all partying and self-congratulatory/aggrandising, then I left uni. Went back a few years later, but by then the even the sciences had been dulled by graduate profs prostituting themselves to find money to run their labs. The golden-age of university is well behind us.
I second your comment, especially the idea of differentiating yourself from substantially identical graduates. I took a similar approach, loading myself up with extracurricular jobs and activities related to my field, at the expense of striving for the best possible grades. The former outweighed the latter in importance, in my mind, as far as achieving employment post-graduation and learning useful skills. The other thing I learned was humility. I was not only less significant than I had thought, but also not as smart relative to the rest of the world. And certainly not as well informed as I needed to be. That rather painful lesson has served me well and shaped my work ethic. I learned what it takes to succeed, and, over the ensuing years, that most people in the world simply aren’t willing to make the necessary sacrifices, which is a perfectly valid choice.
So many posters here who went to great universities, and did well, seem to not understand how huge effect it inevitably had on you. That time where thinking is the thing, and with other people who are thinking, and that group dynamic – it is the most amazing thing that us who did not get it miss most. I did some college, and one term at a university, but always as an outsider just passing through – but I would see the kids living and breathing it for consecutive years, I saw it as an outsider rather as an insider, and so I believe got a better picture.
In my life instead I had no community, mostly mixed with the fringe and rough kinds where thinking and reading and being educated were the rare exception. We talked of lifes hardness and events, and got stoned and drunk – but not thoughtful talk, not intellectual, not smart talk.
Years passed without getting that intellectual basis – I read immensely, as I always had, and that filled in, but to have spent years with bright minds and the reason you are there is to gain ideas and how to think about them – Amazing! What a great fourtune you all had.
You all just do not realize how formative that must have been – to have learned so much information, and to think and understand it wile in the company of a vast variety of others doing the same, but for different topics – amazing. The school of hard knocks is pretty effective at teaching survival, but rarely at teaching intellectual thinking – and that is the higher value. (that and you likely make a lot of money)
There are more unhappily employed post-university people than happily employed ones. The vast majority of us are great at surviving, but the frustrations of misguided academic policy are not superseded by the “good” stuff.
In a society which scorns thinking and data in favour or religion (church or secular) and tribal behaviour, university fed us a delusion of reality.
I probably/maybe (who really knows) would have done better and achieved more happiness with a trade, rather than the illusion of academics, even though it was a STEM decade of uni.
Lovely post which I can strongly relate to.
Thanks, Jerry!
What a wonderfully honest and perceptive comment.
Journalism is killing itself. Whether that’s intentional or not is an open question, but blaming universities is a flaccid answer. Just look at the most recent flip in which journos are realizing that the Wuhan lab theory is not conspiracy nut propaganda after all. In the US, at least one reporter admitted to blowing off the theory because it had an Orange patina to it. Instead of picking up a phone, doing some research, or expending some shoe leather, journos today too often rely on random tweets from people they like or base stories entirely on unnamed sources.
Journalists have traded principles for principals; they will actively cover-up stories (Hunter Biden’s laptop?) that make “their” side look bad, or invent stories (Russians anyone?) that make the “other” side look bad. They’re busy ex-communicating the heretics in their midst, many of those people being old-style liberals who are at odds with some tenet or other of current woke orthodoxy.
It’s too bad. A misinformed public does not benefit a free society, and a disinformed public is even worse. The Trump years brought what was already happening below the surface out front in bold relief. The same names used to tarnish him and his supporters have been used for every Repub president or nominee in my lifetime. Trump was just the guy who wasn’t going to lie there and take it, and the media hate when their tactics are used against them.
We still have the pretense of cops purposely targeting black people, of the country as some sort of dystopia stuck in Jim Crow with its women living The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s embarrassing, perhaps doubly so since my professional life began as a television reporter. It was fun; I was exposed to a lot of things that I would not have otherwise seen, but there were fundamentals to the craft: facts, objectivity, not editorializing within a news story, and all those boring details that went into producing something you were okay with putting your name on. Universities are part of it, but a great deal of the current state of the profession stems from self-inflicted wounds.
Great post. Every word true and to the point. The journalist class as a whole simply decided to give up on journalism some years ago. In return, we have given up on the journalist class outside of a few shining examples such as Project Veritas.
I think it a shame Unherd does so little journalism, but instead social opinion is its bulk of stuff. I suppose they are afraid of getting killed off early if they dared to actually discuss News impartially as that is obviously forbidden today – so they just avoid it.
Tom Chivers does quite a bit of original reporting.
Still, I think it’s more that the basic business of finding facts and reporting them is a commodity. E.g. if there’s a plane crash or an announcement by the government, existing outlets like the BBC or Telegraph or whatever can mostly be trusted to report the existence of those – mostly, exceptions like anti-lockdown protests aside.
The obvious gap in the market right now is for contextualization that isn’t manipulative and based on some strange, quasi-alien worldview.
I’d like to see someone take on the challenge of better factual reporting as well, but I think that would require some much more radical ideas than conventional journalism is capable of. You’d need to change the fundamentals of how news works, not just hire a different set of journalists with different slants.
This whole u-turn on the lab-leak hypothesis is weird. Every normal person absolutely thought it was a possibility, so why the wide-spread rush to condemn the possibility? (Except, orange man bad, obvs).
the whole thing was very fishy at the time and it doesn’t stink any less now.
WHO,UN & Soros,Zuckerberg Covered,Censored . I put Trump Analysis on my FB page &it was taken down,as Not true!! That was last Summer
indeed….. , there are many a lazy journalist out there, merely seeking the messages, news or stories to keep its readers happy: it becomes a business selling news…
With regards to Universities: how they teach their students depends very much on how their research is funded, or how they obtain research funding. This is a VERY big issues in medical universities: they have become dependant on the health (illness) industry… to the point where teaching slides sometimes come with the name of a pharma company on. Dare if you go against the pharma industry policies: you will be warned and then later kicked out as you will not be able to obtain funding any more: this has taken us to the medical mess we are in now. The only thinking is a pill or jab for every illness. Nobody things about health…
Kudos to the author for daring to gently criticise the bbc while still employed there.
For heavens sake though, to say that the bbc’s perspectives are not diverse enough is a pretty mind-numbing way of describing one of the great temples of groupthink.
Justin Webb , the BBC yes yes man trying to diversify as retirement draws near. What next an article by Jon Sopel on how Trump was not all bad?
Great comment! If only I could uptick it…
Two people I know who have worked for and with the BBC for some time use the word nepotism to describe its internal mechanism…
‘Non-graduate’ now does not mean what it meant before John Major and the Blair creature vastly expanded the universities, a policy quite incompatible with full grants and no fees. Plenty of people are graduates now who would not have gone near a university before 1990. Such people might have good experience but be foolishly excluded by a supposedly inclusive ‘non-graduate’ recruiting policy, which would be silly. As it happens I’m one of the many graduates from my era (University of York 1970-73 Marxism-Leninism BA Hons) who went on to apprenticeships on provincial newsapers (Swindon Evening Advertiser, Coventry Telegraph). This was a a good system, but alas the provincial chains are now so impoverished and diminished that it could never work now. I relied for my training on a large number of middle-aged journalists – reporters, photographers and sub-editors – who had made their lives in provincial journalism, knew the towns they wrote about and were prepared to put up with and pass on experience to people like me, who knew nothing of life, and – worse – thought that a degree conferred some special quality on them. I don’t suppose my university education, such as it was, played much part in what I did or wrote for many years afterwards. I also owe a lot to the stern, rigorous primary school teacher who came in on Fridays to make us learn proper shorthand. She wasn’t fooled. In the long years since I slipped into Fleet Street at the rough, popular end (which had not been my plan), it is the non-graduates who have taught me most about my trade. We competed like mad in my early days, but we looked after each other as well. I’m really not sure that refusing to help a stranded competitor get his film out of a war zone is that much of a mark of professionalism, not that journalism is a profession anyway. It’s a trade, scribbling on the backs of advertisements, and the more highly journalists think of themselves, the worse they get. Look at the New York Times.
Peter Hitchens: you should be writing articles for Unherd, not just contributing to the comments!
I’m about a decade after you, US side, but much of this resonates – you learned the craft from those who had been doing it for a while. You learned about cultivating sources, finding the “so what?” that makes a story, creating a narrative (and not in the bad sense of that term), and you interviewed people instead of relying on tweets and press availabilities.
Having worked for tv station near a huge army post, the idea of leaving a competitor stranded in a hot zone is patently offensive. And for the most part, we started in small markets and worked our way up. Today, I see people who can’t find Zimbabwe on a map working at the network level.
And bring back grammar schools with an exacting examination system such as the GCEs and eleven plus while we’re at it.
I think universities benefit a lot from a sort of halo effect in which people take their first steps as adults, are treated as adults for the first time, and in a (in the arts at least) unpressured environment filled with new friends who are all in the same boat. Sometimes literally. Almost any organisation in that position would generate fond memories.
Adult students rarely talk about university education in the same way as people who went when they were young. I think this is not surprising. I went at a young age but had nonetheless spent several years working beforehand, and I honestly hated university. My overriding memory of it is a combination of overwhelmingly unfair work allocations, in which arts students had at least an order of magnitude fewer work hours expected of them than those of us doing computer science degrees, and extremely incompetent staff.
This article has a curiously rosy view of a place where the author admits the staff literally didn’t care about him at all. It is presented as a positive thing. My teachers also by and large didn’t care about neither us, nor their teaching. It resulted in a continuous stream of completely dysfunctional and unfair behaviour, often because the teachers didn’t understand the topics they were trying to teach (I’d been programming already since I was six, so a lecturer who taught students code that was guaranteed to crash wasn’t going to escape unnoticed). Because they couldn’t or wouldn’t teach students programming correctly but still had to pretend it was a computer science course, they came up with a lot of tricks to cover up that the students weren’t learning. For example, setting what were theoretically programming assignments but allocating nearly all the marks to an English language report you had to submit along side it.
What really rubbed salt in the wound was that most of the students had no idea they were being abused. They were instinctively loyal to their lecturers, or perhaps they were glad to partake in the fraudulent nature of the course, as it ensured they’d all get their degree even if they never really learned the skills.
There’s definitely a problem with graduates being trained to be overly “polite”, if by that you mean picking up the hard core refusal to point out incompetence or malpractice in colleagues that pervades academic culture. But I left my own course feeling like university was creating a far worse problem in students – the perception that they couldn’t really fail, even at hard stuff, because in the end they wouldn’t be allowed to fail by those who assessed them. And if you believe that then why try harder? The culture of endless back covering is sometimes called groupthink, and partially it is. But it’s also just the default behaviour those exposed to academics at a young age, when they lack any intellectual confidence, can’t help but pick up.
I did a 1 year masters “conversion” course in computer science at birkbeck in 2000. It cost me 1.5K as I recall. There were a lot of students and not much in the way of personalised tutoring. But the content was solid. It was basic but real computer science lectures, taught in C and pseudocode. I thought it was great. It was sink or swim, so quite a few people couldn’t manage and didn’t get a degree. I’ve just had a look and the syllabus still seems ok actually, it’s probably dumbed down a bit from my day but it still seems OK. I doubt as many people fail and I doubt it costs 1.5K. But it looks OK.
Maybe you just picked the wrong place?
I also did a masters in AI, philosophy and simulating evolution etc in 2003 when I was in my mid to late 20’s. There were about 30 of us, all adults and many of us still friends, and friends/colleagues with the lecturers. That was extremely good. University is very good indeed when it works.
College is what one makes of it. Not every class/instructor is outstanding or inspiring, but students, especially at the graduate level, have the ability to push the class dialog thereby raising the tenor of the class to outstanding levels. Good, intellectually demanding students can push a less than inspiring prof (not incompetent) into higher gear. Engaged students can bring out the best in each other and in teachers. Truculent, entitled, intellectually lazy students (students who don’t want what they paid for) can suck the life out of even the best profs and classmates. Education needs good profs but it also needs students who want what they have paid for, that is, knowledge.
Sure, I’d agree with all that. We certainly need students who understand they are there to be taught something. I hardly think insisting on that is stick in the mud conservatism. When I was an undergraduate I understood that, even though I was argumentative.
Maybe so. The way places are allocated means choice has a limited impact. It wasn’t my first choice, still, the university in question is one of the Russell Group, so supposedly quite good. I learned the hard way that reputation in academia means very little. There are no quality controls, and academics are rarely/never fired for being bad teachers. Maybe if they use a politically incorrect phrase, but for just failing at the basics of teaching, no, I never heard of that.
Did you later go on to become a professional developer? I’m wary of students claiming their teaching was great if they didn’t already know the material beforehand. As I said, a big problem was that students who weren’t already self taught didn’t know enough of the subjects to realize they were being taught stuff wrong, and just assumed that they must be getting a top tier education because everyone else seemed to think they must be. And who were they to argue?
Fundamentally, the fish was rotting from the head down. The prof who ran the department didn’t care about teaching and hired other people like him, into a place where standards were already low (there was a clear difference between before/after lecturers, but few were any good). And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Academics will not criticize each other or hold each other to account under any circumstances other than violations of hard-left orthodoxy, students are assumed to all be ignorant and their opinions of no value (again, unless they’re demanding “decolonization” or something), and reputation doesn’t seem to mean much. So there’s no informed buyer to be found anywhere.
I was a junior developer before hand. Ultimately I went on to become a neuroscientist, which in practice means a lot of code although it’s not really software development as such.
Standards are probably quite low in computer science in many places because it’s hard to find expert staff willing to work for low pay.
I’m an academic scientist alhough I don’t work in a university at the moment I work for a government lab. Teaching is not prioritised in general that’s true. They can be held to account but more for moral infractions as you say.
I felt that only in about a fifth of my uni courses (out of +/-110 uni courses over the course of a decade). I generally had teachers who did a fairly good job, but that was in the 80s and 90s.
More and more, university is designed for children, people who’ve yet to do nothing in life, who’ve only experienced one version of life. I rather like the German idea that all students should try life before doing university.
The candour of this article is commendable.
I would add that a little obscurity, after Uni, in some tough, thankless job, can keep you straight.
Graduates seem to want a 50k job within 18 months and no sweeping the floor.
You are right, of course. Little winds up the average worker bee more than the attitude of “I went to Oxbridge, and I deserve better than this”. Except, of course, that if properly tasked the graduate should be able to prove fairly quickly that if they are indeed asked to sweep the floor, they are doing a better job of it than the others, and so should be moved on to more productive things.
And if there is one thing that does wind up the worker bees even more than the “I went to Oxbridge” attitude, it is to be able to demonstrate in a very short while that whatever those bees do, you the ‘graduate’ can do it faster, better, and more accurately than they do.
…the important point here is that Doctor David Starkey could not now survive five minutes as a junior academic…University broadens the mind if for every Woke Leftist, there is somebody sponsored by the British Army, a third born and brought up in a “Red Wall” town whose Dad runs the local factory, a fourth studying Art History to better look after the Family Seat, a fifth whose Mum is a Labour Peer originally from Barbados…and a sixth who came for the rugby or the rowing. All have now disappeared but the first group, furiously agreeing with each other about what a horrible Country this is, and how vile the people who live here are…except for them, obviously…
Nicely said.
Well, if journalists were people who went out into the world, gathered information and reported it to the public then I think they don’t really need a degree – maybe a degree in doing that stuff might help, but probably it’s better learned on the job.
But that’s not what modern journalists do. Modern journalists pretty much do what I’m doing right now: they simply write out their opinions, and the person with the opinions that get the most attention receives career success.
So in view of that situation, I think they really should be people who have some sort of expertise in something, so that their opinions are based on more than what went through their minds as they performed their morning ablutions. It need not be an academic subject, but the point of academic expertise was/is supposed to be rigorous thought, so academic expertise seems a good idea for them actually, in principle. Universities aren’t working at the moment, but that seems a separate issue. Clearly it was far better when university was paid for by general taxation, and only a few people got to go there. The effort to get half the country to go to University has simply devalued university, predictably enough. I think that’s a different matter to the nature of journalism, which has also been devalued but via a different mechanism to do with information technology.
Great article
“Of course, there are schoolteachers who don’t care about you either, but they had to pretend. At university in the 80s, they didn’t pretend.”
Yes, yes and yes. Very much my experience of undergraduate life at the latter end of the 1980s, and a healthy experience it was too. We had to justify our presence (some of my contemporaries were rusticated for academic inadequacy) and our education was our own responsibility: the opportunity was provided, the rest was our task to perform. Happy days, for which I’m truly nostalgic.
Since we’re all discussing our university experiences, I’ll add mine.
I found Oxford (mathematics and computation) difficult after a high-achieving independent school. I simply didn’t know how to operate in a totally different environment, where you’re having to work out how to wash your clothes and feed yourself as well as get to the lectures and do work for tutorials.
A year or two ago, I heard a speaker saying that university lectures aren’t like school lessons – it’s normal for students not to understand, but they’re expected to use it as a prompt to study independently until they can make sense of it. I’d have found it useful if someone told me that at the time, because I just assumed that there was something wrong with me in not being able to understand.
I did get some very good things out of it though. I learned a lot about rigorous thinking, and the facilities were excellent for learning things which were nothing to do with the curriculum but which I found fascinating and ended up being very useful in my software development career.
One of the problems I had at the time was being ashamed and/or worried to ask about things I didn’t know, because I assumed I was supposed to and didn’t know what the consequences would be of admitting I didn’t. Now I have no problem admitting my ignorance. Apart from being a good way to learn myself, it can also help to reveal when other people don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve seen lots of examples of that in economics, which I’ve been studying independently for the last 13 years.
But should society really tolerate a large scale teaching system in which the teachers are so bad at their jobs that it’s normal for no knowledge to actually be transmitted during lectures, and in which the blame for this is assigned to the student rather than teacher? Such excuses wouldn’t be tolerated from secondary school teachers.
I do wish Unherd could get a sub editor who could write headlines which in some way reflect the content of the article. This was yet another one I nearly didn’t read because the headline implied it was going to be one more boring old bash at Oxbridge from some guy who went there, enjoyed it, benefitted from the doors it opened for him, but now wants to keep on side by giving it a knock. Instead it was an interesting and thought provoking discussion of what might be seen as useful training for investigative journalism (currently an oxymoron), and more widely, the benefits of exposure to University teaching in the era when independent thinking was not just allowed but encouraged.
I suppose at least the title avoided the customary Trump sneer, which would have meant I didn’t bother at all.
I went to LSE in the three years after Justin Webb. I was less impressed than him by the academics, other than David Starkey and Alan Sked, but that probably says more about me than them. Studying political thought aged 19 to 21 is not a productive use of one’s time: I would have got a lot more from it now. I also had classes with Kurt Klappholz, which seemed mainly to concern Pareto optimisation and the benefits of trade, which was no bad thing to learn. Like Justin and several other posters here, though, my main lesson was that there is a big library and you needed to go off, organise yourself and work hard independently, because you certainly were not going to be spoon fed.
Traditional journalism has had its day. How many science, health, defence, technology, education etc journalists have any knowledge, experience, or expertise in the fields they are pontificating about? Next to none. Almost all have degrees in the classics, English, or journalism, and whatever they are reporting on is this year’s ‘beat’. They will come from provincial court reporter, or the LA showbiz beat, to be a media outlet’s specialist reporter. The appallingly poor standard of the coverage of the Covid pandemic illustrates their limitations perfectly.
I think a big part of why some people thought university was so wonderful was that they were comparing it to school. Compared to school it is wonderful, but compared to an interesting well-paid job in an exciting city, living in a decent place and with material comforts like a good car and self-indulgent holidays, it’s parochial, poverty-stricken and tedious.
When I was at university my mates were people who had all the above and I massively envied them their lifestyles. They did not remotely envy me mine. I escaped to hang out with them as often as I could afford but that wasn’t very often. They’ve done OK. I earn more now, but I am not sure wasting the best three years of my life skint among pseuds was wholly worth it.
Yes, other fields of employment outside university have been deeply devalued in society, not salary wise, people who earned two science phds have earned their professional salaries, but in terms of “validity” in society, the humanities have degraded everything that disagrees with their monoclonal view, and society has sadly complied.
Absolutely!
After I graduated I took a job with a large west coast tech firm. It was a revelation. The job required three months of training time and the place was vaguely patterned after a university in the sense that there was a planned series of lectures and a whole lot of self learning material, and people were joining in waves, so you had what was a bit like a “class”.
The main differences: getting paid instead of paying, drastically higher quality education by teachers who were motivated and enthusiastic, the R&D being done there was far more advanced, there was far less work (having weekends with no piles of make-work to get through felt weird at first), and none of the abusive or manipulative practices I’d got used to at university were present.
And to top it all off, the weather was perfect every single day.
Those three months felt like the “university” experience I’d been hoping for originally. My whole life, adults had been telling me how fabulous university was, how much fun they had, how it’s where they met life-long friends and spouses, and how much work sucked in comparison. The total inversion of this experience in my own life was a shock.
The years since haven’t been much different: working life is great, a huge contrast with the misery of my education years. Looking back, a part of me wishes I could have skipped university entirely and gone straight into that job (maybe also A-Levels). The company didn’t have a degree requirement and I believe it still doesn’t. However the country where they required I move to did, so in the end I still needed to get a degree, but it could have been in a subject with much less work.
As a so called Boomer, I never had the chance to join the 15% who were lucky enough to go to university, when I left school at sixteen. I was very grateful to have the chance to study with The Open University in my thirties and graduate at the age of forty. It was tough working full time as well as studying but I had a huge sense of accomplishment at the end of it.
Indeed, universities have become terribly conformist. In the sciences, the disagreements are clear, because they rely on disagreements in numbers, in data, but in the “arts”, disagreement is about opinions only, as proper data play almost no role in the “arts”, so disagreements, end up all being “attacks on the institution” rather than debates about data.
There is too much university, too much “arts”, one does not need to be a thinker to be an artist, most of the “liberal arts” should not be in university, it needs a drastic pairing down.
Fine, I do strongly believe that going to university is a very good thing, but where it’s all gone wrong is in thinking it a necessity to go to university and graduate with a thing called a degree before being employed at almost everything.
It may shut out people who for one reason or another don’t get there, and it narrows the type of person being employed.
There are subjects for which university education is highly relevant, such as physics, and the nation surely needs more scientists, engineers and doctors, but is it a necessity for nurses and policemen, for example? And does anyone benefit from three years at a university studying PPE? I suggest it has added to our problems.
I have worked with excellent accountants and engineers who never went near a university, but that was long ago.
Brave man. Glimmer of light here – hinting at un-cancelling the likes of Richard Starkey?
I didn’t know Ringo had been cancelled!
I now have visions of David Starkey bashing away at the drums behind the other three…
Fewer universities, more embedded local institutions, craft colleges, more not less elitism tied to ruthless meritocracy, more varied research funding, and end to state monopolies and zero tax-payer funds for grievance disciplines https://sdp.org.uk/sdptalk/a-localist-model-for-higher-education/
I spent most of my time at university thinking about girls and drinking beer, I want to say, a la George Best, I wasted the rest but I did enjoy studying mathematics. I wasn’t very good but the interest has stayed with me.
My teaching work, particularly at my school and a little part time university work pushes me to keep learning. It’s fun and has given me interesting experiences.
I have observed, particularly in schools other than my current employer, that lots of teachers stop learning about their subject as soon as they see pathways for advancement into management.
It all changed, I think, when it became an offence to cause offence.
It’s quite remarkable that so many millions of people can be held hostage by such a simple, and such a warped, idea.
What is behind the success of that idea? It is a success, because no matter how many people, even well regarded people, state that it is not an offence to cause offence, people continue to believe that it is.
I think it might have something to do with fear. More should be done to study fear as an unconscious motive behind thought and deed.
We have a wonderful example of the operation of fear at the moment. People everywhere believe that masks work to protect them against coronavirus, when they simply do not. They have no effect whatsoever, yet hundreds of millions of people believe they do.
Why? Fear.
In times gone by the fear of damnation, or the fear of
being accused of heresy, could easily control people’s thoughts and deeds.
It is now as it was then – those who are in love with the influence they wield harness the unconscious driver of fear, and are quite unconcerned about the consequences. So you have academics afraid to offend whatever orthodoxy has been approved this week, and you have little old ladies terrified into wearing a mask in the open air on a fine June day.
A curse on them for their abominable deeds, all those who deliberately use fear to get something done. Let them be cursed.
Masks fact checked : https://www.factcheck.org/2021/03/scicheck-the-evolving-science-of-face-masks-and-covid-19/
Balance is they are a useful too, 50% reduction in virus particles.
Especially considering the initial dose may be significant to the following prognosis.
Do you have a good evidence based article for the anti-masks argument ?
Where in that rather vague article – which as far as I can see has been written to support a political narrative – was there mention of the testimony of experts who have pointed to the ineffectiveness of wearing barrier masks?
Take the so-called experiment between two mannequins facing each other, where a reduction in coronavirus particle transmission was observed.
That would be a more complete experiment if mannequins had been positioned behind and to each side of the transmitting mannequin to see if there was any reduction in particle transmission or, conversely (which I suspect) an increase.
Mask wearing is destructive on a psychological level – and I do believe they are used as a control mechanism – and, as far as I can honestly tell, useless for the prevention of virus transmission.
Last winter all the shops I visited had the windows and doors closed. It was, after all, winter.
But the people crowded into those shops (supermarkets mainly) were all wearing barrier masks (myself included).
It does not take a genius to work out that even if masks were able to offer a tiny amount of protection, it would be nowhere near enough to protect a roomful of people who were effectively in a sealed box with each other.
Surely that is comprehensible. It must be. It is so obvious that the only reason for arguing against it can only be to advance a political argument.
In addition, if barrier masks are able to soak up a given amount of large droplets – which I do not deny is a possibility – the aerosol content (the virus suspended in aerosol form) will escape easily through the gaps around the edges of the masks.
How is this not obvious?
if you want to see a graphic illustration of the problem with barrier masks, check out the You Tube videos of people vaping in the masks. If You Tube has left them up.
You will see clouds, huge clouds, of vape billowing around the heads of the people doing this as they breathe out.
But because normal air is invisible we do not see this. If we were able to see normal air we would all, immediately, throw our masks in the bin and refuse to wear them again.
All it would take is the sight of one person in a mask exhaling.
Studies done on influenza virus, by the way, showed that it was the virus in aerosol form that was most dangerous for people because that was taken straight into the pulmonary tract.
Why would it be any different fort coronavirus, since it too can transmit in aerosol form.
If it only existed in lumps of snot or big drops of water I would be arguing for the wearing of masks.
You might want to consider another possibility as well:
the NHS was short of PPE. It needed the effective masks, so the government was not in a position to say the N95 makes were the ones people needed, because it would have made it even more difficult to get those masks to people on the front line.
I think a decision was made to let people believe in the barrier masks for two reasons:
One, to stop them demanding the N95 masks and two, to get them back out again after the initial lockdown.
Barrier masks are as close to a piece of total fiction as it is possible to get without publishing it in book form and signing it Enid Blyton.
A good set of counter arguments.
I’m not persuaded it fully justifies a conclusion masks are useless in reducing transmission.
I go along with the idea that context can matter, and crowds in masks is an oxymoronic practice.
The psychological aspects are another story.
Sometimes i have an experience of how personality projection is diminished, a kind of equalisation behind a mask. It’s even comfortable when feeling tired, just put a mask on and hide.
Then at other times the sheer submergence like a straitjacket on the personality is horrible.
Back to evidence and science, i read of research on trying to find why there was a greater reduction in cases than the billowing clouds and only 50% reduction in virus particles would predict. The researchers were measuring how the masks became damp, and thus the inhaled air was also slightly pre-moistened, which reduced dehydration of the nose and throat. Seems the primary defense against virus particles is, er, snot, which works best when well moistened.
So maybe masks work to reduce transmission, while doing very little to stop virus particles moving about.
There was also good anecdotal evidence of mask wearers fairing better on a busy bus, with one passenger exhaling virus particles.
Hopefully more quality evidence will emerge, and perhaps masks will be shown to be ineffective, or on balance not worth the psychological impact, or giving false a sense of security that encourages risk, but it would need good evidence.
To date i haven’t seen that, and there is some evidence on the protective side.
So not conclusive, but i’ll accept up for debate.
Justin Webb cracks me up. The BBC is the ultimate groupthinking organisation with the BBC line firmly adhered to across the board and his Today programme is the flagship. Take reporting from Gaza, for example. This last week Hamas threw out the head of UNRWA for calling out the Hamas regime. And the UN is hardly pro-Israel. So what does that say about all the BBC journalism from the strip? There are many untold stories – self censorship and the BBC line well kept as the reporting continues. Brexit, (so-called) culture wars, colonialism, Covid, Trump – groupthink applied across the board.
It’s quantity, these days, not quality, in education. So many pointless degrees and unemployable graduates – except as teachers or lecturers to continue the cycle. But even if we could solve that problem by a dissolution of the universities, most permanently and the rest for five years, there would still be the problem of the BBC.
I used to be an avid listener and was proud of this great British institution but now I cannot bear to listen. Radio 4’s Today programme would have me shouting back at the smug, narrow views of the pseudo-liberals that the BBC only employs these days – pseudo because these people do not accept any opinion which differs from their own comfortable, well-off, “educated” view. So now the radio no longer goes on in my house and the mainstream television has been off for years. What news I do get comes via the internet through various platforms, but cannot say I am a great reader any more, given that the news seems to consist of the ludicrous things that our Establishment gets up to.
FWIW, I have an education of sorts from four years of manual work before going to university in the 60s-70s (which made me more appreciative than my fellow students straight from school). But seven years was enough to make me realise even in those far-off, more exclusive days that there was a lot of dead wood in academia, and even the quality of many of the aspiring shoots would soon create more deadweight in the system
Going to a good university sets you on the road to answering the most important question of all: “Who Am I?” I’ve always felt that the big difference between the better sort of university graduate and the better sort of “University of Life” graduate is that the former has a more highly-developed sense of who he/ she is, and therefore, may have a better crack at fulfilling him/herself. Therefore, it’s a huge privilege to go to a good (I mean a proper) university, and an even bigger one if the tax payer is paying.
In my cohort only 5% of women and 10% of men went to university and A levels weren’t a doddle. It didn’t mean we were less intelligent ( and no wonder subsidy was affordable compared with over 50% today).
When I, a non-graduate, worked alongside Oxbridge/Russell group graduates, I didn’t find it difficult to compete. I’d already worked in the company for 5 years – a passable education.
I know all about the Maldives, because I follow American politics. President Obama says they are islands in the South Atlantic that both Argentina and the United Kingdom claim. Maldives is the Spanish name for them. The British call them the Falklands. It’s a shame that the successor of this erudite cultured man as the US president was the ignorant savage Donald Trump, a man who confuses the terms Scotch and Scottish (much like John Kenneth Galbraith)!
The Maldives are in the Indian Ocean: you’re thinking of the Islas Malvinas.