Hardly a week goes by without universities appearing in the news. Whether it is the debt burden confronting graduates, academic departments being shut down, or business-style mergers across institutions struggling to remain afloat, the sector is in trouble. And that is before you get to the swaths of cuts across the sector, tighter border restrictions squeezing the inflow of foreign students, and universities accepting students without academic qualifications, along with the relentless subversion of academic freedom on campus.

Responding to this multi-pronged assault, the think tank Policy Exchange published a report this week entitled “Tarnished Towers”, in which it advocates that national student numbers be cut by 30%. Arguably, this process is already underway as young people change their minds on higher education. A recent poll showed that 34% of respondents believe a university education “just isn’t worth the time and money it usually takes” — up from 14% in 2005. Meanwhile, 27% of graduates themselves believe the same. This is despite 36% still believing that people who go to university end up being a lot better off financially, down from 50% in 2005. All this comes as the graduate premium — the supposed boost to average pay over an individual’s lifetime flowing from higher education — is eaten away by a labor market saturated with graduates, each of whom is burdened by higher levels of student debt.

The modern British university system constitutes a shiny adornment of the now outmoded model of the world’s political economy. As peak globalization recedes into the past, its key institutions are also under pressure, of which newly marketized universities were integral. As industries shifted overseas, universities were expected to soak up the excess labor by creating a majority white-collar workforce, constituting service-sector employees. Against this backdrop, universities’ expanded campuses would act as the new economic hubs for deindustrialized towns and cities. Tony Blair is widely criticized for his aim to get half of school leavers into higher education, but the process started before him, when John Major converted Britain’s old polytechnic colleges into universities.

But the overall aim was not just to reshape the national economy. Universities were also intended to act as vehicles of socialization for this new order. Campus accommodation would detach students from their families and communities, and better prepare them for a life of submitting to human resources training and bureaucratic obedience.

Now, a reckoning for the old order is underway. As inflation, tariffs and growing geopolitical risk eat away at over-extended global supply chains, the pressure to reshore industry and seek energy self-sufficiency will tilt the advantage back to blue-collar work in trades at the expense of white-collar office work.

The dissolution of the monasteries under the Henrician Reformation was an integral part of Britain’s emergence from feudalism into the modern era. It helped to break up a powerful, seditious elite with transnational loyalties, whose institutions tied up resources that could be more productively employed elsewhere. If Britain has to reconstitute itself as an independent nation-state in the aftermath of globalization, and if the dissolution of the universities, our latter-day monasteries, is upon us, perhaps this can also liberate academics. As universities became less economically important, instead of serving as administrative functionaries and trainers of a globalist salariat, academics can once again return to pursuing a vocational role in research and teaching.

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Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently: The National Interest: Politics after Globalization.

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