Trashing universities is now a populist position

Note well the words of US vice president elect JD Vance (speaking in 2021 to the national conservatism conference):

I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities

Why would a politician be so full throated in an attack on higher education? For JD Vance (Ohio State University, Yale Law School) the issues combine indoctrination (the idea that universities are a means of enforcing conformity of thought), and constraints on opportunity (the idea that universities have become a barrier to social mobility and economic growth).

The Cathedral and the bizarre

The indoctrination claims is perhaps the oldest and the best understood – I trace the recent roots of this meme (as with much of the modern populist right) beyond Toby Young’s “left wing madrassas” to the early work of Curtis Yarvin, and specifically the idea that “Cthulu only swims left”: the establishment (and universities within that establishment) deal with criticism from the right swiftly and without mercy, but deal with criticism from the left with tolerance and grace. For this reason new ideas, should they have any hope of being accepted, need to come from the left and thus progress itself is progressive. His other term for what we now seem routinely derided as the “elite” (universities, mass media, the public sector) is the Cathedral – progressivism as religion.

Yarvin’s solution to this long march to a progressive future in the arms of an academic priesthood is the restoration of the monarchy – the strong leader, backed by aristocrats and big business rather than democracy supported by a professoriat. I laugh whenever I think of that – then I look at the court of Donald Trump and stop laughing. Yarvin is on record as calling for a “CEO as king”: he suggested Elon Musk.

The reaction to this critique among the more mainstream right was the huge resurgence of the “free speech on campus” debates last seen in the mid 80s. You can’t talk about this without talking about The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, a call for academic freedom that led to much closer state attention being paid to what should and should not be said on campus.

This is different to the earlier, Reaganite attacks on left wing ideas that simply should not ever be expressed. I like to characterise it as an interventionist approach to the marketplace of ideas: despite the appeals to Galileo (who, for the last time, was resoundingly not put to death by the Catholic Church for suggesting the earth moved round the sun) most attention has been paid to ensuring older (quasi-reactionary) ideas persist in the face of new and challenging thinking.

Of course, we’re reheating old news here – self-published books and lengthy rambling blogs from the early 00s, which hit the remnants of the thoughtful commentariat in about 2016. But Vance’s opportunity angle is new, and worth examining via a case study.

Kemi Chameleon

One thing everyone now knows about Kemi Badenoch is that she didn’t go to Oxford.

As a pitch for a politician it is an odd (if identifiable- very few people went to Oxford, those who did will no doubt tell you otherwise) choice. But she uses the story to make a point popular with Conservative voters – about the state holding back individual aspirations.

It was a point made in profiles throughout her first run for the Conservative leadership. For example, the Telegraph tells it like this:

Nigerian-born Mrs Badenoch, said she had been encouraged to go into Stem subjects by her family, but had been warned off applying for Oxford or Cambridge by teachers who told her ‘they don’t take people like you’.

The “people like you” comment is left dangling – it’s not clear whether the insinuation is classism (we’ve all heard the story about how she worked at McDonald’s to raise some extra cash while studying at an FE college in Morden, which is how she became – very briefly – working class) or straightforward racism. But it is clearer to see the whole tale as an attack on a low aspirations culture in state schools serving socially mixed areas.

Or at least, that’s what she doubled down on. And this was documented in a TEDx talk she gave in Euston in 2011, titled “the culture of low aspirations.”

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

When Olukemi Adegoke (as she then was known) returned to the UK from Nigeria in 1996 she was on her own – sent to stay with a family friend by her parents (GP Femi Adegoke and professor of physiology Feyi Adegoke) following political instability in her home country throughout the 1990s.

She attended Phoenix College (initially known as Merton Sixth Form College) – which was as the name suggests a sixth form college, not an FE college. This was a smallish college, continually struggling to recruit, with 364 16-18 pupils on the roll in 1997. Adegoke describes this as “just the local state school for people wanting to do vocational courses.”

That said results were broadly average for an English sixth form at the time – and the college had some established links to universities at the time (including Surrey, Sussex, Brunel, and Kingston). A total of 24 A levels were offered (22 by 1999), though the report notes that these “are more restricted than in other local further education and sixth form colleges.”

Olukemi Adegoke wanted to be a doctor, like her parents (as we’ve already noted, her father was a doctor – her mother was an academic physiologist, suggesting that she may well have had a doctorate but she was most likely not a medical doctor). Famously Kemi was told that “medicine is really difficult” and perhaps she should consider nursing.

It’s difficult to argue that the first part of this statement was incorrect – medicine is a difficult course to get into and a difficult subject to study. As Adegoke had arrived only recently from overseas, it is fair to assume the college did not have much evidence of her prior attainment and capacity – there are few 16 year olds you can confidently predict would land the A,A,A at A level that would have been needed to get to medical school (and indeed Oxbridge) in the 90s.

Scholarship child

This is where the story gets odd. In 2020 she told the Spectator that she had been offered a part-scholarship to Stanford University to study medicine as a 16 year old in Nigeria, but she was unable to take it up. As is typical in the US, medicine is available at Stanford at graduate school level – there’s no pre-med at Stanford and certainly not one for 16 year olds. Stanford does have a “summer college academy scholarship” available to international 16 year olds – but it’s a thing you apply to and you need evidence of the funding in place before you apply.

Careers provision at Phoenix College was provided by the local careers service, which was “enthusiastic and committed” if “short staffed” according to the 1999 FEFC report – a little over half of students entered higher education around the time Kemi was studying in the late 90s. You’d think that her earlier offer of a Stanford scholarship would maybe have come up in conversation at some point.

According to Michael Ashcroft’s book, Kemi ended up with a B and two Ds at A level (just like me, as it happens!). This was nowhere near Oxford standard – indeed, if her predicted grades were a little above that there would have been very little point in applying, which was most likely the advice she was actually given. Her results were not sufficient to get a place at her UCAS first choice university, Warwick. She subsequently took MEng at Sussex focused on computer systems- entry requirements at the time were B,B,B with one of those grades including maths.

So the Kemi lore (of potential thwarted) and the documentation don’t quite match up. But what we take from this is not just that she went on to an excellent course at an excellent university (and her higher education did not end there). But most people stop telling “I could have gone to Oxford” stories fairly quickly. The persistence of this tale, and the frequent retellings, are an appeal to the ideal of genius stymied by rules that nominally existed for “her own good”.

Bureaucratic class dismissed

These days Kemi still peddles a very similar higher education mythology – and it is worth taking a few moments to unpick the curious worldview of Conservativism in Crisis: a pamphlet based on a forthcoming book called Your new rulers: the rise of the bureaucratic class.

The idea of a bureaucratic class is a classic piece of political othering, all too familiar from modern populist campaigning around the world. In this episode we learn that the very worst people are those that administer government regulations.

Increasing numbers of middle-class jobs relate more to government rules than goods and services bought and sold in the market. This close relationship with government and regulation creates a different economic, social, cultural and political reality for much of the urban middle class in the UK and wider West

These people apparently took over the left during the “intellectual renaissance” of the 1980s – although we get references to Burnham’s Managerial Revolution and Kristol’s ideas of a “new class” as forerunners. To cut a long story, written very much in the rambling style of a final year undergraduate thesis, short – the contention is that we’d all be a lot better off without this chunk of society interfering with people getting on and doing stuff.

Mutant star goat

For me, the more accurate parallel is from Douglas Adams’ story of the Golgafrinchans in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, one of the series that began with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Facing an (as it turned out) largely imaginary societal catastrophe, the Golgafrinchans built three huge spaceships to transport their people from a supposedly doomed planet to a less doomed one.

The idea was that into the first ship, the ‘A’ ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; then into the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things; and then into the ‘B’ ship – that’s us – would go everyone else, the middle men you see

In Adams’ conception this was a way for the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population – neither “A” nor “C” Arks ever left, and those portions of society lived “full, rich, and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

This is just science fiction of course, the idea of inciting a society – in reacting to an entirely imaginary crisis – to come up with a convoluted and implausible set of reasons and motivations to spend time and energy attempting to rid themselves of peers that they don’t agree with is one that would be anathema to any serious party of government.

Badenoch’s “B” Ark would contain – specifically – university administrators (and universities in general), human resource departments, regulators of all stripes (including the shadowy “green lobby”), and anyone seeking or offering support for mental health issues. It’s an odd grouping, but it does have a kind of twisted internal logic. The claim is that these people are destroying capitalism (and thus growth across the West) with rules, interventions, and controls – all based on a fundamentally flawed perception that people are essentially “fragile” and market forces need to be tamed or checked.

The efficiency of the “bureaucratic classes” framing is that it plays into the everyday workplace frustrations of what can seem like arbitrary and pettifogging rules. Wouldn’t it be easier if, as no less a thinker than Mike Wazowski put it, all this paperwork could just blow away? As appeals to build a coalition of voters go, it has potential – who wants to build a reasonable defence of the worst excesses of red tape or health and safety?

The progressive, left, cause therefore is the killjoy in opposition to a right wing cause that – the “enemy of enterprise” (for Cameron), the “anti-growth coalition” (for Truss), or Johnson’s “doomsters and gloomsters”.

This country needs a social engineer

We are used to frequent Conservative attacks on the public and charitable sectors for similar reasons – Badenoch’s innovation is to extend the opprobrium to the elements of the private sector that deal with regulation. And universities, which could be argued to span all three sectors, come in for a specific and wide-ranging attack.

Graduate numbers were just 77,000 a year in 1990 but rose by a factor of nearly 10 to 750,000 or so by 2020-21. An even larger explosion took place in postgraduate degrees, which rose from 31,000 in 1990 to 493,000 in the same period, up by a colossal 1,500 per cent. This rise in students has been accompanied by a huge increase in university staff. In Britain, the sector employs 500,000 staff directly. Just half of these are academics: the rest are a rising bureaucratic class that surrounds the higher education sector.

It’s worth filleting those numbers a little – the 77,000 first degree graduates in 1990 omits those who graduated with a degree-equivalent award from a polytechnic. Just four years later, in the first published HESA data (for 1994-45) there were 287,798 first degree graduates. Though the sector may well employ around 500,000 staff directly (and around half that would indeed be the number of academic staff) but we don’t really know for sure because we as a nation don’t deem it important to collect that data.

So we clearly have a bureaucratic class within the university sector, but the way the state has supported the work of universities also sparks comment.

The most obvious way in which the state promoted university education was by underwriting it while it became a self-sustaining sector. In 2016-17, for example, around 61 per cent of university finance was from government-backed fees, and a further 11 per cent was from the state directly. Certain areas were now declared as ‘graduate professions’, raising a huge new barrier for people trying to get good jobs. The state has driven this forward, while the promised gains in economic growth have been nowhere to be seen.

Add Vance HE

This is where we draw the line back to the other end of the JD Vance critique. Because so many jobs are now graduate jobs, goes the argument, any young person looking to get on in life needs to get a degree (complete with eye-watering debt and political indoctrination). Again, this is an impressive campaigning point as it is based on such a commonplace observation – who among us has not witnessed well meaning relatives telling young people to “get a trade”?

And it is correct to say that graduate debt (something added to by every major political party) is an important counterbalance to any thinking about life chances, particularly if your ambition is to serve society in one of the ways that doesn’t attract a stellar salary (nursing, teaching, social work, creative art). And even if you do go to university, imagine if it was the wrong one – netting you regret and debt rather than prestige and power?

Now, if we want to get into the weeds of occupation coding, lifetime salary projections, the largely arbitrary nature of application decisions and institutional prestige, and the chimera of a “graduate job”, Wonkhe is very much the publication for you. All of this stuff is arguable, but you can’t argue against experience with data definitions. There are so many graduates now that we all know some for whom a degree was a stumbling block rather than a foundation stone.

The cross-party political pivot away from a desire for more graduates at all costs to a more broadly founded skills landscape, is a political reification of what is a growing consensus that we can’t just keep expanding university provision. But the wilder critiques of expansion are not as universal in scope. The characterisation that jobs have been declared “graduate professions” by some imaginary Office for Graduate Jobs doesn’t quite wash – professional and statutory bodies declared that roles required a degree, and ONS codes jobs as requiring a degree based on job adverts and qualifications held by those doing the job. In fact, the trend recently has been to remove (law, as one prominent example) or soften (architecture) qualification-focused professional requirements.

There’s a suspicion too, around the locus of value within university study. Is it a skills effect or a signalling effect? When Badenoch wanted to go to Oxford was it to access better teaching or more resources? – because if she wanted to be a software engineer or a medical professional this may not be what she would have got. Or was it to be able to say she had been to Oxford? The “poor quality courses” of frequent debate are often those that lead to directly valuable if poorly respected employment: we need good estate agents and golf course managers for the good of our economy, we need public sector workers and artists for the good of our society. The fact that we don’t pay or respect these people enough is beside the point.

Trashing the Cathedral

It’s only when you mix in the indoctrination argument that you can shift from a clear need to reform tertiary education to a call to dismantle the cathedral. To quote Vance again:

Do the universities disseminate truth and knowledge? do they train the next generation of young minds to actually anticipate the world as it is to apply first principles to critical and difficult problems? i think the answer is obviously no, that’s obviously not what the universities do.

And forward to Badenoch, making the same point in a subtler way:

The priming of the younger generation around identity politics is preparing them for a job in the bureaucratic class, or if not directly such a job, to support, transmit and vote for this new ideology… If you want to build an economy where people are prepared to take risks, where they can strike out and be resilient, this is not compatible with the progressive ideology and the belief in protecting fragile people rather than building resilience.

As the opposition leader also notes: “There is no division between social and economic issues.” Driving progressive thought out of universities, or minimising exposure to university indoctrination, is not just seen as an ideological battle. For Badenoch, Vance, and others, it is a prerequisite for innovation and thus economic growth.

The return of the king

Both politicians subscribe to what we might call the myth of innovation. Broadly stated, this is the idea that economic growth comes from invention. The UK foundation myth is situated in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, where – as David Starkey fondly imagines – the seeds were sown for “the extraordinary flowering of the newly United Kingdom of Great Britain, which invented modernity at home and conquered the world abroad”: and you’d better believe Kemi Badenoch is on board with this interpretation.

In a widely reported speech at TheCityUK’s conference earlier this year she said:

It is not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution started in England a few decades following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 … Monarchy is bound by the rule of law, including repaying its debts and this certainty that’s given to business, as it was then, changes the economic game. Interest required on the national debt fell, private lending surges, the stock market grows rapidly, financial services takes off, property rights become embedded and eventually we have more than a social and economic revolution. We have an industrial one.

This, then, is the British talent for invention unleashed. Unshackled from theocracy, our then-new nation (for a brief shining moment) led the world. About a hundred years later – when the industrial revolution is accurately reckoned to have happened by most scholars.

The missing chunk of the story is where the capital that powered these revolutions came from. It came (as Richard Murphy eloquently suggests) from pre-existing wealth: feudal land ownership, patronage, expropriation, rents, and exploitation. To get properly post-colonial, it was at the expense of and to the detriment of other nations and other people. An inconvenient fact that Badenoch attempts to cancel in that very same speech. Of course, ancient universities drank deeply from this particular fountainhead too – although they are at least beginning to acknowledge this grim legacy.

In other words, it’s rich white guys all the way down – and whereas it would be very difficult not to be proud of what Britain achieved technologically (and latterly socially) during the industrial revolution it is not going to happen again if we hand the keys to the nation back to the latest crop of rich white guys.

These days, innovation is generally sustaining (rather than disruptive, or breakthrough). It is additive rather than transformative, and the university contribution to this innovation – and equally importantly to the safeguards on innovation – comes in multiple small steps rather than one giant leap. It’s less exciting, less buccaneering if you like. Dominic Cummings once destroyed a major political party and took the UK out of a key trading block just to build ARIA and make-believe that he could be an inventor just like Wallace and Gromit.

Reactionary hauntology

Curtis Yarvin’s critiques of conservatism are more interesting than his critiques of higher education. For him, conservative ideas are just the progressive ideas of between 20 and 50 years ago. His imagined populist restorationist movement was designed as a way to free society from its progressive past as a way to plan a new future.

But what is notable is the way he harks back to an even more distant past to achieve it. The conservative critique of higher education is similarly nostalgic: in the really old days of course, we prospered because aristocrats had brilliant ideas, but even in living memory university was free and for the “elite” – this being an upper slice of the population in terms of academic attainment and the baked in social advantaged required to take advantage of an innate talent.

But it is not 1688 any more than it is 1820 or 1930. Just as society is unlikely to choose of its own volition to go back to mid-century social mores, innovation has gotten a bit more complicated since the industrial revolution. The weakness of the populist right is nostalgia, and the modern project of the university could be to prove nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.