Welcome to the alien nation

There is a tendency among commentators right now to describe the currently graduating class of students as “unlucky”.

You can see why – but it’s a dangerous framing. We might well regard a period containing the aftermath of Brexit, the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, industrial action and the onset of generative AI as unusual – but the way in which decision makers have responded to them have been choices.

More often than not, those choices have been about deprioritising, defunding or demonising students, where keeping the financialised higher education show on the road has taken precedence over protecting or securing their interests.

I don’t think it’s unfair, for example, to suggest that students – whether they pay fees or not – have the right to the teaching and services promised, to have their work assessed fairly and robustly, and to graduate on time.

Regardless of whatever else there is to say about industrial action and the various hotpotch of regulatory bodies around the UK designed to either secure those rights or hear students’ arguments that they’ve not been met – and the baffling silence from most of them on the MAB in particular – I also don’t think it’s unfair to say that the “system” designed to protect and secure students’ interests amidst that industrial dispute has failed.

Ministers, whose purse strings are key to resolving the dispute, barely lift a finger. Regulators and funders appear to be pretending it’s not happening. Locally, every university has different terms and conditions. All seem to ignore Competition and Markets Authority guidance on limiting liability over industrial action.

Complaints are deliberately drawn out and individualised to reduce impact with impunity. Most universities in England don’t regard industrial action even as a risk in their Student “Protection” Plan.

Few students know their rights, few are brave or energetic enough to enforce them, every regulatory body seems to point at everyone else, those raising material that amount to complaints are treated like it’s interesting feedback, and vanishingly few get redress.

Even if you take the view that the impacts haven’t been as widespread as some say they have, for those impacted it’s a spectacular and remarkable failure, is the main reason the dispute is still on, and needs a deep and urgent review.

Forgiveness

The thing about the pandemic is that even though providers frequently played fast and loose with the law as ministers egged on doomed complaints to get through the news cycle, students were pretty forgiving.

Even now when a bit of distance makes it clear that their lifetimes of debt were required to keep the financial show on the road – hence tricking them into fees and housing contracts only to confine them to tiny box rooms amidst a major mental health crisis – they are pretty sanguine.

But now, every time I explain the law or the various frameworks or bodies that talk about the student interest to student reps, the world opens up, the eyebrow is raised and the look in their eyes is “yes but none of it works Jim”.

Courses morph into shadows of former selves and become nothing like as promised. Services are stretched beyond all reasonable capacity. Promises over time that they will be supported by the state financially or by their university are allowed to evaporate. Stealth charges to loan terms and conditions see them paying much more for much less.

Personal tutor systems end up as 30 people round robins. Assessment gets the most cursory of feedback. Complaints are paid off with NDAs. International students’ need for somewhere to live comes as a surprise. Disabled students have to repeat the implications of their condition at every turn, failed over and over again by a stretched and often dismissive system.

When I tell people about the supposed minimums in the QAA Quality Code or the Office for Students’ B Conditions, or explain what was in their prospectus when they applied, they just laugh ruefully. Sure, there are individual wins and individual crusaders who get redress. But take a step back, and many are being mugged off.

Government doesn’t push the buttons or pull the levers because in the end, it knows it’s partly its fault for draining the unit of resource. Egged on by their insurers and legal advisors, universities take little decisions every week that get further from compliance or principle on the basis that that one, on that day, is the least worst of five options – or at least the least risky.

And everyone smiles and says they’re doing their best and appeals to students’ sense of empathy and partnership to excuse failure.

The great resignation

The problem is this time it isn’t working. It’s not that they are universally angry or especially keen to pick a fight. It’s that they are almost resigned to being let down by a never ending parade of funders, regulators, politicians and officials who barely listen, let alone understand, and occasionally make promises that can’t be kept. They’re all the same.

The deep and visceral lack of faith in the state and its apparatus and organising model amongst the students I meet is astonishing. They’ll nod along and often work in partnership, but they don’t believe a word of most of it. Their acquisition of structural social capital is at rock bottom – because they don’t trust any of the structures we imagine they’ll engage in.

In many ways it’s generating a kind of new communitarianism. They won’t listen to us, they don’t understand us, they lie to us, they can’t or won’t secure our interests, and they demonise us even when we try to make our world more tolerant or safe.

“So we’ll do it ourselves”. Like they always have to do.

Long term, this will have huge costs for a set of structures that always fails them. The assumption – that they’ll suck it up and grow up and thank us one day – is deeply faulty. They are fatally disconnected from all the things that might imagine they should care about. And who can blame them?

The danger is that the communitarianism they often bodge together to get through university morphs into a deeper individualism of survival hustles.

And it’s not daft to imagine that the generational fault lines we see now – prioritising the old and their economics and their values and rarely daring to challenge students’ demonisation and prioritisation – will one day switch on their part into a deep and widespread rejection of the establishment’s interests, and others’ interests in general.

Nothing works. They don’t care why. But soon they will just refuse to pay for it. The one thing they’ll have in common is refusing to pay into a system that has never done anything for them. Mansplaining how hard everyone tried in a broken system will sound like white noise.

Most of all I just want to say sorry.

Averting disasters

Take the ”act of god” framing of the various disasters impacting them. The point about disasters is that you investigate what went wrong and do all you can to avoid them in the future.

Where’s the review of how students were treated over Covid? Where’s the review of how badly the student housing market treats them? Where’s the review of how little we expect them to live on? Where’s the review of how they’re treated at work?

Where’s the review of how massification is panning out? Why do almost all student suicide investigations get conducted in a shroud of secrecy? Why do we still allow NDAs for non harassment complaints? Why is a bonafide crisis in mental health met with equivocation, pitiful pennies of funding, a broken youth health service and yet another charter?

How did this country get to a point where we tricked students into paying for halls, wrecked their mental health, and then told them not to live in those halls for the good of the country without universally funding a refund on them?

And if that industrial action is really not allowed to be in delivery exemption clauses in student contracts, why hasn’t every university written to all students to delete them? If on the other hand industrial action really is an act of God, why has it been happening every year for the best part of a decade?

Where’s the apology that isn’t coupled with pointing at another grown up in the superstructure and saying “they did it”?

Imagine other disasters, where the whole point is that the state steps in to prevent more of them. It’s one of the basic functions of the state. To make sure there isn’t another ruinous flood or another disastrous pandemic. Yet it’s reached the point where planning for industrial action and its impact on students is now utterly routine.

I often tell this story about when I was an SU officer and the auditor came in. He took me to one side and said “Jim, do realise you’re planning to have money stolen out of the safe”. I was like, eh? What? He pointed out the line in the budget. Something utterly unacceptable had just become routine.

I think about it a lot. One of my kids gets literally nothing from the state in terms of education or healthcare. He’s not angry, it’s just his reality. One day though, someone will try to get him to pay taxes for all of it though. He’ll tell them to get lost. And what am I supposed to do to convince him apart from emotional blackmail about those who need the state more than we do?

It’s a whole generation listening to self entitled pontification about things that never did them any harm, who mainly think “well none of them ever did me or us any good” back. It’s worse than war or attacks. They just won’t care. And why should they?

Building back worse

Anger, you see, is related to caring. When they’re angry about the university or politicians or whatnot, there’s almost always an agenda of improvement. Even the student protests of 2010 were infused with hope – on the basis that “Another education is possible”.

But what I sense is a new kind of alienation, a kind of polite coping with the shit show and muddling through for a while because this is just how it is. No conflict with it, no rows with it, no anger with it, no action on it, no hope it could ever change. They don’t want to make it better, or save it, or protect it, because it never gets better. It only gets worse.

They won’t burn it down. They’ll just nod along sagely and ignore it as it burns, churning out doublespeak that they will increasingly ignore. It’s like when people leave an area and never go back. They’re not angry about it being rubbish but they’re also rarely motivated to go back and fix it. They don’t care.

Generationally, one day the power in this country will be like a kind of forgotten, left behind town, preaching its values and value to people that never saw or experienced it. That, for example, is exactly their reaction to the supposed value of the value of free speech and its weaponisation by those who neither engage with nor care about them or the harms that come to them as a result.

One day, a profoundly tired and nostalgia-obsessed state and its arms length institutions will just be left to die. The pendulum will swing. The country will eventually become… younger. And the existing political class and institutions like universities won’t be invited, or thanked, or forgiven, or even thought about really. And why should they?

Thanked for what? Shit in the rivers? A broken housing market? Doing nothing to avert the climate crisis? Enabling predatory staff to hit on students? Making them pay for 40 years for Zoom uni when we can’t even mark the 10k word dissertation they’ve put their heart and soul into without claiming that “robust academic standards have been upheld” when it’s obvious that the work has been marked in a panic by someone who can’t even use the right spelling for “piece” in the four word feedback they’ve got?

Even the tiny bit of subsidy left going into the loan system in England is used to demonise them for picking the wrong course, with the rest increasingly paid for by looting the family wealth of those we imagine they’ll foster effective relationships with from the global south.

How do you think international students respond when their university enforces the Home Office’s immigration regs? How do you think students will react when their university starts protecting the rights of trans-baiting racists who never quite do enough to constitute harassment? They don’t see the predicament that I hear folk say they’re in. All students see is the system – a broken, ineffective and insincere system.

And don’t think this is about “demon VCs” or whatever. There’s a reason I’m sceptical about the intensification of industrial action of the sort we’ve seen recently, and isn’t because I don’t profoundly support the cause. There’s no point in me remixing that Sam Seabourn speech on education and the silver bullet.

I just think it nostalgically pulls at levers that don’t work any more. The state doesn’t care and universities are institutionally and financially prevented from caring if students keep being messed about – and students can’t do anything about it if they are.

The sad part is that most student reps I meet aren’t picking a side or are interested in doing so. They just look on, baffled. And yes of course there are exceptions, and heroes, and skirmishes, and banners. But mainly? There’s indifference.

Student success

When you ask students why they’ve done well or not well, there’s three sorts of answer. One is to call out luck or fate. One is to point at their own efforts or failure. They almost never point at extrinsic factors.

Of course there’s the odd hero coursemate or a great lecturer. But overall it’s never the apparatus because all the people in the systems either look like they’ve gone above and beyond that system, or evade accountability because of that system.

They look at almost everyone in every corner of it and think “why does your reputation stop you doing the right thing”, and then they crack on and build theirs by doing the right thing for each other. They look at those in authority and feel sorry for them.

Pity is such a weird thing. It’s a powerful feeling but really hard to sustain, because it’s shot through with a sort of vicious “ultimately it’s their own fault” thing.

Maybe this is just something that has to happen, and maybe something else is coming. But I think the assumption that one day they’ll inherit the family shop and cherish it and its history and recognise the good it’s done over the years is over. It’s been too long, and the pockets of resistance have been too easy to crush. They’ll just board it all up, and get on with their lives.

They don’t care. And why should they? They’re too busy caring about and for each other.