The exceptional and the ordinary

The contemporary institution fails to understand the real meaning of ‘mass higher education’. A mass higher education should address the concerns of those masses of ‘ordinary people’ who, for whatever reasons, do not attend a university. Instead, the contemporary sector simply admits more individuals from lower social and economic classes. Behind this is a deep suspicion of the intellectual whose knowledge marks them out as intrinsically elitist and not ‘of the people’. An intellectual concerned about everyday life is now seen as suspicious, given the normative belief that a university education is about individual competitive self-advancement. This intellectual is now an enemy of ‘the people’, and incipiently one who might even be regarded as criminal in dissenting from conformity with social norms of neoliberalism. There is a history to this, dating from 1945; and it sets up a contest between two version of the university: one sees it as a centre of humane and liberal values, the other as the site for the production of individuals who conform to and individually benefit from neoliberal greed. The genuine exception is the intellectual who dissents; but dissent itself is now seen as potentially criminal.

Origins, originality, and the privileges of nature

The prevailing cult and culture of managerial audit and measurement systemically translates qualities into quantities. Further, it requires that those measurements be inserted into a form of warfare that we normalise as ‘league-table competitiveness’. The system as a whole then operates in a neo-Hobbesian state of war of all against all, which serves the interests of none and which damages the world’s intellectual and natural ecologies. Ecology is subsumed under economics. This chapter considers what must be done to construct a new model of the institution that will help not only to shape the good society but, even more fundamentally, will help to preserve and sustain the society itself in a time of ecological disaster. What should be the university’s proper relation to the state of nature? The chapter argues that the contemporary institution must reject all forms of political fundamentalism – including especially the dominant prevailing modes of market fundamentalism – if it is to work against any and all forms of political terror. The chapter situates the question of the survival of the university within the abiding question of the survival of the species and of our social existence.

Titles and entitlements: why ‘University’?

Education involves the search for good judgment, and thus also institutes the principles of criticism. It does this in the interests of extending the range of human possibilities and in extending and distributing those possibilities democratically. In this, it is structurally opposed to the logic of privatization as such. This chapter explores how it is that existing social and class privilege has tried to prevent the university from doing this, in the interests of protecting those very privileges. The Browne Review was central to this project. In a peculiar self-contradiction, Browne fundamentally reconstructs the University as an ivory tower institution, one that legitimised privilege by radically reducing the scope and ambit of the university’s roles and social responsibilities. After Browne, the university seeks to entrench the very ideology of privilege, by translating the demands for justice or good judgment into a logic of self-advancement via competition. It institutes the culture of acquisitive individualism or greed over the extension of democracy and freedoms.

Private study

The rise of the managerial class has effected a fundamental reversal of priorities in the university sector, such that faculty now exist primarily in order to serve the demands of management as such. With managerial jargon in the ascendancy, political argument about the nature of the sector falls into cliché; and cliché precludes the yielding of any knowledge that is based in thinking, because it reduces thought to prejudicial clichéd banalities. Inn this state of affairs, there can be little legitimacy for a critical position that might challenge the supposed primacy of economic rationalisation of all aspects of university life and of knowledge. The result is that the privatisation of knowledge and the attendant commercialisation of information assumes a normative force. The university is complicit with a general political trajectory that leads to the corruption of politics and of intellectual work through the improper insertion of financial rationales for all decision-making. The chapter explores the pre-history of this in Thatcherism and Reaganomics; and it demonstrates that the logic of university privatization is essentially a state-sponsored subsidy for the wealthy, and for the ongoing protection of existing privileges.

Introduction

Julien Benda argued in 1946, reprising his 1927 Treason of the Intellectuals, that the intellectual’s primary responsibility was to abstract thought, removing the intellectual from political engagement or ‘passion’. By contrast, Edward Said, essentially extending the thought of Jaspers on the Idea of the University argued that the intellectual’s commitments are absolutely central to her or his identity. In exploring these positions and setting them in their respective historical contexts, this Introduction outlines the ways in which the intellectual has a responsibility towards politics, and exposes the way in which the contemporary university institution conspires to limit the effects of this. The university, today, has a commitment to a specific ideology of market fundamentalism; and the Introduction shows how this rests in prejudice. It thus reveals the fundamental basis on which a contemporary treason of the intellectuals rests, and argues for a rehabilitation of the proper task of the intellectual and of the university.

Preliminary hypotheses towards a manifesto

The ‘social mobility’ agenda permits a society to circumvent the failings that are consequent on its hierarchical class structure. It exists to protect existing unearned privilege and authority, while permitting occasional individuals to be ‘admitted’ to those class privileges. The entire agenda should be scrapped, and the University should dedicate itself instead to a concern for ‘social justice’....

Inflation, democracy, and populism

The crisis in higher education is also simultaneously a crisis in constitutional democracies; and the two are intimately linked. The corruption of language that shapes managerialist discourse enables a corruption in the communications among citizens that are vital in any democracy. Democracy becomes recast first as an alleged ‘will of the people’, but a will whose semantic content is prone to political manipulation. In turn this opens the way to a validation of demagogic populism that masquerades as democracy when it is in fact the very thing that undermines democracy. When the University sector becomes complicit with this – as it is in our times – then it engages in a fundamental betrayal of the actual people in the society it claims to serve. Populism thrives on the celebration of anti-intellectual ignorance and the contempt for expertise, preferring instead the supposedly more ‘natural’ claims of instinctive faith over reason. Lurking within this is a form of class warfare that treats real and actual working class life as contemptible.

Another brick in the wall

Between 1945-1989 we can trace a growing conflation of economic liberalism with social and cultural liberalism, such that social liberalism becomes engulfed by neoliberal capital and subsumed under market fundamentalism. As a consequence, there emerges a political debate about liberal societies – in Popper’s terms, ‘open societies’ – and their relation to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and institutions. However, this misses the point that, when social values are essentially monetized, the institutional values of academic freedom – characterised by an ‘open university’ - are potentially compromised. The chapter examines the historical constitution of the UK’s ‘Open University’ – as an explicitly democratising institution - and sets that against the contemporary logic of zero-sum competition, which envisages the failure and closure of some universities as a sign of the success of the national and global system. The paradox is that, as more universities open, so the range of intellectual options for critical thinking actually diminishes. The consequence is the enclosure of the intellectual commons, and the re-establishment of protected privilege and the legitimization of structural social inequality. Organisations such as the Russell Group embody this entrenching of inequality.