Liberal values at a time of neo-liberalism

There is now a consensus, across the political spectrum of English political parties, that universities are not what they should be. From the political Right come accusations of ‘irrelevance’, claims that universities teach ‘useless’ subjects and do not equip students for the market place of ‘real’ life. These views have been translated into policy and as everyone in an English university knows, funding has been withdrawn from teaching for Band C and D subjects (essentially the Arts and Social Sciences) and much reduced for subjects in Band A and B (the Natural Sciences and Medicine). At the same time fees, and student debt, have increased considerably, and there is no lessening of absurd regimes of regulation. Thus, the vision of ‘real life’ that has been imposed upon universities is one where the implicit and explicit value of some subjects is abolished and the accumulation of debt normalised.

In an ideal world this next paragraph would then turn to an account of the policies and political tactics of those opposed to these brutal assaults on the teaching of the educated understanding of the world in which we live, not least in terms of our various histories and the diverse attempts that we have made to record and understand it. But herein lies a sad truth: as we look around the spectrum of higher education in England in 2013, there is little that can be described as a widely supported, coherent or assertive defence of the values of liberal universities that is connected to a liberal and democratic appreciation of higher education. We cannot turn to the Labour Party or to the trade union for higher education (the UCU) because both, in their different ways, are committed to those Labour Party values expressed in 2009, that universities should ‘make a bigger contribution to economic recovery and future growth’. That statement is re-iterated, critically, in an essay by the eminent historian Keith Thomas (2011) in which he calls for universities to reaffirm ‘what they stand for’. So far it would appear that this call, made in December 2011, has fallen on relatively few ears.

Yet the owners of some of the ears that this call has fallen on have responded in ways that are problematic in themselves for anyone who believes in either democratic access to a liberal higher education or the values of that education in itself. Hence, the argument of this paper is that in England the defence of liberal values in universities has come to have much in common with neo-liberal discourses about the merit of ‘competition’, the value of private rather than public institutions, the assumption of the authority of the location and definition of liberal values within, and by, elite universities, and an overriding sense of, as is also the case with many aspects of neo-liberalism, a narrative of ‘return’, be it to a place of restricted access to high education or to a limited participation by the state in the governance of universities.

These various values can be seen in a number of examples of recent interventions in English higher education. First, the attempt (largely, it would appear, the brainchild of the philosopher A.C. Grayling) to set up a ‘private’ university in London at which students paying fees of about £20,000 a year would be privileged to be taught by various well-known academics. (Teaching, in this context, has to be a somewhat problematic word since many well-known academics may be willing to give single lectures to demonstrate the value of their own expertise but might be less likely to wish to engage in a year-long contact with undergraduates in which seminar teaching and the marking of essays is involved.) The second, and more initially apparently open-minded response, has been the establishment of the Council for the Defence of British Universities, a body which might sound potentially critical of recent government policies but which appears to be embedded in many of the more traditional aspects of the English ruling class, namely that its members are largely male, Oxbridge educated and much preoccupied with the welfare of the most powerful and socially exclusive universities. (See http://cdbu.org.uk.)

In the Olympics of English (and to a large extent British) academic life, it has been apparent for some time that many of the gold medals go to those universities which are the most well provided for in terms of both social and economic privilege. Much of the work done in these institutions has an immense value for many aspects of national and international life, but what is publicly rewarded by existing forms of academic competition, notably the REF, is publication rather than research. As anyone familiar with current British universities would point out, a great deal of teaching is now done by postgraduate students, the new insecure proletariat of the universities but essentially the group which has made possible the massive expansion of student numbers in the past 20 years. Many of the students now paying £9000 a year for an undergraduate degree level course might usefully sit down, do some basic long division and work out the relationship between the hours of teaching that they receive and the rewards to those who teach them.

But these questions about the very conditions of the existence of a democratically available liberal education do not appear in the public documents of the Council, nor are they much remarked upon by the two best-known critics of the policies of the present government, Keith Thomas and more particularly Stefan Collini, who has written – with great eloquence and scholarship – of the demerits of recent policies towards the universities (Collini, 2010; see also 2012, 2013). But in their various remarks both men marginalise, in the most polite way, the post 1992 universities and in doing so do much to endorse that separation, and competition, within the whole higher education sector, which successive governments have done much to promote. In these ongoing exercises of separation what comes to the fore is research expertise, and it is assumed that the core experience of undergraduate students (who make up the majority of students at English universities) will be better or worse through the comparative merits of the research publications of the academics in their home university. However, many undergraduates will never be taught by a research ‘star’ and those university websites which speak enthusiastically of the research achievements of their academic staff may have little or nothing to do with the experiences of the average undergraduate.

The forcing of academics into various forms of competition (other than those implicit in academic life) has received some criticism, from wholesale rejection to critique of the method of the exercise. But the evidence from the results of the RAE/REF suggests a close relationship between material privilege, academic and social ‘capital’, and success in those exercises, arguably showing a way in which the very concept of league tables negates the ideal of ensuring democratic access to consistent and shared standards across the sector. An emphasis on separation does not foster co-operation but distance.

If we cannot accept and challenge these unpalatable truths and realities, we do little to engage with the current circumstances of higher education; indeed one of the characteristics of much public discussion about higher education is that there is little comment or debate about how education is actually being conducted across the sector. Arguments tend to focus on cost (cost to the student and the lack of government support most particularly) and the function of the universities, where comments tend to be divided between those who want a close relationship between universities and the ‘real’ world and those who defend the practices and assumptions of an already rare, and to a certain extent fantasised, academic milieu. Whilst many speeches on graduation days tend to endorse the values of a liberal education, English politicians (from all parties) have long been identifying universities as the training establishments for the needs of the labour market. In this brutal world , the most privileged can continue to assert many of their rights to the authorship of their own world in much the same way as neo-liberalism allows others to do elsewhere. Here the argument could become corralled into an attack on the very different degrees of privilege in English higher education. That is not the major intention here: rather it is more to suggest that not examining the relationship of the defence of a certain kind of academic space to the material privilege that supports it carries with it the unintended, but hugely important, consequence of collusion with those whose policies explicitly reproduce social inequality. Nor, it should be said, is what follows here in any sense an attack on the idea of a liberal education: the problem is the coincidence of the defence of this form of education with associations to privilege and the assumption that universities are in some sense ‘separate’ from other forms of social inequality.

Any examination of the ways in which liberal values in universities are under attack must begin with the various structures and policies that have been put in place over the past 20 years by successive governments. An over-riding common feature of these policies is that of the belief in the value of competition between both individual academics and individual universities. When a postgraduate student wrote to the Times Higher Education Supplement asking why so few tenured and apparently secure academics were willing to put their names (or their energy) to any campaign to defend either liberal values or other intrusive policies towards the universities, she/he wrote:

The academics I talk to are all unhappy and morale is low, but I have not been successful in persuading my departmental colleagues to refuse to implement measures they consider anti-educational. (Cantlie, 2013)

It is unlikely that this experience is exceptional, for academics have now been forced into so many different contexts of competition, with so many sanctions against resisting the various accompanying pressures, that their will towards collective action has been weakened. Thus, it is not that this letter writer was wrong in her/his conclusions about the morale of academics (in most weeks the pages of the THES carry similar comments) but that the need to compete for notice and promotion in academic life is so hard wired into the DNA of many academics (and further exaggerated by encouragements to ‘impact’ and academic participation in the celebrity culture) that, at least initially, further forms of competition too often fall on very fertile ground. The very structures that oppress us are also, all too often, the structures that we cling to most fervently.

These comments could become the prolegomena to a lament for the lost days of the academy, for that better world in which academic life was less intensely regulated and governed; less conforming, in all ways, to all Foucault’s (1984) worst expectations of the post Enlightenment world, many of which, in the views of many academics, have now been confirmed in the conduct of British academia. Even the internal architecture of universities has moved towards Foucault’s panoptic vision, with newly built academic offices organised in ways which maximise the visibility of academics and minimise the extent of individual privacy.

This brief account of the English (and again, to a large extent the British) academy could therefore feed into those various miserabilist accounts of the 21st century, many of which come from various positions across the spectrum of the political Right. We have, on the one hand, political parties such as UKIP and the British National Party putting forward relatively simple ‘return’ narratives (largely based on the politics of racial difference and exclusion) whilst on the other, more sophisticated works such as The Challenge of Affluence by Avner Offer (2006) produce considerable material to sustain an argument which is also characterised by a nostalgia for a departed world. But if we name these accounts for what they are, and for what they support, which is essentially a return to various forms of privilege, be it of class or gender or race, we could open up not a greater space for more mourning for a departed academy but other ways of thinking about the possibilities of change in the universities. Various indications of thinking in this direction have come from across the Atlantic.

The two most recently published papers that could inspire and re-energise British debates about universities are first, the report from Harvard University (2013) titled ‘The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future’, and second, the document produced by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013) titled ‘The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive and Secure Nation’. Both these documents are concerned with what both institutions have perceived about undergraduate student choice in the United States, that students are increasingly turning away from arts (and indeed many social science) subjects in order to graduate with degrees relevant to further vocational training. There are three aspects of these reports which might encourage, if not the present Coalition Government of the UK, then at least academics to consider universities and their future in ways that have some democratic possibilities.

We have seen that in the UK, arguments against the loss of funding to arts subjects have largely come from those institutions which are most closely entrenched in the replication of class privilege and in which the ‘cultural capital’ of the institution is sufficient to minimise the impact of a non-vocational degree subject. A form of the acceptable intellectual segregation of higher education is visible in these accounts: the most privileged have somehow the ‘right’ to study the arts, the humanities and the ‘soft’ social sciences but the less privileged, to put it in its simplest terms, do something ‘useful’. What is striking about the documents from the United States is that they seem to be inspired by a form of liberalism which does not assume that class-based privilege should dictate student choice and, perhaps more importantly, the humanities and the social sciences have a value for what is described as a ‘secure’ nation. It is, arguably, very important here that a suggestion is being made that the better we know ourselves, the better we might understand both our own world and that of others.

So to turn to those three ways in which the papers from the United States might inform British debate and discussion. The first is that, as suggested above, there is – in both the documents – a recognition of the content and the place of what we might broadly call ‘knowledge’ in the 21st century. This involves the acknowledgement of the availability of information in the 21st century and that the crucial task facing anyone is not so much collecting information as being able to assess it. The second is the endorsement of education in the arts and the humanities in particular as a place where people come to encounter the possibilities of the imagination and the imagined: indeed, to recognise that the world does not come ready packaged and formed but that it is the product of both individual and collective imagination. From ways of ‘imagining’ the person to ways of ‘imagining’ society, what arts and humanities education can do is to de-naturalise the pervasive and socially and politically intensely dangerous idea that society is in some sense ‘natural’. This recognition of the ‘science’ of society is for many people the underpinning of democracy, itself an idea that had to be ‘imagined’ before it could have any further reality. Far from assuming that the arts and humanities are some kind of ‘escape’ from the real world, a more appropriate recognition of these subjects would be that they allow students to encounter an often ignored aspect of life in the global world in the 21st century: that human imagination made this world.

The third and final point which these two reports make with some emphasis is that of the importance of interdisciplinarity in undergraduate education. The emphasis on this issue is greater in the report of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but there is a shared view that all stages of education need to develop various skills, both inside and outside the classroom. If we take the case of teaching and research in higher education, there are various examples of the ways in which restrictive disciplinary boundaries inhibit the possibilities of research. For example (and the work of Sarah Franklin, 2007, and Hilary Rose, 1994, provides specific examples), the sociological study of science, and of scientific practices, has enlarged the ways in which we might think of questions of ‘evidence’ and the often fluid boundaries between social and scientific knowledge. Equally, the teaching of economics as if the economy was in some sense a world of its own makes the study of economics intensely vulnerable to the absence of the consideration of social factors (not least those of caring responsibilities).

These possibilities about what could be done about arts and humanities education in the universities have one further facet which should be of note to everyone in the UK. It is the assertion in both the documents that a liberal education is for everyone and of value to everyone: certainly one of the documents comes from what is the best endowed and most prestigious university in the world but its paper suggests that a liberal education is of value to everyone, to every university and in every classroom.

In suggesting that there are ways forward for the defence of what is generally known as a liberal education we encounter, from a comparison of different forms of engagement with university politics on two sides of the Atlantic, both the different impact of class assumptions and habits on universities and, perhaps, different understandings of the term ‘liberal’ and its connections to a wider civic culture. It is interesting too to note that many of the envious glances cast towards universities in the United States by Grayling and others have been focussed on issues about regulation and control: the ‘private’ space of universities that is the subject of envy is of course the private space that keeps others out. But what has not been so widely recognised is that within universities in the United States itself there is a widespread concern about the curriculum and a consensus about democratic access to the kinds of discussion informed by the arts and the social sciences. This, surely, is what the ‘defence’ of the universities should be about.