A Christmas Gift from Peter Mandelson

Lord Mandelson is Secretary of State for the Department of Business and Universities. There's a whole list of reason's why he's an objectionable individual, starting with his status as a peer: he can't be turfed out of the legislature and he's not answerable to the House of Commons.

I also hugely object to the existence of a department which yokes together Business and Universities. Yes, obviously there are shared interests, but there are also (and must always be) conflicts. The role of universities is at least in part to challenge the hegemony, which at the moment is capitalism (despite the total collapse of the banking system - bankers discovered socialism as soon as government handouts were on offer). We shouldn't be content with churning out oven-ready work drones, prepared to do whatever it takes to make money for a bunch of shareholders. In the long term, businesses shouldn't want these yes-men and women either: innovation comes from critical and independent thinking. Sticking 'and universities' on the end of the department's name implies a strategy which sees education as solely training for work, subject to the demands of the market. It's wrong, wrong wrong.

So what's Pete done to us today? He's announced funding cuts amounting to £533 million, including fines for universities which over-recruited this year. What an odd decision: he likes markets, unless universities respond to market demand by recruiting more students. My Hegemon over-recruited, rather stupidly, so we can add another few millions to the several millions we're already being fined for misleading the government over student completions.

I'm not for breakneck expansion of university places. In institutions like mine, where jobs are being slashed, we're already increasing class sizes and losing face-to-face contact with students - this is, without any doubt, worse education. However, I do think that in a massive recession, with jobs being lost, encouraging people to reorient themselves through study is a massive public good. This government has claimed a return to Keynesian economics (spending public money to keep the economy alive during recessions): why not fund more university places as part of this, rather than give it to banks who don't pass it on, but use it to reinflate their reserves? What would these students have done instead? Claimed unemployment benefit, lost skills and motivation, and potentially condemned themselves to a much longer period of unemployment, contributing to the economic slump.

Petey's big plan to square the circle is to massively expand the provision of 2-year degrees. We run a few of these, called foundation degrees. What's missing is the third-year, which should be the culmination of the traditional degree: independent thinking and study, a dissertation, more specialisation. The alternative is three-year courses taught in two years - which obviously means missing out the time required to read, think and discuss ideas. What you'll do on these courses is repeat what the lecturer said, mechanically.

Mandy's plan is to turn places like mine into American Community Colleges - fine institutions in their own right, but a long way from the university ideal. Goodbye, any courses which analyze society or have intrinsic appeal: English literature, philosophy, politics, cultural studies, media studies, blue-sky scientific research, women's studies, most languages, history… all the interesting ones which might generate some critique of what we're up to as a society. Hello nursing, business (great job so far, guys) and legal studies.

Underlying this is, of course, class. Labour's élite are a social élite. They're largely very rich people, often privately educated, and almost all graduates of Oxford, Cambridge or sometimes one of the other élite universities (Gordon Brown was an early entrant to Edinburgh University). I'm completely convinced that - consciously or unconsciously - they have no regard for the legitimate aspirations of the working classes. To them, the poor are call-centre fodder, ASBO-bearers, salesmen and women: an undifferentiated mass who actually shouldn't aspire to a life of the mind, who shouldn't attract the same educational provisions as the traditional middle and upper class university entrants. The political class looks after itself, regardless of party. It sees the poor and can't help thinking that such people must have willed themselves into low status, that they somehow deserve to remain as they are. Its own offspring are encouraged into medicine, the law and other professions, are driven into the prestigious universities, while the proud parents ascribe this success solely to individual effort rather than to the possession of a huge set of advantages derived from wealth and social status.

Once you start from that perspective, you just know that these funding cuts are going to hit institutions which devote themselves to the education of the working classes, the poor and those with chequered educational backgrounds. No Cambridge student will find themselves condemned to tutorials of two students to a tutor. Oxford colleges won't have to forego that desktop hadron collider or the finest wine cellars in Christendom. Their teachers won't find themselves landed with more teaching and less research time.

Here, on the other hand, we will suffer. Already understaffed and undergoing more redundancies, we'll face another round of sackings, course cuts, bigger lectures, larger seminars (already so huge that individual students almost never get to speak), less research time (I haven't done any serious research in two years), poorer libraries, costs passed on to students in sneakier ways, and nastier halls of residence (but you're guaranteed that senior management won't get any less well-fed). Sure, we'll put a brave face on it. We'll pretend that replacing face-to-face discussion with online activity is modern, progressive, go-ahead pedagogy - but we'll all know the truth.

Ritzer was right. Élite-educated politicians are prepared to drop the pretence of humanist education - for the poor. We'll train the poor to do the drudgery, while even the soi-disant representatives of the working classes pull up the drawbridge and entrench their class privileges for ever.

Here's a little project for you. Try to find out how many children of politicians, company directors and other élite people went to a) state schools and b) former polytechnics and non-Russell Group universities. I'd bet a large amount that the answer is 'almost none'.

Ritzer said, amongst many other things, that universities are becoming machines for the consumption of education - whereas the model I hold dear is one in which students educate themselves through lectures, debate, reading and argument. The consumption model is clearly implied in the fast-track system: education becomes a list of facts and a certificate, rather than an intellectual and emotional experience.

You can't unwrap a proper education, shove it into your gob and swallow it. A proper education is upsetting, challenging, difficult sometimes, exciting and passionate. It changes you (hopefully for the better). It's not like a burger, or a spanner, something 'you' 'use'. It's a process in which you discover yourself and your world, and it never ends.

Thanks Peter. You turncoat. You traitor. You sinister functionary for moneyed scum. I know you're just the unconscious mouthpiece of deeper forces, but you seem to relish every attack on humanist values and collective will.

Bye-bye, education. Hello, training.