A Lefty Academic Writes Leftily About Leftwing Groupthink.

If you read or listen to the rightwing media, by which I mean BBC Radio 4's Today show, the Times, the Mail and a range of other grubby outfits, you'll have heard about some research by one Noah Carl (currently studying for a PhD in sociology at Oxford) that reveals that universities are packed with left wingers.  

 Although I have a very busy schedule of indoctrination and brainwashing to get through today, I thought I'd have a look at this report to see whether it stands up to the kind of scrutiny everything I publish has to undergo, even when it doesn't get the attention of major news outlets. If you're interested in methodology, stick around. 

Firstly, the report is called 'Lackademia', though the URL is a little more blunt: it reads 'Left Wing Bias Paper'. Now this hurts, because some years ago I coined the term 'slackademics' to satirise the view that we teach for six weeks a year before bunking off to Siena or somewhere equally agreeable, where we quaff wine in-between organising attacks on Truth or Objectivity. I meant it as a joke, but unless the Adam Smith Institute (for it is they) are making a clever reference to Lacan's theory of desire being fuelled by a lack of being, then it looks like this thing is snide from the off. 

Who are the Adam Smith Institute? Well, it's a very, very rich think-tank funded by nobody knows whom because they won't tell us (though off the top of my head I'd guess: the Koch brothers, mining, pharmaceuticals, weapons, oil and tobacco firms). They dedicate themselves to campaigning against all government and regulations, believing that the state's only roles should be a) nuking foreigners and b) persecuting trades unionists. Sorry, they do have another role: to ensure that the actual Adam Smith spins perpetually in his grave as the Institute continues to abuse his name and ideas by wilfully distorting and extrapolating beyond anything he'd recognise as his own. 

Anyway… the ASI reckons that universities are stuffed with leftists and they want to know why. I must assume that this is the first in a series of papers, perhaps including 'Why Are So Many Bankers Rightwing?' and 'Why Are Conservatives Over-Represented In The Arms Trade?', though I may be being over-optimistic. For those of you too busy to trawl through the whole thing, the Executive Summary is probably enough: 

• Individuals with left-wing and liberal views are overrepresented in British academia. 

• Though relatively little information is available, evidence suggests that the overrepresentation of left-liberal views has increased since the 1960s. The proportion of academics who support the Conservatives may have declined by as much as 25 percentage points since 1964.
• The left-liberal skew of British academia cannot be primarily explained by intelligence. The distribution of party support within the top 5% of IQ is relatively similar to the distribution of party support within the general population.
  
• The left-liberal skew may be partly explained by openness to experience; individuals who score highly on that personality trait tend to pursue intellectually stimulating careers like academia. And within the top 5% of IQ, openness to experience predicts support for left-wing parties.
  
• Other plausible explanations for left-liberal overrepresentation include: social homophily and political typing; individual conformity; status inconsistency; and discrimination.
  
• Ideological homogeneity within the academy may have had a number of adverse consequences: systematic biases in scholarship; curtailments of free speech on university campuses; and defunding of academic research by right-wing governments. 
• Recommendations include: raising awareness; being alert to double standards; encouraging adversarial collaborations; and emphasizing the benefits of ideological heterogeneity within the academy. 

I quite like a report that admits at the very start of a sentence that 'relatively little information is available' then leaves merely a comma before using the phrase 'evidence suggests…'. Point 2 depends on Intelligence Quotient scores, as though IQ isn't thoroughly discredited as anything other than a measure of how people perform on IQ tests: Nisbett's Intelligence and How To Get It is pretty persuasive on how IQ is a function of various silent and/or unconscious social assumptions about what constitutes intelligence. I always did very badly on IQ tests, and also struggle with doors bearing PUSH and PULL stickers, yet here I am with my PhD, managing to string a sentence together. 

Now I have to say that I like the implication of points 2 and 3: that leftwing academics are simply more intelligent and outward-looking than those on the right. Sadly though, it's nonsense. The use of political parties as a proxy for 'conservative' and 'liberal-left' doesn't really work: there are some very-close-minded Stalinists identifying themselves with the left and some very open-minded conservatives (or so I hear: I don't get invited to those kinds of social events). But what's important is that the ASI is worried about campuses producing generations of leftwing graduates and academics who never hear or espouse a rightwing view. Which is funny because virtually every politician did the same course (PPE, Oxford) and there's no shortage of conservatives on any campus. What ASI have done is guess that they're all teaching humanities and decided to focus on that. Then it's a short step to deciding that all these lefties are throttling 'free speech'. 

OK, that's the executive summary: the version that the newspapers and R4 picked up because it makes a good headline. That's what Adam Smith Institute want. But I'm going to spoil their fun by reading the whole thing. First impressions: it's like a bought essay of the kind I'm all too familiar with. It's nicely proof-read and fluently written. There are even footnotes to make it look like real research, but there's a major gap between assertions and evidence. 

It starts with Orwell's attack on the 1930s' left's lack of patriotism (wow, a real 'hot take') and quotations from the Telegraph, the Spectator (James Delingpole, no less) and the Daily Mail bemoaning the leftist bias in universities: “Universities have become breeding grounds for intolerance where anyone challenging left-wing views is ‘shouted down’”. Let's just take a moment to remind ourselves that even Wikipedia has banned the Daily Mail as a reliable source. This is not a great beginning: I once read a student essay which took its definition of socialism from the BNP's website. It feels familiar. 

There's a quick definition of what 'left' and 'right' mean which is largely OK, before we're plunged into the 'evidence' for leftwing overrepresentation. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. 

Relatively little good evidence is available on the political views of British academics. Nonetheless, that which are available point to a sizable left-liberal skew. In April of 2015, the Times Higher Education (THE) ran an online poll open to anyone with a UK university email address, which asked respondents whom they intended to vote for in the upcoming election

That's not great: the 2015 poll was therefore open to all students and staff. It was, as this report fairly notes, 'self-selecting'. However, they continue to use it as evidence, despite admitting in the methodological appendix that 'The question posed by the THE poll (2015) was not stated explicitly in the write-up'. So: the Institute report relies on a self-selecting newspaper poll without being able to say for certain what the question was, and worse, what the response rate was in percentage terms or raw numbers. We learn that 46% of the respondents (probably) said they'd vote Labour but we don't know whether 50,000 people replied or 5. This is backed up by a paper by Halsey from…1992, which even the authors admit isn't an unproblematic thing to do:

Insofar as the question posed by Halsey (1992) was different to the one posed by the THE poll (2015), the two sets of figures are not directly comparable. 

Nonetheless, this paper decides that if there is a flaw with the THES poll, it's that

utilising the overall percentages understates the academy’s left-liberal skew 

for reasons which remain obscure to me. But for them it's fine: it gives them enough ammunition to confidently claim that

Relative to the outcome of the last general election then, British academia shows a considerable left-liberal skew. At least 50% of the general public voted for right- wing or conservative parties in 2015, compared to less than 12% of academics. 

Then the paper says this:

Interestingly, and consistent with evidence from the United States (Carl 2015b), left-liberal overrepresentation varies systematically across subject areas: the percentage of respondents supporting the Conservatives was highest in business and law (though still less than 20%), was low in the social sciences (at less than 10%), and was lowest of all in the humanities and arts (at less than 5%).

Now congratulations are due to Carl – who is cited repeatedly here and is, not coincidentally, the author of this piece –  for getting two papers into the same journal in a single year, both examining why intelligent people are leftwing. However, Carl 2015b doesn't have anything to say about British departmental differences in voting intentions, and nor does the THE poll, at least according to what's quoted in this report (and he doesn't give a link, an issue number or a page number). 

What Carl does do here is make a pretty table conflating Halsey's 1964-1989 political analysis with the figures derived from the THES even though he admits that the questions aren't the same (and without admitting that the THES poll isn't statistically significant or available for analysis). 

Are these percentages or raw numbers? Noah doesn't tell us but let's be charitable and assume that they are. He then provides a graph of the same dubious figures which fills up a little space, then repeats Halsey's 1992 table of far-left/left/right/far-right academic identifications without comment, and certainly without wondering whether definitions (and events) have changed anything in the ensuing 25 years. 

Then we reach Section 3: Intelligence As An Explanation for Left-Liberal Overrepresentation. I should say before I plunge in that I'm a literary scholar, rather than a sociologist or a biologist, so some of what follows is derived from other people who are experts. 

Essentially, Carl sets up a straw man by wondering out loud whether academics are leftwing because they're more intelligent. He cites American research as though conclusions about the political cultures of the US can be imported into a British context without question, and again cites himself to prove that while being clever can make you more social liberal, being clever ('cognitive ability') is positively associated with some rightwing economic beliefs. The suggestion appears to be that the cleverest people don't mind gays and dope-smoking as long as neither activity is being taxed. 

But how do we apply all this to Britain?

Unfortunately, there do not appear to have been any surveys of British academics asking about specific policy issues, either economic (e.g., nationalisation of industry) or social (e.g., immigration). 

 Well, we could do some research. Or we could do this: 

I calculated the distribution of party support for individuals within the top 5% of IQ4 , using data from the Understanding Society survey.  

I don't know anything about the Understanding Society survey other than that it seems legitimate and robust. Score one for Noah. I do know, however and as mentioned above, that IQ is a load of cobblers often promoted by rather unpleasant people who have a habit of moving from IQ scores to theories of racial difference, by which they almost always mean superiority. We'll see what happens as 'Lackademia' unfolds. For now though, Noah discovers that there are as many high-IQ Tories as there are in the general population, and slightly fewer Labour supporters. What he concludes is that Tories aren't being excluded from academia because they're stupid, but because they don't hold the right economic views. I'm starting to smell polemic, children. 

After another couple of exceedingly unhelpful graphs, we move on to a discussion of whether conservatives are rare on campus (despite having no serious evidence of this) because they're not open-minded. Carl concludes that Labour and Lib Dem supporters are more likely to be open-minded than Tories, but dismisses the survey's evidence that UKIPpers are more open-minded than Tories as 'sampling error'. Again, his graphs depend heavily on the problematic THE poll for which he lacks the raw figures and the actual questions. 

Section 5 is where it gets interesting. He asks whether conservatives are too incurious and inflexible to thrive in academia, citing himself to point out that mathematics and similar subjects lend themselves to a 'predilection for certainty'. Elsewhere he refers to science being 'objective':

It should be recognised, of course, that all the evidence of bias cited above is from the social sciences; the physical sciences and mathematics do not appear to have been a icted by ideological homogeneity in the same way. This is perhaps not sur- prising, however, given the objective nature of the physical sciences and mathemat- ics, as well as the obvious fact that the social sciences relate directly to the sphere with which politics itself is concerned, namely human behaviour and society.  

which means he's either missed the last century and the development of postmodernism and poststructuralism, or he just doesn't want to talk about them. Or, and this might just be the answer, he mistakes conservative scientific discourses for neutrality. On this point I'll just leave this here: more research is being done and more money is spent on male baldness than on malaria. Now tell me science is immune to social forces. 

There's a vague discussion about self-selection before Carl wonders whether academics are leftwing because they're paid so little: out of jealousy they start to develop levelling tendencies which they think of as egalitarianism. 

Fourth, the left-liberal leanings of academics may derive from a peculiarity of their social-class positions, namely that they receive low incomes relative to their advanced educational attainment and rich cultural capital (Gross, 2013). The closer that society gets to laissez-faire capitalism, the more status, power and in uence will be tied to individuals’ earnings and commercial achievements, and the less academics will earn relative to those in other occupations vying for social in influence (lawyers, doctors, managers etc.). Consequently, academics generally prefer policies that minimise differences in earnings across occupations, the better to safeguard their own influence. 

Is this true? Am I just a bitter purveyor of the politics of envy? There's no evidence, but Noah's just going to leave it there for you to think about. Meanwhile, he's going to selectively use American research to demonstrate that leftist academics discriminate against conservatives in the hiring process (he's not interested in other research about hiring processes, such as racial and gender biases), nor is he going to mention that hiring is largely a function of managers, not academics). 

But don't worry: he's got solid evidence. Well, he's got a paper which found that 82% of the conservative academics surveyed felt that there's a hostile climate for their views. This isn't, obviously, proof of employment discrimination because 100% of the respondents had academic jobs. Still, 82% is a massive number. We should all be Very Concerned Indeed that 82% of conservative academics feel persecuted. 

What's that you say? Raw numbers? Well, if you insist. 

82% of the 17 conservative respondents felt there was a hostile climate towards their political beliefs within the field, compared to just 7% of the 266 liberal respondents. 

So that's 14 conservatives in one particular field – social psychologists – cowering in their offices in fear of their lives. How many of the liberals feel persecuted? Alas, space restrictions don't permit Carl to dwell on it, but then again, nor does the original paper as far as I can make out (though I'm pretty poor on statistical analysis and remain open to correction). Noah does cite a supporting study, but one review suggests that both papers concentrate on the conservative/liberal divide when what the findings actually reveal is that academics are too ready to discriminate against their colleagues across the field. Some of the evidence just doesn't bear the weight of implication. I'm disturbed by this finding:

Similarly, almost a third of the sociologists interviewed by Yancey (2011) stated that they would disfavour hiring a Republican, while a comparable fraction said they would look favorably upon a prospective candidate’s membership of the ACLU (a socially liberally non-profit organization). 

But I'm reassured by the knowledge that the hiring process wouldn't allow any discussion of this to occur. 

If you're still with me, I can only apologise: we're only just getting to the meat of this study, and this is where the amusement I got from picking holes in Noah's paper comes to a juddering halt. I am officially sounding the Jim Crow Klaxon. The next section of Carl's paper addresses the consequences of his unproved claims. It starts unpromisingly with a citation of Roger Scruton back in 1985, just after the Salisbury Review published Honeyford's academically unjustifiable attack off multiculturalism. Scruton thinks that editing the Review led to him being black-balled from academia: he doesn't seem to think that writing an awful lot of its articles under a range of pseudonyms displayed a lack of integrity. But this is mere throat-clearing. The true purpose of Lacakademia becomes clear. It isn't really about the sociological curiosity of imbalanced political views amongst academics. It is about academic rejection of theories of racial superiority. There's a swipe at climate science, then a sustained critique of sociology's use of the term 'white privilege'. 

the term erroneously implies that whites are advantaged relative to all other groups. Whereas in actual fact, Asian Americans are more advantaged than whites along a number of important sociological dimensions: they have higher average incomes, better educational outcomes, and a lower likelihood of crime victimisation. 

This is of course localised and unnuanced, which is no surprise. A white male author from a country governed by a white male billionaire, taking money from an élite, white think-tank in a country ruled by white conservatives is only ever going to claim that he's actually from a persecuted minority. Plus ça change, plus ça meme chose. 

He then attacks sociologists in particular for their discourse which casts conservative views of society as constricting rather than structured, then castigates them for their 'angry expostulation', which is pretty rich from someone who started his reports with Daily Mail quotations. Economics departments too are up to no good: their text books have too much to say about market failure and too little about government failure (never mind that the global economy was crushed by banking corporate failure). 

And then, dear readers, we are back to the thorny issue of Race. Carl talks of 'witch-hunts' despite the only recent witch-hunt was the terrifying Professor Watchlist in the US, which invited students to add their professors' names to a database of subversives. What it boils down to is this: the sociologists have been nasty to the Eugenicists and Racial Superiority theorists, in particular Charles Murray. E. O. Wilson and Lawrence Summers. Murray used IQ (hello again) to postulate in The Bell Curve that Asians are intellectually superior to whites, with black and Latino people (yes, all these categories are used homogeneously) at the bottom of the heap, because Genetics. Not history, experience, class, economics, racism, poverty. Bad Genes. (As Roger McCarthy pointed out, another reference is to Helmuth Nyborg's outraged (and outrageous) defence of eugenics.

What are the consequences of these nasty close-minded leftwing sociologists (even though Carl's already suggested they're actually more open-minded than conservatives)? Well, it's a dystopian vision of hell:

‘A social science without sacred values’, Winegard and Winegard (2016) go as far to suggest that a substantial number of academic social scientists have become “paranoid egalitarian meliorists”: individuals who espouse a narrative in which society progresses ever closer toward a state of natural equality (between the genders, classes, races etc.), 

Godless social scientists leading us into a state of class, race and gender equality.  The bastards. (And while I'm at it, Winegard and Winegard (2016) is an unpublished working paper, i.e. not peer-reviewed, while the other paper by this duo cited is a rather bitter defence of Evolutionary Psychology against the perception that it's a crank theory indebted to, well, Nazis and anyone who discounts social and environmental factors in favour of biology. Hello again, racial superiority theory. 

After that, it's downhill to the argument that campus homogeneity leads to the end of free speech, because universities have free speech 'codes' and sometimes give 'trigger warnings'. 

On both sides of the Atlantic, lecturers have begun issuing so-called trigger warnings before they discuss potentially upsetting material. Reportedly, law students at the University of Oxford were warned that they might find the content of lectures about sexual offences distressing, and were given the opportunity to leave beforehand (Daily Mail 2016).  

'Reportedly'! This is just embarrassing. UK universities are compelled by government to have rules about these things. I know because I'm a university governor and contributed to writing those rules. The current government equates freedom of speech to Letting Islamic Terrorists Recruit: British universities have done rather well to resist this implication. Personally, I'm in favour of some basic restrictions: the right seems to be arguing that if someone shouts 'Fire', then I check the facts and say 'Don't listen to him, there isn't a fire', I'm an enemy of free speech. As to 'Trigger Warnings: I teach literature. I teach material that represents and explores deeply distressing subjects in graphic ways. I've never once decided not to teach these things, but because I know there are people in the class who have suffered some of the experiences discussed, I make sure we talk about them in a supportive environment. 

However: any paper that uses the word 'reportedly' and relies on the Daily Mail for evidence is a paper that's less interested in what actually happened, and more interested in garnering – as it did – outraged headlines in papers like, well, the Daily Mail. Carl adds to the abject stupidity by citing Spiked Online as evidence for his opposition to no-platforming. If you don't know Spiked, it's an outpost of the former Revolutionary Communist Party, a tiny groupuscule that as Living Marxism accused ITN of faking evidence of Serbian death camps, then devoted itself to publishing pro-industry propaganda under a variety of pseudonyms. It uses a variety of front organisations to propagate a radical libertarian-captialist agenda which opposes government action against, for example, racism, climate change and child pornography. Once you're reduced to citing this disgusting crew as evidence, you're down the rabbit hole and there's no coming back. 

What's missing from any of this is the absence of any contextual analysis. What about universities as institutions, existing within, contributing to and being influenced by neoliberalising discourses? What of the shift in the UK to student fees, to managerial over-reach, to the Employability Agenda? What about diversity between universities and regions? Or about social and cultural factors beyond individual psychology? Nothing. 

Instead, what we have is a nasty attempt to rehabilitate eugenics disguised as a defence of freedom of speech. It's bad enough that Noah Carl was paid to produce this stuff: it's worse that the media didn't spot it. 

One last thing: the Adam Smith Institute's commercial spin-off was in the paper yesterday too: banned from Uk government contracts for, er, corrupt and dishonest practices. Perhaps they need staff from a wider range of ethical positions to prevent this kind of thing happening? Just a thought. 

A modest proposal

If you're environmentally minded, you'll know that the emissions trading scheme, particularly in regard to travel, has been a massive failure. Worse than that, the airlines have made a fortune while increasing the CO2 they pump into the atmosphere. Far too many 'carbon credits' were made available, so the price has slumped and there's no incentive to increase it or reduce the supply.

Various international bodies are meeting, supposedly to fix the problem, but as usual the lobbyists and industry have subverted them. In the meantime, we can help. Individuals can buy carbon permits but more importantly, we should pressure our companies and institutions to do so automatically. For instance, academics quite often travel long distances to speak at conferences. It's not free: the atmosphere and anyone who breathes pays an environmental price. So let's include carbon permit retirement into every grant and travel application. There'll be a box on the form for explaining how far you're going and how you're getting there. The university will calculate the damage and destroy a number of its carbon credits to make up for it, making them unavailable for the market. Crucially, the institution should double the carbon credits retired, so that your own pollution is not just admitted but mitigated.

It will add to the cost of what we do, but it means taking responsibility for the damage we wreak. It will drive up the cost of the credits so we'll have to think carefully about what we do, and it will cost the serious polluters more to do business.

If an institution is capitalistically minded (and they pretty much are), it will buy a large pile of carbon credits and use some of them as investments for the institution, though my preference is to 'retire' them so that pollution is actually reduced rather than just acknowledged.

All this should be a legal requirement for corporate bodies and individuals. I look forward to the day when your tank of petrol costs you £s and deducts carbon credits from your account so that if you run out in November, you take the bus. Or walk.

But for the meantime, universities should take the lead. While solo efforts don't make a meaningful contribution to political or environmental causes, setting an example does. We're far from being the worst offenders, but we have assumed that jetting off to agreeable places is a perk of the job. With me?

The Tory Barrel, Scraped.

Despite my two fundamental disagreements with the Conservative Party (everything it says, and everything it does), I've always had a lingering respect for it as a machine. It is ruthless, sinister, single-minded and vicious. As parties go, it's the Tasmanian Devil.

Until now. Despite having a wider pool of MPs from which to choose, it has awarded PAUL UPPAL a government post. Not only that, but one as Parliamentary Private Secretary to David Willetts, the Minister of State for Universities and Science.

I am baffled. Firstly, Paul Uppal is a serial loyalist. He literally has never disagreed with the party line on anything, in the two years he's been an MP. One might think he has no invididual consciousness. A cynic might say that his loyalty was a job-seeking strategy. But from the government's point of view, one would have thought that so slavish a toady does not require a PPS job: they're unpaid and often used to force rebels to behave. Many spiky Labour MPs were bought off by such a post: you have to resign if you want to vote against your government's line. There was no danger of Uppal rebelling, so there was no need to buy him off. He retails planted questions, I suspect he invents agreeable constituents who adopt perfectly nuanced Parliamentary discourse to elucidate his personal opinions and as I've documented in the past, is not above telling untruths to Parliament.

Is Uppal qualified to be an education expert? He won't tell anyone what degree classification he achieved (Warwick, Politics) and he's never worked in education or evinced any interest in higher education policy, based on his speeches. He's a property speculator, plain and simple.

What other explanations are there? There is a university in Uppal's constituency, but he seems to basically oppose it: he enthusiastically voted for fees and has not concerned himself with our well-being. The constituency is an ultra-marginal one though: he has a majority of 691. The Tory vote hardly increased: Labour voters stayed at home. So giving him a cheap job might be an attempt to bolster Uppal's profile in the hope that it might save him.

I'm determined to make sure it's exactly the opposite. Government policy is to beggar and humble less prestigious universities such as The Hegemon. It wants to concentrate research and high-achieving A-level students in Russell Group universities, and farm out the rest to dodgy corporate faux-universities. It has loaded students with debts of £60,000 each, which will wreck entry to socially-useful low-paid jobs (teaching, nursing, social work, research) and further study, especially amongst the working classes. I am going to make damn sure that every single student associates Uppal with the government's actions: 2015 is the date of the next election and sees the first £9000 fees students graduate - the perfect storm.

So I don't think that it's a particularly clever marginal constituency gambit. Which leaves one horrible, horrible reason:

The Conservative Party actually thinks that Paul Uppal is the best of the remaining unemployed Tory MPs. 

Even I find this hard to swallow. For all their blind ideological idiocy, there are highly-qualified, articulate and intelligent MPs on the government benches. And yet… this is the decision they've reached.

David Willetts' nickname is 'Two Brains'. I hope it's true because frankly, he'll have to lend one of them to his new PPS.

My students eat dinner at noon

The Guardian has done a data exercise to analyse the social composition of Britain's universities. As you might expect, dripping is not on the menu at the Russell Group universities: Oxford manages a magnificent 11.5% of students from manual/occupational and few of its peers manage more than 30%. The Hegemon is near the top, with 53% of the intake drawn from what's traditionally known as the working class.

Obviously there are problems with classification here: there are several working classes and beneath them, a 'non-working' class which seems to have been abandoned. In a post-industrial society, it's always more complicated than the old days of a white male mas-industrial proletariat. And of course the posh universities aren't entirely to blame for having a socially-elevated intake: as they keep pointing out, getting working-class people to apply to Oxford is difficult. Though I think they protest too much: I read that Oxford's 'outreach' programme last year took a roadshow to such benighted, aspiration-free and deprived places as… Eton College, Manchester Grammar School (private) and other sink-holes of social exclusion.

I'm enormously proud of our 53%. As a socialist, I know that education is power. We open our doors to the majority of the population which has never been able to pull its economic, cultural and political weight, thanks to the entrenched privilege of the jealous middle and upper classes. But it's also complicated. I worry when I hear the law students and others talk about getting rich - encouraged by people like Constance Briscoe, who told them that being rich = victory. Yes, I want my students to have a greater share of the economic pie, but I'm not at all interested in encouraging individual greed. For me, the purpose of mass education is to enable what we'll call the working class to access the social, cultural, political and economic goodies previously reserved for their supposed superiors.

The debate around mass education has been around for a long time. Matthew Arnold felt that it was the only way to stop the swinish mob rising up and smashing art and culture to pieces. Nietszche and his followers felt that the mob was incapable of education, and that offering it to them only encouraged them to disobey their enlightened Masters. Some on the hard left suspect that a bourgeois education is simply a hegemonic tool for conveying anti-proletarian ideology. Not me: I know that getting access to culture doesn't mean forcing them to accept dominant interpretations - we're way past that kind of hypodermic needle model of transmission. My students are - or are potentially - independent, critical thinkers, despite eating dinner at noon and sending the port round the wrong way.

However, there is a down side to mass working-class education. Some of my siblings went to élite universities (Cambridge, Imperial, Durham). Visiting them, I realised what exactly everybody else is excluded from. Not just the networks which ensure a gilded and powerful life (social capital, it's called), but the sheer resources. Art on the walls. Any book you might ever want. Nobel prize-winners reading your work. Subsidised holidays (oh yes) and food. Tiny classes and one-to-one tuition. My siblings felt that they'd earned it through getting good A-levels. I felt that it illustrated the maxim 'to those that have, shall be given more'. I look at my students, juggling jobs, and child-care, and money worries, turning up to a university bursting at the seams, and wonder what they could do if we had one-to-one tuition, if we could send them off on cultural adventures, have seminars of fewer than thirty students, or a free creche, or star researchers on the books, and the globe's movers and shakers nurturing them. Perhaps they need it more than the kids who've gone from Eton to Oxford.

What I'm saying is this: there are two educational systems. The élite one is wonderful, but it's a bespoke model in a culture which really believes that there is an intellectual aristocracy which deserves all the treats. Then there's a warehouse or factory educational model in which as many kids are crammed into knackered buildings as possible. The élite take degrees in PPE, Art History, Medicine and the like. Many of mine do 'vocational' courses designed to fit them into the neoliberal economy, rather than train them for power. They are discriminated against, and excluded.

So it's a dilemma. I want mass, working-class education. I want it for social justice. I want working class students to do Medicine and Anglo-Saxon and PPE, but I want them to be independent of the cultural and ideological positions inherent in hegemonic educational structures. I don't want them tossed the crumbs of a 'good-enough' training scheme which fits them for lower-management. I also want people to choose non-academic training and be proud and respected.

How? Er… Now you're asking. Certainly pre-university education must push students to aspire, but the university system currently seems like a vehicle for retarding social mobility rather than enhancing it. Personally, I'd abolish them all. Seriously: I'd amalgamate them and distribute subjects and expertise nationally. If Russell Group teachers are so great, let's see them teach my students. I'd end the REF research funding structure, which only exists to make sure serious funding goes to Russell Group universities, and I'd end pre-results admissions and interviews. No cosy chats designed to establish whether a student is 'one of us'. I'd also abolish the private schools, of course, or at least remove their charitable status.

Curriculum is essential too: the major contribution of progressive humanities departments is widening the canon from texts approved by the cultural elite to the sum of human cultural activity. Thanks to Raymond Williams, Cultural Studies, Reader-Response, Post-Colonialist, Feminist and Queer Theory, we insist that all cultural artefacts and practices are inherently worthy of study. I put working-class writing, Welsh writing and all sorts of overlooked gems on the course lists without feeling tokenistic or patronising. This might seem obvious to you, but have a look at Palgrave's The Short Story in Britain by Maunder, Robbins and Liggins. One chapter is devoted to the short story in Scotland. One sentence of the chapter on Scotland mentions Wales. That is a perfect example of elitist, metropolitan exclusion-by-canon: the short story is central to Scottish and Welsh literary culture, for a wide variety of reasons - yet if you took this book, with it's exhaustive title, you'd never know.

And that's why we need to worry about class and education.

Countdown to Zero

Two annoying things caught my eye over the last twelve hours. Firstly, Newsnight's report on exploitative corporations using 'zero hours' contracts to condemn supposed workers to servitude. It's not really news, of course: companies have been doing this for ages. I know many people on such contracts. One works at Pizza Hut, where you'll be called in on the off chance that there will be enough customers to need you. The staff wait around - unpaid - just in case. You can't go home, or hold down another job, because you might be required.

The other piece of news was the announcement that London Metropolitan University is to outsource all activities other than teaching and the Vice-Chancellor's office: cleaning, library provision, IT support, catering… the lot. We all know what this means: fewer, less-qualified staff, de-unionisation, worse working conditions, shiny presentation while substance declines, and a rejection of the humanist ideal of the university as a mutual, collegiate pursuit. Cutbacks in resources as profit margins become more important - we've seen it all on the railways and other privatised sectors. It's rather revealing that the Vice-Chancellor's office isn't to be outsourced either - clearly some things are an efficiency too far. It's the equivalent of Nike's board making billions by outsourcing the actual shoemaking to Chinese slaves.

What links these stories? Simple: the fact that treating your staff as decent human beings requiring decent working conditions is anathema even in supposedly humane institutions. I'm used to assuming that things are far worse 'out there' in the cut-throat world of call centres, cleaning companies and so on. It's a false assumption. Universities are massive organisations under pressure to cut costs everywhere except in the realm of Vice-Chancellerian salaries (though our new one did promise 'restraint'). Universities are microcosms of the outside world, and we run a distinct class system here. This was very apparent during our last joint strike with the support staff. Most of the academics came out on strike, as did most of the Unison members. That left an awful lot of the worst-paid employees, mostly catering and cleaning staff. There's historically been a problem in the union movement about recruiting the least-skilled employees, which is a whole other annoying debate, but the major cause here is that the worst-paid are also the most vulnerable. They can't afford to miss a day's pay even at minimum wage, and they're most open to management pressure and abuse.

Zero hours contracts are not restricted to the obvious scum like McDonald's and Pizza Hut. The Hegemon, my own university, employs large numbers of people on these contracts. Cleaners, security staff, sports centre staff, caterers (most of whom are sent home, unpaid, for the summer holidays) even the Muslim chaplain, as though spiritual needs can be calculated on a shift pattern. Library staff (formerly a highly-skilled profession) are on a similar deal: they don't get enough hours to make a living but they have enough on their contract to make a second job difficult to manage. When this was imposed, a large number of them left, particularly women.

Zero hours contracts have two purposes: they're financially efficient for the employer, and they maintain the employee in a state of dependence and fear. It's a means of ensuring a cowed and obedient proletariat. If they could do it to academics, they would. Workers on zero hours can't plan a budget, a working week, or longer-term things like savings, mortgages or raising a family. It's a trap, quite simply. But it's efficient - for the employer, while the employee becomes a disposable asset.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, utopian socialists saw in mechanisation the promise of freedom from work, a society based on leisure and learning in which the oppressed masses could discover their higher abilities freed from drudgery (not Marx, he believed in the nobility of labour). It was a beguiling, but naive dream. The future of capitalism was never going to be benefits shared equally. The logic of the market is that worse conditions for the workers lead to higher profits for the owners. The shame of it is that this is now the logic of education. As an academic, it's important that we stand by our exploited colleagues, rather than hope some of the crumbs drop into our mouths. I intend to campaign here against zero hours contracts. Anyone else?

Defending the university, defending Media Studies

As you may know, my job is split between the departments of English and Media, Cultural Studies and Communications. There's some natural crossover: Cultural Studies was informed by and revivified literary criticism, but Media Studies is a discrete academic field.

I should confess that I'm not garlanded with Media Studies qualifications: I started teaching in the department because a long-departed course leader spotted me reading the Guardian (another crucial role that paper has played in my life) in the post-graduate office and asked me if I read a newspaper often. When I replied in the affirmative, he offered me some teaching work. Twelve years later I'm still here - and still in temporary employment.

So I'm naturally disposed to defend both my subjects against the unthinking slights of the snobs. English has only been in existence since the 1920s, and had to fight hard to be taken seriously. I was therefore very cheered by Stefan Collini's piece in the Guardian defending the cultural role of higher education.

He first evoked a dystopian vision of universities reduced to churning out obedient worker bees for business:

Take one job centre. Add several apprenticeship programmes. Combine with an industrial lab (fold in a medical research centre for extra flavour). Throw in some subsidised gigs and a large dollop of cheap beer. Don't stir too much. Decorate with a forward-looking logo. And hey presto! – you've got a university.

In our case of course, there's no cheap beer and no gigs: the SU went bust many years ago and now functions largely as a wing of the university's PR department. But we are resisting the emplyability-discourse to some extent. (Not that I don't think students should be employable, but it's our job to produce the critical, creative thinkers who'll transform society, not manufacture drones according to the demands of economic drivers who've demonstrated their profound inability to understand either industry - cf business and new media) or the economy (banks, ratings agencies, politicians - all thought that everything was going swimmingly until, well, it wasn't).

Universities are failing to some extent, he says:

From anecdotal evidence (especially conversations among parents of university students), it may seem that the major systemic failing is the paucity of individual attention that students receive in many universities – seminar sizes are too big and tutorial hours too few.

I think he's right: my siblings who went to Cambridge got individual tutorials every week, as well as lectures and presumably seminars. They also had to write an essay for every tutorial. It's an expensive system, but a good one: my siblings also got money and resources thrown at them, which they felt was their right because they'd got to the top of the tree. I don't begrudge them that, but do feel that they got there by attending very famous private schools rather than solely by individual toil (I went to a mix of state and private schools and put almost no effort in to anything). I look at my students and feel that they're the ones who need all this academic and financial support: they've been to big state schools, they've overcome all sorts of hurdles, they've often beaten the racial disadvantages built into the system, they often have to work long hours and look after their families, they've not accessed family and cultural networks to enhance their formal educations, and yet they're the ones who have reduced contact hours, large classes and poor resources.

One of my private educational fantasies is importing the NFL (American Football) draft system, in which the 'poorest' teams get first pick of the best debutants. At the moment, the elite universities massively disproportionately favour the privately-educated: teaching them must be a doddle. But if the Russell Group universities are so great, they can surely cope with The Hegemon's disadvantaged students? So let's do a swap. We'll take the 5A* Etonians and they can take our inner-city kids and working parents. Their traditional intake should thrive despite our limitations, and our usual intake should blossom with the intensive attention afforded them at Oxbridge (actually, research shows that comprehensively-educated students do better at university: they've used to relying on their own resources without constant support). OK, a couple of Grade-I listed buildings might have to be turned into crèches rather than film-sets and the Bullingdon Club might have to turn from vintage claret to Carling, but I'm sure they'll cope.

Anyway, the Collini article has lots of good things to say, but amongst them is this:

It is worth emphasising, in the face of routine dismissals by snobbish commentators, that many of these courses may be intellectually fruitful as well as practical: media studies are often singled out as being the most egregiously valueless, yet there can be few forces in modern societies so obviously in need of more systematic and disinterested understanding than the media themselves.

I'm listening to the Leveson Inquiry this morning. It's exposing the extent to which certain sections of the media have coarsened, cheapened and corrupted public life in the pursuit of power and profit. Whenever I hear anyone attack media studies (family, friends, Daily Mail readers), I point out that we're all swimming in media now: the papers we read, the TV we watch, the search engines we use, the blogs on which we rant, the Tweets we dispatch, the censorship to which we assent and object: all these are media studies. The ways in which media are framed and the ways we use them, understand them and interpret them - they're all media studies (the same applies to English). We even run a module called Media Ethics - from the perspective of owners, politicians, journalists and - often overlooked - readers. 

Any parent worried about what their kids are up to on the net, from grooming to Anonymous, should sign up for a Media Studies course immediately. There's nothing more important or more complicated than our relationship with media, whether that's a sonnet or a soap opera.

Live-blogging 'The Politics of the University'

Andrew Vincent, professor of political theory/philosophy, speaking on The Politics of the University. Summary of his take on recent university developments (as much as I could type).

Questions: what's politics, what is a university? Defining politics by distributing significance, patterns of order, utilising collective power etc. University: there's no one pure vision. 2 main senses:
1. a corporate community of scholars and teachers dedicated to knowledge and scholarship for its own sake. Derived from medieval principles of liberality: a broad and wide-ranging education and education for the free (liber) man.
2. a functional institution serving the demands of the state and the economy: training students for particular jobs. The university has to be 'useful'. This version developed alongside the modern state.

Many universities try to cover both formations to some extent. Universities have ideological characters. People say that since the 1980s, universities have become infected by neoliberal ideology. However, it's more complex. Universities are political entities, and are saturated by ideological ferment, despite managerial denial. Classical European and Anglo-Saxon liberalism, conservatism and radicalism are all present. UK institutions seem not to have been infiltrated by totalitarian ideology (nationalist, religious etc.), unlike European institutions, such as under the Nazis, and elsewhere. Oddly claims that law, business etc. might have been relatively unscathed, but to me, these seem like prime grounds for totalitarian ideology.

Employability skills as potentially totalitarian/functionalist?

3 broad ideologies affected UK unit: conservatism, social democracy, and neoliberalism. Traditional conservatism is akin to European liberalism. Social democracy is similar to socialist and corporate conservative traditions. Neoliberalism shares ground with conservatism and classical liberalism. It is epitomised in Cardinal Newman's The Idea of the University. It proclaims the civilising intention of the university institution: a training ground for an intellectual aristocracy or 'national clerisy', in an unequal society with a tiny élite. It still haunts the imaginations of those who fear the modernised, functional university, equality, state growth and democracy. From 1919, the University Grants Committee introduced state funding: to the horror of anti-statists. Kingsley Amis, 1960s: 'More [students] will mean worse'. The liberal vision was being destroyed by expansion and state-driven curricula.

Minogue, 1970: expressed anxiety at expansion, state cash and late 60s student riots and radicalism. University independence was under threat from state involvement in education, from a conservative position. All expressed apprehension at social-democratic intervention.  The private University of Buckingham was established in 1970 by the conservative elite: Woodhead, Peacock, Beloff, O'Hear. Thatcher laid the foundation stone and became its first Chancellor. Proclaimed as 'freed' from state control, though some traditional conservatives distrusted the 'free market' aspect. But for many, elitism, small classes and independent curricula were guaranteed by privatisation. Not to make it more responsive to the economy, but to retain elitism.

The Welfare State university is another model: an inclusive community of assistance to all citizens. Labour 1945-1970 aspired to some kind of Better Society. University expansion was part of this: more institutions and more students. The state took control over most university finance. Hayek and co hated this state intervention as tyrannous. But it aimed at social justice, equality, full employment, full rights to all citizens, the extension of state funding of education, the right to social minimums, the desirability of a mixed public/private economy with state planning.

Universities were a part of this Keynesian Social Democracy. It critiqued unregulated free markets as inefficient, socially destructive and socially unjust. Student grants were an attempt to allow all citizens to enter HE if they had the intellectual ability. This was popular and central to the 1920s-40s-born population. SD triumphed eventually over classical British liberalism (i.e. laissez-faire). It became the social norm, and an expectation rather than a conscious ideology. Privatised prisons, health, university fees etc. would have been seen as fringe madness. But the arguments for social democracy were gradually forgotten as people moaned about taxes.

Added to this was the random but constant growth of Tory/New Labour/coalition neoliberalism. It overlaps with conservatism but has different emphases. It's the ideology which caused the 2008 economic crash. Its basic tenets are the value of the unregulated free market as the most efficient allocator of resources. Obsessed with deregulation and private wealth creation, and the dismantling of the state and of collective workers' organisations of any kind. Dedicated to constant growth. It appeared in the 1950s in the UK (Institute of Economic Affairs), but was popularised by Hayek and co. Early work was particularly interested in universities and laid the ground for Browne: education as a private good, to be paid for by the individual, who should become a consumer. The Adam Smith Institute and the Centre for Policy Studies were also cheerleaders for converting the Conservative Party to neoliberalism. David Willetts was a former CPS director: now Universities Minister (damn it). Gradually the moral case was replaced by the economic case to appeal to ministers on funding grounds: the faith-based element was present but hidden.

The student as consumer was at the heart of this neoliberal model. The state relinquishes control. The elite model is abandoned: the student-consumer becomes the discerning customer, not what the traditional conservatives wanted at all. This idea is applied to all state services, even though the private sector (e.g. banking) has been proved to be utterly destructive. Public services are being made to pay for capitalist neoliberal disasters: this is the function of hegemony. Privatisation is still proclaimed as the solution for public services, with little opposition.

Since the 2000s, academic managers and leaders have adopted the discourse of neoliberalism, presented as neutral truth, 'common sense' or realism. 'Choice' trumps all other ideas. Universities form businesses, conduct marketing, undertake 'esteem indications' and surveys. Private income is lionised. Students are encouraged to pursue self-interest: public service is derided. What of the future? The banking crisis seems not to have penetrated the ideological carapace of the education sector so far. The Browne Report (2010) is a symptom of an ideological hegemony. It reinforces pre-existing neoliberal premises. Browne is the disgraced former head of enormo-polluter BP. It inspired the 2011 White Paper, 'Students at the Heart of the University': free markets, no state intervention, private goods are multiple, public goods are unimportant, all societies are constituted of self-interested utility maximisers - hence fetching student choice (while rigging the market in certain ways, e.g. protecting medicine and certain other subjects).

Neoliberal Education = atomised individuals unintentionally benefitting other people, if at all. The purpose of education is to reap individual rewards. Education is pursued after cost-benefit analysis. This will drive up quality. Only what you pay for is valuable. Department and institutional competition will drive out poor teachers, universities and students thanks to the invisible hand effect. Market-efficient institutions will cannibalise 'inefficient' ones. Competition will be introduced at any cost, and the failure of some institutions is welcomed. The closure of some courses will also be welcomed.

But there's something new on the way, a new ideological hybrid. Neoliberal nostrums still saturate the discourse, but there are problems. Previously public services are difficult to make work in the private sector. How do train services compete, for example? Universities don't have shareholders or pursue profits. They don't have genuine competitors, and owners can't overthrow management. Resistance to neoliberalism generates 'the worst of all worlds'. The Tories don't want 'choice': if all students chose engineering or medicine, the system would collapse. So state subsidies are built into those disciplines: a tiny recognition that there is public good involved.

The market is rigged by student numbers and tiers of fees. It's a state command structure AND a market economy dressed up as 'student choice'. The state must artificially create and rig a market to get this insane structure to work. In the next stage, private providers will be supported by the state - which looks like the state socialism of the bank bailouts. All subjects other than medicine are 'not important to the wellbeing of society' (Browne) and therefore should be abandoned to the vagaries of the free market.

The challenge is to force this weird hybrid onto academics, who care about ideas? We have to be manipulated and retrained by continuous audit to demonstrate that we're already part of a market. Temporary staff are much easier to dominate, and they're cheaper. Insecurity makes them pliant. Private sector management techniques: PRP, staff development review, appraisals, promotion procedures, REF, nagging to acquire external income - all these things are part of a disciplinary system of functionalism - and they damage real teaching and real research. The Student-Consumer will, think the neoliberals, be the final nail in the coffin.

One further aspect of this hybrid. If a university continually audits and monitors its staff, it faces a blizzard of administration. What do they do with this trivia? They create thousands of administrators. Private companies cut administrators for profit: universities won't have to do this. The fastest growth area in UK and US universities is administrators. Teaching numbers are stable. Academics don't administer: administrators have little understanding or interest in academia. They are the foot soldiers of the audit culture. That is their raison d'être. Best practice. Benchmarking: discourse used as a weapon, not for a purpose. Committees, away days and retreats are a substitute for action. Income-generation is achieved by the means of teaching, rather than teaching as the end of administration. Universities are for distributing investments for the efficient utilisation of resources: not for educating students for the public good.

Governments are frustrated by academic resistance. This market-discipline + auditing + rigged market tyranny + 'professional' administrative control is the neoliberal revenge on the educators. It has begun to eviscerate what was a genuine public good. The dignity of the university is now a huckstering, greedy, shallow institution. Ideology masquerades as reality. Universities aren't and shouldn't be businesses, whatever politicians and VCs want. We aren't driven by personal greed. Collegiality and the love of ideas motivate us: we're degraded by this hybrid of managerialism and neoliberalism: our profound shame is that we don't seriously challenge this discourse. Our everyday activity is an affront to our values. Managerialism administration isn't neutral, or economic reality: it's ideological. We act as though they're true - and thereby sell the pass. We need to resist. This ideology will be supplanted… one day. What level of cultural, intellectual and moral damage will it do to our society along the way?

Q+A session:
private providers will cherry-pick. Elite institutions will remain prestigious. Ex-polytechnics will be under massive pressure. Private institutions aren't universities.

UK universities will be amongst the most expensive in the world: that and visa changes will deter overseas students.

Q: Does deregulation of fees lead to the original elite conservative institutions which are still universities, and a hinterland of non-universities?
A: Yes, I think that's true. Some at Oxford etc. welcome this - they can't lose. Unless the auditing culture affects them too. They whine about the demands of chasing external income too. This might interfere with the formation of these separate sectors. Audit culture is seen as a gross interference in intellectual culture at the elite institutions too. If it diminishes, then these elites would be laughing. Civic universities are integral to their communities: the thought that that historical development might diminish to fly-by-night corporate provision might horrify the old-fashioned conservatives. It would be massively destructive.

Q: Most politicians are Oxbridge - they won't be hugely concerned seeing local institutions sinking.
A: There is a strand of conservative concern for local institutions. But Osborne, Willetts etc. are thorough-going neoliberals.

Q: Orwell, 1984: put your faith in the proles - i.e. students. This move to redescribe students as consumers assumes s/he is fully-formed and fully-informed [which seems impossible]. This discourse hides the fact that they aren't fully-formed. They change their minds, and as they immerse themselves in self-education, will develop in gloriously unpredictable ways. There's a potential for resistance here.
A: We want dissatisfied students. If they're satisfied, something is wrong! [See Plato: it's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied].

Q: It goes back to Major's dissolution of the Uni/Poly divide. The ideological impact on students isn't just consumerism. The impact on their lives of massive amounts of debt will be huge. They'll be like US students who can't refuse to participate in the labour market on the employers' terms. It silences the critical voices of the intellectuals.
A: That's one view. Another view is that it's not so organised, and is a response to Austerity Britain. Most ministers couldn't care a toss about universities and just want to cut. The weakness of this second argument is that arguments about fees and alternative financing were being kicked about by neoliberal think tanks as far back as the 1960s, e.g. the IEA pamphlets. Government funding of universities is actually going massively up due to the new loans system, so it's more likely to be ideological than the austerity/cuts agenda. It's a very focussed attack in Browne and the White Paper. It's the most radical agenda for a generation: 'poverty-stricken trivia' with an incredibly poverty-stricken view of a human being', which makes the Robbins report look gentle and civilised.

Are human beings simply economic fodder, or people whose needs we need to care for? I was heartened to see the revolting students put bricks through windows. Banks can afford them. Students aren't highly leftwing now or in the 1980s, and I wouldn't see government policy as an attempt to stop students becoming left-wingers, though they do see academics as left-leaning. The idea of lecturers being forced by all kinds of prompts to become market actors gives them some satisfaction.

Q: To what extent is this European or global, or is there an Anglo-Saxon/European schism?
A: I don't quite believe in globalisation in a positive sense. Neoliberalism has patchily affected a range of countries. In education, it's also patchy. Germans are puzzled by what's happening in the UK. In Sweden, the beginnings of the neoliberal ethos can be glimpsed. Australia tends to follow the UK a few years behind [any comment, MfD?]. The All-Administrative University is a recommended read: case-studies of US institutions' manic audit/grant-chasing culture.

If I had university-age kids now, I'd send them to Maastricht University: all-English tuition for €1400 euro, or Trinity College Dublin. Many European universities feel that no sensible British student would spend £9000 p.a. for a potentially crap education from a private British place when s/he could easily reach a good university in a magnificent city like Barcelona.

Biting the hand that tortures

I may - in passing - have mentioned my objections to The Hegemon running training courses for the police forces of the UAE: those outstanding boys in white who specialise in brutally repressing political demonstrators, led by a man who filmed himself torturing and murdering a business partner when a deal went sour. And who was acquitted by his cousin because 'he was drugged by his staff'.

What these countries are buying isn't education: it's legitimacy. When Amnesty or whoever point to massive human rights abuses, they can point to our logo (and the honorary doctorate in law we gave to this Minister of the Interior) as proof that they're on the level. Presumably we're happy to take the cash and keep quiet. Who knows, perhaps the classes are fearlessly critical of what the UAE's security forces did to their fellow citizens this year - including our academic colleague Nasser bin Ghaith… or perhaps they aren't.

I'm not the only one either: the Times Higher Education isn't impressed either. Lo and behold, the parlous state of the UAE's HE institutions is - yet again - the result of monarchical nepotism:

The blame, within the academic community at least, was usually levelled at the Ministry for Higher Education, or the competence of the sheikh in question - who was a cousin of the ruler.… as with Gaddafi, there seems to be a fascination in many of the Gulf monarchies - most of which are similarly autocratic, and have been similarly flush - with spending vast sums on overseas education projects, even if the domestic sector is left to languish.

Our American cousins sup with a longer-handled spoon, at least in relation to Arab money, thanks to the influence of the Israel lobby - they're perfectly happy to take cash from the evil Koch brothers and other assorted loons:

the Harvard University staff and student body rejected a chair in Islamic studies from Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan on the grounds of anti-Semitism and well-documented human rights abuses in the UAE, including the use of child slaves as camel jockeys. Similarly, in 2007 the University of Connecticut pulled out of a relationship with Dubai for much the same reasons.

God I'd love the chance to actually put forward a view in my place, but democracy has never been on the agenda, here or there:

In such circumstances, junior members of staff or PhD students may feel uncomfortable pursuing sensitive topics relating to these countries. Imagine, for example, writing a negative critique of a regime that has paid for your salary, your scholarship or the building you sit in. In many UK universities, this is not only a possible scenario but now rather likely. What it may lead to (and in some cases it already has led to) is a field that carefully skirts around the key "red line" subjects such as political reform, corruption, human rights and revolution.

The large, youthful, English-speaking and internet-savvy populations of these countries are unlikely to tolerate the current set-up for much longer, and the Western democracies - including their universities - need to make sure they are not out of step with the region's reality. 

Teacher's watching you!

It's the first day of Induction Week, or Freshers' Week if you're young, and American. So there are two things on my mind: what do we do about all the terrorists in my classes, and am I still cool?

OK, terrorism first. There are a few loudmouths around: last year one student wandered about with a t-shirt depicting a man gesticulating with an AK47, and the word 'Mujahid' below the image. When I was a student, I was also a loudmouth on political matters. I still am, to some extent, but I can now tell the difference between an attention-seeker and a committed radical, whether thinker or doer. Mujahid man is very unlikely to be shipping himself off to Afghanistan for weapons training.

However, there is a serious point. This august institution has furnished Guantamano Bay with several inmates. As far as it's possible to tell, they were all either innocent or stupid. Either way, they didn't deserve kidnapping, torture and detention without trial. Be that as it may, there's a sense that universities like these have reservoirs of potential recruits - a large Muslim cohort, an active Islamic movement on and off-campus and what politicians euphemistically call an 'urban' demographic, by which they mean an intake largely of poor, multi-ethnic students.

The question for universities is what we should do about it. It should be blindingly obvious that the security services will be active on campus, both through open liaison with the university management, and covertly through infiltration and informers. But as an academic, I haven't been urged to inform anyone of any suspicions I might have.

I've clashed with the Islamic society recently: they invited a notorious pair of liars in to preach creationism: my overwhelming impression was that academic credibility meant nothing to the students because nobody has trained them to think critically and independently. But ignorance is not a crime (unfortunately).

The government wants us to spy on our students.

One of the government's counter-terrorism strategies,Prevent, has started to once again home in on British universities with a particular emphasis on Muslims. Officials from Prevent have asked university professors to give them details of any Muslim who might be a "threat", especially those who are isolated or depressed.

Apparently, if a Muslim is depressed, he or she is vulnerable to radicalisation. University staff are also asked to report students that have poor relationships with their families, are disgrunted by the government, and access extremist websites.  

Would I inform on students who sympathised with Islamic terrorism? No, probably not. I'd argue, just as I'd argue with supporters of any kind of terrorism. More importantly, I'd contextualise terrorism by examining the conditions and cultures from which it grows. That's what universities are for: not to tell people what to think, but to give them a range of ways to think about any subject.

As to the idea that I should tell the secret services whenever I meet an 'isolated' or 'depressed' student: pshaw! I haven't got all day! Have they met any goths? The answer to isolation and depression is to talk to them, and point them in the direction of the counselling services. If particular student groups think that their teachers, counsellors and student representatives are spying on them, they're going to stop talking to us. They won't trust us, they won't respect us and they won't listen to us. Alienation is the inevitable result - and that's more likely to lead to 'radicalisation' than airing debates in public (not that I think 'radicalisation' per se is a bad thing: except when it comes to violence and Tory free-marketeers, and we're sadly not being asked to inform on potential Tory students).

I'm certainly not going to pick out my Muslim students as though every one of them is a terrorist in larvae stage. They're falling into the trap of assuming that all Muslims are beardy fanatics (even the women), when it's the same as Christianity or Judaism. For every ranting ringleted heavily armed Orthodox Jewish settler, there are at least a couple bacon-sandwich munching Jewish slackers. How many Catholics listen to the Pope's advice on contraception? Not quite all, to put it mildly. Similarly, there are plenty of Muslims who manage to wake up and get through to breakfast without strapping on a dynamite jockstrap. But the idea that most Muslims are idle backsliders - or simply interpret their scriptures more loosely than bin Laden -  like their Christian counterparts doesn't sell newspapers, political parties or sophisticated electronic spying devices. (Nor does pointing out that the EDL is equally, perhaps more dangerous, and yet we're not being asked to inform on fascists in the classroom.

If I were a student at this university, I'd be demanding that the Students' Union disavows any co-operation with Prevent, and pressures the university to do the same.

Anyway, on to the second question, on my relative coolness. This one's informed by a fellow academic's sudden onset of competitive coolness. It's relatively straightforward. I'm not cool. I wasn't cool when I was a student, even in the subcultures to which I belonged. I wasn't even in the 'anti-cool' group. I knew this, and accepted it: but apparently some people, working every day with the young, thin, fashionable, with-it and cool, fall into the trap of craving their respect for matters other than intellectual.

This is what the students see. Embrace it.

Do not try to emulate these people.

It's easy to resist. Every time you feel a pang of envy and decide to throw in what you think is a topical reference, think back to when you were in school or at university. Did you shudder with revulsion when your teachers mentioned something you cared about? Then have the grace to remain silent. It's like my dad, who refers to 'The Google'. He thinks it displays his techno-savvy.

You become a rockstar in the classroom. You play interesting YouTube videos in your lectures and are occasionally spotted at shows by your students. A mythology grows up around your sightings about town. Students want to follow you on Twitter.

I live two minutes' walk from the university. Every drink I buy is served by one of my students, and occasionally I accidentally see a band liked by the despicable youth. This doesn't make me cool. Nor, I should add, is the queue for the gents the place to discuss why I gave you a D.

There are ways to gain students' respect: by treating them as intelligent, independent people whose admiration means nothing to you. Your interests are not their interests, though that may change, and you'll definitely find that you like some of them, and vice versa. But you won't impress them if you try to blind them with clothes, hip references or obscure ideas - that's a pathetic form of intellectual and social abuse. Every academic needs to know this: students' worlds do not revolve around their teachers - and that's a good thing. You're deluding yourself if you think that your existence makes the slightest difference to their inner lives. That is also a good thing. Get your own friends and avoid appearing like some kind of vampire, leaching vitality from your students. And try not to inform MI5 when they look a bit down or say provocative things to get your attention. They'll respect you for it. Before you know it, some of the students will genuinely become your friends. And you'll be cool without even trying.

On the other hand, if your self-image depends on validation by some teenagers, you are definitely NOT COOL. If your resolve wavers, ask yourself this: what the hell do the kids know about anything? The cool kids were morons when I was the same age as them. They won't have improved since then.

It's heartbreaking because it's true

Over at the Guardian, Stefan Collini paints a very bleak picture of higher education's future, and explains the disgusting and third-rate thinking behind the government's plans.

Particularly relevant to us here at The Hegemon is this bit:

It's true that if they go to the handful of "top" universities that will do well out of the new system they may not notice much change, except that a higher proportion of their fellow students will come from comfortable backgrounds. But if they go to the majority of universities, especially to those which in the past two decades have been the main vehicles for the great educational enfranchisement of people from social groups that did not previously go to university, then they will see signs of reduced resources all around them. In some cases their "student experience" may quite closely resemble their current social experience – boarded-up departments, dilapidated buildings, low morale, a resentful sense that the cards are stacked in favour of the few rather than the many.

For all our faults, we specialise in taking those students posher universities somehow excel at excluding: the poor, the provincial, the mature students, those from ethnic minorities and those who've struggled at - or been failed by - school and work. Our government seems to believe that the 'best' will rise to the top by a form of magic. We believe otherwise.

Actually, there is a magic formula for getting to the top in this country: it's private school + Oxbridge + inherited £millions + contacts + being white and male. You can spot these people everywhere, and the one thing that unites them is their conviction that they got where they are through hard work and individual genius, and that anyone who doesn't do likewise is therefore a failure. Can you genuinely imagine Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, or any of the myriad TV presenters, celebrity comedians/lawyers/journalists reaching the tops of their professions if they'd started off at Grim Comp, Stoke?