The Guardian view on higher education: beyond the bean-counters
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Version 0 of 1. Amid the ongoing discussion of how universities are funded, it is worth reminding ourselves why they are funded. And, in particular, why there is a value to universities that exceeds their ability to transfer specific skills and stimulate economic growth. Not that there is anything wrong with quality vocational training. But a university is about more than the acquisition of a checklist of professional competences, more than the sum total of “impact” and “learning outcomes” – terms that represent the depressingly narrow but now dominant discourse of higher education. It may be overstating things to see this as the intellectual equivalent of factory farming. But since John Henry Newman’s 1852 publication The Idea of a University, there have been continual warnings against universities resembling foundries and treadmills. Cardinal Newman believed that education deserved a more exalted purpose. But as vice-chancellors look more and more like CEOs and students like debt-ridden consumers, the noble idea that a university is a place where one learns to think is increasingly painted as indulgent and old-fashioned. Swanning around with a copy of Keats in one’s back pocket, apparently picking up the civilising influence of learning as if by osmosis, is something one cannot reasonably expect the taxpayer to subsidise. Fair enough, but that hasn’t been an accurate characterisation of university life since Brideshead Revisited. These days, the greater danger is, as Newman warned, from Professor Gradgrind and from the assumption that thinking must have an immediately obvious cash value in terms of the contemporary market place. And who can blame young people, contemplating £9,000 a year in tuition fees alone, from thinking that the study of accountancy is a safer bet than classics or Keats? Little wonder the arts are now dominated by those from more prosperous backgrounds. Swanning around with a copy of Keats in one’s back pocket is something one cannot expect the taxpayer to subsidise There was a time when those in higher education were protected from the full chill of commercial reality. Freed from an obsessive concern to instrumentalise all learning, universities were enabled to develop rich traditions of creativity. The university provided space and stimulation where the imagination was given space to grow and develop, to take wrong turns, to try on different ideological hats, to read beyond the curriculum, to make unexpected links, to question, experiment and explore. To the bean-counters, this process was easily misrepresented as lying around in bed a lot and having too much fun. But thinking takes the time it takes. And Aristotle never billed by the hour. Labour’s plan to reduce tuition fees to £6,000, taking the money from pension tax relief on those earning over £150,000, strikes an important and long-overdue blow for intergenerational fairness. But it is also a gesture to improve our culture in its broadest sense. We are all diminished if we allow the world of work too much domination over our whole lives. All of our lives grow thinner and more flat when governments insist that money alone determines the agenda – and the curriculum – of our universities. • This article was amended on 2 March 2015 to clarify a reference to Newman’s The Idea of a University. |