The Elephant on Campus

Diagnosing the problem of the university

That the socialist state attracts the intellectual is understandable enough, given the role of reason in the formulation and legitimation of activist policy. What is less obvious is why this love does not remain unrequited, why the socialist state accepts the intellectuals at their own valuation - a strange position to take on the part of a monopsonist, the sole buyer of their services.

Antony de Jasay

Universities in Britain are in a bad way. This is something on which there is widespread agreement across the political spectrum. And there is, unusually, even consensus about the basic features of the crisis - standards seem to be declining; research is becoming instrumentalised and valued only in terms of narrow ‘impact’; finances are being squeezed. What is interesting about this consensus, however, is that it is equally as wrong about the ultimate cause of the problem from either direction, left or right - albeit for very different reasons.

The wrongness on the left manifests itself in the bizarre idea that the problem facing universities is that they have become marketised. The idea here is that, at some point in the past, sinister ‘neoliberals’ decided that education was not a public good, and opened higher education in particular up to ‘market forces’. This corrupted the entire process by reducing it to a mere response to pecuniary incentives. Universities now compete with one another in a race to the bottom, resulting in a ‘pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’ approach that has transformed them into mere degree factories.

This is a ludicrous belief. Universities in the UK remain, for the most part, reliant on public funding. All that has changed is that students receive taxpayer-funded loans, rather than grants, and have to pay notional ‘fees’ with the loans they recieve. This means that although direct public funding has declined, the taxpayer still underwrites the lion’s share of university budgets. And there is in any case no real market, because the state sets such tight bounds on what is permissible that nothing like a supply-and-demand function can really come into being. The most obvious and important of these bounds is the fee cap for home students, which sets a price ceiling (£9,535 p.a. from August 2025) that is too low for most universities to make ends meet and which results in literally every institution in the land charging exactly the same amount for their product. What has been produced therefore is something like the opposite of a market - a cartel of rent-seekers who compete with one another for slightly bigger slices of a pie of guaranteed size (the fees paid by taxpayer-backed student loans), and who cooperate with one another to lobby for the pie size to increase. Whatever this is, it is not the product of a market.

The wrongness on the right manifests itself in the equally bizarre idea that universities have been ‘captured’ through a concerted project, spanning decades, wherein a nefarious coterie of cultural Marxists have worked to transform the institutions of higher education into a constellation of ‘woke’ madrassas. These, purportedly, then churn out indoctrinated zombies to infest the corridors of power in the civil service and business and transform society accordingly.

This is, again, simply foolish. The main reason why it is foolish - and something which outsiders seem to have real trouble grasping - is that it is impossible to imagine a class of person who would be less capable of planning and executing a project of this kind than academics. Academics are good at all kinds of things, but the thing they are best at is disagreeing with one another, and the thing they are worst at is organisation. The idea that the gradual leftwards drift that has taken place in academia is attributable to a willed effort is therefore simply not credible. As is often the case with conspiracy theories, it gives the purported conspirators far too much credit. This is not to say that the leftwards drift is not real and that it has not, slowly but surely, produced a monoculture. But it is not coordinated, directed, or deliberate in any meaningful sense.

That left and right both understand that something has gone desperately awry but only have bonkers diagnoses of the problem is instructive. It suggests that there is some serious cognitive dissonance at work - a consensus that there is definitely something very big in the room, combined with a sheer refusal to subject it to sufficient analysis to identify that it has a trunk, tusks, and oversized, floppy ears.