Universities and the 'World of Power and Utility': The Case of the 1in5 Climate Initiative

The university as it was known is dying; it is not 'wokeness' that is to blame

A university is not a machine for achieving a particular purpose or producing a particular result…[It is] a number of people engaged in a certain sort of activity: the Middle Ages called it Studium; we may call it ‘the pursuit of learning’.

-Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Idea of a University’

Oakeshott’s ‘The Idea of a University’, penned in 1950 as a defence of universities, reads now like an elegy - or perhaps one should say eulogy. Universities, Oakeshott insisted, should resist the siren songs of ‘missions’, ‘functions’ and ‘purposes’. A university is simply a group of people - scholars, teachers and students - living in a community and engaged in the activity of learning. And learning is not purposive; it is conversational:

A conversation does not need a chairman, it has no predetermined course, we do not ask what it is ‘for’, and we do not judge its excellence by its conclusion; it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day. Its integration is not superimposed but springs from the quality of the voices which speak, and its value lies in the relics it leaves behind in the minds of those who participate.

For the undergraduate, especially, university provided ‘the opportunity of education in conversation with his teachers, his fellows and himself…where he is not encouraged to confuse education with training for a profession, with learning the tricks of a trade, with preparation for future particular service in society or with the acquisition of a kind of moral and intellectual outfit to see him through life.’ Education, ‘which is concerned with persons, not functions’ invariably ‘steals out of the back door with noiseless steps’ when it is forced to be purposive in this sense.

No: university education was to be understood as the ‘gift of an interval…a break in the tyrannical course of irreperable events; a period in which to look round upon the world and upon oneself without the sense of an enemy at one’s back or the insistent pressure to make up one’s mind; a moment in which to taste the mystery without the necessity of at once seeking a solution.’ Oakeshott’s prose is like a warm blanket and it is hard to resist going on:

[W]hat it felt like to be an undergraduate on that first October morning. Almost overnight, a world of ungracious fact had melted into infinite possibility; we who belonged to no ‘leisured class’ had been free for a moment from the curse of Adam, the burdensome distinction between work and play. What opened before us was not a road but a boundless sea; it was enough to stretch one’s sails to the wind. The distracting urgency of an immediate destination was absent, duty no longer oppressed, boredom and disappointment were words without meaning; death was unthinkable.

The ‘harvest’ of this was not training or ‘a possession of an armoury of arguments’, but the learning of ‘something to help [one] lead a more significant life’ - the capacity to think.

And Oakeshott therefore warned universities to beware the patronage of the ‘world of power and utility’, the ‘wealthy, interfering and well-meaning’ world with its ‘amiable carelessness’. If they failed to do so, the result would be their death:

A university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research, when its teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the whole of the undergraduate’s time, and when those who came to be taught come, not in search of their intellectual fortune but with a vitality so unroused or so exhausted that they wish only to be provided with a serviceable moral and intellectual outfit; when they come with no understanding of the manners of conversation but desire only a qualification for earning a living or a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.

As anyone who works at a university or is familiar with their operations will know, we are now perilously close to achieving precisely this state of affairs. Students are not to blame, and nor for the most part are academics, who are generally enmeshed in a structure of incentives they would not otherwise have chosen. But the ‘world of power and utility’ has intruded, and the institutions have almost entirely wedded themselves to its patronage. The result is that the university that Oakeshott knew, and which I glimpsed the tail-end of as an undergraduate (I went to university in 1999), has now largely disappeared. The concept of' ‘we who belonged to no “leisured class” [being] free for a moment from the curse of Adam’ has become, if not extinct, then critically endangered. Now undergraduates are under remorseless pressure from the very first - a ‘distracting urgency’ - and it is a pressure not only to do well but to do something useful in a very narrow, instrumental sense.

The character and import of this distracting urgency is often lost. To the outside world, particularly on the political right, universities have become identified as centres of ‘woke’ brainwashing in which students are indoctrinated into social justice causes. In my experience, this not largely true. The pressure is in fact much more subtle. It is not so much that university education often becomes biased politically. It is rather that it has become about imbuing undergraduates with the purpose of entering what might be called a governing class - concerned not with engaging them in the activity of learning but rather with inculcating into them a particular mindset that I will call (at the risk of sounding like a broken record) political reason.

In short, what this means is that students are from the outset told, relentlessly, that they are not at university to learn, but to ‘change the world’. Their task is not to engage in anything so quaint as a shared conversation with a community of scholars, and much less to simply enjoy that astonishing privilege - unavailable to almost anyone at any stage in human history - of having three or four years to ‘look round upon the world and upon oneself without the sense of an enemy at one’s back or the insistent pressure to make up one’s mind’.

No, it is to identify problems and solve them - and to do so with a sense of immense and unshakeable mission. Political reason is, quintessentially, the rationale for the existence of government in modernity: it is a mode of thinking which justifies the existence of a governing framework and a governing class to occupy it. And it is this that students are chiefly being taught. They are being inducted into a process - the endless search for problems to be solved and the generation of solutions for them, framed in such a way that government is always and everywhere yet more necessary, yet more benevolent, yet more dominant over society.

The promise of modern university study is, in other words, not that one will be ‘gifted an interval’, but rather that one will pass into the ‘world of power and utility’. Indeed, universities increasingly present themselves as the very gatekeepers to that world - the means by which the credentials are obtained so as to operate as a thoroughly effective cog in the governing machine. Their task is to elaborate upon, and transmit to students, a way of thinking that follows an increasingly rigid pattern: there exist problems; for each problem there exists a solution; and the solution is government in the broad sense (including, increasingly, businesses and other private actors, enlisted in the governing process). And, the underlying message goes, you the undergraduate can and indeed must participate in this vast project if you have any hope of getting on in life.

I was thinking about all of this when perusing the website of the 1in5 project, which aims to build a ‘framework to allow the academic community to focus some of its collective brainpower on climate and biodiversity’. The rationale of the scheme is simply stated:

In the UK alone, every year, about 500,000 students complete an undergraduate degree. In their final year almost all students, in collaboration with us, expert academic supervisors, do a substantial piece of advanced work: a research project, a composition, a dissertation, a show etc. If 1 in 5 of these pieces of work focused on environmental change there could be a significant impact.

All very simple: if through nudging and suggestion we can get 100,000 students per year (whatever their discipline: law, art history, chemistry, dance, sports science, optometry..) to do dissertations on a particular issue - in this case, the climate - then their collective brainpower will generate results. So why not do it?

This is all, it is important to point out, voluntary, and the organisers are (wisely) insistent on that point. As they put it in their advice to university administrators (who they, significantly, call ‘managers’):

If you decide to support 1in5, please avoid the temptation to mandate individual staff to engage with 1in5.  Staff enthusiasm for the idea is key to its success.  There will be many who will be enthusiastic about the idea, forcing those that are not is likely to be counterproductive.  Focus on supporting and encouraging schools or departments, and academics within them who are willing to engage. 

It’s all in other words about encouragement. University administrators (‘managers’) should encourage staff to encourage students to do research projects or dissertations on ‘climate and biodiversity’, whatever their discipline. And the results will be ‘positive impact’.

The message here is clear, and unrelenting, and the quotations provided by academic staff in support of the initiative make their case in crystal clear terms. ‘The 1in5 initiative will empower staff and students to work together to tackle one of the most pressing issues of our time’, says the Head of Psychology at Bristol University. ‘It is crucial for university students to engage with the climate crisis and contribute to tackling it in an informed manner,’ the head of Cambridge University’s Climate Society then tells us. For the Head of Psychology at Bath, 1in5 will ‘expand the reach of climate research into areas where it hasn’t previously existed, while helping students and staff to feel they are constructively joining an enormous community of peers and colleagues all working towards the same goal.’ A lecturer at Cardiff sees an opportunity to ‘cultivate a generation of professionals who are attuned to the realities of our world and equipped to shape it for the better.’ A professorial colleague, meanwhile, conjures up an idealised image of progress: ‘Just imagine the positive impact we can make, and the knowledge we can gain, by running tens of thousands of high-quality climate projects every year across the country,’ he tells us, adding for good measure, ‘This is how you change the world.’

These people, and the organisers of 1in5, are well-meaning, and it is not my intention to pooh-pooh their project or impugn its sincerity. And nor do I mean to suggest that reducing carbon emissions or finding ways to adapt to climate change and conserve biodiversity are not worthy causes. The point I wish to make is specifically about what this tells us about how universities are nowadays envisaged: not as communities of scholars engaged in the activity of learning, but rather as engines of political reason whose purpose is to impress upon students the rationale for the existing framework of government’s perpetuation and growth. You, the undergraduate, are not here for the gift of an interval. You are here to learn how to participate in the great project of government, by which problems are identified and ‘expert’ solutions offered. And when you go out into the world, that is the project which you will tacitly or explicitly support and participate in.

Why is that universities have gone down this path? The reason in a sense is not complicated. As I have elsewhere argued or hinted at (for example, here, here and here), the great problem of secular modernity is that it recognises no non-instrumental reason why governance should take place at all. One cannot plead to the existence of God, nor inheritance, and nor can one plead to ‘blood’ or nationalism or even culture, since those things are irrational and intangible and provide no justification that reason can recognise. All that one can plead to in justification of government is that it provides (purportedly) identifiable material or moral benefits - to repeat, identifying problems and proposing solutions.

And this is in itself is a great, instrumentalising force, against which other considerations find it increasingly difficult to compete. Engaging in the ongoing conversation of learning derives no prestige in these circumstances, because it cannot point to any identifiable improvement in anything. Why would one go to a university if one were not being given the tools to solve problems? And why would one become an academic except on similar grounds? The vision of a university that Oakeshott presents therefore comes to be seen as at best sentimental guff or at worst conservative claptrap that gets in the way of the ‘power and utility’ that are the only game in town.

Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. At the coalface, in the classroom, here and there, the activity of learning can still go on, and does indeed do so. It remains the case up and down the land that a student can in their final undergraduate year simply choose something that they find interesting for no other reason than it is interesting, and write a dissertation on it - without any ‘encouragement’ to pursue any one avenue in particular (although with plenty of encouragement to ‘stretch one’s sails to the wind’). And it is still the case that students, if they wish to, can arrive at university at the age of 18 and leave having done little but learn how to properly think. But we are very close to losing all of this. Intellectual adventures can and will take place online, in podcasts, and in books, but those are fundamentally solitary pursuits; it is the conversational aspect of the activity of learning that will die. We will find out what the full consequences of this are in time; my feeling is that we can observe many of them already in the quality of our public debate and the way in which we are governed.