What will become of a society that continually prioritises efficiency over civilisation?
Addressing the Conservative Party conference, Kemi Badenoch took aim at unprofitable degrees, pledging to “shut down these rip-off courses and use the money to double the apprenticeship budget”. Badeneoch told the conference that “We will be giving thousands more young people the chance of a proper start in life. Just like I had.” Leaving aside the frightening prospect of ending up as leader of the Conservative Party, these were promises written on water — policy announcements from a party with no chance of governing, made by a leader who is unlikely to survive till the next election. Yet the thinking behind this attack on universities should be taken seriously.
For one thing, the problem is real. Universities have expanded massively, fueled by government backed debt and a flood of international students. The “graduate premium” has gone down, standards have fallen, and mental health problems amongst students have ballooned. This is a fundamentally unsustainable model, and Badenoch is not the only politician who will be sharpening her tools to carve up the bloated higher education sector. Reform has already promised to cut international student numbers, cancel interest on student loans, promote two year undergraduate degrees and cut funding to universities that don’t back free speech. Starmer has likewise backed apprenticeships over university, and his cash-strapped administration is unlikely to pump more cash into universities.
Many, rightly critical of the politicisation of higher education, and the proliferation of low quality courses, will straightforwardly celebrate this backlash against universities. But critics should be cautious — the emerging consensus repeats many of the original problems, and could make matters even worse. According to the i paper, internal Conservative research points to degrees in the arts, design, English, media, sociology, anthropology, and psychology as being poor value for money.
Contrast this with the high earning courses — law, medicine, economics, business studies, engineers, maths and the sciences — and you quickly see what the fate of modern universities is shaping up to be. STEM and vocational courses are set to dominate, whilst the humanities take a back seat. The purpose of universities, already sold to students in terms of monetary return, “skills”, physical and mental health, and better “life outcomes”, will become even more narrowly utilitarian. And what begins in the classroom, will be realised in adult life. A society that educates future leaders in managerial, scientific and economic studies, oriented towards moneymaking and efficiency, will be governed in those terms.
The traditional humanities have become subordinate to a utilitarian public philosophy and a social scientific approach to public policy
The hubristic expansion of higher education has coincided with its transformation from an intellectual guild of scholars into a kind of business cum bureaucracy. Academics are subject to administrators, students have become customers, and education is focused on marketable skills and prestigious qualifications rather than character formation and inculturation. Now universities are being judged on the terms they themselves have set when justifying themselves to governments, wider society and future students. There have been howls of outrage in mainstream and social media about attacks on the humanities, but even these have often lapsed into listing the economic gains, to pick one example: “My rip off degree of Old and Middle English led directly to #HorridHenry and millions of books sold”.
A 2023 study from Oxford makes the typical form of this case. According to the report, humanities graduates “develop resilience, flexibility and skills to adapt to challenging and changing labour markets.” Humanities careers “open a path to success in a wide range of employment sectors.” Likewise, “the skills developed by studying a humanities degree, such as communication, creativity and working in a team, are ‘highly valued and sought out by employers’.” Even the non-economic benefits are extremely instrumental. The wider benefit to society is supported in terms of providing “analytical tools” for public debates, and spotting “fake news” online.
It’s frustrating, because many participants clearly did have a deeper sense of what their education was about, citing the Greek idea of “eudaimonia” (human flourishing) rather than economic return, with one respondent saying “It’s [degree] about flourishing and happiness … it’s really impacted my life in terms of how I think about my decisions and how I balance the priorities in my life because I could just work all the time, but if I put my family first or other personal relationships first, that’s down to the education I had.” Yet the authors of the report categorise this moral and philosophical account of education as “identity construction and personal development.”
In other words, the traditional humanities have become subordinate to a utilitarian public philosophy and a social scientific approach to public policy. This process is not new, but rather represents the end of a long tail stretching all the way back to the supplanting of the literae humaniores by PPE (the so called “modern greats” of Philosophy, Politics and Economics). Whilst generations of students immersed themselves in a tradition that not only made previous generations of Western culture comprehensible and legible, but exposed them to a genuinely “other” pre-modern world, the PPE graduates who now dominate public life are reared on a shallow, technocratic curriculum, reflecting a Whiggish view of history.
Britain has lost touch with the liberal arts tradition, and the model of education as formation, rather than as “research”. Outside of classrooms, academic publication, conferences and career progression are dominated by the idea of, as Cambridge University puts it, “creating insights”. Through the emergence of “social science”, empirical methodologies have been imposed on areas of study where they have no place or purpose. Graduates are encouraged into increasingly obscure niches in an often fruitless quest for new “insights”. Like tragicomic parodies of evolutionary biologists, humanities researchers spend years seeking to establish textual links, to prove that X read Y, or that Z knew X. The actual substance of what philosophers, poets, critics and statesmen were writing or thinking about becomes lost in a banal obsession with “insight”, underpinned by a grandiose Baconian notion of expanding the frontiers of human knowledge.
There are of course real and original insights to be found in ancient texts, but the creative moment is in the encounter between our own world and lives and the world and ideas of past generations. Good scholarship is an act of translation and performance, in which life is breathed into learning, rather than the worship of the dead letter. Learning here is recovered in its most primordial form, a type recognisable to every culture from medieval Japan to the uncontacted tribes of the Brazilian jungle: education as the perpetuation of culture and the formation of character.
There is great worth here in the technical and analytic side of learning (which was always an aspect of the liberal arts tradition), but the value of this form of scholarship is as aide, midwife and handmaid to a living culture with an aesthetic, moral and political vision which it really lives out and seeks to embody.
Crucially, the goods that we now claim as our own: liberty, justice, the pursuit of happiness and democratic participation in government, are rooted in a millennia old tradition, stretching back to Ancient Greece, Rome and Israel. At its most basic, this tradition can be summed up as the search for truth, virtue and the good through the shared endeavor of political and public life. Politics, in this tradition, is not the mere exercise of power or dominion, but a discursive and rational process, with governance relying on the virtue of individual citizens.
As John Henry Newman wrote in “The Idea of a University”, “if then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society.” Simply put, as a realm dedicated to knowledge, learning and education, and invested with considerable public and private resources to do so, universities are uniquely responsible for the perpetuation of civilised life and the continuation of our culture.
Newman outlined this purpose at length, and it is a worthwhile exercise to compare his idea of a university with what they have become today. “A University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life.”
If universities attempt to justify themselves, or protect what remains of these goods, by embracing their utility as wealth maximisers, schools of professional training, or centres of practical research, they are aiming at their own abolition. There is nothing that a large residential university now does in these respects which could not far more efficiently be achieved on a smaller scale, within workplaces, or dedicated institutions. The very name of “university” is rooted in the idea of universalism; that every subject of learning belongs together, and in studying them together we contribute to a complete human life.
This essentially humanistic ideal is productive of vast material goods, which can in part be measured, but their ultimate cause escapes measurement or calculation. The failure to maintain the basic constitution of the university reflects a general breakdown and impoverishment of Western culture, one increasingly fixated on the acquisition of wealth, the maximisation of pleasure, the extension of life and the pursuit of celebrity. Rather than acting as bulwarks against, and refuges from these baleful trends, universities have all too often advanced them
Much good still happens in classrooms, studies and libraries across the country. Brilliant and hopeful young students fall in love with great texts, dive into the subtle depths of debate and criticism, and leave university as more thoughtful, more refined and more humane people, better equipped to be good friends and citizens. Popular and academic books still shine with the reflected glory of our civilisation, and fine writing, good sense, and moral direction can be found anywhere it’s looked for. All of these goods, however, are imperiled by academic institutions and a public culture that fails to value or fight for them.
What awaits a culture that won’t defend itself, won’t advocate for itself, and won’t perpetuate itself? What will become of a society that continually prioritises profit over culture, efficiency over civilisation? We already see the horrors of this coming anticulture all around us, whether it’s a polarised, thoughtless politics of emotion and hysteria, or the emergence of AI that will substitute for basic literacy, and funnel brain-rotting content onto the screens that perpetually surround us. Technological barbarism and the automation of our basic humanity are not only dangers on the horizon: the barbarians are already at the gate, and the sentries have left the walls.
