How my generation let down our students

Summary; The Essay.

Summary

British academics began to be demoted as a class in the 1970s in a war launched by politicians and administrators. The boomer generation of upwardly mobile academics, who felt like orphans, never mastered the art of self-reproduction. We trusted the state and lacked popular support. Mrs Thatcher completed our demise as part of her attack on the institutions of the postwar political consensus. An audit culture descended on the universities from the 1980s and 90s, a coercive mix of artificial markets and bureaucratic interference. Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government, at a much lower economic level of fees and job opportunities, emulated the US model of piling debt on students as a way of cowing them into submission. Professors enjoy enhanced rewards and freedom, while young scholars perform cheap academic labour without benefits or prospects. Most lecturers still agitate for a return to the golden age after the war. No other class responds to the neoliberal holocaust in this way. There is no reason why students seeking higher education in this century should look to these universities; it was us, the lucky beneficiaries of our parents’ war and its aftermath, who threw it all away.

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My generation matured in the upward mobility of ‘the sixties’ which began in 1964 with the Beatles’ US tour and ended in 1973. Before that, ‘kitchen sink’ drama and novels featured angry young men from the North. This social upheaval was driven by the Butler Education Act of 1944, the postwar baby boom and rising prosperity in the late 1950s. I took little part in this ‘cultural revolution’. Divisions of class, gender, race, religion, language and region did seem to be giving way then. But class inequality has been restored since. Oxbridge is still urged to increase recruitment from state schools. Did the temporary democratization of access to education benefit me? It did. But its content was antiquated. Any breathing space I found was despite my training, not because of it.

In 1969, when I got my PhD, there were 23 lecturing jobs available to me. One had no applicants. The new universities were still recruiting and their students had not yet reached the job market. This situation soon turned to one of job scarcity. The Tory government announced a higher education pay review joining the universities, polytechnics and teachers training colleges. The lecturers’ union stayed out since we were “part of the ruling class.” The Civil List dealt with pay for the royal family, admirals, judges, professors and the like. It was never likely that lower-class provincials would be admitted en masse. The polytechnics had a pay rise of 25% and the universities nothing.

The union made concessions in exchange for small pay rises. I asked the Trotskyite entryists why were we giving away our work conditions for ephemeral pay increases? They claimed that most union members were scientists who were only interested in pay. Why were we placing our faith in the state? I argued for an alliance with the schoolteachers’ unions. Most people thought university lecturers were intellectual snobs who had too many holidays. Politicians could shaft us with impunity. We needed a popular constituency. A Labour government then froze academics’ pay when annual inflation was 25%. This wiped out the small increments.

My generation failed to master the art of self-reproduction. Luisa Passerini’s book, Autobiography of a Generation (1988)—about the student occupation of Turin University in 1968—confirmed this. Its leader was later found in his father’s law office. “We felt like orphans. Our parents’ generation had betrayed us. They embraced Mussolini’s fascism and were defeated twice. We could take nothing from them and had to start afresh by ourselves.” In Britain, although our parents had fought to defeat fascism and then installed the welfare state that smoothed our path into higher education, we too thought of ourselves as orphans, cut off from them. We owed them and our teachers a lot but were in denial.

We had no clue what to do with our own children and students. Coming from ‘nowhere’, the task of upward social mobility absorbed all our energies. We had to accumulate a family, house and car, learn our trade, and navigate the pitfalls of class. We didn’t think about conserving our profession and families. We had no time to reflect on the important things. It was never our masters’ intention to allow us into the ruling class. University teachers began a long descent into the proletariat. It started as bargaining about pay and status in the 1970s. Margaret Thatcher applied the coup de gras.

Intellectual and social life in the British universities was relatively generous in the 1960s and 70s. We still didn’t have heavy teaching loads. We nourished a sense of ethical responsibility towards our colleagues and students that had been eroded in France, Germany, and Italy by mass free enrolments after 1945. The Cold War kept a steady flow of capital-intensive research projects coming in—armaments, drugs and food—which was good for morale. Social scientists bought into the new idea that research was now king, without being as useful to the powers as the real scientists.

My story is mainly about that early turning point. The gruesome denouement is better known. Thatcher decided to pick off all interest groups who might use the old corporate state to obstruct market liberalization. Chief among these were the labor unions and municipal government. She cleansed her own party of the old Tory gentry who held onto the centrist fantasy of a humane politics—she called them the “wets”. But she also took on the civil servants, the judges, the doctors and, of course, the universities, who represented a source of cultural resistance to the assumption of regional and local powers by the central government.

The only major institution that she left unharmed was finance in the City of London, whose denizens on occasionally televised festive occasions cheered to the rafters her publicly modest husband Dennis for the Renaissance prince that he really was. He gave the provincial Oxford chemistry student he married her economics with a strong South African slant, and was generally represented in the upmarket media as a fool.

The English ruling class, lacking a national bourgeoisie, was always ambivalent about education. What would the masses do with it, if not undermine their power? In the 1980s, the Tories pursued a policy of dumbing down aimed at converting the UK into an offshore facility for international corporations inside Europe. The tedium of the assembly line would banish subversive thoughts.

By now the university teachers had lost whatever radicalism remained from the sixties. In the early 70s, when I was teaching at Manchester University, there was a freeze and the thermometers in academic departments were set at 58 degrees F (14 C)—the secretaries were trying to type wearing gloves without finger ends. I was called to the central administration building; when I opened the main door, I was hit by a blast of hot air—I guessed around 74 degrees (23 C). I knew then that we were at war with the bureaucrats and would lose. They had nothing better to do than rig the political game; they have been perfecting it ever since. The universities’ leading  executives are now paid salaries as if they managed a business corporation, which is what they have become.

Society is supposed to have been decentralized by the digital revolution and market fundamentalism. The London-based state has for decades been centralizing remorselessly—and becoming massively over-indebted—the main target being the provincial cities and their hinterlands that produced the industrial revolution. Alexis de Tocqueville once claimed that the British had the strongest state in Europe and a decentralized administration, while the French had a weak state and a centralized administration. Since 1979-80, the position has been reversed.

Access to higher education was democratized rapidly in France, Italy and Germany after 1945. Britain largely missed out on a modern university syllabus when the chance arose between the wars. As well as the Oxbridge-based establishment, this was because of the decentralized powers of the shires and municipalities. The result was a kind of amateur flexibility that was our strength as well as our weakness, when compared with the United States and the rest of Western Europe.

This tradition was brutally demolished in the 1980s and 90s. Until then the proportion of a British age cohort in higher education was stuck at around 1 in 8; now it became 1 in 3—and has since risen higher, while the quality deteriorated. With no more government funding, the universities have become bankrupt and now rely on admitting foreign students at astronomical fees. The proportion of British students is shrinking fast in the leading universities, echoing the situation of American students in the University of California before Asian quotas were introduced.

An audit culture descended on the universities, a coercive mix of artificial markets and bureaucratic interference. The government, faced with a cash shortage, wanted to concentrate its spending in the best places. This meant breaking up the myth that all British universities were alike and equal. Their number was doubled by adding the polytechnics; this made it easier to discriminate between them. They all had to expand recruitment; Oxbridge refused. No more money was forthcoming, however. The combination of mad bureaucratic directives and expanded enrolments has broken British academics’ moral adhesion to a common calling.

The autonomy of university teachers—who now earned less than their high school counterparts—was further reduced by putting them into fierce competition with each other. The method of assessing research and teaching has been well publicized. This audit culture is like painting the Forth Bridge—it never ends. As soon as one exercise is completed, another is on its way. Slowly the victims master the system, upgrade their scores, and then get told that the money isn’t available after all because there were too many winners.

A radical differentiation has taken place. Top professors now enjoy enhanced pay, freedom, and travel, while young scholars perform cheap labor without prospects. The provincial arrivistes of yesteryear, like me, who once struggled to keep our heads above water, now ignore our responsibilities to the next generation, taking leave for research and writing, while the university saves money by hiring a postdoc for a pittance. In the US, former students face enormous personal debts incurred by attending the most expensive higher education system in the world, thereby crushing any surplus energy they might have for opposing their lot. ‘Adjuncts’ with no job security and low pay without benefits now do two-thirds of the teaching.

Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government introduced student fees, accepting neoliberal economic globalization as inevitable while offering mildly better social policies—like the Clinton and Obama Democrats and French Socialists. This emulated the US model of piling debt on students, but with much lower fees and employment opportunities. The political result for young people is much the same in both cases; their European counterparts’ education costs are much lower, but their job situation is often worse.

The financial squeeze on what are still public universities continues. Many lecturers still agitate for a return to the golden age before all hell broke loose. I know of no other class whose response to the neoliberal holocaust is to restore the status quo ante. The covid-19 lockdowns exposed the shambles for all to see. Some universities are already going down, along with fringe academic publishers.

British social anthropologists—displaying a touching reliance on the state as a legacy of colonial empire—work only in the top fifteen universities. We hardly acknowledge our role as teachers. Ethnography is still king, except that the money for expensive overseas trips is now scarce. Students are expected to pay through the nose to study a subject unknown to the public and with few job prospects. I respect the young people who have found a professional toehold there today. Anthropology is an essential aid to understanding emergent world society. We just need to learn how to communicate our knowledge.

We write a stream of journal articles, book chapters and conference papers that no-one reads—now based on ‘the literature’ more than fieldwork. Compulsory reports to bureaucracy squeeze the time even for that diminished role. The European Research Council no longer considers books in grant applications—they are too qualitative to assess reliably. It substitutes scores calculated by clerks based on publications in the top twenty journals of a discipline. The time required for meetings to allocate research grants has been cut drastically.

Universities will struggle to keep their place in formal education and even more in public culture. Some names and buildings may remain; but their educational content will be unrecognizable from today. We, the beneficiaries of our parents’ war and welfare state, threw it all away. The universities’ decline is central to the collapse of British democracy, and with it the national economy’s descent into oblivion with the exception of finance. Voting alone does not give people democratic power. Denying this is just one way that modern education covers up truth at every level in our societies.

The universities outside Oxbridge were not nationally significant before 1900; the middle classes were then more likely to go to a theological seminary for their higher education. No institution was more closely wedded in the last century to the fortunes of its dominant social form, national capitalism—the attempt to control money and markets through central bureaucracies whose premises have been undermined by the neoliberal counter-revolution against social democracy over four decades ago.

Soon after I first posted this essay in a blog some 15 years ago, a young man approached me to ask if I minded him reposting it. I asked him where that would be. He and some others had launched a site called ‘Generation’. Its aim was to prepare for the coming war between the generations by assembling useful documents and providing a forum for discussion. He told me that my essay was a rare example where a boomer academic had owned up to our crimes against them. I felt compelled to tell him that, in any war between his generation and mine, their side would lose. We not only have most of the money and power, but my generation would never have asked for permission.

I have a younger daughter who belongs to Generation Z—children born soon before or after 2000, amounting to two billion globally. Africa in 2100 will have half the world’s children 18 and under. I now place my hope for avoiding the apocalypse in the world’s youth and feel ashamed for that putdown.