A couple of days ago the Congregation of the University of Oxford voted to give outside professional managers more power over the university (it is not a done deal yet – but the plan is now well under way).
The vote showed how things are done in modern Britain. Half way through the debate a letter from the government was produced (by some ex top Civil Servants who are now Oxford dons) and read out – basically the message of the letter was simple, the government has not pushed ahead with ‘reform’ of the university because it expected the people there to “reform” the place, but if they do not do so… So change will be “voluntary” in the sense of an “offer you can not refuse”.
Scholars have been living in Oxford for a long time, perhaps there really were some there in the time of Alfred the Great (as the old stories say). First on an informal basis and then (in the 13th century) in organized ‘colleges’ – communities of scholars who ran their own affairs.
There has always been some government involvement in Oxford. Grants of property (as capital) by various Kings to start up some of the colleges (although private individuals financed the creation of others). Parliament (under the influence of various monarchs) laying down rules concerning religious practices. Even sometimes changing the structure of the university (as with the reform measure of Gladstone).
However, the basic structure of Oxford remained. Colleges as groups of self governing scholars. I can remember when the only non academic staff at Oxford were the cooks, cleaners and the men who guarded the gates of the colleges (who also kept important records). I am not an Oxford man (I am semi-literate dyslexic – and, besides my politics are rather different from those of most of the scholars there), but the changes over recent years have saddened me.
“Why should not Oxford enter the modern world, and why should there not businessmen be in charge rather than head-in-the-clouds academics”.
I support businessmen running their own business enterprises. But professional ‘mangers’ (whether in business or government) who own nothing and have no long term connection with the thing they are in charge of (and no love for it) are often not a good thing.
The ‘modern world’ is too often just endless form filling and ‘targets’ – vast expense to achieve nothing (indeed to achieve less than nothing – to destroy all beauty and tradition).
The trouble at Oxford really goes back to government subsidies. When, after World War II, government started to pick up some of the bill for the year on year current expenses of the universities (not just Oxford all of the universities, bar the University of Buckingham, are in this position) the door was open to government control (for all the empty talk of ‘academic freedom’).
I might not like some of the academic developments at Oxford over the years (such as the Logical Positivism that hit the place in the 1930’s and almost took over philosophy at Oxford after World War II, or the going along with the spread of the economic ideas of Lord Keynes from Cambridge), but that was up to the scholars at the various Oxford colleges. Even at the peak of leftist (for want of a better word) dominance, there were still anti-leftist scholars to be found in some colleges (Oriel for example).
The modern centralized and managerial system that is being enforced on Oxford and the other universities is not a system where dissent will prosper. Nor is it an environment where the eccentric scholar (of whatever political opinions, or none) will prosper.
Such people where once the glory of Oxford (as they were of Cambridge and indeed of British higher education in general). An academic is really neither a ‘teacher’ or a ‘researcher’ they are thinkers. They are people who need time and freedom to think. Then (when they feel the need) they share their thoughts with others, by speech or writings.
I may not agree with some of their thoughts. And many of their thoughts (on subjects that are not familar to me) are beyond my understanding (so it is not a question of whether I agree with them or not). But that is what such people are ‘for’ and that is why so many people donated money and land to to the colleges over the centuries – to give these scholars freedom to work (without the need to earn a living).
The ‘modern’ view, that academics are there to fill in forms, publish X number of articles a year (in the ‘correct’ journals) and fill lots of other targets denies the spirit of places like Oxford.
Nor will the tide of full time managers really make things more ‘efficient’ (although there will be plenty of documents with the word ‘efficiency’ in them). It will just mean (has already meant) vast expense and a lot of unhappy people – academics filling in forms and working to targets (rather than doing the work they love) and students lost in vast webs of bureaucracy.
Ah! The New Men are taking over (cf. CP Snow “Strangers and Brothers). Universities everywhere are paying the price of taking the Government’s shilling. Once professional managers take over (I speak from experience as a one-time University President) the logic of bureaucracy—expand influence, add staff, monopolise the power to approve—pushes the original purposes of the institution to the fringes.
University professors agree to specialise to the point where they are only able to work in universities; in return the institutions “protect” them through reasonable reward and academic freedom. All societies need independent public thinkers, and the western universities, at least until the 1960s, provided the only workable model to produce and protect these rare birds.
However, to the professional manager, measurement is all. One can measure the number of papers published, even construct some rudimentary quality ranking of journals, and delude oneself that one is measuring intellectual activity and creativity. How does one measure “originality” in philosophy? “Creativity” in literary analysis? And so on. Targets, missions, objectives: measurement is all. Trust is a word professional managers are not familiar with. Wide ranging intellectual exploration is unruly, unpredictable. Shudder!
The university faculty brought much of this on themselves, it must be said. Unionisation fatally damaged collegiality. The development of professional schools such as business, and the movement of these into the very heart of the college meant that some of the “alien” (to the university) logic of business and politics came to occupy a central role in decision-making. As these professional bodies gained power—the power of income—they came more and more to claim the right to steer the academies. Eventually the core of the humanties and the pure sciences disintegrated, and now serves a handmaiden role (Art for Business Majors; Philosophy for the CEO; Physics for Historians) or mutates into quasi-political indoctrination courses (any Sociology or Political Science curriculum).
I fear that Oxford is now starting down a path already well-trodden before by most other large universities. I once thought that size was the problem until I saw a potentially excellent liberal arts college sell out to vocational courses. Privatisation a la Buckingham may provide some protection from vocational pressure but it will not protect a small college from the “tenured radicals” bent on politicisation.
A rigourous separation between education in the foundations of thought, logic, proof and communication and the acquisition of specific utilitarian or “professional” skills may be the only way to save the academies. As one grows older one is supposed to become more of a realist. I confess to having moved the other way.
Absolutely fascinating development in Britain’s rapidly accelerating slide into collapse. Toby Huff in The Rise of Early Modern Science argues that European universities were a key factor in the development of modern science as a system of individuals exploring the world in a “neutral” space free from political meddling. The governments of the Middle Ages allowed universities to self-regulate while treating them as self-contained, legal entities much like modern corporations. The creation of the universities were a key to Europe’s rise to global domination.
Now that Britain is chucking that overboard, expect to see the slow stragnation of science that Islam and China experienced.
Toby Huff also argues that Christianity was another key to the creation of modern science because it fostered the idea that God, as a rational being, would create a rational world. Islam, on the other hand, has a God which is unbound by any rules and therefore an exploration of the physical world is pointless since Allah can change the rules at any moment. Christianity also taught that man was “in the world” but not “of the world”. In other words, man, while part of the created order, was given by God the right and ability to control and manipulate the world for his benefit. Once again, in Islam, Allah created a perfect world and it is a rejection of his perfection to attempt to improve on it.
I find it interesting that Europeans have largely rejected Christianity and appear to be embracing Islam. With the destruction of university independence we are seeing a historical development similar to the fall of the Roman Empire.
See also Hookyass and Hookyass’ Religion and the Rise of Modern Science.
The late M.J. Oakeshott (of “On Human Conduct” and other works) half felt that even the more to organized colleges was a mistake (or at least had a cost) – the old informal civil interactions of scholars being pushed into a formal structure (things moving from a societas to a universitas). Although I suspect that being denied E. Barker’s Chair in history at Cambridge had an effect on what he thought of formal associations of scholars (the nastyness did not even end with Oakeshott’s death, leftist dons tried to deny him a memorial service at his old college in Cambridge).
However, you are correct that the colleges (and the universities that they were part of) were part of civil society and people did great work in them. And this included insistutions set up by social democrats and socialists – after all Oakeshott got a position at the London School of Economics and was happy there for many years (for all the faults of the time they were more tolerant days than now).
Whether one is dealing with the humanities or the “social sciences” it is hard to see good things comming out of the modern “business” style insitutions of higher education. It is pretend “business” of course -they are really just vast webs of bureacracy (whether the people put in charge use to work in private business enterprises or not).
Nor will the natural sciences prosper in the a world of “peer review” where the only way to survive is to produce X number of articles that are approved of by other academics. Scientific discovery depends on being able to challenge ideas, not just go along with whatever is in fashion.
“But the students, the students” – yes the students, they will not be served by the changes over the last few years. The best academics are often also the best teachers (although Newton was not I am told), in that they inspire students to think.
Interesting thinkers are leaving academia (and have been for some time). Take the example of history.
If an historian wishes to find out what happened in the past and why it happened (which is what an historian is interested in doing) why would he or she stay in a modern university – where so much time is taken up with admin meetings (the comming of full time managers has not freed academics from such things – quite the reverse) and form filling?
And if an historian wishes to explain what happened and why to other people is it not better to make a television series (as so many good ex academics are now doing) than try to teach students – in a unviversity structure that holds that the passing on of knowledge comes a very poor second to box ticking and form filling.
Certainly one can not really educate someone with just a television series (even if they buy the book as well), but it is better than a modern universtity. And for those academics who feel a passion to teach in a university – there are many other nations in the world.
Norman Stone went from Cambridge to Oxford, but decided he could simply not stand the “modern way of doing things” and went as far as Turkey to find a university in which he could breath (how long Turkish universities will resist Islamic orthodoxy I do not know -but, according to Stone, there is more academic freedom in them now than there is in British universities).
How one passes on knowledge or inspires students to develop their own thoughts is very much “tacit knowledge” (to use a concept from both Oakeshott and F.A. Hayek) it can not be typed up on a form or explained to administrators.
The great academics of the British tradition (men like Oakeshott or R.G. Collingwood or all the rest) could not have prospered (or even survived) under the new system. They are being replaced by time servers – people who are expert at “working the system” (like modern senior civil servants who manage to get big “bonus” payments in return for nothing much) and are expert in nothing else.
Of course vast numbers of students will be “turned out” by insitiutions dominated by such people, but these students will not know much about the subjects they supposedly went to study, and (perhaps worse) all curiosity and delight in thinking will have been killed off in the graduates.
They will be able to shake their fists in support of some popular cause, and they will be able to take up administration jobs. But they will have no life of the mind.
Universities like foreign students who pay large sums of money to go to Oxbridge and other UK universities. It’s a large an important source of income. But those students have a nasty habit of suing when they get bad grades, and complaining that they were not taught properly.
The only way to prove that they were taught properly, is to produce a lot of paperwork showing every little thing they were told to do, told to read, made to write etc.
This is (I’m assured by current lecturers) the main driving force behind the change to a red-tape driven curriculum and teaching style. Drinking port with your tutor was one thing when the taxpayer was footing the bill, but when mum and dad are, they want proof that there’s some proper teaching going on.
Given that the US has had these issues for several decades and don’t seem to be doing too badly, I don’t fear that much for the UK
I’m still saddened, mind, because the tyranny of privately hired lawyers is little better (in my non-libertarian opinion) than the tyranny of the state.
In a world where those paying the bill are unwilling to take the quality of the service on trust, we can hardly be surprised when this kind of thing happens.
See also healthcare.
I watched the growth of form filling (and other such) at several universities – there were very overseas students in any of them (and they were never a reason for the expansion in managerialism).
This is government driven – and it goes back quite a few years now.
If “Mum and Dad” were paying for everything (or better the student themselves was paying) the universities would be free to tell the governement to go to Hell. As Hillsdale did – it refused to fill in the race forms (after all it was the first university to let in black students and had always worked for openess) the government said “then no student who goes to Hillsdale will get government aid” and Hillsdale (thankfully) had the guts to say “fair enough” and to stand up to court action.
As for the United States – the growth of costs and the growth of form filling (and the rest of it) are directly linked to the rise of government subsidies.
The days when someone could work their way through college (taking a job to pay tuition as well as to pay living expenses) are long gone. Subsidies have pushed up tuition costs – so that everyone (bar the rich) must apply for help (it is a trap).
It is a similar story with Medicare and Medicaid – government “help” pushes up general costs, and this is then used as an excuse for demands for yet more statism.
As for the difference between Britain and the United States in higher education. There is one – in Britain government control is becomming far more detailed and universal than it is in the United States.
Thanks for your article and your comments, Mr. Marks — Excellent!
The decline of education in the West is a troubling phenomenon, as is the use of education as a form of disguised unemployment in a number of European nations. The education system seems to suffer from the same problems as so much else in the West (& particularly the EU) — mushrooming overhead; so many talented people working hard to produce nothing of value.
One of the major issues for any society is what to do with its surplus labour. The ancient Egyptians used their surplus labour to build the pyramids — and thousands of years later, people still go to Egypt to marvel. Thousands of years from now, no-one will travel to Oxford to marvel at the serried ranks of filing cabinets that the bureaucrats filled with trivia. We are wasting our labour surplus.
I recently started work at Oxford University again after having been away for a few years. One thing that I had noticed when working elsewhere was exactly this:
academics are there to fill in forms, publish X number of articles a year
The filling in of forms was a very important part, for it gave the administrators more time to write reports filled with managerial nonsense if we filled the forms in rather than them.
I hope that does not go the way you think it will go here.
If you want to balme someoe, blame the Regressive Tendency awkward squad. They have handled the campaing so badly from beginning to end, that this meeting really was a foregone conclusion. Shockingly enough launching regular vitriolic attacks on the Vice Chancellor and the all who earn their living through commerce didn’t do the trick.
Regardless, if Oxford is now going to have to run itself as a business it should go private and follow a Harvard business plan. The current, or rather forthcoming, situation holds no benefits.
Paul, another great thought provoking article, you are my Tutor, Amazon will provide me with a copy of “On Human Conduct” next week.
Here comes the but, I don’t share your and the other commenters pessimism.
Thanks in no small part to the academics at Oxford and other places like it, modern world communication between people has allowed a vast expansion in the numbers engaged in academic thought, discourse and collaboration. If the view is true, that past academia is the root of the current Western lifestyle, then to what heights will today’s academia take us?
Oxford is being superseded by the Hyperspace, the bureaucrats will be bypassed, the future will be created by today’s academics using their knowledge and imagination.
David Roberts
Woops, I meant the Cyberspace. Why are errors more easy to spot after posting?
I fear that this is only partly about management (though I agree with all the adverse comments about that); it’s more about the State grabbing control so that it can impose its own ideology on – particularly – admissions.
Translation – more low-quality candidates will be forced into Oxford, in order to boost some target number somewhere in Whitehall.
The only way Oxford can survive in its present form and with its present quality, is to go private – completely – and accept the consequent loss of “state” funding.
Why are errors so easy to spot after posting? That is a question I have often asked myself.
Be careful of treating a dyslexic like me as a tutor – after all I even left out the word “few” in “there were very few overseas students”.
“But the word was in my mind” – that does not really help nontelepaths.
Good luck with “On Human Conduct”. Three good essays – and like so much important work, the point is not that everything there is correct (many might argue with such things as the description of economists [the assumption that they all viewed civil association as just a way to maximise income and wealth], and Oakeshott himself said he had wished he had put in something on the importance of Thomas Cromwell for enterprise association thought in this country).
The work is important because it leads to thought.
Alice talks of the labour surplus. I am old school enough to believe that with flexible wage rates and getting rid of a lot of regulations and taxes, just about everyone can not only be employed but can be employed doing useful things (I am a Say’s law man – “the market will clear” [i.e. civil interaction will work] if it is allowed to).
Gabriel – quite so.
Something should either be a business or not a business. Non business institutions pretending to be business enterprises and using what they are told are “business methods” are a mess (to put it mildly). As for Harvard, I do not know enough about the place to make a useful comment.
As for the resistance in Oxford. Well talking about W.M.D.s and Iraq was a bit beside the point. And insulting the Vice Chancellor was both rude and dumb. However, with the government backing the “reforms” I do not see them winning in the long term whatever tactics they follow.
Cambridge is an interesting example. For some years academics at Cambridge have been setting up business enterprises (in such things as computers and biotechnology). It was like the old days of scholars acting as independent operators (the days before the establishment of formal colleges), but it did not just benefit the scholars – it encouraged people to become students at Cambridge (to be close to these enterprises and the people who created and ran them) and kept some of the research in these areas connected to the wider world.
But it could not be tolerated in the “modern world”. The administration demanded that X per cent of the money from these enterprises go to the University (not even the individual colleges) even though the academics created and ran these concerns in their own time.
The move has not destroyed Cambridge (as people are still allowed some freedom to run their own enterprises and are allowed to keep some of the money), but it is shove in the direction of decline. Academics interested in creating their own enterprises have now got an incentive to leave the University (or never take jobs there in the first place) and not just because of the money – it is also because of the desire of the administration to cover everything in paperwork.
As for the non “science and technolgy” side of Cambridge, I suspect that a straw in the wind (more than straw in the wind) will be what happens to Adamson at Peterhouse.
This academic is part of the Peterhouse school of historians (who have done so much important work over the decades), he seems to be under pressure. If he can not survive in the modern environment I doubt anyone can.
“Academic politics” does matter. C.S. Lewis fled Oxford for Cambridge (because Oxford got too dominated by such things as logical positivism), but scholars like Tolkien (in English) stayed and faught (as did historians and philosphers [people in the Aristotelian tradition] at Oxford) and Oxford remained a great university (even economics did not totally fall, some interesting economists remained at Oxford – John Jewkes is an example).
But with the government so strongly behind the “process of reform” dissent is much more difficult. I doubt that someone like Tolkien would survive long at Oxford these days.
“Why are you writing silly stories rather than filling in forms” – that would be the way of things.
Of course (in the particular case of Tolkien) when he found out that Anglo Saxon had been taken out of the study of English (and a lot else was going), he would most likely have left before the protests from admin about him wasting time on silly stories became a factor.
BTW, in my humble opinion his best political essay is ‘The Rule of Law’ and his second best is ‘The Tower of Babel’ both in ‘On History and other Essays’. Liberty Fund do a really great edition for silly money.
Before I read them I was a more or less a doctrinaire libertarian verging on Anarcho-Capitalist (some residual emotional conservatism held me back), but, politically speaking, those two essays changed my life.
I also think that many of the essays to be found in “On History and other Essays” (1983 if my memory serves) are fine work.
Although that does not stop me being a rather doctrinare libertarian (although I often despair at the absurd things many of my fellow libertarians say).
As for anarchocapitalism. Whether I think government can be limited (or will inevitably grow out of control – however things I done) is something I am very unsure of.
Just as I am unsure whether any combination of commercial and noncommercial effort could ever replace the state in such things as defence.
I must confess to a strong feeling to towards the sort of traditional government such as the one Tolkien writes of concerning the Shire.
There is a Thrain (a monarch) but he does not toss his weight about (being the monarch is a matter of being able to put a number after your name), and there is a Mayor – but he just goes to formal dinners.
Of course if evil comes these titles can carry real responsibilities, but not normally.
I would like to say how impressed I was with PatrickB’s comment.
It was interesting to read such a clear sighted comment from a former unversity President. PatrickB is also plainly an idealist – and I mean that in the good sense not the bad.
At the price of three comments in a row (not a good practice I admit) I will say to Gabriel (and to anyone else who reads this) that even in my anarchist moods I have always liked the term “Tory anarchist” much better than “anarchocapitalist”.
Oakeshott didn’t change any of my views on political issues so in that sense I guess I’m still a doctrinaire libertarian, but
1) I would now never use faith-based “Natural Law” arguments to justify my positions
2) I realised anarcho captialism is not the logical continuation of my political position, but a negation of it
3) I do not have to base my libertarianism on a positive view of human nature that I know to be false.
That, and he taught me it’s OK to be a conservative.
Understood Gabriel.