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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – the frantic dash to lock in Leftism before Reform can reverse it The instructions? “Focus on ideas, not grammar.” Reward “the use of culture, language and identity.” Embrace “linguistic diversity.” Decolonise the curriculum. “Validate diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences.” Reduce essay word counts to ease “stress.” Ditch proper exams. Let students pick formats that suit their precious “identity.”
This isn’t assessment reform. It’s compulsory brainwashing with a marking sheet. The university’s own Quality Assurance Handbook makes the ideological capture explicit: everything must align with King’s Strategic Vision 2029, embedding EDI, sustainability and “inclusivity” as non-negotiable from day one. One anonymous KCL academic told the Mail students will soon be able to challenge grades on the grounds their “culture and identity” wasn’t sufficiently validated. Fantastic. Nothing screams “world-class education” like turning every essay into a victimhood Olympics where clarity is penalised and grievance is gold.
– Gawain Towler
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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If Reform does form the next government – and never forget that the establishment blob will use every dirty trick in the book to prevent that – then it needs to mercilessly destroy a major university that’s gone woke as a warning to the rest. KCL would do as well as any other. Remove its power to award degrees, make its students ineligible for student loans, ban its staff from receiving any form of government grants, revoke visas for its foreign students, and drive it out of business. Like a new Sheriff in a corrupt and lawless town, a Reform government must be absolutely uncompromising in asserting its authority from day one.
AndrewZ: great comment! (And the original post left me seething.)
Yes, but what do you do about it?
Here are some possibilities:
1. Tell them not to. But how are you going to know if they are complying? A Reform government is not going to have the personnel it can trust to do this.
2. Make them fully independent. End grants, abolish student loans. You could even remove their Royal Charters. There’s going to be a hell of a backlash. But if you can get through that they should get back to education again.
3. Make university education less attractive. I’ve heard it said that people need degrees because IQ tests are illegal. Is that true?
4. Declare all universities “indoctrination centres” and remove all funding until proved otherwise. If they bleat about “independence” then you can say they’ve got what they wanted. The proof could be in the form of each member of academic staff being asked for their opinions on communism and DEI. Could produce some interesting results.
A thought you refuse all subventions.And you accept diplomas given by foreign universities you see fit Harvard Université catholique de Louvain and so one ..
Make them fully independent. End grants, abolish student loans. You could even remove their Royal Charters. There’s going to be a hell of a backlash. But if you can get through that they should get back to education again.
I very much doubt they would get back to education. Once the institution has been taken over, la lutta is all. So they will preserve la lutta and surrender everything else. There may be endowments to squander, stuff that can be sold or borrowed against. Subventions from Bill Gates types. And I’m sure that Reform would not find all the indirect and circuitous pipes leading from the Treasury to the wards of the Lefty State for at least two or three years. And if they can just hang on until the political wheel turns, then the official spigot will be turned back on, not just to pay for the then current lunacy, but to make good the depredations imposed by the “sensible” government.
You make thenm independent if and when they have been cured of the infection. Which really means, as Andrew Z says, closing them down.
However it seems to me that reforming the universities is hardly a sensible government’s top priority. Immediate policy simply requires turning off the spigot, to stem the financial hemorrhage. If, by chance, penury induces some common sense, then that would be a bonus. But do not look for that.
This is why, IMHO, Nige is wise to promise to preserve the triple lock. Obviously it is necesaary for him to do so politically, as the electorate is not strong on arithmetic. But any and all of THE CUTS ! can be justified by reference to the need to preserve the holy pensions.
It comes down to “who will fund the Universities if they refuse to comply and a Reform UK gov pulls the plug”. There are plenty of bad actors out there like China with deep pockets and a wilful hatred of the British. They’ve clearly bought out Starmer with the whole Chagos sale thing along with a bit of extortion and ex PM’s galore seem to kowtow to Beijing, so not without problems.
As others have said. Tell them to get their houses in order and pull the research funding, student loan eligibility and ability to issue degrees. Along with that cut off all channels for illegal funds and put some Rottweiler in charge of them. They don’t have to be Reform folks at all, just give them carte blanche and a seat in the Lords if it needs it.
Dominic Cummings might not be a bad idea. The very thought might terrify them into compliance.
Prime Minister Liz Truss was destroyed by the leftist economic doctrines that control the Bank of England, the “OBR” (Office of Budget Responsibility) and-so-on – it was a campaign of active economic sabotage, coupled with an intense media disinformation and agitation propaganda (agitprop) campaign – which has made her very name a smear, people either laugh when they hear her name, or become angry and say “she caused our problems”, “she crashed the economy” and the other things they have been conditioned (programmed) to say – for those of us who believe that humans are human beings (free will moral agents) rather than Thomas Hobbes – David Hume – Jeremy Bentham style flesh robots whose words and actions are predetermined, the situation is deeply depressing, but conditioning of the public does not mean there are not human beings (persons) deep down beneath the brainwashing – the conditioning.
This economic leftism is joined-at-the-hip with the cultural leftism the post refers to – the same education system teaches both, and the same entertainment culture pushes both. It pushes higher government spending and more regulations just as it pushes “Diversity and Inclusion” – the doctrine that Western culture and Western people, are inherently evil (“exploiters and oppressors”) and must-be-destroyed.
What is to be done?
Somehow the human beings (persons) beneath the conditioning (the brainwashing – on both economic and cultural, societal, matters) must be reached – but I do not know how that is to be done.
I do not know.
But I do believe that human personhood, what used to be called the soul, exists – that humans are human beings (not just programmed flesh machines controlled by the Collectivist establishment) – and if the human soul exists, the situation is not hopeless.
As for “Sustainability” – it is clear that like “Diversity and Inclusion”, this “Sustainability” is just more code-language for the destruction of the West, the “Greens” may have started out as people who cared about woods and fields – but it is now clear that they (and the institutions they push this code language) could not give a damn about the natural environment (“Zack Polanski” and his Islamist Deputy are not in politics because they care about woods and fields) – if they cared they would not push mass immigration, with government services and benefits for the immigrants, especially not from cultures that have no historical tradition of caring about the woods and fields and streams (and so on). More immigration (government backed immigration with benefits and “public services”) means more building on the former woods and fields, and more pollution into the rivers and lakes.
“Net Zero” is not about reducing world Carbon Dioxide emissions – note how the number one emitter of Carbon Dioxide is the People’s Republic of China, yet the establishment (not just the far left establishment – but the moderate wing of the establishment such as the Economist magazine) do NOT call for an end of the importation of Chinese made goods.
Closing down Western factories and importing from the People’s Republic of China does NOT reduce global Carbon Dioxide emissions, if anything it is INCREASES them (transport).
So the “sustainability” agenda is nothing to do with caring for the natural environment (even if one accepts the theory that Carbon Dioxide is a threat to the woods and fields – which it is NOT, indeed it is beneficial to the woods and fields) – it is just Death-to-the-West.
The stuff about the teaching of English, the left’s opposition to teaching English language skills, is interesting.
The leftists are not really interested in “ideas” – apart from their own, indeed they would mark down pupils at school and students at university who put dissenting ideas in their work. The reason the leftists do not want to teach English language skills is a simple, and brutal, one – they do not want people to be able to read and understand dissent.
A population that is only semi literate (that can not fully understand formal language) will get their opinions from television news, and from Hollywood films, and television shows and TikTok videos and-so-on – all of which the left dominate.
It is the same with mathematics – if people actually understand mathematics it is harder to deceive them, they will not fall for lies such as “the Tories cut spending on…..” if they can understand the figures themselves and can see that government spending went UP.
The left love “education” in the sense of jobs in schools and universities and lots of people getting “qualifications” that mean little more than they have repeated back leftist doctrine (like parrots) – but people learning to read and understand to a high level, or understand mathematics, NO the left do not want that.
Hence “Progressive education”.
@Patrick Crozier
There is a fifth possibility:
5. Invent a technology that makes the large majority of university education worthless.
Of course we have that technology, it is called the internet. For the most part (outside of some specific professions) universities provide students with four things: an education (Which is now no longer relevant since you can learn anything 1% of the cost by other means), a certification, which surely we can legally circumvent by setting up a skills based certification system (though see below), networking opportunities which only really matter at very high end and lower end universities — the majority in the middle do not provide value here, and a fourth, letting the kids PARTY. Presumably kids can have a really good time elsewhere too.
The certification is the big issue, but surely there are other ways to prove one’s skills? Certainly in my area of expertise I’d rather have someone as a Certified AWS architect than a poncey degree from Harvard. That is a cultural change though, and I think it is coming. But in truth AI and robotics is going to largely eliminate jobs in this middle part anyway.
I say let them die their natural death. One easy fix? Eliminate student loans and payments and let students bear the full cost of their education while keeping the government out of the “student loan” business. That’d shake things up PDQ.
As I said there are exceptions, people with highly specialized training like Medical doctors and lawyers.
Fraser Orr – yes get rid of the government funding, including the “loans” that have made tuition fees explode, subsidy schemes always have the effect, you know what Medicare and Medicaid did to medical costs – they sent them into the stratosphere.
Lawyers used to be trained by other lawyers, doctors could be trained in specialized institutions.
I have no idea what the law is in Britain.
In the US, the practice of companies applying their own aptitude tests for employment was hamstrung for a few decades due to the “Disparate Impact” doctrine established in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. The judges ruled that the test wasn’t obviously discriminatory, but more black people failed than white people, so that was enough to make it violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — unless the company can prove a ‘business necessity’.
So, while IQ tests weren’t outright illegal, if a protected race ended up below the threshold at a higher rate than non-protected races, you’d face an expensive uphill battle in the courts trying to prove that the content of the test was necessary. Plus, of course, the court of public opinion would notice you were fighting racism allegations.
I think Title VII ended up overruled by later civil rights/employment legislation. I don’t know if privately-owned testing companies have been able to rebuild after the decades of low demand due to the disparate impact doctrine. I know of at least one company — Epic Systems — that runs its own tests for their employees.
Thanks for explaining the situation, CayleyGraph2015. I am unaware of any prohibition on this side of the Pond.
CayleyGraph2025 – “Disparate Impact” sounds like egalitarian dogmatism “if the results are not equal then X group must be being discriminated against”.
It sounds like egalitarian dogmatism – because it is egalitarian dogmatism.
Even the Soviet Union did not go this far.
I am conflicted here. I’ve been an academic mathematician and statistician in the UK at a Russell Group University for 41 years.
I’ve been pretty successful. Full Professor at a top 10 department.
Patrick and Frasier are wrong when it comes to learning higher level maths. Aside from one in 10 million people, you can’t learn it from the Internet.
You can’t learn to be a good practical statistician from the Internet either.
It requires much more interactive learning.
OK, that’s one side if the issue. Now the other- universities in the UK- let alone the EU, are massively colonised by the ideological left.
I know, it’s no surprise to readers here. What I’m inching towards is saying that despite my massive commitment to the enterprise, I’m not sure you can rescue them.
Forget the money, it’s a question of practicalities. Can we make Universities worthwhile again?
I’m not sure.
@Clovis Sangrail
Forget the money, it’s a question of practicalities. Can we make Universities worthwhile again?
I think to answer that question you have to first establish what value they bring over some sort of focused vocational school. To me the question is: are we trying to produce “well rounded” individuals or are we trying to produce people qualified for certain specific vocational tasks. I think most kids and their parents think the latter and most academics tend toward the former. It is why I think universities are caught between the intent of the liberal arts education and the trade school. They can’t seem to decide which they are. Were their focus on producing people with certain skillsets the ideological thing would be less relevant. But the “well rounded individual” is where the problem sets in because “well rounded” often means “thinks like I do”.