Written in a fit of murderous rage
(cross-posted to academics_anon)
If anyone thinks that the nearly homicidal hatred of my friend wemyss for the repulsive rabble that pretends to govern this wretched country is exaggerated, listen to this. A Labour so-called "think tank" (although what in the name of Heaven the notion of thinking has to do with such a body I for one cannot imagine) has come up with the umpteenth "solution" to the "problem" that obsesses Labour minds at this particular time in history: namely, that there are too few working-class students and too many middle-class ones in Britain's overgrown university sector. Never mind that Britain is at present in the worst economic situation in its whole history; never mind that it is being daily outstripped by the despised continentals; never mind that five million people are on benefits, many of them without any prospect of or even the ability to imagine real work. Never mind all that, that is not important. What really matters is that British universities are not admitting enough working-class kids. Their answer to this? Simple. Deny middle-class students the student loans whose universal availability keeps the university system growing and the British population in debt.
The immediate reaction, even of someone who knew nothing about the mountains of intellectual iniquity and self-delusion that have led to this repulsive ideation (as I said, the word "thought" is alien to any description of this kind of mental activity), would be to ask whether they are mad. To deny loans to the part of society most likely to repay them, to push them on that less able to - have we not seen this kind of thing in recent years? And not, in this case, in a deeply important matter such as housing, but in a largely secondary one such as university titles?
To those who know Britain better, the deeper villainy of this notion is obvious. It is the last in a repulsive chain of Labour (but not only Labour, alas) pieces of educational insanity whose end result, as I argued years ago in this blog, is the rise of murderous gangs of children knifing each other on our streets. The first step towards sanity would be Labour admitting that its educational policy in elementary and high school has been a failure, and start again. (This, incidentally, is what the despised Berlusconi government has just done in Italy - one of many reasons why Berlusconi will remain in power no matter how many attacks his ex-wife starts.) Until the 1960s, Britain was growing in social mobility; indeed, the rise of the lower classes to full cultural and social membership of the nation was the driving force behind the explosion of "swinging London" in the sixties, when Britain really was at the artistic and intellectual centre of the world. Groups that had previously been objects of amused observation by the national culture were now producing many of the leading artists of the day: the provincial very-petty-bourgeoisie and working class, speaking with an unashamed dialect accent, gave rise to the Beatles and to Keith Waterhouse; the London working class produced David Bailey, David Bowie and Michael Caine. However, from the 1970s on, and with increasingly calamitous speed, the process was reversed; and if anyone wants to know why, let them read the dreadful prophecy sent forth from his quiet house in Oxford by CS Lewis, in his Screwtape proposes a toast.
Labour is not alone in this disastrous process; the Tories, and - God forgive them - the Liberals, have in the past been just as bad. My point however is that, at this point in time, the supposed government of this wretched island shows no sign whatever of even trying to grapple with the real issues. The Tories, in almost every other way a nasty shower (why in the name of God and of every saint in Paradise does Alan Duncan continue to survive scandal after scandal? Does he have something on David Cameron?), at least nominated the interesting Michael Gove with his interesting ideas as shadow education secretary. It's a start. Labour, on the other hand, carries on a policy that can only be described as a continuous display of total denial. They simply will not admit that the lower schools are in a parlous state; and instead of working on ways to improve educational provision to the working (and, alas, all too often non-working) classes, they act from the presupposition that the low amount of working-class students in the universities is the fault of the universities, and keep pummelling this feeble target, trying to find every way that perverse imagination and obsessional denial can conceive to force them to admit more working-class and less middle-class members. Recently, Oxford has disgracefully admitted that it now discriminates against middle-class candidates - something that should see it in the courts and condemned, if there were any respect for law in this country.
This is among the most repulsive features of this process: the disgraceful submissiveness, the crawling abjection, of the universities, in the face of constant harassment and of the real and profound degradation of their professional and corporate value by a government of intellectual minnows. Part of it can be explained by self-interest; even as it degrades the function of the university as such, this government has presided over a remarkable numerical growth of the university sector. As an industry, higher education in Britain has grown and goes on growing. So what if the Government has a few bees in his bonnet - so might the average vice-chancellor think - so long as we keep seeing enrolments grow, so long as we can build new halls, new labs, new lecture theatres? It is not irrelevant to be one of the few sectors that is bucking the ruinous trend of British economics.
However, this growth is, in my view, built on sand. There is bound to be a downsizing in the fairly near future; too many degrees are sold at a heavy price - every student not of rich family ends their course with a crushing burden of debt - under exaggerated or downright false claims. Even now, and in spite of the fact that enrolment this year has broken all records, students are waking up to the scam; they no longer expect degrees to be a path to decent employment, or even necessarily to any employment at all. They are enlisting because it beats the dole queue, because three years in college put back by three years that dreadful moment when one has to go out into the streets and look for someone who is hiring. And when that downsizing comes, and universities have to cut down or even close - some are already perilously close to doing so - then any notion that Labour has in any way been good for the higher education sector will meet the end it deserves.
More to the point, any academic who conspires to keep the Labour leadership in their state of wilful denial, who humours their obsessions or even only speaks as though they had any merit, is deeply guilty not only towards their profession, but towards their country. They are playing the most classic role of a deluded tyrant's deluded bootlickers. By indulging their ridiculous obsessions, by indulging in more or less meaningless genuflections to their false idols, by acting, in short, as though there was anything to be said for the Labour delusions, they are stabbing their own fellow-citizens in the back. Any academic who had any decent feeling as a citizen, or even as an honest human being, should be shouting as loud as they could that the education system is broken, that no amount of tinkering with college admissions is going to remove the ignorance from the public or the incapacity from the school system, that social mobility is not rescued by gestures but by making sound and genuine education available to all classes. By the time students reach the universities, they have already been ruined, and to alter admission procedures to universities is simply to validate an educational process that needs nothing so much as to be severely and seriously criticized.
If anyone thinks that the nearly homicidal hatred of my friend wemyss for the repulsive rabble that pretends to govern this wretched country is exaggerated, listen to this. A Labour so-called "think tank" (although what in the name of Heaven the notion of thinking has to do with such a body I for one cannot imagine) has come up with the umpteenth "solution" to the "problem" that obsesses Labour minds at this particular time in history: namely, that there are too few working-class students and too many middle-class ones in Britain's overgrown university sector. Never mind that Britain is at present in the worst economic situation in its whole history; never mind that it is being daily outstripped by the despised continentals; never mind that five million people are on benefits, many of them without any prospect of or even the ability to imagine real work. Never mind all that, that is not important. What really matters is that British universities are not admitting enough working-class kids. Their answer to this? Simple. Deny middle-class students the student loans whose universal availability keeps the university system growing and the British population in debt.
The immediate reaction, even of someone who knew nothing about the mountains of intellectual iniquity and self-delusion that have led to this repulsive ideation (as I said, the word "thought" is alien to any description of this kind of mental activity), would be to ask whether they are mad. To deny loans to the part of society most likely to repay them, to push them on that less able to - have we not seen this kind of thing in recent years? And not, in this case, in a deeply important matter such as housing, but in a largely secondary one such as university titles?
To those who know Britain better, the deeper villainy of this notion is obvious. It is the last in a repulsive chain of Labour (but not only Labour, alas) pieces of educational insanity whose end result, as I argued years ago in this blog, is the rise of murderous gangs of children knifing each other on our streets. The first step towards sanity would be Labour admitting that its educational policy in elementary and high school has been a failure, and start again. (This, incidentally, is what the despised Berlusconi government has just done in Italy - one of many reasons why Berlusconi will remain in power no matter how many attacks his ex-wife starts.) Until the 1960s, Britain was growing in social mobility; indeed, the rise of the lower classes to full cultural and social membership of the nation was the driving force behind the explosion of "swinging London" in the sixties, when Britain really was at the artistic and intellectual centre of the world. Groups that had previously been objects of amused observation by the national culture were now producing many of the leading artists of the day: the provincial very-petty-bourgeoisie and working class, speaking with an unashamed dialect accent, gave rise to the Beatles and to Keith Waterhouse; the London working class produced David Bailey, David Bowie and Michael Caine. However, from the 1970s on, and with increasingly calamitous speed, the process was reversed; and if anyone wants to know why, let them read the dreadful prophecy sent forth from his quiet house in Oxford by CS Lewis, in his Screwtape proposes a toast.
Labour is not alone in this disastrous process; the Tories, and - God forgive them - the Liberals, have in the past been just as bad. My point however is that, at this point in time, the supposed government of this wretched island shows no sign whatever of even trying to grapple with the real issues. The Tories, in almost every other way a nasty shower (why in the name of God and of every saint in Paradise does Alan Duncan continue to survive scandal after scandal? Does he have something on David Cameron?), at least nominated the interesting Michael Gove with his interesting ideas as shadow education secretary. It's a start. Labour, on the other hand, carries on a policy that can only be described as a continuous display of total denial. They simply will not admit that the lower schools are in a parlous state; and instead of working on ways to improve educational provision to the working (and, alas, all too often non-working) classes, they act from the presupposition that the low amount of working-class students in the universities is the fault of the universities, and keep pummelling this feeble target, trying to find every way that perverse imagination and obsessional denial can conceive to force them to admit more working-class and less middle-class members. Recently, Oxford has disgracefully admitted that it now discriminates against middle-class candidates - something that should see it in the courts and condemned, if there were any respect for law in this country.
This is among the most repulsive features of this process: the disgraceful submissiveness, the crawling abjection, of the universities, in the face of constant harassment and of the real and profound degradation of their professional and corporate value by a government of intellectual minnows. Part of it can be explained by self-interest; even as it degrades the function of the university as such, this government has presided over a remarkable numerical growth of the university sector. As an industry, higher education in Britain has grown and goes on growing. So what if the Government has a few bees in his bonnet - so might the average vice-chancellor think - so long as we keep seeing enrolments grow, so long as we can build new halls, new labs, new lecture theatres? It is not irrelevant to be one of the few sectors that is bucking the ruinous trend of British economics.
However, this growth is, in my view, built on sand. There is bound to be a downsizing in the fairly near future; too many degrees are sold at a heavy price - every student not of rich family ends their course with a crushing burden of debt - under exaggerated or downright false claims. Even now, and in spite of the fact that enrolment this year has broken all records, students are waking up to the scam; they no longer expect degrees to be a path to decent employment, or even necessarily to any employment at all. They are enlisting because it beats the dole queue, because three years in college put back by three years that dreadful moment when one has to go out into the streets and look for someone who is hiring. And when that downsizing comes, and universities have to cut down or even close - some are already perilously close to doing so - then any notion that Labour has in any way been good for the higher education sector will meet the end it deserves.
More to the point, any academic who conspires to keep the Labour leadership in their state of wilful denial, who humours their obsessions or even only speaks as though they had any merit, is deeply guilty not only towards their profession, but towards their country. They are playing the most classic role of a deluded tyrant's deluded bootlickers. By indulging their ridiculous obsessions, by indulging in more or less meaningless genuflections to their false idols, by acting, in short, as though there was anything to be said for the Labour delusions, they are stabbing their own fellow-citizens in the back. Any academic who had any decent feeling as a citizen, or even as an honest human being, should be shouting as loud as they could that the education system is broken, that no amount of tinkering with college admissions is going to remove the ignorance from the public or the incapacity from the school system, that social mobility is not rescued by gestures but by making sound and genuine education available to all classes. By the time students reach the universities, they have already been ruined, and to alter admission procedures to universities is simply to validate an educational process that needs nothing so much as to be severely and seriously criticized.