MYTH: The fee rises and public funding cuts to universities are fair – graduates should pay for their university education, not everybody else
The coalition argues that since graduates are the main beneficiaries of a degree, it is fair that they should pay for that degree. The structured repayment scheme for students has even led to claims that these plans are ‘progressive’.
However, the idea of the public ‘funding’ higher education through taxes is something of a myth. In reality, university graduates actually provide a profit for businesses and taxpayers through higher income tax contributions. Statistics from the OECD show the net profit from funding a graduate, recouped through social contributions and tax, averages £56,000 over a lifetime. It is true that under the tiered debt repayment plans people on higher incomes would pay a greater proportion of their fees than those who are poorer. But the focus on repayment plans deliberately dodges the issue that taking on up to £50,000 in debt is a massive psychological disincentive that will be felt most keenly by poor‑to-middle-income families.

MYTH: University reform will save money and balance the deficit
Many of the cuts proposed by the government are unlikely to actually save any money, and higher education is a case in point. Despite currently being funded with a comparatively very low 1.3 per cent of the governmental budget, universities employ 2.6 per cent of the country’s workforce and generate 2.3 per cent of GDP (figures from Universities UK). The cuts to universities will cause significant job losses and some institutions will go bust. These redundancies cost money in the short-term, and welfare costs will also rise.
Meanwhile, money saved in subsidising courses and research will be required to fund the massive expansion in lending. The Higher Education Policy Institute recently concluded that the government will be spending so much on increased student loans that increased fees will not save any public money.

MYTH: Student numbers are unsustainably high now, and so cannot be funded by the public any longer
Universities in the UK receive far less funding than in most OECD countries, which have higher levels of student numbers. Student numbers (currently around 36 per cent of young people) are higher than previously but similar increases have taken place across all OECD countries in recent decades. Britain has below‑average participation levels overall, ranking below Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic (Education at a Glance 2010, OECD).
Vice-chancellors have been complaining for many years about underfunding, and until recently their target was the government. This is because the government has been spending a modest 1.3 per cent of GDP on higher education. This compares with an OECD average of 1.5 per cent. The United States, despite huge contributions by individuals, spends 3.1 per cent; Canada, South Korea, France and Scandinavian countries also spend substantially larger proportions of public money on universities.
Neither student numbers nor public spending on higher education in the UK are at unsustainable levels. If anything, targets for public spending on higher education and levels of university participation should be increased.

MYTH: British universities won’t be able to compete internationally without ‘reform’
Fee rises have been introduced to substitute for massive cuts in public funding, not to improve university performance. The proposed enormous higher education budget cuts will clearly damage UK universities, not help them.
The coalition’s disregard for the well-being of educational institutions is most apparent in arts, humanities and social sciences, for which it has decided to virtually discontinue its financial support. The government’s reforms entail a shift of the burden for university funding from the public budget onto students. But British universities will continue to require financial support to maintain and increase the impact of their research, and their appeal when it comes to research contracts and international students. Students’ university fees will simply not cover the costs in some departments, irrespective of their research standing. The tripling of university fees is ‘necessary’ to safeguard standards only because of this government’s refusal to subsidise higher education as a public good.

MYTH: The proposed changes won’t affect student numbers and won’t prevent access for poorer students
The government, backed up by vice-chancellors from the 20 Russell Group universities, denies that the huge increase in fees will deter potential students from university. They claim that increases in student numbers since the 2006/7 introduction of top-up fees is evidence to the contrary.
Closer analysis of the impact of top-up fees, however, reveals a decline in participation precisely from those eligible to pay them. Poorer students (those below the median household income) paid no increase in cost or in debt levels due to the introduction of grants up to nearly £3,000 alongside more bursaries.
The numbers of students who did experience these rises in fees, those from the four higher social classes, declined from 43.8 per cent to 40.6 per cent (BIS, The Impact of Higher Education Finance on University Participation in the UK, September 2010) in the year of the increase. Even looking at families most able to pay the £1,800 increases in fees there was still a significant reduction in access, despite the doubling of available loans. Students could borrow to pay these fees, yet they were still deterred from entering higher education – this shows that fees, even in the form of debt, negatively affect access. Increases of up to £6,000 on top of these levels are therefore certain to hit participation levels very significantly.
There is no equivalent package to that introduced in 2006/7 to lessen the impact of these new changes or protect prospective students from the huge increase in debt. A tiny £150 million (coming from scrapping free school meals) will be spent on new scholarships for the very poorest.

MYTH: Top universities have been taking in more poor students, promoting social mobility
While 36 per cent of students go to university, there is vast inequality in the student population. 19 per cent of young people from the least advantaged fifth of the population go to university compared to 57 per cent from the most advantaged (Office for Fair Access, Fair Access Report, 2010).
Although this is actually a marked improvement since the 1990s, the 20 most selective institutions have not increased their percentage intake from the least advantaged areas at all over the same time period. The increases that have taken place are almost entirely in former polytechnics and others outside of the Russell Group universities.
The government’s near-privatisation of university education, and the ensuing ‘competition’ envisioned by Lord Browne, is expected to promote the expansion of some universities while allowing others to close. The institutions that will suffer the most will be those outside the core of the existing big, well-funded institutions – precisely those that young people from poorer backgrounds would attend. Moreover, the evidence shows that any system of bursaries and loans has little positive impact on the likelihood of poorer students applying to and attending more selective universities, so the new scholarships are unlikely to address any of these inequalities.
The government’s statements on higher education cuts are designed to provide bland reassurance. They mask a brutal attack on university education as a public good. We cannot allow them to be its epitaph.

It is important, though, not to see this as merely a struggle over cuts in funding or job losses, however devastating they will be. There is also a deeper critique beginning to materialise over the role and form that universities and higher education take. Criticisms are being voiced over the commodification of knowledge – the enclosure of research within exclusive and expensive institutions and publications, or behind electronic gateways such as Ingenta or ProQuest.

The squeeze on educational institutions is, like the crisis of capital, global. But so too is the emergent resistance. People from Chile to Austria, from Greece to the US, and from Japan to Puerto Rico are challenging the neoliberal model of the university, which produces ‘skilled’ workers who can be put to use for the reproduction of capital.

In the US, there have been some of the largest and most vibrant student mobilisations for years. California has seen students facing prohibitive hikes in fees and increasingly dire job prospects join forces with precariously employed academic and support staff to stage a wave of marches, strikes, teach-ins and occupations. On 4 March, there was a US-wide strike and day of action to defend education.

Here in Europe, the focus is on challenging the ‘Bologna Process’ aimed at the privatisation and standardisation of universities across the EU. Students and educators are proposing alternative processes of collective self-organised struggle, knowledge sharing and the liberation of education. To these ends there have been protests, counter-summits and occupations in hundreds of European cities, including Vienna, Paris, Prague, Barcelona, Rome, Turin and Bologna itself.

In the UK, 200 University of Westminster staff and students occupied the vice-chancellor’s office for three days in March. Protests and occupations have occurred at Sussex in the face of forceful attempts to suppress them by university management, including arrests and the use of riot police with dogs. Many other campuses are gearing up to take action against cuts.

Here at Leeds, vice-chancellor Michael Arthur announced £35 million cuts, branded the ‘Economies Exercise’. Leeds University Against Cuts (LUAC) and the Really Open University (ROU) formed to resist the plan and in early February, in a record ballot, UCU voted in favour of action.

While UCU was balloting its members, Leeds University Student Union started an anti-strike campaign, erroneously called ‘Education First’. In response ROU created a spoof union website, reallyopenunion.org, as well as a series of stickers encouraging strike action. LUAC ran stalls on campus, mobilised staff and students for demonstrations, and attempted to counter some of the scaremongering and disinformation that the ‘Education First’ campaign had spread.

Experiments in education

ROU was established to simultaneously resist cuts, critique the neoliberal model of education and engage in experiments in critical and participatory education. The aim is to break out of the insularity of the university and student politics. ROU asks ‘What can a university do?’ placing itself within an expansive politics of creativity and affirmation. It produces a newsletter, The Sausage Factory, and has organised several public meetings with participatory workshops, where participants are encouraged to create collective visions of what a ‘really open university’ would look like.

These attempts at resistance and the creation of alternative spaces share a common recognition of the systemic nature of the crises facing not just students, universities or the public sector in general, but the very commons on which life depends. There is a growing recognition that the same ‘logics’ that demand education serves the needs of markets are also those fuelling socio-ecological degradation, precipitating global financial crises and excluding the majority of the world’s population from participation in how the world is run.

While there have been important successes in these university battles, there have been setbacks too. Although UCU won an important victory in Leeds, it has not undermined the threat of cuts in general, with various departments, especially classics and biological sciences, still facing uncertain futures. Another challenge is that those taking action are facing punishment, with six students facing disciplinary action at Sussex.

If the resistance to the commodification of education and research is to be successful then it must be generalised beyond the walls of the university. If this happens then perhaps the spectre of university radicalism may once again come to haunt the academy.

I found three main areas of conflict. First, students and non-students do not always want to campaign on the same issues. Second, even when they do, they often fail to appeal to one another and form strong alliances. Third, there is the problem of how to get along with each other in residential areas. These three issues are linked but solving one does not necessarily solve another.

A bloody history

The two sides of ‘town and gown’ have long been posed in opposition to one another. As far back as medieval England we can find examples of conflict between student incomers and the indigenous population. In 1298 a band of Oxford students attacked more than 50 townspeople with bows and arrows, mortally wounding a number of their victims. Half a century later, on 10 February 1355, the even more bloody St Scholastica Day riot ensued as a result of continuing local unrest and anger at students’ immunity to local taxes. Locals were so enraged by the attitudes and actions of the students that they invaded the university, killing students in retribution. The clash, which led to around 90 deaths, is said to have started with a dispute in a local pub, and the public house features again in more recent examples of conflict.

Researcher Elizabeth Kenyan has found that one of the main outcomes of such conflict was the provision of segregated living and working environments to house students (A Community Within the Community? An empirical exploration of the constitution and formation of ‘student areas’, Lancaster University Ph D paper, 1998). This style of campus was adopted almost universally until recent times. But now that a greater proportion of students are living in residential neighbourhoods, renting ‘houses in multiple occupation’ (HMOs, or ‘houseshares’), they increasingly compete for the same space as local communities. The latter is closer to my experience in Withington, a residential area of Manchester, where an anti-student campaign developed while I was there.

Although the picture now is far removed from the days of bloody battles, there are recurring issues of inequality, clashing lifestyles and different senses of community spirit that have remained unaddressed and are present in the Withington example.

Student heaven or hell?

‘Students in Withington: heaven or hell?’ This was the title of a Withington Civic Society public meeting in May 2007, which more than 200 people attended. The student population of the area has been steadily increasing for some time, but despite every household being invited to the event I was the only student who showed up.

Many angry residents voiced their concerns about the influx of students, who they felt were destroying their community. Roger Smith, the Civic Society’s chair, believed the tension stemmed from two interconnected problems: ‘the over-arching one of huge numbers of students moving into an area for 30 weeks every year, and the day-to-day local gripes of noisy parties, unkempt gardens, inconsiderate parking, overflowing wheelie bins, etc.’

One man heckled throughout the meeting, shouting bitterly and with much emotion: ‘Remember the Orange Grove!’ The Orange Grove was once a public house favoured by the locals, but had become a student-only nightclub. This seemed to be the last straw. Most of the residents were willing to tolerate the seemingly self-destructive lifestyles of students in the area and they were quick to point out that most of their gripes were with absent or ‘irresponsible’ landlords, rather than their student tenants. But when it came down to losing focal points of their community and having neighbours priced out of the area, they’d had enough.

The primary initiative to come out of this public meeting was the establishment of a working group of residents, students, officers and councillors, who meet regularly and have visited other cities for inspiration. The group demanded and won a visit from housing minister Iain Wright, who, as the local paper reported, ‘waded through food, filth and furniture to greet them’. It is currently lobbying the government for an additional council tax to be levied on HMOs, for a limit to be put on the number of HMOs in a street and for planning permission to be required before a family home can be changed into a HMO. It has also pushed the council and universities to develop a Manchester ‘student strategy’, which seems to be well overdue, considering that Manchester has one of the largest student populations in Europe with almost 90,000 students in the city.

The activist and the everyday

As with other UK student bodies, only a small minority is politically active and, judging by attendance at their events and the lack of press coverage, they are not taken very seriously by the general public. Julius Lester would not be surprised. He wrote in his Revolutionary Notes of 1968 that: ‘The student radical has to become an everyday radical before he can be totally trusted. He must know the concrete problems that face the everyday person. And while such issues as the war in Vietnam, the repression of Mexican students and the invasion of Czechoslovakia are important, revolution is made from three eternal issues – food, clothing and shelter.’

Can we link these big global campaigns with everyday struggles at home? Many student campaigns that I have participated in have grappled with issues – anti-capitalist, anti-climate change, anti-war – that exist far beyond the campus limits. For such issues to be faced head-on, a degree of consensus would have to be reached across different sectors of society. My fear is that currently students are far too out of touch with the rest of society to be able to raise an effective rallying cry.

If students were seen to be engaged on a community level, aware of local, everyday struggles, then their political arguments might carry more weight. Perhaps this is key to dislodging the stereotype of student activists as naïve and only discussing abstract or distant issues using academic jargon. When campaign targets are chosen that are about more than student affairs, and students and non-students can be found starting to work together, the effect can be quite impressive.

‘Students can bring some great assets to campaigns,’ as long-term environmental activist Marc Hudson observes. ‘They have time, imagination, a lack of fear over getting arrested, humour, distrust of elected officials. And importantly, they are being trained in critical thinking and research skills. I think it is crucial that students stay engaged at a community level, and bring their refreshing approaches to revitalise off-campus campaign groups.’

But not all comments from non-student activists are this positive. Jessica Ryan from the No Borders network points out how ‘even though they have debt and many work, the perception is that students have a three-year party.’ She says that the nature of No Borders campaigning in support of refugees reveals great disparities of income and wealth. ‘There is certainly the barrier of a class difference here. As students don’t seem to want for much, there can be a little resentment.’

Reliability is another common sore point. John Ally, who helped manage the Basement, a radical social centre in Manchester, agrees with others I spoke to that students often commit to high levels of involvement in a project but only for short periods of time. ‘We lost over half of our volunteers every time term ended or an essay deadline was approaching,’ he recalls. He points out, too, that students are unlikely to be found joining campaigns that involve lobbying local government. Because of the transient nature of the student population, ‘they are unlikely to vote, or be interested in how the council works’.

The class and wealth divides have also shown themselves in the increases in crime directed against students. Many urban universities have responded by actively encouraging students to stay in ‘safe zones’ that are covered from every possible angle by CCTV cameras. This is despite the National Union of Students campaigning against student segregation and the ‘studentification’ of areas.

Further difficulties can arise in basic organising, as Robbie Gillett, communications officer of the University of Manchester student union, explains: ‘I was torn recently when deciding whether to push for a climate forum event on a Wednesday, when we have students on campus, and would get more people turning up, or on a Saturday, when we would get more locals.’

There is a minefield of issues to take into account if you want to dismantle these barriers and allow a broad range of the public to feel ownership over and to actively participate in a campaign. Sensitivity to class or wealth divisions, meeting locations and time constraints are just a few of the issues that might crop up.

Is it worth it?

Is it worth the fight for greater integration of student and non-student campaigning? There are some student campaign organisers who aren’t convinced. As Angela Lawrence, a member of a radical reading group at Manchester, puts it: ‘We have a tough enough time radicalising students as it is, and that job would become a lot harder if it had to involve integration with local groups and issues.

‘We are busy competing with the heavy – often sexist – club-night promotions, pub crawls and society socials. Universities have noticed that student life seems to be more and more about the nightlife and started to promote themselves on the basis of their club scene.

‘The entertainment industry is huge and if a campaign group wants to attract students then it has to be ready to compete with that, and I think other students are best placed to do that job. We can stick to our strengths and organise in a way that suits a student lifestyle, because that’s all we can do at the moment. That isn’t to say that we can’t link up with other groups on occasions, but we can’t make full integration a priority.

‘It is also likely that we will be able to get more students out in the street if we focus on student issues – we have seen this in German student campaigns against the introduction of fees, for example, where they had some victories. So we will always have to have some student-only type campaigns to keep momentum.’

This shouldn’t be surprising, given that students are (at least in theory) energetic, passionate and intelligent, and uniquely situated in society to affect the world at large. This was particularly true before the introduction of fees and when students were supported by grants, but even today students are in the forefront of campaigning on issues that affect wider society, from climate change to global inequality.

Yet we in the student movement are told constantly that students are apathetic. There is something in this – the available figures on student participation in their own affairs, measured crudely by student union election turnouts, seem to suggest that the number of participants is roughly the same as ever, despite the massive increase in the student population. Those who win these elections are also often less activist-minded than they once were, with many believing that student unions should now operate more as charities, lobbying for student interests, rather than as campaigning mass-member organisations (see Hind Hassan, LINK).

This trend does not exist in a bubble. People in general feel disconnected from the decisions that affect them – as reflected in declining election turnouts and the increasing apathy that afflicts society and politics as a whole. But in order for us to be shaken from our apathy, we need someone to do the shaking. Student unions could and should build up participation among their members, which would in turn feed into greater participation in wider politics.

That is why I am sick and tired of people telling us that we cannot make a difference. I am ashamed to hear fellow student unionists say that we should focus inward on ourselves – on ‘student issues’ and nothing else. Why should there be a distinction between the issues that affect us as students and those that affect us as citizens? We are both at all times, and we should always be conscious of that.

The Iraq war, for example, is a not only a brutal assault on the people of Iraq but an attack on us as well. Our taxes are being taken away from hospitals, schools and other public services – including, of course, our universities – and used to smother the world in misery at our expense. Student unions should mobilise students and throw themselves into the anti-war movement.

When higher education is attacked, education as an entire system is attacked – and thus society is attacked. Higher education creates what some call ‘cultural capital’. It shapes the future leaders of society; it produces pioneers and new thought. If higher education is restricted to the wealthy, or to those lucky enough to go to a ‘good school’, then the future of our society – the future pioneers and new thinkers – will reflect and reproduce that inequality for another generation.

And the whole of education is under attack, from primary school to PhD. Neoliberalism sees public education as a huge source of potential profit that it has yet to privatise. The attacks on education affect students and educational workers – the academics, the teachers, the people who look after our welfare. It is through realising that our fights are not unique to us as students – that they are a product of the system and affect wider society – that we see the reason why students should be campaigning on wider social and political issues and standing in solidarity with others who take action on these issues.

This starts locally, and student unions can always do more. After all, what are universities for – or what should they be for? At the moment many are simply degree and research factories – ivory towers of academia whose work has little to do with day-to-day reality.

Universities should instead be places to equip the future generation with the knowledge, skills and passion to tackle the serious issues of the day, and to mobilise their skills to benefit the wider community and society. They should be accessible centres of learning and action, firmly embedded in their local communities and the struggles facing those around them.

Students have a proud tradition of fighting to alleviate the suffering of others. We need that tradition now more than ever.

Aled Fisher headed the Green Party’s London Assembly list for the north-east London constituency in May’s elections

Under New Labour, government rhetoric has shifted dramatically from a focus on providing ordinary people with a decent living, to the belief that people and their skills are quantifiable as ‘products and services’. A recent government report concluded that the current crisis in higher education can be reduced to the fact that: ‘The market won’t buy products and services that don’t suit its purposes. The current culture does not, in general, engender confidence in the markets in higher education’s ability to deliver effectively courses and services that bring clear, direct benefit to the employer and employee’ (Higher Education for the Workforce, DIUS, 2008).

Graduates, it seems, are now simply an industrial input whose value decreases or increases depending on their particular skill set. The government believes it has a socio-economic duty to provide ‘the market’ with the raw materials it requires, in the form of employees. It is hardly surprising that the concept of dignity in work has all but disappeared from contemporary British parlance, especially for young people entering the workplace.

A degree is not enough

The popular careers website prospects.ac.uk sets future graduates straight about exactly what three or four years of hard struggle and financial strain have won them: ‘A degree is not a guarantee of a good job. In selecting employees, employers will look at what else graduates have to offer, including their skills, work experience (providing desirable commercial awareness) and overall potential. Quite simply, a degree is not enough on its own.’

Final-year students are caught in a bind: their degrees are not yet fitting them out for appropriate employment in Britain’s emerging tertiary sector economy, leaving them to make up the deficit in training and knowledge by themselves – but they still need a degree to progress beyond junior level in most professions.

The current university skills crisis is plain to our political leaders. According to skills minister David Lammy: ‘Britain’s future is as a knowledge economy, creating high-value products and offering innovative services. Low and unskilled work won’t disappear, of course, but our competitiveness depends on a sophisticated workforce who are world-leaders in finance and IT, in engineering and the creative industries. The skills dimension to this new reality requires us to raise our game, and to operate differently … to ensure sustainable economic growth.’

Since higher education is no longer entirely state-funded, most students graduate with a great deal of debt – but the scale of that debt and the impact it makes on their future lives varies hugely with social class. While local education authority (LEA)-sponsored student loans are still low-interest and need only be repaid when the student is earning a decent wage, many students without subsidies from wealthy parents find themselves with overdrafts and ‘career development loans’ to pay off as well. This drives many students from poorer backgrounds into immediate low-level employment in an effort to assuage their creditors. These students, whatever their talents and drive, cannot afford to devote the extra funding and hours of free work (‘work experience’) needed to develop a graduate career, to enhance the skills their degree has given them, or to pursue postgraduate study.

Rhian Jones, 26, grew up in the former mining community of Tredegar, in south-east Wales. ‘Academic research is always what I’ve been best at,’ he says. ‘This led me to get a first from London, and I then went on to do two postgraduate degrees at Oxford, where I focused on popular protest in 19th-century Wales. In order to enable myself to go to Oxford, because I had no means of support or income other than working part-time, I took out a professional studies loan of £25,000. The loan covered my tuition and college fees over three years and in order to pay my rent and bills I worked six part-time jobs over that time.

‘If I hadn’t had to do that work,’ he continues, ‘I would have been able to spend far more time and energy on my research, which would have allowed me to gain the funding I so desperately needed. As it was, having failed to gain sufficient funding to complete a doctorate, I had to cut my degree short and immediately take up work to pay back the loan. Because my part-time employment had lacked a cohesive focus, the only jobs I could get were relatively low-paid.’

A premium on testicles

Hardworking female graduates could be forgiven for feeling themselves particularly worked over by an employment culture whose pretensions to educational meritocracy remain as hypocritical as they ever were. A survey found that the gender gap in earnings for recent graduates starts at 11 per cent and rises to 20 per cent by the time they are in their third jobs (Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility at Work, Sutton Trust, 2007). Women had lower average earnings than men in similar jobs and with similar qualifications, and were far less likely to use their academic qualifications to their fullest potential; only 30 per cent of female science and business graduates went on to gain jobs in the field using their degrees, compared to more than 90 per cent of men. The market buys those raw materials it considers of most economic value – and in the modern workplace a disturbing premium is still placed on the possession of testicles.

For a time, rapid economic growth did a little to kick the sand over the inequality of opportunity that was reasserting itself in higher education. More and more graduates were churned out across the country as higher education expanded to meet New Labour’s target of 50 per cent in university by 2010, but most of these graduates were able to find lowly jobs to cover the bills, even if these jobs were traditionally ‘non-graduate’. Economic expansion and heavy public sector borrowing meant that firms across the tertiary sector could afford to take on and train graduates, and new jobs were relatively easily had in metropolitan areas, to which school and college leavers accordingly flocked.

The ‘credit crunch’ (a concept it’s impossible to pronounce without baring the teeth) has put a stop to that. For the classes of 2007, 2008 and 2009, the glaring inequalities and inefficiencies of the graduate employment world in which 43 per cent of our young people are now involved are becoming all too clear.

Corporate agenda

The function of a degree has perceptibly shifted from a rigorous course of academic and intellectual training to a necessary ticket into a certain class of ‘graduate’ professions – many of which would not have required a degree even ten years ago. As this shift has occurred, colleges, departments and university careers services have aggressively pursued a corporate agenda.

In 1989, Matthew Salusbury observed in Thatcherism Goes to College that ‘Bristol University’s history department was proud of the number of bankers and financial service personnel they had produced, using the fact to justify their continued existence. They would not have recognised the argument that a life in the stock market was as much a waste of a history degree as a lifetime’s unemployment.’ Two decades on, it is the received wisdom that, with a history degree from Bristol, you should have your sights set on the City. How the course makes one more qualified for a career in finance than three years working as a trainee bookkeeper in your hometown, is a question rarely asked. A degree is now a mandatory entrance ticket for higher-paying jobs in most employment sectors, with graduates being expected to find and finance their own targeted training outside study hours.

The onus on graduates to use their own initiative to train themselves through work experience, part-time jobs and postgraduate and vocational courses would be far more acceptable were it not for the regressive nature of student debt. The student loans system and the removal of universal grants have created what is in effect a graduate tax that hits the poor and aspirational far harder than the sons and daughters of the rich.

Simple privilege

Let’s look at this picture from the other side. I’m no slacker. I was raised in the sure knowledge that if you believe in your dreams, trust your heart and follow your star, you will still get beaten every time by the kids who worked harder than you. I was lucky enough to win a place at, and eventually a degree from, an ‘elite’ university. But what has made a difference to my career since is not talent, nor motivation, nor even my degree: it is simple privilege.

At 18, I inherited a sum of money from my grandmother, and that money has meant that I’ve been able to put in hours working for free, holding down only part-time paid work and concentrating on gaining extra qualifications and work experience, while many of my more talented and deserving classmates still find themselves paying off debts in jobs way below their personal and educational capabilities. As the possession of a degree becomes less and less of a social leveller, the privileges and opportunities conferred by wealth continue to differentiate graduates entering the job market, entrenching the very social inequalities that Labour’s notion of higher education for all was meant to erase.

The dialectics of progress are changing in the UK today, and our education system has not yet adapted itself for the transition to an economy based on tertiary-sector employment. Our higher education machine does not deliver the skills and training needed for the 43 per cent of young people who now graduate from university to enter the workforce with ease. However, the aggressive expansion of higher education under late Thatcherism and New Labour has meant that a majority of employers looking for ‘skills’ still require a degree as an entrance ticket to ‘knowledge-based’ careers – leaving graduates with no choice but to find some way of making up the deficit themselves.

The apparatus of post-Thatcherite market ‘meritocracy’ has destroyed the vestiges of social democracy that allowed a minority of our parents’ generation to overstep the economic barriers of their class. It is now harder than ever for new graduates to escape the dictates of their socio-economic background, as a degree loses what value it had as a social leveller.

On the contrary, the powers that determine our destiny know very well what they are up to most of the time, and continue to get up to it even though they are aware that it is morally shabby or outrageously indefensible. If it isn’t the job of the left to put them straight, it’s partly because we have better things to do, and partly because they don’t need it in any case. Besides, you don’t bring about major political change simply by changing people’s minds. It’s their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.

For another thing, Chomsky argued, it isn’t the rulers who need the truth, so much as those they lord it over. The role of the intellectual left is to service the dominated, not the dominators. The point, Marx commented, is not to understand the world but to change it; but nobody has ever changed a world they didn’t understand, and this is where intellectuals have a role to play. Or, if you like, the universities.

At the moment, however, there are remarkably few intellectuals hanging around universities. There are people called academics, but that’s different. Academics spend their lives researching such momentous questions as the vaginal system of the flea (the title of a Cambridge PhD thesis I once spotted); intellectuals have the rather more arduous job of bringing ideas to bear on society as a whole. And universities, once upon a time, were where they were to be found in considerable numbers.

The absence of intellectuals

If they are to be found there much less these days, it is partly because the number of public intellectuals on the left has notably declined. A group of them, including Jürgen Habermas, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, have either defected to the political right in the wake of 9/11 or become besotted with the ‘Free World’. No militant younger generation has replaced the likes of E P Thompson and Raymond Williams, Edward Said and Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Hannah Arendt.

Yet the problem is not just that the intellectual left is out of favour, compared to the years in the late 1960s and 1970s when there was a thriving socialist and feminist intellectual culture in these islands. This didn’t mean that all students back then were card-carrying Marxists or feminists; it just meant that these ideas made a kind of everyday cultural sense, enjoyed a kind of general currency, as Darwinism did in Victorian times. The real problem today is that universities have largely ceased to play their classical role as sources of critique.

There simply isn’t sufficient daylight between them and society as a whole for them to do so. Universities can’t get critical leverage in a situation of which they have become an integrated part, any more than a Picasso hanging in the lobby of the Chemical Bank can make an implicit comment on finance capitalism. By and large, academic institutions have shifted from being the accusers of corporate capitalism to being its accomplices. They are intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries.

Managerialising the mind

The free play of the mind has been managerialised. Holding our way of life to account has yielded to accountancy. The logic of the commodity has now penetrated into the sphere of human needs and nurture, breeding pathological symptoms there. In universities, as in transnational corporations, a largely disaffected labour force confronts a finance-obsessed managerial elite.

Utility is now the touchstone of reality, in which case one might as well give up reading Macbeth: the witches’ cursing simply can’t be quantified. One can foresee the future of this situation easily enough. Before too long, academics will be offering students a menu: £80 for their most world-shaking insights; £45 for some bright but not brilliant stuff; £15 for a standard range of ideas. As far as marking essays goes, a fiver for each comment doesn’t seem too excessive. Eagerly anticipating these developments, I already have a slot on my office door into which students must insert a pound coin simply to gain admission. Since they can’t afford to buy books, I have launched a rather profitable little lending scheme.

Whereas critique assesses actuality in the light of possibility, measuring the indicative by the yardstick of the subjunctive, the ambition of advanced capitalism is not simply to combat radical ideas, or even to discredit them. It is to abolish the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present.

Its task, in brief, is to annihilate that perilous power known as the imagination. The past is a narrative of unbroken progress from the mollusc to monopoly capitalism, destined in the fullness of time to give birth to that avatar of the World-Spirit known as Gordon Brown. The future is simply the present plus more options. The apogee of history is the free market. It was for this that the ancient Greeks wrangled and the Levellers revolted.

Cultural custodians

When universities become incorporated, the role of the critical intellectual tends to shift outside the college walls to the writers and artists. It is they who are landed with the unenviable role of acting as the custodian of humane values in a social order that tips its hat to such values in theory while flouting them in practice. Here, too, however, there is a serious problem. Writers and artists can be relied on to be militant and robust in defence of individual freedom and civil liberties. That, after all, is the very air they breathe as professionals. Yet such a politics has its limits – it cannot really push beyond a very middle-class English liberalism.

Novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan may be vociferous in their opposition to Islamism, but it is hard to imagine any of them speaking out in defence of, say, council workers’ wages or the right of Iraqis to defend themselves against a brutal invasion. Given their conditions of labour, writers and artists are unlikely to have much sense of collectivity.

There is something self-interested as well as valuable about their pleas for free speech. As self-appointed champions of civilisation against barbarism, they fail to see that a certain barbarism is the flipside of civilisation itself, inseparable from its smooth operation. For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every artistic masterpiece, human wretchedness and back-breaking toil. Writing novels, like any other form of cultural activity, is made possible only by the labour of others. This isn’t a fact of which Amis and his ilk seem particularly aware.

Universities can’t be changed in isolation. To prise them loose from the grip of late capitalism, we need a society that can afford free education for its young people and academic independence from private interests.

This means transforming the economic system that currently syphons off billions of pounds for shareholder profits, fat-cat salaries, weapons, offshore tax scams, useless commodities and a good deal more.

To achieve such political goals, we need, among other things, a new generation of public intellectuals prepared to do the hard analysis demanded, and to engage in the task of spreading the word abroad. Otherwise, we shall continue with a situation in which, when Martin Amis made his odious comments about harassing and discriminating against innocent Muslims, his close friend Christopher Hitchens wrote that his remarks were simply ‘mind-experiments’, while his other close friend Salman Rushdie claimed that Amis had not spoken of discrimination at all, even though the novelist had spoken of favouring ‘discriminatory stuff’.

It is remarkable how the liberal intelligentsia reveals such a disinterested passion for truth and justice, except when it comes to its mates.

Terry Eagleton was forced to retire from his post as John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University in July 2008