The Guardian reported today that, following the arrival of their new Vice Chancellor*, Oxford are leading the way in campaigning directly for a US style funding system for higher education. Interestingly the article focuses on his advocacy of US style scholarships. The upshot is that a fundamentally retrogressive move can be presented as a progressive one: he is calling for the existing scholarships in the UK to be improved to match their counterparts in the US but for this to take place within the context of a move from the present UK funding system to one similar to the US. Under the latter system, Ivy League universities charge feeds of up to £31000 a year… so while his argument that increasing tuition fees must be accompanied by an increase in student support to US levels is a little better than calling for an outright and unqualified lifting of the cap on fees, it’s hardly the progressive move his language paints it as being.

He says that “The commitment that we must make to [the brightest students] is that they will attend Oxford irrespective of their economic circumstances”. So, much as in American debates of the last two decades, the disingenuous concept of capitalist meritocracy (the ethical goal of social institutions should be to allow natural hierarchies to emerge) acts as a banner under which to undermine the postwar liberal settlement. Of course this ‘debate’ takes place within a political climate where, as a consequence of the media echo-chamber, it’s become accepted that Britain has a “debt crisis”: so the non-political necessity of austerity is seen to underscore the need for yet more privatization of the costs of higher education, as well for universities to seek more diversified funding sources i.e. relying on wealthy individuals and corporate partnerships rather than government.

*Formerly the Provost of Yale no less! Thank god for another socially beneficial American export.

Last month saw British industry once again repeat its all-too-frequent demand that the form and content of higher education in the UK be assimilated to the needs of business. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), in essence the union for bosses, launched a new task force along with the vice-chancellors of Bath and Coventry universities, as well as the principal of Kings College London, that aims to explore “what business wants from higher education, how business and universities can best work together and how the sector should be funded”. At a time of pervasive insecurity throughout the British economy and rampant levels of personal debt amongst students, one of their first suggestions was to call for the lifting of the cap on tuition fees.

The perverse timing of this intervention, as governments and central banks around the world struggle to repair an ailing financial system, demands critical scrutiny. The director of the CBI, Richard Lambert, while recognising that “the role of universities is broader than just business” argues that “as a significant funder, user and customer of higher education, it is only right that business sets out what it needs”. Surely this seems reasonable? It would be were it the case that the CBI merely intended to set out the ‘needs’ of business yet the launch of the task force purposively coincides with the review of higher educational policy by the main three parties and its ambitions extend far beyond simply giving voice to the desires of its members.

As the President and CEO of McDonalds, a member of the CBI’s task force, puts it, “It’s absolutely essential that universities and businesses work effectively together to maximise the benefit this delivers for the UK economy and ensure we remain competitive – the rest of the world certainly isn’t standing still”. The CBI is demanding that universities be made ‘competitive‘, as the harsh realities of the modern global economy are seen to necessitate that universities, not to mention wider society, reorganize themselves to meet the needs of the British economy. And who is best placed to articulate the needs of the UK economy? Well the CBI of course. Obviously business makes an important contribution to the national economy. Given we live in a market-based system, something would be seriously and confusingly amiss were this not the case. Even so, the recognition of this contribution doesn’t entail that what’s good for business is necessarily good for the UK economy.

The recent crisis in Anglo-American capitalism graphically illustrates how the unrestricted and short-termist accumulation of private profit, leading in this case to a largely unprecedented boom time for business (particularly the financial sector) and the super-rich, ultimately comes to erode the social relations that make wealth generation possible. As the economic commentator Will Hutton argues, “without trust and fairness, capitalism risks its own sustainability”. The rampant pursuit of short-term competitive advantage by individual businesses undermines precisely the sort of rational planning and investment that produces the social and intellectual capital that these business rely on for their long-term profitability.

The CBI, as well as private economic interests more generally, shouldn’t have influence over higher-education not simply because it’s wrong and undemocratic, relying on a utterly false conflation of the interests of business with the interests of the UK economy more widely, but also because it simply doesn’t work. The myopic subordination of all other concerns to the short-term demands of the market place undermine the sort of creativity and innovation which the UK needs if it’s to succeed in a global market place which is, as the CBI argues, genuinely competitive. If profitability, efficiency and immediate usefulness to business come to dictate higher educational priorities then everyone will, in the long run, be worse off. If universities are geared towards the needs of business than departments like English, Sociology and History will lose out yet the cultural value of these disciplines extends far beyond anything that can be quantified in narrow financial terms. Universities are not in existence to further the market economy or promote business but to allow the development of thought and knowledge. These goals may often coincide, particularly so in what has been called the UK’s modern ‘information economy’, yet where they do not the integrity of the university is something it is worth fighting to preserve.

In yet another striking example of how little involvment I had in university life as an undergraduate, I’ve been reading accounts on Ted Honderich’s website of a related set of scandals that took place during my second year at UCL (though I was entirely unaware of it). Suffice to say it now all seems rather interesting and I wish I’d actually had the chance to engage with it.

At the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 Ted Honderich gave a lecture that included moral support for the Palestinians in their struggle against neo-Zionism — neo-Zionism being the enlarging of the state of Israel beyond its original borders, with what that has entailed and will entail for the Palestinians. This was objected to by the chairman and some other members of the undergraduate Jewish Society in University College London, and also by the Union of Jewish Students. A campaign was begun of which the aim of was to have the college take down the website at which you are looking.

It’s also a very clear example of rhetorical anti-racism genuinely threatening academic freedom. I’d call it rhetorical anti-racism because I simply won’t accept the Jew/Israeli conflation. Even so, it poses questions that I have no immediate answers to. I can imagine many of the arguments I’ve routinely made re: no platform being made by the students at UCL and yet I vehemently disagree with what they’re doing. Not least of all the sheer fucking hubris of the student pontificating upon the acceptable future for Honderich, an Emeritus Professor at UCL.

Danny Stone, Campigns Organiser for the Union of Jewish Students called Honderich’s comments “an abuse of UCL resources, and desecration of the name of UCL”. Stone added that “an apology may not be enough”, instead suggesting that the professor receive further education “about the issues and the students he’ll be dealing with.”

he UCL Jewish Society has also joined UJS in calling for clearer guidelines to be published on the use of UCL personal webpages. Samuel Lebens, President of the Jsoc, stated: “UCL’s website should not be allowed to air views that are so removed from fact and so likely to disrupt the good relations between different religious groups on campus. As chairman of the Jewish Society, I will be challenging the administration to create clear guidelines as to what can and cannot be said from the platform of UCL”

I’ve argued in the past for a communitarian understanding of students unions. They are institutions run for, as well as theoretically by, their membership. As such, the decision making forums of the institution may reach conclusions about what constitutes acceptable use of the platforms it offers, providing it does so in an open and democratic way.  To suggest otherwise implies a certain understanding of how what Chantal Mouffe calls the Democratic Paradox should be resolved. Democracy and liberty stand in tension with each other, as you can never foreclose the possibility that democratic processes may lead to illiberal outcomes. It’s impossible to resolve the conflict, as opposed to negotiating it in political life, without privileging one term over the other. Yet to privilege democracy over liberty risks tyranny and to do the reverse is just, well, shit, in a way that’s difficult to summarise in an off-topic point on a blog post. To deny that a students union may legitimately reach conclusions that stand at odds with liberal principles is a perfect example of trying to resolve the paradox by, tacitly or otherwise, holding one value (in this case liberty) to be necessarily prior to the other. Let’s reject this as a crap and superficial* attempt to resolve a profound paradox at the heart of political life.

Yet once we’ve rejected the priority over liberty over democracy, it becomes much more difficult to make a knock-down in principle argument to support Honderich. Obviously there’s lots of empirical questions left here (e.g. were the campaigining students indicative of wider concerns amongst the student body? were the computing regulations about not bringing UCL into disrepute or causing offense arrived at through a democratic process?) but these can be left aside for now, as can the differences between universities and students union. I can concieve of a situation where the (unjustified) attacks on what Honderich carried the sort of democratic legitimacy I’ve been talking about. If such a situation held, does Honderich still have the right to work and write in a way that stands at odds with the democratically reached ideas of a common good and acceptable behaviour within the institution? On a purely theoretical level, I’d say no. Yet in this particular case that revulses me. What becomes of academic freedom?

*In case anyone objects, I’m really not calling Rawls and his ilk “crap and superficial”. The difficulties faced by an insistence on the priority of the right over the good are all together more complicated.