Imagining the Socialist University

Universities are currently on the frontline of attempts by the UK government to drastically reshape
education. One symptom of this – although far from the only one – is the recent conflict over
proposed reductions in pensions provided by USS, the main university pensions scheme, which led in
March 2018 to the largest strike ever seen in UK higher education. Strikes were eventually called off
in April, though without a final solution being agreed. Consultations between USS and employers
continue at the time of writing.

The strike followed a controversy that erupted in January 2018 around the appointment of the right-
wing journalist Toby Young to the board of the new Office for Students (OfS), the body that since
April 2018 has had the job of regulating universities in England, including administering the Teaching
Excellence Framework (TEF), distributing funding, ensuring that ‘Prevent’ duties are followed, and
ultimately granting or withholding of university title. While many commentators pointed out that
Toby Young’s history of misogynist, discriminatory and apparently pro-eugenics comments made
him highly unsuitable for this position, some also drew attention to his lack of experience in higher
education, which amounts to two years spent on a doctorate he did not complete. Even the
government seemed somewhat embarrassed by Young’s appointment, sneaking the news out at
midnight on New Year’s Eve, apparently hoping the country would be too inebriated to notice.
Although Young eventually resigned from the role under public pressure, much less remarked upon
was the make-up of the rest of the OfS board, which includes 6 members with a mainly or entirely
business background (coming from DLA Piper, Boots, HSBC, Norton Rose Fulbright, Credit Suisse and
Eukalia training), but only 5 whose main experience is of working or studying in a university
(including one student member), as well as 3 members who have a primarily policy or administration
background, including the chair.

Why does this matter? Because when the board of OfS looks more like the board of a corporation or
a product regulator than a gathering of educators, it suggests that universities will be assessed not as
communities of knowledge but as providers of a consumer service. The job of universities is
confirmed as producing work-ready graduates in service of the market. This is not a secret, but the
overt aim of the new regulatory regime, supported by the recent extension of Competition and
Markets Authority (CMA) rules to university degrees, which means they are now considered under
the same rules as fridges or toasters. The former universities minister, Sam Gyimah, even called for
universities to be compared through ‘MoneySuperMarket’ style rankings. This would, it is imagined,
allow students to play the university market like rational economists, making data-based decisions to
maximise personal gain.

Although these changes seem to aim towards the transformation of the university sector into a
classic private market, there is an unacknowledged hypocrisy in the government’s approach. On the
one hand, prominent Conservative MPs such as Jo Johnson have called for changes that would allow
more private providers to emerge and challenge existing universities, pursuing a rhetoric that
relentlessly stresses student choice and the ‘student experience’. On the other hand, the much-
vaunted freedom of the market only seems to apply when universities do what ministers want them
to do. As an article published last year by the university policy website WonkHE points out, the
government has responded to the inevitable failure of the university market by ‘continually
attempting to correct’ it through interventionist means (article here). The hypocrisy involved is

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evident in a speech made by Theresa May in February 2018, when she launched the Conservative
Party’s policy of forcing universities to reduce tuition fees on certain courses, particularly the
humanities (not coincidentally the site from which the university’s most powerful ideological critique
emerges) and potentially requiring them to provide shorter (2-year) undergraduate degrees. These
policies have since been overshadowed by the chaos of Brexit, but they should not be ignored. The
attempt to devalue the humanities and turn universities into teaching machines that churn out
graduates at as high a rate as possible (while simultaneously degrading the time available for
university research) betrays an anxiety that, if left to their own devices, universities would not
choose to differentiate courses by fees, or to slash the length of degree programmes. The rhetoric of
market freedom is, then, actually cover for the desire to exert centralised control over the university
system while also degrading the shrinking, but still persistent, public perception of universities as
institutions operating in the public interest. Such a view is being replaced by a model that sees
universities and students as individualised, rationalised and wholly quantifiable – which is to say
controllable.

How might we begin to move away from this vision of the university as a neoliberal education
factory and start to rethink it in socialist terms? The first stage is to take a broad perspective on the
historical function of the university, and to identify the key ideologies that underpin it. We could
begin by recalling that the European university system dates back to the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, when universities such as Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca were granted charters, and that
it was from the beginning a semi-independent institution for teaching and study attended by a small
fraction of an already small educated male elite. This origin encapsulates the central problem that
still remains for any attempt to transform the university into a socialist institution: how to make
open and egalitarian a body that is premised upon elitism and exclusion, while maintaining its
(proclaimed if not always enacted) values of intellectual rigour and independence?

It is true that the modern history of universities in the UK has been one of gradually expanding
access, from the founding of London University (now UCL) in 1826, which broke with the Oxbridge
requirement for students to be practising Anglicans, and then began to admit women in 1868, to the
post-war establishment of universities such as East Anglia, Kent and Warwick. The transformation of
polytechnics to universities in 1992 opened up the sector further, but also abolished local authority
control, so that university policy became for the first time fully centralised. The era of free higher
education which ran from 1962-89 broke down further at this point, mainly because participation
had grown rapidly, from 8.4% in 1970 to 33% in 2000.1 This vast expansion of access to universities
led to a major ideological transformation in the way they were understood however, which
ultimately worked against many of the benefits the expansion had brought. The shift was not
inevitable, but rather defined by key political decisions such as Tony Blair’s 2004 introduction of
loan-based tuition fees and the subsequent escalation of the programme by the Coalition
government in 2010, when fees hit £9000 a year. As Robert Anderson puts it, writing for the History
& Policy research network, the system had been redesigned so that students were ‘conceived of as
customers exercising choice in paying for a product in a market – and no longer as citizens exercising

1
Parliamentary briefing, http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04252/SN04252.pdf, p. 14.

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a social right’.2 It is this new status quo which the OfS is designed to police and protect, though it
comes into being at a moment when the system is manifestly beginning to fray at the edges.

History and politics alone are not enough to understand the forms of thinking which underpin the
university system however, or to appreciate how these have shifted in the UK in recent years. We
can turn here to Jaques Lacan, whose seminar XVII, originally held in 1969-70, discussed what he
calls the ‘university discourse’. Lacan associates this discourse with the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, who worked at Cambridge from 1929 to 1947, though he would, ironically enough,
have been hard pushed to survive in the current academic climate, given that he produced no major
publications between the 1920s and 1950s. As Lacan characterises it, Wittgenstein’s approach
proclaims that ‘the world is supported only by facts. No things unless supported by a web of facts’.3
This is the outlook of Charles Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind, the educator in Hard Times (1854), who states:
‘what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life’.
While Gradgrind is a caricature of Victorian education, Lacan shows that the belief in truth and
knowledge he represents shores up the ‘myth of the ideal I, of the I that masters, of the I whereby at
least something is identical to itself, namely the speaker’.4 Traditionally, the university discourse has
meant guarding this myth of mastery through the claim to identify, control and distribute truth and
knowledge. But such mastery extends beyond facts, since one of the main goals of the university
discourse is to reproduce itself, in service of which it produces subjects, which is to say graduates,
who are themselves bearers of the abstracted, fetishized form of truth-knowledge that is the
university discourse.

Yet we have now reached a point where universities are frequently no longer in control of this truth-
knowledge discourse, which is rather determined by the economically-driven society the university
was once supposed to stand apart from and pass judgement upon. One symptom of this is that the
2:1 degree, regardless of its content, has come to be seen as vital for many students, for whom it
signifies not knowledge but a certain ‘exchange value’ of knowledge that can (so the hope goes) be
traded for a decent job. Another is the periodic media and political outrage over so-called ‘Mickey
Mouse’ degrees and courses, during which universities are revealed to be failing in their role as
guardians of knowledge.

At the same time, the growing managerialism and bureaucratisation of UK universities has brought
with it a gradual but persistent shifting of the location of the university discourse from lecturers and
professors, as was the case when Lacan was teaching, to government-appointed external bodies
(such as HEFCE, QAA and their successor OfS) and non-teaching university managers. This is a local
manifestation of a global trend: universities in Sweden experienced an increase in administrative
staff seven times greater than the increase in academic staff between 2001 and 2013, and while the
number of non-academic employees at US universities has more than doubled since 1987, the
proportion of teaching by full-time staff has decreased (articles here and here). Nowadays, an
extensive apparatus of reviews, assessments, league tables, excellence frameworks, surveys and
measurable student outcomes enforces its own form of truth-knowledge, one which, like the old
university discourse, is presented as identifiable, unified, manageable and transmissible. The irony

2
‘University Fees in Historical Perspective’, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/university-
fees-in-historical-perspective
3
Jaques Lacan, Seminar XVII (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 60.
4
P. 63.

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for students is that this system, which claims to speak in their name, in fact divides them against
themselves, turning their experiences into data points that are ultimately used not to help them but
to support an economised view of the world that sees success and failure in terms of growth rates
and market values. In the process, it seeks like the old discourse to turn students into carriers of a
belief in its own account of truth – which is, of course, wholly insufficient to deal with the massive
destabilisations of truth being enacted by the likes of Trump and Brexit.

The basic contours of the problem are now clear. A partially successful opening up of access to
universities has taken place, but only at the cost of an extreme shift in the social position of the
university and its leveraging into a pseudo-marketised institution. This process has been
accompanied by a shift in the location of the university discourse, which retains all the power Lacan
identified but is no longer under the control of the university; instead it is shaped by administrators,
government and the logic of business. These changes require continual work to maintain, not least
because there remains resistance in the system, as last year’s strikes attest.

In order to move towards a socialist university from this point, at least two things are necessary. The
first, as many have already pointed out, is to change the economic basis on which universities are
organised, and thereby to redefine their social role. Crucially, however, this change cannot succeed
unless it is accompanied by a transformation of the university discourse, which must not only be
transferred to a new location, as has happened over recent decades, but challenged and if possible
dismantled.

One the one hand this is a political problem, but lessons from the classroom also have a crucial role
to play. We might do worse than starting with Jacques Rancière, whose 1987 book The Ignorant
Schoolmaster considers what might be learnt from Joseph Jacotot, a lecturer in French Literature
who moved to the Netherlands in the early nineteenth century, and found himself in the position of
teaching Flemish students who spoke no French at all. Rather than trying to teach his students
French, Jacotot asked them to intensively study a bilingual edition of a text originally published in
French, and then to write in French about what they thought they had read. Their success was swift
and surprising. For Rancière, this anecdote shows the anti-democratic structure of traditional forms
of education. The mastery of the pedagogue takes the form of a double gesture in which the teacher
first declares the students ignorant, and thus in need of education, and then ‘appoints himself to the
task’ of lifting this ‘veil of ignorance’.5 It is precisely this faith in explication as the only route from
ignorance to knowledge that maintains the hierarchy of knowledge on which the university
discourse is based. In current parlance, this becomes the turning of students (i.e. consumers) into
work-ready graduates (i.e. commodities).

As Rancière notes, however, the best knowledge we have is that of our mother tongue, which is not
taught to us but something we teach ourselves when provided with the right circumstances. The
socialist university would learn this lesson, creating an environment for students in which, as
Rancière puts it: ‘someone has addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond
to, not as students or as learned men, but as people; in the way you respond to someone speaking
to you and not to someone examining you: under the sign of equality’.6 This would not only be the
case for students, but for all members of the university, so that the socialist university would have

5
Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), pp. 6-7.
6
Ranciere, p. 11.

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no distinction between teaching and research (which would be very different from the current
degrading of research in many disciplines). Indeed, this lack of distinction might be its very principle.
All members of the university would be understood as intelligent learners, without master
explicators. The socialist university would in this way reject the mastery of the designated outcome
that tells students where they will end before they have begun, which tells them that this degree will
prepare them directly for that career. The point would not be to make degrees less socially
applicable, but precisely the opposite; it would entail the opening out of possibilities so that
students and staff are able to think widely and freely about the applicability of what they are
studying without it being dictated ahead of time.

Such a conception of the university perhaps seems utopian, especially from our current position, and
it leaves open vital economic questions that must also be addressed if it is to become a truly socialist
institution. Nonetheless, Rancière’s thoughts on Jacotot at least begin to provide an alternative
vision than the stultifying university discourse, which the current government is trying desperately to
cling onto even as its limitations grow ever clearer.

Ben Moore for Everyday Analysis