Priyamvada Gopal describes the marketisation of higher education unleashed by New Labour as a result of which the intrinsic value of education is being steadily eroded.

Freedom, democracy and widening social participation through education are fine ideas. Especially in other people’s countries and societies. Billions can be spent and two wars waged in the name of these high-minded ideals.

Back home? Well, between the bankers and the bombs, the chest is now empty. Something’s gotta give and it certainly won’t be the bailouts and bonuses. We’re all in the same boat, we’ve been told (though most of us in steerage as we head towards the iceberg) and must share the pain. (‘Privatise profit, socialise loss’). There go pensions, savings, jobs, public transport, housing, benefits and, obviously, higher education. But, hey, cheer up. The Prime Minister says that when things get better, we can have a Pride in Britain Day as a treat, a ‘dividend’ on a better economy: ‘It’s to celebrate the many things that are good about Britain and the British people.”

Of course, by then we might not know quite what we are celebrating. Most of the humanities will have been decimated through department closures and job losses (which will inevitably affect the quality of primary and secondary education) and most young people will have been corralled into factory-farmed vocational training.  In the name of ‘productivity’ and ‘economic value,’ the study of the arts, classics, literature and history will have either dwindled into nothingness or become, as they once used to be, finishing coats of glamour paint for the privileged and the pampered, stops on an educational Grand Tour to garnish the bombast of future bankers and politicians.

Commentators have noted that the 6.5% cuts in the higher education budget announced by Lord Mandelson represent a recent reversal in New Labour’s investment in Higher Education following the colossal devastation of the field wrought by Thatcherism. While that is not incorrect, it is also true that the corporate managerialism that New Labour has developed as its core ideology has also been mounting a sustained attack on higher education for some time now, and against the humanities in particular, on the basis that it does not ‘produce’ economic benefits. (In)famously, Charles Clarke, then education secretary, announced in 2003 that he considered Medieval History to be merely an ‘ornament’, the sort of work that should not be funded by the state because it was not of ‘clear usefulness’ (to the economy, stupid). The stupendous ignorance which underlies such an assessment rather neatly underscores the need for better humanistic education. It is such non-thinking which underlies the latest half-baked idea for evaluating academic output—the Research Excellence Framework (REF)—which will assess scholarship in terms of its cultural, social and economic ‘impact.’  Sounds like a rightly accountable attitude to public money (though coming from people who haven’t exactly been accountable themselves with that money), but typically, there is no real insight into or understanding of how such impact might actually be measured.

It’s easy to denounce this as simple ignorance or crass commercialism, but there is more going on here. In the name of ‘economic impact’, ‘skills’, ‘employability’ and ‘productivity,’ what is ultimately being attacked is any form of teaching or learning that might turn out citizens with a real sense of their history, capable of independent thought or critical analysis. What a hollow celebration of ‘Britishness’ it will be when the study of this land’s vast and variegated historical, cultural and literary riches is kept out of the reach of the majority and scholars discouraged from researching into it. What kind of democracy is it—no less one that aspires to ‘teach’ other cultures about democracy and freedom—which, rather than widening access to higher education, chooses to turn its young people solely into ‘skilled’ workers to service the needs of the better-off? Skilled people need not be uninformed or badly-read people. The idea that skills and studying are two separate things is absurd and facilitating that separation, as Mandelson and company seek to do, is an insult to the intelligence of the British electorate, implying as it does that reading and thinking ought only to be the preserve of the rich and the privileged (‘highly selective’). It denies the vast majority of young Britons the chance to become fully-fledged, informed, well-read and historically aware citizens. Britain’s Got Talent and democracy alright, it says, but we’d rather you didn’t develop it any further than pressing the right buttons on your keypad. (Calls from mobiles and a university education will cost considerably more).

In an age marked by two unpopular wars, widespread economic and social discontent, the criminalisation of the poor and the young, and the erosion of civil liberties, is this coincidence ? Who can say. But then again, it could hardly suit the governing milieu and their corporate allies to preserve, let alone extend, the privilege (and responsibility) of advanced learning and a space in which to reflect on ideas, leading people to what the writer Jamaica Kincaid calls ‘a different relationship with the world,’ based on ‘knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live, why the things happened to them happened.’  Give people more than reality television and video games and who knows what democratic hell you might unleash.

The Mandelson antidote to real democracy and freedom of inquiry is simple. Corporatize, corporatize, corporatize! As Iain Pears recently pointed out in a punchy article on the dismal state of affairs at Kings College London where Britain’s only professor of palaeography will be made reundant, the inflated pay of administrators and managers at HE institutions might well account for some of their current fiscal problems. Rather than making the right sorts of cuts, which would also address the growing problem of higher education being run by people who fancy themselves to be captains of finance (and we all know how they’ve been runing things. Like banks) and pay themselves handsomely for doing so, the strategy is to force academics to account for their work through some imaginary balance-sheet of scholarly commodities with ‘demonstrable benefits’ for society and the economy as returns on investment. You might think that smart citizens in full possession of their political and intellectual heritage, equipped to think critically and imaginatively, would be as demonstrable a benefit as a society could get. Choosing to be more than ‘demonstrable’, these ones might actually demonstrate.

There will, however, be demonstrable losses. Britain still has a culture of debate and dissent, and the more eroded the educational system, the more vitiated that culture will inevitably become. It is not that intelligence or ability don’t exist where there is no education, but they certainly cannot be developed to their full potential—particularly in an economy where most people are slated to live as ‘skilled’ wage-slaves, struggling to meet rent and mortgage payments, pay the energy bills and look after children and the elderly. As such, withholding higher education is a crime with intent, rags to riches mythologies, usually circulated by the university-educated, notwithstanding.  (SurAlan, now Lord Sugar, made it good without a university education, even GCSEs, didn’t he? Look at Simon Cowell! Oh, alright then.

The time has come for academics, students and everyone who actually cares about Britain beyond the hypocrisies of patriotic bank holidays to unambiguously challenge the corporatism that has already decimated the economy and is now turning its scorching, destroying gaze towards this country’s long tradition of higher education, too long the preserve of the privileged few.  To do so and to insist on the value of a humanistic education—and of the pure sciences with no immediate industrial application—is not only to defend a long heritage but to challenge those very damaging ideas of productivity and profit that have brought this country—and every one of us not cushioned by wealth and offshore accounts—to the brink of collapse.