One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new podcast series, produced as part of the Global Democracy Commons project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe.
The series explores diverse trends such as those related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private, not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to police classrooms; the waves of layoffs and closures of departments and programs; and the attempts to delimit academic freedom, free speech, and rights of assembly and protest.
We hope our conversations with those who work in higher education around the world will allow us to consider the degree to which the university has become the canary in the coal mine for the fate of democracy.
Episode 3
As universities across England and Wales continue to announce redundancies and close departments and programs, we talk to political theorist Lorna Finlayson about the nature of the crisis, why academics are relatively restrained in their responses to it, and how students offer some hope for alternative visions of higher education.
Lorna is a political theorist and a philosopher who teaches in the school of philosophy and art history at the University of Essex. She is the author of two books, The Political is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy and An Introduction to Feminism.
Listen to the podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ANNOUNCER: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
JAMES VERNON: Hello, and my name is James Vernon. I’m a professor of history and the director of the Global Democracy Commons at UC Berkeley.
One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. In this podcast series, we explore how universities are increasingly being targeted as spaces of debate, critique, and democratic protest. We hope our conversations will allow us to understand why universities are one of the canaries in the coal mine for the fate of global democracy.
Today, I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to talk to Lorna Finlayson about the state of higher education and its relationship to democratic life in Britain. Lorna is a political theorist and a philosopher who teaches in the school of philosophy and art history at the University of Essex. She is the author of two books, The Political is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy and An Introduction to Feminism. They were published in 2015 and 2016.
She also frequently contributes to the New Left Review, where recently she’s written about the petty authoritarianism of Keir Starmer’s politics, the limits of our conventional understandings of freedom of speech, and a bracing piece about the complicity of academics in the managerialism that has hollowed out universities as critical spaces in Britain. Thanks for joining us, Lorna. I really appreciate it.
I’m going to start by asking you a set of impossible question, which you can take in whatever direction you want because I think many of our listeners won’t necessarily know much about the state of higher education in Britain. So I wonder if you could briefly give us a sense about how higher education and the position of universities have changed over the last 30 or 40 years, and particularly perhaps what that means about our changing understandings and experience of democracy in Britain.
LORNA FINLAYSON: Yeah, sure. I think it’s important to resist the temptation to go into too much technical detail with this sort of thing, because even those of us who care about it can get very easily bored very quickly once you start getting into the details of thresholds and repayment rates and so on. And it’s very easy to lose sight of the overall point.
I think that might actually be strategic to some degree. You can do a great deal of evil if you make it boring enough and complicated enough that everybody kind of tunes out. So I want to just try to say something very general about the change that I think has taken place in the last 30 years or so.
And roughly speaking, that change is one from a public goods model of higher education to a private goods model. There are various, as I say, caveats and complications you could add to that. It’s propped up with various kind of bursaries and student loans. And then they get withdrawn.
But without going into all that, the underlying essence of that change, as I say, is from a public goods model to a private goods model. And roughly speaking, a public goods model of higher education or of something else like health is that people pay into this institution, which we collectively think is worth having around in society. And we may pay according to our ability to pay as in progressive taxation.
And the institution is funded in that way and is available to people in general. A private goods model, by contrast, is where you think about something as an individual product or investment that you can pay into and from which you expect to derive benefit. And so these two modes or models are associated with different kinds of justification.
The first, the public goods model, as I say, is to do with whether it’s fair to pay for something is understood in terms of your ability to pay your means. In terms of the private goods model, the question becomes, well, what’s in it for me? Am I getting anything out of this? And if I’m not getting anything out of this, why should I pay for it?
So you hear what I think of as a faux progressive argument, which is, well, if I’m not benefiting from higher education, why should I pay for somebody else to attend university? And of course, you can see what happens when you apply that logic to something like health care. The wealthy are not benefiting from the health system. So why should they pay so that the unhealthy can be treated? So that’s the rough change that I see as having taken place and as having been entirely detrimental to the good in question.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
LORNA FINLAYSON: –which is that, the way in which it’s been detrimental is not just [INAUDIBLE]. And I think this was a mistake that we made, those of us who were involved in the movement against fees and cuts from the early 2000s onwards, and in particular 2010 in the UK. We placed a lot of emphasis on the question of access. And the claim was often made that working class people wouldn’t be able to afford to go to university. They’d be put off by the debt. Or they just wouldn’t be able to come.
I think the transformation of higher education in the direction of a private goods model has had bad effects in terms of preserving and, in some ways, exacerbating social inequalities. But it’s much more complicated than that story that I just mentioned would indicate. So it hasn’t really been the case that poorer people have been put off from attending university altogether.
And this is something that the defenders of the fees regime make great play of. They say, oh, well, actually, you see that the number of people going to university– the proportion of the population going to university has continued to rise, including amongst poorer people, people from poorer families. And therefore, it’s not exclusionary. And I think that’s a mistake. But I think it also shows that our emphasis arguably was in the wrong place.
What I think that this story about access to a good misses out is that the good in question is not something that is fixed and constant across this process of change. Rather, the transition from a public good model to a private good changes the thing in question. It changes the kind of good that higher education is.
And when I say that, I think people probably assume that I mean something entitled student consumers who are coming in demanding a top grade because they’ve paid a lot of money. And that happens to some extent. But I have to say, in my experience, that’s not really how students have responded to this change.
It’s actually, in a way quite heartening and in a way quite poignant to notice the ways in which students relate to higher education even under a system which puts a lot of pressure on them to relate in that entitled consumer kind of a way. What you actually find is students, even without having any acquaintance with the system of higher education that used to exist, sort of have a yearning for it, kind of implicit or instinctive yearning for that. And they seem really to want a space where they can actually pursue thoughts and develop as people in an unpressured and unforced and non-instrumental way. So I don’t really see that they have become these kind of entitled brats that you see depicted, for example, I think in certain media representations of students.
Instead, actually, what I see is they want this dream of what you might call the old school university experience. At the same time, they have to meet rents that are getting higher and higher and their loans no longer cover the rents. And so they have to work in Tesco. And they’re stressed about grades. So rather than entitlement in the student mindset, I would characterize the atmosphere among students as one of great anxiety above all.
But when I say that the good in question that is higher education has changed, I mean something else primarily. And what I mean– and this is going to sound really hyperbolic and possibly paranoid. But I think actually what so-called paranoia is quite a correct and reasonable response to the political reality that we find ourselves in.
I think that the change that we’ve seen in how higher education is is about making thinking almost impossible. It’s about creating an environment in which it’s almost impossible to complete a thought. And this is where it begins to sound paranoid to some people.
But I think that’s no accident. I think that those in power would quite like us not to be able to complete a thought. They would like that pressure that really makes reflection and critical consciousness impossible.
So I think that’s the way in which it’s changed. It manifests itself in lots of different ways. But I’ll just say something a little bit about the mechanisms by which it happens.
So there’s an argument for the transition to a private goods model of university, which is sometimes known as the driving up standards argument. And according to that logic, if you subject higher education or anything else to the discipline of the market, you will get people to work harder and better and be more productive and creative. And you’ll drive up standards.
And of course, as we know from any number of examples, including higher education, pretty much exactly the opposite happens. So instead of actually focusing on the core functions of a university, like teaching and research and thinking, you get more and more energy and more and more resources displaced onto peripheral functions, like recruitment, like branding, paying consultants to come up with supposedly better branding.
And you have a kind of a process where the means and the ends become inverted. Or rather, the ends slip out of the picture altogether. So you think, well, just as an academic, if I just apply for one more grant, maybe I’ll finally be able to complete a thought. Maybe I’ll finally be able to do the thing that actually interests me rather than just trying to get the next application done or jump through the next hoop.
So I think that’s the really big thing that I think people ought to understand about the transition from a public good to a private good. It’s not just about access, although that’s still important. It’s about a hollowing out actually the ruining of the good in question. Your question, though, was really, how did we get here? How did that happen?
And I think one really important thing to say about that is that it didn’t happen for the reasons that it sometimes claimed to have happened for. So I think a popular assumption might be the reason we ended up with the fee system is that university access was expanding. And that’s a good thing.
It’s good that more people should be able to access higher education. But that’s not affordable for more than a tiny percentage of the population. So you need to change something.
And so it makes sense that students should bear some of the costs of their own higher education [? so ?] that good can be expanded and enjoyed by more people. And of course, maybe we can make it a bit fairer by having bursaries for the poorest and so on and so forth. And now, if you say it like that, that can sound very reasonable to a lot of people.
And the problem with it, of course, is that it’s complete nonsense, as with so many arguments for austerity and privatization. It’s nonsense because, in fact, the private goods model of higher education is so expensive to administer that it’s not clear that it actually represents a saving as opposed to a public goods model, even allowing for an expansion to the sorts of numbers of students that we see now.
And in fact, it may even be more expensive. So the reason that it’s happening, as with cuts and privatization more generally, is sometimes said to be ideological. It’s just because people are so committed to this particular view of the self and of society that they will push it through even though it’s actually irrational. I would only add to that that I think it’s not purely ideological at the expense of some kind of material logic.
And here, this is a point that comes up again later. But there’s a question of, what is the correct unit of analysis with which to think about this? So if you think about things just from the point of view of the government, say, the national finances, then it looks like it’s irrational to replace one system with another on the basis of an austerity or saving money kind of rhetoric when that doesn’t, in fact, save money.
But if, on the other hand, you remember that, in fact, those in power don’t necessarily care about the public purse, that’s not necessarily that’s driving things here and, in fact, that its private companies, then it begins to make a lot more sense because there are beneficiaries from all of these transitions. And those beneficiaries are private companies. So in the context of higher education, outfits like Kaplan that do certainly stand to gain from this process.
Then the final thing to say that I think is really important is that this transition from a public good to a private good has not been democratic in any way. It’s not something that anyone, as far as I’m aware, ever voted for. The system of fees was introduced first by Tony Blair’s new labor government. And it wasn’t part of the manifesto. There was no mandate for it in that sense.
And then in the 2001 labor election manifesto, there was an explicit promise, in fact, not to introduce so-called top-up fees, which were the fees that went up to 3,000 pounds. They said that they would not do that. And in 2004, of course, they did that.
So it was without a democratic mandate. And in fact, against an election promise, I think the top-up fees vote, in fact, also only scraped by five votes in parliament at the time. And it was also against mass protests by students and by some academics. So I think that’s a really important thing to remember, that it was something that was really forced through in the teeth of opposition by a relatively small number of ideological zealots. So that’s a really long answer.
JAMES VERNON: That’s so great. And it gives us so much that we can talk about. There’s so many threads there that I want to pick up that the way in which the intensification of work, both for people who teach in universities and for people who try and study in universities but after work, jobs to cover their loans, make it impossible for people to be able to actually learn, let alone to think the massive expansion of a managerial class, which aims primarily to market and the university.
So it can recruit more students and develop what they call now the undergraduate student experience and build fancy, new facilities for them. And then critically, of course, also this question of the profoundly undemocratic way in which these changes have been made. And so there’s so much there that we can get into.
But we’ll maybe take each one in turn a little bit. But let’s just dwell on the fact– because I think it’s a really important point that, as you say, people often forget. So much of the current crisis in the UK at the moment– and listeners should understand that in the last couple of years, universities have been making– university staff faculty, as they’re called in the US, redundant in unprecedented numbers. They’ve been closing departments and academic programs in ways that the university sector has never seen before. And the way in which these cuts are always explained is as a financial necessity and that universities are in a state of bankruptcy.
So the very fix that was meant to be able, in the logic of this transition from a university as a public good to a private good, the mechanism that was meant to be able to, as you say, democratize the experience of university, the introduction of fees that would allow a greater number of people to attend university, clearly hasn’t worked.
If the logic now is we have to make– we’re laying people off because we can’t fund this program, we can’t fund this program, so this language of financial crisis that is used to justify the cutting of programs and the cutting of staff, really, above all, seems to indicate that the entire model of higher education as a private good that can be sold on the marketplace hasn’t worked. Am I missing something? Am I missing something there? Or is there genuinely a financial crisis in British higher education?
LORNA FINLAYSON: No, I don’t think you’re missing something. I think this is something that I’ve sometimes been slightly confused about for reasons I’ll try and explain. But I think the most obvious thing to say first is that the parallels between the sorts of austerity arguments we’re hearing from management of universities and the sorts of austerity arguments we’ve heard from governments over the past few years are unmistakable.
And we know just about how much validity the arguments made by governments about for austerity had. And we know that they were bogus. And I think that basically the same thing is the case with the arguments that we’re hearing coming from university management. And some of the replies are parallel too. So you can point out that, really, statements about economic necessity are never just neutral statements of fact, right? They are the products of framing. And financial situations are also the products of past decisions.
So when, for example, a university says, oh, we can’t afford to pay this many staff or we can’t afford to pay our staff properly, that may be technically true in a framing where they’ve already decided in advance that they have to spend this amount on capital expenditure and vanity projects, and they have to have a vice chancellor who has a six-figure salary and also a private chauffeur and all the rest of this stuff.
So I think we have reasons to be extremely suspicious of those arguments coming from management. At the same time, it is true that universities are facing severe financial pressures, and that’s not an accident. So if you look at the early statements of or the proposals by the architects of the present system, people like Brown as in the Brown report, you find that the idea of market exit was always part of the plan.
The idea was that those– it’s like survival of the fittest, and those universities that weren’t up to scratch would again be subjected to the discipline of the market and would go under. They would fail because they deserved to fail. That was the idea. So it’s not surprising to see that things are going in that direction because that was always the intention of these reforms.
How do you then put these– the reason I’m puzzled about this sometimes is that how do you put these things together? So our universities are really in dire straits economically, or aren’t they, right? Is it a bogus rationale only, or what’s going on? And do universities actually have any or management have any choice but to act in the ways that they act? And that’s something that I think can sometimes, as I say, be quite confusing.
So from the perspective of many academics, it appears that management is acting in ways that are just irrational and self-defeating because they could, in fact, invest in their staff, and they’d probably do better if they did. And they probably even do better by their own metrics, in terms of their reputation and their position in the rankings if they didn’t waste all their money on consultants who tell them to adopt slogans that are exactly the same as the slogans adopted by every other marketized university in the UK.
So it looks like management are stupid from the point of view of a lot of academic critics of what they’re doing. But I sometimes think, well, we’re the stupid ones if we really think that that’s all that’s going on here. Might it be that, actually, there’s something else driving this, and might it be that the people in positions of power in universities, as with the kind of national level with rhetoric around austerity, they don’t necessarily really care about whether the university flourishes or even survives?
They’re going to be fine. They can go through the revolving door to a job in Kaplan, or they can be bussed around from one destroyed university to destroy the next one. So looked at that way. And again, this is a point about what’s the right unit of analysis. If you think about individual management creatures and also outfits like Kaplan, profit-making outfits that are poised to cash in as soon as a university does go under, then these decisions by management no longer look so obviously stupid or irrational.
So to put it another way, I think the right thing to say is that universities actually could act differently from the ways in which they are acting. And it’s not obviously the case that they would fare worse financially, if they did, than they already are faring. But they won’t, and they won’t for quite systematic reasons to do with where their interests lie and their own ideological commitments and so on.
So in sum, then, I think it’s true that the economic situation of universities is, in many cases, dire. But one, this is often partly of their own making through what, from our point of view, seem like perverse priorities and financial decisions but which, as I say, from another point of view, might actually look rational. Two, the economic direness or the economic necessity or need is, anyway, not the reason for the sorts of cuts that are being announced.
That is something that I think, again, is ideologically driven. And these moments of crisis are often just used as a pretext or an excuse for doing things that they wanted to do anyway. And then thirdly, these measures are also not going to solve the problem that they claim to be trying to respond to. And I think you mentioned this really already. You don’t cut your way out of a crisis.
That doesn’t work at the level of a country. And it also doesn’t work at the level of the university. So it won’t work, and universities will go under, but there’ll be some people that will be quite happy about that.
JAMES VERNON: It’s a bleak situation that you’re telling us about. I want to come back to some of the other issues you raised right at the beginning.
But just while we’re on this, let’s lean into the responses of students and staff, those who teach university students in Britain to this predicament because, as you said, right at the beginning, the introduction of tuition fees was undemocratically imposed and led to– I mean, actually, I remember, in the early ’80s, when I was an undergraduate student going on a protest march for the abolition of the student maintenance grant, which was actually the very beginning of this process.
But the protest that we were doing in the 1980s was nothing compared to the size of the protests that paralyzed London in the 2010s when the big introduction of fees came in and fees went up to 9,000. And also in an unprecedented way, university lecturers have organized through their union. And listeners in the United States, especially, should understand that all university teachers are members of a union and in this country.
And that union has mobilized two nationwide strikes in the last four years, which had not happened for a very long time, if at all, I believe. So there is a clear resistance to this resignification of higher education as a private good and to the debt financing of that private good and to the austerity measures that have been introduced to it. But you’ve also written about the complicity of many university teachers in this system. Can you explain a little more why the business of university teaching is still going on in these impossible conditions?
LORNA FINLAYSON: I think I can say a little bit about the complicity and some of the reasons for that as I see them. It reminds me of– there was this famous interview that Chomsky did or with Andrew Marr, when they’re talking about the media and they’re talking about the kind of selection mechanisms which make sure that people who are really boat rockers or people who are really too critical just don’t make it into positions of influence in the media in the first place.
So Chomsky was saying to Marr, look, it’s not that I think that you’re being manipulated or brainwashed or being led into saying something that you don’t believe. You just wouldn’t be sitting there if you didn’t believe the things that you believe. And I think a similar selection mechanism exists in the case of academia. It begins at school. It’s also something that Chomsky mentions interestingly.
But people who generally were successful at school are going to then, with plenty of exceptions, of course, to be those who reacted well, to a reasonable extent, to authority or were able to tolerate authority. And those, of course, are the people who are going to end up in academia. In addition, if you think about the changes that have happened to academia just in the last few years– and I’m really talking in my own time from being a student to being an academic. This happened very fast. And I don’t know if I could have got through these filters now.
There are these additional screening mechanisms that have come into play whereby if you want to get a job or if you even want to get PhD funding, it used to be that you could just write what you wanted to do your PhD on. And if you were lucky, you would get funding. Now, you almost have to be this kind of corporatized academic self-entrepreneur even to fill in the forms to get to the point of– and I’ve seen people go through this process. And by the end of it, it had messed with their minds.
They didn’t even want to do a PhD anymore. They were unable to think in that kind of free, unforced way that is the whole point of doing PhD. Anyway, so my point is there is a selection mechanism that I think selects for conformists, even against those people’s own better judgment or instincts. It’s hard to get through that net without coming out deformed in some way on the other side.
And I think that that partly explains why academics are the way they are. I think part of it also has to do with class interest. Certainly more senior academics might, in fact, not care so much about the fate of precarious junior academics. They’re OK. They have their pension.
They’re far enough through their career. They feel it isn’t really going to affect them. So they will turn out when it comes to pensions, but they will then not turn out when it comes to opposition to casualization. We’ve seen this in the UK. So I think those are some of the mechanisms that are involved. Did that answer– I’m not sure if that answered all your questions.
JAMES VERNON: Oh, that’s great. That’s great. And it leads us to where I wanted to go next, which was, you raised at the top of our conversation this question of how when a university degree is presented and experienced as a private good and it’s presented as a private good in conditions of labor, both for university teachers and for undergraduate students, where it becomes impossible to think, where everyone is just trying to get by and get through the next deadline of whatever it is that they have to do, and that the university is a critical space, becomes hollowed out, basically, because everyone just has their work down there filling out the forms, as you say, that they have to fill out for the next grant or for their next leave or for their next teaching evaluation or anything else.
So I wonder if you could just say a little more about– it’s been 25 years since I’ve taught in the UK, so I think it would be really helpful for me to understand what universities in the UK, how they’ve been changed as critical spaces, how– you’re talking about the production of a certain type of conformity and consent around the system that currently exists.
And I wonder whether there are spaces of exception to that type of rule or whether universities have just become degree factories in which university teachers and students are focused on output and the product, as opposed to thinking and learning so that they can be informed democratic citizens of a country that would think that universities could be a public good of some type?
LORNA FINLAYSON: Yeah. I’m going to say two things, which maybe point in opposite directions. One of them is sort of borderline sentimental, and the other is very pessimistic. I think the more optimistic part of it is that, yes, there are exceptions. And in a way, I think that life is all about the exceptions.
And I said already that I thought one heartening thing was that the way that students don’t really conform to this model of the consumer that management really want them to be and even their student unions, which have been taken over largely by management, really want them to be. And they really try and whip them up to be that and to pressure their lecturers and to be that kind of entitled customer that they actually don’t really want to be.
So there is this kind of human resistance that I think is a source of hope, and nothing bad is ever really total. Or when it is, maybe there really is no hope. But none of these processes, I think, are absolute or complete. And there’s some, I think, solace in that. So that’s the happy bit. The less happy bit is that– and this is going to sound rude, but I don’t really buy and I’ve never really bought the idea that universities are, were ever critical spaces.
And this is, I think, where I part company with some people on my own side because now, obviously, if you want to defend the public university against something worse, which is the marketized hellscape, it’s tempting to want to say very nice things about the old model of the public university and how wonderful it was, and it was a source of this critical consciousness, and people were really doing this genuine reflection and thinking critically about power structures and all the rest of it.
Well, why would you– I mean, really, why would you really think that that was going to be allowed, right? And unless you think already that society is much nicer in general than I think it is, why would you find in a society, which is in all sorts of ways, exploitative, oppressive, exclusionary, why would you find these islands being allowed to flourish where this wonderful kind of critical thought is going on? I don’t think that’s the case.
I think maybe this is just a kind of a Marxist story in a way, but I think it’s correct that overall function of something like a university and of academia is going to be to oil the wheels of the machine to find and to come up with, one or another, more or less elaborate justification for the status quo. And that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t defend it because it doesn’t mean that– it’s still better than the marketized hellscape. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t exceptions. But I don’t think we should be naive about what the overall character of institutions like academia is.
JAMES VERNON: I’m so glad you say that. That’s such an important point to make that we don’t forget that universities in Britain, for an unspeakably long time, were training schools for an elite that would govern the country through what they considered to be their own excellent judgment. Universities were intricately related to the development of and the implementation of colonialism across the British Empire.
All of the disciplines were profoundly shaped by that in different ways. They were locked in relationships with industry and with the production of technologies used for the conduct of war. So clearly, I think even an old white guy like me doesn’t want to go back to the post ’68 expanding university. We know the limits and the contradictions of that as a type of space.
But that begs the question then I think of what words are public university– how do we imagine a public university now that could be a type of critical space? How do we reach for a sort of new utopian vision of the university? And what would that look like? I’m actually just interested in whether you have any sort of roadmap or ideas of whether the university can be saved not just from its marketized self, but from those remnants of its public spirit that I think you talk about really wonderfully as still existing in certain pockets and locations.
LORNA FINLAYSON: I think just before answering that bit, a sort of footnote on the first thing you said– in a way, I would want to go back to something like the ’68 model, not because I think that that was perfect or that the overall function was critical or revolutionary but because the factors that you mentioned– complicity in the arms industry and so on and so forth, the production of an elite, and now, in the case of the contemporary university, I think also the production of indebted consumers as well, indebted and perennially stressed consumers– are still very much with us.
It’s not as if there are student movements for divestment from the arms industry that are still going on. But those things haven’t gone away, and other things have got much, much worse. So in a way, I’d be content for going backwards a bit before anything else.
In terms of the utopian question, I don’t really have an answer to that. And partly, I think, what’s the point in me having an answer because there’s no plausible mechanism for me or anybody else’s vision of something better for a public university at the moment coming to fruition because those in power are completely hostile to anything that would be better. So in a way, it almost seems like an indulgence.
But I think maybe there’s a couple of things that I can say about it. I think the first thing is that the problems of things like hierarchy and the reproduction of a ruling elite are problems of society, not just of the university. It’s the same with access. People always used to talk about this at Oxbridge a lot. And really, they had no serious interest in doing something drastic to improve access. Otherwise, they would have done it.
They could have just had– OK, I, years ago, annoyed a lot of people by writing a thing about how they should just have state-school-only colleges and that would be one way. But of course, no, no, they couldn’t possibly.
Anyway, though, that’s a tangent. What I was going to say is if you want to transform the university, you would have to do that as part of a wider project of transforming society. That’s the only way you could not have it something which is compromised, elitist, reproduces inequalities. You take on the inequalities in the first place. And you take on the war machine in the first place.
And if you didn’t have something like our modern arms industry, then you wouldn’t have universities being invested and complicit in it. So I think that’s part of the answer. It has to be part of a broader process of social change, much broader than just the university.
I think one more thing to say about this is that– I’ve said that it’s sometimes bad to get rid of something which is itself bad, right? So even if I have a really dim view of the university and of academics and of academia, it could still be bad to get rid of it in a certain way, which we’ve talked about, which takes the form of the marketized university. I think, though, by the same stroke, it’s possible to imagine better abolitions.
It’s not possible, I think, to imagine them in very much detail. We are talking about a radically different kind of world here from the one that we see or that we’re likely to see anytime soon. But if we’re talking in that frame, then I think what I would say is I don’t necessarily think we ought to be wedded to anything recognizable as the university. I think the same about schools, for example.
If you were just to abolish schools overnight and replace them with a voucher system like Milton Friedman I think wanted to do, then I think that would make things worse rather than better. But that doesn’t have to mean that in a kind of postrevolutionary world, you would want something recognizable as a school. And I think maybe you can say something similar about universities.
Maybe in that sort of transformed society, universities would actually be obsolete, and forms of learning could be much more dispersed among groups of people and among different institutions, libraries. I don’t know, it’s hard even to imagine it in any detail. But what I’m just saying is there’s no particular reason to think that universities as we know them are something that is absolutely necessary if anybody is going to learn anything or think anything.
JAMES VERNON: And that’s really interesting. If we can think of the history of the university in the UK of moving from a institution that educates a handful of elite students to one that is democratized, the public version that trains an elite, the private model, which turns into a factory and produces a much larger number of people.
But you’re saying that in both contexts, there’s a type of constraint of thought and of imperatives that means we may need to think of a third model, which is– yeah, the abolition of the university as a space of confinement of education and to unleash education, higher forms of education that might happen in different types of spaces and ways.
I’m going to push back a little bit because it seems to me that one element of universities that we might want to hold on to is the way that they have produced forms of knowledge that appear dangerous to the ruling classes. So, I mean, we can think of probably– I mean, perhaps closest to your own interest would be think of the role that second-wave feminism had in actually beginning to take shape and rearticulating what was possible in universities.
And we can think of– you could think of other types of examples. So is there something about traditions of critical thought that come out of universities that need to be salvaged and rescued and reimagined rather than simply dispensed with?
LORNA FINLAYSON: I think that critical thought is valuable and to be defended wherever it’s found, really. I don’t at all disagree that it sometimes is found within universities. And I think the way I would express my ambivalence about universities is that, as I say, while the overall function might be a conservative one, there are exceptions. And what’s valuable about universities is that they have provided a kind of space where it’s possible to have exceptions. And that’s better than not having the space.
So they give you a kind of breathing space. And sometimes good things come out of that. Having said that–
JAMES VERNON: OK, I was going to hope that you were going to end on that, that you were going to end that thought on that positive note. [LAUGHS]
LORNA FINLAYSON: Fair enough, I can do. I don’t have to ruin it.
JAMES VERNON: [LAUGHS] Well, I want to pause you at least. You can come back to the miserable afterthought that you were about to give us. But I wanted to pause you there because I wanted to ask about the university and culture wars in Britain. Obviously, in the US, we’re experiencing right now a level of insanity around the culture wars and universities.
And it’s also been very, very present in the UK, the right critique of what they call wokery and which in the old days used to be called political correctness. Those are attacks precisely on those critical traditions of thought that we are saying it still exists in pockets in universities. So I wonder whether you can give us a sense of how far those debates or those attacks on the types of critical thought that’s still possible in universities is unfolding in Britain, and what you think is driving that or involved in that process?
LORNA FINLAYSON: Yeah. Well, the woke thing is interesting. I think one of the things that’s most striking about universities is that people outside of them really have very little idea of what they’re like or what actually happens inside them. And that’s not really surprising because why would they? There’s the lack of direct experience of it, but then there’s also this proliferation of totally misleading media accounts of what universities are like.
So I think most people operate with them are completely false image of what goes on there. And part of that false image is that universities are these palaces of wokeness. I think the Netflix series The Chair played on this, where the idea is you can’t say anything, and students will somehow be triggered, and then they will shut you down and get you fired and all the rest of it.
This has very, very little basis in reality. And most of these stories that you hear, these free speech rallies, are almost entirely confected in my experience. So you don’t necessarily– you’re not necessarily able to verify that for each one of them. But so many times it’s happened that I’ve read a story in the media, and because I was there or I knew somebody was there, I happened to know that this is not at all what happened. Absolutely not what happened.
So I think most of it is just complete hype, really, to be honest. But is that answering–
JAMES VERNON: Yeah, but, presumably, it’s hype with a purpose. I mean why invoke an enemy? Why make the account that you’ve given us of higher education in the UK as pacific places, as docile spaces, where they’re just the remnants of the possibility of having an education that allows you to think differently?
So why, if universities, if the private marketized model of the university has created docile subjects, why then have this critique of the extremities of thought, which is how wokery is characterized. And I’m interested in what you think is going on there.
LORNA FINLAYSON: I see. Yeah. So it’s part of the thought that why would the right wing media need to pick a fight with universities and academics if they didn’t pose some kind of a threat?
JAMES VERNON: Yeah, exactly.
LORNA FINLAYSON: Well, I think that’s also an argument that came up in around 2010, which I thought was interesting, where people would ask questions like, who’s afraid of the humanities? And there was this common narrative that the reason why there was this push to close down humanities departments in particular was because we in the humanities are free thinkers, and they’re scared of us.
And I can see why people in the humanities would want to think that because it makes you feel very good about yourself. But I think, even at the time, I thought that that was probably too self-congratulatory a narrative. But that’s not to say that there’s absolutely nothing to it.
I think what it is that, as I say, what there is not an overall critical function, but there is a little bit of air, a little bit of space where things are possible. And those in power, maybe not exactly are threatened by that because, actually, I think of this as more a case where they’re just on the up. And they have unbridled power, and they’re just triumphant. And they would like to stamp out as much as possible.
So if they can complete the process where they can really shut down the last places where a thought might possibly sprout, then they will, and they’ll take great satisfaction in doing so. I think that that’s a bit different from saying that they’re really scared of us because I don’t think that’s plausible. But in terms of what the argument about wokery does, I think it nevertheless does something.
But perhaps what it does is not so much defeating the great enemy of the universities or the humanities, but it functions very usefully as a form of ideology by distraction. It keeps people focused on a false problem and a false enemy, which allows you to distract them from other things that actually they would do better to be thinking about because they actually are real. So I think it’s functional in that way.
JAMES VERNON: Yeah, it’s imaginary, like the danger of the migrant is– it’s a fiction that is deployed in order to create a public that is scared of something that doesn’t really exist.
LORNA FINLAYSON: Yeah, and I think there’s also a strand of anti-intellectualism that is part of it as well. And again, like from my point of view, I’m a little bit ambivalent about this because I can understand why people might despise academics. I can see why they might have the view that, well, they’re all just sitting around saying obvious things to each other and are overpromoted and overvalued and are not really contributing anything of use.
I do think largely something like that, but perhaps for different reasons. I think they’re too complicit in the social, political, and economic status quo. But this anti-intellectualism is of a different kind, I think. And it’s something which is quite easily weaponized by those in power. I don’t really claim fully to understand it, but it certainly has a degree of fire to it. It’s something that people can get whipped up about quite easily.
And there’s a certain kind of philistinism to it, a kind of idea that actually all this stuff is just hot air. And we should just get down to cold, hard money and getting things done. And that’s something that I think has become quite dominant in our culture and usually in ways that turn quite ugly.
JAMES VERNON: My last question and it’s going to be a brief one, but I’ve been very struck how quickly the Palestine Solidarity Movement has been closed down on British university campuses. And I mean, to me, as a historian, it seems markedly different from the policing of other types of student protests on university campuses in Britain, going back to campaigns for nuclear disarmament in the 1950s or the anti-apartheid movement. Or I could give you lots of examples going way back.
And I wonder whether you have any thoughts about whether that’s reflective of the bizarre sensitivity that seems to now coalesce around the question of Palestine or whether you see it as reflecting a more sort of authoritarian political climate on university campuses in Britain?
LORNA FINLAYSON: I think there’s maybe layers of it. I think, firstly, the university was never the friend of students in the way that it might have presented itself to be. And it’s always been the case that universities would ultimately call the police and get student occupiers hauled out. And they did that when we had an occupation against fees in 2010. And that’s what they will do. I think it has also got more authoritarian.
And I think, on top of that, Palestine is a special issue. It’s not only a special issue in the context of student protests, which, as you say, have been cracked down on with particular brutality. It’s also a special issue in the case of the issue of free speech.
So while I’ve said that a lot of these rules about free speech are simply made up and the ones that aren’t made up are the ones that you tend not to hear about in the media, which generally have to do with Palestine, there is one issue where it really is the case that I don’t think academics would feel safe speaking critically about Israel on campus. And they’d be right not to feel safe doing so because there would be repercussions. And we’ve seen many instances of that already.
And we also know that there is a much wider chilling effect, way beyond the handful of instances that we’ve seen where people have been disciplined. So people know that they cannot, in fact, speak clearly on the issue of Palestine. I would add, more broadly, critical criticisms of British foreign policy are increasingly difficult to express.
And academics who I think, for example, were to deviate from the line of the British government on something like the war in Ukraine would quickly find themselves in trouble in a similar way. So I think that’s something which has changed very quickly and is extremely concerning.
I think in the question of– in the case of Palestine, it can’t be separated really from what happened with the Labor Party under Corbin. And I think that the effort to demonize that incarnation, that brief incarnation of the Labor Party, and to demonize speech that was pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist speech was so successful that those who pushed for it and those who wanted to see that happen have no reason to stop.
It’s working so well, so they just keep going and keep going. And it’s also been extremely effective, extremely successful in universities, the vast majority of which in the UK have adopted the so-called IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is then used to discipline critics of Israel because it faithfully blurs the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism.
And I have to say, this is also an area where I think the spinelessness of academics has been much in evidence because there hasn’t been anywhere near the amount of opposition to this process as there really ought to have been by liberal academics’ own self-professed standards, their belief in academic freedom and freedom of speech.
JAMES VERNON: Thank you, Lorna. And I can’t say I enjoyed having that conversation with you because we came to some pretty miserable conclusions, but it was such a helpful and thoughtful conversation. And I really thank you for your time and for your insight today.
LORNA FINLAYSON: Thanks for inviting me.
ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
