According to an education watchdog, universities in England could be told to sever links with foreign countries if such links undermine free speech and academic freedom. That’s good to hear.
In parallel developments, Spain cuts links with countries that practise bullfights, Russia with those that invade other countries, France with those that continue to work in August, and Holland with those that make cheese.
If you find such possibilities risible, we should all roll on the floor with laughter at the news that British universities are concerned with free speech and academic freedom. However, once that hilarity has stopped, we should catch our breath and read the news more attentively.
For the Office for Students (OfS) is only worried about those basic freedoms when they are imperilled by contacts with foreign countries, specifically China. In effect, OfS is only opposed to outsourcing suppression of free speech, not to such suppression per se.
This is a sort of protectionism. OfS doesn’t want foreigners to mess with our academic freedom at a time when our universities are doing a sterling job of it all on their own.
Any biology professor who insists that only women can have periods is likely to lose his job and be blacklisted for life. Any climatologist who questions, never mind debunks, the global warming swindle, ditto. Any sociologist who as much as hints at innate racial differences, ditto. Any professor who refuses to speak in vox DEI, ditto. Any political scientist who finds fault with the welfare state, ditto. Any English professor who refuses to acknowledge bowdlerised versions of great books or accept the woke mauling of grammar, ditto. Any historian who denies that England has always been racist, ditto. Any professor of theology insisting that not all religions are equally worthy, ditto. Even any physicist who doesn’t accept the string theory, ditto.
Our top universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, routinely and rudely ‘cancel’ conservative speakers. For example, a friend of mine got cancelled at the last moment, having accepted the invitation to appear a month earlier. So much for free speech.
This isn’t to deny that the links between British universities and foreign countries are nothing short of scandalous. Most of our higher education is financed by overseas students on scholarships, and many of our research programmes are sponsored by foreign governments, with China taking pride of place.
According to OfS, this situation is as intolerable as its prose: “For instance, if it means that there are people who are employed by an institute who are preventing legitimate protests or shutting down lecturers from covering certain kinds of content regarding that country for instance, or that country’s foreign policy.”
Should that be the case, says OfS, all such links must be “terminated”. This presumes on the goodness of human nature more than is warranted. For in effect OfS expects many of our academic institutions to “terminate” themselves.
In fact, whenever their overseas sources of income show signs of drying up, our top universities instantly begin to cut courses, roll up research programmes and lay off staff. Foreign students in particular are the cash cow that has to be milked – or else.
No wonder. Some of such respectable institutions as University College London, Imperial College and the London School of Economics are getting up to 80 per cent of their student fees from overseas. And over the whole Russell Group comprising our top universities (including Oxbridge), that proportion is over 57 per cent.
While fees for domestic students have been frozen at £9, 250 a year since 2017, foreign students pay several times more, and no one seems to take issue with such blatant discrimination. Foreign governments don’t seem to mind either: China alone boasts about 100,000 students at UK universities, and believe me: they don’t patronise our mushrooming network of crypto-polytechnics.
This situation can be neatly summed up by the old proverb: he who pays the piper calls the tune. It’s hard to expect an institution sustained by China’s funding to come up with scathing criticism of, say, China’s massive cyberattacks on the West currently under way.
On the other hand, it’s both hypocritical and counterproductive for institutions committed to abusing academic freedom only to object when such abuses are perpetrated by Johnny Foreigner. Reaffirming commitment to free speech should be the starting point for anyone seeking solutions to the Chinese communist piper calling the British academic tune.
Once that commitment has been chiselled in stone, solutions to the problem that so vexes OfS will offer themselves. Otherwise this is a case of the pot calling the kettre brack.
It’s dishonest to tell a professor not to pull his punches when criticising, say, China’s foreign policy while telling him in the same breath that he isn’t free to insist that Israel’s fight for survival shouldn’t be hamstrung by international pressures. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, that sort of thing.
Once we’ve established that basic principle we can talk specifics. It’s obvious that freezing domestic student fees at an unsustainably low level was inspired by wokery. In this case, it was the egalitarian fallacy that at least 50 per cent of all Britons should have the benefit of higher education.
It’s true that high fees shouldn’t block the path of talented youngsters from poorer families. But I’ve looked up ‘talented’ in the thesaurus and haven’t found ‘all’ among the synonyms. The government should join forces with charitable foundations to offer enough grants and scholarships to ensure that intellectual talent rises to the top even if it starts at the bottom.
Yet anyone who has ever stood in front of a class will tell you that talented students of any social origin hardly ever make up more than 10 per cent. The rest of them should be charged the kind of fees that would enable the universities to sustain themselves.
That would enable all students to seek and eventually find their level. Some would soar all the way to Nobel Prizes, others to simply high levels of academic competence. And some, conceivably most, would weigh the pros and cons to decide they’d be better off studying plumbing than pre-Socratic philosophy.
Foreign students should be welcomed on the understanding that they must be happy to live by British standards of academic freedom – take it or lump it. (I mean the re-established and re-confirmed standards, not the nonexistent ones currently in place.) The same should go for overseas funding of research programmes.
Foreign investors must be made to understand in advance that, even if their money may be welcome, their meddling isn’t. If they feel their sensibilities are too brittle to countenance the direction in which research is going, that’s just too bad. The take-it-or-lump-it principle applies.
Now, if you re-read the last six paragraphs, you’ll know that no university professor can advocate such subversive ideas and remain a university professor. Therein lies the real problem. The strangulating influx of foreign lucre is just a subset.
Spot on, again, Mr Boot! And I say that as a retired university professional.
Where else can I see such cogent analyses nowadays?
I don’t see a way out of our current mess with higher education. It has evolved from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of a piece of paper that will land the paper-holder a job. Courses have changed from a study of the natural world to indoctrination of various ideologies. The only jobs available in some of these disciplines (say, women’s studies) are for professors in that discipline. Large corporations have the ridiculous requirement of a degree for even entry-level clerical jobs. This only exacerbates the problem.
One solution would be for the majority of young people to forgo college and learn a trade. Unfortunately, my experience is that most young people do not want to work, so that solution will remain untried. Perhaps in a future world of only internet content providers and consumers eyes will open to the fact that without workers civilization will collapse. It is fascinating to ponder a world where nobody wants to work. While we can all do without the censors at YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc. (as Elon Musk has shown) and various bureaucrats, I doubt we can do without construction workers, farmers, auto mechanics, plumbers, electricians, dentists, police, and so many others.
We know what happened when the Japanese launched an attack on a mostly Christian country of blue-collar workers. What will happen when the Chinese launch an attack on an atheist nation of women’s/ethnic/gender/environmental studies majors?