Our weird ‘unis’ are increasingly pointless

[Julian]

Some of our great inventors and artists never went near establishments
that are now becoming tin-pot and intolerant


It’s the time of year when anxious A-level students are hoping their
grades will enable them to go to university while the majority of the
country, who aren’t at university, are thinking what weird places they
must be nowadays, where books such as The Canterbury Tales come with
“trigger warnings”, and where students can gang together to vilify
professors whose views offend them.

Like many people who did not attend such a place, my father idealised
universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, and longed for me and my
brother to have what he, probably rightly, saw as a marvellous
privilege. I tried to resist him, and even got a place at an art college
instead, but his emotional blackmail won me over and I ended up not only
going to Oxford to study medieval literature but staying on for seven
years to teach the stuff.

My father was brilliant chemist, artist and designer, in every way a
more useful person than myself. In the Royal Artillery during the war,
he developed anti-aircraft capabilities that helped to defeat the
Luftwaffe. Before the war, as an industrial potter, he and Josiah
Wedgwood (great-great-great-grandson of the founder) built the new
Wedgwood factory, the first electrically powered pottery in Europe. This
not only made beautiful objects, it prolonged and saved thousands of
lives, since before then your average potter died in his thirties of the
lung disease silicosis.

He did enormous practical good, while being a designer of utter genius.
Yet my dad thought that writing books and teaching literature was a
higher calling. Really?

The autumn never approaches without my being so glad, so very, very
glad, that I no longer have anything to do with any academic
institution. If only a fraction of these current stories about the state
of academe are true, it seems as if universities have entered a crazy
world, where a careless word, offending the new orthodoxies, will land
you in real trouble.

The last time such a state of affairs existed in England was in the 18th
century, when only those who subscribed to the 39 Articles of the Church
of England could go to university. It is no coincidence that nearly all
the great pioneers of science and technology in that time were
nonconformists who were forbidden to go to university — men such as
Joseph Priestley, a Unitarian minister who was the pioneer of modern
chemistry. With the discovery of the composition of water came the
capacity to link this to the engineering skills of James Watt. A steam
engine was born, and with it, the industrial revolution.

Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin and Matthew Boulton would have learnt
nothing but a few limited bits of maths and Latin had they been to
Oxbridge. As it was, their broad range of scientific curiosity and
technological know-how transformed the world.

Of course, with the 19th century things changed. British universities
were reformed, partly through the influence of Prince Albert, who
introduced science and modern history to the syllabus at Cambridge. John
Henry Newman in his great series of lectures in Dublin on “The Idea of a
University” set out what we all believe, in a ideal world, universities
should be: places that cherish knowledge, however useless.

With the kindest of intentions, successive generations sought to expand
the privilege to as many as possible. Surely nothing wrong with that?
Those who have had the privilege would not wish to pull up the ladder
after us. But are we really convinced by politicians telling us that
everyone should aspire to go to these places? Now, at the very juncture
when so many of them seem increasingly tin-pot, and where the strident
voices of the new Savonarolas drown out the voice of reason?

Liz Truss thinks that everyone with three A*s at A level — thousands of
students — should be given interviews at Oxbridge, thereby implying that
the other universities in the country are not really worth going to. Are
we doing young people a kindness by suggesting that if they don’t get
into Oxford they are a semi-failure, and if they do not get into the
Russell Group, they are real losers? And even if they are not losers, to
use that odious term, what bargain is it, exactly, that they are getting
for the £30,000 of debt with which they are saddling themselves for
tuition alone?

Many rich students in Britain are heading for the United States, where
Ivy League universities will not persecute them for having been to
private schools and where their parents’ bank balance is seen as an
advantage, not an embarrassment. That’s their (very understandable)
decision, though they’ll find the Savonarolas even fiercer on the
American campuses than in Britain.

My question is not whether Harvard is better than Oxford or Sheffield
Hallam, but whether most undergraduates get much out of those three
largely depressing years they spend mooning about at “uni”, eating Pot
Noodle and longing for the next stage of life to begin.

I am not speaking of the very few who are destined to be true scholars,
who want to devote their lives to studying Husserl’s phenomenology or
string theory or the structure of cells. I am talking about the
intelligent majority who might get something out of the undergraduate
experience, but might profit even more from learning to do something
useful, earning money, meeting those of a practical turn and of a
different background from their own.

My own guess is that the sheer cost of these increasingly weird
universities will lead to their eventual extinction. Even before that
happens, it is surely worth noting that many of the most innovative and
interesting career paths in our own day — industrialists, painters,
soldiers — are already followed by those who never went near a
university and are untainted by the esoteric and intolerant doctrines
that now seem to buzz in the heads of the students and the dons.

A.N. Wilson

[Love]

In article <td7p2l$2pqtk$1...@dont-email.me>, julia...@gmail.com says...

Hmmm, I'll have to think hard and long about whether to
approve this article...



...someone else might say.


--
Love, speaking out of turn