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Buckingham and elsewhere - some viewpoints from the U.K.


    by John Kersey

    Forty years ago, British universities regulated themselves in a culture of independence. Government was prohibited by a Treasury minute from interfering with the administration of the universities, which were regarded as sovereign institutions, and such government bodies as there were (including the University Grants Commission, which was founded in 1889) were generally remote and strictly non-interventionist. Academic standards were regarded as a matter of common agreement between institutions, largely maintained by means of external examining. Reading statist material on the universities now, one would never imagine that the stifling web of university regulation was such a relatively modern encumbrance. Those who wish to destroy institutions begin with the re-writing of their history.   

    The increasing dominance of the authoritarian Left and the negligent concentration of the free-market Right on areas other than education has allowed the ties between state and universities to become a stranglehold. Not only this, but statist academics have effectively ensured that their ideas now dominate the academic agenda and that academic appointments are largely restricted to those who support that agenda. That post-war period saw an expansion in university provision; in 1992 this was to be further augmented. More universities may not have resulted in a lowering of standards, but more universities certainly did not mean an increased variety or an increased choice. Rather, expansion led to ever more oppressive centralisation. The coming of the Research Assessment Exercise standardised postgraduate education to little more than a tick-box procedure whose blandness insults genuine innovation and subjects every subject to explicitly political strictures. 

    Kenneth Minogue, writing in “Buckingham at 25” has this to say in summing up the position: 

    “Here, then, is one saga in the creation of our servile state, which may be defined as the subordination of independent institutions to, as Mr Blair puts it, the priorities of the state. The various ministers who have presided over this process – Shirley Williams, Kenneth Baker, Kenneth Clarke, David Blunkett, et al. – were all, as the Ministry of Education poured out their hundreds upon hundreds of pages of laws and regulations, animated by the best of intentions, but they have (as Elie Kedourie memorably put it) turned diamonds into glass. Animated by an egalitarian hatred of élitism, they have destroyed the reflective quality of English academic life. Like every other independent tradition, the academic is now being squeezed dry by the government.” 

    The extent to which this situation has taken hold is perhaps witnessed by the overwhelming decline in media-visible academics who espouse a free-market or libertarian philosophy in the UK. Talking in general terms, there are now a few areas of the university where those views are still acceptable and whole swathes of subject-matter where they are not. The study of English, Music, Media Studies, Sociology, Education and the humanities in general is subject in many institutions to an overwhelming authoritarian-left bias so pervasive that it has become a Gramscian hegemony – and therefore by nature seen as “common sense” and “natural”. Also implicit in this definition is the fact that the academics concerned have cheerfully fastened the millstone around their own necks. Nowell-Smith’s definition of common sense comes strongly to mind; “the way a subordinate class lives its subordination.” 

    The objectives of the ruling class in education, at least as far as the UK is concerned, is to promote social engineering and to ensure that the ideas of the authoritarian-left gain such hold that they are accepted as givens (as explained above). Right-wing intellectuals, as well as libertarians of all shades are marginalised and increasingly find the modern university an impossible place in which to work. The most prominent of Thatcher’s historians, Norman Stone, left his chair at Oxford for the relative obscurity of Turkey’s Bilkent University. There are some exceptions, but in the area of education, there are only really two places among all of Britain’s universities where the teaching of education is separated from the process of the inculcation of authoritarian-leftist and statist propaganda. Those two places are the private University of Buckingham[1] (which is theoretically exempt from government quality assurance schemes, although it has voluntarily invited a government quality audit of late) and the public (but part privately-funded) E.G. West Centre at the University of Newcastle[2], which is devoted to the study of educational privatisation and competition. Professor James Tooley, who is in charge of the E.G. West Centre, is probably the most prominent right-wing educationalist in Britain today, and his book “Education without the State” is of considerable interest. The foreword[3] (by E.G. West himself) contains several passages that are worthy of quotation: 

    “...there remains a confident assumption among professional educationists that, with continual perseverance, they will soon produce the "one best system", a system of course, that remains a monopoly within the public sector... 

      Tooley argues that, except for the truly indigent, government financial support for education is neither essential nor desirable.  With regard to the revisionist history of British education he concludes that most critics would now agree that the quantity of schooling prior to its collectivization [in the mid-nineteenth-century] was substantial but they would strongly disagree about its quality.  After careful consideration, however, he is not convinced by the claims of some historians that there were superior standards in publicly inspected schools prior to 1870, one of the reasons being the biased nature of the inspectors' reports... 

      His involvement in the historical discussion, however, gives Tooley occasion for developing a major new theme.  Whereas the historians are speaking primarily of nineteenth century schooling the real issue is education, and this occurred in a wide variety of places including formal and informal apprenticeship, communal discussion groups, the availability of newspapers in public houses, coffee houses or reading rooms, the institution of the traveling lecturer, the radical press, the Sunday schools and generally the extended family.  Today we should be similarly aware of the even greater potential for decentralized sources of education, as for instance with the new avenue of networking through the internet with influential people around the world.  James Tooley's emphasis on the dispersed and unplanned nature of the dynamic of new knowledge creation is clearly inspired by the work of Hayek and it leads him to produce, in Chapter V, a brilliant challenge to those who enthusiastically support the idea of a national curriculum.” 

    In this last, you can see a very clear connexion with the ideas and concepts of non-traditional education, and notably this concept of “uncontrolled” education is now being conceived as a major conceptual threat to mainstream education, both in ideology and in that it threatens the control of the university and thus of the ruling class. There are further interesting case-studies in this area in South Korea[4].
     
    The leading text that promoted the concept of the independent university in the UK was Harry S. Ferns “Towards an Independent University”[5] (1969). At the time of its publication there was a multitude of small institutions in the UK offering degrees in a free market. It was quite possible in Britain until 1988 to form a limited company and give that company the right to grant degrees in law. I will come on to this concept of the “free university” later. However, to prove that this practise was widespread and accepted, one need simply cite the London School of Economics, which (along with many other British universities) was and is a limited company, and the many private colleges later granted university status in the latter part of the nineteenth-century. 

    Increasingly the elite among British universities have argued for independence from government control as far as quality assurance is concerned. Tooley, writing in “Buckingham at 25[6]” (“The Future of Higher Education: Seven Straws in the Wind”) cites this dissatisfaction at its height: 

    “The first is the way in which some of the more prestigious universities are currently rebelling against government regulation. The London School of Economics (LSE) is leading the revolt. In March this year [2001], it resolved to break away from the QAA process. Its board passed a motion arguing that the QAA ‘has infringed academic freedom, imposed its own bureaucratic and pedagogical agenda, neglected student “intellectual development” and used incompetent and unprofessional reviewers’. In its place, the LSE is looking to develop with the Russell Group – the elite group of British universities – an alternative quality assurance system. The QAA approach, its motion continued, is ‘an insult to the Russell Group’. In a similar vein, a few days earlier, King’s College London had “disowned” its QAA report, declaring that the agency had failed to “intellectually engage” with the university. All this signals a growing dissatisfaction with government regulation, and a willingness to look to alternative, private means of self-regulation.” 

    In “Freeing the Universities from State Control”[7] (2001), which also contains the earlier-cited paper, Tooley et al argue that the influence of the state is to reduce university standards in common with the effects of other state monopolies. This contribution is from Martin Jacomb, Buckingham’s Chancellor: 

    “State control of universities is damaging to standards, as nationalisation of any other activity has always proved. Furthermore, history shows that when governments control universities, even if they do not intend this, they stifle freedom and endanger liberty in a fundamental way.” 

    This leads to the perhaps inevitable citation of Germany under National Socialism as an example of the corruption of university independence through unprincipled state control.   

    Beyond Buckingham, a similar and equally-revealing point is made by education writer John Clare in his response below,

    “Q: I was surprised by your assertion that the entry requirements of a university are a guide to its overall quality. Don't they simply show how oversubscribed departments are and, therefore, how selective they can afford to be? 

    A: That is certainly the joint view of UCAS, the university admissions service, and the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), which claim to be "the experts on standards and quality". They have just published a self-serving little booklet, "How do I find the best course for me?", which strives to give the impression that one university is just as good as another and all that sets them apart is their "reputation in the public psyche". It even has the nerve to cast doubt on the usefulness of research excellence as a guide to quality, on the grounds that the assessments were completed in 2001 and "as you can imagine, some of the information is getting a bit out of date". In the next breath, it urges pupils to consult the QAA's reports, most of which were published before 2001 and some of which go back to 1993.

      The truth is that, thanks to the blandness of the QAA's new inspection regime, it is now impossible to compare current teaching standards in universities. So a combination of entry requirements and research excellence is the only reliable way of distinguishing between the good, the middling and the poor"
      [Source: “Any questions”, The Telegraph, 29 June 2005: formerly available via free login at www.telegraph.co.uk] 

    We also come on to this keynote statement by Jacomb: 

    “Freedom of thought can only truly flourish at institutions which are free and independent; it cannot do so if fettered by government interference. Moreover, an independent university must respond to its ‘market’. It should be responsible to those it serves, not to government diktat. If it does not provide the standards of excellence which its students expect, it deserves not to succeed. If the quality of its research proves fruitless, it will wither. Universities serving their ‘markets’ with excellence are the ones that flourish. 

    This requires the free pursuit of truth in teaching and research.” 

    The whole work is of considerable interest in putting forward arguments and historical perspectives on the concept of universities that are private in the sense of their private ownership and freedom from government regulation. In particular the Academic and Economic Agendas described in the section on the history of Buckingham are noteworthy. 

    Here the conflict between those agendas is described (p 205): 

    “Supporters of the Academic Agenda always wanted to retain some links with the state sector. They believed that the best way to gain recognition for the qualifications – obviously essential for the recruitment of students –was through validation from some external academic body. Approaches were made to the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), but discussions were broken off when it became clear that validation would not be forthcoming. It was necessary to award ‘Licences’ to Buckingham’s first graduates – qualifications that appeared to be of rather uncertain status. Of course, from the perspective of the Economic Agenda, market forces would mean that these qualifications would be acceptable if the students who possessed them proved to be good employees. But with the prospect of very small cohorts of graduates, how could the Buckingham Licence become familiar to employers? 

      In the event a solution was found which in some ways represented a compromise between the philosophies of the Academic and Economic agendas. Perhaps the learned professions represent a halfway house between the world of the market and the world of state regulation. They enjoy substantial independence but in some respects they are monopolies. It is possible that Buckingham came to aspire to be their academic equivalent. The fact that the Law Society and the Bar Council agreed to give the same professional exemptions to holders of Buckingham Licences in law as those accorded to holders of law degrees from other universities probably did more than anything else to enable Buckingham to acquire a reasonable viability. Of course, when the University received its Royal Charter in 1983, the problem was removed – although this could be regarded as a further step in the traditionalist direction.” 

    Although Buckingham is a non-profit organisation, a favourable view is nonetheless taken of for-profit universities in principle and practise.

    Further in the same symposium, Alan Peacock comments on the pre-charter existence of Buckingham, when the university college (as it then was) was a private limited company:

    “Two hundred years later the same issue was raised about the status of the University College of Buckingham (UCB) Licence, given that the UCB was not then recognised as a university institution as it did not possess a Charter or similar document approved by the Privy Council. Consequently, UCB faced the prospect of discrimination against its graduates, despite the fact that it was widely admitted that they received an education and training at least comparable to that in universities of good standing. The matter was resolved by the application of UCB to become a university, which was eventually successful, despite considerable opposition from influential educationists and the educational press.” 

    Peacock also has some interesting comments to make on distance education.

    It should be pointed out that Buckingham succeeded in gaining recognition where Britain’s other private universities failed, largely because of its connexions with the ruling class. Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, was one of the key figures in Buckingham’s governance and support. Other private institutions fell victim to the Education Reform Act 1988 that was essentially an anti-competitive measure designed to shore up the market for the academic establishment, suffering as a result of a lack of ruling-class backing. There was no significant attempt to assess those private providers to determine what quality of education was being supplied; simply a blanket ban on all of them bar Buckingham.

    I have dealt with Buckingham enough here hopefully to make a convincing case that in its whole outlook it provides a single-institution revolt against the state-controlled model of education elsewhere. 

    In conclusion, I would perhaps do well to point to an article that, whilst it concerns the school rather than university system, has much of relevance to add to the debate: Sean Gabb's “Less is Good, Nothing is Better; How the State can Improve British Education”[8]  This section in particular strikes a distinct chord:

    “In the second place, there is the fact that the main purpose of state education has always been to legitimise the wealth and status of the ruling class. We can see this was so in the past. Without all the drilling in the playground, and all the team sports, and all the hours given to nationalist propaganda, would those ten million young men have marched even semi-willingly to die in the killing grounds of the Great War? Nothing fundamental has changed since then. All that has changed is the personnel of the ruling class and the nature of its legitimation ideology. 

      Because it is suited to our present assumptions, we cannot see this ideology so clearly as we now see those it replaced. It is there, even so. It is that axis of anti-liberal, anti-western, anti-science, anti-Enlightenment and pro-collectivist values and coercive social engineering that we call political correctness. With the decline of traditional socialism, this has gained a growing and hegemonic role in most developed societies. As an ideology, it manifestly promotes the power and privileges of our new ruling class - this being a coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, lawyers, media people and associated business interests who derive wealth and status from an enlarged and activist state. The ideology is used to stigmatise and demonise any dissenting opinion, and to censor and silence it; and information is socially constructed in order to balkanise society into alleged "victim groups" who provide tribalistic bases for the exercise of political power and the extraction of economic profit by the ruling class. As ever, education is the chief mechanism by which this legitimation ideology is transmitted from one generation to the next.” 

    I hope that this brief survey has made clear that beneath that surface is a good deal of support for those ideas from diverse locations, and the beginnings of an essentially libertarian movement to reclaim the traditional virtues of a liberal education from those whose response is essentially one of the reduction of that concept to one of state-servitude and subjugation.

    One final point is that this cycle is not new, although it is taking a new form. In the eighteenth-century the British universities went through a decline that led to the significant developments of the day taking place outside of their walls. Again I believe we are seeing this. The without-walls of our day are the users of the Internet, and the next model of education that comes forward will encompass and respond wholeheartedly to the web as educational medium and knowledge supplier.

    Author's note: This article began as a request for such a survey from Australian educational consultant George Brown, to whom I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify my thoughts on the matters concerned.