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: 


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: 




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: 


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: 


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,


We also come on to this keynote statement by Jacomb: 


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): 



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:


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:



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.