This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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On a recent holiday to Yorkshire, I had the pleasure of passing the remains of Jervaulx Abbey. Established by the Cistercians in 1156, standing proudly in the Wensleydale valley, the abbey owned half of the area at its peak, developing a reputation not only for the quality of its horse-breeding, but for the valley’s eponymous cheese. Aside from a monk murdering an abbot in 1279, it was a happy house.

That all changed in 1537. Adam Sedbergh, the abbot, had the temerity to send meat and drink to the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular revolt against Henry VIII’s break with Rome and closure of the monasteries. Henry did not take this act of charity well. He had Jervaulx forfeited to the Crown. The abbot was hung, drawn and quartered, and his abbey was dissolved.

Its remains are open to the public and serve as a romantic reminder of the 825-odd religious houses that faced the axe of between 1536 and 1541. The monasteries had previously owned a tenth of England’s land. They were fonts of justice, medicine and education. According to Diarmaid MacCulloch, no one was more than 30 minutes’ walk away from one, their devotions a feature of the English landscape for four centuries. And then, one day, silence.

On first look, there is little in common between pre-Reformation England’s stirring ruins and the architectural mediocrity typical of our modern university campuses. No budding Wordsworth, to my knowledge, has done a “Tintern Abbey” for York University’s Central Hall, or Warwick’s (in)Humanities Building. Few students, upon finishing their degree, miss most the look of their lecture hall.

And yet, whilst pondering Jervaulx’s ruins and the process of destruction that produced them, Britain’s higher education sector sprang to mind. Beside state greed, amongst the justifications given for the monasteries’ closures was that they had strayed from their original functions and principles, that they represented a waste of human talent and intellect, and that they sat on riches better deployed elsewhere.

Look at our universities today and one can readily swap the charges of scandalous monks, the hoarding of wealth and the corruption of souls for the solicitation of too many students to accrue crippling debt in the pursuit of too little knowledge for insufficient personal benefit. For hotbeds of popery, we have hotbeds of wokery. The case for the dissolution of the universities begins to make itself.

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Universities now stand accused of failing the two metrics by which they are usually judged: as guardians, transmitters and developers of the sum of human knowledge — cultivators of the mind — and as preparatory institutes for the professional classes. But more has meant worse. And if that is so, fewer would be better.

Amongst the UK’s more than 160 universities, too many are failing to justify the extent of the indebtedness with which they saddle predominantly young people. Grade inflation diminishes the academic value of courses, whilst genuflecting to woke shibboleths debases their content. Whilst our top universities still excel — four are in the world top ten for scientific research — how well is the country being served by the majority that have developed no such distinction yet ensure comparable levels of graduate indebtedness?

The situation in our universities is dire … a new Thomas Cromwell is required

Several are already on the verge of bankruptcy. The prolonged freezing of tuition fees means they make a loss on the average home student. The previous government talked tough on clamping down on “Mickey Mouse” degrees and foreign student numbers, with limited action. The Starmer government plans to turn a blind eye to the former, and ignore the latter, whilst considering a hike to tuition fees that would further erode the graduate premium. The situation is dire. A Thomas Cromwell is required.

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In the 30 or so years separating my parents becoming the first in their families to attend university in the late 1980s and my own arrival in 2018, the sector changed enormously. The per centage of young adults going to university has surged from one in five to more than one in three. Since 1993, league tables have become the standard by which institutions are judged, straddling grades, employability, student satisfaction and more.

John Major’s renaming of the polytechnics, Tony Blair’s introduction of tuition fees and David Cameron’s tripling of them mean today’s undergraduates have far more institutions and courses to choose from at much greater cost. Their motivations remain various: love of subject, career prospects, the desire to spend three years away from home, the shame accruing to any middle-class child who doesn’t and so on.

But expansion has diluted the value of a degree. One in three graduates are in non-graduate jobs, and many struggle for employment at all. Two-fifths of language students from Oxford Brookes, for instance, are unemployed on graduation.

According to the Intergenerational Foundation, the graduate premium — the ability of graduates to earn more than non-graduates — has shrunk by 20 per cent in parts of the country since 1997. Oxbridge, medical and STEM students are likely guaranteed a return on their £9,250 a year, but arts students at underperforming universities can expect negligible returns. Performing arts graduates make, on average, just over £23,000 — only marginally more than working full time on the national minimum wage. Many would have been better off doing a higher apprenticeship.

To some, this reality appears to have filtered through. Applications are falling whilst history, philosophy and other departments have closed due to lack of demand. Declining contact hours, shrinking reading lists and fewer exams are common, whilst surviving courses are plagued by the progressive spectres of “decolonisation”, “abolish the canon” and “intersectionality”.

The consequences are a perversion of scholarship. Music professors at Oxford complain of “colonialist” notation, and Nottingham erases the notion of “Anglo-Saxons” to keep up with America’s politicised nomenclature. Even STEM subjects aren’t safe, with Durham’s Maths department recently aiming to “decolonise” sums. Meanwhile the permanently outraged ensure a chilling effect on free discussion.

The number of first-class degrees has doubled in a decade. This cannot solely be down to brainier undergraduates (has public discourse become more intellectual?). With universities aiming to attract more students by climbing the league tables, it is no surprise that marking is inflated and degrees further devalued.

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When Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell first set about the monasteries, their intention had not been to close them all, but to focus on the smaller institutions and those committing the most flagrant abuses. Only after the Pilgrimage of Grace did houses such as Jervaulx face the chop. Similarly, no nationalisation, closure, pensioning off or disposal of the assets of our worst-performing universities should be attempted without a metric with which they can be judged.

Which raises the question, why haven’t our worst-performing universities failed already? Partially, the mass-importation of foreign students has allowed universities to cover their losses, whilst standardised tuition fees means the “market” element of the system has failed to work.

So why do so many students still apply? Most assume, against all evidence, that a degree will improve their prospects, partly because of the credentialisation of jobs that never previously required a degree (and have not obviously been enhanced by it).

This perverse incentive needs to be dismantled, and the land and buildings of failing universities sold. Unlike Henry VIII’s money-grab or an absorption into all-purpose state coffers, the profits should finance the fees of future generations of students studying at institutions that really do enhance knowledge and skills. This would make for a more needs-blind university sector that would free poorer students from the debt burden they are currently required to shoulder. There should also be investment in the expansion of technical education and in public museums.

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For the surviving universities, necessary safeguards will preserve free inquiry and guard against the Pilgrimage of Woke. With the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, having axed the last government’s attempts to protect campus free speech, a new Tests Act is needed — not to prevent students and staff from attending on religious grounds, but to ensure each swears to protect free discussion and to endeavour to pursue and preserve the best of human knowledge.

These proposals are unlikely to curry much favour with a university lobby hooked on the drug of perpetual expansion, or with those would-be and current students, lecturers and other staff who will lose out. There is great self-interest from these individuals in an ever-expanding and less purposeful higher education sector. But a dissolution will be worth it.

Fewer but better institutions, committed to open inquiry and delivering genuine value for students, will better satisfy the aims of a university education than the status quo. All that is needed is a government with eyes to see and a will to act. Then, failing universities will fade from the landscape as the monasteries once did, their ruins a reminder of a misdirected faith.