All nostalgia can be said to be somewhat naïve, but looking fondly back upon one’s college years, as most of us do, takes unusually thick rose-tinted spectacles. Students abroad in particular face hardships of acculturation often memory-holed when graduating — more swiftly so if the bittersweet ceremony preludes repatriation. My brother’s commencement at our alma mater last month was unlikely to recall distress, my chest inflating instead with pride of the brotherly and alumni varieties. What it evoked instead was foreboding at the institution’s future — and that of the modern university at large.

Second only in Britain to the country’s e-learning powerhouse in terms of student numbers, University College routinely tests the limits that London’s Bloomsbury district puts on its continued growth. Families too numerous for campus swarmed the city’s South Bank as more than a hundred departments took literal shifts to graduate 26,000 students at Royal Festival Hall. 

The humanities units featured in our ceremony included a modest centre for Jewish studies that taught me the odd class while I was an economics major with thinly spread interests in the early 2010s. Painfully visible were scores of keffiyeh-clad students from sundry courses. The former graduated a meagre ten students and the day’s single PhD, their undergrads either repatriated or barred from exchanges in Jerusalem by the Gaza war. In contrast to the radicals, whose Palestinian scarfs spanned the chromatic range, and who were loudest even when not discussing “apartheid” and “genocide”, my fellow Hebraists were poised and demure.

Yet one clenched fist is all our student revolutionaries had to display in terms of activist antics. In a testament to the domestication of activist concerns in an academic sphere ruled by neoliberalism, the raised fist and the keffiyeh seem increasingly not dissonant but of a piece with the modern industry of higher education that colleges like UCL so neatly embody.

Granted, the business model of such a large, urban and multi-faculty campus renders impracticable the commencement pomp common elsewhere — no tailgates, no boat races, no class presidents, let alone a year-wide “Class of 2024” sentiment. But the sense of anonymity was exacerbated in our case by a minimum ceremony executed with clockwork efficiency that led to us being ejected from the auditorium after a 20-minute cocktail. The entrance alone set us back more than £500, not counting the renting of my brother’s gown and mortarboard and the fees paid for portraits. In fairness to the timekeepers, consuming the single (plastic) glass of champagne took less than the allotted time. A less scrupulous operator than me would have quietly purloined a couple of refills. I went for merely one.

As we took off, I pitied the graduates for entering a world where even companies are building alumni programs, while their alma mater will nurture the much-touted “lifelong connection” with far less upkeep. The platitudes about “changing the world” felt like an ousting injunction — leave room for the next dues-paying clients, you pesky crybabies — rather than the expression of a stake in seeing its graduates make the institution proud. As someone who eschewed the corporate careers many of them are chasing, the stultifying logic of commodification gave me the shudders.

There’s nothing new to the smuggling of market motives into the sanctum of higher education, even at an institution whose secular-humanist legacy far-left students routinely draw on in their grinding activism. Some contest UCL’s claim to be England’s third-oldest university, and even scoff at its closeness to “Oxbridge”. Yet it is widely acknowledged to be England’s first college to sever admissions from faith of any kind since its founding in 1826 under Jeremy Bentham’s radical auspices, and the first to admit women on par with men half a century later. Activists claim, however, that these radical achievements arrived too late, and that the academic pedigree UCL touts serves to mask its failure to live up to this storied legacy.

The Liberal Democrat-Tory coalition’s 2010 betrayal of their pledge to spare tuition from its austerity policies, instead trebling fees across the board, met at UCL some stiff resistance, if inchoate and ultimately fruitless. UK and EU students were betrayed alike, but the latter faced further affront when Brexit came, joining the higher overseas tuition range when a later Tory government invoked the cut-off access to EU research grants to milk European students further, an increasingly common instance of students being taken hostage in political quarrels. The EU has taken Hungary’s undergraduates out of Erasmus, for instance, as collective punishment for what it claims is their government’s democratic backsliding.

All-inclusive higher education separated from results, moreover, has fed a perverse sense of universal entitlement

Student activists in the UK claim tuition should be discounted below the costs faced by “public universities” like UCL (the category misleads, as these receive little government support while having tuition fees and other diktats imposed on them). Many non-leftists, meanwhile, agree with university administrators that other factors than cost should be reflected in the price of tuition, and that colleges inclined to profiteer would be outcompeted by more honest actors. Academic prestige is expensive to build, they claim, and its blessings should not be easy to acquire. Those who stand most to benefit from a world-class diploma — students whose earning potential spikes upon obtaining it, as opposed to the wider citizenry that shares the thinner and diffuse societal benefits of research — contribute a comparatively low share of the income that funds UCL’s academic empire. 

All-inclusive higher education separated from results, moreover, has fed a perverse sense of universal entitlement in other countries that the UK should not seek to emulate. Imposing a not-insignificant tuition fee, while affording bursaries for the truly needy, can preempt the worst aspects of what Peter Turchin called “elite overproduction”. Through selective criteria and the pricing of degrees, elite colleges create a sense of that degree’s worth, which the UK strengthens in turn by helping to connect it to the labour market’s demands through career advice and a professionally-oriented student experience (with all its downsides). 

Furthermore, UK administrators and the government offer honest orientation while demanding transparency from companies and sectors on the salaries their graduates can expect when hired. It is no coincidence that out of the many forms of anti-neoliberal protest the UK has seen in the wake of 2008, none reached the proportions of the “Occupy” movements of jobless graduates seen in Mediterranean countries that had made university a right for all on par with healthcare and compulsory education.

Yet if fees fund the research on which a university’s prestige ultimately rests, and that makes admissions competitive, as Bryan Caplan hinted in his 2019 New York Times bestseller The Case Against Education, the asymmetry between funders and keepers of the prestige is clear. Professors at places like UCL are too concerned with the papers, grants and seminars that secure academic advancement to not view the teaching of introductory courses as something of an inconvenience, in turn feeding the widespread dissatisfaction of undergraduates with their tuition. 

Tuition fees are also fattening universities’ incomes (nearly 2 billion pounds last year in UCL’s case), even as their business models rest on investments in industries most of their students and faculties often find questionable — arms and fossil fuels, for example — on the promise that returns will be invested to propel prestige even higher: more scientific discoveries, awards, and Nobel Prizes. In the case of UCL, this creates further division between the student activist base and its managerial elite.

UCL even voluntarily throws red meat to woke-progressive pieties if they can usefully serve as a smokescreen

Yet it is hardly as if the institution operates this ghastly business model with no heed to the discontent it sows. Instead, it is too aware that its progressive aura is staked on a degree of responsiveness to the rolling inequities of the modern age. Universities seem indeed increasingly adept at choosing which equity and justice claims to address in service of keeping their operation humming. UCL even voluntarily throws red meat to woke-progressive pieties if they can usefully serve as a smokescreen to eclipse deeper concerns around material inequities.

The woke pandering comes in many forms. Among the courses we discovered at the graduation ceremony was one bachelor’s in decolonial studies that would have been unthinkable only a decade ago. The qualm at the time could have been, short of epistemic and ideological concerns, lack of job opportunities for graduates, but that shortfall may have turned into an oversupply in the interim. There’s also UCL’s perennial campaign, “Why isn’t my professor black?”, to indict its own faculty’s lack of racial inclusivity. No longer so skittish about twisting its egalitarian creed in favour of race quotas and against equality of opportunity, UCL seems concerned that “the generation that produces knowledge is unrepresentative of the generation that consumes it”.

Yet it cannot escape its own contradictions. UCL suspended, in September 2020, its membership in Stonewall, Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organisation. As part of its “Diversity Champions and workplace equality index” programme, Stonewall members submit data for a nationwide workplace equality index and receive advice on inclusivity policies. While at the time UCL claimed that its withdrawal from the scheme was a temporary measure, the following December UCL made its exit from Stonewall official and definitive, becoming the first member to pull out of the programme. Management claimed it had sided with the board’s opinion that membership could smother academic freedom, yet no changes were pointed to in the charity’s activities or requirements that could have prompted a sudden reexamination. The claim defied credibility for opponents and supporters of the move alike. UCL was already less a haven of academic freedom than many other members of Stonewall, and keeps overperforming them in stifling open inquiry.

As recently as March this year, an associate professor had her course on energy cancelled when a Chinese student took issue with a slide she projected drawing attention to forced labour and slavery in his home country, which supplies a quarter of the institution’s student body (and untold sums in tuition). While “academic freedom” is often pointed these days as a risk to the “safety” of student minorities, the truth is that things have gotten palpably worse at UCL since the Sokal affair that served as the precedent, over 20 years before, to the more widely known “grievance studies affair”. Led by a mostly American team that included the British scholar Helen Pluckrose, the latter effort set out to test the declining academic standards of critical theory journals by pitching bogus papers. Yet in 1996, holding simultaneous professorships in mathematics at UCL and NYU, Alan Sokal had pitched his own postmodern deconstruction of quantum gravity to a journal that accepted it. His troll reached the front page of the New York Times.

In these ways and more, universities seem happy to go along with woke pieties so long as those don’t eat away at the bottom line. UCL is willing to cave and pander if the resultant progressive bona fides can be wielded as a smokescreen, a diversion from the material inequities raging across its offline realm. While these two stances may seem incoherent, they’re in fact two faces of a whole: the calculated wielding of inexpensive woke totems that defang calls to address more serious, and expensive, issues. As showcased at the graduation, where no student seemed to complain about having paid such hefty sums for a ceremony where the pro-Gaza displays turned out mere gestures, this institutional balancing act involves welcoming the woke performances of the community, as long as they don’t spill into the material.

Earlier last year, UCL had chosen to let a smaller version of America’s pro-Gaza encampments fester for weeks, while it routinely lights its neoclassical Portico in pride colours, builds unisex toilets, funds other “gender wellbeing” initiatives, and keeps pumping out new gender and race-related bachelors and masters. But these cost far less — and could even turn out to be lucrative — than dealing with serious causes of discontent: dorm fees, low wages, and a less than amenable environment for staff and students. Rent strikes have been roiling the university since 2016. On-campus prices of everything, as showcased at graduation, have been up for even longer. And a 2021 accreditation as a “living wage employer” obscures a nasty round of salary bargaining, a decade earlier, that saw “poverty wages” unaddressed by UCL. It took a citywide uproar in left-wing circles then to assist cleaning staff — many immigrants and too alienated, linguistically and otherwise, to exercise the slightest countervailing power.

With students keenly aware of injustices in need of redress beyond, and increasingly within, the university’s confines, the injunction to “change the world” would seem naïve on UCL’s part. The ethic of post-pandemic “adaptiveness” that was touted, at graduation, by the lone student who got to speak (but not on stage) in a 3-minute videotape seems like a therapeutic mystique deployed to fill the vacuum left by the lack of any real binding glue to tie institution to its own community. 

Being a microcosm of Britain’s multicultural model, and its failings, is UCL’s other major weakness. The ceremony at times felt like a world’s fair, with family cheers louder at times than student-to-student encouragements. When one decolonial studies graduate walked onstage, her brother sitting next to us hollered: “Queen! Empress! There’s only one you!” “Was it you that was chanting?”, queried the father, garbed in a traditional awosoke, at the end. So far, so multicultural. Except the father’s West African accent alone was natural. The cheering brother spoke in perfectly urbane London drawl, but couldn’t help reminding his sister where she really was from — and where her loyalties ought to lie.

With much of its accommodation one-year and intercollegiate anyway, any institution would struggle to create a sense of cohesion, shared consciousness, spirit, and purpose. The reaffirming of traditional British student and academic culture would help, but UCL seems the space most abandoned by Britannia. It’s not just that individual Brits seem scarcer every year. Anyone crossing from Tottenham Court Road towards Tavistock gardens would feel like trespassing an enclaved astro-turf laid in Britain’s post-national capital, exacting on its members no duty to assimilate. To John Cleese’s controversial observation that “London isn’t an English city anymore”, UCL’s own self-branding as “London’s Global University”, along with the utter absence of any signs recalling the British soil on which it’s built, amount to a forthright acknowledgement.

Meanwhile, foreign students hoping for an academic experience devoid of wokeism and class war, while eager to pay gratitude to the hosting nation and its legacy of academe and scholarship, may be better advised to stay home. If they succumb to the lure, they should not expect their “nourishing mother”, by the time they’ve left, to invite the slightest nostalgia.