This article is taken from the November 2021 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10.

In a long career of university teaching (1968-2014) many of the most interesting and satisfying moments involved overseas students. There was the robust Finnish girl bursting into my room demanding clarification of what I had said about rowing in my book on amateurism. There was also the Greek girl who read voraciously and questioned relentlessly and the quiet Italian adolescent with a slightly aristocratic demeanour (echoes of Lampedusa) whose sceptical questioning of orthodoxy was regarded by all present as always worth a hearing.

And generically, for someone teaching courses on the politics of sport and the politics of the environment, there was the usefulness of the student who would interject, “we’d look at this problem completely differently in Norway (or wherever)”. Overseas students, more than domestic ones, offered that elusive symbiosis of teaching and research, providing a range of answers to Kipling’s rhetorical question, “What should they know of England, who only England know?”

Then there were the Japanese, the most numerous foreign nationality in my classes. Overwhelmingly female, they were a challenge in a system where students were supposed to learn how to argue and express an opinion, having come from a culture that taught them not to argue or express an opinion.

My most vivid memory is of two sullen young women from Bordeaux

I often met the students when they arrived and at first used to judge that this was not going to be a success — the cultural and linguistic barriers were too formidable. But two years on I was almost invariably impressed by what had been achieved through hard work and determination. It was my pedagogic fantasy objective that one day a young woman called Aiko or Mihoko would say, “Lincoln, what you just said was complete bollocks.” This had often been said in the happy, stormy days at the start of my career, but of course no Japanese ever said it, though I did get some to be comfortable with expressing an opinion demurely.
All of these cases were students from overseas who had chosen to do their degree in England, though many of the Europeans were beneficiaries of the EU insofar as they paid domestic fees. By the time I taught them in their final year, they were linguistically fluent and culturally assimilated. I have completely different memories of the Erasmus students who came for shorter exchanges on the EU’s exchange scheme named after the Catholic humanist, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466-1536).

These came for a maximum of a year and often for as short a period as two months. Usually they were eminently forgettable, but my most vivid memory is of two sullen young women from Bordeaux in my environmental politics seminar who resolutely refused to contribute anything other than spitting out corrected pronunciations every time I mentioned a French word or name. Meanwhile I was fielding tearful phone calls from one of our students sent to Bordeaux (part of our “Erasmus network”) who was terrified of the level of violence endemic in the banlieu in which she had been accommodated.

The Erasmus Programme of university exchanges formally started in 1987 (though prototypes go back to 1981). It incorporates a previous “Socrates” scheme and is now called Erasmus Plus. Notwithstanding my experiences, it has attracted considerable enthusiasm and idealism. Perhaps the extreme case was the late Italian writer Umberto Eco who saw it, as many others have, as creating a new European identity.

He went further than most in imagining “sexual integration”, a million “Erasmus babies” who would see themselves as part of no nationality other than “European”. This would have made the scheme, which has had over three million students, one of history’s more successful marriage bureaux or dating agencies.

Perhaps aware that his view of the scheme could look like the breeding ground of a new cosmopolitan elite dreamed up by a Bond villain, Eco insisted it should be extended to all, including “plumbers and taxi-drivers”. Yet, the idea that international exchange will stimulate love and understanding is one that is constantly open to question. Otherwise, why would the Chinese Communist Party pay for 150,000 students at any one time to study in the USA, including the Chairman’s daughter, Xi Mingze?

A more recent enthusiast is Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who in 2020 ostentatiously tried to keep Scotland in the scheme. There are non-EU members such as Serbia and Turkey, but the EU baulked at including what is technically a part of a larger country.

Real achievement depends on nuanced linguistic skills

Sturgeon said that opting out of schemes like Erasmus is “not who we are”. This reveals a very contemporary form of irrationality: support for a policy because of what it expresses about us (that we are cosmopolitan and virtuous), rather than because the policy is clearly beneficial. For its part, the British government has decided that Erasmus does not represent value for money which would be better spent on its own new global scheme named after Alan Turing.

Whatever advantages exchange schemes have for undergraduates, they also come with huge unavoidable disadvantages. You are trying to build a progressive degree structure in which later courses build upon earlier ones. That structure is disassembled when students go on exchanges.

There are problems enough when exchange programme universities operate in the same language. For Erasmus, the great thing-in-the-room is the language problem. I made myself very unpopular on one occasion by pointing out that I was being required to teach students who just didn’t understand English (though they were paying full fees).

Academics can be embarrassed when it comes to questions of language: they pretend they can operate in French in seminar conditions when they cannot; they pretend their foreign students understand more than they truly do (which, in my experience, led to some spectacular marking rows).

And that is in England, the optimal destination for Erasmus students whose English is already quite good. But what happens in Poland? Actually, the universities there hold separate classes for Erasmus students in English. It is different in mathematically based subjects, but in the humanities and social studies, real achievement depends on nuanced and sophisticated linguistic skills.

From a British perspective, there is also the problem that so few students can work adequately in a foreign language. To my surprise, the Higher Education Policy Institute claims that 32 per cent of 16-30 year olds in Britain can operate in a foreign language as compared with 89 per cent in the EU. From experience this seems an optimistically high figure, until you realise there are 16 million people in the country with a mother tongue other than English.

It would be a waste of time to pretend to study in those languages

It was widely reported that 90 per cent of academic staff in British universities were in favour of remaining in the European Union. For some, this was because of a genuine rejection of national identity and its constraints, but in most cases it was a strong if vague sense of the cosmopolitan, a combining of taste with self-interest. International students pay the wages and international research projects get you dining in Strasbourg and Bologna. I was considerably less enthusiastic than most. At the beginning of my career I was in a small department that attracted male Anglophones; by the end I was in a vast Tower of Babel. Something had been gained, but a great deal had been lost, including collegiality and honesty. Somehow, we had moved from a world in which students were prepared to tell me that I was talking bollocks to one in which their children would only mention that they thought some of their lecturers had an inadequate grasp of the language sotto voce and with a drink in their hands.

In the last seminar I taught as an employee, there were 25 students and the Kazakhs outnumbered the English by three to two. The unstated purpose was no longer debate and self-expression, but instruction. I felt sorry for the two English students and thought they deserved better. Like a lot of things that go on in universities, the Erasmus scheme is not even designed to work well academically, but is a piece of symbolic, expressive politics and we are right to abandon it.

Overseas students are a great asset provided they come for a full degree course and, if needed, an assimilation year to start with. Though I’ve staggered along in French and Italian all my life (my father spoke both fluently), I would have thought it a waste of time to pretend to study in those languages.

What I and many of my generation did do was to travel, freely and slightly dangerously, by sticking our thumbs out and getting to wherever we could. I got to Africa and Asia, experienced dictatorships in Greece and Spain, fled from a coup in Libya, experienced the purest of racism with an African companion in the old Yugoslavia, dined with lovely Italian lorry drivers, lost all my money in a Munich gambling den, met an unreformed Nazi in Leipzig, and woke up in ditches and oases.

And that’s only the half of it. That was what the vacation was for. It was surely better than sitting in some French or German lecture as part of somebody else’s political project.