University: a good idea

A former student of mine has penned an attack on universities, derived from their own disappointing experience studying Politics and International Relations at the place where I ply my trade. In short, they argue that unless you want to be an academic, university study is a waste of money, irrelevant to modern careers, and only offering what you can get elsewhere for free.

It’s worth a rebuttal. This student is no fool. Yet their complaint is shallow, and reflects an increasing set of attitudes taken up not only by students but by public figures. It is a warning to all of us, about how easily we can lose sight of what makes university good.

Here it is below. I will reply to each claim, blow-by-blow:  

I’m £63000 in debt due to my degree. Here’s how my degree benefited my career: Honestly, I don’t think it did at all (negative emoji). 

Notice immediately the structure of the attack. University degrees are only valuable if they service one’s career. That’s called careerism. It’s a form of intellectual and moral poverty that mocks the meat it feeds on. Besides, it probably isn’t true. Their career is likely to be long and various. Time spent thinking and writing about politics will turn out to be useful.

 Though the student thinks they could have done this more cheaply:

Sure, I now understand interstate relations, international conflict and hegemonies, but I could have EASILY learned this all online for free.

Well, “online” covers a multitude of sins. The internet user browsing at will, without direction from a teacher (who, gasp, expects to be paid), can wander where they like, selecting only what is pleasing and what confirms their prior opinions, without being contradicted or unsettled. This may amount to “understanding.” But it is understanding without challenge, and therefore of an impoverished kind. It is why the online Open University beats random internet browsing hands down. There’s “easy” learning, with low payoffs, and there’s hard learning, with higher returns.

But can’t we do it all remotely? We can. We can live disconnected, distanced lives if we wish. Yet the limitations on that existence are obvious in other domains. Why pay to attend a football match when you can watch it online? Why go see Taylor Swift or the London Philharmonic in person, when you can download their tracks? 

At times, being in the room with others matters, given the potential power, poignancy and community that comes with it. We are social animals, after all. A well-delivered lecture isn’t primarily a delivery system for information. It is an ignition point for curiosity, all the better for being experienced in an audience. 

I’m not the pedagogical equivalent of Taylor Swift. No really. But I will defend the claim that my classes are non-boring, and better consumed not remotely but at close quarters. Not that this student would know. They report: “I didn’t go to a single lecture at all for 2.5 years so I’m not sure if I can attribute much of my success to tutors or lecturers.” Note, again, the metrics on offer here, so narrow and instrumental. What matters is “success.” Notice, too, the atomised world view. It is the world of “I”, not “we.” Life is just about one’s immediate material and instrumental things. Wider, richer existence be damned. Well, even on that narrow basis, it is hard to get much out of lectures if you don’t attend them. Life’s tough in the NFL.

Sure, careers and money matter. But so do citizenship, war, justice, faith and the common good. You can think about such things without paying academics, of course. Yet thinking about them beside scholars who study them is a good place to start, and is another kind of value for money.

In-person study is valuable because it is done dialectically, that is, in conversation and argument, and collectively. To be a student alone is a contradiction in terms. It is one reason the recent global plague, forcing study online, damaged so many young souls. How much better it would be not only to imbibe the offerings of the web, but to argue about them with other people in the same room. Learning collectively, in an organic human setting, is the essence of the university.

There’s more:

Sure, I learned how to write long essays well, but I had to unlearn this instantly as written communication at work mostly requires a punchy and concise style. 

This is presentism on steroids. A workplace right now might require short statements. But life has a way of being disrupted, and one might have to re-learn longer-form expression. When writing a report or, indeed, a denunciation of one’s university lecturers, the ability to write well for longer than a Tik Tok post may come in handy.

My debt is even more painful knowing I had little interest in academia or politics but I felt the pressure to get that ‘stamp’ on my CV. Is uni a scam? I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it can definitely feel like that sometimes. That’s my honest reflection of my own uni experience.

Some sympathy, here. Our society creates a narrow image of universities as mere vehicles for credentials, only good for upskilling youth and converting people into useful widgets for life in the economy, where the only value for money is more money. People of a generation who enjoyed the fruits of cheaper university education yet who encourage the idea of universities as vending machines should know better.

You attend in order to actively study, and actively take part in your own destiny

But this isn’t just the doing of government ministers. It is an attitude that students themselves should interrogate. You (the student) do not just attend university for an “experience”, to passively consume a product handed to you transactionally for a fee. You attend in order to actively study, and actively take part in your own destiny. You are an adult, despite every effort of the paternalistic to suggest otherwise. 

Thinking of yourself merely as an entitled customer interfacing with a business to receive things one-way, leads to a bad place. A place where you denounce lectures without attending them. A place where you view the classroom only as a place to get a mark and a job. With that world view, there is very little chance of forming an interest in anything in the first place, or of obtaining a wider value from study.  

Many students, thankfully, do not take the mercenary view of the campus. Instead of waiting to receive things as customers, they are in the arena, turning up, taking a stand, asking questions, arguing until dawn, seeking out the light under a darkening sky. The decision to put up money to study is indeed a weighty one. It is serious enough to warrant reflection about making the most of it, and what it’s for.  

In my first lecture as an undergraduate, the professor arrived in an Italian suit and delivered a razor sharp polemic about the civil war in the historical profession. His eyes were ablaze, he moved his hands like six guns, and he gave us the immortal line he used against those who disparaged ancient history. “If all that matters is what happened in the last five minutes, where does that put you in five minutes’ time?” It’s hard to convey the effect that had on us. You had to be there.