Month: May 2025

Three ghosts of British higher education

Blog, Conference presentations, higher education, Philosophy of social science, Politics, psychoanalysis, Reviews, Uncategorized
[These are the more-or-less unedited notes for my speech at the event Multiple Crises of Higher Education, held on 20 May 2025 at Queen Mary's Mile End Institute, and organised by the fantastic Accounting and Accountability Research Group. Queen Mary's branch of UCU have also been at the forefront of fighting and writing about redundancies in the sector, and maintain an excellent and well-organised webpage, so give them a follow alongside AARG (the best acronym in the sector?)]

To start, as philosophers do, from examining a concept, a crisis means a point of shattering; sense of rupture; breaking point, crack in the fabric of reality. To say something has reached a crisis is to recognise that from this point there is a division into multiple paths. From a personal perspective, to reach a crisis means we can no longer go on as before, or as usual; a crisis usually invokes a reconsideration of what the project (whatever project we are committed to – a movement; an ideology; a job; a relationship; an idea) is, and whether it is still worth doing or living.

So when we start from the diagnosis that higher education is in crisis, we are in fact acknowledging that multiple facets of what we thought higher education is are no longer viable. Some of these (also mentioned in the description for this event) include the sector’s funding model; its approach to academic labour, including benefitting from precarity (insecure, temporary contracts) and competition (for research funding, for prestige); and its relationship to other important sectors of society (government, the military, industry, and so on). But where do we go from here?

To foreground the question of where we go from here is also to acknowledge – or argue – that turning back is no longer possible. This is the starting point for my remarks today. I draw inspiration from Adam Phillips’ On Giving Up (am currently reading the book, but the link is to the – open access – essay in the LRB), which opens with Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms: “from a certain point there is not more turning back. That is the point that must be reached”. To say we are in crisis, among other things, is to say that we have reached that point. From here, Phillips asks: what are we willing to give up in order to go on living?  

Philips’ question reframes giving up as a fundamental element of worth. As worth is the key of valuation and as such of any kind of counting, including acc-counting (sorry), I believe it is tantamount to understanding how we talk about value. In this sense, I intend to perform an analysis that sketches in more explicit terms this intersection between moral and economic; between what we give (and expect to receive in return), and what we give up on.

Giving up/going on

I want to argue that any analysis of a ‘crisis’ that harbours the illusion that turning back is a possibility is one that is fundamentally committed to maintenance of the status quo, and thus counterperformatively denies the very diagnosis is purports to establish. Indeed, it is quite possible to argue – in analogy with how some Marxist critics have described the 2008 economic crisis – that there is, in fact, no crisis at all, and that the system is working exactly as intended. The major thing I will be arguing we need to give up on, in this consideration, then, is our commitment to the system as it is, given that as it is it is a system working as intended.

So from there, we need to reorient ourselves, perhaps towards a different system, perhaps towards one working towards different ends. To do this, however, we need to rid ourselves of three ghosts. Three ghosts, a bit like in Dickens’ The Christmas Carol.

The first ghost is the ghost of the Empire. Now, some of you may be surprised by the appearance of this ghost. After all, haven’t we comprehensively purged this ghost by decolonising our curricula, by extensively renaming our halls and libraries, even – gasp! – in some cases, by enquiring into our links with slavery?

But this ghost rests barely disguised in the ideal of the superiority of British higher education, the idea of higher education as an ‘export’, and the almost unquestioned assumption that we should reap profit from international students. For what is the source of appeal of British higher education for (most) foreign students today if not the accessibility and usefulness of an education in English (the language of global trade, the fact we owe to the British Empire) combined with the opportunity to take endless photos in front of different vestiges, artefacts and similes of that very empire, from the Big Ben to Harry Potter-esque halls in Oxford, Cambridge and Durham? What is the ambition to be on top of league tables if not a transmogrification of the desire to sustain a hierarchy that was built on a monopoly on trade routes and cotton mills, and now continues through degree mills? Finally, what is the belief in the ‘superiority’ of British higher education but an inflated ego projection of our own (yes, I am British now) colonial past, which in turn enables if not validates the racialised and classed hierarchy of the UK immigration system, the system that requires people to prove their ‘worth’ in order to be exploited as much as (or more than) British nationals?

The second ghost is the ghost of welfare state. Now, quite contrary to the previous, the ghost of the Empire, this one is the kind of ghost we repeatedly and obsessively summon. We do this in ritual invocations of the famed social contract that created the NHS, or in the postwar (meaning WWII) expansion of higher education, enabled by the Education Act in 1944 but usually attributed to the Robbins report (1963), which opened higher education to “all who qualify, by ability or attainment”.  

The most important contribution of the report, perhaps less visible because it was bordering on the obvious, was to, for the first time, conceptualise higher education as a system and thus a distinct domain of public policy. In 1964, the University Grants Committee officially became part of the newly created Department of Education and Science (DES). Instead of a set of disparate universities and colleges, with their histories, traditions (or lack thereof), and institutional trajectories, higher learning became a matter for the nation-state – and, consequently, its development deemed relevant for the well-being of its citizens (citizen-subjects) on the whole, not just for the (still small) proportion of those who attended the (equally relatively small) number of institutions. This is how the massification of higher education became the main ‘lever’ for state intervention into university governance. The essence of the ‘social compact’ between the university and the state, thus, was always a tradeoff between expansion and funding.

It is important to note that this social compact intentionally excluded international students, who were exempt from no tuition fees since 1962. It is also important to understand/acknowledge how it occurred in the first instance. The expansion of higher education was not some benevolent act of enlightenment (well, neither was the Enlightenment a benevolent act of enlightenment, after all 😊); it was a strategic investment into upskilling the workforce so as to enable UK – no longer an empire, at least by its own lights, though still very much keeping overseas territories – to compete in industrial production, including that of weapons and surveillance technologies. This is explicitly acknowledged in EP Thompson’s edited Warwick University Ltd., which documents the analyses and reactions to the revelations made during the student occupation of the Registry of the University of Warwick in 1970. The files students found revealed widespread labour surveillance and military contracting, including to Bristol Sideley Engines, the predecessor to British Aerospace Limited, which which provides jet engines to Saudi Arabia and Israel (if you’d like to see the continuing links between universities in the UK and arms manufacture/trade, I strongly recommend this). This critique, however – just like Thompson himself – stopped short of reimagining higher education that would not be beholden to national (and, increasingly, offshored) industry, even if that means arms industry.

This also tells us something about the vestigial dream of a Labour government restoring this ghost of a welfare state to its former glory. Recent policies suggest Labour has no intention of dusting off this model of the social compact. More importantly, however, it tells us something about the ethical tradeoff involved in the dream of higher education as part of a welfare state – whose welfare?

The third ghost, and this is going to be most difficult for some of you to hear, is the ghost of social mobility.

From this post.

This brings me to the diverging (or converging, if you’re a fan of strict visual metaphors) rates of graduate debt and graduate premium.

There are different policy solutions proposed to address this, and today we have heard some of them. What we fail to comprehend, however, is that the graduate premium itself is based on the idea that there should be an exploited and underpaid class of (under)labourers. It makes sense to remember that the concept of ‘social mobility’ assumes that there is a class to escape from (move out from), usually the working class, and a class to aspire to, usually the middle class.

The fact that the ‘graduate premium’ is stagnating or decreasing apart from in a few professions/sectors (and we know what those sectors are – finance, fossil fuels, big tech) tells us little about the intrinsic ‘value’ of higher education (as if there were a thing such as intrinsic value) and more about wage suppression across sectors.

After all, in an equal society, where we would all be paid the same, what would be the reason to have a graduate premium?

So that people can pay off debt; and this brings me to ‘the system is not in crisis, it is working as intended’.

Why should we expect a graduate premium?

Not long ago, I encountered the same question in a session on cooperatives.

It was run in the local community/anarchist centre, and I came by to hear what people thought setting up a cooperative would really be like. When it came to the distribution of income, I mentioned that I thought it fair that people be paid the same kind of money for the same kind of work, and that that was the principle I tried to institute in one of the collectives I had been part of (The Philosopher).

But what would people with PhDs do? Asked one participant.

Be paid as everyone else, I said. Independently of qualification? They asked. Of course, I said. (They did not know I had a PhD – two, in fact).

But why would people with PhDs agree to that, they protested. After all, they paid so much for their education, they surely have to earn more to pay that off!

And that, my friends, is why we cannot have nice things.

Because as long as we cannot accept – or even conceive – that knowledge (by which we mean tokens or credentials of knowledge) should not bestow material privilege, as long as we accept inequalities in employment, as long as we cannot even imagine that a ‘professor’ could be earning the same as a ‘lecturer’ and as a ‘teaching assistant’; let alone as a cleaner or a nurse, or, if we want to bring this closer to university contexts, as an IT technician – we are both naturalising and reproducing this hierarchy. This hierarchy tells us that of course higher education should confer a privilege, and of course there should be an (over)exploited and (under)paid class, and of course British higher education bestows that privilege (particularly luxuriously), so of course we have the right to ask people to pay for it, and foreigners to pay even more. Unless we are willing to give that up, we are not only tacitly but, what is I hope by now obvious, explicitly accepting that higher education is an instrument that serves to reproduce and maintain the status quo. If anything, it is intended to maintain graduates tied to low-paid, precarious, and exploitative jobs – think Starbucks – that they cannot get out of, even if they would want to, because they have too much debt. And there is one thing people like that are unlikely to do: create any kind of meaningful, longer-lasting, opposition.

So what we need to give up, in order to go on, is the fantasy of exceptionalism – institutional, sectoral, or personal. That universities (as institutions), higher education (as a sector), or the fact we are in them, makes us special. And even if we are committed to status quo – and it remains my belief that many academics who would call themselves ‘radical’ or ‘progressive’ are, in fact, deeply committed to it, not least because they cannot imagine alternatives – it is clearly breaking down. So we cannot go back. The question is, where shall we go forward?

P.S. Some people asked me about other stuff I had written on the topic. Most academic publications are listed (in chronological order) under Articles and books; I also blog and write invited op-eds. Some of the stuff directly relevant for this one are:

On the relationship between academic freedom, autonomy, and the state:

On political economy of higher education, including the relationship between extractivism and knowledge production:

On the relationship between social change, social inequalities, political subjectivities, and education policy:

and, of course, my book:

Bacevic, J. 2014. From Class to Identity: Politics of Education Reforms in Former Yugoslavia. Budapest and New York, NY: Central European University Press.

On elephants

Blog, Philosophy of social science, psychoanalysis, Uncategorized

From Ayya Khema:

Once Pessa, an elephant trainer’s son, came to see the Buddha and said to him: ‘I have no problems with elephants. They do exactly as they appear to want to do. They have an intention and I can see that intention and then they follow through with it. But I have a lot of problems with people. They say one thing and do another.’ The Buddha said, ‘That’s right. The elephant lives in the jungle, but the human being lives in a mental jungle.’ People say one thing and mean or do another. The worst of it is that we’re not even aware of it. We think that is the way it ought to be done. We think that this is convention, custom or tradition, and we don’t thoroughly examine our thoughts, speech or actions.

(“Being Nobody, Going Nowhere: Meditations on the Buddhist Path“, 1987, pp. 37-8)

For various reasons this quote has been on my mind a lot over the past few days (the book, incidentally, is also a lovely introduction to Buddhism/meditation for those looking to get better acquainted with either or both). It is not only that intentionality works differently with different sorts of beings, but also that the environment – for humans, the mental jungle – can sometimes seem poised to ‘scramble’ the relation between intention, speech, and action.

Less of a problem if you’re an elephant, I guess.

Here’s a longer snippet – also important to pay attention to the distinction between pity and compassion, the first, Khema says, the feeling of being sad for, the latter being sad – as well as, conversely, happy, joyful, etc. – with.