“Now all the ways in which you would have traditionally, historically, for two and a half thousand years understood something like the value of higher education: you haven't got that anymore.”

This sentence appears mid-way through an epic three-part podcast by Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Gilbert called “Universities in Crisis.” Together the episodes ran for around six hours on Gilbert’s Culture, Politics, Power podcast; the transcript runs almost 60,000 words. This series is one of the best outlines I’ve seen of the British university’s strange and special history. It also offers excellent principles for the next university, principles that overlap with some of mine as well as with those of our working group, Reconstructing the British University, here at ISRF. The project has generated a dozen Dispatches from academic staff about their experiences while caught in an increasingly unworkable higher education system. 

This year, an expanded working group will start developing a new model for post-16 education in Britain, which needs to rebuild further, and higher education at the same time. Signs of fundamental rethinking include the new “Manifesto for Higher Education,” by the Save HE Committee.

Modern universities had a powerful self-definition that Finlayson and Gilbert (hereafter F&G) describe in the British context. The European version, dating from Kant, Humboldt, and others in the 1790s and 1800s, had a dual character: the university served the state while necessarily keeping teaching and research independent of it. Kant formally split the university into “higher” and “lower” faculties, contrasting the professions that contributed knowledge to state and church (law, medicine, theology) with the “lower” faculty of philosophy, whose job was to remain independent of power and maintain the validity of knowledge, including the validity of the “higher” faculties. Modern universities have remained in this double condition, furnishing the state and society with professional skills, trained bureaucratic cadres, and technological development, while having to stay autonomous in order to do these jobs. The concept that defined this distinctive kind of public service has been academic freedom.

F&G are professors of the sociocultural disciplines that developed to help not so much elites, but the wider population understand the relations between individuals and their society. The humanities and social sciences became especially important to the British university’s ability to help make public institutions work from railroads and water companies to museums, theatre, and the BBC. The post-war university helped graduates create rather than just consume their national culture while grasping their own place and powers in a racially diversifying and dynamic society. Culture is a mode of interpretation, and interpretation involves not just reading but also writing the culture. One tacit theory was that the culture of a full democracy required organised ways to develop the general population’s capabilities for building and making that are not confined to an unrepresentative elite.

F&G describe the post-war university as “generating the people who could work in and be part of nationalised industries, new forms of technological development, but also generating the cultural context for that social democratic modernisation, both citizenship and democratising skills.” They are especially good at explaining how post-war higher education can’t be separated from social democracy as an imaginative horizon and state practice. Social democracy was about what Prime Minister Andy Burnham is repopularising as “public control” of core social infrastructure, and also about popular ownership of the national culture. This meant that the culture, always consisting of an endless struggle among Raymond Williams’ “dominant,” “residual,” and “emergent” elements, would have universities that organised the popular skills for full participation in these struggles. The culture would reflect the wider public’s highly various inner and collective lives—and also their sense of their own agency in relation to national institutions. The university’s role in revealing the actual diversity of national culture, while helping a much wider cross section assert agency within it, produced a fifty-year backlash that has discredited the university with a good section of public.

Back to that opening quotation: F&G are right to insist that the next paradigm, the neoliberalised university, has been a radical rupture with and even a negation of its predecessor. They link the change to a core topic of Jean-François Lyotard’s often misread work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979; English trans. 1984). Lyotard was reporting not on the death of truth but on the capturing of the production of truth by the private sector, the corporate world. The postmodern condition was not “relativism” but knowledge being validated to the extent that it could be commercialised by the private sector. This sidelines or discredits cultural and social knowledge, including “stories about our past, present and future, and particularly ... national stories.”  Widespread cultural wars and attacks on “identity” narratives were central to this uber-commodification of knowledge, as they tried to discredit the cultural stories that wielded civil rights power.  

Today’s AI industry is history’s most powerful incarnation of Lyotard’s thesis: tech platforms come to control not just the distribution of culture but also its machine creation. If taken to its logical conclusion, these claims of large language models’ “superintelligence” will translate the “largest theft of labor in human history,” in the words of Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, into their control of the creation of the culture as such. This is one of the possibilities ushered in by the barbarism of the West’s 2020s.

As F&G put it, “tech hates the universities. Tech wants to replace them, the universities, with AI and with its own things. . . .  [T]ech wants to become the universities, and it wants to destroy them, the traditional universities and the new ones in the process.”

The neoliberal turn made universities vulnerable to this tech hatred. If we had to boil it down to one thing, it is the replacement of students matching courses to their intellectual interests with students seeking admission to the highest-ranked university to maximise the return on their tuition investment. 

Gilbert notes that students used to attend his institution, the University of East London, because of its unique course in cultural studies, perhaps because it would teach them important things about their culture and their possible roles in it. By studying, they would awaken and develop their intellectual capabilities. The current generation has instead been trained to go to the “best university” as defined by league tables. The standardised educational goal is the high-status credential, not distinctive capabilities created by a well-suited course, which in any case is overwhelmed by many hours of paid work — the cause of debt management. Education as future salary was locked in by government metrics, particularly the misnamed Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) indicator, which was a wage average that had nothing to do with the graduate’s learning.

Nonetheless, AI’s universal knowledge crisis brings a massive opportunity to rebuild universities. The B.A. credential is easy to commodify and offload to LLMs in its production. The prospective emptiness of every university degree makes obvious the critical need for universities to refocus on the joint cognitive and personal development of students and researchers alike.

F&G mention Further Education. Every kind of work is getting more complicated, not just desk work. The knowledge crisis affects the entire rising generation, not just A-level students. FE and HE need to be redeveloped as different parts of an overall national education system. Non-university skills are now also cognitively intense. The best apprenticeship programmes, the Cambridge labour economist Paul Grey once explained to me, “don’t teach how to follow the rules; they teach what to do when the rules don’t work.” FE and HE will have different modes and settings but will require similarly professionalised instruction and high intellectual ambitions. The Labour government should be interested in this project and figure out how to pay for simultaneous upgrades in FE and HE before it’s too late for both.

A particularly powerful sequence in the F&G podcast comes when they ask why politicians and the press limit the university’s effects on its community to providing jobs. Its deeper impact is actually on the collective culture of the region, on what we might call its intellectual capabilities. Economists agree with pretty much anyone who’s gone through university (or an apprenticeship) that the pecuniary effects are accompanied by nonpecuniary effects, which appear as new ideas, capabilities, skills, and powers for oneself and for society. Direct pecuniary effects like salaries are smaller than the sum of social, cultural, and cognitive effects, judging by one major effort at quantifying all of them. In this context, what really is the university’s educational function? “How do we benefit [people] more broadly?”

They propose opening the university directly to the wider society, building on community-facing British institutions like Birkbeck College London and the Open University. This is Gilbert (slightly edited):

it's an important part of what universities can do to give people of all ages, opportunities to meet together and I think, and learn together in all different ways. Basically the university should be available to anyone. It should be your right as a taxpayer, that you can have access to a local university. And you can have also access to specialist provision remotely, like on Zoom or whatever, from anywhere in the country as well. And through that combination of access, you should be able to do anything from [spending] a couple of weeks learning about the Trojan War, if that's what you want to do, to doing a PhD in some really specialist subject. And the fact of its accessibility to everyone should be rammed home, and that's what should legitimate it's being supported publicly, I think. And I don't think any of that is unattainable. I don't think any of that is impossible. I don't think any of that is totally utopian. And I don't think it's incompatible with the academics doing the teaching there, being also researchers if they want to be. So that the university retains some of that role as the place where knowledge is produced and knowledge is validated. I think that validating function is really useful, and I think it is better at the end of the day. You have publicly funded institutions with people who everybody can see transparently are experts because they studied for a long time with other people who were experts.

The idea here is that people (as well as councils and public enterprises) would make use of universities to develop the intellectual and skill-related interests that everybody has. People who come from the society into the university, as “students” or as “lifetime learners,” for B.A.s over years or for short courses, bring their own knowledge to their education. They learn the process by which knowledge is made, and also how it is assessed, validated, rejected, and advanced. Large numbers of people come to understand formal expertise and also which of its elements they already possess. Post-16 institutions help them develop it, use it, and adapt it to public needs. Those parts of the public who’ve been taught to see the university as their enemy will, through their own engagement, be less trapped by culture-war alienation from experts and from the processes of knowledge creation.

My sense is that the next phase of democratic socialism might emerge semi-organically from a generalised open university or a system of open universities. Universities would retain intensive research operations while bringing many more people into contact with them. The university’s explicit project would include the development of mass capabilities and of the culture (in addition to professional training). It would enact the centrality of knowledge creation to the advancement of society. Universities would work with the further education system to build a society full of people who can understand the processes by which knowledge is created and assessed, processes in which they have directly participated. The function of this new university is not only the transmission of knowledge but also the continuous public participation in the processes by which it’s made. 

This would be a social university. It rejects the cognitive offloading of essential capabilities for both people and the demos. And in the medium term it allows the reversal of the postmodern condition of the corporate or platform ownership of knowledge.

All of this will be very hard to create. But that’s all the more reason to move more quickly on the discussion and planning for prototypes and pilots of new models. 

A major practical impediment is the fact that academic staff have no management power in British universities, which are run by a non-academic if not anti-academic managerial structure. F&G have sympathy for university managers, whose work they grant is “really, really hard.” But they also suggest the need for a “public inquiry into university management in this country,” which would look into its current indifference to the intellectual and material wellbeing of academic and professional staff.

The British system includes Oxford and Cambridge and their model of college-based academic self-management. F&G ask why this model has been reserved for the most prestigious end of the system and denied to the rest, without any rationale other than tradition. The overall system also includes teachers at every level who never stopped trying to help their students have meaningful agency and independence in the capitalist economy they were to enter. The social university will draw on the professional values of these teachers.

We are learning again in the 2020s that a society can be democratic only if knowledge is assessed, created, and validated by all of its members. That’s what a social university, in conjunction with its FE and community partners, can make possible. Finlayson and Gilbert’s series offers a range of good ideas about how to build this out of the system we currently have.