As observers of the trendy psychedelic scene know well, it is strongly advised that anyone who wants to experiment, anyone who wants to go on ‘a trip’, should only do so when their lives are otherwise content. In other words, when no negative moods might impinge on the intentional lunacy. It is therefore unfortunate that Britain’s universities seem to have embarked on a truly hallucinatory episode, complete with moments of florid self-harm, just as every economic force in the universe seems intent on their destruction.
Consider the surreal visions now swirling through the Oxbridge quadrangles. First we have Professor Jason Arday, Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor, whose heroic backstory is falling apart under scrutiny. Arday says he once ran 30 marathons in 35 days, despite a right leg swollen to twice its normal size. It seems odd that nobody noticed a man with a leg the size of Italy pounding out his 27th marathon.
Arday also reportedly claimed an appearance on Seven Up, the world-famous documentary that began following its subjects two decades before he was born. Add to that the elusive charity millions he has supposedly raised and some very serious plagiarism allegations, and it really doesn’t look good. And how has Cambridge University responded? Instead of admitting error, of any kind, our second-oldest university has chosen to shoot the messengers and ignore the message.
Of course, universities being woke, weak or hypocritical is nothing new
Meanwhile, the Oxford Union, the world’s most famous nursery of statesmen, has spent the 2020s auditioning for panto. Its president-elect last year greeted the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a man he personally debated in May that year, with the Instagram verdict: ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool.’
Fast forward to June this year, when the Union invited Tommy Robinson to debate Islam. Thanks to footage revealed only later, we now know that a speaker helpfully and gleefully informed Our Tommeh that, without the hired security, the mob outside would have beaten him to death.
Nor is the fever confined to Oxbridge. The past decade of campus life has seen endless depressing turmoil: the writer Germaine Greer needed bodyguards to deliver a lecture at Cardiff, Julie Bindel was attacked outside her own lecture at Edinburgh, and Kathleen Stock, guilty of believing in biological sex, was driven out of Sussex by masked protesters with flares, a debacle for which the regulator later fined the university £585,000. Sussex later appealed the fine and it was overturned by the High Court in April.
Of course, undergraduates being bonkers is an old story, and universities being woke, weak or hypocritical is nothing new. The difference on this occasion is the wretched timing. Even as our universities are gleefully trashing their reputations, they stand perilously close to an economic and intellectual abyss.
First, the money. The universities’ regulator expects 45 per cent of English institutions to end this academic year in deficit. Half of our universities have axed courses; nearly one in five have closed whole departments. Meanwhile, the foreign students who subsidised everything are staying away – numbers are down 14 per cent since a visa squeeze. A parliamentary report in May had ‘threat of insolvency’ in the title, which is not a phrase you’d put in the prospectus.
Then, the demography. The number of British 18-year-olds will peak around 2030, then fall remorselessly for many years as the post-2012 baby bust feeds through. The British fertility rate is 1.4 and declining. Only mass immigration can save this, and voters have had quite enough of that.
Even the politicians have stopped pretending. Keir Starmer binned Blair’s sacred 50 per cent higher education target as ‘not right for our times’. And the new man, Andy Burnham, says out loud that a mortarboard is no better than a hard hat. When Labour prime ministers talk down degrees, the game is up.
Looming over it all, we have AI. James Reed, the recruitment boss, reports graduate vacancies have collapsed from 180,000 to 55,000 in four years, as the robots devour the entry-level jobs that degrees once secured. Nor is the teaching safe: why borrow £50,000 for a hungover online seminar when a brilliant AI tutor, available at 3 a.m., will teach you anything, for free, one-on-one?
At the same time, students are writing their essays with ChatGPT, and lecturers are marking them with ChatGPT. The kids are therefore pretending to learn, and the dons are pretending to grade, and nothing whatsoever is achieved. Put it another way: higher education specialises in producing desirable, artisanal, hand-crafted intelligence, at great expense. Yet AI mass-produces the stuff for pennies. Luddites know how this ends.
I expect a few institutions will survive the coming tsunami. Oxbridge will likely persist as a beautiful, Gothic finishing school where rich kids network and make out. The better London universities might specialise and evolve. The majority, however, face a brutal comedown, and many British universities will disappear. For anyone who has watched, in recent decades, the insane ideas flooding out of academia, polluting our civilisation, this might feel like rough justice. For those more deeply involved – the tutors, the professors, the chancellors – it will be a really bad trip. Oh well.
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