AND ANOTHER THING
Is your journey really necessary, professor?
PAUL JOHNSON
More and more young people are try- ing to get into universities. The trend is hailed with approval as though, in an ideal world, every boy and girl in the country ought to have a university education. The Government appears to share this delusion, since it is feverishly trying to divert funds from more worthwhile objects, or the still more desirable aim of reducing taxation, in order to provide extra 'places'. So I was glad to see one academic, Geoffrey Strick- land of Reading, launch a fierce attack, in the Sunday Telegraph, on university expan- sion plans. He would prefer to see the money spent on retaining famous old regi- ments, believing they provide a better form of training for those aged 18 and over. Hav- ing been subjected to both forms, I agree with Strickland, provided enlistment remains voluntary.
Universities are the most overrated insti- tutions of our age. Of all the calamities which have befallen the 20th century, apart from the two world wars, the expansion of higher education, in the 1950s and 1960s, was the most enduring. It is a myth that universities are nurseries of reason. They are hothouses for every kind of extremism, irrationality, intolerance and prejudice, where intellectual and social snobbery is almost purposefully instilled and where dons attempt to pass on to their students their own sins of pride. The wonder is that so many people emerge from these dens still employable, though a significant minority, as we have learned to our cost, go forth well equipped for a lifetime of public mischief-making. I remember the days when the new Uni- versity of the West Midlands was designed to contribute to the reinvigoration of our car industry; instead it provided the kiss of death, by churning out Trot shop-stewards a good deal more destructive than their supposedly uneducated working-class pre- decessors. It is no accident that Ontario, Canada's richest province, is now being wrecked by a socialist government led by a fanatical 1960s' Rhodes Scholar. The new form of totalitarianism, Political Correct- ness, is entirely a university invention, and the virulent outbreak of black anti- Semitism, which has Brooklyn in violent uproar, was bred on campus in the fraudu- lent 'Afro-American Studies' departments. At the very moment when these evils — and others — are spreading rapidly to Britain, a Conservative government plans to expose yet more of our children to them, at public expense.
Even if you can prevent universities from doing positive harm, it is not clear what positive good they are supposed to do. They have expanded haphazardly from mediaeval institutions designed to train theologians and geared to the ecclesiastical year. No one has ever thought out, from scratch, the best way to provide advanced training in a secular world. We have just grafted new notions on to the same old decaying corpse. The most sensible colleg- iate bodies today are the expanded business schools now spreading rapidly in Latin- America — I lectured at several of them this spring, and found them admirable — but even they have been unable to cast off completely the university heritage. The fact that universities are popular with young people is neither here nor there. They still have a social value, more's the pity, and of course, during a severe recession, it makes sense for school-leavers to postpone, by three years or more, their launch into an uncertain job-market. But a visitor from another planet, unfamiliar with the history of the institution, would think it odd that our ablest boys and girls, at a time when their mental and physical powers are at their highest, are withdrawn from the ser- vice of society and kept in comparative idleness at the expense of the rest of the community, which is denied such a privi- lege. To those who object to this by point- ing to the cultural blessings a university education confers, I reply: don't think in abstractions, turn to the real, living prod- ucts. For an archetype university graduate, recipient of these inestimable advances, you need look no further than Neil Kin- nock. He and the way he thinks, talks and
acts, are what the system is all about.
The space-visitor might question other aspects of universities we take for granted. Ought not doctors to be trained in clinics and surgeries and hospitals? And lawyers in courts? And engineers in factories, mines and on construction sites? And teachers in schools? And civil servants in government offices? Why take them away from the background of their work and concentrate them in an academic pressure-cooker? Again, he might look at many of the univer- sity courses and decide they make no sense at all. Last week's Times Literary Supple- ment revived the old, ferocious battle about compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the Oxford English degree. A don from Corpus had no difficulty in showing that, on its own merits, 'doing' Anglo-Saxon was ridiculous. But it was made compulsory because old-fash- ioned academics thought taking a degree in English was a soft option anyway — which it is — and should be stiffened by forcing the undergraduates to do something hard. Take away Anglo-Saxon and there is noth- ing left but idleness and an increasing clut- ter of nonsense, such as deconstruction, post-deconstruction and the like, all expressed in hideous jargon. The contempt of the Oxford English faculty for the ratio- nal world beyond has just been exhibited by the appointment of an unrepentant Marxist to one of its chairs. By all means drop \Anglo-Saxon. But if English is taught at all as a degree subject, students should be expected to show a proficiency in at least two European languages and a familiarity with their literature, as well as our own. At some stage they should be obliged to take tough papers in grammar, syntax and spelling. Good handwriting should be required too. They should be asked to pro- duce competent verse in a wide variety of strict metres, under examination condi- tions. Above all, they should be expected to write clear, concise, purposeful and pleas- ing prose, putting arguments with logic, sense and succinctness, and without recourse to jargon. At present they are taught few if any of these things, and exam- ined in none. What they get, instead, is ide- ology, polysyllabic constipation, and a cer- tain diabolic skill in turning works of literature into texts for preaching class hatred. English faculties at many, indeed most, universities illustrate perfectly what is wrong with the university idea and why it has no long-term future.
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