UNIVERSITIES OCCUPY A PRIVILEGED place in British society. The degrees they award confer prestige and qualification for the best jobs. As educators to students in their formative years, they have considerable cultural influence. The notion of academic freedom enjoys semi-sacred status, with any curtailment seen as almost unthinkable. The market for their services is massively subsidised by the state, which ends up paying for half the sum it forks out in student “loans”. And we need to cut them down to size.
Sitting in the Oval Office a few weeks after winning the 1972 election, Richard Nixon turned to Henry Kissinger and imparted the following hard-won wisdom: “Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.” You don’t have to be on the same frequency as the former US president’s paranoia to see his point. Whether you want to improve the lot of young people, make meaningfully conservative policy, improve the quality of academia, or implement the Year Zero necessary to deliver a communist utopia, the universities — as they stand — are the enemy.
It can be difficult to make this case to graduates who have fond memories and remain wedded to the idea of universities as elite spaces which guaranteed their own prosperity. But on each metric by which we can judge them — educating their students; boosting the economy; preserving the flame of Western
