Language matters. It reveals what you’re really thinking. It displays some of the mechanics of how you’re thinking. It shows off to the world not only what you want to say, but also quite a lot about what you're trying to leave unsaid. Imagine how depressing it is, therefore, if you work in Higher Education and you have to listen to Ministers – actual Ministers of the Crown – speak in the most deadening, heavy-footed, depressing way about a sector they barely perceive as it is, let alone understand.
To that end, let’s take a look at two significant recent speeches about England’s universities from the Education Secretary (Gavin Williamson, above) and the Higher Education Minister (Michelle Donelan). Take your eye off the ball of policy for a moment – lest you get carsick at what we are supposed euphemistically to call the challenges ahead – and look at the way they speak.
First, Donelan, whose speech was surely much more interesting for how it expressed disappointment and frustration than it was about true opportunity:
Today I want to send a strong message – that social mobility isn’t about getting more people into university. For decades we have been recruiting too many young people on to courses that do nothing to improve their life chances or help with their career goals. True social mobility is about getting people to choose the path that will lead to their desired destination and enabling them to complete that path.
There you have it. University is all about ‘courses that… improve… life chances or help with… career goals’. For Ministers, ‘social mobility’ is about the ‘desired destination’: end-points defined in relation to those self-same and critical ‘career goals’.
Next, Williamson, a man whose contact with reality is tenuous at the best of times, but who surpassed himself recently when he gave a ‘speech’ along the same lines:
I don’t accept this absurd mantra, that if you are not part of the 50% of the young people who go to university that you’ve somehow come up short. You have become one of the forgotten 50% who choose another path. It exasperates me that there is still an inbuilt snobbishness about higher being somehow better than further, when really, they are both just different paths to fulfilling and skilled employment. Especially when the evidence demonstrates that further education can open the doors to greater opportunity, better prospects and transform lives.
The emphasis on the importance of Further Education is absolutely right (though Williamson’s own government has done its own part in gutting FE of meaning and purpose). But take a look again: FE and HE are just two ‘different paths to fulfilling and skilled employment’. That’s what ‘greater opportunity’ and ‘better prospects’ mean.
Now, had we once been sacked by a Prime Minister for endangering national security, and were our chief claim to fame owning a pet spider, we would keep quiet about ‘skilled employment’ and ‘better prospects’, but leave that to one side for a moment. What’s really bothering you, and by the way us, when you read all that?
Yes, it’s the soul-enervating, grey-tinged, narrow-horizoning of the whole lot. It looks like a Paul Nash of the consciousness, and not one of those uplifting ones from the 1940s about the ultimate victory of democracy. Oh no: it looks a lot more like a load of that crazy-paving mud and blasted treescape he started with in 1914-18.
Let’s get this straight. University does not exist to get you a job. It does not exist to smooth your path into the workforce. It does not exist to give you some skills. It does not exist to help your employer. It does not exist to ‘open up opportunities’. It does not exist to lift your salary. It exists, only and ever, to learn with you - to experience with you the moment, as the Goldsmiths academic Les Back puts it, where the 'luminous fragments' of your past experience and present knowledge fuse.
We’ve recently been taking a look at some actual ideas about, and voices from, Higher Education. Needless to say, the actual insights involved (and looked at a bit more theoretically here) are by some way more heartening, and just a little more uplifting, than the management gobbledygook Donelan and Williamson read out from the teleprompter.
Let’s look at Lowborn, Kerry Hudson’s memoir of growing up poor across England and Scotland in the 1980s and 1990s. What does she say about university, at the end? Inspired by an extraordinary teacher, she decided to give it a go with her BTEC in Performing Arts. Check the different cadence, tone, words, intent:
I decided I would achieve the highest grades I cold… My audition speech was Lady Macbeth decrying the permanence of the stains of her mistakes that could never be washed away. I got an unconditional offer to start university in London. I finally made my way to the big city that seemed to promise everything, but most of all a future with wide horizons and choices that would be mine. From that moment onwards, I started running and didn’t look back. Until this year, until I was ready.
Or we could check out Deborah Orr’s extraordinary autobiography, Motherwell, so lived and vivid that it makes you astonished that she isn’t still with us. Orr had a difficult time at St Andrews, to say the least, struck for one thing by (shall we say) the class divides of the place, but despite her parents’ doubts she made it through and she got her degree. How did she become one of the best writers of her generation? It wasn’t through the skills panel in her module handbook. There was chance, experiment, serendipity, busking it, wondering, hanging about. Listen:
When I was at St Andrews I did two years of English, two years of philosophy, one year of modern history, one year of medieval history, one year of social anthropology and one year of Arabic culture. The last – which I signed up for as everyone said it was really undemanding – has probably been the most useful. Bizarrely, although I never went to lectures in my own subjects, I’d slip into history of art lectures sometimes, because I could see the point of those. Even St Andrews, so fantastically traditional when I was there that it was compulsory for English literature students to learn Anglo-Saxon, had embraced the Kodak Carousel… The loose crowd I eventually ended up in [were]… some former students who’d never left, some ‘townies’ attracted in rebellion to student life – sex, drugs, rock and roll. Also – Barleycup – a vile coffee substitute – plus macrobiotic food, the I Ching and shiatsu massage.
Lastly, because the point hopefully now looks pretty obvious, Tara Westover – now an academic and writer, but in the 1980s to the early 2000s an emergent talent torn between two worlds. Her Mormon background and faith, her tough and trying upbringing in conservative Idaho, clashed with her university education (and eventual place at Cambridge) until she had what might be thought of as an epiphany. This is how she remembers meeting Jonathan Steinberg, eventually her Doctoral supervisor:
I mumbled something about historiography. I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement – since realising that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected – a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a… process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed on was not the history I had been taught… In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.
See the difference? On the one hand, the stifling constraints of the instrumental, and therefore meaningless, demands of use and usefulness. A managerial process that has deep roots: in Human Capital Theory's view that education is investment, in just those economics of social capital, and in the needs of Departments of Education the world over to get and keep their share of scarce budgets. It's an argument likely to prove a diminishing asset, even in its own terms, but it's still an argument. Still, on the other hand, it's challenged by a far greater contrast and enemy: actual life, real life, the warmth of feeling hopeful, optimistic, sharing, world-shifting, outward-looking. The feeling of being changed, with and alongside others, and not just individually. Expressed in a language of being changed that feels true, and not part of some tendentious simulacrum.
The university exists not to serve the one, but to give voice and rise to the other: to the glorious risk of education, its grand adventure, its sense of an opening, its stealing of a fire, and – following Westover – its moment of revelation. Government has forgotten that, if it ever knew it. You should not.
PLEASE NOTE: This blog will be coming to an end in October. The very first entry was published on 25 October 2010, and exactly ten years later seems like the right time to bring down the curtain. There is so much to do, and some other people are very kindly asking me to write for them. The blog will therefore cease, although it will stay up as a reference point - for its hyperlinks, if nothing else. So, given the traditional August break, there are only two more monthly blogs to come. Hopefully they will be good ones...
