One summer in the early 2010s, on a bleak, drizzly morning, I was running around Farringdon in a blind panic. During the final weeks of my undergrad degree, one of my exams had, bizarrely, been scheduled in a different part of London from the others, at a venue I didn’t even know existed. Making my way to this unfamiliar place, I became lost in a rabbit warren of alleys, tunnels and underpasses.
I was late for the exam, got a bad mark, and ended up narrowly missing out on a first-class degree. So ended my university career: years of hard work undone by a navigating blunder. I’ve sometimes thought back to that nightmarish morning and wondered if I was deflected from my proper calling as an academic. Others have suggested the same, which I suppose is an insult for an author (as one acquaintance put it: “have you considered writing for the London Review of Books?”). These days, it strikes me more as a lucky escape. Almost everything I hear about the University now, including from those inside its walls, makes it sound like a frustrating and somewhat depressing place to be. Underpaid and overworked, facing negligible career prospects and an increasingly illiterate culture: I can have all of this as a writer, without the footnotes and office politics.
This raises a question that, I suspect, goes beyond my own experience. How can those of us with intellectual inclinations lead secure and fulfilling lives today? And if neither the University nor the world beyond it can sustain intellectual activity — aside from research for medicine and technology, that is — then what is the point in nurturing such aspirations anyway? These questions are explored with wit and imagination in a new book by David A. Westbrook, Social Thought From the Ruins. Westbrook approaches them from the opposite angle to mine: the director of the business and law programme at the University of Buffalo, New York, he is a veteran academic who now finds he is “no longer in love” with the University. The “ruins” in the book’s title are those of the humanities and social sciences, in particular — disciplines which seem increasingly unable to foster original thought, to engage constructively with modern society, or to convince the public that they deserve to exist at all.
Westbrook argues that the crisis of the University is bad not just for committed professors — a group he likens to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, who longs to be a gallant knight after the age of chivalry has already passed — but for all of us. The contemporary world is full of complex structures, from banks and corporations to armies and government bureaucracies, which need competent people to lead them and competent critics to save them from their own worst tendencies. Only a University-like institution can fill these roles, even if it is not doing a very good job at the moment. As Westbrook puts it, “sickness in the University is sickness in the gonads of the polity”, a cancer in society’s reproductive organs.
The modern University, in Westbrook’s account, was born after 1945. Previously, there had been “the Free University”, a model stemming from the Enlightenment, whose guiding ideal was the cultivation of autonomous citizens who could hold their governments to a high standard. It reached few people though. What emerged after the Second World War, by contrast, was “the People’s University”, an enterprise which encompassed a much larger section of society, and performed functions of vital importance to the state. Not only did it provide the knowledge for an increasingly specialised economy, and the research for new technologies (especially military ones; the People’s University was a child of the Cold War). It offered a way of binding nations together, socially and ideologically. In the United States, especially, “the promise… of success through education became a way to offer participation in the American project to diverse communities”.
Something similar can be said about the expansion of the British University, first during the Sixties and then under Tony Blair, who aimed to get half of young adults into higher education. A University education had become an important dividing line in Britain, in terms of culture as well as occupation. The gradations of the middle and upper classes share the experience of leaving the place where they grew up (residential universities being favoured in the British system) and entering an institution that habituates them to socially desirable ways of thinking, acting and speaking. An important aspect of this division is the one David Goodhart described as “anywheres” versus “somewheres”. Those with a university education tend to develop a more cosmopolitan outlook and to be comfortable among people of a similar graduate background more or less anywhere in the West. Those without it are more likely to be tied, practically and culturally, to a particular place and sense of home.
But the role of facilitating entry to middle-class life was always in tension with traditional ideals such as the pursuit of truth and the forging of independent minds. As universities have grown, they have bureaucratised, commercialised, and infantilised. Undergraduates now pay large fees to enjoy an extended adolescence under the supervision of administrators who are more concerned with their safety and satisfaction than their development as adults. “We teach them that they are weak, and their world is shit,” writes Westbrook in the most scathing section of the book, “and then… we wonder at the sorry state of our political discourse”. The same managerial oversight applies to those working and teaching at the University, who find their vocations reduced to performance targets and their freedom of thought sacrificed for “deeply humiliating, cruel, Orwellian” training in political correctness. In this way, “the professionalization of the life of the mind… has been almost fatal to intellectual life, or joy”.
“Undergraduates now pay large fees to enjoy an extended adolescence under the supervision of administrators.”
The academics are not, of course, blameless for the decline of the academy. As two young teachers at Oxford recently complained, many disciplines have become “puritanical and doctrinaire, obsessed with an oddly narrow range of social justice issues”. Westbrook points out that this, too, can be traced back to the institutional prerogatives of the People’s University. The importation of French “theory”, with its emphasis on activist scholarship, helped professors to feel they were doing something more profound than rubber-stamping the next generation of bourgeois professionals. More importantly, it gave the multiplying departments of the humanities and social sciences a shared language in which to converse. The result was that, for all its pretensions to radicalism, “theory” ossified into a rigid orthodoxy, a body of precepts more closely resembling a religious creed than an intellectual framework. The most damaging of these, for Westbrook, is the axiom that “power is bad by definition”. This effectively rules out politics, the entire point of which is the (hopefully beneficial) use of power, replacing it with protest. And when locating the transcendent evil of power becomes the goal of scholarship, it leads to a numbing incuriosity about the actual world that people inhabit, and the actual circumstances facing those who must wield power. “Once sin has been identified, the intellectual’s work is over”.
None of this has gone unnoticed by the public, and especially not by populist movements which identify the University, quite correctly, as a linchpin of the progressive cultural and institutional power they despise. “We are watching the de-legitimation of the mandarin class”, says Westbrook, “the class created through higher education”. In the United States, Donald Trump has brought the crisis to a head. Seizing on collapsing public trust, as well as outrage at the frenzied anti-Israel activism on campuses, Trump is forcing many of America’s most prestigious universities into humiliating ideological capitulations by threatening to withhold their funding. Should they come to power, British admirers of Trump would no doubt do something similar at home, where universities are already engaged in mass redundancies due to their failing financial model. Many are closing entire departments.
Even those without political animus may agree that it’s past time to slim down the University, an unaffordable relic in an age when so much knowledge is freely available. A degree like mine, English Literature, now means incurring significant debts in exchange for poor employment prospects. Surely this does not need to be part of a state-subsidised institution? There are few signs, however, that the world beyond the University can sustain a healthy intellectual culture. Yes, many public intellectuals have used new platforms to attract large audiences, whether it be Jordan Peterson’s ascent to stardom via Youtube, or phenomenally successful newsletters like that of economic historian turned policy pundit Adam Tooze. Westbrook himself writes on Substack, speaks at film festivals, and has been involved with a new play by Matthew Gasda, the fashionable New York author. But it’s no accident that each of these individuals, and many more like them, can draw on years of study and teaching at universities. For obvious reasons relating to time and money, it is rare for a blogger, journalist or podcaster to achieve a similar intellectual depth without any academic background.
Moreover, if the University has problems with falling standards and groupthink, it seems crazy to think that a public culture dominated by social media could do better. The relentless crushing of attention spans, the restless mob mentality, the constant exposure to the judgment of our peers: these do not seem like promising conditions for original, fearless intellects to be forged.
Besides, modern society needs mandarins to function, and so it needs institutions to train those mandarins. The techno-populist fantasy of replacing bureaucrats with AI engineers is no less frivolous than the academic squeamishness at “power”, since the problems of governance are ultimately human and political, not technical. Fiascoes such as the Global War on Terror, the Great Financial Crisis and the Covid pandemic are good reasons to mistrust elites, but we still need people to steer our military, financial and public health systems, and they might as well be good people. But Westbrook’s vision for the University goes beyond the education of elites. He sketches a possible future for the intellectual as someone who actively engages with major institutions, an “interlocutor” and benevolent critic helping to grease the wheels of modernity. Rather than pretending they are somehow aloof from power, academics should aim to “humanise” powerful organisations by providing them with different perspectives and insights, seeking to diminish the blunders and absurdities which bureaucracies are so prone to. Curiosity and conversation are the key concepts here; I imagine a lot of fieldwork taking place in bars, on company cards.
This may be an ingenious way to save the role of the intellectual from oblivion by making it socially useful, perhaps even glamorous. It is true more broadly that the rush to embrace AI, against a backdrop of plunging literacy, makes the humanities more important, not less so. Sadly, the modern way is not to adapt new technologies to our shared ends, but to bend society to accommodate new technologies, which will likely mean that our systems become increasingly unresponsive to the complexities of their human subjects. That deficit is something which humanistic knowledge and understanding ought to fill. The news that the University of Chicago, long a heavyweight in the humanities, will now be cutting down or removing PhD programmes in many of those subjects is not just a tragedy; it is a very bad omen.
What I am left wondering, though, is whether there cannot also be space for learning for its own sake. Looking back at my own academic experience, cut short as it was, I can think of no better way to have spent those three years immersed in Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Eliot, and I’m glad that there are people who can dedicate their careers to this cause. Can such study be useful in life? Undoubtedly. But a stronger defence of the humanities is surely that they keep alive our stories, our history and our cultural inheritance, as well as the practice of scholarship itself. Now more than ever, as the wider culture grows intellectually barren, these things need some sort of institutional form to survive; losing them would make us infinitely poorer.
