“This lecture is forbidden by radical opinion,” shouts one protestor into a hijacked microphone, as the mob fills the lecture theatre. “Forbidden! Forbidden!” answers the crowd, determined to prevent the Jewish geneticist Professor Mangel from delivering a talk titled “Do Rats Have ‘Families’?” It could have happened last week — but this scene is taken from the climax of Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical campus novel The History Man, published 50 years ago this year.
Bradbury’s novel about radical politics and its discontents skewered the post-1968 zeitgeist, that age of blazing up and making out. Set in 1972, it follows the Machiavellian villain Howard Kirk, a “radical sociologist” at the University of Watermouth who can “explain anything” with “a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social history”. A Left-wing ideologue, all Kirk needs to hear is “an apparently casual remark about one’s schoolboy stamp collection, or a literary reference to the metaphoric significance of colour” before he denounces you publicly for your insipid “bourgeois materialism” or racism.
Kirk is a “theoretician of sociability”, so between teaching seminars on the difference between “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft” and marking student essays with comments like “pure fascism” and “reactionary crap”, he hosts parties, arranges protests, and pursues younger women. The character Bradbury created is a comic distortion — he doesn’t exist — and yet Kirk embodies a recognisable set of social and intellectual anxieties.
Today, the British university is dramatically different: academics spend more time in redundancy pools than seminar rooms, and students use ChatGPT to summarise everything from Shakespeare soliloquies to departmental emails. And yet half a century on, Howard Kirk still has plenty to teach us about class, intellectuals, and the real importance of a university education.
Watermouth is a fictional plate-glass institution, with concrete buildings, Perspex domes, and an interdisciplinary programme. It’s a radical place with something for everyone, and “a zealous equality prevails in the air”. In the campus auditorium, actors perform a communist adaptation of King Lear one week and a capitalist version of The Good Woman of Szechwan the next. On the walls, we find notices for events like “Gaysoc Elizabethan Evening: With Madrigals” and “Women’s Lib Nude Encounter Group”. There is even a “multi-denominational” chapel named, to avoid offence, the Contemplation Centre.
In this time and place, the opportunistic Kirk is thriving. He receives generous royalty cheques for his fashionable books — titled The Coming of the New Sex and The Defeat of Privacy — and he regularly travels to London to appear on television and opine on current affairs. Meanwhile, his wife Barbara, smarter than her husband but intellectually and emotionally unfulfilled, is begrudgingly relegated to keeping house. For everybody else, university expansion in England is on the wane, and the Watermouth campus is in decline. “The concrete has stained,” writes Bradbury, “the glass grown dirty, the services diminished.”
“The basic promise of England’s new universities has been betrayed time and again.”
It’s difficult to appreciate the sense of decline felt by Bradbury and his colleagues in the new universities without realising the original promise (and betrayal) that these institutions represented. The early Sixties saw seven “new” universities built in the English provinces, beginning with Sussex in 1961, then UEA and York in 1963, Essex and Lancaster in 1964, and finally Kent and Warwick in 1965. This expansion had been the result of a rapid increase in student numbers in the late Fifties, which continued for the next two decades. UEA, for instance, had grown from just 113 students in 1963 to 1,724 in 1967. By 1971, it had surpassed 2,600. In part, this rise was due to the baby-boomer generation’s coming-of-age, but it was also a consequence of Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act: by removing fees from grammar schools, the Butler Act enabled children from poorer families to attend grammar school and from there go on to university.
Bradbury himself benefitted from this change: born to a lower-middle-class family in Sheffield in 1932, he attended West Bridgford Grammar School in Nottingham. His closest friends, colleagues and collaborators were also children of the Butler Act, foremost Lorna Sage and David Lodge. In The History Man, we see how a life could be shaped by learning: as Bradbury puts it, Howard and Barbara Kirk “had had their sights lifted by a grammar school and university education”.
No wonder, then, that this generation thought of education as a form of training, rather than a leisure pursuit or a chance to accrue cultural capital. In 1956, Bradbury published a short article for The Antioch Review entitled “The Rise of Provincials”, in which he praised “a rigorous training in discrimination” in provincial universities like Leicester, Leeds and Hull. Bradbury saw this new education as far superior to the “Good Taste” associated with Oxford dons or with Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.
This, then, was the intellectual origin of the “new” universities: a genuine alternative to the leisurely and complacent gentlemen’s scholarship of Oxbridge. The new universities were self-consciously novel: UEA’s founding motto, taken from an old Norfolk phrase, was “do different”. Subjects were divided not into departments but rather interdisciplinary schools. “English Studies”, for instance, combined history and literature, while “European Studies” blended languages with history.
There were other innovations too. In 1963, when Ian Watt was hired from Berkeley to be UEA’s first dean of English Studies, he brought with him the idea of teaching seminar groups of eight to 10 students. At the time, this was a West Coast idea, influenced by new developments in group therapy and the fashion for “encounter groups” (in which participants would meet to express themselves and experiment with wacky group interactions like sleep deprivation or being nude). Before then, academics either held an Oxbridge-style Socratic dialogue with one or two students, or else delivered a civic-style lecture to hundreds. (In the end, Watt himself lasted only a year at UEA before he returned to California; according to Lorna Sage, the weather in Norwich disagreed with his pet boa constrictor.)
By the end of the Sixties, the excitement about progressive teaching methods had given way to anxieties about a drop in standards, from primary schooling to postgraduate research. The Labour government had plans to replace grammar schools with comprehensives, and the May 1968 protests in France had led to a series of diminutive copycat rebellions in Britain. As Paris burned, there was a peaceful sit-in at the LSE, while at Essex bricks were chucked through windows. When Princess Margaret visited UEA in May 1968, students planned to burn a Union Jack. But struggling to find one, they decided to make their own. In the end, they were reduced to drawing one on a paper shopping bag. The makeshift flag wouldn’t catch alight, so the would-be revolutionaries just stomped on it instead.
Later, in 1971, a 10-day sit-in was held at UEA to protest the expulsion of an American undergraduate who had received a police caution for smoking marijuana. Bradbury’s own office was trashed — the basis, perhaps, for the destruction of timorous Henry Beamish’s office in the novel. Unlike Kirk, who capitalises on these antics for his own gain, Bradbury and his cohort of grammar school-educated provincial academics were appalled by these developments and demonstrations, which represented for them a churlish rejection of the serious-minded liberalism and free debate of the postwar university. Today, the professors are less offended: after all, it was their generation who invented student politics.
In 1969, Bradbury’s friends Brian Cox and Tony Dyson published a special issue of their journal Critical Survey titled “Fight for Education”, in which they sought to make the case against progressive education and student protest. The first of their so-called “Black Papers” (a play on government white papers), the issue carried contributions by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest (“Kingers and Conkers”, as Christopher Hitchens remembers them), and opened with a letter to MPs in which the authors claimed that anarchy “is becoming fashionable”. In a panicked tone, they wrote that university students were now “claiming the right to control syllabuses, to abolish examinations, and even to become involved in appointing their own teachers”. In one new university, students apparently objected to history or science, instead demanding to “be taught LIFE”.
The most prescient essay in the first Black Paper is “Decline and Fall of the University Idea”. Written by the pseudonymous “B”, the article lays the blame for the failure of the universities not only on student extremists, but also on university management and government policy, “with its highly rationalistic view of society and the economy”. “These are not particularly comfortable or happy times for the campus,” writes B, “and the signs are all that they will get more and more uncomfortable — especially if we end up with alienating, culturally destructive forms of rationalisation that are being canvassed in some quarters, like the four-term year or other versions of the shift-system.”
As Cox wrote in his 1992 memoir, suitably titled The Great Betrayal, “Decline and Fall of the University Idea” had been published under a pseudonym because the author “so feared student reprisals that he dare not reveal his name”. This was hardly necessary, as the piece is written in Bradbury’s recognisably droll style. At one point, he quips that “governmental pressure is increasingly toward making all universities the Bowden Institute of Technology” — B.V. Bowden had been Minister for Education and Science for a short period in 1965 — whereas “student pressure is increasingly toward making them all the Che Guevara Institute of Strategic Studies”.
Looking back at The History Man, we therefore see it is as much a novel about bureaucracy and mismanagement as about radical politics. Kirk manipulates departmental meetings, moving deftly from “document A” to “document L” to “document Y”, and raising a constitutional point to ensure Professor Mangel’s visit to Watermouth goes ahead (and in doing so ensure maximum student disruption). Kirk is, deep down, a master bureaucrat: in a 1998 piece, Bradbury speculated that an older Kirk “would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University”.
The woke students and cancelled academics of The History Man may well seem familiar to readers in 2025, but really the novel is a period piece. Students today are less interested in reading or protesting than they are in mindlessly scrolling TikTok, and the young academics who teach them are precariously employed, paid by the hour to navigate Zoom calls and “virtual learning environments”. Kirk, by contrast, lands a permanent job straight after his PhD, and his monograph The Coming of the New Sex is a commercial success that generates enough royalties to renovate his house. The Howard Kirks of today are still Left-wing, but too busy editing their CVs or scrubbing mould from the walls of their tiny rented flats to even begin starting a plan for a protest.
And yet The History Man goes on being relevant. Why? Because what it can teach us — if we want to learn — is the damage that’s done to our institutions when they are hijacked by opportunists, charlatans, grifters and wreckers. The basic promise of England’s new universities has been betrayed time and again by the avaricious cost-cutting of opportunistic bureaucrats and university managers. Will we ever learn?
