A University Betrayed
Content
A University Betrayed
It is twenty years since I graduated from the University of Buckingham, about which I
recently made an unkind joke: ‘What’s the difference between the University of
Buckingham and the Falkland Islands? More British people choose to go to the
Falkland Islands!’
Like the Falklands, Buckingham is a place mythologised by Thatcherite ideologues,
who will vigorously defend its right to be what it is, but wouldn’t dream of going there
themselves, much less send their children there, and this, I firmly believe, has
amounted to a betrayal of the University.
I write this more in sorrow than in anger as I was genuinely attracted to Buckingham
because of its conservative ethos (I was not then familiar with the term ‘libertarian’)
having learnt to hate political correctness before I knew it had a name, but what I
found was an intellectual desert.
Much has been written about how militant student unions are stifling free speech on
British university campuses, with speakers at debates being shouted down, shunned, or
not allowed to speak at all, something to which Buckingham’s own Anthony Glees,
sadly, can attest.
However, if these ‘Social Justice Warriors’ are like George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour, in which the state makes people too afraid to express their thoughts, Buckingham
was like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which there is no need for it to do so, as
people have no thoughts to express.
The only debate held by the Debating Society during the whole time I was there
consisted entirely of law lecturers debating a point of law and making silly in-jokes,
resulting in neither quality nor quantity of debate, and my attempts to revive it and
attract new members proved completely futile.
Unfortunately, such is the cult-like devotion to ‘Bucks’, it is difficult to explain why I
find fault with it. People will say ‘you were awarded a 2:1, given a discount on fees to
do a master’s, and given extra time to complete your dissertation because of ill health,
so what’s your problem?’
My ‘problem’, however, is not with Buckingham being what it is, or with the students it
attracted, but rather, with the University claiming to be what it is not, and with the
students it failed to attract, particularly when I was there, at the most difficult time in
its history over twenty years ago.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2003, the then Vice-Chancellor, Terence Kealey,
said that ‘The University of Buckingham was not created to be what it has become; it
has become a vocational school for non-British students because that’s where the
market has taken us.’
I do not begrudge Kealey for saying so, in fact he was disarmingly honest in saying it,
but while I concede that the University has changed since then, and indeed, since the
time that I was there, I do not believe it can ever become what it was created to be, a
liberal arts college.
In his interview, he also said that the state-funded universities of continental Europe
were ‘toilets’ and ‘sausage factories’ which didn’t ‘give a toss’ about their students,
and claimed that Buckingham saw its students as ‘customers’, but some of its
customers were more equal than others.
While it is common for humanities students anywhere to be jeered at for doing
‘useless’ subjects or ‘soft options’, at Buckingham it was more pronounced because law
and business were the mainstay of the University, while the humanities, and even
sciences, were poor cousins.
Doing a humanities degree at Buckingham was the worst of both worlds, as it had all
the abstractness and vagueness of such degrees, but without the intellectual
environment to justify it, and all the cramming of the two-year degree course but
without any sense of being on a career path.
Some will claim I have a vendetta against Buckingham, or that I am idealising other
universities, but these are straw men; I believe that its shortcomings when I was there
stem from it being betrayed, and if I single it out for criticism, it is only because it
portrays itself as a model for others.
Of course, when I first came there in 1994, the UK was a very different place, in which
John Major was Prime Minister, there was no National Lottery, little Sunday shopping,
mobile phones were bulky, and some new-fangled thing called the internet was the
preserve of a few IT boffins.
More significantly, if you and your family were resident in the UK, or the then EC,
Buckingham was the only British university at which you had to pay tuition fees. As the
child of an expatriate, I was deemed British enough for the dole or the NHS, but not
British enough to be a home student.
To its credit, Buckingham made no distinction between home and overseas students, so
even if I had a Dutch or Italian parent, as some of my classmates at boarding schools
did, there was no getting away from paying fees on account of being an EC national.
Of course, devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland now means that having
a Dutch or Italian parent would make me less of a foreigner as regards tuition fees
than someone from England, whereas I would be treated as less of a foreigner at a
university in the Netherlands or Italy.
Free market ideologues often attack their opponents for wanting to skewer the market
to create a ‘level playing field’, yet for years, even in the supposedly free market
Thatcher era, Buckingham’s academics complained that their university was
disadvantaged by being the UK’s only private one.
Indeed, even before the University was established, one of its earliest supporters,
Harry Ferns of the Institute of Economic Affairs, feared that it would be difficult for it
to attract British students when they could study elsewhere at little or no cost, and this
long remained a handicap.
However, need it have been? Why should this have deterred their parents from sending
them to Buckingham, any more than the public funding of the NHS stopped them
taking out private health insurance? Or the public funding of the BBC stopped them
from subscribing to Sky or cable TV?
Or indeed, than the public funding of state schools stopped them sending them to
private schools? What’s the difference? Why did these self-styled conservatives and
libertarians happy to spend thousands of pounds sending their children to, say, Stowe,
resent paying for Buckingham?
The fact that such people did not send their children to Buckingham represents the
greatest betrayal of the University of all, particularly in the 1990s, which was the most
difficult time in its history, when it began to stagnate, and then contract, in the face of
competition from new universities.
If ever there were a time when the University should have been supported by them, by
sending their brightest and best children to study there, it was then. I am not
suggesting that they should have boycotted Oxbridge, but would they really have sent
their children to a rebaptised polytechnic?
Funnily enough, some people would ask me what Buckingham was called ‘when it was
a poly’, while I also faced left-wing inverse snobbery from people sneering at it as ‘the
rich man’s university’, despite their children being sent to the same private boarding
school as I was!
Yet had Margaret Thatcher tried to introduce tuition fees for British students in the
1980s, she might not just have faced a backlash from people on the left, but also on the
right, much as she did when she was defeated over her attempts to relax Sunday
trading laws in 1986.
Arguably the people who have proved most loyal to Buckingham from its inception
have been Malaysians, in spite of, or maybe because of, their government introducing a
‘Buy British Last’ policy in protest at the British government’s decision to raise
overseas tuition fees in 1981.
Certainly they bore Lady Thatcher no ill will, although when she was the University’s
Chancellor it was debatable as to whether they knew who she was. When I told my
Malaysian housemate she was going to present me with my degree, he exclaimed
‘Wow, Ken is going to meet the Queen!’
Ironically, while Theresa May has been accused of discouraging foreign students from
remaining in the UK after graduation, despite potentially benefiting the British
economy, most of Buckingham’s non-British students return home to pursue careers in
law or business.
When I hear people from conservative or libertarian think tanks and pressure groups
pontificate about the free market, not least in higher education, it is striking that so
few, if any, of them went to Buckingham, instead, as Ferns feared, they chose to go to
publicly funded universities instead.
Sadly, the University has been better at attracting libertarian academics, like Terence
Kealey, fleeing from the ‘dead hand’ of state control elsewhere, than it has been at
producing libertarian graduates. Ironically, such beliefs are often formed in reaction to
such control, not to the absence of it!
Much as I loathed my Quaker boarding school, my cultural conservative beliefs were
formed in reaction to its ethos, just as the libertarian beliefs of Terence Kealey were
formed in reaction to the unquestioning belief in state authority held by his French
mother and her family.
I am not suggesting that we should all have been made to listen to readings from
Milton Friedman’s Freedom to Choose, nor made to watch the film adaptation of Ayn
Rand’s The Fountainhead, but there should have been greater exposure to, and
discussion of, such beliefs at Buckingham.
While the University did not make me libertarian, it did make me a sceptic, and this
once saved me from being lured into the Church of Scientology, not long after I
graduated; the experience of being at another organisation which isolated and
brainwashed me clearly stood me in good stead.
To be fair, while I have, tongue-in-cheek, likened Kealey to the equally flamboyant,
charismatic and colourful L Ron Hubbard, on the grounds that I am as sceptical of him
as I am admiring, he has been a far better spokesman for the University than his recent
predecessors.
He is also a polymath, as well versed in history and philosophy as in biochemistry, as
befits a classical liberal, but I worry that ‘Buckinghamisation’ could mean such people
becoming even more of an endangered species, as few of my fellow alumni could be
regarded as such.
Margaret Thatcher once said that Politics, Philosophy and Economics wasn’t a proper
degree, just common sense, but despite reading Chemistry instead, she was in an
intellectual environment in which she could read F A Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom,
which influenced her political beliefs.
However strongly people may disagree with those beliefs, I am glad that such an
environment existed at Oxford and other universities, in which students would have
exposure to intellectual debate and political thought irrespective of their degree
discipline. But does it exist at Buckingham?
If the people who, in my view, betrayed the University wish to atone and make amends,
then they should help students who genuinely subscribe to its beliefs to attend on a
‘need-blind’ basis, in the philanthropic spirit of the Ivy League universities in the US,
which so inspired Buckingham.
If they can contribute to the upkeep of organisations like the Institute of Economic
Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Freedom Association, the Taxpayers Alliance
or the European Foundation, then they can contribute to what they should always have
regarded as their university.
That Buckingham became a vocational school for law and business for non-British
students (or British mature students) does not make it a bad place, nor the people who
benefited from that bad people, but that is not what the University was created to be.
If state-funded universities are the Soviet Union, Buckingham is less Radio Free
Europe than Beriozka, the chain of hard currency stores which disappeared with the
end of communism. Does it really want to be a university at all, or just a libertarian
pressure group cum think tank in disguise?
It is twenty years since I graduated from the University of Buckingham, about which I
recently made an unkind joke: ‘What’s the difference between the University of
Buckingham and the Falkland Islands? More British people choose to go to the
Falkland Islands!’
Like the Falklands, Buckingham is a place mythologised by Thatcherite ideologues,
who will vigorously defend its right to be what it is, but wouldn’t dream of going there
themselves, much less send their children there, and this, I firmly believe, has
amounted to a betrayal of the University.
I write this more in sorrow than in anger as I was genuinely attracted to Buckingham
because of its conservative ethos (I was not then familiar with the term ‘libertarian’)
having learnt to hate political correctness before I knew it had a name, but what I
found was an intellectual desert.
Much has been written about how militant student unions are stifling free speech on
British university campuses, with speakers at debates being shouted down, shunned, or
not allowed to speak at all, something to which Buckingham’s own Anthony Glees,
sadly, can attest.
However, if these ‘Social Justice Warriors’ are like George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour, in which the state makes people too afraid to express their thoughts, Buckingham
was like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which there is no need for it to do so, as
people have no thoughts to express.
The only debate held by the Debating Society during the whole time I was there
consisted entirely of law lecturers debating a point of law and making silly in-jokes,
resulting in neither quality nor quantity of debate, and my attempts to revive it and
attract new members proved completely futile.
Unfortunately, such is the cult-like devotion to ‘Bucks’, it is difficult to explain why I
find fault with it. People will say ‘you were awarded a 2:1, given a discount on fees to
do a master’s, and given extra time to complete your dissertation because of ill health,
so what’s your problem?’
My ‘problem’, however, is not with Buckingham being what it is, or with the students it
attracted, but rather, with the University claiming to be what it is not, and with the
students it failed to attract, particularly when I was there, at the most difficult time in
its history over twenty years ago.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2003, the then Vice-Chancellor, Terence Kealey,
said that ‘The University of Buckingham was not created to be what it has become; it
has become a vocational school for non-British students because that’s where the
market has taken us.’
I do not begrudge Kealey for saying so, in fact he was disarmingly honest in saying it,
but while I concede that the University has changed since then, and indeed, since the
time that I was there, I do not believe it can ever become what it was created to be, a
liberal arts college.
In his interview, he also said that the state-funded universities of continental Europe
were ‘toilets’ and ‘sausage factories’ which didn’t ‘give a toss’ about their students,
and claimed that Buckingham saw its students as ‘customers’, but some of its
customers were more equal than others.
While it is common for humanities students anywhere to be jeered at for doing
‘useless’ subjects or ‘soft options’, at Buckingham it was more pronounced because law
and business were the mainstay of the University, while the humanities, and even
sciences, were poor cousins.
Doing a humanities degree at Buckingham was the worst of both worlds, as it had all
the abstractness and vagueness of such degrees, but without the intellectual
environment to justify it, and all the cramming of the two-year degree course but
without any sense of being on a career path.
Some will claim I have a vendetta against Buckingham, or that I am idealising other
universities, but these are straw men; I believe that its shortcomings when I was there
stem from it being betrayed, and if I single it out for criticism, it is only because it
portrays itself as a model for others.
Of course, when I first came there in 1994, the UK was a very different place, in which
John Major was Prime Minister, there was no National Lottery, little Sunday shopping,
mobile phones were bulky, and some new-fangled thing called the internet was the
preserve of a few IT boffins.
More significantly, if you and your family were resident in the UK, or the then EC,
Buckingham was the only British university at which you had to pay tuition fees. As the
child of an expatriate, I was deemed British enough for the dole or the NHS, but not
British enough to be a home student.
To its credit, Buckingham made no distinction between home and overseas students, so
even if I had a Dutch or Italian parent, as some of my classmates at boarding schools
did, there was no getting away from paying fees on account of being an EC national.
Of course, devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland now means that having
a Dutch or Italian parent would make me less of a foreigner as regards tuition fees
than someone from England, whereas I would be treated as less of a foreigner at a
university in the Netherlands or Italy.
Free market ideologues often attack their opponents for wanting to skewer the market
to create a ‘level playing field’, yet for years, even in the supposedly free market
Thatcher era, Buckingham’s academics complained that their university was
disadvantaged by being the UK’s only private one.
Indeed, even before the University was established, one of its earliest supporters,
Harry Ferns of the Institute of Economic Affairs, feared that it would be difficult for it
to attract British students when they could study elsewhere at little or no cost, and this
long remained a handicap.
However, need it have been? Why should this have deterred their parents from sending
them to Buckingham, any more than the public funding of the NHS stopped them
taking out private health insurance? Or the public funding of the BBC stopped them
from subscribing to Sky or cable TV?
Or indeed, than the public funding of state schools stopped them sending them to
private schools? What’s the difference? Why did these self-styled conservatives and
libertarians happy to spend thousands of pounds sending their children to, say, Stowe,
resent paying for Buckingham?
The fact that such people did not send their children to Buckingham represents the
greatest betrayal of the University of all, particularly in the 1990s, which was the most
difficult time in its history, when it began to stagnate, and then contract, in the face of
competition from new universities.
If ever there were a time when the University should have been supported by them, by
sending their brightest and best children to study there, it was then. I am not
suggesting that they should have boycotted Oxbridge, but would they really have sent
their children to a rebaptised polytechnic?
Funnily enough, some people would ask me what Buckingham was called ‘when it was
a poly’, while I also faced left-wing inverse snobbery from people sneering at it as ‘the
rich man’s university’, despite their children being sent to the same private boarding
school as I was!
Yet had Margaret Thatcher tried to introduce tuition fees for British students in the
1980s, she might not just have faced a backlash from people on the left, but also on the
right, much as she did when she was defeated over her attempts to relax Sunday
trading laws in 1986.
Arguably the people who have proved most loyal to Buckingham from its inception
have been Malaysians, in spite of, or maybe because of, their government introducing a
‘Buy British Last’ policy in protest at the British government’s decision to raise
overseas tuition fees in 1981.
Certainly they bore Lady Thatcher no ill will, although when she was the University’s
Chancellor it was debatable as to whether they knew who she was. When I told my
Malaysian housemate she was going to present me with my degree, he exclaimed
‘Wow, Ken is going to meet the Queen!’
Ironically, while Theresa May has been accused of discouraging foreign students from
remaining in the UK after graduation, despite potentially benefiting the British
economy, most of Buckingham’s non-British students return home to pursue careers in
law or business.
When I hear people from conservative or libertarian think tanks and pressure groups
pontificate about the free market, not least in higher education, it is striking that so
few, if any, of them went to Buckingham, instead, as Ferns feared, they chose to go to
publicly funded universities instead.
Sadly, the University has been better at attracting libertarian academics, like Terence
Kealey, fleeing from the ‘dead hand’ of state control elsewhere, than it has been at
producing libertarian graduates. Ironically, such beliefs are often formed in reaction to
such control, not to the absence of it!
Much as I loathed my Quaker boarding school, my cultural conservative beliefs were
formed in reaction to its ethos, just as the libertarian beliefs of Terence Kealey were
formed in reaction to the unquestioning belief in state authority held by his French
mother and her family.
I am not suggesting that we should all have been made to listen to readings from
Milton Friedman’s Freedom to Choose, nor made to watch the film adaptation of Ayn
Rand’s The Fountainhead, but there should have been greater exposure to, and
discussion of, such beliefs at Buckingham.
While the University did not make me libertarian, it did make me a sceptic, and this
once saved me from being lured into the Church of Scientology, not long after I
graduated; the experience of being at another organisation which isolated and
brainwashed me clearly stood me in good stead.
To be fair, while I have, tongue-in-cheek, likened Kealey to the equally flamboyant,
charismatic and colourful L Ron Hubbard, on the grounds that I am as sceptical of him
as I am admiring, he has been a far better spokesman for the University than his recent
predecessors.
He is also a polymath, as well versed in history and philosophy as in biochemistry, as
befits a classical liberal, but I worry that ‘Buckinghamisation’ could mean such people
becoming even more of an endangered species, as few of my fellow alumni could be
regarded as such.
Margaret Thatcher once said that Politics, Philosophy and Economics wasn’t a proper
degree, just common sense, but despite reading Chemistry instead, she was in an
intellectual environment in which she could read F A Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom,
which influenced her political beliefs.
However strongly people may disagree with those beliefs, I am glad that such an
environment existed at Oxford and other universities, in which students would have
exposure to intellectual debate and political thought irrespective of their degree
discipline. But does it exist at Buckingham?
If the people who, in my view, betrayed the University wish to atone and make amends,
then they should help students who genuinely subscribe to its beliefs to attend on a
‘need-blind’ basis, in the philanthropic spirit of the Ivy League universities in the US,
which so inspired Buckingham.
If they can contribute to the upkeep of organisations like the Institute of Economic
Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Freedom Association, the Taxpayers Alliance
or the European Foundation, then they can contribute to what they should always have
regarded as their university.
That Buckingham became a vocational school for law and business for non-British
students (or British mature students) does not make it a bad place, nor the people who
benefited from that bad people, but that is not what the University was created to be.
If state-funded universities are the Soviet Union, Buckingham is less Radio Free
Europe than Beriozka, the chain of hard currency stores which disappeared with the
end of communism. Does it really want to be a university at all, or just a libertarian
pressure group cum think tank in disguise?
