Universities should indeed offer "value for money" - but how do we measure the value of education? Every test that comes from government is crassly econometric. We need to recapture a higher vision of what the university is for - and of what it means to be human. [THREAD]
2. To be human is to be curious: to seek out new ideas and experiences; to understand ways of living that are different to our own. We climb mountains, cross oceans, send rockets to the moon & probes to map the stars. Among the first words we learn are "why?", "how?" and "when?"
3. That spirit of adventure - that desire to breathe a different air, to chart new worlds beyond our mental horizons - should drive the university, too. That means challenging at source the market-speak of government, and its shrivelled understanding of the purposes of education.
4. Human beings are more than consumers; more, even, than future employees. We are citizens, neighbours, parents & friends. If poetry gives us a way through love & loss; if philosophy makes us q. our ideas; if science lets us see with new eyes, that is “value added” to our lives.
5. Someone who takes from their degree a love of music, or literature, or art; who has a new understanding of other cultures & ways of living; whose thinking has been challenged by new ways of seeing the world - that person has been "enriched", whatever the size of their wallet.
6. "Useful knowledge" comes in many different forms. My own subject, History, starts from one fundamental idea: that the world we live in is contingent, not fixed; that things we take for granted can be and have been different. That makes it an extraordinary force for change.
7. Every great liberation movement of the C20th wrote history: women's history; black history; queer history; labour history. It taught them that other worlds - other ways of living - were possible; that hierarchies that once seemed "natural" both could and should be challenged.
8. Universities should be sites of resistance: places that stand outside the dominant ideology of the state. So let's say it loud and clear: universities are not "service-providers"; students are not "consumers"; and the worth of a degree is not measured in future earnings.
9. Education is not a "market", graduates are not "human capital", and "learning outcomes" are inherently unknowable. Other universities are not our "competitors", for it is collaboration, not competition, that drives excellence in academic work.
10. I could have written nothing of any value without the generosity of scholars in other institutions, who read chapters, shared ideas & suggested reading. The REF, which measures one department against another, captures nothing of how academics actually work.
11. If we believe all this, we need to act on it. There is no greater crime in academic life than intellectual dishonesty; so we have to stop pretending we believe in these metrics when they go our way. We have to stop plastering "strategy documents" with words we disbelieve in.
12. That's not a plea for less public scrutiny. Students, parents & taxpayers are entitled to ask how their money is being spent - & why. But we cannot answer these questions in terms we don't believe. We need to be honest about what we think matters & how this shapes what we do.
13. Part of that explanation will rightly be economic. Universities create jobs and bolster their local economies. Advances in engineering, medicine and biotech drive new treatments, products and technologies, while drawing international talent & investment to the UK.
14. A good education *should* teach employable skills. Universities should not be releasing students into the world who are not equipped to find a job. But we must not pretend that careers training is the *purpose* of what we do, or the quickest and most direct route to that end.
15. The chance to spend three years studying History, or Arabic, or Biology, or Politics, or Art, or any other branch of human understanding is a magical, life-enhancing thing. It should be treasured in and for itself, as a "graduate dividend" that enriches more than our salary.
16. If we must have these ghastly corporate metrics, let's coin some new ones: “Future learning potential”; “average starting sagacity”; “enjoyable skills”. Universities could be engines of “social humility” – the recognition that our society is not the endpoint of civilisation.
17. Our students bear a cost my generation never had to pay; yet I'm endlessly impressed by their curiosity, enthusiasm & adventure. We owe them every drop of "value for money":not in the debased coinage of a philistine govt, but in the richness of a fuller, more human life.[END]
