There is a strong case for university freedom.
Universities are about illumination, about fostering illumination and about
passing it on, in the deepest and broadest questions in the humanities and
the sciences. To pursue this, their proper goal, they must be free from
outside control in the people they appoint, in the subjects they study and
in the pupils they admit.
It may be unrealistic to expect a modern state to fund universities and to
respect their freedoms, though a state which does not have free
universities within its borders will lack the illumination universities can
provide. And this will be to the detriment of society as a whole and of
those young people who might pass through their gates.
In Britain the hope of free state universities is certainly unrealistic at
the moment. Recent government policy sees universities in terms of wealth
creation and links with business; and it wants degree courses to be judged
in terms of ‘aims’, ‘objectives' and learning
outcomes’, criteria appropriate to training, perhaps, but not to
education. And it also wants universities to admit many more students from
what it calls lower socio-economic backgrounds, as an end in itself.
To this latter end, it is instituting an office called The Access
Regulator. This person will allow universities to charge its better-off
students higher fees and so partially compensate for a 36% drop in
government funding per student over the last decade, providing that they
admit more students from poor schools and whose parents earn little and who
have had little formal education. To this end new applications forms are
being devised, on which these factors will show up. And university
admissions tutors are going to have to go on special courses to understand
how to operate these new admissions policies.
There would be a strong argument for university fees—providing that
they freed universities from extraneous interference. And there can be no
objection to admissions tutors looking for academic potential in their
candidates. They could do this by talking to them, and assessing their
native wit; or they could get them to write about something of general
interest; or they could ask their teachers for their opinions, or see how
they have progressed over a given period. Best of all, they could look at
the most reliable guide to future potential: a candidate's actual knowledge
and achievements so far.
But what are not signs of potential in any sense are parental poverty and a
candidate's poor schooling (the latter of which is the government's
responsibility in any case, and because of which universities are being
forced to distort their admissions policies, and ultimately their courses,
to cater for these new types of students). People would be outraged if
university places were given on the basis of parental wealth and the mere
fact of having attended a good school. And rightly so. What is currently
being proposed is simply the obverse of admitting a candidate because he or
she was born with a silver spoon, and is just as objectionable.
What we are currently seeing in Britain is what happens when universities
are treated not as institutions of illumination, but simply in terms of
training for wealth creation and of egalitarian social engineering. The
result is the worst of both worlds, irksome fees, combined with massive and
ever-more intrusive interference by the state. But, by a perverse
incentive, the introduction of larger fees for students may also give an
opportunity for those who wish to set up universities which are truly
independent, particularly in subjects without huge capital overheads, in
philosophy perhaps.