In praise of universities

This week the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a hard right free market think tank, produced a report entitled ‘Lackademia: why do academics lean left?’ It claims – and treats as a problem – that “left-liberals” are “over-represented” in British academia. The methodology used to establish the political views of academics was risible, being based on a self-selecting survey (what survey methodologists call a ‘voodoo poll’) and this and other flaws were pointed out by John Morgan in the Times Higher Education.

Even if the data were more robust, it is a bizarre notion that academics’ political views should be ‘representative’ of the general population and that, if they are not, they are, to use the report’s word “skewed”. Academics are not appointed for their political views, or to represent anyone under some kind of proportional representation system – and it would be disastrous if they were appointed in this way, rather than on the basis of their academic expertise. But the choice of the term ‘over-representation’ is deliberate, as signalled in the closing line of the full report – it tries to take the language of diversity (in relation to gender, class and ethnicity) in order to imply, although there is absolutely no evidence of this, that those on the political right are victims of discrimination so that whilst being qualified for academic posts they are excluded from them.

The word ‘victims’ is significant in understanding what is going on here, which is a species of the populist politics sweeping Western societies. That populism has at its heart a victim narrative in which the ‘liberal elite’ (sometimes the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’) has a fiendish power to do down the common sense of ‘the people’. It is a nonsensical reading of where power lies, since the intellectual apparatchiks of recent decades are more obviously the ASI and similar neo-liberal bodies than anyone else, but after the events of the last year no one can doubt its traction. Another part of the populist wave is its anti-intellectualism, with ‘experts’ being denounced and even compared to Nazis. So the ASI report channels that strand of populism, too.

The populist implications of the ASI report were quite apparent in the way it got picked up in the media. Especially grotesque was a spiteful piece by Tom Utley in, inevitably, the Daily Mail. It started with a long whine about having been put down by his ‘left-wing’ tutor at Cambridge (like so many of the populist Right – Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg - Utley is a product of ‘elite’ universities) some forty years ago.  The ‘put down’ was, in fact, a correction of his misunderstanding about the subject under discussion – as it happens John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ concept, discussed on p. 146 of my book - although Utley clearly doesn’t realise this and it apparently still rankles.

The rest of the article is a series of tendentious assertions (e.g. cherry picked examples of Oxbridge college heads) and smears (e.g. the ‘endless holidays’ of ‘dons’) exhibiting such a degree of intellectual dishonesty and disregard for evidence that one can at least agree that he was not very well-taught when at university. These are then explicitly linked to populist politics by pointing out that most academics opposed Brexit. That is hardly surprising: most people with a degree and even more with a higher degree did.

The irony is that British universities are extraordinarily successful in any terms they might be judged. They perform far better proportionate to either the size of the UK or the funding they receive than those of any other country in the world in terms of placement in world rankings, where the UK has 34 of the top 200 universities, and quality of research. They are intimately linked with medical and industrial innovation and the communication of culture. Moreover, they earn billions of pounds for the UK in student fee income (though this is under threat from government immigration policies). To jeopardise this in pursuit of ‘politically representative’ staffing would be, to coin a populist phrase, political correctness gone mad. Would we want, say, biologists, to be selected on the grounds of political representativeness rather than scientific ability? Is that the Lysenkoist dream of Tom Utley and the ASI? I fear that it might be.

But universities should be defended on wider grounds than this. To the extent that it is the case that they are bulwarks against populism then that is a good thing in itself. The hallmark of populism is what we are learning to call post-truth. The hallmark of universities is still that of a liberal Enlightenment commitment to truth, evidence and reason (that is so even when academics interrogate and critique the liberal Enlightenment). So it is small wonder that they are under attack from populists, and that is all the more reason to hold on tight to what they embody and represent.

Fat cats?

The British government have today announced plans to further restrict redundancy pay-offs made to public sector employees. Proposing an £80,000 cap, this will only affect senior staff, and it is in part a response to a populist media campaign, enraged about public sector ‘fat cats’ not just because of redundancy pay-offs but, more generally, high salaries and ‘gold-plated’ pensions.

Fair enough, perhaps – although where is the comparable outrage about private sector rewards? – but it is worth considering how it has come about that public sector managers enjoy the high rewards that they do. For it was not always so. Traditionally, senior managers (then more often called administrators or officials) had substantially lower salaries than in the private sector, and were expected to be motivated primarily by their commitment to public service.

That all changed from the 1980s, when under the general ideology of the market and the particular influence of the ‘New Public Management’ that derived from it, it was argued that the public sector was inefficient because it did not have the dynamic management of the private sector and that, therefore, it had to offer rewards commensurate with those in the private sector so as to attract that talent. This new breed of managers could hardly be expected to work for so fluffy an ideal as public service – no, in line with the motivational theories of what was then called the New Right, they had to be paid top dollar. And they were – bringing with them many of the reforms that have laid waste to the public sector. But that is another story, about which I have written elsewhere in the blog.

One way of understanding this story is to see it as one of a huge number of examples where the consequences of decisions by now long-retired or dead politicians who were in power in the 1980s neo-liberal heyday have now come to fruition. Examples range from the decision to relax planning regulations on flood plain building because the market should decide where to build, leading to the floods of recent years, through to the deregulation that led to the global financial crisis.

It’s the same with the 1980s approach to those parts of the public sector that were not privatised (those that were, by the way, have mostly now died). Wind forward 30 years and we see that the very same ideologues who blasted the public sector for not paying the going rate for top managers now blast the public sector for … paying the going rate for top managers. It is a hypocrisy unleavened by any acknowledgement that the going rate for top managers is ludicrously high. Because of course their quarrel is not with top management pay rates at all, but with the very existence of the public sector.

Indeed, the attack on public sector fatcat pay is really only a way of finding a soft point to attack public sector pay in general. It is part and parcel of two claims. One is that public sector workers are paid more than private sector workers. The other is that public sector workers get 'gold-plated pensions’. Often, the two claims are linked together.

The problem with the first claim is that – again because of the impact of market ideology and neo-liberal reforms – the lowest skilled (and therefore lowest paid) jobs in the public sector have been outsourced to private sector contractors. Thus, of course, average public sector pay is higher. As regards pensions, in 2012 (the latest year for which I have been able to find comparative figures) the median-average public sector pension was £5,600 pa (mean-average £7,800 pa) and the median-average private sector pension was £5,860 pa (mean-average £7,467). It’s true that most final salary pension schemes in the private sector have closed; it’s also true that those in the public sector are closing (one reason being the pressure put on them by high paid managers).

So let’s by all means challenge the high pay and pensions of senior managers in the public sector. But doing so only makes sense if we do so across the board, perhaps by considering a maximum wage. In 1998 FTSE-100 CEOs were paid a huge 47 times the pay of their average employee. Shocked? Well, by 2014 they were paid 130 times as much as their average employee. We might think about Fred Goodwin, who brought down Royal Bank of Scotland and cost the taxpayer billions of pounds, scraping by on a reported pension of £342,500 pa, poor fellow. We might think about Paul Dacre, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail which has so vociferously campaigned against public sector largesse. In 2014 his pay and bonus package was £2.4M. The average UK pay in 2014 was £26,500 or 1.1% of what anti-elitist Dacre earned that year. The highest paid public official, and this by a long chalk, in 2015 was the Attorney-General at £205,000 or 8.5% of what public sector scourge Dacre earned the previous year. We might think about Jonathan Isaby, the Chief Executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance that campaigns against public sector pay in the interests of transparency – but, alas, so profound is his commitment to transparency that his pay isn’t on the public record, nor are the identities of the donors that fund the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Strange, perhaps, to learn that the Taxpayers’ Alliance are enthusiastic advocates of freedom of information, but we surely can’t doubt that everyone associated with them is an assiduous taxpayer, can we?

So let’s think about all that, let’s understand the hypocrisy of those who decry the consequences of what they advocate, and the underlying agenda they champion, and the kind of world they really want to see.