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.

Trumping rationality

This week will see the outcome of the US Presidential election, with the possibility of the victory of Donald Trump. If this occurs it will have profound consequences not just for the USA but for the world. It is hardly worth me adding to the many voices that view the prospect of a bombastic, ignorant, vicious narcissist in the White House with alarm.

But whether or not he is elected, Trump’s popularity has a significance as part of the wider rise of a nationalist populism (very evident in Brexit Britain) which can be read as the illegitimate offspring of four decades of neo-liberal globalization. Those decades, as I argue in chapter five of my book, are both the condition and consequence of much contemporary organizational practice. A key theme of nationalist populism is an angry backlash against the loss of secure employment and against immigration, both of which can be ascribed to globalization.

Hence Trump rails against NAFTA, just as Brexiters rail against the EU. At the same time, the very evident crisis of neo-liberalism that has been ongoing since 2008 has not only born down hard on employment and public spending but also opened up a profound sense of injustice and inequality. Allied with this is the idea that powerful elites – corporate, financial, political and intellectual – are profiting at the expense of and unaccountable to the people.

Something like this has become a fairly standard analysis of nationalist populism from the liberal-left (and elements of the right as well), and it clearly captures something of what is going on. However, I feel increasingly unpersuaded by it, for several reasons. Not least because under the guise of understanding, it exhibits a kind of patronizing liberal guilt: ‘those poor little people, left behind by neo-liberal globalization, of course they are angry’. That patronizes because it absolves nationalist populists from responsibility for their choices and actions. There is no reason why their reaction has to be one of vicious denigration of immigrants, for example. Nor is there any reason why it should lead to making choices which will not improve, but worsen, the lot of the left behind.

The liberal-left are often associated – by nationalist populists especially, as it happens – with ‘political correctness’, but there is a new political correctness associated with nationalist populism in which it is unsayable to call out stupidity. Because to do so is just another sign of elitism. We are ‘the people’, and you cannot question the ‘will of the people’ or you are ‘the enemy of the people’. But we are all people, and we are all equally capable of stupidity, and all equally challengeable as to the basis of what we do and think. There are not special rules for those people who proclaim themselves, and only themselves, as ‘the people’.

Nor does it make much sense to think that nationalist populism is confined to those left behind by globalization. In the US (and the UK) it seems as if something like half the electorate is willing to vote for nationalist populism. So many of them are well to do and by no means ‘left behind’ (for some fascinating data on this, see this report showing that Trump’s supporters are actually better off than most Americans). Equally, the other half of the population can hardly be described as ‘the elite’ – or if it can, that’s a hell of a big elite. And in both the US and the UK the populist leaders are themselves very obviously members of the elite, Donald Trump being an obvious example with his inherited wealth and massive business empire.

Beyond all that, nationalist populism long precedes neo-liberal globalization. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate in the 1964 Presidential contest, with whom Trump is often compared is an obvious example. So is McCarthyism, perhaps the most shameful element of Twentieth century US history. Both these comparators relate to the period of post-war US prosperity and progress whose loss is supposed to account for the nationalist populism of Trump. Going further back we can see in the America First Committee and Charles Lindbergh very similar political positions. In the UK, it can be seen in Powellism and Thatcherism.

So nationalist populism has long been with us, and whatever the failings of neo-liberal globalization we should not hesitate to say that it is the wrong answer, even if to the right question. But that proposition runs into trouble for a reason which is perhaps new. The philosophical underpinnings of right and wrong answers have been substantially battered by the intellectual climate of postmodernism that is more or less coterminous with neo-liberalism. That is to say, the critique of rationality that has dominated recent decades of intellectual debate has found an unhappy partner in the ‘post-truth’ politics of nationalist populism. So evidence, expertise and rational debate can themselves be dismissed as just another way that ‘the elite’ tries to put one over on ‘the people’. It is a rich and bitter irony that the rarefied intellectual salons of 1970s Paris are being channelled to the American Rust Belt and the former mining towns of Britain. The more bitter since those Parisian salons were also where the Enlightenment was in some part born, and which had so profound a part in the formation and constitution of the United States.

Turkeys and Christmas

Before the virtual ink had dried on my last post, the campaign for the UK to leave the EU produced their biggest and, so far, most pernicious, lie with the launch of a poster stating: “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU”. The idea – signalled in the population figure – is to whip up fears of Turkish – meaning Muslim – immigration to the UK.

The lie is that Turkey is not joining the EU. They applied to do so in 1987 but negotiations did not start until 2005. Joining requires the opening and closing of 35 ‘chapters’ or areas of agreement, of which so far only 15 have been opened and just one closed. Turkey is nowhere near to joining the EU and in any case its joining could be vetoed by any member state and almost certainly would be. In some ways it is further than ever from joining because of its deteriorating human rights and democracy record. And, for that matter, Turkey itself is far less interested in EU membership than in the past: its longstanding failure to join has led it to reposition itself strategically away from Europe and towards being a middle-eastern regional power.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Turkey or its EU negotiations, but the expert opinion is clear, as in this recent summary:

“To infer that Turkey may one day soon join the EU is to reveal a fundamental ignorance of the political and procedural realities of the EU and of its enlargement process. Turkish membership of the EU is at best a distant prospect.”

Reading – as, sadly, I do – many internet discussion forums about the EU Referendum it was interesting and depressing to see how the lie that ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ was defended. One line was to say – mendaciously – that the recent deal by ‘Germany’ to give Turks visa-free access to the Schengen zone meant that they had ‘free movement rights’. It doesn’t (three month visa-free travel is not the same as free movement) and, anyway, the deal may not go ahead because it is not ‘Germany’ that decides but the democratically elected EU Parliament which is blocking or at least modifying the deal which, for that matter, Turkey may not accept. And even if this were to happen then, of course, it would not mean that Turkish membership of the EU was any closer.

Another line of defence was downright peculiar. It was that ‘joining’ is the present continuous tense and therefore the poster was true since Turkey was ‘in the process’ of joining. This kind of sophistry gives sophistry a bad name. If I say that ‘I am joining the campaign to leave the EU’ any reasonable person would think that means that it is going to happen, not that I am in a process that might or might not end in the future in me becoming a member of the campaign.

The wider context for this anti-immigrant sentiment associated with a supposedly anti-elitist movement is the well-worn theme of how the consequences of economic crisis play out. It never has a happy ending, not least for the ‘ordinary, salt of the earth folk’ that the anti-elite elitists play for fools in the way that the Brexit advocates are currently trying to do. For their goal is not to help, sustain and support ‘ordinary people’ in the face of global capitalism, but to expose them to the most extreme form of unregulated global capitalism. Those who fall for it are voting, like the proverbial Turkeys, for Christmas.

Buyer's remorse

This post in many ways follows on from the previous one and indeed a series of posts recently where I have circled around issues of nostalgia and populism. These issues seem to me to be at the core of current politics, and central to understanding contemporary organizations within that politics.

Yesterday, the Mail columnist Peter Hitchens wrote an extraordinary and I think noteworthy opinion piece. Hitchens, for those who don’t know him, has for many years been a provocative right-wing journalist. Younger brother of the late Christopher Hitchens, he is by no means predictable in his views and although I mainly find them objectionable he can’t be dismissed in the way that one might, say, dismiss those of right-wing controversialists like Richard Littlejohn or Katie Hopkins who also write for the Mail.

In his piece, Hitchens laments having fallen for the free market politics of the Thatcher era, which he now sees as a "con that ruined Britain". In particular he bemoans the consequences of privatization, deindustrialization and globalization remarking, to quote just one sentence:

“How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.”

Similarly, Hitchens remarks on the loss of secure employment and stable communities that accompany this transformation.

Well, it’s rather late in the day for him to be expressing buyer’s remorse. After all, it’s not as if the consequences of the policies he endorsed were not warned of. But I am struck by how close his views now seem to some of those expressed in my own book, for example:

“One of the many organizational consequences of all this [neo-liberalism] is to break the connection between businesses, places and communities” (p. 105)

But after listing a wide array of formerly British brands now sold off or disappeared, I go on to say that this is not a nostalgic, nationalist lament; whereas I think that that is exactly what Hitchens offers. What he seems to hanker for is the world of his 1950s childhood, with the apparent certainties it contained (but which, perhaps, only seem so in the way that childhood at any period does).

What I think is significant about this is the way it derives from a fissure that was always present in Thatcherism between nationalist traditionalism and free market globalism. They are necessarily contradictory because free markets inevitably corrode social traditionalism whilst, of course, globalism inevitably corrodes nationalism. Both Thatcher and Regan managed to hold this contradiction together for a while, but its consequences are now glaringly apparent.

They are apparent in the EU Referendum debate, about which I have already written plenty on this blog, but especially in the current wave of support for Donald Trump in the US. This has been described as a kind of cry of agony of the traditional US working and middle classes, for whom the security of the post-war consensus has been eviscerated. And what is so important to understand is that this comes in large part from the same segment of the population that, like Hitchens, so enthusiastically supported Reagan (and, in the UK, Thatcher) to pursue precisely the policies the consequences of which they now lament.

So what we are now seeing is the long-term consequences of the incoherence of the neo-liberal political narrative (i.e. not simply of neo-liberal economics) and it is almost bound to turn nasty as the nationalist and traditionalist strand of that narrative becomes dominant. Remorseful buyers want their money back but, alas, it has already been spent and so remorse turns to anger, but an anger misdirected at foreigners, immigrants, refugees, the disabled and so on. True it also blames ‘elites’, but in an incoherent and contradictory way, shown not least by taking as its champion a figure such as Trump who so obviously belongs to an elite, by any reckoning.

Of course in both the US and the UK (and elsewhere) there is a left-wing version of this which is more coherent in its analysis and more progressive in its solutions, but likely in both cases to struggle to achieve electoral success (though I may be proved wrong about that). Indeed, in the European context, it is this which makes the EU so important, as a regional, rather than nationalist or globalist, response to a situation which whilst certainly implicated in neo-liberalism also offers some potentials for social democracy. These potentials, which the recently launched Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (Diem25) seeks to realise, offer some kind of hopeful response to the calamitous unwinding of the neo-liberal experiment.

At all events, Hitchens’ dream of a lost and mythical England is not the right response, any more than is Trump’s sloganizing about making America great again. At best these can lead only to another fit of buyer’s remorse in which their supporters suffer the further disillusionment their inevitable failure would bring. To what extremes would they then turn?

What's in a picture?

Further to my recent post on the perils of Twitter, another British politician has come a cropper because of a tweet. This time the victim (or villain, depending on your take) is Emily Thornberry, who tweeted a photo of a house displaying large St George’s flags (i.e. the English flag) and with a white van parked outside. The context of this is a little complicated to understand outside of England so I will try to summarise it.

The house that was pictured is in the constituency of Rochester and Strood, where there was a by-election yesterday which was won by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) who are opposed to British membership of the EU and to what they believe are too high levels of immigration. If you want some background, I have written about UKIP elsewhere, and also about British debates about immigration. UKIP have recently attracted high levels of electoral support, first in European elections and now in two by-elections where they have won seats in the British parliament.

Whilst being a party of the Thatcherite Right, they have a populist appeal that is increasingly attracting traditional working-class Labour voters in a way not dissimilar to the way that Thatcher herself was able to do in fact. This is where the tweeted image becomes important. The English flags can be taken to reference a particular strand of working-class English nationalism. ‘White van man’ is an expression connoting a stereotypical working class tradesman – not, actually, the traditional industrial working class, then, but perhaps a skilled, self-employed worker. Again, very much the segment of the working class that Thatcherism appealed to, and now UKIP. Thus Thornberry’s tweet was widely interpreted as derogatory towards working class voters, and she resigned her position as a member of Labour’s front bench.

This interpretation has great purchase because it plays into a narrative whereby Labour politicians (and politicians in general) are depicted as an out of touch ‘metropolitan elite’ who are alien to working class sentiment and interests. That Thornberry is an MP for Islington, stereotypically a part of London associated with multi-culturalism and 'trendy lefties', compounded this. It is an aspect of the cosmopolitans and locals split I discussed in another post, and has it counterpart in many countries apart from Britain

This situation is fraught with strange ironies – the UKIP leader and its two MPs are all men educated at elite, fee-paying public schools who used to work in the City of London, and so hardly horny handed sons of the toil, and UKIP are notably cool on trade union and employment rights whilst being four-square behind global free markets and deregulation. Elitist Emily Thornberry, by contrast, grew up on a council estate and went to a State school.  As for the Labour Party, its leader is simultaneously denounced as a left wing firebrand and as having abandoned its left wing roots. That is all part of the long-term consequences of the Blairite New Labour project, and is another topic.

What I want to focus on here is something different. It is that the tweeted picture was instantly read in a particular way. It had no accompanying text other than to say that it was taken in Rochester, so it was almost entirely a matter of the picture being interpreted in the way that it was. Other interpretations were surely possible. It could have been taken to mean that this was a working-class seat that Labour should be aiming to win (they have held it in the past), for example. Or it could just be seen as the habitual Twitter post saying ‘this is where I am today’. But John Mann, a Labour MP, criticised Thornberry’s tweet because he said that the symbols of the English flag and the white van were emblematic of traditional Labour values, so she had insulted traditional Labour voters. This seems truly peculiar: if it is the case (which I doubt) that these were symbols of Labour values then how could it be ‘insulting’ for a Labour politician to depict them?

That it was read the way that it was I think points to another irony of the present political situation. It is a pervasive trope of UKIP supporters that they are hamstrung by ‘political correctness’ and are not ‘allowed to say what they really think’ as a result; in particular that they are ‘not allowed to talk about immigration’ (bizarre, since it is constantly talked about). Yet what this episode shows is something quite different. Let’s assume that the picture did indeed mean something like: ‘look, this is the kind of people who vote UKIP: English nationalists from the self-employed skilled working class’. Would this really be so awful? Isn’t it the case that, as UKIP themselves say, they attract such support? Is it so terribly derogatory and sneering to say this, and yet fine to ‘sneer’ at the ‘middle-class metropolitan elite’? Isn’t the real ‘political correctness’ in play that any implicit criticism of UKIP support is immediately positioned as unacceptable?

We seem to be a long way from organization theory, I know, but that is not really so. What lies beneath all of this is the nature and consequences of global capitalism and in particular the international mobility of what management textbooks would call the human resource. Politics in Britain, as in many other countries, is struggling to come to terms with what this means – in terms of employment, wages, employment protection, welfare, healthcare and communities. These are serious issues for all of us and yet no politician seems able to discuss them seriously. Into that gap has stepped, in Britain, the beery, blokeish populism of UKIP but that offers no realistic answers. That would not matter, except that by positioning elitism in terms of things like the supposedly sneering nature of a tweeted photo this populism makes it all but impossible to discuss the actions of the real elite, who do not tweet but buy and sell our companies, jobs, lives and livelihoods and for whom welfare, healthcare and community are entirely irrelevant. UKIP have nothing to say about this, of course, but nor do any of the main political parties in Britain.