Universities in the moral maze
Has academia replaced its role as custodian of reason by social engineering and propaganda?
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On this week’s edition of BBC Radio’s Moral Maze , my colleagues and I discussed the role of the university.
For years, there’s been concern about so-called “Mickey Mouse” degrees that do nothing to boost job prospects. Eight British universities are currently under investigation for providing poor quality degrees. The proportion of first-class degrees has increased so much that at this rate it’s been estimated that by 2061 all undergraduates will gain a first.
The expansion of the universities in the nineties was aimed to increase social mobility. But have university standards been sacrificed to social engineering? Are so many young people really suited to the disciplines of academia, or would they be better served by vocational training courses? Have declining standards substituted propaganda for knowledge, replacing “how to think” by “what to think”? And with the principal aim no longer the training of the mind, is this why the universities have ceased to be the guardians of ideas and free expression and have become instead engines of coerced conformity and suppression of dissent?
My co-panellists were Ella Whelan, Matthew Taylor and Mona Siddiqui. Our witnesses were Rachel Hewitt, chief executive at Million Plus, the “association for modern universities”; Harry Lambert, senior politics correspondent at the New Statesman; Edith Hall, professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Durham; and Dennis Hayes, professor of education at the University of Derby.
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