Universities have a privileged position in Britain.
The development and testing of Covid vaccines in part justifies this. The
scientists worldwide who were behind this showed that they are worth funding
because what they do is not merely clever, but useful.
While many businesses have failed in Britain due to
lockdown and social distancing, universities were allowed to transport students
up and down the country and across the world even when this was completely
unnecessary in most subjects. Students have mostly been learning virtually on
campus anyway and they could have done so just as well at home. But
universities would have gone bust if halls of residence were empty and students
might not have bothered to go at all if they had been kept from campus. But why
should universities be given special treatment over Debenhams or the local pub?
Governments can legitimately point to the usefulness
to society of a university that helps develop a medicine or a new method of
building bridges. But it is not the whole university that does this, but rather
a small part. Many university departments produce work that is not merely
useless, but rather harmful.
I had a look recently at the books and journal
articles produced by Arts and Social Science faculties at various British
universities. Some academic journals have publicly available statistics for how
many people have read an article. What I discovered was that a typical journal
article was frequently read by hardly anyone. If only thirty people read your
article, some of them accidentally stumbling across it, some of them search
engine bots, it’s unclear what the purpose of your writing it was. Yet these writers
and these journals are paid for by universities at enormous cost. Why pay
people to write words that almost no one wants to read? You might as well pay them to dig holes and
fill them in again.
Academics must continually publish books and journal
articles in order to remain employed. There is in theory quality control
because much of this work is peer reviewed. But the problem is that the peers
are all remarkably similar. They nearly all hold the same leftish views. They nearly
all subscribe to the latest woke ideology and they nearly all think that
certain views are not merely wrong but ruled out in advance.
Conservative common-sense views that disagree with
woke ideology such as I write will not be published in academic journals. If a
person wrote a reasoned critique of feminist theory, it would not be published
in a feminist journal. Someone who wants to keep their job has to pretend to
hold views that they don’t. It is necessary to play the game, stick to the
rules and hide.
When I began studying at university political ideology
was a non-issue in philosophy and theology. Students were expected to read and
understand difficult books and journal articles and to use reason to critique
them. The topics that people wrote about had nothing whatsoever to do with
race, disability, sex, sexuality and transgenderism or any of the other woke
categories. These were simply nonissues or at best fringe issues. The topics
studied were broadly similar to those that had been studied for centuries.
I was encouraged as a student to write clearly and to
justify each point I made with a rational argument. I could write anything I
pleased so long as I could justify it. Nothing was forbidden. Nothing at all.
The first thing that changed was that Arts and Social
Science subjects became political. Whereas previously someone’s political views
had been unknown and irrelevant, they began to become central. The fringe woke
topics began to take over subjects so that they became not merely an aspect of
each subject, but the whole subject. The result is that many subjects are now
obsessed with race, sex, sexuality gender transgender etc.
The addition of these topics plus a jargon that goes
with them has made much of academic writing unreadable. It is unclear what the
argument is because it cannot be seen through sentences filled with jargon and
terms that are impossible to define. Like Humpty Dumpty Postmodernism means
what I want it to mean.
The students who follow academic courses dominated by
woke ideology are not taught to write clearly and to use reasoned argument.
Rather they are taught to follow the party line and condemn anyone who doesn’t.
In the Soviet Union some good work was done in subjects
that did not involve Marxist Leninist ideology such as mathematics or even archaeology,
but whatever could be interpreted politically was worthless because it was
forbidden to disagree with the Party. But this situation has exactly been
mirrored in modern British universities. It’s not the ideology that makes the
work worthless, it’s that only one view is allowed. Without a Conservative critique
left-wing thought ceases to be interesting, because it doesn’t even have to
argue with anyone. Left-wing thinking becomes lazy and then wonders why it
convinces no one outside university precisely because it has forbidden debate. Eventually
after seventy years or so it collapses.
What you get after four years of woke education is an
employee seeking to be offended by everything and treating jokes as
micro-aggressions. He hasn’t learned anything useful, but rather lots that is
harmful. He can’t think for himself because everything he has been taught has
told him he must agree with someone else. He is educationally worse than when
he was eighteen.
While certain university departments such as science
and medicine remain useful, there is always the danger that they become
infected by those that are not. If you can have feminist philosophy, why not
feminist physics? If homosexuality becomes an important theological topic, what
is to stop it becoming a crucial aspect of engineering?
We have already seen how transgenderism took over the
medical establishment. The danger is that the woke ideology that has
essentially destroyed the Arts and Social sciences is allowed to spread still
further.
This year we have learned how wokeism can spread far
more than anyone could possibly have thought possible. When taking the knee
began it was seen by many Americans as an extreme and unpatriotic response to
the National Anthem. But in a remarkably short time there has been huge social
pressure to comply with knee taking and any dissent is condemned.
Ideas that would have been considered bizarre by every
academic thirty years ago are now obligatory. The problem is not so much now,
but thirty years from now.
What will we be forced to believe in 2050? Here are
some predictions that may seem ludicrous, but much of what is now mainstream
was ludicrous in 1985.
1. White people will be forced to apologise to black
people and pay them alimony because of slavery.
2. There will be no such thing as sex or gender, but only
a spectrum of sexual identities.
3. It will be possible to “change” not merely sex, but
race and species.
4. Homosexuals will demand the right to surgery that
enables them to have children.
5. It will be illegal to discriminate against someone
on the grounds that he has fewer qualifications or less intelligence than
someone else by denying him a job, because this is ableist.
6. Women’s sport will cease to exist.
7. It will be forbidden to say I gave birth to a boy
or a girl. Parents will have to wait for the child to decide where it is on the
gender spectrum.
8. It will be illegal for someone to discriminate
while dating or marrying on the grounds of genitalia.
9. Although race will be abolished because we can be
any race we please, everything we say or do will still be considered racist.
10. We will have to ask people not merely which
pronouns they prefer but what race and species they are and whether they wish
to be described as tall, short, fat or thin. It will be illegal to describe
someone in a way ze dislikes.
Only parts of universities deserve the privileged
position given them, because only parts are turning out educated students who
go on to do useful work. The Arts and Social sciences are not merely useless,
they are positively harmful. Where Arts subjects formerly taught students to
reason, to write and to think, they now merely teach a leftish woke conformism
which damages the student and society as a whole.
To send arts and social science students up and down
the country infecting themselves and others is unjustified in terms of the
utility of what they study. What they study puts them into debt that they will
never pay back because whatever their subject is called it is teaching them
merely to be unemployable. Worse that that these subjects spread their woke
disease gradually but inexorably to the rest of society and may in time infect those
university departments that are still doing things that are useful.