Why universities are dying.

The diversity obsession, bad managers and ideological extremists are killing campus

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MATT GOODWIN

Ten days ago, Lord (William) Hague gave his inaugural speech as the new Chancellor of Oxford University. He said some very interesting things.

“Oxford”, declared Hague, is “a home of free speech”. It’s a place where people have “a duty to listen to and include others, to have an open mind, and to regard diversity of thought as a strength”. Oxford, he went on:

“… is a place where we can disagree vigorously while sheltering each other from the abuse and hatred that are so often a substitute for rational opinion … The concern of a university is that opinions are reached on the basis of truth, reason, and knowledge, which in turn requires thinking and speaking with freedom”.

It all sounds rather noble and admirable. But is it true?

Not so, says historian Niall Ferguson, who in a brilliant essay in The Times this weekend points out the reality of what life is really like on campus —and it’s very different from the rosy picture painted by Lord Hague.

In both Britain and America, Ferguson rightly notes, universities have been engulfed by multiple crises. In Britain, many are now grappling with bankruptcy, having massively over-expanded in the 2000s and the 2010s.

At least four of our most elite universities are dumping staff to try and balance the books while many more further down the league table have been doing so for years, including my old University of Kent which started to offer professors voluntary redundancy to try and cut costs.

In America, too, federal funding for the most elite universities or colleges looks set to be slashed as Team Trump turn their sights on campus while, more importantly, many prominent individual billionaire and millionaire donors have withdrawn support, having been understandably horrified by the recent displays of left-wing extremism and anti-Semitism after the Islamist attacks on Israel on October 7th.

But as Ferguson hints, and as I explain in my book Bad Education, the financial problems afflicting universities are really just the start of a much deeper crisis:

“Despite the staringly obvious problems that programmes to promote “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” have caused at the Ivy League universities, the University of Oxford’s leadership seems intent on going down the same path to perdition. It is astonishing, after all the lunacy we have seen in the elite US colleges in the past year and a half, that Oxford employs 59 staff in DEI roles, at a cost of £2.5 million before pensions and benefits. Even more baffling, given the dire state of the university finances, is the 20% increase in DEI staff nationwide since 2022. (UK bureaucrats prefer EDI. I prefer DIE, because that is what the institutions that go down this path will ultimately do.)”

Too many of Britain’s universities, in other words, are embracing the openly political and deeply divisive DEI agenda which does the opposite of what it claims to do.

Diversity is the new conformity on campus, a new religion that celebrates all forms of diversity except the diversity of thought and opinion that Lord Hague talks about.

Equality sounds nice but in reality it means forcing equal outcomes on different groups which equates to lowering standards and discriminating against white students. And Inclusion means excluding the views of centre-right and gender critical academics who question or challenge the dominant orthodoxy on campus.

The effects of this openly political agenda on students are also negative. As Ferguson, who has taught in both America and Britain, points out:

“According to the Foundation for Individual Rights of Expression (Fire), the number of deplatforming attempts at US campuses quadrupled between 2010 and 2017, dipped during the pandemic, and then soared to a new peak … This explains why last year, according to Fire, 17% of American students said they felt unable express their opinion on a subject on at least two occasions a week because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond. More than half (54% ) said of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that it was difficult to “have an open and honest conversation about [it] on campus” … At Harvard, 74% of students say they would be “uncomfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic”.

Academics who violate or merely challenge the new religion on campus also suffer, with the old-fashioned notions of ‘academic freedom’ (the ability to research or teach whatever one likes without having to suffer negative consequences) and ‘tenure’ (which gives academics long-term job security) looking exactly that —out-of-date.

Many prominent academics —Kathleen Stock, Eric Kaufmann, Joshua Katz, Roland Fryer, Amy Wax, among many others—have faced harassment and bullying from university woke bureaucrats and academics.

I’ve also written about my own experience of what happened when I simply tried to invite centre-right and counter-cultural thinkers onto campus to speak to our students, as well as what happened when I publicly accepted and supported the vote for Brexit, believing it was important for democracy to see it through.

Across the West, as Ferguson points out, you can now see the miserable results that this politicisation of campus has produced.

It’s not just that many students and faculty now feel completely unable to express what Lord Hague talks about, genuine diversity of opinion, it’s also reflected in many other negative changes —idiotic protests, student mobs, open letters demanding that nonconformists be sacked, rampant plagiarism, countless speech codes, and a total obsession with prioritising the ‘emotional safety’ of students over academic standards.

This is what happens, put simply, when institutions become utterly obsessed with prioritising radical political dogma like Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion above intellectual merit. Everything we are witnessing on campus today is not just the result of a financial crisis but, more fundamentally, the product of transforming what are supposed to be ideologically neutral public institutions into activist woke madrassas.

And at the heart it, argues Ferguson, is not just the proliferation of woke ideology among campus radicals but something more mundane but just as important: bad governance. The crisis on campus is not so much an ideological revolution as one that reflects just how badly these organisations are now run:

“… my view is that the crisis in higher education was, at root, the result of disastrously bad governance. In some cases, presidents were too eager to promote progressive politics, forgetting that universities should not be political entities. In others, it was the faculty who decided to hound conservatives out of every department or to fire up the student radicals. And in still others, the DEI thought-police took over. But the common factor has been that boards of trustees have been woefully negligent stewards.”

From one university to the next, it’s often been people with the ultimate responsibility who have deliberately subverted or ignored the goal of university founders to prioritise truth, scientific knowledge, and reason through good faith debate.

In far too many cases, universities and colleges have been placed into the hands of former bankers, financiers, and people plucked from other cosy jobs in the private sector who, let’s be frank, have absolutely no understanding of the traditional virtues of academic life —free speech, academic freedom, the need to prioritise scientific knowledge above woke dogma.

Many just want an easy life and the social status that goes with running a college, and so they continuously bend to the demands of student mobs and activist radicals rather than taking a stand to actually defend the things universities are meant to prioritise.

Consider the recent shocking case of Buckingham, where Vice Chancellor James Tooley faced a coordinated attempt by woke technocrats and university managers to oust him from his role.

His crime?

Tooley wanted to turn up the volume in the West’s crusade against the Woke, having already appointed Eric Kaufmann to lead a new research centre on heterodox social science (the first to offer courses in the study of woke) and now wanting to appoint a number of prominent counter-cultural scholars, including Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and myself.

And who sought to oust Tooley? As Ferguson points out, the chair of Buckingham council is a man named Mark Qualter —a former banker who worked at RBS/NatWest and went to the School of Oriental and African Studies, one of the most left-wing universities in the country.

In what strange world is a banker like this exercising power over a man like James Tooley, whose seminal work on private schools in the slums of India has proved be influential on the global stage? And why, exactly, is this man in charge of a university like Buckingham, which has a long track record of defending free speech?

It is merely the latest example of the forces that are now undermining the things Lord Hague trumpeted in his inaugural speech at Oxford ten days ago.

You can either have free speech, free expression, diversity of thought, and good faith debate. Or you can have massively inflated university bureaucracies that cave to the woke mob, impose DEI from above, and are led by hapless business managers with no serious background in academic life. You can’t have both.

I know this. Every decent academic around the world knows this. And so do more than a few university students who are well aware of the fact they are paying good money for a university education that is no longer giving them the things it used to give. The only question is when will our politicians, university leaders like Lord Hague and many others like him also grasp this dark reality and, finally, for the sake of our students, do something about it?

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This article (Why universities are dying.) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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