Trashing universities is now a populist position
David Kernohan,
WonkHe,
Nov 09, 2024
I suppose I would agree with a lot of what David Kernohan offers in this long and winding discussion of the populist critique of the university, but I'm also finding myself disagreeing with a lot of it. With Kernohan, I reject the core of the critique, which is to assert that today's universities focus on "indoctrination" or "the priming of the younger generation around identity politics" and the consequent "rise of the bureaucratic class." It's a red herring. What the populist critique does tap into (and we see it even in Kernohan's retelling of the Kemi Badenoch origin story) is the idea that university is funded by an elite, for an elite, and otherwise blocks opportunities at the door for the rest of us.
When universities decided that raising tuition fees was a viable strategy, they laid the foundation for populist attacks against them. It's not so much the idea that "I could have gone to Oxford" as it is the idea of "a growing consensus that we can't just keep expanding university provision." If the doors to opportunity are being locked, and it's a different type of people being granted admission, why not tear down the institution? After all (goes the argument) it's not like they "disseminate truth and knowledge" or "train the next generation of young minds to actually anticipate the world as it is (and) to apply first principles to critical and difficult problems." Or, bluntly, if universities aren't empowering us (the people), what's the point of them?
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