Will our universities ever recover from Covid?

From job losses to course closures, British universities are in meltdown — as panicked institutions are desperately shedding their crumbling 20th century identities. Yet if academics, subjects and even physical buildings all look set to go, with administrators scrambling to be “fit for purpose” in a new world of metrics and edutainment, the sector seems strangely unwilling to reflect on why the collapse has come.

There are plenty of candidates here. Tuition fees and burgeoning student numbers are two obvious examples, together encouraging universities to compete for an unsustainable market of teenage “customers”. More recent changes haven’t helped either, particularly a national insurance hike set to cost higher education some £372 million. In the end though, these challenges only became existential after one single event: Covid. Amid all the hand-wringing over the sector’s current crisis, its failure to rise to the challenge of the pandemic has provoked curiously little attention.

During the first lockdown, universities, like schools, were legally required to treat students as germs on legs. They were first closed down, then subjected to a range of bizarre “social distancing” requirements that made large in-person lectures impossible. But as the months went on, and government guidance promoted the importance of face-to-face teaching, many institutions dragged their feet. Having been forced to push through strategies of emergency remote teaching, it seemed safer and easier to stick with it. That’s despite having exhorted a new intake of freshers to move to campus so they could take up (read: pay for) a “student experience” that effectively meant being locked up in their rooms.

From a hard-nosed business perspective, the desperation to retain students as fee-paying bodies, even while providing an experience that was neither educational nor social, was the logical outcome of a policy approach that sees students primarily as units of funding. It was also, ironically, the outcome of an attitude to university governance that has long prioritised safety and satisfaction over robust education and academic freedom.

Universities have spent so long pandering to the idea that their role is to give the student-consumer “what they want” — higher grades for less effort; the gamification of learning in place of reading books; safe spaces in which they can be shielded from uncomfortable ideas — that they couldn’t compute why bedroom learning was not, in fact, any kind of education at all.

This was not what students wanted. Remember the scenes from the University of Manchester, with angry teenagers tearing down the steel “cages” built around their accommodation? Or what about the angry scenes of kids trapped at a party when the fire alarm went off? The door was faulty, but the safety messages reissued by the university emphasised that “illegal” large gatherings were putting students’ health and safety at risk. Nor, of course, was Manchester the only university to turn its campus into a student-funded quarantine camp, even if others showed slightly more flexibility. For my part, I largely taught in person outside of formal lockdowns. The masks, visors and distancing made it very weird, but at least I got to know students by their eyebrows.

For over a year, at any rate, the central purpose of higher education was subsumed beneath a veil of hysterical safetyism, eagerly fuelled by the main academics’ union. The University and College Union (UCU) set its face against on-campus teaching, warning that asking students back would turn them into the “care homes of the second wave”. No less telling, it also briefed its members about the dangers of arguing that “staff are required to work on campus and/or deliver face-to-face teaching or services”. When your own union claims your job is inessential, you might not be surprised if a wave of redundancies follows — especially when the same union decides that the biggest threat to academics’ health is freedom of speech.

How else to explain the attacks against anyone who questioned the wisdom of lockdowns, with many academics finding themselves subject to vicious smear campaigns from colleagues and government officials alike? In this time of dangerous uncertainty, when societies were dealing with literal matters of life and death, there was an urgent need for academic collaboration and debate. Instead, debate was stifled, with similar attitudes soon spreading to other corners of the academy. In October 2021, to give one example, philosophy professor Kathleen Stock left her post at the University of Sussex following an intimidation campaign by students and academics opposed to her gender-critical views. Far from supporting their colleague, the local UCU branch called for a university-wide investigation into “transphobia”.

Nor was this mania to die down with Covid. The UCU has continued to dismiss concerns about academic freedom as a “sideshow” invented by the Right, while also opposing the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, with the union suggesting “there is no real evidence” of a free speech crisis on campus. Tell that to the hundreds of academics who signed an open letter imploring the Government to implement the remaining provisions of the Act, something even Keir Starmer now seems willing to accept.

Not, of course, that this is a purely British problem. Across the world, higher education’s failure to prioritise academic inquiry during Covid has been a huge blow to its legitimacy. Yet in the UK, where the public has long raised concerns about the status and value of degrees in our massified, financialised system, people are now questioning the worth of university altogether. This not only speaks to how lightly we hold our cultural heritage: it is a terrible shame for the kids. Students and parents continue to be broadly positive about higher education, despite its problems. But when the sector is tearing itself apart, why should the public come to the rescue?

A year ago, Professor Shitij Kapur, vice chancellor of King’s College London, argued that UK universities are trapped in a “triangle of sadness” between “aspiring students who feel burdened with debt and uncertain prospects, a stretched government that has allowed tuition fees to fall far behind inflation, and beleaguered university staff who feel caught in the middle”. To escape this mess, we need an unflinching discussion of a single basic question: what are universities for? To come to an answer, meanwhile, we need people committed to the intellectual and educational purpose of higher education and prepared to acknowledge previous mistakes. Otherwise, we’ll be left with the policy fudge we have right now, a consultant-led drive to achieve institutional “sustainability” by cutting back the things that give universities their heart: subjects, academics, and students who are there to broaden their minds.

This article was first published by UnHerd.