Britain’s universities are feeding their own dest ruction

As observers of the trendy psychedelic scene know well, it is strongly 
advised that anyone who wants to experiment, anyone who wants to go on 
‘a trip’, should only do so when their lives are otherwise content. In 
other words, when no negative moods might impinge on the intentional 
lunacy. It is therefore unfortunate that Britain’s universities seem to 
have embarked on a truly hallucinatory episode, complete with moments of 
florid self-harm, just as every economic force in the universe seems 
intent on their destruction.

Consider the surreal visions now swirling through the Oxbridge 
quadrangles. First we have Professor Jason Arday, Cambridge’s youngest 
ever black professor, whose heroic backstory is falling apart under 
scrutiny. Arday says he once ran 30 marathons in 35 days, despite a 
right leg swollen to twice its normal size. It seems odd that nobody 
noticed a man with a leg the size of Italy pounding out his 27th marathon.

Arday also reportedly claimed an appearance on Seven Up, the 
world-famous documentary that began following its subjects two decades 
before he was born. Add to that the elusive charity millions he has 
supposedly raised and some very serious plagiarism allegations, and it 
really doesn’t look good. And how has Cambridge University responded? 
Instead of admitting error, of any kind, our second-oldest university 
has chosen to shoot the messengers and ignore the message.

Meanwhile, the Oxford Union, the world’s most famous nursery of 
statesmen, has spent the 2020s auditioning for panto. Its 
president-elect last year greeted the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a 
man he personally debated in May that year, with the Instagram verdict: 
‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool.’

Fast forward to June this year, when the Union invited Tommy Robinson to 
debate Islam. Thanks to footage revealed only later, we now know that a 
speaker helpfully and gleefully informed Our Tommeh that, without the 
hired security, the mob outside would have beaten him to death.

Nor is the fever confined to Oxbridge. The past decade of campus life 
has seen endless depressing turmoil: the writer Germaine Greer needed 
bodyguards to deliver a lecture at Cardiff, Julie Bindel was attacked 
outside her own lecture at Edinburgh, and Kathleen Stock, guilty of 
believing in biological sex, was driven out of Sussex by masked 
protesters with flares, a debacle for which the regulator later fined 
the university £585,000. Sussex later appealed the fine and it was 
overturned by the High Court in April.

Of course, undergraduates being bonkers is an old story, and 
universities being woke, weak or hypocritical is nothing new. The 
difference on this occasion is the wretched timing. Even as our 
universities are gleefully trashing their reputations, they stand 
perilously close to an economic and intellectual abyss.

First, the money. The universities’ regulator expects 45 per cent of 
English institutions to end this academic year in deficit. Half of our 
universities have axed courses; nearly one in five have closed whole 
departments. Meanwhile, the foreign students who subsidised everything 
are staying away – numbers are down 14 per cent since a visa squeeze. A 
parliamentary report in May had ‘threat of insolvency’ in the title, 
which is not a phrase you’d put in the prospectus.

Then, the demography. The number of British 18-year-olds will peak 
around 2030, then fall remorselessly for many years as the post-2012 
baby bust feeds through. The British fertility rate is 1.4 and 
declining. Only mass immigration can save this, and voters have had 
quite enough of that.

Even the politicians have stopped pretending. Keir Starmer binned 
Blair’s sacred 50 per cent higher education target as ‘not right for our 
times’. And the new man, Andy Burnham, says out loud that a mortarboard 
is no better than a hard hat. When Labour prime ministers talk down 
degrees, the game is up.

Looming over it all, we have AI. James Reed, the recruitment boss, 
reports graduate vacancies have collapsed from 180,000 to 55,000 in four 
years, as the robots devour the entry-level jobs that degrees once 
secured. Nor is the teaching safe: why borrow £50,000 for a hungover 
online seminar when a brilliant AI tutor, available at 3 a.m., will 
teach you anything, for free, one-on-one?

At the same time, students are writing their essays with ChatGPT, and 
lecturers are marking them with ChatGPT. The kids are therefore 
pretending to learn, and the dons are pretending to grade, and nothing 
whatsoever is achieved. Put it another way: higher education specialises 
in producing desirable, artisanal, hand-crafted intelligence, at great 
expense. Yet AI mass-produces the stuff for pennies. Luddites know how 
this ends.

I expect a few institutions will survive the coming tsunami. Oxbridge 
will likely persist as a beautiful, Gothic finishing school where rich 
kids network and make out. The better London universities might 
specialise and evolve. The majority, however, face a brutal comedown, 
and many British universities will disappear. For anyone who has 
watched, in recent decades, the insane ideas flooding out of academia, 
polluting our civilisation, this might feel like rough justice. For 
those more deeply involved – the tutors, the professors, the chancellors 
– it will be a really bad trip. Oh well.


Sean Thomas