The Chimera of the 'International University'
The chimera of the ‘International University’
FRED HALLIDAY
No one who teaches in a British university can be unaware of the pressure to become more ‘internationally’ aware: encouragement to admit more overseas (i.e. non-EU) students is accompanied by calls for increased international competitiveness and assessment, and by the announcement of new courses, on a range of topics, that have ‘international’ in their title. The term ‘international’ covers, however, a variety of issues and meanings. It is at once a spur and a sales gimmick, an appeal that issues as easily from the mouth of the financial manager as from the lips of the cosmopolitan scholar. It may be time to question this fetish, not least for fear that an unconsidered pursuit of the international can lead to a less, rather than a more, effective international contribution. Exchange of ideas, and academic cultures, rests more on specialization, a division of labour, than on a pursuit of modish homogeneities.
An internationalized crisis The debate on the international character of universities has been transformed in the s by a set of changes in context and direction. Anyone reading the education press will be familiar with the term: ‘world-class’ status, ‘global’ campuses, plans for worldwide distance learning and so forth. The Economist has speculated on the university of the future, with a restricted physical campus and a network of computer-linked outlets and students—a ‘virtual’ or ‘cyber-university’ or, as it engagingly entitled it, ‘core-and-cloud’. Other universities are exploring the implications of technology for this new, internationalized, teaching.
This is an edited version of a public lecture originally given at the London School of Economics on May . ‘The knowledge factory’, The Economist, October . Guardian Higher, April . That index of academic concern, the conference, shows where interest is going: in April an international conference at Tours, organized by three universities—Central Lancashire, California State University at Fresno and the Institut Universitaire de Technologie at Tours— discussed the theme of the ‘global’ university. (Papers from www.uclan.ac.uk) In in Los Angeles a group of US colleges got together to discuss, at a meeting on ‘International education in the new global era’, the crisis of international education, covering a range of topics from teaching immigrant communities to language, international relations and technical developments. (Papers from www.isop.ucla.edu)
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All that is international is not new, however; nor is it necessarily clearly defined, or even international. There is nothing less international than the national prejudices of the powerful. I would suggest that there are at least three different strands of discussion here. They may not necessarily exclude one another, but they are conceptually and in policy terms distinct. In the first place, the economic context in which universities operate and the constraints on them are increasingly similar: annual OECD comparisons show a convergence of public spending on primary and secondary education combined at around per cent, and of that on higher education at around . per cent. Equally, the current crisis of the university—in terms of funding, relation to society, content and means of education—is itself an international one. The problems faced in British higher education are not unique. On the continent there has been considerable public upheaval in France, Italy and Germany over recent years. Students have been on the streets, academics have protested at new directives, intellectuals have speculated on the nature of the academic life. In the United States, which has , institutions of higher education, there is enormous debate, and concern, about the future of education, with much talk of culture wars, dumbing down and the like. One has only to look at the best-selling books: The closing of the American mind, Alan Blum’s lament at the vulgarization of teaching; Generation X goes to college, a vibrant, if itself self-indulgent, account of a teacher enraged by the presumption, sloth and plain rudeness of his under- graduate students, who slouch behind baseball hats, bring their own portable TVs, and all expect to get As; Bill Readings’ The university in ruins, an assault on the role of corporate management in higher education. For those with a com- parative perspective—The Economist in its supplement, or annual OECD indicators—the comparative dimension is taken for granted. It has, largely unnoticed by public discussion, been central to the reports on higher education of both Dearing and his predecessor Robbins: both sent exploratory missions to over half a dozen countries and provided substantial appendices to report on these visits.
Education at a glance: OECD indicators (annual publication). Ekkehart Krippendorf, ‘Die Idee der Universität’, Prokla , September , and his thirteen theses on the contemporary university, ‘Zeit und Geduld, Stannen und Nengier’, Frankfurter Rundschau, January . Thesis is ‘…?’ ‘The knowledge factory’. Dearing Report, Appendix , ‘Higher education in other countries’. As a member of staff one is forever arrested by comparisons. A while back I was questioned by two visitors, one from the United States, the other from Russia. The American, neat and fit in his fifties, was to the point: ‘Halliday, I have two questions for you. First, what do they pay you? Secondly, can you choose your own graduate students?’ He was not impressed by either answer. The Russian was older and not fit; he had fought in the Second World War and endured much else. He spoke several languages. ‘Dear Professor Halliday’, he said, ‘for you I have two questions. First, how many days a week do you have to come into the office? Secondly, the books on your shelves—are they your personal library, or do they come with the job?’ British colleagues tend not to ask questions, except about other colleagues, but I suspect they might want to ask one of each of these.
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Contemporary discussion of universities is international in a second respect in that it is increasingly related to the process termed ‘globalization’, in the sense of the breaking down of barriers between societies and cultures, and the subordination of all of this to something called the market. Here an element of caution, definitional and historical, is in order. Globalization is not one process, but several, and not all of these processes are necessarily new. Not only goods and technologies but ideas have been crossing frontiers and civilizational boundaries for millennia, as Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Martin Luther and some others, such as Adam Smith, Mazzini and Marx, would be the first to remind us. They did not need the BBC World Service or CNN to get their messages across, or indeed to have an enduring effect. In one dimension of economic and social life, and one with considerable social science, legal and ethical implications, namely freedom of movement of individuals, the world has never erected more barriers than it does today. Globalization, moreover, for all that it brings together and unites, also divides by creating new hierarchies: in income terms the world has never been as unequal as it is now, and part of that inequality is access to quality education, to technology, to good libraries. But globalization of markets, of information, of lifestyle does affect the university in its very workings, as it affects the content of courses taught. Equally, it tends to produce a new elite, what Le Monde has termed a ‘cosmocracy’, of people who are mobile as between countries, contingents and cultures. Like MIT and the Sorbonne, leading British universities, are, among other things, a training ground for this cosmocracy. Internationalization should not mean homogenization. The tendency of globalization to make everything the same, to turn universities into anodyne hotels or shopping malls of the mind, is not the desired goal. Universities are, in this sense, like restaurants: they have distinctive cuisines, more or less creatively linked to national origins, invented or real. Those who teach in universities may indeed allow themselves a measure of patriotism, in regard to what they offer and sell. For this you need to have a student body, and a staff, with a shared ethos about what constitutes academic discussion and quality. A British university culture involves writing essays and a personal relation to a tutor: these are not divinely given, but part of one distinctive, valuable, culture. The same caution should apply to the term ‘market’. Universities are distinct institutions, with a distinct role in society and culture. They are not industrial enterprises, nor policy institutes, nor secular cloisters: our job is to impart ideas and knowledge, to stimulate people to think as well as to train in the skills and knowledge relevant to the modern world. Recently there has been much talk of universities in terms of market analogies: students as consumers, universities as knowledge factories, departments as economically unviable. Universities have to
A good example of how the LSE is seen is provided by an article on it from the Swiss Tages-Anzeiger of February . Entitled ‘Werkstatt für kritische Kapitalisten’, the subheadingss include ‘Kreatives Chaos statt Elfenbeinturm’, ‘bierselige Koryphäen’ and ‘Kein intellektueller Kitsch’: workshop for critical capitalists, creative chaos instead of ivory tower, tipsy eggheads, no intellectual trash.
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balance their books, but such analogies are misplaced. In the first place universities are a public good—they benefit the community as a whole and require a commitment, financial and cultural, from that community. It is not the job of the university but of the community, and the state, to meet that need. Secondly, the imparting of knowledge, and the examination of students, are not driven by market forces; nor, to a considerable degree, is research. If markets determined research we would have a pretty flat agenda—lots on prices, not much on human rights, gender, development or social movements. Equally, it is an insult to teachers and students alike to refer to the latter as ‘consumers’: if students were consumers they would be able to buy their assessments and exam results which would, as a result, be devalued. Nor do we determine what we teach by market forces. Contemporary relevance is a major criterion, but we also have a responsibility to make available the best in the wisdom of the past, the better to comprehend how we got to where we are, and the better to set the present in its historical context. It was a distinguished chairman of the LSE court, and of the BBC court of governors, the late Sir Huw Weldon, who said: ‘I will not do something just to beat the competition.’ Indeed, it was a former director of the LSE, Dr I. G. Patel, who in his valedictory address to the School drew attention, as an economist, to the theory of ‘non-competing groups’: of groups, that is, who value what they do for itself, not in terms of competition with each other. Such groups, he argued, are necessary for the functioning of any economy, and any civilization. The international dimensions of social change associated with globalization are paralleled by a third contemporary trend, that of processes associated with the term ‘knowledge society’. This reflects broader international changes in economies, in terms of employment, and a recognition of something that was, arguably, always the case, namely that a country’s economic and strategic competitiveness is correlated with its educational level. Talk of the ‘knowledge society’ has, indeed, led to a greater comparative emphasis on education than at any time in the past. The OECD, for example, argues that this knowledge society is distinct from previous economic orders in which capital, or material inputs, were the decisive factor in economic growth: now, according to some surveys it uses, and which some economists dispute, economic performance can be correlated with levels and quality of higher education. This is an international phenomenon in its diffusion, but it is equally so in that it is impelled by international competition. The country that does not invest in its higher education, in its research and in other areas now given greater emphasis, life- time learning and retraining, will fall behind. The argument for education as a public good is reinforced by reference to world league tables in economic perform- ance: taking expenditure on higher education as a percentage of GDP, the UK spends just over per cent, well behind the United States at . per cent.
Director’s speech at the reception held on July . ‘Education and the wealth of nations’, The Economist, March .
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For countries that are members of the European Union this point is given somewhat more concrete form by the commitment of the EU to enhancing higher education at a European level, the goal being a ‘Europe of knowledge’ or ‘knowledge-based European Union’. Jack Lang, chairman of the French National Assembly’s foreign affairs committee, has called for the ‘rejuvenation of Europe’s economic and intellectual policies’. The Commission itself has identified policies which advance the knowledge society as one of the four fundamental pillars of the Union’s internal policies: these were contained in a statement issued on November .
Historical perspectives Every claim to novelty invites reflection on how ‘new’ the supposed trend really is: ‘multinational’ banks, transnational cultural movements, terrorism would be three cases in point. The same applies to the ‘international’ university. One place to begin is with a word which, perhaps more than any other, conveys the quality of life in a university. It is the leitmotif of the culminating chapter of Ralf Dahrendorf’s history of LSE;11 it is central to the definition which George Steiner uses in his own account of the institutions of higher education. The word is ‘tension’. The tensions that Dahrendorf and Steiner discuss are those of scholarship and engagement, abstraction and application, teaching and research. They are tensions not in the sense that they inhibit or paralyse, but in two other senses: they stimulate, and they endure, they invite no definitive resolution. In his autobiography Steiner writes:
Universities are, since their instauration in Bologna, Salerno or medieval Paris, fragile, although tenacious beasts. Their place in the body politic, in the ideological and fiscal power-structures of the surrounding community, has never been unambiguous. The fundamental tensions, furthermore, are inherent. No edifice, no organization of higher learning has ever equilibrated satisfactorily the competing claims of research, of specialized scholarship, of bibliographic and archival conservation, with those of a general education and civic training. Universities house diverse often rival parishes.12
By such policies it means innovation, research, education and training. These it links to the development of lifelong learning and the promotion of broad access to education. Among the six main areas of activity envisaged are physical mobility of students and teachers, the use of new information and communication technologies, and the promotion of language and cultural skills. The Commission, with an eye to the years –, aims to develop a common framework of activities, coordination and monitoring. The goal is the construction of a ‘Europe of knowledge’. This will be framed in legal instruments based on Articles and of the Treaty of Amsterdam. One of the implications will be a policy aimed at increasing budgetary resources devoted to education at a rate higher than increases in GNP. These EU goals are relevant to the international context but they also cast a critical light, not least in regard to language training and resource allocation, on our national debate here. The implications for British universities of greater educational coordination have been discussed by Dearing in Appendix of his report. Ralf Dahrendorf, LSE: a history of the London School of Economics and Political Science, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. ff. George Steiner, Errata, p. .
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One would add a further tension to their lists: it is that between the neces- sarily national, embedded, character of universities within particular societies, and with responsibilities to particular states, and their broader international context and vocation. In this sense there is no such thing as an international university—all are at once national and international. This tension, like the others, has been there, and will be there, as long as there are universities, and like the others it does not allow of any one-sided resolution. Nor should it. We have to live it, manage it, enjoy it for all it is worth. There may be a tendency to see this as something wholly new, but this international character of higher education is in many respects not new. It is part of the enriching, stimulating, life of being in higher education. Equally it allows of several definitions. Current preoccupations aside, there are four evident longer-run respects in which the international dimension of the university is visible. It is evident in the composition of the UK student body—up from , in the early s to over , today, of whom , are from the EU. At the LSE we have students from around of the world’s countries. On a single morning I can sit in my office and meet people from twelve countries. A university may also be international in its staff: this has, equally, long been so, nowhere more than at the LSE, whose faculty has included Popper and Lakatos, Hayek and Gellner, Kedourie and Mackenzie (to name but some). The university may be international in the source of its income—fees, grants, endowments. It may, equally, be international in the location of its teaching, with campuses abroad, or franchise arrangements. Even here, in the most self-evident of international dimensions, two obvious warning lights flash. First, a university, or any other institution, is not necessarily international just because it carries out activities, or generates revenues, overseas: it can do this and retain a national location, and a specific academic culture. A firm does not merit the term ‘multinational’ just because it sells or produces in more than one country. Moreover, there are obvious dangers, several of which we have heard quite a lot about recently: excess reliance on precarious fee income, artificial and massaged PhDs, noddy courses and degrees, dubious franchise arrangements. These four areas—students, staff, income, teaching location—are self-evident. They are only part of what a university may mean in international terms. Equally central is the intellectual horizon of teaching and research, and the context of responsibility and relevance that is set for staff and students alike. This may involve issues that are seen as of public relevance at the time; it may involve the more academic question of participation in, and competition with, colleagues in other countries but similar disciplines. Whatever we work on, we collaborate with colleagues in other countries. This international dimension can be well illustrated by the history of the LSE itself in regard to two contrasted but equally important issues in modern history. One was empire: as Dahrendorf reminded us, the founders of the LSE saw it as committed to the five ‘e’s—economics, education, efficiency, equality, and empire. Our first director, Hewins, published Dahrendorf, LSE, p. .
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his memoirs under the title Apologia of an imperialist: you cannot get more international than that. In a contrary vein, we had on our staff, though denied tenure, John Hobson, author of the classic liberal critique of imperialism. This engagement with diverse views was also evident in regard to another divisive event of modern times, the Bolshevik revolution. Sir Halford Mackinder, director from to , was in – High Commissioner for South Russia, i.e. British representative with the White Russian armies. One of the most influential books of the Cold War, which bore the subtitle a non-communist manifesto, was Walter Rostow’s The stages of economic growth. It was based on a study of British economic history undertaken at the LSE. Yet others took a different stand. Sidney Webb reported indulgently on the Soviet Union in the s. One of the longest-serving leaders of any Communist Party in a developed country, that of Japan, was Nosaka Sanzo, who studied at the LSE in the early s until his expulsion by the Home Office. It is engagement with, and diversity of views on, world issues that above all marks out the international character of a university. These are permanent aspects of the relation, and tension, that should set current concerns in perspective. A similar, long-established, international commitment is evident in the engagement of students, as is clear from the student upheaval of May in its broad international sense. Much has been written about that time, and it was, of course, an important and difficult chapter in the history of the LSE, as Dahrendorf records. But there is one aspect of it that I wrote about at the time and would like to return to here, and that is the democratic and internationalist commitment of students themselves, a commitment to solidarity with others at home and abroad and to righting those wrongs that are in part a result of international processes, whether through overt political activity or work in humanitarian NGOs. It is easy to reject some of the nihilistic claims and illusions of that time, but the passage of three decades since has continued to sustain part of this message: looking at the great upheavals of the past thirty years—the democratization of Latin America, the transitions in Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan, the mass protests in the last months of communism in eastern Europe, events in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Indonesia, not to mention Tiananmen Square, students have continuously played a civic role, with international content, that has been sustained and courageous. This is a great and commendable dimension of the international university and it is one which should, in different forms, continue.
Issues obscured So far I have tried to answer the questions of current trend and historical context. I would now like to tackle a third set of issues, that of the choices which such
Chairman of the Japanese Communist Party –.
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developments pose for us. It is here that I want to inject an element of concern, in some cases of criticism, in the face of these changes. In this regard we need to look critically at the current national post-Dearing debate on education. At first sight things look good: the election was, it was said, about three things, ‘education, education, education’. Our Prime Minister even said it in Russian in a guest appearance on a Moscow soap opera. The election was about education; but it was not about tertiary education. No candidate ran for election promising to make university education a national priority. I cannot recall when I last read a newspaper editorial, in tabloid or broadsheet, or heard a serious television discussion, where the case for universities, for their funding but even more for their value, was vigorously put. When universities are discussed it is too often in terms of stale stereotypes—on the one hand, lazily researched photographs of dreaming spires, the academy of Brideshead revisited; on the other, revolting students. Equally, current education is framed in national terms. To take secondary schools first, attempts have recently been made to introduce an element of civic, ethical education into the school curriculum with an international component; it is significant, however, that the world outside these islands is not included in the ethical framework presented by most schools. Responsibility to self, family, society, environment is stressed; but not to humanity, to international law, to the quarter of the world’s population who live in poverty, to the European Union. In some other European countries schools mark United Nations Day, October: this does not happen here (not least because it always coincides with half-term). The initiative on broadening horizons lies with enterprising sixth-form teachers, not local or central educational authorities. In the case of higher education we have had an excellent, far-reaching, survey in the Dearing Report, issued in July . You can read Dearing with an international eye, as you could his predecessor Robbins, and find much there: but the response to Dearing—by politicians, press and public alike—has been very restricted and couched almost wholly in national, if not parochial, terms. Fees and access are not the only issues facing British higher education. It would seem that those areas of public debate that have an international dimension—concerning Europe, or globalization, or economic competition, or human rights abuses—are somehow detached from the debate on education. So, indeed, is funding: the needs of this country in terms of international participation and competition, whether in the natural or social sciences, are not being translated into educational policy. This is especially so as far as two issues central to the future, national and international, of our university system are concerned: academic pay, and funding for postgraduate studies. In an otherwise cogent report, these two issues, as politically important as any other, have been kicked into touch, that of pay by reference to another committee. The
Education for citizenship and the teaching of democracy in schools, final report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship (London: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, September ).
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opportunity which the Dearing Committee had to make a mark on issues that were within its terms of reference, to focus the minds of politicians, public and press alike was lost, out of political timidity. What are the specific academic issues that we need to take into account? There are several, some pertaining to the content of what we teach, and the way we teach, some to staffing and student composition. To start with issues that pertain to the content of what is taught, I would mention three that merit attention in a social science context and where apparently objective impersonal and irresistible processes have been allowed to hold sway. One is that of foreign language competence. We live in a world where English has become a near- universal second language and where students and researchers can, or think they can, do much of their work, depending on the subject, in English alone: the globalization of English, promoted by the United States but abetted by the UK, is accompanied by decreasing interest and competence in anything but English in our educational system and in our intellectual life more generally. What we see at secondary school and university levels is, therefore, a situation in which it is no longer regarded as necessary or even significant for someone to have competence in a foreign language. Of course, this is a recent development: until a decade or two ago competence in some language was a prerequisite for admission to many courses in the humanities and social sciences. The LSE, until the s, had a department of language and linguistics, on the premise that language, for most of us still a rather important form of human interaction, merited departmental status. It was closed down and is now a ‘non- academic service unit’. I for one would like to see this decision reversed. Nor is it merely a matter of university policy: in part it reflects, in Britain at least, a decline in languages at secondary school. Twelve out of thirteen who start a foreign language at age fail to continue it to A level: the total number of - year-olds who take any foreign language, including classics, at A level is ,. By contrast, every student in the universities of continental countries knows at least one and usually more than one foreign language. Since this is something which has happened, and which would seem to have few short-term costs, the response may be: why bother? Equally it may be said, indeed it is said, if the citations and bibliographies of what is produced in English in the social sciences can be taken as a statement on this matter, that there is not much worth reading in other languages. This is a deplorable situation. Knowledge of a foreign language is not some- how an extra or an option. It was until recently, and rightly, regarded as a necessary component of any education and a necessary part of work in the social sciences. It is, in the first place, absurd to assume that a language spoken as first tongue by a small percentage of the world’s population, and by under per cent of the population of the European Union, can be sufficient to under- standing the modern world: per cent of material on the Internet may be in English, but per cent of the world’s books are not. The English-speaking world is not now, any more than it was in the nineteenth century, the repository
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of all or even most wisdom. Little wonder that some see here a residual, or not so residual, continuation of imperial attitudes. It is, equally, essential for the conduct of a wide range of activities—foreign affairs, business, intelligence—for there to be competence in foreign languages. The DTI, for example, has drawn attention to the fact that per cent of British exports go to non-English-speaking countries and, increasingly, to countries such as those of eastern Europe or the Far East where English is not even the second language. It and the CBI have joined in the National Languages for Export Campaign, chaired by Sir Peter Parker. Above all, however, knowledge of a foreign language is a necessary component of that self-awareness which is essential to an education in the social sciences: as Goethe put it, ‘the monoglot is deaf’. It is extraordinary that in the very era when we all talk of globalization, and the global (or at least European) aspirations of British universities, this dimension of social education should be so neglected. It is a sign of the times that, whereas it was discussed in by Robbins, foreign language teaching was not mentioned in in Dearing. It has been ignored in the current public debate about higher education. It has gone by the board: yet I would argue, in the face of this apparent consensus, that, on the eve of the next, allegedly globalized, millennium provision for, and insistence on, foreign language competence is more important than all the hype about information technology. The lack of it in modern social science higher education is a far more serious deficiency than whether we have the latest this or that on the flickering screen. To quote Steiner again, speaking of the resistance his own cosmopolitanism encountered:
This plurality of convictions across frontiers, this alleged absence from my writings of the somnambular innocence and authority of the native, monoglot spirit—the Cambridge shibboleth is inwardness, the German Blut und Boden, the French, la terre et les morts has provoked distance, professional suspicion and marginalization. A grateful wanderer, I have to press on my students and readers . . . that which is ‘other’, which puts in doubt the primacy of household gods.16
We live in an age that proclaims its multiculturalism, and where the study, and sometimes undue indulgence, of nationalism is part of the Zeitgeist and curriculum: yet never has university culture in the Anglo-Saxon world been less multicultural, less open to the other in this cultural and linguistic sense, and, I would argue, as a result less critical of the household gods. This neglect of language is closely related to another curiously introverted feature of globalization, that of the content of the social sciences themselves. There will be no final resolution of these matters, but the case against certain
Steiner, Errata, p. . Calls for increased attention to foreign language competence punctuate recent decades. For an earlier appeal see E. H. Carr, What is history? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), pp. – and Michael Howard, ‘Ideology and international relations’, Review of International Studies : , , p. .
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current trends needs to be made. On the one side we see a decline in what is conventionally referred to as ‘area studies’; that is, departments, courses, posts in which a knowledge of social science is combined with knowledge of a region or country, its history, language and culture. Thirty years ago area studies were regarded as an important and growing area of social science, both in Europe and in the United States. One of the most impressive studies of this field was conducted by Sir Peter Parker in a report issued in . Things have changed: funding is in decline, posts are not being filled, the academic defence of area studies and specialists has fallen off. In a parallel development I understand that in the United States universities no longer hire graduates in diplomatic history. Part of this decline is due, in the United States at least, to the end of the Cold War: there is no longer the need to know about hostile, or dangerous, regions of the world, except to make fatuous generalizations about Islam or Japan. This is apparently the argument that ‘since we beat them we don’t need to study them’. Part arises from the spread within the social sciences of a spurious, scientifically philistine, concept of science. It was Einstein who pointed out that the most important quality of the scientist was imagination. What we have too often today is a hegemony of style over content, a vacuous and banal obsession with methods, the inscription of such approaches within certain unwarrantedly hegemonic departments, and their increasing focus on abstract, deductive or unwarrantedly quantitative approaches to their fields of study. Part of the neglect also arises from the overstated and ill-substantiated critique by some post- modernists of the whole enterprise of seeking to understand other societies. All is compounded by the weakness of foreign language competence and expectation in students coming from secondary schools in Britain and the United States. In all these ways contemporary trends press not towards greater knowledge of other societies, but against it. Does all this matter? I think it does. All social science, not least that taught at the LSE, involves some balance of the abstract and the applied, some knowledge of and understanding of specific histories, countries, cultures. Here is one of the university’s creative tensions. I do not believe that it is possible to study any significant social science—not history, not politics, not sociology, not international relations, nor management, accountancy or law, not even economics, without some knowledge of this dimension. In a revealing recent article in the International Herald Tribune the economist Robert Samuelson wrote of his confusion at listening to the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, testifying to Congress about the Asian financial crisis: Samuelson realized that neither he nor Greenspan, for all their data and all their deductive theories, knew what was going on, let alone what
International Herald Tribune, April . I would point out that this is in marked contrast to the commitment, often at personal risk, of the founders of post-modernism to the defence of dominated peoples—Lyotard in underground work in support of the Algerian FLN, Foucault against human rights violations in Tunisia.
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was going to happen. The answer lies in politics and culture, in the dreams and fears of people, as well as in something no social scientist will ever master, the unpredictable flow of myriad human events. From the point of view of public debate, or of potential employers, knowledge that is not related to that of concrete societies and their problems is also devalued. Take for example some issues of current international concern—the development of government stability in Russia, or the evolution of the labour market in China, or the underlying causes of the East Asian currency crisis: these involve knowledge of facts, and competence in their analysis, but they equally involve awareness of the history, attitudes and customs of these countries. Small wonder that in the United States voices of concern at the overly abstract output of universities have been heard. Small wonder, too, that faced with the great unexpected upheavals of recent years the social sciences have been attacked for their lack of insight and foresight. The case of the British embassy in Tehran in the s is perhaps relevant here: when the time came to make cuts, the first person they fired was the man who studied mullahs. An official of the US Department of Defense recently commented on the quality of courses and graduates they were receiving: ‘They have taken no courses in diplomatic history or world history, they know nothing about international law, they speak no foreign languages, they have no knowledge of foreign countries or areas. All they can do is mathematical models. They are useless unless they are retrained.’ Here, the Foreign and Common- wealth Office complained in that this country was not equipped, in language and area studies terms, to meet the challenges of the newly democratized states of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. These concerns of language and country expertise are, perhaps, part of a traditional academic agenda. The issues involved are not specific to the current debate. What is more central, and has indeed come in some accounts to define what is meant by the international university, is information technology. This is a wondrous form of communication, within and between universities, with worldwide outlets growing at per cent per month, and is a rapidly growing area of international activity, even as it comes to absorb larger amounts of the budgets, and room space, of higher education institutions. It is also an occasion for promoting the abiding sins of intellectual life—plagiarism, unmonitored gossiping and academic long-windedness. I do wonder, as a teacher and a parent, what is going to be the relation of younger people to what has for five centuries been the main source of knowledge, the book. One used to say of an educated person that they were ‘well read’. Will we now say they are ‘well surfed’, or ‘widely clicked’?
‘Asian boom + Asian gloom = total mystery’, International Herald Tribune, March . Quoted in Gilbert Merkx, ‘Plus ça change: challenges to graduate education under HEA Title VI’, paper presented to ‘International education in the new global era’, International Studies and Overseas Programs (Los Angeles: UCLA, ), p. .
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We are right to be enthusiastic about developments in communication, but we should also retain some critical perspective on it. Between technophilia and cybermania, and its opposite, technophobia, there lies, or can lie, a reasoned and socially responsible middle, what has recently been termed by a group of American experts ‘technorealism’. Information technology is not the solution to the problems of the modern university, and for four very obvious reasons. First of all, information itself is not equivalent to knowledge, let alone to the ability to analyse and to explain. An electronic mountain of facts is not, in itself, a means of educating anyone. As Harry Gelber of Boston University has written, ‘The plural of historical accounts is not data.’ Secondly, the World Wide Web has no quality control: there is no guarantee of reliability, or for that matter decency, in what is put on it. The information superhighway is also an information superjunkyard. Thirdly, there is no answer, or hope of an answer, on what are the central issues, analytical and ethical, confronting social scientists and citizens today: to take my own subject, we cannot address the causes of war, or nationalism, or state breakdown, nor can we decide on the rights to self- determination, or the legitimate use of violence, or the right of asylum. To present the highway, or the Web, or the latest gadget as if it somehow resolves what education is about is a travesty of education. Finally, the deployment of this technology to create the core-and-cloud or virtual campus is not a solution to the challenge facing education. As John Ashworth—no shrinking violet when it comes to technology or shocking traditional academics—put it in a lecture in November , the virtual university cannot provide an education because it cannot teach students to be the two things that will be most needed in the next century: to be self-critical and to be wise. These are qualities that come through real contact and intellectual discussion. Much is made, and rightly so, of the successes of the Open University; but the OU’s success rests on a multi-layered approach to education, involving close tutoring and essay assessment relationships, so-called ‘Tutor marked assignments’, regular summer schools, widespread self-help. No education can succeed with- out face-to-face discussion among students and between those students and their teachers. OU tutors are responsible for a group of – students, to whom they provide face-to-face teaching at a study centre. The OU also rests, in large measure, on students coming to their distance learning from a shared secondary school culture, and with fluency in English. In sum, the answer to the challenge of IT is above all for us to take control of what we use, not to be driven by fashion and gadgetry. On staffing, the most important issue concerns the impact of internationali- zation on universities not here, but elsewhere: specifically I mean the brain drain, the depleting of poorer, weaker and more insecure countries by the universities
Technorealism website: www.technorealism.org Harry Gelber, Sovereignty through interdependence (London: Kluwer, ), p. . John Ashworth, ‘The School, the future and the social sciences’, LSE Director’s Lecture, November .
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of the stronger states. We in the UK are conscious of this vis-à-vis the United States; but more serious, because it goes to the heart of the increasing world inequality being produced by globalization, is the brain drain from elsewhere, not only the traditionally defined Third World, but also the former communist countries. The Soros Foundation, for one, has sought to address this issue as it applies to Russia and its former associates: the problem is, however, global. A free market in academics, by creating an oligarchic and unbalanced world education system, is inimical to a global diffusion of ideas and education. A different problem concerns us here, namely the composition of the student body. This is not the main issue in British higher education as a whole: it is an issue in some institutions, and it is time to address what is involved. Since the introduction of the differential fee system in the s, and even more so since the changes of the early s, British universities have come under increasing pressure to admit high-fee students, i.e. ones from outside the EU. The rise in non-British students overall has been welcome, enriching the culture and quality of our institutions; but in some cases it has meant something more. This is not a problem in undergraduate studies, but it is important, for British and foreign students alike, at the postgraduate level. On the one hand, it has encouraged some institutions in effect to exclude British students from courses, on the grounds that it is no longer economic to admit them. On the other hand, it has meant that in some courses, and some departments, the percentage of British students has fallen to per cent or below of the overall student number. Two factors—a sanctionable quota for EU students, including British ones, as a whole, and the lack of a remotely adequate provision for postgraduate loans, scholarships and grants—have brought this about. To my mind this is the greatest long-term problem in British higher education today: it merits attention equal to the issues of undergraduate fees and access that so preoccupy us. Should this matter? Should some balance, of, say, one-third British resident and two-thirds non-resident be a legitimate aim? Some will say not. Economic necessity is one argument. Others say they take the best students, and those who apply first, and if none of these is from the UK then that’s the way it is. There is, however, another argument: there are choices here as in other areas of policy. First of all, any long-term policy of sustaining British higher education, and of meeting the needs of employers, requires a supply of qualified personnel. Univer- sities, to fulfil their national and international responsibilities, need a seedcorn: in many disciplines, natural scientific and social scientific, that seedcorn is seriously depleted. The international dimension militates in this direction: you cannot sustain the international standing of a set of teaching and research institutions if you cease producing the graduates to staff them. There is also a cosmopolitan argument. It is to an institution with a distinct educational culture that an international student body will gravitate: students do not come to the academic
This has produced its own reactions: the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Mohammad, launched his ‘Buy British last’ campaign in the early s in protest at the UK’s high fee policy (Financial Times, – July ).
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equivalent of Terminal . I understand that foreign students at some of the more internationalized campuses express, for good internationalist and cosmopolitan reasons, disappointment when this is what they find: they do not want to be tourists, they want to live in, and relate to, the country they are in. Students come to British universities for what we do well, and for the quality of the other students they find here. Education cannot become an offshore operation. There is, moreover, a further dimension to location and, at least partially, to subvention, and that is one of responsibility. Responsibility in the narrow sense is to the voters, taxpayers, government that license, support and in part fund universities. A university is in this, as in other respects, not the analogue of a multinational corporation, a body with only a contingent, fiscal, relationship to its country of residence. This is in a quite proper sense a civic, political responsibility. Equally civic and political are the responsibilities of the university to the society in which it is located, not only in terms of training qualified personnel—doctors, or accoun- tants, or lawyers—but also in training its students and staff as a whole in responsibility towards the public debates in which their society is engaged. Dearing writes of universities as ‘part of the conscience of a democratic society’. Such a respon- sibility entails some distance: universities cannot become conveyor belts of consultancy or ministerial advice. Equally, as all of us from the s know, this responsibility may be differentially interpreted—from the most complacent and conformist to the most turbulent and nihilistic. But such a responsibility is held, by most of us, to be there: it is part of our history and our culture and it must shape, even if it does not limit, the relation of that university to the international arena. It relates both to national, domestic, issues and to international ones.
External contexts I have so far discussed issues that are present within the teaching and research of universities. But the university is not isolated from an external environment and the internationalization of universities is itself dependent on, and responsive to, broader changes in society. Some of these changes are positive. I welcome, as I see it at the LSE and other British universities, the cosmopolitan interchange of cultures and experiences in a university of this kind. I particularly salute those who, through their time at university, have come to criticize and break with the delusions of their own communities, with Steiner’s ‘household gods’. These are not trivial matters. Not a few of the embassies, and their paid agents, make it their business to report on the views of, even sometimes the seminars attended, and theses written by, students in the LSE. The job of educational attaché can be quite a sinister one. In years teaching in a university I have seen more than one or two representatives of the less democratic and open, foreign state institu- tions interfering with the work of students. Nor does oppression always come from the state: the community, a much overrated word, can be just as repressive. We know students who have been sanctioned by their own communities because of their friendships with others from historically opposed communities.
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Equally, as anyone who works in London does, I welcome and enjoy the international environment that the city offers. The developing relationship of an institution like the LSE to London is three-layered—at once local, national and international—and all the more exciting for that. We are, arguably more than any other university in the world, an international college in an international setting. We know of the world leaders (even the chairman of the Bundesbank) who beat their way to our doors to deliver their messages. London is an international financial centre, the foreign exchange capital of the world, the news centre of the world—across the road we have the BBC Overseas Services—and a centre of arts and culture: every weekend half a million young people, from Britain and the continent, come here to enjoy themselves. London is a multi-ethnic city: there are immigrant communities with over , members in the London area. All of this, too, we can enjoy and benefit from. The external environment is not, however, unequivocally favourable to our work, and I would like to mention some ways in which this is the case. One concerns the partners we deal with: we have to be much more careful than those in the commercial world usually are. Let the fate of BBC Arabic TV, with which I collaborated, be a warning: financed and organized in conjunction with Orbit, a Saudi company, it was closed down from one day to the next in April by the BBC when the Saudi owners, angered at the showing of a Panorama film on human rights in Saudi Arabia, cut the satellite link. There were no diplomatic protests: we caved in. The staff, who had risked their reputations by working on this programme, were summarily dismissed. If this is an index of a new, cost- effective managerialism, universities and the media can do well without it. In developing international links we are, quite properly, drawn into collaboration with other universities, and with those who in large measure fund those universities, and the students who come here, namely states. But the attitude of states to students is in large measure a function of the political culture of those countries: academic freedom, as we understand it in the UK, presupposes a democratic politics and a relatively honest public administration. These do not exist in many, indeed most, countries in the world, and the universities there reflect it. Some universities have armed guards at the gates and patrolling the campus. In many others staff appointment, admission and final examination are open to pressures, political and clientilistic. I recall visiting a Commonwealth country some years back and being removed from a lecture by the university security guards on the grounds that, as I was not a member of that university, I had no right to listen to speeches by opposition members of parliament. I had been invited to the lecture by an expatriate member of staff. He protested at my expulsion, and was told next day by his head of department that his contract would not be renewed. This was not Iraq, or Soviet Russia, but it was not the UK either. We have seen an explosion of higher education in many countries in recent decades; but this has been accompanied by greater state control of potential sources of opposition, and by what Professor Benedict Anderson of Cornell, a scholar of East Asia, has termed the ‘stupidification’ of academic life in these
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countries. Not all the institutions with which we cooperate share our values. This does not mean we should not develop links, but we should be aware of what we are doing and never forget that there are choices to be made. Ernest Gellner’s judicious essay, ‘A blobologist in Vodkobuzia’, discusses the dilemmas of visiting a university in a communist state. Distance learning and IT are not going to guarantee any freedom of academic discussion, or research. On the lines of the quantitative indices drawn up by bodies such as the UN Development Programme, we might consider a world league table ranking universities not just by numerical indicators, such as numbers of students and staff, but also by some less measurable but relevant criteria. Sitting a few weeks ago in a university that was indeed patrolled by armed guards, and where some years back quite a few staff had been fired, in some cases imprisoned, for critical views, I came up with four criteria: the probity of admissions; the integrity of examinations; freedom of expression for staff and students; the availability in the library and bookshop of materials critical of the government of that country. Not all the universities with which we deal, including quite a few in the Commonwealth, would score that well on these indices. Yet they are relevant to any conception of a university; and they are, I would suggest, more important than the number of IT outlets or the size of the dean’s salary. So much for the university. In a world of ‘globalization’, we are seeing two contrary trends: on the one hand, an increasingly narrow, national, focus of interest; on the other, a definition of the global that is itself limited and superficial. In the former camp I would point to the character of political debate, and media coverage. The end of the Cold War has been accompanied by a narrowing, not a broadening, of the perspectives of politicians. Take the British general election of : international issues had no role whatsoever in that campaign. There is no definitive way of measuring this, but anecdotal impressions are that a smaller percentage of our MPs are now interested in foreign affairs, or see any need to educate themselves, than ever before—Afghanistan, or Angola, or Kosovo merit much less attention than foxhunting or the Dome. One reason is that the main ladder to parliament is now through local government. It may also be that, despite ‘globalization’, fewer British people under now have a formative international experience than in the days of empire and Cold War. In the US Congress the situation is worse: a third of the members of the US Senate reportedly do not possess a passport, and the Senate leader Trent Lott has openly said he is not interested in foreign affairs. President Clinton has lamented Congress’ inattention to foreign affairs. When the initial vote on NATO expansion came up in the House of Representatives there was not a quorum; supplementary funding for the IMF, a necessary part of the multilateral rescue plan for East Asia, was long blocked. Ernest Gellner, Culture, identity and politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ‘What strikes me as really extraordinary about the present Labour Party . . . is that its ordinary members seem to have lost interest in foreign policy. Moreover, this transformation has not been wished on them by Tony Blair and the Blairites. It seems to be self-generated’: Ian Aitken, Guardian, March . International Herald Tribune, May .
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This contraction is matched in the electronic media and in the press. There is some excellent foreign reporting in our press and in the media, especially on BBC television and radio; arguably (I would certainly argue) the best in the world. The continued health and funding of that reporting is essential to all of us—to the conduct of debate in a democratic society, and to the fulfilment by universities of their international role. In particular, the culture of the media is, for us in the universities, not something out there, but a necessary part of our environment, as important as government funding or the flow of students. If universities live the tension of national and international, those who work in the media live it to a more intense degree: journalists can no more resolve this tension, or ignore changes in public attitude and interest, than we can. The climate is, however, shifting, and for the worse. Our popular press indulges, time and again, in chauvinism against the continent of Europe: the website of the European Commission’s London Office is worth a visit for its list of ‘Euromyths’. At the same time, as study after study has shown, the percentage of foreign coverage, in news and documentaries, is shrinking. The current custodians of the BBC and press proprietors do not like to hear this: they say this is Mark Tully and John Tusa all over again. Tully and Tusa were, and are, right; so is Martin Bell, who addressed this question in his memoirs, War zone thug. The arguments are well known: foreign news costs more, there is less interest in it. But this is a passive, fundamentally irresponsible, reply. Once the market, or some fatuous circulation or ratings war, becomes the supreme or sole goal, then the battle is lost. Equally, the now prevalent criterion of JPMs, or jolts per minute, speaks to an institutionalized immaturity. The media have, as much as any other estate, a professional responsibility to analyse the world and educate its public: this is in large measure being abandoned. As for providing a record of what has actually happened, you can forget it. Anyone, for example, who tries to follow UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq or Bosnia from the press will find it impossible. The foreign is also trivialized. For example, the Observer of April devoted several pages to a first-year report on Labour’s domestic policies. The article on foreign policy was a sloppily researched discussion of Robin Cook’s anorak. Virtually the whole of the British broadsheet press has caved in to this degeneration, such that there is only one national daily paper for adults left: the Financial Times. To an increasing degree also, foreign reporting is a function of domestic news priorities—the domestic scandals of politicians or visits abroad, an obscene focus on the face of British nationals caught up in foreign wars or disasters, propaganda about foreigners learning from, or thanking, British specialists. Outside the BBC news programmes, there is also a general decline in the commitment to analyse and comment: the number of serious documentaries on
http://www.cec.org.uk Nik Gowing, Media coverage: help or hindrance in conflict prevention? (New York: Carnegie Corporation, May ), pp. –; Samantha Lay and Carolyn Payne, World out of focus: British terrestrial television and global affairs (London: Third World and Environment Broadcasting Project, February ).
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ITV went down from in to in . Channel simply has no foreign documentaries. Look on any average day at the British tabloid press, one that television news and increasingly the broadsheets seek to ape. For this cascade of drivel, obscenity and intrusion we pay, as citizens and as academics, a high, a very high price. This is especially so for international news and is equally true in the UK and the US, for the left and the right: it was Gore Vidal who said, ‘Why should I care about Saddam Hussein, he’s no worse than the Los Angeles police department?’ The evidence of the past year shows how the nightly news has chosen how to treat us—Dodi’s baby (which turned out not to exist), Branson’s balloon, Clinton’s puppy, the scandals of soccer stars and their managers, Thomas the Tank Engine news (on steam engine revivals in far corners of the world). When a new TV channel was opened, all quiz shows and sport, the director was asked to define it, and replied, ‘Bosnia it ain’t’. He apparently didn’t care that over , people had been bombed to bits over the last days, or that thousands of people, among them many from the UK, were working in peacekeeping forces and humanitarian operations in Bosnia, risking their lives. Some years ago the BBC commissioned a five-part series on the UN: the series was made, but a person in overall charge, a media studies graduate, allowed only one of the five pro- grammes to go out. ‘Nothing bores me more than the UN,’ he reportedly said. It has to be said again and again that this press is a disgrace, a diseducative and irresponsible force in our society that makes any informed discussion of foreign issues, by politicians, academics or the citizenry as a whole, all the more difficult. The confused, moralizing and irresponsible tone of those who repudiate our international responsibilities on peacekeeping, above all in regard to Iraq, is one consequence. The degree of degeneration is evident to others: former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, writing in The search for peace of why Britain and other developed countries were so inactive about Bosnia, said that part of the problem was that the press did not campaign on this issue. Our press is also marked by a deeply entrenched irresponsibility, known as one that never admits a mistake: abroad the British press is credited with having invented the phrase ‘the fact that is too good to check’. This is compounded by the epidemic of vacuous ‘commentary’ that clogs the broadsheets: much of this is sad, narcissistic stuff. Most of the columnists in the broadsheet press are not worth reading. They spend an inordinate amount of time commenting on other com- mentators, rather than on events. There are three ways to write a column: go somewhere, read a book, have an idea. The majority fail this test. They sit at their screens, talking to each other and their cats. As has often been said: facts are expensive, comment is cheap.
The reflex response to this will be that I am denying the validity of a ‘popular’ press. My argument is, on the contrary, for one that is both popular and informative. Such papers exist in other countries: as my colleague Christopher Hill has drawn to my attention, the most popular Italian paper La Nazione carried an obituary of the post-modernist philosopher Jean-François Lyotard ( April ). Could you imagine the Daily Mail doing so? International Herald Tribune, February . See also Nick Cohen, ‘The death of news’, New Statesman, May .
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If you teach international relations, or if you have any regard to that very tension between the national and the international, you expect students to read the press and to follow developments in the media. They can still do this, but the cultural and political climate militates against it. Academics are supposed to court the media: I value my own relationship with them. But in terms of the fulfilment of their civic and educational responsibilities we should turn around and say: these people are, quite simply, not doing their job; they are a national and an international disgrace. I cannot but note that more and more of those calling up to ask for interviews are incompetents, who have not done their research and cannot handle a discussion, and have to compensate for this by pre- interviews or tedious brain-picking enquiries. The dumbing down of education is thus exacerbated by the dumbing down of the press and much of television. To put it in good old-fashioned academic terms, the fourth estate gets a ‘gamma minus’. Turning to the international cultural environment, I would note two disturbing developments. The first I have already hinted at: the definition of the international in a monocultural, ahistorical, form. We can see this in areas related to the culture of universities: in the publishing industry, now controlled by a few conglomerates; in the cinema industry, dominated by a Hollywood in which no one ever reads a book, speaks any language other than English or seems to have any ideas. You would hardly know from most video stores that there was a cinema other than the English-speaking. International television culture is also profoundly philistine. It used to be assumed that part of any respectable journal, or television series, was a regard for ideas and for books, as well as for history and cultural diversity. Sit in a hotel room anywhere in the world and turn on the television, and in particular turn to any of the supposedly trendsetting world television stations, and what do you get? On globalized channels no one is allowed to speak in any language but English: the subtitle, a technological means of acknowledging respect for diversity, has gone. The average news soundbite has shrunk from forty seconds to nine seconds in twenty years—another constraint on the complex or subtle. As for programming, we have endless transient data and sport. I’ve nothing against World Markets Roundup, except that they could do with a bit more analysis and political economy and less obsession with percentages, more Schumpeter and less Dow Jones. I can happily fall asleep over World Golf Roundup, but what about World Books Roundup, World Poetry Roundup, World Critical Ideas or Ethical Issues Roundup? This is not helpful for an international university, on any definition.
Seventy-seven per cent of UK cinema box-office takings go to five US distributors: Guardian, February .
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Conclusion I began by discussing the national context in which education is located, and the need to recognize choices. If we are to meet our national and international challenges, the time has come for universities to be more assertive in public life: the universities are not held in high esteem in this country and it is time this changed. Like royalty and animals, academics are supposed not to be able to answer back: this should end, and perhaps it now will. Under the Conservatives we had two Prime Ministers who cared little for universities, and a Secretary of State for Education who sought to abolish the term ‘social science’, forcing the SSRC (the Social Science Research Council) to change its name to ESRC (the Economic and Social Research Council). There is no such ‘thing’ as society, they said: well if there is no such ‘thing’ as society, there is no such ‘thing’ as ‘the market’, or for that matter ‘the number ’. I once heard Margaret Thatcher tell a Chatham House audience that as a biochemist she can tell them there is no such thing as social science. As LSE was then privileged to have as its director someone who was also a biochemist, I was not much impressed by her remark, and had great pleasure in getting up to ask a question, introducing myself as from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She did not like it. We have to protect the word science, in its proper broad sense, from two groups of enemies: those who think there is no such thing as social science, and those who wish to give social science a narrow, technicist and ultimately banal interpretation. I hope, and expect, that the present government will do better, and the place to start is in mutual respect. Some signs are not, however, encouraging. The government and other bodies associated with it—the British Council, Demos— have been talking of rebranding Britain. All sorts of people have been invited to give their views. Yet there seems to be no university input into this project. For example, in April the government set up a task force of people, entitled Panel , the job of which was to lead a ‘full frontal attack on the myth of a tired Britain’. Of the people on it, not one was from a university. Perhaps they thought we were working too hard to make the committee meetings. I have nothing against a ‘cool’ Britannia, but I would like there to be a shrewd Britannia as well. The international role of universities depends in large measure on the support they get from the society they are in. For British universities this has not been encouraging. Under past governments, we have had two decades of badgering and interference, of sermonizing by windbags of all stripes and persuasions, of politicians posturing in Westminster, of vacuous pseudo- managerial talk about the need to bring in outsiders to run our affairs. As someone who teaches in higher education I am sick and tired of being talked at by people who have never worked on the shop floor—never marked an essay, set an exam, advised a student on a dissertation, given a lecture or a seminar. We have suffered, and continue to suffer, from an excess of audit and intrusion.
Guardian, April .
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Those outside universities are fond of saying we are out of touch and in need of a shake-up. We should learn from more dynamic, efficient, sectors, we are told. I would make a contrary argument: that we have talked more sense, have played a more responsible role, and have been less riven by corruption and complacency than any other area of British public life. It was not in regard to universities that the Nolan Committee on standards in public life was set up. Let the comparisons speak for themselves. Where are the paragons of probity and good sense in public life? Compare the universities to a City of London repeatedly involved in misconduct, to the more voluble and opinionated politicians of the past two decades at Westminster, to the increasingly dumbed-down and irresponsible media (they could do with a bit of a research assessment exercise), to television channels that to the last are failing in their intellectual and ethical duties, to the over-hyped worlds of sport and popular culture, to some of the upper reaches of the aristocracy, to the religious establishments: the universities come out of it pretty well. We are doing our job and, in the main, doing it well. We are doing it faced with a massive decline in per capita funding, with a decline in our earnings compared to average earnings that no other profession, I repeat, no other profession, would tolerate—a per cent fall as against average earnings in the past two decades—and, as far as the LSE is concerned, in a city where house prices have gone up , per cent in the same period. On the basis of what we have achieved, we should approach the issues of education in the next century, and the international challenges we face, with confidence and enthusiasm. We might perhaps take a lead from the fate of a significant document whose th anniversary has recently fallen, in : the Communist manifesto. The Manifesto is rather a curate’s egg if read in modern light, since while some of it makes great, utopian and unfounded claims about world history, other parts read, in their praise for the opening of markets and knocking down of Chinese walls, like a publicity statement for the World Bank. I would draw attention to the strange, and relevant, history of its final words. Arbeiter aller Welt, vereinigt euch, it says. This is normally translated as ‘Workers of the world unite,’ continuing, ‘you have nothing to lose but your chains.’ As I shall explain at greater length in my new book, Revolution and world politics, I do not think this is what is actually meant. I would, however, commend to you the version that was produced for the original translation into Mandarin, made early in this century by Chinese students in Japan, which I learnt from someone whose lectures I attended as an undergraduate, Conrad Brandt. The original Chinese translators were coming at the text from a different culture and rendered the final words as: ‘Scholars of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your shame.’ Not a bad slogan, then and now, and one that has considerable relevance in this context of the discussion of the international university.
Such carping is not confined to orthodox politicians. For a typical whinge from a former academic and overrated columnist, see Ros Coward, ‘Publish and students be damned’, Guardian, July . AUT, Higher education preparing for the twenty-first century (London: Association of University Teachers, ), p. .
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