stefan collini
Stefan Collini has won widespread recognition at home and abroad for his incisive criticism of British higher education policy as it has developed since the 1980s, under Labour and Conservative governments indifferently. He has not been alone in this, of course: Andrew McGettigan has been tireless in unpicking the tangled threads of wishful thinking, cynicism, dogma and sheer recklessness that pass for rational financial policy and practice both in government and in the academic institutions themselves, while Helen Small—to take just one more notable example—has struck a contrasting emphasis, undertaking a critical appraisal of the current array of arguments in defence of an education in the humanities.footnote1 But Collini’s record has been outstanding for its stamina and critical range: within the past decade there have been lectures to universities in Australia, Portugal, the us, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as several vintages of the uk system, addresses to conferences of various kinds, unions and a Westminster parliamentary committee, articles for the print platforms where he has long been a familiar name, the London Review of Books and the Guardian. His range of topics extends from finance to axiology, bookends of a comprehensive engagement including the apotheosis of management and metrics, the follies of official research and teaching assessment, the status of students and the relative merits of different kinds of support for research and scholarly activity. From these diverse occasions, so many interventions in a single field of engagement, come the texts making up the bulk of his second book on the subject, Speaking of Universities.footnote2
This has always been Collini’s preferred mode of operation. He is a committed and skilled practitioner of the higher journalism, a master of what Bagehot in the middle 1850s characterized as ‘the review-like essay and the essay-like review’.footnote3 Most of his books are focused compilations of such occasional pieces. The twin volumes Common Reading and Common Writing, from 2008 and 2016 respectively, are noteworthy cases in point. Between them, they contain thirty-seven chapters largely made up from thirty reviews of some sixty titles, the first offered as ‘essays on literary culture and public debate’, the second on ‘critics, historians, publics’. They are evidence of enviable productivity and of the freedoms inherent in this prose form, even if those subtitles seem a little strained, not quite equal to their role in containing the miscellaneity within. Collini’s intellectual histories lean towards portraiture rather than conceptual schemes: he has a liberal’s suspicion of ‘the pretensions of a full-blown ism’ and so of what is pejoratively called ‘labelling’—of others as well as himself.footnote4 At the same time, he is wary of the kind of history that provides the occasion for many of his essays—biography, which normally privileges the detail of an individual life over social-structural conditions—while showing what may be done in the frame of the genre with a virtuoso one-sentence exercise in the cultural stratigraphy of the subject, in this case the conservative historian Arthur Bryant:
The figure whom Britain’s cultural and political establishment had gathered to honour in Westminster Abbey in the 1980s had sustained into the 1950s a relation with a public defined in the 1920s and 1930s while writing in the manner and with the confidence of an Edwardian man of letters who in turn was striving to emulate the achievements of Victorian historians.footnote5
Collini’s Bryant is the ‘historian as man of letters’, and Collini himself is the historian as writer, self-consciously working with a rhetorical palette more varied than that of conventional scholarly discourse. Playful as well as ‘pin-striped’, his critical resources include all the ranges of mockery from mischief-making to satire. It is striking too how often his texts are shaped by a single presiding metaphor. Cyril Connolly is associated, not for the first time, with fine food and wine. The historian A. L. Rouse’s writing habit appears akin to dipsomania: ‘It hardly comes as a surprise to learn that he was a teetotaller: he didn’t need it.’ And Stephen Spender, as editor of the cia-backed Encounter, emerges as a self-deceiving cuckold.footnote6
Not too much should be made of that inevitable element of miscellaneity, however. Collini’s historical coordinates have been constant over time: his field is English intellectual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with strong leanings towards historical and literary thought—and occasional excursions to the us, as in his treatments of Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling. And within that field, a particular concern has been critical resistance to ‘declinism’, which Collini regards as a fixation of the culture. He has recently devoted a book-length study—originally the Clark Lectures given in Oxford in 2017—to this topic, arguing that English literary criticism as it took shape in the first half of the twentieth century was in effect a kind of cultural history, and one governed by declinist assumptions, a redoubt of ‘the nostalgic imagination’ and, as some would more bluntly judge, a ‘misplaced cultural imperialism’.footnote7 The general thesis, in its broadest terms, will be familiar to many readers but has never been elaborated in such fine detail or with the same archival support. However, the book was a long time in the making, and years before the lectures were given, Collini had opened a second critical front. Declinism was no longer the main object of engagement, which was now something like its opposite: a thoroughly modern and thoroughly destructive programme of ‘reform’ of the Anglo-British higher education system—no decline this time, and not so much a fall as a wanton felling.
Measuring up
The changes have not been uniformly negative. In the past three decades, universities have tripled in number (from 46 to 140-plus), while the student population has grown at double that rate (from around 350,000 to more than two million), and Collini is unequivocal in his support for this as ‘a great democratic gain’.footnote8 However, he adds, over the same period of time ‘the whole ecology of higher education in Britain has been transformed’ in ways that the expansion of the system did not itself require: ‘Most of the procedures governing funding, assessment, “quality control”, “impact” and so on that now occupy the greater part of the working time of academics were unknown before the mid-1980s.’ Norms of governance have been revised to promote ‘top-down control’ by ‘senior management teams’ at the expense of ‘vestiges of academic self-government’. The core functions of the universities have been discursively refashioned as the elements of a business, to be run as such—or as organizations of that kind are thought to be run. In a complementary reform, the most widely known of them all and not merely another case of the pervasive linguistic programming of the period, students have been recast as customers: the consumers in the academic marketplace, financed now by a government loan scheme rather than grants from general taxation, and bent on value for money. For many of the universities, this will be a salutary discipline, the official reasoning goes: direct financial support for teaching has been discontinued or reduced to a top-up, and success in the resulting competition for fee-paying students is now essential, with predictable gains in quality over time. For others, it is an opportunity. By 2013, more than half of the institutions validated as fit to receive government-funded fee income—and operating at significantly lower levels of regulation—were private, ‘for-profit’ as well as ‘not-for-profit’, with the latter sometimes the former trading in organizational disguise. In that year too, thanks to the intensive cultivation of emerging student markets in Asia and elsewhere, higher education ranked as the uk’s seventh-largest ‘export industry’.footnote9 In the space of a generation, higher education in the uk has been remade, and, under most pertinent headings, remade for the worse. The workings of the process, as recounted, analysed and assessed in what remains, for all its singularity of emphasis, a very diverse book, call for reading in detail, not least among those for whom this dismal British history may not yet presage a confirmed future; a critical report, in contrast, may best be framed in summary and correspondingly general terms.
The central term in Collini’s critical account—its governing negative—is metrics, meaning ‘the currently favoured, but actually doomed, endeavour to translate informed judgements of quality into calculable measures of quantity, and then to further reduce those quantitative proxies to a single ordinal ranking’ in one of the league tables that have proliferated since the 1980s, becoming an obsessional focus of attention and effort throughout the system.footnote10 There is no doubting the ascendancy of quantitive measures in the evaluation of goals, purposes and achievements, including, increasingly, as a negative corollary, the fading of considerations that are not amenable to quantifying procedures. But the objection cannot be to quantitative methods as such. That would be naive, and misplaced as well, given the central role of quantification in necessary processes of administration and assessment. (After all, Collini’s general wording would be a fair description of the process of aggregating, say, two dozen academic ‘judgements of quality’ to produce a final degree classification, each class itself internally ranked.) What is objectionable is the ascendancy of quantifiability as a threshold condition of relevance and admissibility, a species of transcendental reductionism in the plane of all that Speaking of Universities upholds as ‘judgement’. We need look no further than the familiar, degraded world of academic research. Scientific and scholarly projects do well in these times to internalize the definitions, priorities and time-scales of the Research Excellence Framework (the sometime Research Assessment Exercise, first run in 1986), as a main condition of finding institutional support. Reputation—the regard of peers and of serious audiences—is a frothy index of achievement if it cannot be captured in scores and tables. League tables generally don’t only reduce particular and distinct activities to a single numerical scale; they offer perverse compensation by generating distinctions that may not be detectable in working reality. Ten or fifteen institutions may differ within the space of 1–2 per cent, but the visual code of the table—equally spaced differentiation in the vertical plane—renders such trivia grave and lapidary, carves them in stone.
The quantities that matter most are financial, and the leading tendency now and in the relevant future is one of second-order quantification, or financialization. In the first stage of quantification, concrete intellectual purposes, practices and achievements are reduced to countable things—ref scores, league-table outcomes, external funding successes. In the second stage, the scores themselves are transcoded as money, which then comes to function as the substance of planning and evaluation. In prevailing conditions, as financial pressures become even more intense, the obvious danger in this is that financial promise serves as a privileged index of academic worth; fundability becomes the decisive validity test. The financial targets bring forth the concrete academic choices. Is this scholarly work ref-aligned and is it well placed to attract external income? If not, then switch into work that honours these desiderata. Follow the money . . . In Collini’s appropriately Marxian phrasing, ‘The true use-value of scholarly labour can seem to have been somehow squeezed out; only the exchange-value of the commodities produced, as measured by the metrics, remains.’footnote11
This fetishism is the principal count in Collini’s indictment of the prevailing culture of mismeasurement, but not the only one. A second is that even in their own deforming terms, these operations may not be measuring what they claim to. The notion of research ‘impact’ offers a simple illustration. As defined, this would-be metric rules out consideration of the scientific or scholarly value of a piece of research to colleagues and students and its potential interest to wider, non-specialist audiences to whom it may be disseminated—‘the public’, or publics, as Collini prefers. What is left to appraise, then, as social ‘impact’, is probably not evidence of research quality at all but a record of ‘extrinsic’, mainly economic matters that may or may not be socially significant but are in any case contingencies incidental to the research itself. The Teaching Excellence Framework, which ranks institutions gold, silver or bronze, is an even plainer case: of the seven metrics it applies, including such compelling indicators of pedagogic excellence as graduate earnings, none bears on actual teaching.
These convergent processes have favoured a progressive abstraction of university functions, and the labour of perfecting and defending them has led to the development of an equally abstract organizational stratum of leader-managers. The tendency has been uneven, across what is a very diverse university system, but all one way. In a classic process of bureaucratization, institutional power becomes concentrated in a specialized layer of functionaries, at the expense of norms of policy-making and management which, if not altogether democratic, have been nevertheless more inclusive and collegial in character. This involves the weakening or abolition of such familiar conventions as fixed-term tenure in positions of responsibility and rotation of post-holders along agreed lines, and the extension of a contrasting principle of permanence ever further downwards from the top, to the point where not only faculty deans but also their specialized lieutenants (the standing committee chairs of yesteryear) and even heads of department come to be appointed from among those who look to these roles—or at least accept them—as strategic career choices. The right of return to ordinary duties is suspended, and for the hesitant, a change of contract may burn the boats. The emergence of this managerial stratum is assisted by restructuring processes that it in turn has facilitated, as faculties and schools are configured and reconfigured for reasons having more to do with finances and personnel than with academic considerations. The progressive rarefaction of management roles accentuates the old tendency, always latent in the division of organizational labour, to loosen the ties between post-holders and the academic population. The representative dimension of academic management fades from view—not in the stricter democratic sense, which may not have applied anyway, but in the sense of shared professional intuitions and ethos. Indeed it may not have been there to begin with, for a career manager, unlike a senior colleague taking a turn in a necessary position of responsibility, may come from anywhere in the system. There are deans in post today whose most advanced academic qualification is an mba in higher education management.
Ideas of a university
So, one abstraction manages the university workforce by the light of another abstraction, with the aim of optimizing market share. The gilding of graduate earnings as an index of teaching quality is in its way an epitome of the general remaking, as Collini understands it. Together with such priceless data as the results of annual National Student Surveys, it signals the transformation of the student population into a flock of consumers in search of good value and an appreciable long-term return on their investment. As such, they have a strategic role to play, dynamizing the universities, with ‘their archaic structures of self-government, their gentry-professional ethos and their blinkered devotion to useless knowledge’—all ‘leftovers from an earlier history’.footnote12 Collini may be allowed the bitter edge in his voice. And yet this is not a narrative of decline, rather an angry counterpoint in a narrative of culmination, or—not to scant the sarcasm—fulfilment, in which, omelettes being what they are, eggs must be broken. ‘Universities and research’, Collini writes, ‘have come increasingly under the aegis of bodies whose primary concerns are business, trade and employment’.footnote13 Such phrasing cannot help but sound a wrong, ci-devant note, it has to be said, however well-founded the observation itself. But elsewhere he speaks in terms that cannot be managed into the past. The ‘unstated aim’ of this wholesale remaking of higher education is ‘to convert universities into market-driven corporations that are governed by the financial imperatives of global capitalism’.footnote14 This purpose has been shared by Conservative and Labour governments, and is sustained by something more powerful than either: ‘the drive by capital and its markets to mould human experience to its will’, which ‘is hardly going to lessen . . .’
Collini’s sentence continues: ‘and so neither will the flickering and uncertain recognition that universities are one major expression of a still-valuable ideal of the open-ended search after fuller understanding that is not wholly governed by that economic logic’.footnote15 He is referring to writing in the genre of ‘the Idea of a University’ (the title of John Henry Newman’s classic work, from the early 1850s), to which he now makes his own contribution. What is the idea and how can it be defended? To begin with, ‘idea’ is probably a mistaken choice of word, as in truth ‘university’ may also be, both of them being vulnerable to essentializing elaborations that Collini takes pains to forestall, insisting always on the historical character, the diversity of the institutions so designated, from the High Middle Ages to the present. ‘But I do wonder’, he reflects, ‘whether we may not be approaching a point where our usage of terms such as “universities” and “higher education” may . . . be best understood as the deployment of an inherited vocabulary without the underlying assumptions that for a long time made sense of it.’footnote16 Across the long century running from the emergence of the modern European university in the early nineteenth century to the expansionary wave of the three decades after the Second World War—the stretch of time from Humboldt to Robbins—‘there is a recognizable family resemblance’, a continuity of thinking:
the idea that the university is a partly-protected space in which the search for deeper and wider understanding takes precedence over all more immediate goals; the belief that, in addition to preparing the young for future employment, the aim of developing analytic and creative capacities is a worthwhile social purpose; the conviction that the existence of centres of disinterested enquiry and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are self-evident public goods . . .footnote17
But the experience of growth was misleading, an Indian summer that came to an end once the long postwar boom had subsided and inclement weather set in. Looking back from a distance of a further thirty years, Collini sounds more tentative than he need be or should be: ‘we may be witnessing the shift from the university as shaped by the social-democratic era to the university as reflecting the era of the politics of market individualism.’ In these conditions—and referring specifically to the humanities disciplines—he writes, there can be no realistic expectation of continuing benefit ‘from the older kind of deference to the ideals of “culture”’.footnote18 Recalling the portmanteau name of an earlier movement of voluntaristic class purism, we might call the new order Marketcult.
Terms of resistance
Collini is ‘not optimistic’ about the short-run prospects of a political counter-movement, and is certainly not dreaming of a return to the conditions of les trente glorieuses. (Indeed, it might be said that his fallback acceptance of a graduate tax as a second-best funding mechanism—his first preference being provision from progressive general taxation—already marks a concession to the prevailing view that university education is primarily an individual good rather than a necessary and desirable collective investment.) His immediate priority is resistance of the kind announced in his choice of mottoes.
The first, from Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’, is a call to arms against the ‘invasion’ of ‘ready-made phrases’. Collini’s title is exact: his book is about ‘speaking’, about the discourse that has been devised and propagated in the uk over the past thirty or more years as the one and only valid way of seeing universities today. His target is ‘the language of the company report, with its relentlessly upbeat account of productivity, income streams, commercial partnerships and international ventures’, leaving us with ‘no way to distinguish the activities of universities from those of the business corporations in whose image they are being remade’. He is unrelenting in his mockery of the wooden, word-of-the-year formulism of the academic bureaucracy—the ‘deliverables’ that seldom refer to lectures or babies, ‘excellence’ meaning not outstanding but, roughly, up to scratch, and so on—and at times hilariously so, as when he announces ‘our old friends Robust and Transparent, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’ of this ‘HiEdBiz’ boilerplate.footnote19 The justifying function of universities, Collini maintains, is not their contribution to economic growth or the confused ‘democratic’ goal of ‘social mobility’ or any other ‘immediate or instrumental purposes’. However, this must not be mistaken for a claim of academic exemption from ordinary ‘usefulness’. That criterion is in reality highly diverse in its indication, and always context-dependent; and the familiar contrast of knowledge ‘for its own sake’ is arguably a misdescription of the various motivations that may be at work, singly or more often in combination, none of them really comparable to the ideal distillations of l’art pour l’art:
A better way to characterize the intellectual life of universities may be to say that the drive towards understanding can never accept an arbitrary stopping point, and critique may always in principle reveal that any currently accepted stopping point is ultimately arbitrary. Human understanding, when not chained to a particular instrumental task, is restless, always pushing onwards, though not in a single or fixed or entirely knowable direction . . .footnote20
That sudden uplift in register in the passage from the first sentence to the second is telling. This is an idealized vision, the university’s ‘best self’. The ‘chains’ in the concessionary qualifying clause are presented in the form of their absence, that is wishfully; but the mundane limitations for which they stand as proxies are nonetheless real and even integral to the ordinary pursuits of the academic institution, including its more advanced work. Training, the transmission of established understanding, is a much bigger part of what universities do than such formulations allow, not least in the uk, where the emphasis on undergraduate teaching has always been strong; Sartre’s faux-intellectual ‘technicians of practical knowledge’ are in evidence everywhere, including those quarters where an etiquette of detachment prevails.footnote21 Yes, intellectual inquiry is an adventure, but its fruits may be bankable assets to be protected against all comers, and no longer in the spirit of the early work; and besides, can there be a sustainable intellectual practice without its moment of dogmatism? Senior managers have no monopoly of the ‘ready-made phrase’.
The second motto, from T. S. Eliot, inscribes the call to discursive resistance in an extended narrative:
If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
This show of tragic resolve is not altogether incongruous in its new setting, even if it is hardly characteristic Collini. But the more important feature of the passage is that it announces an inter-generational theme that recurs Speaking of Universities, coming forward at the finish as a crowning argument. On its first appearance this marks the extended temporal aspect of the general reality of academic interdependence, which is also spatial, across institutional and national borders.footnote22 In its final, fullest statement, the inter-generational reality has come into its own and acquired the force of an ethical imperative. Interdependence through time complicates the idea of ownership, so that:
If there is any value in reflecting from time to time on the unanswerable question of who the university belongs to, perhaps it lies in this—in reminding us, amid difficult political and financial circumstances, that we are only the trustees for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance that we did not create, and which it is not ours to allow to be destroyed.footnote23
Movingly spoken—though ‘inheritance’ is too eirenic, misleadingly consensualist, as a description of the academic archive, which is a radically conflicted thing, and this prompts an associated objection to the form of Collini’s argument, whose locus classicus is Edmund Burke on the question of the French Revolution. In Burke’s reasoning, the ‘partnerships’ that constitute the social bond are of a family character, such that inheritance is a contract of a special kind. Society, he wrote,
is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.footnote24
With due allowance made for the legal niceties of bequeathing and inheriting, this logic, with the tendentious metaphor that facilitates it, is nevertheless fallacious. There cannot be partnership between the living, the dead and the unborn, because the living alone have agency in the here and now, have the capacity to make and execute decisions. They have no partners, if not one another. But Burke’s advocacy was intended precisely to invalidate that partnership, to ward off a democracy of the living in the name of inheritance as mortmain—which he extolled as ‘ten thousand times better than choice’. It hardly helps Collini’s cause to see responsibility and choice so fatally polarized. This is a sword that turns in the hand, a conservative device that cannot so easily be made to serve progressive purposes, and need not be. At the level of basic assumptions, the fact of radical social interdependence—which always includes inter-generational relations—is surely sufficient to undermine the rationale of academic Marketcult and found the case for an open, cooperative public university system. However, the appeal to the objective socialization of life remains a long way short of a developed politics of reconstruction. The decades of neoliberal reform have seen the whole system called into question, and the echoes of that questioning outlive the immediate occasion. In refusing—correctly—the reductive, deforming logic of homo oeconomicus and the professional pragmatism it fosters, and at the same time—again correctly—discouraging any expectation of deference to received ideas of cultural precedence, Collini leads his readers towards exposed ground, a field of inescapable choices.
A social-democratic turn?
This is unmistakably a critique from the left, plainly anti-capitalist in its condemnation of the prevailing social and economic inequalities and insistent on their stubborn, structural character. As such, it calls for two related comments, the first of them retrospective and in an obvious respect personal. Some sixteen years ago, in the course of an exchange with Collini in nlr, I used the term ‘quietist’ in characterizing the ‘cultural criticism’ he was defending against my general critique of ‘metacultural discourse’, ‘a variation’ unpersuaded by calls to political engagement, leaning rather to the private sphere in its norms and priorities of evaluation.footnote25 However much merit there may have been in this reading of the texts then in question, I was too quick to infer a general politics from the sensibility inscribed in them.footnote26 It soon became evident—if it was not already apparent to someone more fully informed—that as a rounded characterization of Stefan Collini as writer and intellectual presence the judgement of quietism was mistaken. By a satire of circumstance, it happened that, just as my text appeared, late in 2003, he was writing ‘HighEdBiz: Universities and Their Publics’, his scathing response to the Blair government’s White Paper The Future of Higher Education and an early landmark in what became a marathon of public activism.footnote27
However, a more nearly accurate, discriminating and telling characterization may be available. It begins by broaching the question of Collini’s placing on the spectrum of the left inclusively understood. A standard summary would leave him somewhere on the left wing of social democracy, trenchantly critical of capitalism and its thought-world: his rejection of economic ‘growth’ as the obvious paramount good in policy-formation and of electoral pragmatism as the highest form of political leadership marks his distance from the nostrums of today’s centre-left.footnote28 Yet the critical target of his preferred ‘Socialism’ (so styled, upper-case) is precisely ‘unfettered’ capitalism, which must be ‘tamed’ but not necessarily put down, it seems.footnote29 Whether this qualification is grounded in principle or historical judgement or simply a trained habit of reservation, the indicated category would indeed be social democracy. But this is a greatly distended term, which over the past century has accumulated meanings extending from reformist strategies for the abolition of capitalism to the post-labourist neoliberalism of the Blair years. Borrowing again from Sartre, we might object that while Collini may be a social democrat, not every social democrat is Stefan Collini.footnote30 A finer characterization would take a simpler route, passing once more by way of the theme of ‘declinism’ and Collini’s vocal resistance to it.
The canon of English declinist thought is mainly literary—we need think only of Eliot’s modern ‘dissociation of sensibility’ or Leavis’s ‘technologico-Benthamite’ threat to cultural ‘continuity’, which is itself one of many catastrophist accounts of the industrial revolution—but the discourse of decline has been pervasive, as Collini gives us to consider, not in his own words but those of E. H. Carr, to whom he devotes an appreciative essay: ‘the seat of the most profound intellectual pessimism is to be found in Britain’, Carr wrote, for ‘nowhere else is the contrast between nineteenth-century splendour and twentieth-century drabness, between nineteenth-century superiority and twentieth-century inferiority, so marked and so painful.’footnote31 The condition is deep-laid, and ineluctably political—Eliot’s summarizing term for everything he stood against was ‘Whiggism’, and Collini, like the more downright William Empson before him, is not having it. ‘The Whig Theory of History is the correct one’, Empson had written, ‘and it is remarkable that the book given that title offers no single reason to think otherwise, being merely a fashion report of some High Table giggles.’ Collini expands:
Empson retained a wider optimism than was fashionable among the literary elite of the day that science, secularism, liberty and the social-democratic state were advancing on a common front. . . . [His] sturdy liberal convictions made him a telling critic of all forms of cultural pessimism.footnote32
That collocation of terms does less than full justice to Empson’s socialist convictions, which underwrote his demonstrative public solidarity with the Chinese Revolution, and the phrasing—the date is c. 2006—sounds Whiggish indeed. But it gives the coordinates of Collini’s political orientation.
A liberal-socialist line
Collini’s writing unites a ‘progressive’ politics (his own term) with a cultural liberalism that valorizes the historic archive as a critical reserve, amorphous in the positive sense that its valences may shift from one occasion to another, allowing renewals of perception and valuation—and radically eclectic in another perspective, as his choice of mottoes suggests: Eliot and Orwell for Speaking of Universities, Henry James, Nietzsche and Scholem for other volumes. An ‘idealized conception of a university’ is one locus of this living resource, the ‘company’ as which he is wont to model the authors he finds sympathetic. Collini’s personalist commitment, to call it that, is to intellectual history as something more or other than ‘history of ideas’. This cultural liberalism is a formative condition of his kind of ‘Socialist’ politics, however exactly they might be specified: social democracy, perhaps, but the more telling description would be ‘liberal-socialism’.
The term comes out of the history of the Italian left in the 1920s, when it was coined by Carlo Rosselli to define a variety of reformism breaking with the intellectual inheritance of the Second International, committed to the goal of socialism but also, and crucially, to liberal institutional values, means and goals. Rosselli’s main political inspiration was the British Labour movement, in which connection not many will immediately be put in mind of cultural liberalism: Labour’s historic ‘liberalism’ was mostly a matter of constitutional inertia. But there was at least one Labour intellectual to whom the description ‘liberal-socialist’ applied: the Tribune-supporting Arnoldian Richard Hoggart. Here was the specular opposite of a kind of social-democratic cultivation sometimes called ‘hinterland’, the reserved area in a busy public life. Politics, in Hoggart, was a necessary but secondary consideration to be rendered, finally, in moral terms, the terms of a ‘heritage’ that was in an obvious sense a shared resource and yet—Collini’s words—‘how individual, almost private’.footnote33 This self-sublimating public discourse has something like ancestral status for Collini. He has written about Hoggart, the writer and critical observer of the common life, with real warmth and admiration. The idea of affiliation may over-interpret the suggestions of the prose, but they are there, and his closing words (he has been reviewing Townscape with Figures, from 1994) are an act of canonization:
Hoggart’s natural home is not with that international company of cultural analysts, literary theorists, and assorted academic superstars who are today’s most familiar intellectuals. He belongs, rather, to an older family, one with strong local roots and some pride in ancestry; his forebears include Ruskin and Lawrence on one side, Cobbett and Orwell on the other. Richard Hoggart is an English moralist.footnote34
The hyphen in ‘liberal-socialist’ is not a fixed value; the compound varies according to the exponent and the given situation. Hoggart was a declared ‘once-born Socialist’ who spent much of his working life in the higher levels of cultural policy and administration—an admirer of Orwell, indeed, but as his cv confirms, a dedicated and greatly respected member of the liberal service intelligentsia. Collini, on the other hand, remains averse to political self-classification, in a familiar liberal reflex, while conducting a public campaign worthy of Michael Kohlhaas against government higher education policy and the academic functionaries who mediate it. There is a suggestion of paradox in this distribution, which a difference of context goes some way to explaining. All organizations have their passages of crisis, but surely none of the many committees and boards that Hoggart served on, ranging from the New Statesman and the Royal Shakespeare Company to unesco and a London University college, suffered the kind of prolonged, system-wide convulsions that the uk’s universities have borne over more than a generation—and these not as unintended consequences but as objects of policy. Hoggart retired from Goldsmiths to a long after-career as a writer just as that sequence of trials was beginning, in the earlier 1980s. For a like-minded academic some thirty years his junior, fidelity to the ‘ideal’ liberal university could not be a sequestered option, nor would it be served in the form of yet another narrative of decline: it was in the most down-to-earth sense bluntly, inescapably political.
Academic prospects
And yet even at its most trenchant, Collini’s argumentation has remained—in spite of itself—somehow politically abstract, indicting a system and its culture, that of capitalism, but at a familiar, contemplative distance. The overmastering reality is a machine-like system that must be resisted in the name of an inherited grace: Eliot’s theme of a cause that is never quite lost and never finally gained turns out to be no more than the prosaic truth of the matter. One apparent departure from this contemplative tendency was the open letter Collini wrote to Liam Byrne, a Labour mp and at the time (2013) the newly appointed opposition spokesperson on universities.footnote35 A Harvard mba and energetic Blairite, Byrne was not the likeliest or most sympathetic of addressees, but he had given some sign of taking an interest in the cruces of higher education funding policy, and Collini moved to make his case. He urged an end to the abusive modelling of teaching and learning as a business transaction and to the loan scheme associated with it; a thorough review of research assessment procedures; and the creation of a government department adapted for the distinctive needs and purposes of universities and related areas of cultural and scientific activity. And there it rested. The letter was never sent, or published in any form until Speaking of Universities, where it appears in an appendix with the title ‘Short Work’.
Short indeed, and in one politically decisive respect short-weight. The measures Collini has proposed are unobjectionable—and in fact the first two featured in Labour’s 2019 election manifesto—but the third and last of them, concerned to fortify the old principle of ‘arms-length’ government funding, illuminates a significant absence. There is no reference on this occasion to institutional politics, the internal management of university affairs, and specifically no mention of the bureaucratic degeneration of the past decades: the wholesale assimilation of the professoriat to a corporate ‘senior management’, the downward spread of permanent appointments in posts of responsibility, the remaking of committees as ‘teams’, and the rest. It is not that Collini is indifferent to these developments, and it is true, of course, that such matters are not usually the concern of government—in this respect the arms-length convention may actually favour bureaucratic preferences—but they are not forbidden territory either. Besides, open letters are written to win the attention of a relatively mass readership, rather than the authority-figures to whom they are nominally addressed, and the core mass audience in this case would be academics, whose typical reaction in the face of all this has been, as Collini says, mere ‘hand-wringing’, or making the best of things as they are and seemingly must be. A generic anti-capitalist denunciation of the prevailing trends of the past thirty years is more likely than not to produce more of the same, or at most a high-minded abstention from the official linguistic decorum, for want of any point of collective political leverage. In this lies the importance of developing concrete demands, both local and general, aimed at limiting and reversing the advance of the academic bureaucracy. Without the coadjutant formation of that managerial stratum the marketization of university education would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. What element of academic self-government may yet be saved or restored or even won will vary from place to place, and from one kind of institution to another. In no case can it be said with confidence that the odds are good, after Labour’s electoral debacle in 2019 and at a time when the militant energies of the university teachers’ union, never so great and already hampered by reactionary legislation, are engrossed in the elemental questions of pay, pensions, workloads, casualization and equality in work. But a collective effort on this front will be an indispensable part of the general struggle for a progressive renewal of the university system.
This has always been Collini’s preferred mode of operation. He is a committed and skilled practitioner of the higher journalism, a master of what Bagehot in the middle 1850s characterized as ‘the review-like essay and the essay-like review’.footnote3 Most of his books are focused compilations of such occasional pieces. The twin volumes Common Reading and Common Writing, from 2008 and 2016 respectively, are noteworthy cases in point. Between them, they contain thirty-seven chapters largely made up from thirty reviews of some sixty titles, the first offered as ‘essays on literary culture and public debate’, the second on ‘critics, historians, publics’. They are evidence of enviable productivity and of the freedoms inherent in this prose form, even if those subtitles seem a little strained, not quite equal to their role in containing the miscellaneity within. Collini’s intellectual histories lean towards portraiture rather than conceptual schemes: he has a liberal’s suspicion of ‘the pretensions of a full-blown ism’ and so of what is pejoratively called ‘labelling’—of others as well as himself.footnote4 At the same time, he is wary of the kind of history that provides the occasion for many of his essays—biography, which normally privileges the detail of an individual life over social-structural conditions—while showing what may be done in the frame of the genre with a virtuoso one-sentence exercise in the cultural stratigraphy of the subject, in this case the conservative historian Arthur Bryant:
The figure whom Britain’s cultural and political establishment had gathered to honour in Westminster Abbey in the 1980s had sustained into the 1950s a relation with a public defined in the 1920s and 1930s while writing in the manner and with the confidence of an Edwardian man of letters who in turn was striving to emulate the achievements of Victorian historians.footnote5
Collini’s Bryant is the ‘historian as man of letters’, and Collini himself is the historian as writer, self-consciously working with a rhetorical palette more varied than that of conventional scholarly discourse. Playful as well as ‘pin-striped’, his critical resources include all the ranges of mockery from mischief-making to satire. It is striking too how often his texts are shaped by a single presiding metaphor. Cyril Connolly is associated, not for the first time, with fine food and wine. The historian A. L. Rouse’s writing habit appears akin to dipsomania: ‘It hardly comes as a surprise to learn that he was a teetotaller: he didn’t need it.’ And Stephen Spender, as editor of the cia-backed Encounter, emerges as a self-deceiving cuckold.footnote6
Not too much should be made of that inevitable element of miscellaneity, however. Collini’s historical coordinates have been constant over time: his field is English intellectual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with strong leanings towards historical and literary thought—and occasional excursions to the us, as in his treatments of Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling. And within that field, a particular concern has been critical resistance to ‘declinism’, which Collini regards as a fixation of the culture. He has recently devoted a book-length study—originally the Clark Lectures given in Oxford in 2017—to this topic, arguing that English literary criticism as it took shape in the first half of the twentieth century was in effect a kind of cultural history, and one governed by declinist assumptions, a redoubt of ‘the nostalgic imagination’ and, as some would more bluntly judge, a ‘misplaced cultural imperialism’.footnote7 The general thesis, in its broadest terms, will be familiar to many readers but has never been elaborated in such fine detail or with the same archival support. However, the book was a long time in the making, and years before the lectures were given, Collini had opened a second critical front. Declinism was no longer the main object of engagement, which was now something like its opposite: a thoroughly modern and thoroughly destructive programme of ‘reform’ of the Anglo-British higher education system—no decline this time, and not so much a fall as a wanton felling.
Measuring up
The changes have not been uniformly negative. In the past three decades, universities have tripled in number (from 46 to 140-plus), while the student population has grown at double that rate (from around 350,000 to more than two million), and Collini is unequivocal in his support for this as ‘a great democratic gain’.footnote8 However, he adds, over the same period of time ‘the whole ecology of higher education in Britain has been transformed’ in ways that the expansion of the system did not itself require: ‘Most of the procedures governing funding, assessment, “quality control”, “impact” and so on that now occupy the greater part of the working time of academics were unknown before the mid-1980s.’ Norms of governance have been revised to promote ‘top-down control’ by ‘senior management teams’ at the expense of ‘vestiges of academic self-government’. The core functions of the universities have been discursively refashioned as the elements of a business, to be run as such—or as organizations of that kind are thought to be run. In a complementary reform, the most widely known of them all and not merely another case of the pervasive linguistic programming of the period, students have been recast as customers: the consumers in the academic marketplace, financed now by a government loan scheme rather than grants from general taxation, and bent on value for money. For many of the universities, this will be a salutary discipline, the official reasoning goes: direct financial support for teaching has been discontinued or reduced to a top-up, and success in the resulting competition for fee-paying students is now essential, with predictable gains in quality over time. For others, it is an opportunity. By 2013, more than half of the institutions validated as fit to receive government-funded fee income—and operating at significantly lower levels of regulation—were private, ‘for-profit’ as well as ‘not-for-profit’, with the latter sometimes the former trading in organizational disguise. In that year too, thanks to the intensive cultivation of emerging student markets in Asia and elsewhere, higher education ranked as the uk’s seventh-largest ‘export industry’.footnote9 In the space of a generation, higher education in the uk has been remade, and, under most pertinent headings, remade for the worse. The workings of the process, as recounted, analysed and assessed in what remains, for all its singularity of emphasis, a very diverse book, call for reading in detail, not least among those for whom this dismal British history may not yet presage a confirmed future; a critical report, in contrast, may best be framed in summary and correspondingly general terms.
The central term in Collini’s critical account—its governing negative—is metrics, meaning ‘the currently favoured, but actually doomed, endeavour to translate informed judgements of quality into calculable measures of quantity, and then to further reduce those quantitative proxies to a single ordinal ranking’ in one of the league tables that have proliferated since the 1980s, becoming an obsessional focus of attention and effort throughout the system.footnote10 There is no doubting the ascendancy of quantitive measures in the evaluation of goals, purposes and achievements, including, increasingly, as a negative corollary, the fading of considerations that are not amenable to quantifying procedures. But the objection cannot be to quantitative methods as such. That would be naive, and misplaced as well, given the central role of quantification in necessary processes of administration and assessment. (After all, Collini’s general wording would be a fair description of the process of aggregating, say, two dozen academic ‘judgements of quality’ to produce a final degree classification, each class itself internally ranked.) What is objectionable is the ascendancy of quantifiability as a threshold condition of relevance and admissibility, a species of transcendental reductionism in the plane of all that Speaking of Universities upholds as ‘judgement’. We need look no further than the familiar, degraded world of academic research. Scientific and scholarly projects do well in these times to internalize the definitions, priorities and time-scales of the Research Excellence Framework (the sometime Research Assessment Exercise, first run in 1986), as a main condition of finding institutional support. Reputation—the regard of peers and of serious audiences—is a frothy index of achievement if it cannot be captured in scores and tables. League tables generally don’t only reduce particular and distinct activities to a single numerical scale; they offer perverse compensation by generating distinctions that may not be detectable in working reality. Ten or fifteen institutions may differ within the space of 1–2 per cent, but the visual code of the table—equally spaced differentiation in the vertical plane—renders such trivia grave and lapidary, carves them in stone.
The quantities that matter most are financial, and the leading tendency now and in the relevant future is one of second-order quantification, or financialization. In the first stage of quantification, concrete intellectual purposes, practices and achievements are reduced to countable things—ref scores, league-table outcomes, external funding successes. In the second stage, the scores themselves are transcoded as money, which then comes to function as the substance of planning and evaluation. In prevailing conditions, as financial pressures become even more intense, the obvious danger in this is that financial promise serves as a privileged index of academic worth; fundability becomes the decisive validity test. The financial targets bring forth the concrete academic choices. Is this scholarly work ref-aligned and is it well placed to attract external income? If not, then switch into work that honours these desiderata. Follow the money . . . In Collini’s appropriately Marxian phrasing, ‘The true use-value of scholarly labour can seem to have been somehow squeezed out; only the exchange-value of the commodities produced, as measured by the metrics, remains.’footnote11
This fetishism is the principal count in Collini’s indictment of the prevailing culture of mismeasurement, but not the only one. A second is that even in their own deforming terms, these operations may not be measuring what they claim to. The notion of research ‘impact’ offers a simple illustration. As defined, this would-be metric rules out consideration of the scientific or scholarly value of a piece of research to colleagues and students and its potential interest to wider, non-specialist audiences to whom it may be disseminated—‘the public’, or publics, as Collini prefers. What is left to appraise, then, as social ‘impact’, is probably not evidence of research quality at all but a record of ‘extrinsic’, mainly economic matters that may or may not be socially significant but are in any case contingencies incidental to the research itself. The Teaching Excellence Framework, which ranks institutions gold, silver or bronze, is an even plainer case: of the seven metrics it applies, including such compelling indicators of pedagogic excellence as graduate earnings, none bears on actual teaching.
These convergent processes have favoured a progressive abstraction of university functions, and the labour of perfecting and defending them has led to the development of an equally abstract organizational stratum of leader-managers. The tendency has been uneven, across what is a very diverse university system, but all one way. In a classic process of bureaucratization, institutional power becomes concentrated in a specialized layer of functionaries, at the expense of norms of policy-making and management which, if not altogether democratic, have been nevertheless more inclusive and collegial in character. This involves the weakening or abolition of such familiar conventions as fixed-term tenure in positions of responsibility and rotation of post-holders along agreed lines, and the extension of a contrasting principle of permanence ever further downwards from the top, to the point where not only faculty deans but also their specialized lieutenants (the standing committee chairs of yesteryear) and even heads of department come to be appointed from among those who look to these roles—or at least accept them—as strategic career choices. The right of return to ordinary duties is suspended, and for the hesitant, a change of contract may burn the boats. The emergence of this managerial stratum is assisted by restructuring processes that it in turn has facilitated, as faculties and schools are configured and reconfigured for reasons having more to do with finances and personnel than with academic considerations. The progressive rarefaction of management roles accentuates the old tendency, always latent in the division of organizational labour, to loosen the ties between post-holders and the academic population. The representative dimension of academic management fades from view—not in the stricter democratic sense, which may not have applied anyway, but in the sense of shared professional intuitions and ethos. Indeed it may not have been there to begin with, for a career manager, unlike a senior colleague taking a turn in a necessary position of responsibility, may come from anywhere in the system. There are deans in post today whose most advanced academic qualification is an mba in higher education management.
Ideas of a university
So, one abstraction manages the university workforce by the light of another abstraction, with the aim of optimizing market share. The gilding of graduate earnings as an index of teaching quality is in its way an epitome of the general remaking, as Collini understands it. Together with such priceless data as the results of annual National Student Surveys, it signals the transformation of the student population into a flock of consumers in search of good value and an appreciable long-term return on their investment. As such, they have a strategic role to play, dynamizing the universities, with ‘their archaic structures of self-government, their gentry-professional ethos and their blinkered devotion to useless knowledge’—all ‘leftovers from an earlier history’.footnote12 Collini may be allowed the bitter edge in his voice. And yet this is not a narrative of decline, rather an angry counterpoint in a narrative of culmination, or—not to scant the sarcasm—fulfilment, in which, omelettes being what they are, eggs must be broken. ‘Universities and research’, Collini writes, ‘have come increasingly under the aegis of bodies whose primary concerns are business, trade and employment’.footnote13 Such phrasing cannot help but sound a wrong, ci-devant note, it has to be said, however well-founded the observation itself. But elsewhere he speaks in terms that cannot be managed into the past. The ‘unstated aim’ of this wholesale remaking of higher education is ‘to convert universities into market-driven corporations that are governed by the financial imperatives of global capitalism’.footnote14 This purpose has been shared by Conservative and Labour governments, and is sustained by something more powerful than either: ‘the drive by capital and its markets to mould human experience to its will’, which ‘is hardly going to lessen . . .’
Collini’s sentence continues: ‘and so neither will the flickering and uncertain recognition that universities are one major expression of a still-valuable ideal of the open-ended search after fuller understanding that is not wholly governed by that economic logic’.footnote15 He is referring to writing in the genre of ‘the Idea of a University’ (the title of John Henry Newman’s classic work, from the early 1850s), to which he now makes his own contribution. What is the idea and how can it be defended? To begin with, ‘idea’ is probably a mistaken choice of word, as in truth ‘university’ may also be, both of them being vulnerable to essentializing elaborations that Collini takes pains to forestall, insisting always on the historical character, the diversity of the institutions so designated, from the High Middle Ages to the present. ‘But I do wonder’, he reflects, ‘whether we may not be approaching a point where our usage of terms such as “universities” and “higher education” may . . . be best understood as the deployment of an inherited vocabulary without the underlying assumptions that for a long time made sense of it.’footnote16 Across the long century running from the emergence of the modern European university in the early nineteenth century to the expansionary wave of the three decades after the Second World War—the stretch of time from Humboldt to Robbins—‘there is a recognizable family resemblance’, a continuity of thinking:
the idea that the university is a partly-protected space in which the search for deeper and wider understanding takes precedence over all more immediate goals; the belief that, in addition to preparing the young for future employment, the aim of developing analytic and creative capacities is a worthwhile social purpose; the conviction that the existence of centres of disinterested enquiry and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are self-evident public goods . . .footnote17
But the experience of growth was misleading, an Indian summer that came to an end once the long postwar boom had subsided and inclement weather set in. Looking back from a distance of a further thirty years, Collini sounds more tentative than he need be or should be: ‘we may be witnessing the shift from the university as shaped by the social-democratic era to the university as reflecting the era of the politics of market individualism.’ In these conditions—and referring specifically to the humanities disciplines—he writes, there can be no realistic expectation of continuing benefit ‘from the older kind of deference to the ideals of “culture”’.footnote18 Recalling the portmanteau name of an earlier movement of voluntaristic class purism, we might call the new order Marketcult.
Terms of resistance
Collini is ‘not optimistic’ about the short-run prospects of a political counter-movement, and is certainly not dreaming of a return to the conditions of les trente glorieuses. (Indeed, it might be said that his fallback acceptance of a graduate tax as a second-best funding mechanism—his first preference being provision from progressive general taxation—already marks a concession to the prevailing view that university education is primarily an individual good rather than a necessary and desirable collective investment.) His immediate priority is resistance of the kind announced in his choice of mottoes.
The first, from Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’, is a call to arms against the ‘invasion’ of ‘ready-made phrases’. Collini’s title is exact: his book is about ‘speaking’, about the discourse that has been devised and propagated in the uk over the past thirty or more years as the one and only valid way of seeing universities today. His target is ‘the language of the company report, with its relentlessly upbeat account of productivity, income streams, commercial partnerships and international ventures’, leaving us with ‘no way to distinguish the activities of universities from those of the business corporations in whose image they are being remade’. He is unrelenting in his mockery of the wooden, word-of-the-year formulism of the academic bureaucracy—the ‘deliverables’ that seldom refer to lectures or babies, ‘excellence’ meaning not outstanding but, roughly, up to scratch, and so on—and at times hilariously so, as when he announces ‘our old friends Robust and Transparent, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’ of this ‘HiEdBiz’ boilerplate.footnote19 The justifying function of universities, Collini maintains, is not their contribution to economic growth or the confused ‘democratic’ goal of ‘social mobility’ or any other ‘immediate or instrumental purposes’. However, this must not be mistaken for a claim of academic exemption from ordinary ‘usefulness’. That criterion is in reality highly diverse in its indication, and always context-dependent; and the familiar contrast of knowledge ‘for its own sake’ is arguably a misdescription of the various motivations that may be at work, singly or more often in combination, none of them really comparable to the ideal distillations of l’art pour l’art:
A better way to characterize the intellectual life of universities may be to say that the drive towards understanding can never accept an arbitrary stopping point, and critique may always in principle reveal that any currently accepted stopping point is ultimately arbitrary. Human understanding, when not chained to a particular instrumental task, is restless, always pushing onwards, though not in a single or fixed or entirely knowable direction . . .footnote20
That sudden uplift in register in the passage from the first sentence to the second is telling. This is an idealized vision, the university’s ‘best self’. The ‘chains’ in the concessionary qualifying clause are presented in the form of their absence, that is wishfully; but the mundane limitations for which they stand as proxies are nonetheless real and even integral to the ordinary pursuits of the academic institution, including its more advanced work. Training, the transmission of established understanding, is a much bigger part of what universities do than such formulations allow, not least in the uk, where the emphasis on undergraduate teaching has always been strong; Sartre’s faux-intellectual ‘technicians of practical knowledge’ are in evidence everywhere, including those quarters where an etiquette of detachment prevails.footnote21 Yes, intellectual inquiry is an adventure, but its fruits may be bankable assets to be protected against all comers, and no longer in the spirit of the early work; and besides, can there be a sustainable intellectual practice without its moment of dogmatism? Senior managers have no monopoly of the ‘ready-made phrase’.
The second motto, from T. S. Eliot, inscribes the call to discursive resistance in an extended narrative:
If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
This show of tragic resolve is not altogether incongruous in its new setting, even if it is hardly characteristic Collini. But the more important feature of the passage is that it announces an inter-generational theme that recurs Speaking of Universities, coming forward at the finish as a crowning argument. On its first appearance this marks the extended temporal aspect of the general reality of academic interdependence, which is also spatial, across institutional and national borders.footnote22 In its final, fullest statement, the inter-generational reality has come into its own and acquired the force of an ethical imperative. Interdependence through time complicates the idea of ownership, so that:
If there is any value in reflecting from time to time on the unanswerable question of who the university belongs to, perhaps it lies in this—in reminding us, amid difficult political and financial circumstances, that we are only the trustees for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance that we did not create, and which it is not ours to allow to be destroyed.footnote23
Movingly spoken—though ‘inheritance’ is too eirenic, misleadingly consensualist, as a description of the academic archive, which is a radically conflicted thing, and this prompts an associated objection to the form of Collini’s argument, whose locus classicus is Edmund Burke on the question of the French Revolution. In Burke’s reasoning, the ‘partnerships’ that constitute the social bond are of a family character, such that inheritance is a contract of a special kind. Society, he wrote,
is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.footnote24
With due allowance made for the legal niceties of bequeathing and inheriting, this logic, with the tendentious metaphor that facilitates it, is nevertheless fallacious. There cannot be partnership between the living, the dead and the unborn, because the living alone have agency in the here and now, have the capacity to make and execute decisions. They have no partners, if not one another. But Burke’s advocacy was intended precisely to invalidate that partnership, to ward off a democracy of the living in the name of inheritance as mortmain—which he extolled as ‘ten thousand times better than choice’. It hardly helps Collini’s cause to see responsibility and choice so fatally polarized. This is a sword that turns in the hand, a conservative device that cannot so easily be made to serve progressive purposes, and need not be. At the level of basic assumptions, the fact of radical social interdependence—which always includes inter-generational relations—is surely sufficient to undermine the rationale of academic Marketcult and found the case for an open, cooperative public university system. However, the appeal to the objective socialization of life remains a long way short of a developed politics of reconstruction. The decades of neoliberal reform have seen the whole system called into question, and the echoes of that questioning outlive the immediate occasion. In refusing—correctly—the reductive, deforming logic of homo oeconomicus and the professional pragmatism it fosters, and at the same time—again correctly—discouraging any expectation of deference to received ideas of cultural precedence, Collini leads his readers towards exposed ground, a field of inescapable choices.
A social-democratic turn?
This is unmistakably a critique from the left, plainly anti-capitalist in its condemnation of the prevailing social and economic inequalities and insistent on their stubborn, structural character. As such, it calls for two related comments, the first of them retrospective and in an obvious respect personal. Some sixteen years ago, in the course of an exchange with Collini in nlr, I used the term ‘quietist’ in characterizing the ‘cultural criticism’ he was defending against my general critique of ‘metacultural discourse’, ‘a variation’ unpersuaded by calls to political engagement, leaning rather to the private sphere in its norms and priorities of evaluation.footnote25 However much merit there may have been in this reading of the texts then in question, I was too quick to infer a general politics from the sensibility inscribed in them.footnote26 It soon became evident—if it was not already apparent to someone more fully informed—that as a rounded characterization of Stefan Collini as writer and intellectual presence the judgement of quietism was mistaken. By a satire of circumstance, it happened that, just as my text appeared, late in 2003, he was writing ‘HighEdBiz: Universities and Their Publics’, his scathing response to the Blair government’s White Paper The Future of Higher Education and an early landmark in what became a marathon of public activism.footnote27
However, a more nearly accurate, discriminating and telling characterization may be available. It begins by broaching the question of Collini’s placing on the spectrum of the left inclusively understood. A standard summary would leave him somewhere on the left wing of social democracy, trenchantly critical of capitalism and its thought-world: his rejection of economic ‘growth’ as the obvious paramount good in policy-formation and of electoral pragmatism as the highest form of political leadership marks his distance from the nostrums of today’s centre-left.footnote28 Yet the critical target of his preferred ‘Socialism’ (so styled, upper-case) is precisely ‘unfettered’ capitalism, which must be ‘tamed’ but not necessarily put down, it seems.footnote29 Whether this qualification is grounded in principle or historical judgement or simply a trained habit of reservation, the indicated category would indeed be social democracy. But this is a greatly distended term, which over the past century has accumulated meanings extending from reformist strategies for the abolition of capitalism to the post-labourist neoliberalism of the Blair years. Borrowing again from Sartre, we might object that while Collini may be a social democrat, not every social democrat is Stefan Collini.footnote30 A finer characterization would take a simpler route, passing once more by way of the theme of ‘declinism’ and Collini’s vocal resistance to it.
The canon of English declinist thought is mainly literary—we need think only of Eliot’s modern ‘dissociation of sensibility’ or Leavis’s ‘technologico-Benthamite’ threat to cultural ‘continuity’, which is itself one of many catastrophist accounts of the industrial revolution—but the discourse of decline has been pervasive, as Collini gives us to consider, not in his own words but those of E. H. Carr, to whom he devotes an appreciative essay: ‘the seat of the most profound intellectual pessimism is to be found in Britain’, Carr wrote, for ‘nowhere else is the contrast between nineteenth-century splendour and twentieth-century drabness, between nineteenth-century superiority and twentieth-century inferiority, so marked and so painful.’footnote31 The condition is deep-laid, and ineluctably political—Eliot’s summarizing term for everything he stood against was ‘Whiggism’, and Collini, like the more downright William Empson before him, is not having it. ‘The Whig Theory of History is the correct one’, Empson had written, ‘and it is remarkable that the book given that title offers no single reason to think otherwise, being merely a fashion report of some High Table giggles.’ Collini expands:
Empson retained a wider optimism than was fashionable among the literary elite of the day that science, secularism, liberty and the social-democratic state were advancing on a common front. . . . [His] sturdy liberal convictions made him a telling critic of all forms of cultural pessimism.footnote32
That collocation of terms does less than full justice to Empson’s socialist convictions, which underwrote his demonstrative public solidarity with the Chinese Revolution, and the phrasing—the date is c. 2006—sounds Whiggish indeed. But it gives the coordinates of Collini’s political orientation.
A liberal-socialist line
Collini’s writing unites a ‘progressive’ politics (his own term) with a cultural liberalism that valorizes the historic archive as a critical reserve, amorphous in the positive sense that its valences may shift from one occasion to another, allowing renewals of perception and valuation—and radically eclectic in another perspective, as his choice of mottoes suggests: Eliot and Orwell for Speaking of Universities, Henry James, Nietzsche and Scholem for other volumes. An ‘idealized conception of a university’ is one locus of this living resource, the ‘company’ as which he is wont to model the authors he finds sympathetic. Collini’s personalist commitment, to call it that, is to intellectual history as something more or other than ‘history of ideas’. This cultural liberalism is a formative condition of his kind of ‘Socialist’ politics, however exactly they might be specified: social democracy, perhaps, but the more telling description would be ‘liberal-socialism’.
The term comes out of the history of the Italian left in the 1920s, when it was coined by Carlo Rosselli to define a variety of reformism breaking with the intellectual inheritance of the Second International, committed to the goal of socialism but also, and crucially, to liberal institutional values, means and goals. Rosselli’s main political inspiration was the British Labour movement, in which connection not many will immediately be put in mind of cultural liberalism: Labour’s historic ‘liberalism’ was mostly a matter of constitutional inertia. But there was at least one Labour intellectual to whom the description ‘liberal-socialist’ applied: the Tribune-supporting Arnoldian Richard Hoggart. Here was the specular opposite of a kind of social-democratic cultivation sometimes called ‘hinterland’, the reserved area in a busy public life. Politics, in Hoggart, was a necessary but secondary consideration to be rendered, finally, in moral terms, the terms of a ‘heritage’ that was in an obvious sense a shared resource and yet—Collini’s words—‘how individual, almost private’.footnote33 This self-sublimating public discourse has something like ancestral status for Collini. He has written about Hoggart, the writer and critical observer of the common life, with real warmth and admiration. The idea of affiliation may over-interpret the suggestions of the prose, but they are there, and his closing words (he has been reviewing Townscape with Figures, from 1994) are an act of canonization:
Hoggart’s natural home is not with that international company of cultural analysts, literary theorists, and assorted academic superstars who are today’s most familiar intellectuals. He belongs, rather, to an older family, one with strong local roots and some pride in ancestry; his forebears include Ruskin and Lawrence on one side, Cobbett and Orwell on the other. Richard Hoggart is an English moralist.footnote34
The hyphen in ‘liberal-socialist’ is not a fixed value; the compound varies according to the exponent and the given situation. Hoggart was a declared ‘once-born Socialist’ who spent much of his working life in the higher levels of cultural policy and administration—an admirer of Orwell, indeed, but as his cv confirms, a dedicated and greatly respected member of the liberal service intelligentsia. Collini, on the other hand, remains averse to political self-classification, in a familiar liberal reflex, while conducting a public campaign worthy of Michael Kohlhaas against government higher education policy and the academic functionaries who mediate it. There is a suggestion of paradox in this distribution, which a difference of context goes some way to explaining. All organizations have their passages of crisis, but surely none of the many committees and boards that Hoggart served on, ranging from the New Statesman and the Royal Shakespeare Company to unesco and a London University college, suffered the kind of prolonged, system-wide convulsions that the uk’s universities have borne over more than a generation—and these not as unintended consequences but as objects of policy. Hoggart retired from Goldsmiths to a long after-career as a writer just as that sequence of trials was beginning, in the earlier 1980s. For a like-minded academic some thirty years his junior, fidelity to the ‘ideal’ liberal university could not be a sequestered option, nor would it be served in the form of yet another narrative of decline: it was in the most down-to-earth sense bluntly, inescapably political.
Academic prospects
And yet even at its most trenchant, Collini’s argumentation has remained—in spite of itself—somehow politically abstract, indicting a system and its culture, that of capitalism, but at a familiar, contemplative distance. The overmastering reality is a machine-like system that must be resisted in the name of an inherited grace: Eliot’s theme of a cause that is never quite lost and never finally gained turns out to be no more than the prosaic truth of the matter. One apparent departure from this contemplative tendency was the open letter Collini wrote to Liam Byrne, a Labour mp and at the time (2013) the newly appointed opposition spokesperson on universities.footnote35 A Harvard mba and energetic Blairite, Byrne was not the likeliest or most sympathetic of addressees, but he had given some sign of taking an interest in the cruces of higher education funding policy, and Collini moved to make his case. He urged an end to the abusive modelling of teaching and learning as a business transaction and to the loan scheme associated with it; a thorough review of research assessment procedures; and the creation of a government department adapted for the distinctive needs and purposes of universities and related areas of cultural and scientific activity. And there it rested. The letter was never sent, or published in any form until Speaking of Universities, where it appears in an appendix with the title ‘Short Work’.
Short indeed, and in one politically decisive respect short-weight. The measures Collini has proposed are unobjectionable—and in fact the first two featured in Labour’s 2019 election manifesto—but the third and last of them, concerned to fortify the old principle of ‘arms-length’ government funding, illuminates a significant absence. There is no reference on this occasion to institutional politics, the internal management of university affairs, and specifically no mention of the bureaucratic degeneration of the past decades: the wholesale assimilation of the professoriat to a corporate ‘senior management’, the downward spread of permanent appointments in posts of responsibility, the remaking of committees as ‘teams’, and the rest. It is not that Collini is indifferent to these developments, and it is true, of course, that such matters are not usually the concern of government—in this respect the arms-length convention may actually favour bureaucratic preferences—but they are not forbidden territory either. Besides, open letters are written to win the attention of a relatively mass readership, rather than the authority-figures to whom they are nominally addressed, and the core mass audience in this case would be academics, whose typical reaction in the face of all this has been, as Collini says, mere ‘hand-wringing’, or making the best of things as they are and seemingly must be. A generic anti-capitalist denunciation of the prevailing trends of the past thirty years is more likely than not to produce more of the same, or at most a high-minded abstention from the official linguistic decorum, for want of any point of collective political leverage. In this lies the importance of developing concrete demands, both local and general, aimed at limiting and reversing the advance of the academic bureaucracy. Without the coadjutant formation of that managerial stratum the marketization of university education would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. What element of academic self-government may yet be saved or restored or even won will vary from place to place, and from one kind of institution to another. In no case can it be said with confidence that the odds are good, after Labour’s electoral debacle in 2019 and at a time when the militant energies of the university teachers’ union, never so great and already hampered by reactionary legislation, are engrossed in the elemental questions of pay, pensions, workloads, casualization and equality in work. But a collective effort on this front will be an indispensable part of the general struggle for a progressive renewal of the university system.
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