PETER HITCHENS: Our expansion of universities has failed
PETER HITCHENS: I’ve learned one precious lesson… our expansion of universities has failed
It is just 50 years since I graduated from what was then the shiny new University of York. I and a few hundred others had spent three years on a wooded campus entirely divorced from normal life.
We had full grants and our fees were paid. I had no debts. And it was the modern world, before it existed. We did more or less exactly what we wanted, and did not do what we did not wish to.
For several reasons I did not enter fully into the spirit of things. People used to say that I and Harriet Harman were the only two York students in that era who did not smoke marijuana, but I cannot vouch for this. There may have been one or two others.
The novelist Linda Grant, who was there around the same time, described the experience of her generation leaving York as like a lorryload of baby koalas being tipped out on to an ice-floe in the Arctic and left to fend for themselves.
As somebody once said, the main purpose of a university education is to teach a man to disagree with his father, and our universities have certainly achieved that successfully
I fended. I had been brought up (literally) in hard schools. But I am not so sure about the others. Imagine. We had to re-enter a world where laws were still more or less enforced, where people believed in respectability of many kinds, where food and rent were not subsidised and where employers expected us to turn up on time and not leave till the job was done.
More than that, they had never heard of the ‘inclusive’ opinions we had on everything, which in those days were not called that.
Banks, for instance, were highly conservative institutions and, while they hoped that we would one day bring them fat accounts, they were stand-offish about our lifestyles. No wonder so many of us devoted ourselves to turning the world upside down, so that we could go back to being free.
It was people like me who infiltrated the banks, not to mention the schools, the BBC, the law and the police and turned them into what they are today. For, as somebody once said, the main purpose of a university education is to teach a man to disagree with his father, and our universities have certainly achieved that successfully.
I have often wondered since whether the three years I spent in that dream world might have been better spent at work, or perhaps before the mast in a sailing ship, or learning the military arts of which I now know nothing.
I reckon I was about ready to be a university student when I turned 45, by which time it was not an option. Even at almost 19, my age on entry, I was far too young to benefit properly.
And as my older brother got to college before I did, I have never been able to make the Neil Kinnock boast that I am ‘the first from my family to go to university’.
Not that it is much of a claim.
Good secondary schools, good technical and vocational colleges, good polytechnics are what this country really needs and has not got
Mr Kinnock and my brother and I went to university in those years because a wealthy country made it easy for us to do so. It is not much more of a claim than saying you were the first in your family to wear polyester, or eat fast food.
I am not quite sure how I ended up assuming (as I must have done from around the age of 14) that I would automatically go to university. The word glittered in my mind, conjuring up a picture of stars shining in the night sky, which I still haven’t quite shaken off.
The Monday morning reality in my first week was very different. In retrospect, I am grateful to them for being tactful enough to award me a degree at the end, though, typically of my generation, I never turned up to collect it, or scrambled into a mortarboard and gown, as people do nowadays.
It is not just a matter of ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’. The whole idea of mass university education is wrong, especially now that it lures the young into debt. Universities, by definition, are for the few, who can get the most out of them – and that means a tough, highly selective education system based on merit – which we destroyed in 1965.
Good secondary schools, good technical and vocational colleges, good polytechnics are what this country really needs and has not got.
While I think (and know from the experience of others) that the Open University is a wonderful thing, and favour all kinds of heavily subsidised access for those who later in life feel inspired to study, I think the great expansion that began in the 1960s has been a mistake. I was lucky with it. Others are not.
‘Gollum’ Tony is no moderate
Last week the Blair creature emerged from wherever he dwells to sit alongside another leathery old Marxoid, the current Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
Amazingly, people still think of Blair, who has done so much to ruin a prosperous and happy country, as a ‘moderate’.
They make the same mistake about Sir Keir, a veteran ultra-radical. The resulting interaction was about as much fun as gallstones or reflux.
WITHERED: Tony Blair speaking at the Future for Britain conference last week. Right: Gollum in Lord Of The Rings
But what struck me was how Blair is starting to look like Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings, consumed and withered by his embrace of war in Iraq, and the great tidal wave of evil released by it.
By the way, his invasion of Iraq genuinely was unprovoked, which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not. Why is it never referred to as such?
What is it about the BBC? Why can it not leave any good thing alone?
What is it about the BBC? Why can it not leave any good thing alone? The radio show I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue is famous for its wit – often subtly rude, not prudish but not lumpishly coarse either.
Under its original host Humphrey Lyttelton it was a joy.
Last week, it broadcast an entire segment of sub-schoolboy jokes about condoms.
A friend wrote to the BBC: ‘I tuned into I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue on Monday evening while having dinner with my teenage boys – it’s the end of a long term and I thought a bit of humour would jolly us along. However, I was mortified by the condom item, which went on and on and on, one explicit or coarse contribution after another.
‘My sons were as embarrassed as I was. What’s more, it wasn’t particularly witty or clever, just crude. The best of I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue doesn’t rely on a cheap and quick laugh, but on clever pun and improvisation – please don’t reduce it to the former.’
I agree with her. I wonder what the chances are of her getting a thoughtful or helpful response?
At last, a grown-up verdict on inflation
Hurrah for former Bank of England chief Mervyn King, who has condemned the ‘Left-wing’ policy on inflation of his successors.
The collapse in the value of money is quite obviously the result of the mad spending of mountains of non-existent cash during the Covid Panic.
Once this had happened, our wages and savings were simply bound to shrivel. That is why I warned against it at the time, for all the good that did. Inflation is described as prices going up, but it is not. It is money shrinking. It has happened.
Hurrah for former Bank of England chief Mervyn King (pictured at Wimbledon), who has condemned the ‘Left-wing’ policy on inflation of his successors
Like a flood rolling down the Mississippi river, the resulting fall in our standard of living must be endured and cannot be stopped – though it would be wise if nobody repeated the mistake. But the idea that putting up interest rates will help is quite daft.
This policy will only make things worse, by destroying business and raising the already mad cost of housing. I am troubled by the idea that this country is, for the most part, run by teenagers.
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