Between 1536 and 1540, the monasteries of England and Wales were dissolved.
What should the great political project for the remaining years of this decade be?
It should be a similar assault on universities in England and Wales.
The arguments for surpression are similar in both cases: corruption and social change.
The 16th century sage, Erasmus, condemned the monasteries for vice, fraud and contributing nothing to wider society.
I cite as evidence a recent planning application for ‘luxury student accommodation’ in my home town.
The student loan system created incentives for people to go to university for the wrong reasons and burdened graduates with crippling debts, inhibiting their ability to buy property and support their own families.
As it was in the 1530s, so it is today. Society’s values have changed.
One day they woke up and realised that there were better ways to live than being a monk or a nun.
Universities were worthwhile institutions, but the student loan system wrecked the dynamics that made them desirable places to study.
When higher education is monetised and mass-produced, it loses its meaning and purpose.
Being a student in the 1950s meant being part of a small elite of young men or women living in separate institutions in austere circumstances devoted to learning and fellowship.
In the old days, universities were not vulnerable to upheavals in global markets.
Wage bills were small and the students had low expectations.
70 years later the same institutions are unrecognisable.
The conventional roles of academic and student don’t fit into the technologised 21st century world.
Thousands of students in 2026 will go to university, not because they want to, but because they fear they will not be able to get a job without a degree, or because they have a lack of imagination as to what else they could do.
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I’ve had a privileged view of how education has evolved over the past 45 years.
I had an austere boarding school education in Oxford, which gave me an insight into how the colleges used to work.
I then studied at Brasenose College, where I took an unconventional attitude to my studies.
Ever since I’ve observed how my old school and university have become corrupted by money.
My education in the 1980s was strongly influenced by religious traditions. I was taught unworldly values by unworldly teachers.
That education has now become secularised. Secular education sounds like a good idea. But what are you teaching?
Skills that can get you a job as an investment banker, doctor or corporate lawyer?
It can’t be about training the ‘whole person’ because non-religious people can’t agree what the ‘whole person’ means.
I recently spoke to someone at one of the colleges who said that the students are ‘customers’ now.
There’s the rub.
My conversations and experiences over the past six months suggest to me that any proposal to dissolve the universities would get a lot of popular support.
It has a visceral appeal for those who feel betrayed by the self-vaunting idealism of the liberal elite. And it will win votes among graduates who feel cheated by the experience of university.
There was a very cogent case made for shutting down the pits because they were economically unviable. The same argument can be made to shut down the ailing universities.
During a recent return trip to Oxford, I was struck by the contrast between the wishy-washy progressivism on show on the noticeboards in the colleges, and the manifestation of nationalist anger through Union flags at the top of Headington Hill.
‘The expansion of the universities has been a crime on the scale of the subprime mortgage scandal’, I heard from one ex-military man.
Another person commented at a public gathering: British education began as a vision after the Second World War, it then became a business in the 1990s, and now it has become a racket.
It’s the cycle of many human institutions.
They wanted secular education to be a panacea, enabling social mobility and the teaching of vocational skills, leading to employability and everlasting economic growth.
If we levelled and equalised at every opportunity, if we downgraded excellence, and upgraded potential, we’d atone for the divisions and privileges of the past and prosperity would prevail.
The program would be funded through the ‘financialisation’ of degrees.
After 40 years this liberal project par excellence is entering its spectacular final days.
We’re harming young people by coercing them into the system.
It’s now time for bold political leadership to bring the experiment to an abrupt close.
Henry VIII had the right idea.
After abolition, new institutions will emerge that reflect new needs and priorities.
Ending the deluded notion that a utilitarian system of higher education can make better citizens is a way to start building a new world from the wreckage of the old one.
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It started so well.
Let’s give everyone the Russell Group experience of being independent with three years of intense socialising and learning, followed by excellent job prospects.
You keep your restless young population off the dole and instead give them purpose.
You create employment for thousands of academics and support staff.
You lift dreary and desolate town centres by filling them with student accommodation and you invigorate local business with ideas and innovation.
Yes, you charge the students for the privilege, but they will all go on to successful jobs that will mean they can pay off their debts and rapidly join the ranks of the prosperous middle classes.
You introduce aggressive American-style fundraising into British universities and you allow institutions to expand in the global marketplace.
Let’s turn academia into Premier League Football. Then the Vice-Chancellors can pay themselves megabucks.
How’s that going?
They hoped to sell that most desirable of commodities – a traditional English education – to the world.
After all, everyone needs to learn English so we can give them that with a sprinkling of Brideshead Revisited thrown in.
It certainly appealed to an uneducated politician – John Major – and an educated politician – Tony Blair.
Instead of abolishing Oxbridge, you mass produce it.
And when globalisation was unleashed, it worked – for a while.
Just long enough to make massive investments in infrastructure and staffing.
A lot hinged on the bogus modern management theory of branding.
You could take humble educational institutions and call them ‘universities’.
While the top UK universities had cultures and traditions that were not unlike the public schools, the lesser institutions offered no such extra-curricular growth.
When the state was paying for university it was a rite of passage for a select elite, who went on to do prosaic jobs like being a teacher, a civil servant or solicitor.
The offer was similar to the military, you sank or swam. Nobody cared about your mental health. If you failed your exams you were out.
The new ‘business values’ that came required you to pay for your own degree, which, they promised, would inevitably lead to status and secure employment (never the kind of promise you would get from a religious institution.)
It meant that university was no longer a character-building exercise, it was a passport to the workplace.
Getting a Blue or acting in the college production of Hamlet, was not what you were there for. It was to get a 2.1.
The examinations ceased to be the pretext for the whole university experience, they were the whole university experience.
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One of the most despicable bits of propaganda that business and government pushed in the C21st was that unsecured debt was socially acceptable and often necessary.
A religious education would point out that debt is a form of slavery. A secular institution offers all kinds of casuistry to justify a student loan.
If you own a house and you can’t afford to pay off the debt, it can be repossessed and sold. The asset is redeemable.
If you pay for an education, you have a murky contract. If you never earn enough to pay it back, you won’t have to pay it back.
But who is ultimately going to have to pay that debt if you can’t? The financial services industry.
And when they can’t cover their losses, what will they do? They will ramp up the interest rates, thus imposing ever greater burdens on those people who were foolish enough to believe the promises of the government.
This is where we are now.
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There are more mundane reasons why universities are now an anachronism.
In the 1980s you had to go to a university to study, because that’s where the libraries and the academics were.
It’s hard to imagine now that before Amazon, you had to trawl second-hand bookshops in search of obscure books.
The quality of lecturing and teaching at universities has always been, with a few exceptions, poor.
They don’t really feel it is their job to teach you at all.
It was a rite of passage. Did you have the initiative and the wherewithal to study?
Now, the books and the lectures are all available on the internet.
You can say that’s not the same as being initiated into the academic way of thinking about things, but even in the 1980s, the academic way was becoming more ideological and detached from tradition.
Is the internet an entirely satisfactory replacement? No, but digitalisation, the loan system and social change have degraded the student experience beyond recognition.
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The owner of my favourite local café makes and sells amazing cakes. Where did she learn to do that?
From YouTube.
My optimistic vision for Britain is that we can become a nation of autodidacts.
In the early 1960s, there were 100,000 students in higher education, there are now three million.
It’s a racket sustained by the rigging of the job market, the vested interests of the financial services industry and political inertia.
Out of curiosity, I went to a conference of academic accountants a couple of years ago.
If you’re going to do a degree – and you’re seeking to please future employers – accountancy would seem a valuable vocational qualification.
We had a series of rather glib presenters who were explaining how the courses involved using computer simulation software to model the experience of being an accountant.
I then made a contribution as a business owner about how my experiences had taught me that it is absolutely vital to keep track of every penny that comes into my life and goes out of it.
They guffawed. One woman piped up: ‘What a miserable life!’
There are two problems with this.
Firstly if you’re teaching accountancy it might be worth understanding the core intellectual principle of your discipline.
The flow of money reveals profound truths about the nature of your business. The more accurate you are the more insight you will have into what you’re doing.
What you may do in private is your own concern, but if you’re teaching young people about accountancy, you should acknowledge the necessary rigour of your discipline.
Secondly, my eight year old played Grow a Garden obsessively for weeks. It’s about managing the purchase and sale of seeds and plants.
If all the university has to offer is computer simulations, and tutors who create babyish presentations, why not use your child’s tablet addiction to get them to do that without sending them away to university?
This conference gave me another insight.
I spoke to a tutor from the University of Manchester, I joked with her: ‘As an accountant, you surely agree with me that the days of universities are numbered. You can tell that based on the state of their accounts.’
I expected her to make a spirited defence. She didn’t.
She said the expansion of the universities had been a mistake, but what could they do now?
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I have a habit of picking up anecdotes that sum up the parlous state of education.
My dentist who used to work for a dental school. He told me he would hand out ‘Cs’ and ‘Ds’ to the students for their work. He was called in by the principal of the school and asked not to do that.
‘Does that mean there are some very poor dentists out there?’
‘Yes it does’ he said.
Earlier this year I paid a visit to Bournemouth University campus. A place I hadn’t visited for several years.
I saw huge buildings, rows of computers, media studios and lecture theatres. It was peak term time, but it was deserted.
I found a young woman on her own and I asked her where everyone was. ‘Oh it’s reading week. So nobody’s here.’
I met a graduate journalist who studied there and wanted to talk to me about his career. I had a coffee with him in a café:
‘Rowan, the campus was deserted. Why? Don’t they do reading in the holidays?’
‘No’, he said.
‘And they don’t do much reading in reading week either.’ he added.
We laughed. And the guy sitting next to us laughed. The kind of manic laugh that heralds the demise of a profound collective delusion.
Bournemouth University campus was as if I’d visited the set of the Truman Show and they weren’t filming that week.
The set was there, the actors would soon return, but nothing about it was real.
Henry VIII needs to be our role model.
Those universities that still have wealth should have it confiscated in a brutal Henry VIII style.
Those resources should go towards paying off outstanding student debts accumulated by younger generations.
If employers want to have ‘graduate’ employees, they should pay for them to study at their selected institutions.
If wealthy people want to pay for their children to have a university education, that’s up to them.
As far as my children are concerned, I will encourage them to get a job at 18 or live abroad for a year.
Living and working abroad, especially if it involves learning a foreign language, offers similar character-building challenges to the old university experience.
What should they do with Bournemouth University campus? And many of the other campuses around the country?
The student accommodation needs to become cheap housing for young people who want to stop living with their parents.
And given the global changes taking place, some academic facilities can be transformed into military barracks.
This article has got some positive responses, if you would like to join a Campaign for the Dissolution of the Universities, please send me an email.
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