Ill Winds from Bloated Universities

Most of the wise and good have long ago offered their five cents worth of comment on the August riots and looting in London and other English towns. But there might just be room left for (say) a further two and a half cents worth from a late starter lower down the ladder of eminence.

Surely any rational consideration of such an outbreak of civil violence ought to start at the beginning? And the beginning can only be the question: “What is the true essence and quality of aboriginal human nature which drives our behaviour?”

Many—most—of the wiseacres have dodged the logical starting post, and have begun with the outrageous and unexamined assumption that individual human beings are born naturally virtuous; “society”, therefore, has created these disorders, and “we” are to blame.

For example, writing in the London Spectator (August 20), Allan Massie bleats about the need for pity and sympathy (for the rioters!) from “those of us in more fortunate circumstances”. What disappointment to find a first-class writer like Massie spouting such politically correct drivel. To be sure, the Spectator offers us also the redoubtable Theodore Dalrymple, whose long service as a prison doctor so often supplies more than a touch of life’s gritty reality; and Taki, the journal’s wisecracking multimillionaire “High Life” columnist, also rubbishes the bleeding hearts. Nevertheless, the world’s English-speaking media in general inclined towards the line that the rioters, looters and arsonists are to be more pitied than censured.

It remains to me an abiding mystery how such a starry-eyed misconception has managed so widely to permeate the zeitgeist. Still well within the reach of living memory lie the Holocaust and the gas ovens; Stalin’s slave camps in Siberia; millions of Chinese peasants simply abolished by the stroke of a brush upon a decree of Mao Zedong; in today’s Africa, unspeakable oppressions and cruelties are routinely inflicted on their own people by the likes of Robert Mugabe.

It is indeed self-comforting and powerfully “feel-good” to profess the belief that, deep inside each human being, there is an angel trying to struggle to the surface. But is it true? Alas, the evidence for such an appealing proposition is very far from conclusive. Our great poet James McAuley did not think the actual state of the world as we see it around us led to happy conclusions about its inhabitants (I quote from memory): 

No worse age has ever been:
Lying, murderous, obscene. 

Mankind’s ancient intuitions of original sin, of human imperfectability, and the need for a strong bridle on the necks of wayward individuals have all today declined almost to the point of discredit and disuse. True, such concepts are hard to establish with formal philosophical certainty, but the empirical evidence for what follows their abandonment is plain to see: look only on the streets of London last August.

Those old-fashioned notions once informed much of our literature and teaching. The Bible told us that the heart of man is desperately wicked, and that madness is in their hearts; it was no happy augury that Cain, the first baby born upon Earth, murdered his own brother out of rancid envy; in Moby-Dick (a book almost as insightful as the Bible) the sermonising old negro sea-cook Elijah preached that men were no more moral than sharks, “unless the shark part of them was governed”; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, through the clouds of his ample opium, saw clearly enough that “the world is not a girl in a petticoat, but a madman in a strait-jacket”; even the high-minded Kant posits “the crooked timber of humanity” as the dubious raw material from which civility somehow must be crafted.

It is some fifty years since William Golding published his celebrated novel Lord of the Flies, about a party of schoolboys dumped unsupervised on a desert island. In a very short while true human nature revealed itself: they turned feral. Many of the novel’s readers with progressive views found this unpalatable and reactionary, which of course they were entitled to do. But, lurking behind their comments, one sensed a moment of horrid unease: “What if Golding should be right?” This was quickly dismissed: “He couldn’t be! Let’s deny it as a thought not even to be entertained by such impeccable bien pensants as us.”

Is it mere coincidence that Theodore Dalrymple worked in prison hospitals in real life, and that Golding was actually a master in a boys’ school? Would it be unfair to wonder whether both of them got closer to the heart of their subject than all the professors of politics, social studies, history and so forth who pullulate and prosper in our universities today?

Which just leaves space for us briefly to raise—but by no means to settle—the question of whether our chances of securing an open, free and decently behaved civil society are helped or hindered by the enormous proliferation of tertiary education, and the popping up of (so-called) universities, like mushrooms after rain.

It is uncommon nowadays to attribute the status of “wisdom” to words uttered before the opening of this century—a whole eleven years ago. But in those olden days (actually in Encounter magazine of July 1960) Kingsley Amis predicted the consequences of a then proposed vast expansion of British universities. His words apply so aptly to the bloated state of today’s Australian tertiary education that we would be wilfully blind not to remind ourselves of what he said half a century ago: 

The delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefiting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there, is … a necessary component of the expansionist case. … More will mean worse. [my emphasis] 

By the early 1960s our Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, had adopted the Murray Report on the future of Australia’s higher education. Shortly stated, the Commonwealth would shoulder the main costs of the running of the universities, of which each state then had one or two, plus the new ANU in Canberra. The needs of the postwar world undoubtedly demanded a vigorous new consideration, and especially a lot more money, which the states were too poor, or too mean (or too wise) to provide.

Thus Australia committed to what became a policy of promiscuous academic expansion, enthusiastically continued and enlarged by Labor’s education minister John Dawkins. Australia’s taxpayers (whether they realised it or not) had committed to half a century of the bondage of paying annually an arm and a leg for the creation of universities which were undoubtedly “worse”, and the development of subsidised student bodies of philistines who had been more or less blackmailed into enrolling by promises of better salaries and prospects when (eventually) they got a job.

It would be ridiculous to claim that all our universities are wholly bad, or that all their students are unworthy. But it is a pity that our Productivity Commission did not establish a baseline about 1963, and resurvey it (say) every five years thereafter.

There is a widespread impression—which I share—that our universities tend to be heavily over-bureaucratised featherbeds serving, above all, their own corporate interests and the comfort of those who work in them. Stuart Macintyre, whom some would regard as the Melbourne mandarin of high scholarly History, takes a different view: he has described himself as a “middle manager in a vast corporate enterprise”.

To look no further than Victoria, it cannot be said that its universities always generate an atmosphere of brisk intellectual and administrative integrity. Monash University lost a vice-chancellor somewhere in the mists of his own suggested scholarly plagiarism; Victoria University is mired in a welter of inquiries into aspects of its conduct; RMIT University was lately the subject of a report by the Victorian Ombudsman which did little for the credit of its management.

Melbourne University has barely forgotten the odorous scandal in which Geoffrey Blainey, one of the finest scholars and writers of our country, was driven from his Chair of History by a combination of left-wing academic thuggery and threats of student violence. Over thirty years, to my certain knowledge, the university condoned theft by students from its own bookshop to the tune of millions (yes, millions) of dollars, and forbade the shop management to take appropriate legal action against the offenders. This shabby limp-wristedness I describe in detail in my recently published book Final Proof, as also the disgraceful disorders in which rioting students beset the University administrative building.

But now it appears that the students themselves may enforce some economy and common sense. At Melbourne’s Australian Centre they seem to be voting with their feet, and simply not enrolling in some of the higher-nonsense courses they are offered. (How would you like to spend some years of your life developing skill and ability “to discuss and theorise homosexuality within an interdisciplinary framework”? Do you think I made that up? Do you think I could make that up?)

A report soon to be considered by the university seems likely to recommend a big chop in the funds spent upon such whimsies, accompanied by a “redeployment” of the staff not teaching them, because the students have become too shrewd to enrol.

I can imagine that famous and eloquent shrug of the Kingsley Amis shoulders.