Matt Goodwin, in The Sunday Times, 1 September 2024 where the title reads “Left-wing groupthink is strangling universities, so count me out”
Having watched free speech being marginalised by a narrow monoculture over two decades, Matt Goodwin is stepping down from teaching students
This summer, after more than 20 years of teaching and researching in Britain’s universities, I decided to quit my full professorship. While I remain an honorary professor I will no longer teach students or carry out my usual academic duties. This is the first September in two decades that I will not be welcoming first-year students on to campus.
Why?
Universities are weighed down by financial problems, an ideological monoculture and a shift in focus to “student satisfaction”
ILLUSTRATION BY RUSSEL HERNEMAN
The official story is that like a rapidly growing number of universities in the country, the University of Kent, my academic home, is engulfed by a major financial crisis that has pushed it to the brink.
Like the wider sector, Kent has been smashed by a toxic cocktail of a cost of living crisis, growing competition for undergraduate students, rising inflation, over-expansion and a cap on student tuition fees. The £9,000 tuition fees (later raised to £9,250) that were introduced in 2012 are worth less than £6,500 at today’s values.
All this has left three universities on the verge of complete collapse while 40 per cent are expected to run deficits this year. In response Kent, like others, has been quickly slashing courses and encouraging academics, such as me, to take voluntary redundancy. I am one of about 50 academics to do so.
But if I’m being honest with you, my decision to step down as a full-time professor, as I explain in my forthcoming book Bad Education, has little to do with this financial crisis and much more to do with how several other factors collided to erode the quality of higher education, betray students and make universities an unpleasant place to work.
I could point to the dumbing down of standards and rampant grade inflation I’ve witnessed over the last 20 years, like the fact that since 2010 the share of students in England graduating with first-class degrees has rocketed from 15.5 per cent to 33 per cent.
I could point to the disastrous rise of online, or remote, learning, which — especially since Covid-19 — has killed attendance and intellectual life, undermining students’ interpersonal and learning skills.
And I could point to a wider problem these things reflect, which is how universities have increasingly replaced the things they used to prioritise — intellectual rigour, hard work, exposing students to debates and ideas, even ones they find disagreeable — with an obsessive focus on “student satisfaction”.
What ultimately matters now is not whether students are being pushed intellectually but whether, like consumers, their expectation of the university “experience”, “enjoyment”, or “emotional safety” are being met on campus, which often comes at the expense of expanding their minds.
But while all these things played a role in my decision, the real crisis that’s unfolding on campus, the real reason a rising number of academics are giving up on the universities, is neither about finances or teaching — it is deeply
The University of Kent has encouraged academics to take voluntary redundancy to help tackle its financial crisis …. ALAMY
Over the past 20 years universities across the West have morphed into openly political and highly activist institutions.
They are imposing a dogmatic worldview on their academics and students, enforcing a narrow groupthink, silencing dissenters, and eroding the very things higher education is supposed to promote: truth, reason, evidence and wide-ranging debate.
Universities always leant left, of course. But since the 1960s in Britain, the ratio of left-wing to right-wing academics has spiralled from three to one to closer to ten to one. In some college departments in America there are zero registered Republicans.
This has produced an ideological monoculture on campus, where only a very narrow set of ideas are allowed to dominate.
Call it “woke”, “cultural socialism”, “radical progressivism”, whatever your preferred term. But what defines it is a total obsession with viewing racial, sexual and gender minorities as sacred, with wanting to transfer power and resources from the majority to minorities, and sacrificing anything that gets in the way of this “social justice”, including free speech and scientific knowledge which does not support the new narrative.
By the time students reached my third-year course a handful would always complain about how, until that point, they felt they had been politically indoctrinated.
Another problem with monocultures is they enable an even more radical activist minority to take over academic departments and the university’s ever-expanding bureaucracy.
Today, for instance, you cannot apply for a research grant or academic job without submitting a “diversity statement”, whereby you are forced to swear allegiance to the new progressive creed. This is a political litmus test designed to weed out dissenters and strengthen this stranglehold over institutions that are supposed to be politically neutral.
Meanwhile, academics like me are told to “decolonise” reading lists, take part in “anti-racism” training (which has shown to be flawed) and display our gender pronouns, another symbol of a highly contested political belief system.
Monocultures also breed an intolerance of those who hold different views. Over the last decade, I’ve watched an alarmingly large number of my friends be harassed, intimidated, abused, even losing their jobs because they asked questions about the new orthodoxy on campus.
Kathleen Stock is the most high-profile academic to have been forced out of her post, but it is estimated that about 200 have been sacked, harassed or disinvited from giving talks
The gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock, hounded out of her job by pro-trans activists at Sussex, is the most prominent example. But there are many more. The group Academics for Academic Freedom list nearly 200 academics who have been sacked, harassed, or disinvited from giving talks in recent years.
I experienced this first-hand after the Brexit referendum, in 2016, after which I suggested, publicly, that we should implement a democratic decision made by 52 per cent of voters. What followed was a sustained campaign of bullying, harassment and intimidation, with many leftist academics closing ranks to shut me out.
For Brexiteers like me, everything that is essential to academic life — getting grants, getting published, giving talks — became harder than it was before the referendum.
Many students and their parents have noticed these problems, too. One in four students say they “self-censor” on campus, feeling unable to say what they really think.
Across the West, public confidence in colleges and universities is collapsing. In America, the reliable pollster Gallup finds the share of conservatives who express “a great deal of confidence” in universities collapsed from 56 per cent in 2015 to 19 per cent last year.
Here, according to YouGov, 52 per cent of all Brits disagree that university education offers “value for money”. This number has stayed roughly even since YouGov started tracking this in 2019, and clearly these numbers are not all a result of the political crisis on campus; but students are not idiots — the smarter ones can see what’s happening and they don’t like it.
Some students have complained that they feel politically indoctrinated by the university monoculture …. ALAMY
This is why Kent and other institutions are now running into “student retention issues”, otherwise known as students coming for one or two terms and then just disappearing.
I did try to fix these problems. Between 2019 and 2024, I joined a group of academics who helped design and deliver the Higher Education (Free Speech) Act, which creates a legal requirement for universities to promote and protect free speech. Furthermore, if they sack or harass academics because of their views, they could be fined under the act.
Why did we do this?
Because we simply do not trust these biased institutions to reform themselves, and we wanted to try and push them back to their founding mission — the pursuit of truth and free debate.
Yet while this law passed, a few weeks ago Labour’s new education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, announced her plan to pause if not cancel the law altogether. This will only further empower the radical activist minority on campus. We must ensure that this law comes into force so that free speech on campus can genuinely be promoted and protected.
It’s also the case that a number of new institutions are also emerging to emphasise the traditional virtues of academic life. These include Professor Eric Kaufmann’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, or the University of Austin in Texas, which just matriculated its inaugural class.
And what about me? While I will continue to write books and my Substack politics blog, I am done with working full-time in the universities. I wish the first years arriving on campus this year the best of luck. They are going to need it.
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Mmmmm……the University of Buckingham was co-founded by my old and deeply conservative Oxford Professor of Government and Politics, Max Beloff, late of All Souls, brother of Nora Beloff, the right-wing journalist who wrote for the Telegraph. The Beloff’s were Russian Jews whose forebears had emigrated to UK in 1903. Max and Nora were anti-Labour Party/Labour governments and anti-EU. Max got his Baronetcy from Margaret Thatcher in 1980 for defending ‘conservative values’ so steadfastly. The University of Buckingham was the first private University set up in UK since before WW2. It was largely a money-making exercise: courses lasted four terms per year with short breaks in-between, enabling students to complete a degree in 2 years. As to the University of Austin, Texas, I really don’t know . But as this British academic seems to quote some stats from US universities, I feel his diatribe may possibly be aimed at pro-Trumpian academe in the States: perhaps he’s looking for work in the USA?
While there is a bit of substance to Matt Goodwin’s concerns, he himself is a militant purveyor of highly simplistic arguments and of hostility to an invented left wing elite. I would not trust his analysis of anything