Laudator Temporis Acti

David Butterfield, "Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised," Spectator (26 October 2024):

Last month, after 21 years studying and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job. And it’s precisely because I loved the job I was paid to do, and because I believe so firmly in preserving the excellence of higher education, in Britain and beyond, that I have left.

When I arrived in Cambridge two decades ago, giants were still walking the earth. Students could attend any lecture, at any level, in any department; graduate and research seminars were open to any interested party, and you could sit at the feet of the greats. Unforgettable gatherings of everyone from undergraduates to professors would discuss the big questions late into the night.

Cambridge’s historic strength came through respecting students’ abilities and giving them freedom to pursue their studies how they wished, but with some important restrictions. The so-called ‘supervision system’ is the beating heart of this: each week students (especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences) are sent away to read up and write on a single question. The challenge is to take a position, craft an argument, and be prepared to defend it during an hour’s discussion with an expert in the field. Under such scrutiny students learn where the inconsistencies of their position lie and develop the intellectual humility and adaptability that are the lifeblood of academic research.

It is fundamentally through this process that Cambridge evolved to become one of the best universities in the world. This is why its contribution to the arts and sciences outstrips any other institute of higher education.

Cambridge students’ performance is measured by examination — which, crucially, was for centuries a public matter. The results, posted as class lists on Senate House, were also published in the press. When Agnata Ramsay topped the Classical Tripos in 1887, for instance, it was news that shocked and delighted the nation.

A few years ago, Cambridge’s class lists became private. University administrators alleged grounds of ‘data protection’, after a minority of students campaigned under the banner of ‘our grade, our choice’. What was first an opt-out for students soon became uniform policy. No longer can undergraduates discover who did best (or worst) in their cohort, their subject, their college — even academics are given limited access to results, based upon their role. The desire to save students personal embarrassment has thus snuffed out much of the competitive spirit of the university. (The unofficial ranking of overall college performances, the Tompkins table, still circulates quietly, but only because a senior tutor leaks the data.)

Now even the fate of examinations hangs in the balance. There is a strong push, from students, administrators and a clutch of academics, to reduce or remove the traditional closed-book exam, which tested knowledge, ingenuity and (where appropriate) rhetoric under the real pressures of time and circumstance. Not only have many exams become open-book exercises to be carried out from students’ rooms, but there has been a marked increase in coursework. Naturally this is less stressful for students, but few see the irony of having their final academic grade being based upon earlier, i.e. less learned, versions of themselves. Meanwhile, the university has no clue whatsoever about how to deal with the rampant use of illegitimate, but increasingly undetectable, AI software.

For students, the risks have never been lower. Grade inflation is rampant in Cambridge, as elsewhere in the sector. A third-class performance, let alone a failure, is almost impossible in most subjects, as students can either intermit for the year and take the exams again, or avoid them on health grounds and be given an effective pass. When I came to Cambridge, students would be removed from the university for lack of attainment; it is now unheard of for students to be sent down for insufficient academic performance.

These changes reflect a bigger shift: for various reasons declarations of disability have spiked dramatically. Over the past 15 years, disability at Cambridge has increased more than fivefold, and is now declared by some 6,000 students (roughly one in four). The two major areas of growth have been ‘mental health conditions’ and ‘specific learning difficulties’. Many students register anxiety as the cause, yet the university and the NHS have neither the bandwidth nor the incentive to stress-test the claims. In four years, the number of students with ADHD has doubled, and is now approaching a thousand. As a result, the university’s Accessibility and Disability Resource Centre has gone into overdrive, mandating changes in teaching and examination across the board.

Whatever the truth behind the much-discussed ‘mental health crisis’, it has ushered in developments that disrupt university life. Many students are now excused from writing essays and permitted to submit bullet points; deadlines are extended, and regularly missed without penalty; extra time is given for all examinations.

The pace of change over the past decade has been astonishing, driven on by three forces: an administrative class that wants to minimise complaints, a subset of academics who actively resent the no-nonsense traditions of the university, and a proportion of students who will take the easiest path proffered. The result is a steady infantilisation of education, whereby challenging workloads are reduced, and robust criticism of bad writing and bad thinking is avoided. And now there is the prospect of the intense eight-week term being divided in two by a ‘recovery week’.

An even sadder development is that lectures now have to be filmed and made available online after the event. This constrains both lecturer and student materially: the experience in the room is compromised by the unknowably large third party who can watch whenever they want. Since ever fewer students now attend lectures, the very esprit de corps of the cohort is fading, and one of the university’s most special environments is threatened.

For those in the humanities and social sciences, there is a steady narrowing of knowledge and lowering of requirements. Set texts and supervision reading lists have been circumscribed: almost never are students tasked with reading a full book within the week. In some faculties abstract (and absurd) quotas of pages to be set for reading have been imposed. So-called ‘content warnings’ are mandated for courses: anything supposed to portend possible controversy, such as animal sacrifice in Homer’s Iliad, or religious conflict in Late Antique Rome, needs explicit flagging in advance. And if someone says they don’t want to confront such a topic, the department quietly excuses them. The net decline of standards cannot be ignored.

The entire success of Cambridge is predicated on admitting the brightest and best students. Yet, despite this truism, a particular obsession has fallen recently on applicants’ school backgrounds — unless they are foreigners. Cambridge, like many other universities, has imposed its own self-willed targets for increasing the proportion of state-school pupils. There was no clear rationale behind the numbers chosen, but they operated with a ratchet effect: when a figure dreamt up by committee was not just met but overshot, the new figure was then treated as the baseline against which ‘we must do better’.

From 2013 to 2023 the proportion of UK state-school admissions rose from 61 per cent to 73 per cent. This increase was made possible by undeniable discrimination against another group of students — those who, whether through a choice made by their parents or a scholarship won by their talents, attended fee-paying schools. It is one of the few green shoots that Cambridge’s current vice-chancellor, Deborah Prentice, recently paused this freewheeling process that placed politics ahead of talent.

In a similar spirit, the university boasts that it is more ‘inclusive’ by the year, but there is no clarity about what the goal is. No one has made the case that box-ticking protocols materially improve the academic activity or excellence of the cohort. Instead, there is a complete lack of curiosity about what ‘diversity’ actually means, and about why there is over- as well as under-representation of certain ethnic groups in the university. Other than increasing raw numbers — 39 per cent of undergraduate students at Cambridge are ‘non-white’, compared to 22 per cent a decade ago — there is no coherent sense of what is being aimed for.

For centuries the Cambridge college was based on fellowship. At its best, this is a wonderful thing. It is a remarkably flat structure, where peer trusts and respects peer. All high-table conversation is necessarily interdisciplinary, and those who remember the old traditions know that politics and academic gossip are to be eschewed. At times in my 16 years as a Fellow of Christ’s and Queens’, instances of true communion were possible, and made everything else worthwhile. The high-table culture is now greatly diluted — by a sharp decline in academics dining in the evening, and a steady drop at lunch; by not just the rapid expansion of the size of college fellowships, but also the co-option of many members from other categories, including graduate students; and by the undermining of that deep sense of communal responsibility for the institution.

The character of the college as a micro-community of academics is being doubly subverted: from within, by the rapid growth of bureaucratic roles taken up by professional administrators, and from without, by a university seeking to centralise control and elide differences among the colleges. The more uniform the overall environment becomes, the more rapidly it will suffer from the bad decisions inevitably yet to be made.

‘The content of this letter is extremely important, so please read it carefully.’ It isn’t often that the university speaks to its employees in this way. This was a follow-up email from the former pro-vice-chancellor for strategy and planning, David Cardwell. He wanted academics to complete his Time Allocation Survey by tabulating how many hours were spent across a vast suite of possible activities. It is characteristic of contemporary Cambridge that the strongest rhetoric it can muster is directed toward this self-serving bureaucratic exercise. Cardwell rubbed shoulders with four other pro-vice-chancellors, all enjoying a salary that is several multiples of the typical university academic, and surpasses the Prime Minister’s. There’s one for education and (as if the brief need be bigger) environmental sustainability; one for community and engagement; one for innovation; and one for research.

All of this is new: until 1992, the role of vice-chancellor was covered in short stints by the Heads of House, who paused their college governance while the rest of Cambridge got on with what they were here to do. Now we have not only career administrators at the helm, but their five deputies, for an annual cost of around £1.5 million. All the while, the university fails to find the money to keep important subjects alive, such as the centuries-old study of millennia-old Sanskrit.

As for our age-old titles — of lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor — these were replaced with American titles so as to be ‘more intelligible’ to a global audience. One of the university’s historic strengths has been that academic departments, and indeed colleges, operate as relatively horizontal structures, with only a small number of individuals having the temporary authority to steer what others do. To conjure up a world of ‘assistant professors’ and ‘associate professors’, who in fact have no supporting relationship to ‘the professors’, makes a mockery of that venerable system.

There is, unsurprisingly, a major disengagement of academics from the university’s growing central administration. It was telling that a few years ago the authorities silently closed down the University Combination Room, the 14th-century hall in which academics could freely convene outside their individual colleges.

Although in theory Cambridge academics are self-governing, the move to online voting, with minimal announcement, allows for many university policies to be driven through by those who want them enacted. Occasional victories are still possible, when the academic community is given the time and space to be heard. In late 2020, the Regent House voted overwhelmingly against an overbearing anti-free-speech policy wheeled out from the top. Our then vice-chancellor, a short-sighted and thin-skinned lawyer named Stephen Toope, would later mock this striking outcome as the confected result of an extra-mural conspiracy led by the Telegraph.

With morale low, and time at a premium, many senior academics steer clear of teaching as much as possible, especially in science and tech, where the lures of the lab and of business ventures are far stronger. The outcome, across all subjects, is a proliferation of graduate-level supervisors. Despite their genuine skill, this development is steadily severing the pipeline of world-leading scholars fostering the brightest students.

More alarmingly, there is a deeper-seated loss of trust in what the essential character of the institution is: elite, selective, competitive, rigorous. I have even heard academic colleagues agonise about whether it is ultimately ethical or appropriate that some students do better than others in examinations — academics doubting the very principle of grading by degrees.

The cleverest students sense that they are part of a faded spectacle, and I feel for them. They have neither the voice nor the medium to express that regret. Their own JCR committees face ever-declining levels of student engagement, as their (usually uncontested) ‘officers’ pivot to promote less relevant topics. Students vent their frustrations through the anonymous ‘confession’ pages on Facebook, where countless staff members lurk in the hope of gauging what decisions to make to pacify the most unhinged student protests.

All this I say of Cambridge. But these issues go right across the university sector, if somewhat less obviously in Oxford. By my reckoning, between the 74 colleges of England’s two ancient universities, there remain nine or ten sound institutions. I hope they dig their respective heels in and preserve the great traditions before they are irrevocably lost. Alphabetically, I think of: Christ’s, Corpus Christi (Ox), Jesus (Ox), Lincoln, Magdalene (Cam), Oriel, New, Pembroke (Cam), Peterhouse, and Trinity (Cam).

For the situation won’t get any better in the near term. The public need to trust and respect the elite academic institutions they fund; but that respect is waning, as stories continue to reveal politicised teaching, grade inflation, authoritarian campus policies and lurid, even laughable, research grants. The ambitions of our whole education system are ultimately pegged to the achievements at the very pinnacle of academia. If Cambridge can’t resist decline, who can?

‘Nobody does that’ is what most colleagues, friends and family said when I handed in my resignation. That may be, but the university I leave behind with sadness is certainly not the one I entered.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.