Britain’s Universities are Being Destroyed From Within

The announcement by the University of Hertfordshire of the imminent closure of its English Literature, Philosophy, History, Linguistics and Creative Writing departments has caused controversy and an X-storm. Hand-wringers have seen this as an attack on the humanities, as a ‘crisis’ that’s the result of corporate control. But it’s more nuanced than this. It’s true that humanities courses don’t attract as many high-fee paying foreign students to the same degree as STEM subjects, and one can lament the bloated administrations and the inflated salaries of VC’s and Bursars at universities, but this is all by the by, for the truth was laid out clearly in Hertfordshire’s press release on the matter: the closures are down to “low student recruitment and declining demand”, that is, young people no longer want to study these subjects.

What’s described as ‘the hollowing out of the humanities’, however, is largely the result of changes in the humanities themselves: who is teaching, what is taught and how. As with every cultural institution in Britain the activist-minded are, termite-like, destroying humanities departments from within. Let’s take English Literature: the numbers of young people wishing to study the subject have been in freefall for years, and it has the highest dropout rate for first year students. This is because a young person with a passion for novels and poetry may well find themselves having to ingest Judith Butler and queer theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory and Marxism, and to take as a given the moral failings of the authors they study and the Western civilisation from which they came, and accept that they are uniquely evil.

It’s instructive to browse the staff of any English literature department and read the about the research interests of the staff and the modules they teach. Doing so, you’ll get the impression that some departments are not about teaching literature at all, but about political indoctrination. Interested parents of potential undergraduates who think these subjects are anything like they were, say, in the 90s, will get a shock (over the past five years school curricula and exams have also changed radically and become shockingly politicised, too). Many of the modules on offer are openly subversive of their disciplines and of society in general, and it seems they have succeeded all too well – and are destroying their own departments and careers.

Some departments are worse than others. Cambridge’s English faculty includes several Marxists, but it doesn’t ostensibly seem to obtrude on its teaching. Yet it does include Priyamvada Gopal, whose courses are openly activist, and the department has a Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies and a Centre for the the Study of Empire.

At Kent University, the Deputy Head of the School of Humanities, who lectures in English, lists his research areas as “posthumanism, feminism, queer theory, eco criticism, critical theory, affect theory and Mad Studies”. On the BA in English at King’s College “Questions of gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity come in throughout the course… and the final year will empower you to specialise in the topics that interests you, whether that is literary culture and queer theory or testimonies of genocide, race and Empire in the 19th century!” All of this quite typical.

What are being taught by some staff are ideological orthodoxies, where everything is seen though distorting lenses of queer theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory and Marxist critical theory. Such courses appeal only to would-be activists, and this pedagogy of resentment is profoundly ant-intellectual, producing Red Guards, not critical thinkers. Scholarly disciplines are being deformed into clichéd vectors of race and gender theory and social justice activism, and some lecturers are quite open in thinking of their function within academia to be that of politically revolutionaries.

This is reflected in the mimetic, boiler-plate academese that contemporary academics in the humanities, and most especially English, now produce. Contemporary teaching material in English literature, PhDs and peer-reviewed articles are full of obfuscating jargon that is intended to be exclusionary, its opacity intended to elide critique and, despite so many of the writers of such prose identifying as socialist, intended to undermine language as communication in order to consolidate class injustice. The peer-reviewing of articles in this discipline has become a closed, self-affirming, self-nourishing coprophiliac circle, excreting and ingesting the same orthodoxies year after year.

It is PhDs that secure jobs on English faculties and you’ll find them full of the same words repeated ad nauseam: words such as ‘instantiation’, ‘valencies’, ‘social reproduction’, the ubiquitous and pretentious ‘logics’, ‘iterations’ and ‘interrogates’ (never just ‘asks’). A word split into two by parentheses, ‘(dis)pleasurable’ is a tic that’s been around since the late 80s and has been as hackneyed as ‘herstory’ for decades, but still appears in may PhD and book titles in history or English. ‘The Bronte Sisters in other Wor(l)ds’ was one I spotted recently, or how about this perfect storm of imbecility: ‘Queering babies (Auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy’. ‘Ecologies’, ‘modalities’, ‘problematise’ and ‘liminal’ are also part of this pre-set lexicon. But these words have a significance beyond their meaning: they are counters used for a text to be accepted as contemporary academese. This kind of writing, strewn with specious multisyllabic glitter intended to beguile readers, ultimately stems from Critical Theory, whose influence Camille Paglia anatomises in her essay ‘Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf‘, where she shows how such language-use quickly became inextricably linked to cynical careerism.

English courses are also full of modish, activist buzzwords, rather than the language of literary scholarship, as are the PhDs that are used to obtain positions in English departments: ‘queer’, colonial’, ‘decolonialise’, ‘intersectional’, ‘gender’, ‘power structures’, ‘colonial legacies’, ‘social reproduction’… a ritual incantation of cant, adverting fealty to a faux-ideology, manifestations of herdthink, so many academic moos. This activist language, like the tired language of Critical Theory, is signal and entry key, caste-language and secret handshake, serving as a sign that those who use it want to enter the elite progressive world.

As English departments shrink, opportunities to teach become scarcer and competition fiercer, so nepotism and shows of ideological fealty become increasingly important. The eroding of objectivity and the barrier between scholarship and activism is not only de rigeur when submitting research proposals but is now evidenced in job ads themselves. The recent ad for a Teaching Associate at Nottingham’s Department of History informed applicants they’d be teaching ‘Philosophies of Revolution, Anti-Imperialism and British Decolonisation in the 20th Century’ and ‘Villains or Victims: White Women and the British Empire’; similar modules are now legion on undergraduate history degrees.

The ad goes on to say that the postholder “will contribute positively to the school’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” and that the department “particularly wants to hear from people under-represented in the field of history, such as those from marginalised genders, people with disability conditions or people from Black, Asia and Minority background”. This is now absolutely standard for all academic positions (and is also now a requirement for Arts Council funding), a phenomenon made possible only by the Equalities Act 2010.

Here is a taster of what you’ll come across from today’s English academics:

My work is inflected by feminist, Marxist, critical race and queer theory as ways to imagine a world that moves beyond white, heteronormative patriarchy. … I write about Marx as a philologist, critical theorist and Marxist. … I reinterpret Marx’s theory of value to show how it provides the basis for a new, more capacious style of Marxist literary criticism. … A feminist reading method attuned to the ways social forms are shaped by capital’s inner logics and tendencies. … Marxist studies of racialisation, relating to black feminist methodologies… I wrote about performativity, temporality, capital and queerness as utopia… primary research specialisations are black feminist studies in cultural theory, with particular focus on the ethics of representation, migration and the UK’s hostile environment… ‘queer reading as practise’ and ‘reading queer futures’ … exposes the ways postcolonial partition territories were always in the process of spatial reproduction, which determines identity so that it is understood as identification.

And so on and so on..

Over the years, it has become harder and harder for an undergraduate to avoid Critical Theory and radical politics, just as it has become difficult for postgraduates to have research approved that is not ‘inflected’ by one or both of them. The politicisation and political correctness of English departments is nothing new, and has been decried since the 80s, notably by Harold Bloom and by Camille Paglia in the 90s as Critical Theory took hold on campuses. But it has now gone into overdrive and become more extreme with the intake of staff since 2014 and the baleful influence of Critical Race Theory, decolonisation, Queer Theory and, most recently, Black Lives Matter.

The result is that English departments, like other public bodies and cultural institutions, end up being dominated by activists, who consolidate their power through the possession and dissemination of this new symbolic capital, and who destroy those bodies and institutions from the inside. The truth is PhDs have always largely been bought, in that their fees, and the cost of living without earning for three years, creates an enormous financial barrier, which is why the majority of those that undertake them are middle class, and why most English lecturers are also middle class.

To these financial barriers to higher education have now been added insurmountable ideological and linguistic barriers. The main funding body for the humanities is the highly politicised AHRC, and if one looks at what PhDs (and other projects) it funds, it reads like satire – the same progressive shibboleths and overused activist buzzwords appearing in title after title, abstract after abstract, all written in the same tortuous, try-too-hard prose. If some English departments give the impression of being woke madrassas it is in no small part due to research-funding decisions over the years by the AHRC and other funding bodies such as the Leverhulme Trust and the British Council.

Like the Arts Council, the AHRC is now one element of the progressive middle-class’s grotesque upside-down version of communism, whereby the despised proletariat has its wealth taken from it in the form of taxes, to be then redistributed to this parasitic sector of the bourgeoisie, otherwise known as ‘the Blob’, taking in civil service departments, consultancies, advisory bodies, NGOs, charities, trusts, think tanks, sections of the mainstream media that propagandises for it, most of the cultural sector and now, increasingly, academia.

It should be said that there are still many teaching in the humanities who do on subscribe to this view of the world, but it is the dominant tendency, and the politics of these activist academics are reflected in those of many administrators. It is driving students away. At the moment the problem seems intractable. The only way to save the humanities is for the long march through its institutions to be reversed, for the AHRC to be abolished and built up again from the ground up with no activists on its boards. But the lecturers and administrators responsible for creating these woke syllabuses are neither going to give up their jobs nor change the tenor of their courses. In fact, the problem is only going to get worse as more young, right-thinking, incoming staff jump through the necessary ideological hoops to obtain their posts. But, as they commit departmental suicide by activism, some of them will lose these positions eventually, as their departments are given the chop.

Chris Milton is a freelance writer based in the North East of England. He blogs at the Ragged Wood.