There is one important aspect of AC Grayling's New College that has been strangely ignored, which is a shame because it is arguably the most odious, whatever Terry Eagleton might say. The media has understandably focused on the fee of £18,000 a year, and the fact that this will turn education into an extreme luxury item; but as Chris Dillow suggests, the worth of an £18,000 degree will be considerably less than that of a £9,000 one from a good university, once it becomes plain that its full of dense Etonians.
I also think the notion of a 'private' university is not, per se, anything to fear, and on this Grayling deserves to be heard. Paul Mason's evocative phrase, used in his LSE lecture, that the 'Ross and Rachel era is over', cannot be ignored, simply by demanding more of the form of credit-fuelled and state-driven opulence that Britain enjoyed during Blair's second term. Who knows where the humanities will be housed in twenty year's time? Lets listen to Paul Gilroy, when he says:
Maybe we have to look to a younger generation, people who are either not academics, or have a very tenuous or marginal position in the academic world and are very skilled or adept at using elements of the new technology to build a different kind of platform than the one they would get inside the bubble of official commentary. People like Dan Hancox, and Kay Punk, and Richard Seymour – all bloggers of one sort or another. They may have a journalistic gig too, do a bit of academic life, and have 10 or 20,000 followers on Twitter. I think new technologies impact this idea of public intellectuals very directly.
Against this backdrop, the notion of listening to Niall Ferguson and Richard Dawkins blather on, at a cost of £18,000 a year, purely because they are publicly recognisable to non-intellectuals (which is purely because they get invited to blather on on Newsnight, purely because they are publicly recognisable to non-intellectuals), appears the equivalent of listening to Emerson Lake & Palmer in 1977. They're yesterday's people, and the only people who don't realise that are those who can't distinguish price from value.
No, the really odious thing about Grayling's proposal is a term that gets lost between '£18,000' and 'private'. That term is 'for-profit'.
Consider the meaning of a for-profit university. Not for-learning or for-research, but for-profit. Actually, this term is always something of a misnomer. The central contradiction of capitalism from a Marxian perspective is that the extraction of surpluses depends on use value: something useful, productive, desirable must be invented or built, before money can start being creamed off. A for-profit car manufacturer must also, to some extent, be for-cars. It transpires in the case of Grayling's New College that even the financiers have interests and objectives that extend beyond accumulation of more money.
But if for-profit means anything, it means that financiers and owners are owed some form of surplus, and are entitled to take whatever surpluses happen to arise unexpectedly. This is quite different from conventional debt finance, in which we assume that the lender will receive some interest on the loan. 'Not-for-profit' organisations such as charities and Foundation Trust hospitals borrow money in this way from banks, but this is not to say that the bank receives the surplus. Surpluses, as Georges Bataille argues, are the central fact of all economy in the 'general' sense of the term. Feasts, wars, orgies, exploitation, sacrifices are all anthropological phenomena which dispose of that which is left over, that of which there is too much. Capitalism's solution to this problem, namely surplus value extraction from labour and distribution of it as profit, is only one of innumerable ways of dealing with the fact that value overflows, that our needs are often more than met. The surplus produced by universities, for example, typically spills over into the public sphere and the enrichment of human lives.
Following the Alan Greenspan-induced 'Ross and Rachel era' of opulent, overflowing credit, finance has returned to its traditional Scrooge-like mentality. There is scarcely enough to go round. And therefore to introduce a profit motive into universities, at precisely the moment when finance has already removed all of the surpluses from public use, represents an appalling insult to injury. To say that the lender and the owner have first dibs on any additional value that happens to be lying around, and to say that in a university, positions Grayling alongside Fred Goodwin and Bob Diamond as those who privatise all gain, then socialise all loss. This is the logic of 'drill, baby, drill' - that because the surpluses are running out, we need to privatise more of them - extended into the intellectual sphere.
So, yes, by all means privatise universities. After all, how many academics enjoy the state breathing down their necks via the Research Excellence Framework? And if you can find an education that is 'worth' £18,000 a year, and genuinely intellectual students who happen to want to spend this, then who, really, is to stop you? Private entities can serve public interests, and anyone who disagrees needs to put down their David Marquand book and consider where their treasured cultural artefacts come from. Where Grayling has suffered a complete failure of imagination is in jumping directly from 'private' to 'for-profit', thereby confirming our worst suspicions about the company that he, Dawkins and Ferguson are keeping, and the Thatcherite politics they harbour.
A very acute analysis Will. The propensity to assume that all the surplus value belongs to you was Veblen's definition of predation.
Posted by: Dick Pountain | June 17, 2011 at 11:55 AM
Keep blathering away. No-one's listening.
If someone wants to pay £18,000 for a degree, let them. If a university wants to make a profit, who the hell are you to complain?
The 'all beneficent state' has succeeded in dumbing down education in this country so that we are falling in educational league tables in almost every subject.
The 'state' universities are producing graduates who haven't the basic skills for the current job market.
I think Grayling should be knighted for daring to stand up to such closed and snobbish minds as yours.
Posted by: Richard Holloway | June 17, 2011 at 05:03 PM
Richard - I suspect you've only skim-read my blog-post (that's right, you better read it soon, or I'll send you to the Gulag!) because I specifically argue that the price of the degree is not the main problem, nor is the fact that it is independent of the state. My argument (or 'complaint' if you prefer) is that the problem lies in its 'for profit' status. Surely if Conservatives want to avoid bad caricatures of the private sector, to match your bad caricature of the state, it's time to recognise that there are multiple ways of devolving power, beyond this form of hackneyed, greed-driven privatisation?
Posted by: Will Davies | June 17, 2011 at 06:24 PM
Oh I read it.
What blinkers you is this notion that profit is always greed driven.
Is the John Lewis Partnership greedy for wanting to give its Partners a bonus?
Is the creator of a new medical technique greedy for wanting to be rewarded for its diligence and time?
If a university wants to make a profit to reinvest as well as reward shareholders, why does that make them greedy?
Posted by: Richard Holloway | June 17, 2011 at 08:01 PM
Try again, Richard. The John Lewis Partnership does not *maximise* profit - for example, what incentive does the firm have to lower the wages of its employees (through outsourcing, offshoring, etc.) to increase the surplus when that surplus goes to the partners?
The point is that rewarding shareholders can act as a deadweight on productive and creative activities because their return is not capped - their liability is limited through incorporation, but not their share of the surplus.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1333366645 | June 18, 2011 at 12:18 AM
Richard - on your specific examples...
It would (as the comment above) indicates be difficult to describe JLP as a 'for profit' entity, in that it has no external shareholders. Its equity is held in a trust which exists to defend the interests of its 'members', i.e. employees. If and when surpluses exist, these get distributed as dividends. But those surpluses are a side effect of a company that is well run and attractive to consumers; if they dried up, it wouldn't imperil the company or management in any way, as would occur for Tescos.
Re medical innovations, it is widely recognised, even by fairly radical free-marketeers, that 'up-stream' R&D will not be delivered to an optimal level by markets and profit-maximisation. This is why (Republican-supporting) thinkers such as Michael Porter worked hard to persuade the Bush administration that neglecting public spending on research and universities would imperil the long-term competitiveness of the US economy. If you want to be more neo-con about this, think of what the Pentagon and NASA did for US technological and economic supremacy during the Cold War and years following.
A 'reinvested profit' is called 'retained earnings' not 'profit', so I don't understand the final point.
Posted by: Will Davies | June 18, 2011 at 09:47 AM