Standing Room | 27 June 2009

Logging on to a university homepage I noticed that the first thing it flags up — breaking news — is that they’re installing a £56,000 digital satellite TV system which will ‘transform’ the way students access multilingual news and information from around the world. Apparently the purchase of Exterity IPTV represents the Language Centre’s biggest-ever investment in technology for learning and teaching since it was established in 1994 and is ‘available to staff and students registered with the self-access area, who use it to improve their foreign language skills’. Personally I would have used the word ‘within’ as opposed to ‘registered with’ but hey, what do I know? I finished my formal education at 18 and opted out of becoming a Mistress of the Universe.

According to one campus academic, ‘you can even pause live TV, so it’s ideal if you want to stop and have a discussion part way through.’ Wow. I can now sleep easy knowing that all our poor little children schlepping off to university this September won’t be deprived of Sky+. God forbid any of them miss an episode of The Wire and have to add to their student loan by renting the boxed set from Blockbuster.

Beside this snippet of groundbreaking news is a smiley snapshot of faculty members gazing in awe at their computer screens. Their office is a monument to Heal’s circa 1970 — varnished orange wood and strange, multi-tiered desks that you can just tell came flat-packed and needed someone with a degree in engineering (and probably currently unemployed) to construct. I found it strangely depressing.

Since the 1980s, when the Conservatives first had the right-on and well-intentioned brainwave of lumping all higher education institutes together and encouraging each and every school-leaver to go off and get a degree, university has lost its kudos. It’s been systematically devalued. Still imperative for those seeking a vocational career, but for those kids who leave school with a sigh of relief it would appear a pretty pointless exercise in artificially depressing unemployment statistics. It saddens me because I want universities to be like they used to be: truly aspirational seats of learning.

I want wall-to-wall Alan Bennett types in crusty corduroys, young pontificating Stephen Frys, lecturers who don’t rely on impersonal emails to communicate, and cerebral tutors who stoke the fires of their students’ knowledge while sitting in wood-panelled studies, toasting crumpets and discussing 18th-century literature. I want eureka moments of learning. I want universities to go back to being the highly competitive and intellectually elitist institutions of yore. We’ve all been bullied and hoodwinked into sending semi-enthusiastic (and sometimes semi-literate) students off to third-rate universities to study subjects they’re only moderately interested in. It’s no longer the exception — it’s the rule. Everyone seems to have a degree in obscurity. It’s become little more than a delaying tactic. The government employment figures look so much better if indifferent students are busily employed binge-drinking, partying and saddling themselves with impossible debt as opposed to actually joining the real world and looking for a job.