Patrick Christie: Searching for the Golden Age of Higher Education
After being appointed interim chair of the Office for Students last summer, Sir David Behan declared that the ‘golden age of universities is over’. I imagine I’m not the only one working in higher education who, upon hearing this, wondered what golden age, exactly, he was talking about. In the near-decade I’ve been at my institution, we’ve lurched from one crisis to the next, through Brexit, campus culture wars and the coronavirus pandemic while our financial outlook has grown ever bleaker.
The Office for Students predicts that nearly three quarters of universities will be in deficit by the next academic year. Over eighty institutions have launched redundancy and restructuring initiatives while those academics that aren’t being laid off are increasingly employed on casual or short-term contracts. At the same time, degree programmes are being closed across the country — a process that has hit the arts and humanities especially hard as students turn to STEM subjects for their supposedly better job prospects. In the United States, the situation is no better. Contingent (i.e. non-permanent) positions now make up almost 70 per cent of all academic faculty at American universities and enrolments in the humanities have fallen by almost a fifth in the last decade.
If ours demonstrably is not a golden age, David Behan’s claim did nevertheless make me wonder if higher education has ever enjoyed such a period. One when academics had job security; universities were free of government meddling; and students, unburdened by high tuition fees, chose subjects on the basis of passion over career prospects.
Following the recent death of novelist and academic David Lodge, I came across an interview he gave to Times Higher Education, in which he claimed that ‘the golden years of British higher education [were] from the 1960s to 1987’. Although I would choose a slightly earlier start date, this period — bookended by neoliberal reforms of universities — does seem the obvious candidate for a golden age. Higher education in the UK saw huge expansion after the second world war. The 1944 Education Act tripled the number of attendees to higher education by making secondary schooling free while the Robbins Report in 1963 lead to the creation of ten new universities. The funding needs of institutions throughout this time were also met almost entirely by the Government via the University Grants Committee, who made few demands upon them in return.
In the US, the benefits of the 1944 GI Bill, which included subsidised tuition, saw the number of graduates double between 1940 and 1950. Anxiety about America falling behind technologically in the cold war — coupled with the baby boom generation coming of age — saw enrolments further triple between 1956 and 1970 and expenditure on higher education over the same period increase sixfold. The burgeoning demand for faculty to facilitate this expansion (particularly in the humanities and liberal arts, demand for which peaked in 1970) saw the number of full-time academics double over the decade, with PhD students often being hired while still completing their theses.
But while expanding resources are all well and good, would this have translated into more prosperous conditions for the academics themselves? In thinking about how to answer this question, I decided to take inspiration from David Lodge and look at the campus novels from this period. Campus fiction is typically written by authors who have either spent time teaching in universities or remain active academics and, as Elaine Showalter has pointed out in her survey of academic fiction, Faculty Towers (2005), most campus novels ‘reflect the preceding decade’s issues, crises and changes’, with the result that:
Reading academic novels from 1950 to the present gives a good overview of the way the academy and its scribes have moved from hope to endurance to anticipation to cynicism and around to hope again.
Reading two of the most notable British examples of the campus novel — Malcolm Bradbury’s History Man (1975) and Lodge’s own Changing Places (1975) — suggests that the post-war golden age may not have been a thing of fantasy.
In History Man, the high first that sociology lecturer Howard Kirk achieves in his Bachelor’s degree secures him a Social Sciences Research Council grant for his Master’s that is generous enough to support both him and his wife financially. The university at which Kirk is conducting his research subsequently asks him to apply for a temporary assistant lectureship before he has even submitted his dissertation. After eventually receiving his doctorate, Kirk submits a book proposal that is immediately accepted with a sizeable advance. When he sends out applications for a permanent academic position, he is invited to interview at three separate universities. Without National Student Survey Scores and B3 Outcome metrics, Kirk feels no reticence in challenging the opinions of students he disagrees with and takes his classes on impromptu field trips to the local crown court, the salvation army and even to witness the birth of his first child.
Philip Swallow in Changing Places is similarly able to secure a tenured assistant lectureship at a red brick university on the basis of being awarded a high First in his Bachelor’s degree. After completing his MA, he has no plans to pursue a PhD and faces no pressure from his department to conduct research. Towards the end of the novel, he is promoted to senior lecturer by dint of having reached the top pay spine of his current role.
The rosy impression these books convey of post-war academia is undermined, however, by Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954). With his working-class background, history lecturer Jim Dixon frequently feels uncomfortable in the presence of his upper-middle class head of department, Professor Welch. But as Dixon reflects near the start of the book, Welch has ‘decisive power over his future’ in deciding whether to offer him a permanent position at the end of his probation. As a result, Dixon attempts to curry favour with Welch by assisting with his research, spending a weekend at his home singing madrigals and agreeing to deliver a lecture on ‘Merrie England’ during a university open evening. In an attempt to get his first article published to counter the ‘bad impression’ he feels he’s made at the university, Dixon submits to a fledgling journal only for the editor to steal his piece by translating it into Italian and publishing it under his own name. When nerves cause Dixon to drink too much before his Merrie England lecture, he bungles the delivery and concludes by mocking the Donnish pretentious of his colleagues, resulting in the termination of his employment. Before his academic career is cut short, Dixon also encounters indignation about the effects of widening participation, such as his colleague Alfred Beesley’s claim that:
All the provincial universities are going the same way… my God, go to most places and try and get someone turfed out merely because he’s too stupid to pass his exams — it’d be easier to sack a prof. That’s the trouble with having so many people here on Education Authority grants, you see.
Sefton Goldberg, in Howard Jacobson’s Coming from Behind (1983), is similarly unimpressed with the expansion of higher education, claiming: ‘I’ve decided I can no longer be a party to degrees. We give too many. It’s time we started to take some back.’
Despite having studied literature at Cambridge, Goldberg is only able secure a position as an English lecturer at Wrottesley Polytechnic in the ‘Department of Twentieth-Century Studies, so called in order to meet the Polytechnic’s stringent requirements of relevant contemporaneity.’ Due to a lack of teaching space, there are plans to relocate the Department to the south stand of the local football club, Wrottesley Ramblers.
Goldberg sends out countless of job applications regardless of how unsuitable the positions are (i.e. ‘Head of Pastoral Care at St Michael’s Agriculture College’) in order to find a more prestigious institution to work at. When he is eventually invited to interview for another position, a Disraeli Fellowship at Holy Christ Hall College, Cambridge, he is only successful in securing it because all the other applicants decide to drop out. The novel ends with the book Goldberg has been writing being rejected by a publisher.
Henry Wilt, in Tom Sharpe’s Wilt (1976), is also only able to advance professionally through convoluted means. Wilt has worked for the last ten years in the Liberal Studies Department at Fenland College of Arts and Technology as an Assistant Lecturer ‘teaching classes of Gasfitters, Plasters, Bricklayers and Plumbers’ and trying ‘his damnedest to extend the sensibilities of Day-Release Apprentices with notable lack of success.’ Wilt’s lack of doctorate and administrative capability have seen him passed over for promotion to Senior Lecturer five years in a row. When he is wrongly accused of murdering his wife and held in police custody for a week, he blackmails the Principal of the College upon his release, demanding to be made Head of Liberal Studies in exchange for not publicising his unlawful arrest with the press nor instituting proceedings against the College for unfair dismissal. The Principal quickly agree to his request.
Instructor Henry Mulcahy faces precarity from the very first page of The Groves of Academe (1952) by Mary McCarthy (usually considered to be the first American campus novel). The book opens with Mulcahy being informed via a letter from Maynard Hoar, the President of Jocelyn College, that his appointment ‘will not be continued beyond the current academic year’. Despite the position leaving Mulcahy’s family in near-penury with ‘doctor bills, coal bills, small personal loans never paid back, four children outgrowing their clothes… [and] the threatening letters of a collection-agency,’ Mulcahy feels he has no choice but to force the President to reverse his position, having spent a year and a half unemployed writing ‘scores of fruitless letters’ before being hired by Jocelyn. Since Hoar has positioned himself as being in opposition to the persecution of leftwing academics spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Mulcahy spreads a rumour that he is a former member of the American Communist Party to make it appear that Hoar is hypocritically bowing to political pressure in letting him go (when, in fact, he simply doesn’t have the budget to keep him on). The campaign ultimately causes the President himself to resign.
James Walker in Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward (1965) is also surprised at the politicisation of the post-war American campus when he is invited to travel over from Britain to take up the position of writer-in-residence at Benedict Arnold University. By being in receipt of public funds, the state government forbids the sale of alcohol on campus and forces all staff to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States government. Walker, being a British citizen, is reluctant to do so; when he criticises the loyalty oath during a public lecture, it causes a scandal on campus, the fall out of which ultimately makes Walker decide to prematurely end his employment at the university.
Stepping Westward also shows that the Humanities have always been required to demonstrate their value. Walker is assigned several classes to teach as part of his residency, including a composition class that is mandatory for all first-year students, which, as the Head of the English Department explains:
It’s sometimes the only way we have of presentin’ English as a university subject at all to the other departments like Science and Business… tell the U that you’re teachin’ scientists to talk to one another and teachin’ business majors to write memos and reports and they listen to you because they know that’s important.
Walker is confronted by the disdain with which English is held by many of the students when one undergraduate remonstrates him for his complex explanation of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, arguing ‘I didn’t come to university to improve my mind, Mr Walker. I came here to, duh, train me for a job.’
The narrator of A New Life (1961) by Bernard Malamud faces a similar problem to Walker. Sy Levin dreams of teaching English literature but, lacking a PhD, is only able to find a job at an agricultural and vocational community college in rural Oregon, where the overriding purpose of the institution’s ‘Liberal Arts Service Division’ is to provide composition classes in order to ‘satisfy the needs of the professional schools on the campus with respect to written communication.’ The Department Head argues that ‘we need foresters, farmers, engineers, agronomists, fish-and-game people, and every sort of extension agent. We need them — let’s be frank — more than we need English majors.’ Levin’s frustration at the rote nature of the composition courses and their use of technical texts over literary ones causes him to compete with Gerald Gilley, the Director of Composition, for the position of Head of the Department when the post becomes vacant. After the college finds out that Levin has also been having an affair with Gilley’s wife, his one-year contract is terminated.
Holman Turner similarly feels the strain of delivering freshman composition classes, in his case the ‘Humanities Course C’, in Alison Lurie’s Love & Friendship (1962), as does Gertrude Johnson in Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954) who ‘some days… was so brimful of the book [she’s writing] that she could hardly bear to talk to the girls about their silly stories.’ Upon being hired as the new teacher of creative writing at Benton College at the start of the novel, the President of the College apologises to Johnson that ‘the salary was not either would have wished.’
A more hopeful note is initially struck by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), though. After arriving in America as a refugee twice-over — having first fled the Russian Revolution then the Nazi occupation of France — Timofey Pnin is employed as Assistant Professor of Russian at Waindell College. His appointment is maintained despite his having a degree in sociology and political economy rather than linguistics; his imperfect grasp of English; his course only attracting a handful of students each year; and the fact that his ‘academic existence had always depended on his being employed by the eclectic German Department in a kind of Comparative extension of one of its branches.’ The arrangement unfortunately comes to an end after nine years when Dr Hagen, Head of the German Department, is offered a position elsewhere and Pnin loses his protector.
While a higher education golden age is an undeniably appealing idea, the overall impression these campus novels convey is that it’s not one found in reality. It may have been the case for David Lodge that ‘once you had got a job at a university, it was yours for life’ but if the post-war campus novel even partially reflects the reality of academia, then his experience was clearly not universal. Instead, it seems that academics have always faced frustration, precarity and competition for secure employment; that the humanities have always had to fight to justify themselves, and that government attempts to influence higher education are nothing new.
Hopefully, when a permanent Chair of the Office for Students is appointed, they won’t lament an idealised lost past like David Behan, but push the regulator to articulate how we might secure a more stable, diverse and prosperous future for both students and academics within higher education.
Patrick Christie holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London and has worked at a modern university for the past eight years in a policy role. His writing has previously appeared in The London Magazine, Review 31, The Oxonian Review, The Mechanics' Institute Review, and elsewhere.
