Big Society, Big Oil, Muzzled Universities (III)
by ecologics
Please note: this post is part of a series. Click on any of the titles below to see the rest of the posts.
Part III (this post)
In this last post in the series I begin to make the case that John Browne’s appointment as the head of Britain’s ‘Independent’ Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance’ can be interpreted as the coming of plutocracy—or as ‘global strategists’ for CitiCorp once called it, ‘plutonomy‘—to Britain’s higher education.
Vince Cable delivered today what was described as a ‘searing’ speech which attacked the ‘spivs and gamblers’ in Britain’s finance industry. But even before he had delivered the speech, he was forced to fend off attacks from much of the corporate media, and from the current and former directors of the CBI. Richard Lambert played what might be described as a gender card by accusing Cable of using ‘emotional’ language in his widely-trailed speech. Presumably Lambert would have liked Cable to use the cold, ‘unemotional’ language of, say, Digby Jones, the former head of CBI, who accused Cable of behaving like ‘a Liberal rabble rouser’. Jones urged Cable to re-write his speech, and according to the Guardian, he even suggested ‘There’s still time, Vince. You can still withdraw it,’ Jones said.
Cable may have left his speech intact, but he also left his policies in place. It is a sign of Britain’s extraordinarily conservative political culture that even as Cable threatened to regulate Britain’s runaway big business, he embraced a series of policies that have been promoted, to not say dictated, by that very sector. It is Cable who still wants to privatise Royal Mail, and it is also Cable that is determined to accept and adopt the likely recommendations of Lord John Browne, the Mandelson-appointed head of what many regard as the grossly misnamed ‘Independent Review of Higher Education and Student Finance’.
In case some of the readers haven’t seen the first two parts of this series, it was John Browne that led the image makeover of BP in the early 2000s, and indeed it was Browne who is said to have made ‘Beyond Petroleum’ the slogan of BP. It was John Browne that gave speeches in the early 2000s claiming that ‘we are all citizens of one world, and we must take shared responsibility for its future and for its sustainable development’. But alas, it was also Browne that advocated the relentless cost-cutting that many believe to be a cause of BP’s fatal industrial accidents as well as its calamitous oil spills. Indeed, some three years after Browne left the post as BP’s chairman, it was Browne that Time Magazine put at the very top of its list of ‘dirty dozen’ figures which it suggested might be blamed for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
And yet, scarcely two years after John Browne was caught out by a court signing an untruthful statement about his relationship to a former partner, it was also Browne that Peter Mandelson appointed to be the head of an ostensibly ‘independent’ review of the funding of Britain’s higher education —in effect, a review that would determine whether Britain would continue to have a public, broad-based higher educational system, or a private, American-style system dominated not just by business-led funding, but by the kind of class-based access to education which has been shown to be at the heart of Britain’s growing social divides.
Lest we forget (and how quickly people will forget), Mandelson was a politician in Britain’s New Labour Party—the same party that once pledged to draw a red line on tuition fees, and which was elected in 1997 on pledges to put an end to the Conservative Party’s culture of corruption—a key aspect of which was the policy of handing over more and more aspects of public sector work to the Tories’ cronies in the private corporations.
In this last part of the series, I want to address two questions: first, how is it that a manifestly pro-big business figure—let alone a publicly disgraced former oil baron—was appointed to head the UK’s higher education funding review? And second, how is it possible that, after 13 years of lived experience of the New Labour deceptions—and after less than six months of the coalition government whose kingmakers made tuition fees their own ‘red line’—we are about to witness yet another political betrayal?
* * *
Any explanation of the political process behind the higher education funding review must consider the UK’s political culture, and with it, a culture of corruption that in my view deepened under New Labour. It would, however, be a mistake to single out New Labour for all of the blame; if three sets of governments—the Tory government from 1979 to 1997, the New Labour government from 1997 to 2010, and now arguably the LibCon coalition—have engaged in much the same political practices, then our analysis has to look beyond party politics at the structural organisation of political representation.
It is no secret that the UK’s political system is less than perfect. For all of Britain’s much-vaunted tradition in parliamentary democracy, it still lacks a real system of checks and balances. If a party is elected with a large majority, and if that majority is undivided, then its leading politicians can wield a near-dictatorial power in what remains a constitution-less state.
The post-devolution arrangements may have weakened the power of 10 Downing Street over Scotland, but that power remains very much a reality in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In the latter countries, it remains true that the government of the day not only proposes legislation, but then enacts and polices it. Despite the notion that the civil service and the parliamentary committee system should attenuate any partisanship in government, the fact remains that in Britain a government with a large majority can ram through pretty much any policy it pleases. It can also appoint just about anyone it deigns to fulfill leading political and para-political functions. Unlike the U.S., where top officials are often vetted by congress, in the UK any figure from the head of a quango like HEFCE to the head of a review such as the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding can be appointed—we might as well say anointed—with little or no extra-executive oversight.
Of course, British or indeed European courts may eventually thwart the most authoritarian or undemocratic legislation. But the examples of David Blunkett’s semi-secret DNA database, the Guantánamo-like system that prevailed at Belmarsh Prison during much of Tony Blair’s prime ministership, and more recently the so-called ‘control orders’—in reality, a form of indefinite house arrest without charge—show what a British government can get away with. In this context, the oft-repeated invocation of the need for a ‘strong government’ is actually a way of agreeing with a system that is arguably only an election away from a kind of dictatorship.
The government-led policy reviews are no exception to this political culture. The idea behind such reviews is that new policies should be developed by way of committees able to consider the various policy options with all due rigour. The reviews are supposed to conduct their business at arm’s length from government, and in a manner that consults the wider civil society. But under New Labour, these principles were often jettisoned, and replaced with a kind of rubber-stamping dynamic. It is my belief that, by way of this modus operandi, the party’s allies (some might prefer the term ‘cronies’) were offered the symbolic capital associated with a review in exchange for railroading the government’s preferred policy. A detailed analysis of this tendency is beyond the scope of this post; however, for a proper contextualisation of this argument, you may wish to have a look at my analysis of the Leitch Review of Skills.
Of course, it might well be argued that this kind of political patronage has long been a feature of the UK’s political culture. I would not disagree ; while I point repeatedly to examples drawn from the New Labour era, it would be a mistake to assume that the culture in question only applies to that party. We have only to consider, for example, the way in which many of Thatcher’s privatisations were reviewed to realise that a similar dynamic took place in the pre-New Labour era. That said, I’d like to suggest that we are now dealing a political culture that involves at once an intensification of long-term tendencies, and a qualitative shift towards an even more radically undemocratic form of political representation. That form involves what is best described as a plutocracy.
* * *
When we look back at the appointments of the heads of most of the different reviews of education, a few similarities stand out. One of these is the utterly arbitrary nature of the nominations: from Lambert to Browne, passing through Leitch and Sainsbury, none of the heads was an expert in education or higher education. The individuals’ claims to fame were almost entirely to do with their business acumen; to paraphrase the old joke about turtles and the universe, with New Labour it was business all the way down.
While Blair, Brown and Mandelson spoke euphemistically about the importance of ‘listening to employers’, in my opinion there was only one kind of ‘employer’ that really mattered: the kind of globe-trotting, cost-cutting, employee-sacking, if not union-busting and ethics-jettisoning executives who both courted, and were courted by the New Labour troika, and by their pusillanimous nomenklatura. Again, a similar kind of ‘employer’ was courted by the Conservatives before New Labour was elected to power, and a strong case can be made that the LibCons are at it again. I suggest that it is these managers, and their backers in and beyond the boardrooms of vast multinational corporations that constitute the core of the plutocracy that I have just referred to.
The notion of plutocracy refers to government by the wealthy, and this leads me to a third similarity across the mentioned heads of reviews. All might well be described as belonging to that category legitimated by Peter Mandelson, the ‘filthy rich’. If in doubt, consider the salary ‘packages’, and/or the estimated worth of Their Lordships Sandy Leitch, David Sainsbury, or indeed, John Browne. Even Richard Lambert, the outgoing head of the ‘lowly’ CBI, would most likely have obtained a ‘package’ that would have placed his earnings at a level many times that of the UK’s national average.
Now it might be argued that a handful of chairs of reviews does not constitute evidence of a plutocracy. This would be a valid criticism were it not for the fact that there is plenty of other evidence that this kind of political system is on the rise in Britain and in its mentor nation, the United States. We might point, for example, to what is daintily described as the social ‘background’ of most of the LibCon members of cabinet. But perhaps the best evidence is the result of a more systematic analysis, and comes from a surprising source: as early as 2005, a couple of CitiCorp ‘global strategists’ suggested in an internal report that the U.S. and Britain had become ‘plutonomies’, a term for what I take to be an extreme form of plutocracy.
The ‘internal’ report provided by the economists (or at any rate, attributed to them), has found its way into the internet, and it makes for interesting reading:
‘We… posit that:
1) the world is dividing into two blocs – the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. What are the common drivers of Plutonomy? Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist-friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.
2) We project that the plutonomies (the U.S., UK, and Canada) will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.
3) Most “Global Imbalances” (high current account deficits and low savings rates, high consumer debt levels in the Anglo-Saxon world, etc) that continue to (unprofitably) pre- occupy the world’s intelligentsia look a lot less threatening when examined through the prism of plutonomy. The risk premium on equities that might derive from the dyspeptic “global imbalance” school is unwarranted – the earth is not going to be shaken off its axis, and sucked into the cosmos by these “imbalances”. The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats, like it, or not.’
I leave it to readers to investigate in more detail the ins and outs of the ‘global strategists’ representation of the matter. Here I would simply note that a number of questions might be raised vis-à-vis the strategists’ (presumably economists) account. Is it that the earth is being held up, or held down, by those ‘muscular’ arms? And how can the plutocrats be so confident that that the ‘global imbalance’ known as climate change won’t suck the life out of our planet? The CitiCorp’s economists appear to have been cheerleading what was a nakedly self-interested ideology and its concomitant practices.
I nonetheless find it convenient to refer to their account because it constitutes an acknowledgement, however uncritical, of the reality of what can only be described as a new form of dictatorship: a dictatorship that does not appear to be a dictatorship, and which indeed must not be mistaken with the kind of authoritarian system associated with a Videla or a Pinochet (though as I have noted in past posts, Pinochet’s Chile was the ‘laboratory’ for Chicago School-brand neoliberalism). Today’s plutocracy, in its ‘plutonomic’ form, is a dictatorship that gets it way not so much by way of secret police (though they are also employed), as by way of vast private and corporate networks and resources that can be weilded, à la BP or News Corp, to secure just about any vested interest.
Another advantage of using the CitiCorp report is that it provides evidence of the way in which the plutocratic (or ‘plutonomic’) elite have now cast aside any pretense of accountability, and are operating according to an agenda that involves a gross inequality.
I do not use any of the above words lightly. According to the same economists’ account, ‘…the top 1% of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie! … the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe) – the top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together.’
We would need to recognise that divisions or at least tensions, contradictions and any number of ambiguities are likely to arise within any such system. Some divides may occur, for example, along national lines, or indeed along the lines of declining and nascent, or simply competing industries. The return of Karl Rove in Washington D.C. reminds us of the importance, within the plutocratic sphere, of party-political divides. The blatant sexism that continues to pervade top management in most countries may constitute its own source of contradiction. A full account would also need to explain the history of ‘plutonomy’, and the space in which any coordinated and coordinating interventions emerge (Davos? Bilderberg?). Such an investigation would also need to explain the role of formal financial institutions (IMF?) as well as of informal financial ‘alliances’ of the kind that have wrecked Ireland, Greece, and now it seems, Spain. Last but not least, it would have to be acknowledged that the plutocratic (or ‘plutonomic’) system might face significant disruption and even resistance in a variety of contexts.
But after recognising these and many other complexities, it seems clear that the top managers in what seems increasingly like a global plutocratic ‘coalition’ now have virtually all of the instrumental power in the U.S and the UK. I say ‘instrumental’ power because of course, it would be grossly simplistic to suggest that the people in question have all the power. But when it comes to engaging in the instrumental mobilization and application of economic, cultural, and perhaps even symbolic power, these are the people who can bring huge amounts of pressure to bear not just on a single politician, but on whole parties, countries, and their governments. This is only partly a matter of being able to pull ‘levers’—unsurprisingly, during the New Labour era this became one of the favourite metaphors in transnational ‘corporatese’. In addition to actual political corruption, the plutocrats may be able to mobilise vast legal and other epistemic resources which can thwart state opposition when a ‘quiet word’, a propaganda campaign such as BP’s, a stated or unstated threat, or indeed a bank transfer, fail.
It might be argued that this conception is simplistic, if not ‘conspiratorial’. It is simplistic as outlined in this post (more detailed accounts will be forthcoming), but not for the reasons that a neoliberal critic might invoke. Such a critic might suggest that the corporations in question, and by extension their leading executives, only really provide goods and services for ‘Joe Public’ (and presumably ‘Jill Public’). According to this view, it might, for example, be argued that the actions of executives like John Browne do no more than reflect the wills, at one remove, of hundreds of millions of consumers who want, or even demand, this or that product—be it a hydrocarbon-based fuel source, or the plastic toys (themselves made from oil) in pound shops. The eponymous Digby Jones, well known for the unemotional nature of his interventions, put the point succinctly when he suggested in the context of his attack on Cable that businesses are ‘just a reflection of society’.
But aside from the fact that, strictly speaking, ‘Joe Public’ is a convenient abstraction, it is one thing to say that there is a demand for oil-based (or any other) products, and another to say that there is a demand for the provision of the goods regardless of the economic, social, or environmental costs. Given the choice, it is difficult to believe that most people would not prefer the kind of ‘ethical’ business culture that Browne claimed to develop, but which his actual policies arguably contradicted. There is also the question of just how the demand for a product may be stoked by those most interested in profiting from it.
Alas, that is now a somewhat academic point to debate. Consumers don’t elect CEO’s of corporations, and equally if not more importantly, today even the widest alliance of social groups in the most powerful country on Earth may be thwarted by any one of the gigantic corporations at the core of the plutocratic coalition. If in doubt, have a look at the historical precedent established by the Exxon Valdez disaster, in which BP played a role (as I write this post, Exxon executives have still not been brought to book for that disaster, and the corporations lawyers are still working, successfully, to further reduce the original fine).
Alternatively, consider the way in which the Obama administration has been forced to provide ‘cover’ for BP’s Macondo disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. If, as now seems likely, BP will perform yet another Houdini with respect to this spill of spills, then how not to conclude that executives like Browne, and the networks they can mobilise, have become virtually unassailable ‘masters of the universe’?
I use the last term only partly in jest. The point is emphatically not to suggest that the political system in question is made up of a just a few super-powerful and wealthy individuals; instead, it is to suggest that individuals in positions like that of Browne (when he was BP’s CEO) now have an ability to mobilize networks and resources that can neutralise, or indeed co-opt, those of the most powerful nation-states. Indeed, it seems likely that increasingly coordinated groups of managers like Browne may be working formally and informally to produce the kind of intervention that led to the catastrophic ‘disciplining’ of centre-left governments in Greece and in Spain. In this context, to suggest that individual citizens (notice how nowadays most politicians seem to prefer the term ‘consumers’) are the real ‘kings’ (sic) amounts to a form of extreme naiveté, to not say ideological inversion.
* * *
I suggest that it is this utterly undemocratic, indeed reactionary form of political representation that is now heading towards a university near you. By way of an admittedly unprovable hypothesis, I suggest that it was this kind of a system that led to Browne’s selection as head of Britain’s review of higher education funding. Browne is arguably a plutocrat’s plutocrat; if my analysis in the previous part of this series reveals anything, it is how far he was willing to go to advance what was, in my opinion, an essentially ‘plutonomic’ ideology, which BP arguably attempted to mask with talk of ‘ethical’ business.
In my view, this hypothesis might also shed light on the manner in which Howard Newby proceeded in the University of the West of England, and then at Liverpool. Again, given the nature of the politics at stake, the hypothesis would be very difficult to research, let alone prove. It would require the very best investigative journalists, and would need to research in historical and sociological detail what must be a process full of complexities, if not contradictions. Here it must suffice to suggest that, if my hypothesis is valid, then at some point, a ‘coalition’ of plutocrats appear to have realised that there was big money to be made in universities. But they must also have realised that universities provided one of the last havens for the production of discourses capable not just of critiquing plutocracy (or plutonomy), but of thwarting it by way of free higher education, and free speech. According to this interpretation, the two motivations came together, however ‘spontaneously’, to produce the far-reaching policy of ‘skillification’ and academic censorship that we now have in the UK. As of 2009, the UK is a country where ‘blue skies’ research in the sciences, and especially the critical human and social sciences is being neutered by an extremist pragmatism (if the Pope can call atheists ‘extremists’, then we can use the term for the knowledge exchangers, too): from Mandelson onwards, all state-funded research must serve, and indeed ‘prove’ especially economic functions if it is to qualify for support.
As I began to note earlier, the new coalition government has done nothing to repeal this principle. On the contrary, Vince Cable, the once critical Lib Dem business spokesperson, appears to be a firm advocate of the policy. He is also an advocate of uncapped tuition fees, despite the noise that his party made about the matter prior to the elections, and despite the latest efforts to transform tuition fees into a kind of ‘graduate tax’.
It would almost be comforting to think that this entirely a ‘top-down’ process, and that the universities are the victims of a government policy in the service of a James Bond-like conspiracy. But this is far from being the case. Beyond Howard and Sheila Newby, a number of media have noted that a significant proportion of the UK’s vice-chancellors earn salaries that place them, if not in the top 1% of British households, then certainly in a percentile that not far from that figure. Over the last few years, many of these wealthy administrators have been only too happy to echo calls for what seems set to become a fully privatised system of higher education. Even Nigel Thrift, the vice-chancellor of Warwick University who was once better known for his research about ‘non-representational’ theory, gave a speech in 2009 that could be read as a plea for multinational alliances amongst universities of the kind seen in aviation sector (Thrift used the example of Air France and KLM).
To be sure, this advanced neoliberalism is not only found amongst the highest university managers. Many of the British academics who earn rather less than their managers, but who still take home comfortable salaries appear to have been persuaded that there is no alternative to the lifting of current restrictions on tuition fees. From the late 1980s onwards, a veritable cadre of middle managers, many of them still practicing academics, have felt compelled to operationalise policies that have slowly but surely made way for the kind of skillification that I have described in many other posts. If there is one thing for which the plutocratic ‘coalition’ can be admired, it is the remarkably astute way in which its members have succeeded in overcoming, by way of a mixture of smallish carrots and very big sticks, any opposition to its increasingly hegemonic rule.
* * *
If this hypothesis has any validity, then we can expect Browne to propose a series of changes in the funding regime that will take the best universities—or at least, those that are perceived as having the most symbolic capital—in the direction of the kind of exorbitant fees that only the very wealthy can pay. ‘Lesser’ universities will set their own fees accordingly. If the mythical ‘market’—read the plutocracy—has its way, then in Britain all universities will charge fees that reflect their real, and/or perceived place in the hierarchies established by the league tables of mass media (many of them the proxies of a handful of the leading plutocrats.)
This possibility is not a matter of mere speculation. The media have already reported that the Browne review appears to be predisposed to increase students’ tuition fees, and all of the noises we’re hearing sound very much like the softening process which Dem Tories have used for the rest of their proposed slashing and burning. According to an article published last May in the Sunday Times,
‘Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP, wants to remove the current £3,225 limit on fees. Leading research universities could charge students an estimated £7,000 a year while fees for science undergraduates could rise to £14,000.
Browne’s committee recognises this cannot be done immediately, but universities would be allowed to increase fees well above the inflation rate each year — possibly by as much as £1,000 — as they moved towards a free market.
Previously, it had been thought the review panel, expected to report by late summer or autumn, would recommend an increase in the fee cap to £5,000-£7,000. But one source said last week that Browne, appointed by Lord Mandelson, the first secretary of state, was “hawkish”.
Another added: “He wants the cap off altogether, but he will go by tiers. I’m pretty certain he will not go to a free market straight away.”’
If this article is accurate, then Browne’s review (read Mandelson’s and Cameron’s review), as coupled to New Labour’s overarching policy of skillification, will arguably have the effect of killing not two, but three or more birds with one boulder of a financial stone.
First, many of the teaching jobs may eventually be eliminated by way of ‘consolidations’ (cue Nigel Thrift’s Air France + KLM comparison). But, seemingly outlandishly, the jobs may also vanish thanks to a series of ‘automatizations’. One of the planks of what I have described as the skillification of higher education involves a much-vaunted shift to distance education, and this shift celebrates a growing role for modular, and increasingly automated ‘delivery vehicles’. Again, this point would require a separate article in its own right. But if a course is designed in such a way that it can be delivered and assessed by computers, then surely it will be delivered and assessed by computers? From a plutocrat’s perspective, there is, presumably, no reason why a lecturer should be treated any differently from a bank teller. And if bank tellers have been all but replaced by ATM’s, why shouldn’t lecturers be replaced by IBUC’s (internet-based university courses)?
Second, this self-same skillification will pressure the teaching side of higher education to offer more and more courses that provide ‘economically valuable skills’. Whatever space there still exists for critical theory, for critiques of capitalism, in short for all those ‘elite left’ practices reportedly so despised by Tony Blair and other leaders in the plutocratic coalition, are likely to shrink and shrivel, at least within the increasingly corporate universities. We may reach the point where radical poetry or critical philosophy courses will eventually become ‘non-fundable’—or worse, their lecturers may be branded as ‘domestic extremists’. In my opinion, we’ve been served early notice in the examples of philosophy and politics at Howard Newby’s Liverpool University, and also philosophy at Michael Driscoll’s Middlesex.
To be sure, the pressure will not only come from the teaching side of higher education. If students are going to incur a huge debt, then many will feel that their education had better be instantly exchangeable for economic capital, and lots of it. From this perspective, Browne’s ‘recommendations’ may well produce another life-time financial prison for those who are not able to make plutonomy ‘work for them’. The Times rightly noted the irony of this point when one of its headlines reported that ‘Lord Browne, worth £45m, tells students not to fret about loans’. (I’m aware, in quoting this headline, of the apparent contradiction to my overall argument; but as I noted earlier, we mustn’t forget that there may be some significant contradictions, or ambiguities at the heart of the plutocratic ‘coalition’.)
There are, of course, precedents for this kind of ‘imprisonment’. If a first wave of neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher succeeded in exchanging social protest for visits to the DIY stores by selling Britain’s council houses, the current ‘third wave’ of neoliberalism may well have an analogous effect. Tony Benn decried a similar logic when the Tories introduced the brilliantly named ‘top-up’ loans. Anyone still independent (or ‘foolish’) enough to rebel will have to think twice before defaulting not on one, but on two life-long mortgages: one for the home—if they an acquire that increasingly difficult-to-obtain luxury—and another one for higher education.
The last point leads me to a third, even more grievous consequence of the emergent plutocratic order, which involves social class. It is no secret that access to university plays a key role in determining one’s ‘life chances’. While trying to increase access to higher education is not a guaranteed cure for deep social divides, it seems very clear from the research that the opposite is true: that restricting the access in uncritical, capital-based ways is a recipe for deepening class divides. Indeed, this very week research has been published that suggests that the panacea recommended for this problem by the neoliberals will not work: according to research conducted by the Office of Fair Access, bursaries provided by Cambridge and Oxford are failing to attract young people from the poorest homes (but for an example of government spin, compare, if you will, the Guardian’s report of these findings, with Offa’s own account).
Although we’ve known about this danger for quite some time, New Labour, and now Dem Tories are doing their best to dissimulate this fact. There is, however, a particularly bitter twist to the newest political medicine, known by the brand name of Austerity: a plutocratic higher ed system is likely to exclude not just working class and lower-middle class students, but even ‘middle-middle’ and perhaps also upper-middle classes who once thought they had the right to go to the best universities if they had good enough grades. I wrote a post some weeks ago about how middle-class-ness (in the sociological sense of the term) is now itself under threat, and no better domain than to watch its erosion than in higher education.
Any readers inclined to think that this is yet another ‘gloomy leftism’ might wish to return to the fabled words of the CitiCorp economists quoted earlier: ‘the world is dividing into two blocs – the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest’. The question now is what, if anything, can be done to stop this dynamic from gaining even further momentum.
