King’s College London Has Ceased to Be a University

Avid readers of the Daily Sceptic might recall my occasional accounts of surrealism and insanity I withstood at the hands of my former employers at King’s College London. Ordinarily, I don’t dwell on why I left. I was offered a better job, walked out the door and never looked back — at least not deliberately.

But institutions, like tropical diseases, have a way of revisiting you years later. And so, every now and then, a former colleague sends me a freshly cultured sample from the still-smouldering wreckage of the Department of War Studies – or what one former colleague dubbed the Department of Woke Studies – and I experience a familiar fever: the chills of bureaucratic delirium, the sweats of astonishment, the shakes of uncontrollable laughter.

The latest specimen is a set of grading guidelines entitled ‘Inclusive Assessment and Closing Awarding Gaps’, a document so transcendentally absurd that it should be preserved in a museum of educational decline: somewhere between the phrenology exhibit and the Victorian devices for treating hysteria. It is a masterpiece of the managerial age – a seamless fusion of progressive sanctimony, pseudo-educational jargon and the tranquil confidence of people who no longer notice how ludicrous they are.

The guidelines claim to promote fairness yet will only achieve the opposite. They claim to liberate students yet will only infantilise them. They claim to support learning yet will replace learning with therapy.

What follows is a guided tour through their ironies, contradictions and unintentional comedy – a glimpse of what happens when a once-serious university trades standards for slogans, rigour for reassurance and education for the bureaucratic equivalent of aromatherapy.

Pedagogy for the Perpetually Fragile

The guidelines begin by informing us that “familiarity and diversity are complementary”. A curious formulation. Most things that are familiar are, by definition, not diverse. And most things that are diverse do not become familiar until one spends time with them. But logic is not the concern here. The phrase simply sounds soothing, like the kind of platitude printed on a mug in the office kitchenette – vacuous, smug and mildly insulting.

We’re told that students perform better when exposed to “different formats”. This is fair enough in principle, though the guidelines decline to specify what these formats might be, beyond implying there will be an impressive number of them. One can already picture the future: a single course requiring essays, posters, podcasts, puppet shows and a short stop-motion film made from Play-Doh – each designed to develop the student’s confidence, creativity and capacity to perform self-expression in increasingly unhinged ways.

Next, the document warns that “Standard Academic English” (once known as “English”) is an oppressive tool that advantages “already privileged students”. The implication, apparently, is that requiring coherent writing is a form of violence.

This is the educational equivalent of a gym announcing that push-ups are discriminatory because they favour those with upper-body strength.

Standards are Exclusionary, Chaos is Inclusive

“One-size-fits-all assessments are exclusionary,” the guidelines declare. Really? In former times, one-size-fits-all assessments were adopted because they were considered, well, you know, fair and transparent, and because they helped distinguish those who were talented and worked hard from those who spent the night before the exam face-down in the student bar. An appallingly old-fashioned notion, I realise. But the proposed solution – complete flexibility in format, criteria and evaluation – achieves something far more radical: it abolishes the very notion of a standard.

When a university abandons standards because some students might struggle with them, it is no longer a university. It becomes a therapeutic service provider whose core business is self-esteem. I’ve written elsewhere that progressivist dogmas are turning the modern university into the ‘anti-university’; here, the diagnosis requires no elaboration – the patient is doing the shouting for me.

The guidelines encourage “alternative assessments” that “align with students’ goals”. This is a beautiful principle, if applied to recreational pottery classes. Applied to a degree programme, it reduces knowledge to a menu and learning to a lifestyle choice.

Under this model, a future War Studies dissertation might be a mood board entitled ‘Decolonising Clausewitz: Toward a More Empathetic Battlespace’, though for all I know this could already be the title of a compulsory core module.

Assessment or Group Hug?

Next comes the section on feedback, steeped in managerial bromides that treat disappointment as a procedural failure. Markers should emphasise “growth”, avoid “punitive approaches” and celebrate students’ “individual” journeys.

Academic feedback, once intended to sharpen thought, should now read like a staff appraisal written by someone who’s terrified that honesty is a breach of safeguarding policies. Mistakes are not mistakes – they are opportunities for empowerment. Weak arguments are not weaknesses – they are emerging competencies.

Under these guidelines it is unclear whether one is marking an essay or writing an encouraging email to a friend going through a bad breakup.

Let the Passengers Fly the Plane

The guidelines then wander into full self-parody: students should help co-design assessments, write learning outcomes and even assist in crafting the marking rubrics.

This is like inviting airline passengers to co-design the cockpit controls. “Sure, we’ll still fly the plane, but perhaps you can advise which switches won’t trigger your anxieties.”

Let’s be honest: these days universities regard students as paying customers. Many are delightful. Many are brilliant. Many are hardworking. But asking them to write the criteria by which they will be judged is educational malpractice. It is not empowerment. It is the institution confessing that it no longer has the courage to articulate expertise.

Truly, abandon all standards, ye who enter here.

Culturally Responsive Assessment: When Identity Outweighs Argument

Then we reach the section on “Culturally Responsive Assessment (CRA)”, where the document achieves its philosophical crescendo. Students should “integrate” their “cultural identities into assessments”. “Validate diverse cultures,” the guidelines intone in boldface.

Leaving aside the small matter of how terms like “diversity” and “culture” might be defined, the document insists that students’ “lived experiences” should count as academic knowledge. Their “epistemologies”, however defined, must be authenticated, endorsed and duly patronised – intellectual coherence being a dispensable luxury.

Here the university completes its metamorphosis: from a site of inquiry into the world to a place where one submits a personality for grading. The guidelines tacitly instruct markers not to ask whether an argument is good, but whether it is sincere; not whether it is true, but whether it’s on message.

This is not learning. This is a feelings-based talent show.

It also creates a rather unpleasant dynamic: students become representatives of their demographic categories. Their work is no longer judged against a set of objective criteria, but by how convincingly they perform their ascribed identity.

This is a form of intellectual ghettoisation masquerading as inclusion. Worse, it invites academics to play at being Victorian anthropologists, classifying the tribal natives for their own moral gratification. That said, I suspect some of my former colleagues would rather fancy themselves as progressive imperial administrators.

The Post-Grammatical, Post-Thinking University

When the guidelines turn to marking, subtlety gives up and leaves the room. Markers are told to disregard “rigid grammar”, embrace “translanguaging” and “code meshing” and avoid downgrading “linguistic difference”. “Prioritise reward centred feedback,” naturally.

All this is admirable, I guess, if one is teaching toddlers to express themselves. In a university, it is a farce. Grammar is not elitist. It is the technology that allows ideas to be communicated with precision. To treat clarity as optional is to treat thought as optional.

If a department of War Studies, or any other discipline worth its name, adopted these principles, the natural next step would be to stop penalising errors in historical chronology or mathematics, on the grounds that time and arithmetic themselves are culturally contingent constructs.

Anonymous Marking – The Last Neutral Thing, So Naturally It Must Go

Another section concerns anonymous marking. The guidelines question its value and encourage “alternative approaches”, including open marking where the identity of the student is known.

Anonymous marking exists so that students are judged on what they write, not who they are (or whichever identity box someone has helpfully pre-ticked for them). Undermining it is not inclusive; it is a fraud. It invites precisely the sort of bias the document claims to oppose but this time redirected towards ideologically approved targets.

It seems we have reached an age where impartiality itself is construed as a form of bigotry. Fairness now requires subjectivity. Equality requires differential treatment. Accuracy requires empathy.

At this rate, grading will soon take the form of interpretive dance – a fitting symbol for a system that, in closing the awarding gap, opens the abyss.

If in Doubt, Add Another Committee

The document concludes with a grab bag of institutional recommendations: more staff training, more monitoring, more accountability structures, more integration into strategic plans, and –  inevitably – more committees, more managerialist slop.

This is the administrative solution to everything: build another labyrinth to shepherd staff through the labyrinth they already can’t escape.

When the problem doesn’t exist, invent it, then staff it and make everyone live inside the maze.

The Post-Academic University

And so, let’s return to the notion of the anti-university. Taken as a whole, the guidelines mark a decisive shift from education to therapy, from standards to vibes, from intellectual formation to ideological performance. They are not just misguided; they are the manifesto of a new, post-academic institution.

The post-academic university does not teach knowledge. It teaches attitude. It does not evaluate learning. It evaluates confected sincerity. It does not cultivate independence. It cultivates compliance.

It is, in short, a cult with seminar rooms.

I once said my experience at King’s was not fundamentally about me: it was a symptom of a wider decline – the corrosion of the university into a place where contradiction is celebrated as nuance and confusion is packaged as sensitivity. These guidelines are the predictable consequence.

They are not meant to be workable. They are meant to be unchallengeable. Their whole function is to keep the goalposts in motion – to create a world in which anything can be justified, everything can be scrutinised, and anyone can find themselves, without warning, on the wrong side of the rules.

Welcome to Kingdergarten

So here we are: a set of marking guidelines that refuses to mark, a set of academic principles suspicious of academia, and a university so committed to inclusion that it has excluded standards entirely.

In truth, these ‘guidelines’ mark the natural endpoint of post-structuralism in academia. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then there can be no objective educational standard. And if there is no educational standard, there is no university. Only its successor remains: the post-academic university, the anti-university — an institution that has mislaid the very reason for its existence and decided to celebrate the loss.

The darker irony is that even if these guidelines made sense – which they don’t – they’re already obsolete. When almost everyone writes their essays with AI, the prose becomes disbelievingly smooth and eerily uniform. In the coming utopia, the awarding gap will finally close because there will be nothing left to distinguish.

If this is the future of higher education – and it is – then I can offer only one final, generous piece of advice for anyone considering signing up for one of these therapeutic non-subjects: flee now, before you find yourself enrolled in one of them — because soon, verbs won’t have tenses, and assessment will be replaced by a feelings-based colouring-in activity supervised by HR.

Save yourself: the crayons are already on the table.

Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic. Formerly head of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Following generations of earlier political offenders he was banished to Australia for unforgivable thought crimes, where he is Professor of Strategic Theory at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra. Guilty of being hideously educationally traditional. Beyond all hope of rehabilitation.