Is the Imminent Closure of 50 Universities Really Such a Bad Thing?

The Guardian reports that, in the next two or three years, 50 “higher education providers” — 24 of them within a year — could (just like the providers of other goods-and-services) close down or, as Sally Weale, its education correspondent puts it, “risk exiting the market”. Sally thinks — that is, takes it for granted — that this a bad and unhappy circumstance, to be spoken of as ‘collapse’, ‘threat’, ‘turmoil’, ‘worry’, ‘disorder’, ‘fear’. And no doubt, from the point of view of the providers themselves, that is just what it is. What provider of goods-and-services — no matter what — wants to be forced to exit its market? It is a poor look-out for all the employees thrown out of work, and can’t be a good look on the managers’ own CVs. And then there are all those job-seekers the provider provided with qualifications. If their provider goes bust and out of existence what does that suggest to potential employers about the worth of the goods they were provided with? From the point of view of everyone whose interest is bound up with the provider’s, its exiting the market is, as Sally suggests, very bad news.

Still, let us acknowledge that the point of view of the providers is not the only one possible. According to the OfS (Office for Students) there were, in December 2023, 423 higher education providers (and I don’t suppose that in December 2025 there are many or any fewer); so, if, in two or three years time, that figure were to be as low as 373, would that be so terrible a blow for provision in the higher education sector? Only 373! Would – could – anyone, disinterestedly, think that shockingly few? (Notoriously, there used to be only two.)

Perhaps we should ask what connection there is between having a degree and being educated. I mean, is it possible to have a degree and the kind of job that goes with it, perhaps a good position in a famous old national newspaper, even maybe its correspondent for education, and still be (let’s call it) under-educated? If we did, perhaps, for convenience’s sake, we might take the case of Sally herself?

Let’s.

If she can take it for granted that 423 higher education providers is not just 50 more than 373 but 50 better then 373, then you or I can take it for granted that she has a degree, that it is a ‘good’ degree from a ‘good’ higher education provider and that, given her job, it is a degree in ‘English’ — so that by measuring Sally we measure what university English courses are worth.

Now, I have a degree in English myself (provided when there was no such thing as ‘providers’) and from the time I entered the VIth form until I retired I never asked for any better a job than teaching English at such a provider myself. I am not only fond of literary criticism as something I grew up with, but am jealous for its reputation as a form of study that educates — believing it the form that, for the English, educates better than any other, better than History, better than Philosophy — giving us the essential history of our country, that is, of its mind. So I am not anxious to run it down.

But, surely, no one — with or without a degree — can be thought educated who doesn’t see the import of his own words? To understand what you mean by what you say must be (in one of those Latin phrases even the unLatined of us know) a sine qua non of being educated. Of course, anyone might, here or there, fail to see the import of what he says and perhaps get shown it by someone else. But surely habitually to fail to understand your own words and to be without any habit of self-correction is the stamp of the uneducated. And, mysteriously, isn’t this stamp stamped upon the best — that is, the most — educated more plainly and more deeply than anyone else? Who, who hasn’t had much schooling, fails to construe his own meaning like those who have had the most? And our Sally, the education correspondent of a famous old newspaper, is a prime example. Perhaps she came from an alley, ours or some other; if so, she would understand herself better if she’d stayed there. She’d have been fitter to be the education correspondent she is. What has her degree in ‘English’ done for her? It hasn’t stopped her systematically misrepresenting education as qualification-provision and hasn’t enabled her to recognise it (even though it is roughly equivalent to the correspondent for religion representing Churches as buildings with pews for sitting on). It hasn’t enabled her to see the sense her own English makes.

For here is an education correspondent who understands education not as education (something having it in common with virtue, truth and beauty that it is real but not as brick and mortar are) but as a commodity, the provision of whatever might be on offer in a certain sector of the market and, if at risk of collapsing, then doing so not as education but as a business enterprise. For what else is it, to assume that fewer providers and less activity makes a collapse? After all, less might mean better, as education — except that it can’t within this understanding, shared with Sally by everyone with any political responsibility, including, as her short article shows, Susan Lapworth, the chief executive of the OfS, Jacqui Smith, the Universities Minister, Helen Hayes, Chair of the House of Commons Education Committee (also, I imagine, the Committee as a whole) and an unnamed Department for Education ‘spokesperson’. The last (another woman?) thought the ‘sector’ faced serious challenges but that the Government was taking action to bring sustainability to it and to put it on a secure footing in order to support universities to face the challenges of the future: talking of universities while thinking of higher education providers. The ‘challenges’, the ‘action’, the ‘support’, the ‘footing’, the ‘sustainability’ they promise are, like the ‘collapse’ they fear, all financial. What else could they be?

The modern educational dignity speaking, from all sides… claptrap: Clap-Trap. Trap-Clap. Clap-clap-clap. Trap-trap-trap. The rattle of the voice box mistaken for speech, forever. If this is what England — its mind — has come to, what does it matter whether it’s Reform or Labour in charge, in or out of the EU, running itself or run by the globalists, woke or sound asleep, free to speak or unfree? In any event, it has gone. And where else but into its past?

Duke Maskell writes Reactionary Essays at dukemaskell.substack.com.