Letters

Vol. 48 No. 11 · 25 June 2026

Bonfire of the Universities

Stefan Collini is right that the English university system is in deep trouble, and that the problem is structural (LRB, 4 June). A funding model built on fees, debt and permanent competition hasn’t merely altered the way universities are financed, it has changed the way they understand themselves. Universities have internalised the language of the settlement that has weakened them. Strategy, sustainability, efficiency, portfolio review, impact: such terms are not empty in themselves, but they increasingly function as a way of making political and educational choices appear inevitable. Departments aren’t closed because anyone thinks – or is prepared to say publicly – that philosophy, languages or English no longer matter; they are closed because they are ‘not viable’. Staff are not dismissed because institutions have decided other priorities matter more; instead structures are ‘reshaped’. Anyone who has sat through a modern ‘portfolio review’ will recognise the peculiar atmosphere in which educational questions survive only as shadows cast by financial projections. The discussion begins with an intellectual mission and ends with colour-coded spreadsheets forecasting recruitment trends till 2032. By that stage, the argument is effectively over. The educational language remains, but mostly as ceremony.

The crisis is both intellectual and civic. Universities have increasingly been made to adapt their purposes to the funding model rather than adapting the funding model to sustain their purposes. That inversion has narrowed curricula, weakened disciplines, casualised labour and encouraged a conception of students as purchasers of credentials rather than participants in a shared educational undertaking.

Yet there are points at which Collini’s account risks idealising the older university settlement. The collegial university of memory was often exclusionary, sustained by assumptions about class and educational entitlement that no longer hold. Expansion was not itself a mistake. One of the genuine achievements of the late 20th century was that subjects such as English, history and drama ceased to belong almost exclusively to a small social elite. Some of the most intellectually ambitious teaching in British universities happened not in ancient institutions but in post-1992 universities. That is one of the reasons the present contraction feels so bleak. The danger isn’t just the loss of particular departments. It is the quiet restratification of intellectual life. Subjects that survive cuts increasingly retreat into a small number of highly selective universities whose student populations remain disproportionately advantaged. The result may not be the death of the humanities so much as their social narrowing.

Managerialism isn’t simply something imposed by government. Too many universities have embraced it with enthusiasm. The corporate language of targets, restructuring and market share was adopted aspirationally, accompanied by expensive branding exercises, consultancy culture and the conviction that a university demonstrates its seriousness through the construction of vast atria filled with coffee franchises and collaborative seating. The hollowing out of senates and academic self-government matters here. Once academic communities cease to play a meaningful role in determining educational priorities, universities become organisations that manage revenue streams while continuing to speak the language of scholarship.

Collini is surely right that a more strategic national view of subject provision is necessary. It is plainly irrational that whole disciplines can disappear regionally because neighbouring institutions, acting independently but under identical pressures, each make locally rational decisions that cumulatively damage the system as a whole. But co-ordination alone will not solve the deeper problem unless universities recover the confidence to speak in educational rather than exclusively economic terms.

Kevin Morris St Albans, Hertfordshire

Though I agree with much of Stefan Collini’s assessment of the current state of British universities, I am always shocked that so little attention is paid to the impact on staff. The university crisis is rarely presented as a workers’ rights issue. The University and College Union said last autumn that there had been cuts equivalent to 15,000 job losses in the previous year, with more to come. Jo Grady, the UCU general secretary, has pointed out that the 2700 jobs Keir Starmer recently promised to save by nationalising British Steel was the number currently at risk at Nottingham University alone.

I left my job at a university in the Midlands last year after choosing not to undertake the exceedingly unpleasant task of applying for my current job on far worse terms. In the ‘new roles’ we were being offered, we would be employed by a subsidiary company and would no longer technically be university employees; we would not be eligible for union membership and would be thrown out of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme in which we were entitled to participate as part of the agreement made with post-1992 universities. Senior management got very tetchy when any of us referred to this as a ‘fire and rehire’ scheme, which is what it was. Similar practices are being deployed elsewhere and at speed, partly no doubt to pre-empt the government’s ban on them, which comes into force next year. At the time, my supportive but seemingly powerless local Labour MP sent a letter on my behalf to the skills minister, Jacqui Smith. Smith responded that she was sorry I was feeling anxious about my situation but that ‘the government does not have a role in intervening with specific providers, or in resolving disputes between providers and their staff.’

Katie da Cunha Lewin London E17

Stefan Collini gives a clear-eyed diagnosis of the deteriorating financial position of the UK’s universities, arguing that the fee-dependent model is being eroded by compounding pressures: volatility in migration policy, enlargement of the sector, real-terms cuts because of inflation, the shift from a discerning selection of students to desperate recruitment. He concludes that a precarious situation is moving closer to structural collapse. The diagnosis is correct, but one could go further. The financial crisis of the universities is a threat not merely to the sector itself, but to the economic performance of the UK, its international standing and the government’s ambitions to achieve renewal through science, technology and innovation.

The structural dependence on student fees is a symptom of decisions taken from the 1990s onwards. The state progressively withdrew from direct engagement in research and development – it privatised public sector research establishments, closed public laboratories and sold utilities that had performed important applied research functions in energy, water and transport. At the same time, there was a reorientation of public funding towards excellence-based basic science, with a growing share of government funding allocated through the university system. No subsequent reform has challenged this organisational logic. The university system absorbed an ever increasing share of public R&D investment to the point of international anomaly: national science and innovation systems differ for a variety of historical and structural reasons, but even so, it is notable that the UK ranks first in the G7 for higher education R&D as a share of GDP, higher than Germany, France, Japan or Italy.

The university sector is now struggling with the financial implications of this role. The public funding mechanism covered on average only 67 per cent of research costs in 2023-24, down from 76 per cent in 2015-16. Non-publicly-funded teaching recovers on average 143 per cent of costs, meaning that the income from international fees is not supplementary – it is the structural foundation on which university research and domestic teaching alike depend. The result is a sector-wide structural research deficit of £5.4 billion, cross-subsidised by the volatile income flow from fees.

An excellence-based logic for the allocation of competitive research funding is necessary to push the scientific frontier, and the concentration of resources is unavoidable, as most scientists would agree, even if it is politically uncomfortable. It is not necessarily the most appropriate organisational logic for an entire system, however, and many other countries have a more differentiated approach. The point is that this logic is applied uniformly to a highly heterogeneous set of institutions that could and should play varied roles. In particular, it has been applied to institutions that have only recently become universities and must now compete on excellence-based terms with well-established research-intensive peers. Even if there were a coherent social rationale for fee-based private investment in education, many of the post-1992 institutions were never in a position to sustain it, though there are of course institutions that have managed the transition exceptionally well.

Yet the incentive structure has continued to encourage expansion. A professor at one such institution recently described to me a taught master’s programme that enrolled fifteen students in its first year and five hundred in its third, the majority of them international. One is entitled to ask whether the town and the taxpayers underpinning that university are better served by this model than by an institution focused on skills, lifelong learning and the needs of the regional economy.

The UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy – a government policy document from November 2025 – mentions UK universities (‘world-leading’) 35 times. There is no mention of public-sector research establishments. As others have pointed out, the UK has a long-standing tendency to conflate science policy with industrial policy, or to substitute one for the other. What’s more, the government’s primary instrument for supporting private-sector R&D is the tax system: tax incentives account for approximately £7.6 billion in 2023-24. Roughly half of this flows to large multinationals, many of them foreign-owned remnants of 1980s and 1990s privatisations. The logic is coherent for cash-constrained smaller firms; less so for the larger beneficiaries. And once such commitments are established, the political economy of reversing them is formidable.

The issue Collini’s piece implicitly but never quite explicitly raises is the one that should preoccupy politicians of all parties. In the absence of more robust levers to steer the science, technology and innovation system – through public R&D performance, ecosystem-building in strategic sectors or instruments that do more than respond to market failure – the UK is reliant on a university sector that isn’t designed to perform the role assigned to it. If it cannot, the consequences will extend well beyond the lecture halls.

Lùcas Mackle Glasgow

I was dismayed to learn from Stefan Collini about the decline of Classics courses in British universities, as this goes against a trend among school students that has received surprisingly little attention. While history A-level has been on the decline – entrants down 4 per cent over the last seven years – classical subjects have seen a 22 per cent rise in entrants, compared to a rise of 10.2 per cent in all subjects over the same period. You might think this would be driven by private schools but that isn’t the case – almost all the rise is driven by state-school students taking Classical Civilisation, especially girls.

My own teenagers and their friends are at non-selective state schools in Essex, and I noticed a while ago that they were talking about taking classical subjects. It is hard to know what is driving this, but what I have picked up from these students is that they are at least in part responding to an increasingly chaotic and fragile contemporary world, in contrast to which studying the ancient world offers an engagement with something enduring rather than ephemeral, something that isn’t oriented towards ‘skills’ or ‘relevance’ in any overt way. Gen Z is often talked about as if its culture existed entirely online, but the trend in Classics points to a desire for something very different, and it is discouraging to hear that their interest isn’t being recognised and seized on by universities.

Hana Loftus Colchester, Essex

I’m not sorry

Thomas Nagel, in his reflections on T.M. Scanlon’s Morality and Responsibility, refers to two principles I propose in my paper ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ (LRB, 21 May). He regards the weaker principle – which has the implication that if affluent people can save the lives of people in low-income countries by contributing modest sums to effective charities, it would be wrong of them not to do so – as straightforwardly implied by Scanlon’s moral theory. Nagel himself says nothing against this principle, and I read him as endorsing it, although he does not explicitly say so.

Nagel goes on to say, however, that I think this principle is too weak, and instead support a much stronger principle that implies affluent people ought to give until they are almost as badly off as the people whose lives they are saving. He writes that Scanlon’s theory credibly explains what is wrong with this more demanding principle. Nagel accurately describes what I wrote in ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, but that paper was published in 1972, and over the past half-century, my views have developed. I no longer recommend following the strong principle. On the contrary, I argue that instead of condemning people for failing to act in accordance with it, we can reasonably praise them for giving at levels much lower than the strong principle implies. Further details, and a table of suggested levels of giving at various levels of income, can be found in my book The Life You Can Save (2009).

Peter Singer National University of Singapore

Squillions

John Lanchester quotes George Cottrell and Lawrence Burke Files’s remarks to the effect that Chinese porcelain is easier to fake than metalwork or jade, whose age ‘can be determined through non-destructive testing’ (LRB, 21 May). In fact, no known scientific test can determine when metal was cast or stone was carved. We have to work this out using other information. If, to give two recent examples, X-ray fluorescence analysis shows that the alloy of a Bronze Age vessel contains aluminium, or that a stone Khmer deity is covered with the microscopic parallel scratches left by a power buffer, we know they’re not what they seem.

Porcelain is another story. Nuclear scientists left underemployed after developing the atomic bomb perfected a technique for measuring accumulated radiation to determine exactly how long it has been since the clay was exposed to high temperatures in the kiln. The test is inexpensive and requires taking a sample smaller than the size of a pencil point. Clever forgers nowadays simply add faking the test paperwork to their to-do list.

Erin L. Thompson City University of New York

Thanks to John Lanchester for another of his reliably terrifying articles, this one on money laundering. The discussion of high denomination ‘bin Laden’ notes and their dodgy uses reminds me of when I lived in Madrid and had to recover my deposit as I left one chichi Malasaña flat to move to another. I arranged with my landlord that I would meet him at his place of work on the outskirts of the city. I used my last metro ticket getting there, and was nonplussed when he handed me the money in the form of two €500 notes, which he took from a thumb-thick wodge in his wallet. I had to walk back to the centre, as no taxi driver would break such a large bill. I don’t think it’s irrelevant to mention that my (gruffly pleasant) landlord was a senior police officer.

James Womack Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge

Famous Friends

The photographs Inigo Thomas has from his trip to Cuba might seem mundane to him, but they include John Kennedy Jr for goodness’ sake (LRB, 4 June). My snapshots from a visit there about ten years later were poorly focused, haphazardly composed and, with all due respect to my travelling companion, featured not a single 20th-century icon. Or so I thought until I got home. There was very little commercial advertising in Havana, but there were billboards, some of which showed up in the background of my snaps. A lot of them bore large-scale painted copies of Alberto Korda’s photograph from 1960 Guerrillero Heroico. When I imported the pictures, my computer’s photo-organising app ran a facial recognition algorithm which identified frequently featured people, which is how Che Guevara got added to my ‘friends and family’ album.

Ben Campbell Brighton, East Sussex

Rather like Golf

I share Malcolm Gaskill’s enthusiasm for the 1945 Ealing Studios horror classic Dead of Night, but not his breezy dismissal of its single comic segment, ‘The Golfer’s Story’ (LRB, 4 June). To condemn it as ‘dated comic relief’ is rather like condemning the Cavalcanti/Redgrave ventriloquist segment for its lack of digital effects. The lead actors in ‘The Golfer’s Story’, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, were enormously popular with 1940s audiences for a flexible double-act that relentlessly mocked middle-class English parochialism and pomposity. In The Lady Vanishes they are obsessed with cricket, in Passport to Pimlico with bureaucratic procedure, and here with golf. The joke is the discovery that to be a successful ghost requires endless practice, mastery of obscure technique and much loss of temper, rather like golf itself.

Martin Spence London SE20

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