How have the people we once relied upon for explanations and advice got to be so very, very, stupid? Fifty years ago, when a journalist needed an expert opinion, the chances are high that he or she would have picked up the phone and dialled the university. The universities were, after all, the places where New Zealand’s best minds gathered together. There were other places, like the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, where expert opinions were on also tap, but by and large it was to the universities that the news media turned for up-to-date knowledge and opinion. They still do, but what reporters glean from today’s academic community strikes most New Zealanders as unmitigated rubbish.
That’s when reporters can get anything out of the universities at all. In 2022, there is a rigorous filtering system in place, operated by the university’s communications staff, which “protects” academics from releasing something which might upset the institution’s administrators. In 1972, the idea that a professor of philosophy or history, let alone of physics or biology, would one day have their comments vetted by a 23-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in communications would have been laughable. Back then, a professor was a quasi-sacred person, whose right to communicate directly with the public was accepted without question by the university administration.
That acceptance was entirely justified, because any professor speaking to the news media in 1972 understood that what he said had to fulfil a number of requirements. It had to be correct – or as close to correct as human understanding allowed. It had to reflect well on the university – enhancing, not diminishing, its status as society’s repository of cultural and scientific wisdom. And, finally, it had to impress the ordinary citizen as information he or she could both believe and respect. Academics whose remarks made the ordinary citizen guffaw, or, worse still, protest, were doing neither themselves nor their university any favours.
What a difference 50 years have made! New Zealand’s universities and their academics have changed dramatically. What had been accepted by the state, and civil society generally, as ‘special places’, which could be funded and governed differently from other state institutions, have become straightforward commercial bodies, managed in the corporate style, with a staff to be bossed around like any other workforce. Hence the ‘comms’ filter. Hence the powerful incentive towards academic orthodoxy – and the fierce intolerance of those who rock the boat.
The assumption of the ordinary citizen would likely be that this transformation – from quasi-medieval independence to full-on commercial discipline – would produce a university much more closely aligned to the needs and preferences of society than the university of the 1970s. That this is so clearly not the case requires some explanation.
The first part of the explanation is to be found in the fact that the students of 2022 pay a much larger share of their tuition costs than the students of 1972. This “user-pays” approach has radically altered the balance of power between the teachers and the taught. Attracting and retaining students has become a commercial imperative for the universities. An academic staff that teaches as and what it pleases is a luxury only the most prestigious tertiary institutions can afford. Students paying for their degrees cannot afford to be failed by high-minded lecturers determined to uphold “academic standards”. Professors whose courses are deemed “too hard” are similarly unaffordable. What the students of 2022 want, they must be given.
The second part of the explanation is political – very political. Fifty years ago, the great “youth revolt” of the 1960s – which had begun in the universities and spread out from there to disrupt the buttoned-down post-war societies of the West – was slowly petering out. Undaunted, the best and the brightest of the youthful revolutionaries, those who scorned a career in business or the state bureaucracy, were placing their young feet firmly on the academic road. In imitation of Mao Zedong, they were ready to start what German student radical Rudi Dutschke called “the long march through the institutions”.
Bring these two explanations together and you have a perfect storm of institutional disruption and destruction.
Young people, hungry for a way of explaining society that differs fundamentally from the explanations of the ‘mainstream’, and keen, as all young people are, to discover the true extent of their parents’ moral deficiencies, were brought face-to-face with steely eyed revolutionaries only too willing to oblige them.
Western society, the revolutionaries declared, was irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic and patriarchal. It was also classist and capitalist: but since that kind of old-fashioned Marxist proselytising tended to be career-limiting in the new, commercial university, the emphasis shifted decisively towards what were once referred to as the “new social movements” (black civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmentalism) but are now described simply as “woke”.
The administrators of the new commercial universities aren’t too bothered about wokeness. Indeed, if the radical teaching of the academic staff attracts the interest of an increasing number of fee-paying undergraduates, they are happy to give their revolutionary teachers a free rein. So long as those graduating from the universities accept the inviolability of the neoliberal economic order (and most of them do) they can be as woke as they like.
That the wokeness their institutions are fostering is regarded by the rest of the population as nonsense-on-stilts does not dismay the administrators of the universities of 2022 anything like as much as it would have dismayed the administrators of 1972. Very few of them appear to grasp that the universities that grew out of medieval societies were only tolerated and supported because their monkish inhabitants were engaged in justifying the ways of God to Men. And, after that, of explaining how the universe worked. And after that, how human-beings work. Only while the answers provided to ordinary citizens by academics continue to help them to make sense of the universe will the vast sums needed to keep them running continue to be seen as a sensible use of their taxes.
When a journalist finally gets through to an academic today, or, more likely, receives an official media release from the university singing the praises of its latest research paper, the chances of it impressing or enlightening the ordinary citizen are slim. In 2022, not even scientists can be relied upon to relay reliable information – not when the Royal Society of New Zealand grants Matauranga Maori equal status with “Western Science”. From the ordinary citizen, loud guffaws or angry protests have become the stock response.
Not that the journalist will guffaw or protest. Not when the chances are high that the professor who wrote the media release is the same professor who awarded her an honours degree in communication studies.