In July 2019 I was made an honorary fellow of Goldsmiths University. Should I now publicly burn the certificate? For the university seems to have betrayed the values I celebrated when I accepted it.
The speech I gave to those graduating that year had Martin Luther King’s ‘The love that does justice’ as its theme. I reflected on the buildings in the Goldsmiths’ campus named after Richard Hoggart, Ben Pimlott and Stuart Hall. Instead of 19th-century imperialists or 21st-century oligarchs, they represented a democratic tradition, “expert and exploratory”. Hoggart, dedicated to literacy; Pimlott, an exemplary public servant; Hall, a democratic life-force. “Each,” I told the graduates, “personified what higher education should be about and resisted it being marketised and commercialised.”
I wrote in my speech about Lord Browne’s 2010 report on funding higher education. It was commissioned by Peter Mandelson in the last Labour government. The ex-boss of BP asserted that no “objective metric of quality” could be found to guide public investment in higher education. Funding should therefore be decided by students based on the financial returns they could anticipate.
