Ancient & modern | 07 November 2009

As part of a revolution in higher education, Lord Mandelson is requiring information about universities to be modelled on a food-labelling system that will treat students as paying customers — another step on the route to the day when the job of our university teachers will be to provide not education but gratification. What else do paying customers demand? The don becomes a pimp.

In his dialogue Gorgias, Socrates describes a pimp as a person who caters for the desires of others. Socrates is driving towards the view that the body and soul have genuine interests that must be served if one is to lead the good life. He rejects the view that the way to achieve this is merely to supply the needs of mind and body as they cry out for them, like a ‘merchant, baker, cook or weaver, who not surprisingly become obsessed with the idea that they are the real authors of the body’s welfare, and inspire the same belief in others’.

Socrates then constructs an analogy: a doctor brought to trial against a pastry-cook, before a jury of children. ‘Just consider how the doctor would defend himself if he found himself before such a jury, if someone accused him and said, “Children, this man has done nothing but hurt you. He ruins the youngest of you by cutting and burning; he chokes you with those horrible, bitter medicines till you do not know whether you are coming or going, and then starves you by withdrawing all food and drink. He is not like me, is he? I gave you the most delicious feasts, didn’t I?” What do you think a doctor caught in this unhappy predicament would say to them? Or suppose he told them the truth and said, “All this, children, I did for your own good” — what sort of outcry do you think that reply would draw from the benches? A loud one, wouldn’t you think?’

Elsewhere Plato took the view that the best way to select students for higher education was to be quite honest about the serious demands that it would make upon them, and choose only those prepared to commit their lives to it: so different from the vision of Lord Mandelson.