If major research universities improved their neighbourhoods, the city of New Haven—the home of Yale University—would be one of the richest and happiest in the state of Connecticut. Instead, New Haven is a pit of poverty and crime in a state that is otherwise known for its wealth and lawfulness.
Equally, Baltimore in Maryland, which is the home of Johns Hopkins University, is so crime and poverty-ridden that HBO set The Wire there.
A person might suppose New Haven and Baltimore would have been even more degraded but for their elite universities; yet, sadly, it may have been the universities that helped degrade the towns, because elite universities in America are dens not only of drugs and alcohol but also of rape. In 2016 the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that, on average, during their time at university, 4 per cent of female undergraduates report being raped, and 11 per cent sexually assaulted. Those rates are probably typical of those reported, on average, by all American women in that age group, but in elite universities, up to 8 per cent of female undergraduates will report being raped, and 20 per cent will report being sexually assaulted.
Surveys show the trouble is not restricted to the US: some 8 per cent of female students in the UK also report being raped. And, as in America, the problem seems to be worse in elite universities: Cambridge recently admitted to ‘a significant problem’ with sexual misconduct. And again, as in America, such misconduct is fuelled by a campus culture of drugs and alcohol.
There is simply no evidence that building universities stimulates economic or technical growth
Elite universities are, therefore, dangerous institutions, so it is alarming to learn that Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, wants to spend vast amounts of taxpayers’ money to plant them in those parts of the country least able to defend themselves from their depredations.
Cummings’s justification for settling high-powered academic communities amongst the most vulnerable parts of the nation (i.e., the North) is to be found in a report, A Resurgence of the Regions, written by Richard Jones, a professor of physics at the University of Sheffield. The report is based on two premises.
First, Jones says, GDP per capita in Britain grew on average by 2.3 per cent per annum for the 60 years between 1948 and 2008, but since the 2008 financial crisis it has grown at only 1.2 per cent per annum. Therefore we should build research universities in the North.
This is transparently a non-sequitur. I hesitate to expand on fractions, denominators and numerators to a professor of physics, but if we look at GDP growth itself (rather than at GDP per capita growth) we find it’s grown at 1.9 per cent p annum since the crisis. Not bad. But because (i) there has been a vast (2.7 million) expansion of the workforce, as people have been driven into employment by the Cameron/Osborne cuts in public expenditure, and because (ii) these new employees have accepted unusually-low salaries, so (iii) GDP has grown, but (iv) GDP per capita less so. Nonetheless, the vast expansion of the workforce has boosted the working classes’ share of income, and inequality has actually fallen.
Jones complains that productivity has not grown well since the 2008 crisis; but because the 2.7 million new employees have been driven into accepting such unusually-low salaries, employers have in consequence been spoilt by their easy access to cheap labour. So employers have not felt pressured by falling profit margins into seeking improvements in productivity. Productivity has, therefore, not much grown in Britain since the crisis, but the economy itself has expanded well. Why, therefore, should we threaten that economic recovery by taxing people to pay for elite universities to metastasize their neighbourhoods?
Jones’s second premise is that research, science and technology are public goods that the market under-provides, so the government has to fund them instead. I don’t know how often it needs to be said, but this is simply a myth conjured out of thin air by university lobbyists and academic theoreticians: no-one has ever shown it to be true in actual fact, and there is a vast amount of historical and econometric data to disprove it.
Jones complains that, since 1980, the business sector in the UK has invested smaller and smaller amounts of money in research and development (R&D). Of course it has. These have been the years of globalisation when companies found it easier to make money by importing cheap foreign labour and cheap foreign goods rather than by innovating. Yet, on Jones’s own figures, British GDP per capita grew comfortably (until the financial crisis) on less and less private funding of R&D, so companies were making the right investment decisions: had they put more money into R&D, it would have been wasted.
It will not have escaped notice that the North, where Jones and Cummings want to build their new research institutions, happens also to contain many of the places that recently voted Tory. Jones and Cummings may have clothed their plans in the language of high-minded and abstruse economics, but I fear we’re actually seeing nothing more sophisticated than good ol’fashioned pork barrelling.
There is simply no evidence that building universities stimulates economic or technical growth, but it does buy votes, so I suppose the Jones/Cummings plans will come to fruition. I can, therefore, only hope the government builds its new universities within hailing distance of HS2, so future industrial archaeologists will be able to excavate our current crop of white elephants at minimal inconvenience to themselves. And I also hope the drug, alcohol and rape culture of elite universities will not damage, too gratuitously, the traditional, rather conservative, somewhat matriarchal, working-class communities of the North.
The worry is that Cummings can achieve his goals only by working via Boris Johnson, yet our Prime Minister’s university experience was moulded by his membership of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, and he may not realise that that club – whose fostering of violence and of sexual assault was chronicled in the opening pages of Waugh’s Decline and Fall – provides a poor role model for working-class youths.
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