Katy Hamilton

In the late 1990s, I and a considerable number of my friends and peers were hooked on Joss Whedon’s smart, funny, and emotionally complex TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a time prior to the arrival of sparkly Edward Cullen, the vampires of the Buffyverse were selfish, scheming, sometimes intensely stupid, violent and soulless. (Come to think of it, that largely reflects how I feel about Edward Cullen too… but that’s another story.) And the most troublesome of them all was Angel, the biggest and baddest of all the vampires, who was cursed by gypsies to have to live once more with a soul and understand the nature of everything he had done.

Long story short, by the end of season 2 of Buffy, Angel loses his soul and goes on a stupendously vindictive stalking, mutilating and killing spree. In doing so, he arrives one night at Sunnydale High School (which all the main characters attend, either as students or teachers), and kills a central character. She is frantically working on a spell that she hopes will cure him, holed up in the computer lab after dark, when Angel appears from the shadows. Here’s the script for his arrival:

JENNY

Angel! How did you get in here?!

ANGEL

I was invited.

[she looks puzzled]

The sign in front of the school:

“Formatia trans sicere educatorum.”

 

JENNY

“Enter, all ye who seek knowledge.”

ANGEL

What can I say? I’m a knowledge seeker.

 

The children born in the year that this episode first went on air (1998) will be university age now. And if any of them come across this particular episode of Buffy, they might well find themselves thinking that such invitations – albeit delivered in distinctly dodgy Latin – are apparently easier to come by if you’re a murderous, soulless, fictional vampire attempting to enter a school in the middle of the night and kill someone, than if you just want to quietly get on with doing a degree and without committing murder in twenty-first century Britain.

The new white paper for higher education is out, and various experts have given their opinions on the good, bad and ugly of the various changes proposed. Among the most controversial are the conditions around the introduction of a Teaching Excellence Framework – both in terms of the methods proposed to measure such excellence (including results of the National Student Survey, which the NUS thinks is a terrible idea, and information about graduate job destinations, which has been proven to defy the very basic statistical models used so far) – and the proposed removal of the cap on tuition fees for those who do well at it.

There couldn’t have been a more perfect moment to uncover George Osborne’s letter of 2003, promising a young constituent that the Tories would scrap tuition fees. And my favourite line has got to be his opinion on the then proposed increase in fees: ‘To my mind, this is a tax on learning and is very unfair.’ And so it is, now that Osborne and others have put this very thing in place – an education tax which it is perfectly easy to defend by saying that no one will be forced to pay back their massive debt unless they earn beyond a certain pay threshold. So assuming the students can fund themselves through their degree, if they end up working in low-income jobs afterwards, this debt becomes a damoclean sword which simply vanishes in a puff of harmless smoke.

I genuinely have no idea how that is supposed to work for anybody involved. If you go to university and can’t pay it back, the finances have to account for a major disappearing act. If you go to university and become a high-flying city executive, you pay the thing back in full – but are there really so many of those? – and if you go to university and end up with a reasonably well-paid job, you’re going to end up watching a chunk of your pay disappear each month. This system is therefore hugely destructive towards the kind of social mobility that education is supposed to encourage and support.

Of course, there is the business argument. A.C. Grayling has recently published a defence of offering good teaching institutions more money because it will fund ‘innovative teaching’. ‘Better education,’ he tells us, ‘doesn’t come for free.’ Of course, university education doesn’t come for free anyway, and some of us remember enjoying excellent, well-supported and stimulating teaching through our degrees without the need to cough up literal or theoretical fortunes to get them. Also, the only example he actually offers is that more money could mean smaller class sizes. It’s a nice idea, but let’s be honest: my mobile phone is more ‘innovative’ than that.

Universities are businesses, the word ‘target’ features so frequently in paperwork around research, teaching, intake and student experience that Robin Hood and his merry men would have nervous breakdowns trying to hit them all, and at the end of the day, the reason we are supposed to be going to university has now become, almost exclusively, to learn the precise skills needed to get a job. I refer you to Buffy again, a later episode in which, in an alternate version of the present, a bunch of particularly awful vampires set up a factory to remove the faff of hunting and killing humans and simply extract their blood via production line. ‘The humans,’ the head vampire declares at the factory opening, ‘with their plebeian minds, have brought us a truly demonic concept: mass production!’

I have not worked exclusively in higher education for several years now, but I do still teach undergraduates on a regular basis. They come to university for all sorts of reasons. They have a passion for their subject. Sometimes their expectations of possible career options are unrealistic, and that is why they have lecturers and other university staff who can help them to work out where to set their sights. Of course we all have to be pragmatic about how we can earn a living, and sometimes that means that long-held ambitions must be projected further into the future, beyond the end of a degree course, to give more time and scope to develop the necessary skills and contacts to make them happen. Or those ambitions might need interrogating intellectually, to see if they are authentic, inherited, or the result of needing to fill in a personal statement that requires you to stand out from the crowd. We offer advice, support, information, thinking strategies… and knowledge. We are there to help our students learn and grow beyond the production of a shiny CV.

So tell us, Mr.Osborne: are you seeking to produce a generation who aspire to social mobility but are held back by massive student loan repayments and overpriced housing? Are you hoping to demonstrate that I am a good lecturer because someone I taught now has an excellent job, and the students found my jokes amusing? Are you aspiring to create a society in which those currently at, or leaving, university will feel themselves powerless because despite protests, political statements and rational argument, they are being ignored by the government? At the moment, I’m finding it difficult, you see. Because the more I think of the state of higher education in the UK, the more I picture the blood-sucking vampire factory… and the more I wish that someone would show you that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which, crappy Latin and murderous plot-lines aside, anyone seeking knowledge is freely and publicly invited.