Higher Education: EUC Report

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, it is a challenge to follow the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve. Throughout our deliberations she has made wise, incisive and penetrating contributions, and that is characteristic of her whole approach to public life. I am therefore certain that I do not speak for myself alone in saying how much we admire her for agreeing recently to take on a huge new challenge on behalf of society, one that is not unrelated to the issues we are discussing today; in fact it is very close to them. We all wish her well as she shoulders those responsibilities. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Hornsey, and her colleagues for a helpful and useful report. It will be of value to the many people who get hold of it and study it.

Earlier today in another debate about constitutional matters, I ventured to suggest that the first reality of political life is that, whether we like it or not, from the day we are born we are locked into a totally interdependent international reality. The world is totally interdependent internationally. I feel strongly that we fail our young, and we certainly undermine the United Kingdom’s future, if we do not recognise that and then grapple with the challenge in order to meet it effectively. As I said in the earlier debate, I am quite certain that history will judge our generation of politicians by the contribution we make to finding effective answers to the challenge of international interdependence and the success, or indeed the mess, we make of it.

Universities are central to all this. Unless we enable the young of the world to prepare to participate in and contribute to an international community, what are we doing with our educational system? This is not simply a matter for those reading international relations formally. That is a daft approach. Of course we need the discipline of international relations as a subject of study, but it would be daft just to leave it at that. All the dimensions of higher education, and indeed of education at all levels, are related to what needs to be done. In that context, if we adhere at all to the concept of a real university being a community of scholars, it totally lacks relevance unless it is a vibrant international community in which all parts of the world are represented. We desperately need access socially, ethnically and internationally in order to ensure that our universities provide a climate of learning that is essentially part of the international reality.

Too often the debate is dominated by what overseas students represent to universities in terms of the income they provide and how universities are going to be in dire economic straits if the overseas students do not come. While that is part of managing universities, it is completely to miss the point, which is that the quality of the education and the educational experience in our universities is related to the degree to which they are real international and socially representative communities.

These days we have a very utilitarian approach to education, which of course cannot be dismissed; it is an important part of enabling society to function. But sometimes I wonder about where we draw the frontiers in our evaluation of what is relevant in utilitarian terms and what is not. I declare an interest as an emeritus governor of the London School of Economics, and I find it extraordinary that the Government should give the emphasis they do to science and technology but deliberately underrate the significance of the social sciences. If we are to make a success of society, if we are to meet the radical new challenges that are presenting themselves, the social sciences are absolutely essential. Even if you take a utilitarian management approach, the social sciences are every bit as important as the physical and other sciences in enabling us to make a success of what we are trying to do.

There is another point in all this. Understandably, we are desperately preoccupied with our economic plight. Our leaders have nightmare situations to deal with. But why do we want our economy to be successful? Is a successful economy just an end in itself or is it a means to having a society worth having? If we are going to have a society worth having, what about revisiting the principle of education for its own sake, and the principle that part of living as distinct from existing is discovering your potential and realising it, or discovering your creative potential and realising that? If we really care about the future of our society, we neglect at our peril an emphasis on the arts, including the creative arts.

As was powerfully argued by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, languages are crucial. There is a great importance in studying language as part of education for its own sake, and the richness of studying language, of course, but languages are also essential to the functioning of international society. We need to reinvent a passionate concern for people being able to live the fullest possible lives, and that means being able to enjoy music, art and all the rest; and we are hell-bent on creating a hell on earth if we let our commitment to these dimensions of higher education slip. The interplay in European education is crucial to all this.

To conclude, it has been a very high-minded debate today, which has avoided the immediate controversy of party conferences and the rest, but I was very depressed last night when I heard the Prime Minister’s jibe about intellectualism. Where are we taking our society if we try to score cheap political points by talking about intellectuals in politics? For God’s sake, why are we in the mess we are in? We are in the mess we are in because we have not been doing enough thinking, because we have not being doing enough evaluation of where we are and why. If I were to pick one urgent priority in education and our national life, it would be a revival of intellectualism and the ability to think about our predicament, and to think about where we could be as distinct from where we are, and what we should be doing. From that standpoint, I make no apology for introducing a hard political point at the end of this debate.