ust as a prolonged drought reveals previously obscured contours in the landscape, so the coronavirus pandemic has revealed, with disturbing clarity, fault lines in our society. The shambles that passes for Tory education policy in England and Wales exaggerates these through its combination of incompetence and ideology. But although it’s tempting to discuss the recent exams fiasco entirely in terms of ministerial inadequacy, what the debate around this issue has revealed are unsettling tensions in our current assumptions about the nature and role of higher education and its relation to wider society. And we can none of us claim to be merely outraged observers in this matter: we are all implicated in these contradictions. One of the most obvious is between our de facto endorsement of a bitterly class-divided society and our fantasy that universities can not only escape the consequences of this but can positively correct it. We seem, for example, to be willing to allow wealthy parents to buy educational advantage for their children up to the age of 18, but then we believe that this advantage can somehow be made to have no consequences for their educational trajectory thereafter. We profess to be shocked that those from disadvantaged backgrounds do less well in the scramble for places, but we strain every sinew to give our own children an edge in this scramble. Many parents seem to regard universities primarily as a filtering mechanism for employment. The “better” the university their child can go to, the better their chances of a job that will insure them against the worst ravages of an unforgivingly competitive society. One reason why further education is the Cinderella sector is that the parents of those who tend to go into further education are nowhere near so powerful and noisy a voice as the parents of those who tend to go to universities. The truth is that if you say you want more children from deprived areas to be able to go to university, then don’t faff around with entry tariffs: invest in Sure Start centres, preschool groups, subsidised childcare and properly resourced primary schools. Make benefits genuinely accessible and life-supporting. Better still, stop whole sections of society being condemned to underpaid, vulnerable, soul-destroying labour while others cream off inordinate wealth from the profits of that labour. But don’t kid yourself that the odd bit of “widening access” will in itself provide a magic bullet and thereby allow you, the beneficiary of a rigged competition, to sleep soundly at night. Then there is the rather less obvious contradiction between consumerism and education. Our higher education system is at present structurally consumerist. Even now, it is not widely understood how revolutionary were the changes introduced in 2010-12 by the coalition government in England and Wales (Scotland wisely followed another course). It wasn’t simply a “rise in fees”. It was a redefinition of universities in terms of a market model. The Office for Students is explicitly a “consumer watchdog”. Consumers are defined by their wants; in exchange for payment they are “entitled” to get what they ask for. The core experience of life-changing education is almost the exact opposite of this. It involves engaging with what is not us. It’s not about studying something we can “identify” with: it’s about encountering manifold forms of otherness; it’s about coming to understand things we didn’t previously know existed; it’s about struggling with the knotty intractability of how the world is, rather than how we like to think of it. Given this contradiction, there are few more pathetic sights than Tory backbenchers bleating about “grade inflation” while insisting that universities must provide “value for money” by “giving students what they want”. Then there is the tension, though it may be unpopular to articulate it, between thinking of universities as a continuation of school and thinking of them as having a lot of functions in addition to undergraduate education. Those who urge that we move to “comprehensive universities”, on the model of comprehensive schools, taking all 18-year-olds from a given area regardless of grades in A-levels or equivalent exams, may be animated by admirably egalitarian convictions. But quite apart from the immediate resistance such a scheme would encounter from the dominant consumerism – “I want my children to be able to choose which (better) university they go to” – this neglects all those other functions. Universities are, by a long way, the main centres of research and scholarship in our societies; they curate the greater part of our intellectual and cultural inheritance; they provide by far the best source of disinterested expertise; they select and prepare those who will be the scholars and scientists of the future, and so on. Countries all over the world have found that you cannot fulfil these functions by distributing students and academics across all institutions either uniformly or randomly. Some element of selection and concentration is needed, and that brings with it some element of hierarchy, however unofficial. Explicit differentiation of function among higher education institutions might well be preferable to any pretence that they are all doing the same thing and doing it equally well. Finally, there is the tension between wanting an ever-increasing number of people to attend university and wanting to have “world-leading” institutions. In recent years it’s become something of a mantra that the great “success” of the coalition’s higher education policy was to get more children going to universities. One of that government’s most market-driven measures – the removal of an agreed cap on numbers that each university could take – has been credited with “enabling more school-leavers to realise their dreams”. But in practice, as some of them are discovering, it’s more a question of realising their nightmares. Universities are overcrowded and understaffed; contact hours are reduced; most teaching in the first two years is done by temporary and part-time staff; and underprepared students suffer debilitating stress. Moreover, instead of reliably leading to a better job, all it guarantees is a higher tax bill for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, universities lower down the pecking order lose student numbers to their more favourably placed “competitors”, leading to desperate attempts at “recruitment”, the firing of staff, and the possibility of bankruptcy. Yes, it’s all been a wonderful success, hasn’t it? Entrenched contradictions of the kind I’ve itemised here can’t be wished away overnight. But bringing them to the surface should at least disabuse us of any lingering notion that the present system is working well. The past 10 years have seen a revolution from above that has, by its lights, been successful: our universities have been remade. The chaos around us is conclusive evidence of that. • Stefan Collini is professor emeritus of English literature and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. His books include What are Universities For? and Speaking of Universities