The Ends of Reason.

There are other, more eloquent opponents to the Coalition government’s education policy out there than me. However I did feel that I could maybe add some useful counter-argument, based on my own positive experiences of academic research, to the Con-Dem contention that all research should have a demonstrable commercial application.

In March 2005 I was halfway through a Master’s at the University of Cambridge. It was, without doubt, the most intellectually rigorous experience of my life. One Friday evening in March, as I staggered out of the library after yet another one of the rigorous judging exams, I was feeling particularly cross-eyed and weary, so my wife suggested a pint in our local followed by a curry. We had a drink, bought a take-away curry and were cycling home when I managed to thread the plastic bag of curry between the spokes of my ancient Raleigh, atomising my vindaloo and flipping the bike over. Having elected to take the full impact of the fall on my face, I managed to lose three front teeth, break my nose and fracture a cheekbone.

The following Monday I let my college and faculty know what had happened. Everyone was very concerned and very supportive. The general consensus was that I shouldn’t worry about the work for now, but rather concentrate on getting better. My college tutor invited me over for tea at her house and talked me through the process of rearranging my essay deadlines, the course director pleaded my case to the Board of Graduate Studies and the supervisor of my Dante paper, which was now destined to be overdue, reassured me that he was more interested in hearing what I had to say than when I said it. I resigned myself to easing off the pressure, closed my books and settled into the half-life of the convalescent, subsisting on painkillers, puréed food and old films. A week or two into my cure, I received a letter from my college. They wrote to express their sympathy and also to inform me that they had voted me an extraordinary bursary of £1,500 to help during my convalescence.

Let me stress, the college barely knew who I was at this stage. I had neither performed exceptionally in my work nor made myself especially useful to the college, since I lived on the wrong side of town and hardly ever visited. Furthermore the college in question is only a small postgraduate institution with a fraction of the wealth and ostentation of its neighbours; if it’s known at all, it’s known for being the college that hardly anyone outside Cambridge ever knows about. So, if it wasn’t a display of parochial largesse, what was the meaning of this incredible generosity? I tend to think it had a dual purpose: on the one hand, it was simply a very welcome act of kindness intended to help me out through a tough period; on the other hand, it conveyed an implicit faith in my ability and the hope that I would keep trying, not give up and thereby vindicate their trust in me.

In its secondary function of symbolic gesture, it certainly did the trick. As soon as I felt better, I went to work. I buried myself in the graduate centre on the top floor of the MML Building and worked straight sessions from nine in the morning until eight or nine or ten at night. When I got stuck, which was often, I would look out of the high windows over the University Library and watch the early summer unfold. At lunchtime I’d lie on my back in the grass beneath the library and stare at the high cirrus merging and dispersing against the concrete angles of the faculty buildings. At night I’d cycle back over Garret Hostel Bridge and through the centre of town, past the crowded bars and kebab vans around the Grafton Centre and so home, to a few precious hours with my wife and then bed, before starting the process all over again. I handed in my paper a month later and forgot about it. I went cycling round Suffolk. When I got back, the examiner’s report was ready: my essay had received the highest mark ever awarded on the MPhil and was published the next year. It also formed the basis of, and secured the funding for, the PhD which I started in 2007 (and stopped, somewhat over-precipitately, in 2008).

Dante meets his old friend, Belacqua.

Would I have been able to do so well without the support I received from my college, my tutor, my supervisor and all the other people who stood by me during that period? Would I have worked so hard or cared so much? The answer is no, almost certainly not. I worked so hard, and felt so driven, because their support admitted me a glimpse of why people dedicate their lives to study. And it’s not for any of the utilitarian reasons propounded by the Coalition government in the recent spending review; people do not study to enrich themselves or their patrons, to generate income for their country's economy or value for its society. The people who dedicate their lives to study do so, I believe, because they recognise the intrinsic and absolute value of an idea, and that the realisation of an idea adds, however partially or marginally, to the cumulative sum of knowledge available to all people, irrespective of the claims of nation, employer, caste or race. 

Of course, not everyone who does a degree ends up wanting to dedicate their life to study. But that’s not the point. The point is to glimpse these new worlds of thought and allow yourself to be altered by them; to recognise the sacrifice of the countless men and women who dedicated themselves to a pure and selfless ideal; to realise that you can make a contribution (however partial or marginal) to that tradition. This is the underlying thrill of scholarship – and it should be inviolable. And this inviolability of learning brings me to the real crux of my argument. In short, I know that I never would have learned what I did or experienced that precarious thrill of following my idea, Dante-like through the dark wood, if I had not received the support which I did from my college and my incomparable supervisor. The contribution which I made to Dante studies (partial and marginal though it was) was fundamentally a collaboration – with the people whom I knew were supporting me, and with their implicit faith in a tradition of knowledge and learning which goes back two and a half thousand years. Without those people and the system they represented, it wouldn’t have happened. I was, I realise, extremely privileged to have access to this support – and yet it is precisely this kind of support, by which proven academics take risks on untried people and ideas, that the current government is threatening to undermine by insisting that all research should be government sanctioned and corporate sponsored.

Universities and their members need financial freedom. They need financial freedom in order to retain intellectual freedom – the freedom by which to follow their instincts, use their imaginations and take a risk on something or, in my case, someone, unproven. Using your mind to its limit is about exploring without knowing precisely where you’re going, pushing towards to a destination that only reveals itself to you on reaching it. The current government’s insistence on demonstrating a commercial end or application to all research will necessarily preclude the unimpeded exercise of this intellectual freedom, foreshortening the limits of imagination and impoverishing our intellectual legacy to future generations.

Finally, we would do well to remember that the consequences of the government’s stance on research are not localised to a few students and lecturers: they will affect us all. When an idea is finished and complete, it is immune to appropriation, suppression or distortion. Of course, oppressive regimes or opposing ideologies may seek to undermine that finished idea, but once it exists it will generally find a way to reach the light of day if it’s needed. However, suppression of ideas is not the risk we face. The risk we face today, as the beneficiaries of a democratic society, is the erosion of our ideational culture by shortsighted, materialistic leaders. This threat resides in the fact that an idea, before it is completed, in that gestational period when form struggles to emerge from incoherence, is vulnerable. Without money, without effective infrastructure, without a sympathetic intellectual community, ideas can be thwarted and undermined, terminated before they ever have a chance to live. If ideas are lost, it diminishes us all, weakening the common fabric of intellectual culture which civilises and unites us. Those people who talk about wanting a ‘knowledge economy’ should remember that, and curb these measures which seek to debase the one currency, that of thought, which the British haven’t entirely forsaken.

Some close formation aerobatics in Paradise.