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From International Socialism, No.44, July/August 1970, pp.42-44.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Warwick University Ltd
ed E.P. Thompson
Penguin Educational Specials, 6s
As the editor, E.P. Thompson points out that the writing of this book by a group of staff and students at the University of Warwick was itself a ‘political act’. It was written in a busy week at a time when the Warwick events still had some dramatic moments ahead, and the book inevitably suffers somewhat both from the haste – it must at times be a bit difficult for someone not acquainted with the intricacies of the Warwick bureaucracy to follow it – and from the fact that it fails to give an account of subsequent developments such as the Warwick Open Week.
The book is really in three parts – a detailed descriptive account of the development of the University and of its students’ struggle, a fat selection of documents, most of them captured from the Vice-Chancellor’s files, and finally a short and polemical Personal Comment by the Editor.
Warwick University Ltd does not offer much of a theoretical or startegic contribution to the student movement. What it does present is somewhat valuable research into the actual workings of an industrialist dominated University. How it came into being, how it consolidated its oligarchic power, how it manipulates and manages. Of the nine co-opted members of the University Council eight are big industrialists and these men take the crucial decisions as to the running and the future development of the institution – men like Gilbert Hunt, Managing Director of Rootes (now Chrysler) who ‘knows little about cars. But when it comes to questions of productivity and business methods, he is in his element’, Sir Arnold Hall of Hawker Siddeley, R.J. Kermuir of Courtaulds and A.F. Tuke of Barclays Bank. (Barclays finance a ‘chair’ of Management Information Systems at Warwick: they believe it ‘benefits banking and the business world generally’.)
The book gives a revealing glimpse of that ‘brash, amoral, pushful, world of expense-account living, lavish salesmanship, cocktail bars in restored 16th century inglenooks and of refined managerial techniques and measured day work’ which the Midlands industrial barons inhabit. It shows how the values and techniques of this world took over the running of a University. Three detailed case studies show the Barons and their Vice-Chancellor J.B. Butterworth in action – cheating and lying to block plans for a student controlled Union building, juggling to produce a technological (read Business) University and pushing through ‘managerial’ efficiencies in University administration the logic of which meant spying for political information on staff and students, attempts to remove staff security of tenure, and the adoption of the Tyzack Report which overruled ‘democratic principles’ for the sake of ‘efficient government’.
The eloquence and detail of the case leaves one in no doubt as to the effective control of the University by industrialists. The meaning and logic of this control is spelt out in the captured documents. What is especially obvious is the active opposition to staff or students meeting, talking to or leafletting trade unionists. As the whitewashing Radcliffe Report on Warwick, published at the same time as this book, states,
‘the Deputy Managing Director of Automotive Products was incensed at what he regarded as an unwarranted interference by staff and students of the University in negotiations that his company was at the time conducting for a new system of productivity pay for his employees.’
Apparent too in the documents is an attitude of mind, the authoritarian smugness of the ruling class – the underlying assumption, which this book’s introduction identifies, that ‘this is their world, to dispose of by ownership and by right of purchase. These are the people who know other people; who govern by telephone; who are unaccountable because it is always their inferiors who make up the accounts; who put things in each others’ laps’.
As an attack on the Midlands industrialists and their Business University therefore the book bites but as a guide to further developments in the student movement (the Warwick events, after all, had national repercussions) it is barren. This results from the failure to place the developments at Warwick within any overall perspective in terms of the trends in higher education generally. It is a failure to appreciate that capital does not meddle in education in order to play committee games with academics or even with an eye for the odd Honorary degree, but that it is forced to do so by the needs of an increasingly competitive world economy which demand that advanced technology and labour-cost reducing techniques must be urgently drafted into the service of profit. So though it is noted that the Business University has full Government support, the implications of this never register.
This lack of a general framework leads the editor into a sort of liberal voluntarism by which the advances of the industrialists are seen to result from the ‘paralysis of will’ of the supine academics and that they have but need, of courage to throw off their unpleasant overlords. Thompson, in his Highly Confidential: A Personal Comment by the Editor, argues correctly against ‘translating a simplistic class-struggle model from industry to education’ so that ‘academic staff and “the Administration” are seen together as one reactionary blur’ but his own analysis of the role of staff and Administration is nothing if not blurred. Ideology is discussed not at all, and apart from blatant examples such as Industrial Relations there is no attempt to relate capitalist control of the University to what is actually taught there – a gap in the analysis which allows the trapped academic to snap back: ‘But no one restricts my freedom to teach!’ They don’t need to. As Aneurin Bevan once said, ‘There is no need to muzzle sheep’.
The failure of other than a very small group of academics to fight, actively and publicly, against Butterworth’s outrageous policies and tactics is explained away by their short-sightedness and lack of awareness of the ways of the world and in hints at the selling of souls in return for departmental enrichment. There is no suggestion that some academics are as ideologically committed to profit as Gilbert Hunt himself and spend their lives in its service and that most of the rest, while perhaps troubled by some of the excesses of modern business methods nevertheless have enough ideological commitment to defend it against threats from a student movement making socialist noises.
In passing Thompson makes some justified attacks on the ‘uncomradely narking’ and the astounding arrogance of some ‘experienced’ London student militants (though he unfairly picks out the Red Mole for this treatment – the Black Dwarf was at the time the worst culprit). An account of the Open Week which, before its close had attracted a significant number of militant especially young workers would have scotched the taunts of futile ‘workerism’ which were aimed at the Warwick students by that sophisticated group of RSSF dilettanti.
Thompson also devotes a couple of pages to an attack on a position so ultra-left and little held as not to deserve mention, but some of his criticisms strike at all revolutionary socialists who do not involve themselves in the procedures of ‘liberal constitutionalism’, for he claims that only by being involved in these procedures can we defend them from attack from the right (a position most apparent in all the CPs hollow victories in the trade union hierarchies, most obvious and futile at present in the National Union of Students). Politics is still seen as a matter for ‘politicians’ and there is no conception of a rank-and-file movement, based on mass politics and consciousness which in the end is the only meaningful defence against Right repression.
In the last analysis this book must be judged for what it claims to be – a ‘political act’. It advocates an alliance of academics, constitutionalist students and revolutionaries in the struggle for the liberal values of the Universities. Above all its appeal is to the academics. By his scathing and at times brilliant portrayal of Academicus Superciliosus Thompson tries to embarrass University academics into action. The nature of the alliance they are invited to join is radical, serious but above all moderate – it appeals not to the working class but to ‘public opinion’: it involves the Labour Party and opposes red moles – while socialist principles are evident they are not priorities. Thus the University he aims for will have ‘a more democratic constitution than any existing university enjoys’ but it will still have connections with all levels of industry.
If the alliance fails and the University authorities ‘effect the least possible change’ and ‘public opinion offers no safeguards against political files’ then of course the red moles and Maoists will have got the better of the argument. Red moles and Maoists offered few arguments and no leadership at Warwick. But the point is taken.
For while tactical political alliances with constitutionalists are sometimes necessary (as in Warwick), this does not mean that we hold our Marxist fire – our theory, after all, is our main contribution to any movement – nor that we falter in our attempts to create truly democratic alternatives to bureaucratic institutions. Our aim, to borrow Peter Sedgwick’s words (The Two New Lefts, IS 17) ‘must not be to supplement those who have influence, and possible even administrative power but lack gumption and consistency and are subject to the wrong pressures but to supplant them’.
For liberal, constitutionalist student leadership can lead nowhere – except at its best to a few meaningless concessions and perhaps to a few more Labour votes, since it offers the movement nothing beyond the obvious and sterile bounds of reformism. And as the movement is filtered by every committee and every constitutionalist irrelevance it gets smaller and smaller leaving in the end only the pure form of constitutionalist – the careerist. Some of the political casualties strewn behind might twitch into the ultra-left, there to be finally killed off.
For such an outstanding historian Thompson is strikingly ahistorical. To lead a movement into struggle for an institution such as the Liberal University, with a dubious past and little future is irresponsible: to pander to, indeed to bolster up liberal illusions can only be destructive. To believe in the rebirth of the autonomous liberal educational system is just such an illusion. The Government don’t want it, the academics don’t want it and more important, the economy can’t take it.
There is no inevitability that we shall follow the American model. There are and will be important differences if only in the more elitist structures of British higher education, and areas of liberal dominance might well survive, but only where they are allowed to and where they are well-managed. On his final page Thompson asks
‘Can we by our efforts transform it (the University) into a centre of free discussion and action, for a dynamic renewal of the whole society within which it operates?’
For any Marxist the answer should be obvious. Defend our freedoms of speech; of thought and of political action we must of course do, but they are ultimately only defensible through the struggle for a mass revolutionary movement based in the working class. The defence of elitist illusions is not part of this struggle and may safely be left to others.
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