At Balliol, the event is thick with what I’d call posh gits. The event felt conservative, not just politically, but in the deeper, old-school, institutional sense. The air was deep with entitlement. The room was full of young wannabes, the privileged types who don’t need to try, the future “elitists” rehearsing for their inheritance.
The line-up set the tone:
- The older “priests” of the cult
- First up, a writer for The Spectator.
- Then a student from Dublin, the token woman?
- Finally, a smug young man who writes for The Times and a news blog – Unheard basically right-wing student cosplay.
The first guy? A damp squib. A classic Tory prat with nothing to say. He took a predictable swipe at the “fashionable” paths universities have taken, diversity, equality, inclusion checklist from a conservative, nostalgic lens. His question, “Who does the university serve?” landed flat. He missed the moment entirely, pining for a return to the old order while ignoring the real crisis: who has power now, and how it’s wielded.
Next came the debating society woman. Equally, damp. Her speech was a buzzword salad of all the boo-words “they” used to signal disdain for anything progressive. It was as if someone had copy-pasted a Times’ opinion page into her brain. No spark. No substance. Conservative zombie thinking, the kind we thought had decayed along with the rest of the mainstream mess. Her conclusion? Bow to the establishment. Academia, she said, is about “developing character.” Whatever that means in this context, it sure didn’t sound like any challenge to the status quo.
Then the last guy. God help us. Public school, of course. He opened with “woke”, and the room laughed. He played the “fascist” card as a joke. More laughs. Eventually, he got to the point: universities, he claimed, are driven by bureaucracy following social trends. His example? In 2011, gender became the vector of change. Now, in his area, philosophy, bureaucrats impose “care” as a form of control. A tangle of half-thoughts and culture war agenda. He described a shadowy “bureaucratic class” at the heart of the university, the deep state of academia. The audience chuckled. But behind the lols, there was a whiff of fear?
Later, an older man, the priests of the cult, responded patronisingly to a question from a young right-wing woman. She asked something in earnest, and he waved it off like a bore at a dinner party.
Then a #fashernista liberal offered a question that began with all the right liberal signals but ended on a strangely rightward note, a sort of horseshoe moment in miniature.
One posh git got up to ponder: “Are universities for jobs or knowledge?” No mention of progressive public good, human flourishing, or collective liberation, just the normal #mainstreaming.
A recurring theme was the power imbalance between bureaucrats and academic staff, with students positioned as consumers, granted power by their tuition fees. The marketization of education has become normalised, ironically, these people hate markets and love hierarchy, so long as they sit comfortably at the top.
The panel discussed Blair-era university expansion as a kind of moral failing. Universities, have grown too big to care about individuals. A strange complaint from people who seem fine with the erosion of care as a value in every other domain.
What was missing throughout? Any real commitment to learning. Any fire. Any imagination.
Instead, we got rigid academic standards used as shields against criticism. A proud conformism. No wonder “innovation” gets crushed, the whole system selects for obedience wrapped in polish.
A rare, substantial question came from the audience: someone brought actual data about the growth of “woke” discourse. Where does the pressure come from, upstream (ideology, power) or downstream (social media)? The dominant theme, the lowest common denominator thinking. A retreat from ambition under the guise of “maximum inclusivity.”
One speaker touched briefly on humanism, the idea of creating knowledge for the public good. But it was an aside, quickly buried under the usual careerist rhetoric. Again and again, they insisted they had no ideology. But the dominant ideology was everywhere: jobs, prestige, status.
The whole event kept circling one unspoken truth: things are breaking down, but instead of grappling with that rupture, they reinterpreted it as nostalgia or bureaucratic failure or “wokeness gone too far.” Because the system they’re defending, consciously or not, no longer works for most of us, these guys are uninterested in composting the mess.
These guys’ waste time, lives and distract focus, lifting the lid, a mess, maybe their narrow point of view has some value sometimes, but I did not see it at then event or in the groups’ history #frendlyenemies #spoilers #energyvampires #deathcult