Higher Education: Affordability and Quality

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too express my gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for securing this debate. I declare my interest as a professor at King’s College London.

I am one of the many Europeans who came to this country to pursue an academic career. I arrived at the age of 22 with a first degree from an Italian university, with respectable—but certainly not native—English, and with a social network that consisted of only two people, both Italian students. After my master’s degree, however, I obtained funding to do a PhD at the LSE, and I got my first academic job at Oxford. What academic immigrants like me found was that British universities, unlike universities in our countries of origin, were liberal and based on merit. They did not demand conformity. They were institutions where young academics especially could flourish. This was in part because, as a young researcher, one did not feel stifled by overbearing professorial egos, as was unfortunately the norm in Italian, German or French universities.

In my 32 years in this country, things have changed. These changes have been examined in the report by Policy Exchange that has been mentioned. It has a powerful foreword by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. I associate myself with what she wrote in that report, and with the excellent introductory speech that she gave. The Policy Exchange report identifies several trends that many of us who work in universities recognise well.

First, there is the growth in managerialism and bureaucracy. Of course, universities need good administration, but administration should serve scholarship and teaching. When the best-paid jobs go to the administrators, you create the wrong incentives. Moreover, what is worse is that the academic managers too often understand their main role as ensuring and enforcing compliance with the myriad of regulations that govern academic life these days. In turn, they generate vast amounts of internal policies and processes that take time away from scholarship and teaching.

Another major change that has happened in these 30 years is that students are now treated as consumers who need to be satisfied. This has changed higher education for the worse. The purpose of education is not to flatter students; it is to form them. Satisfaction is completely the wrong notion. If anything, the objective of education should be to encourage dissatisfaction. I support a number of the recommendations in the Policy Exchange report, including abolishing the National Student Survey and making the OfS a light-touch regulator.

Another, even more sinister trend has emerged, and both the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and the noble Lord, Lord Biggar, have addressed it. In the late 1980s, Allan Bloom wrote a famous book titled The Closing of the American Mind, in which he examined the narrowing of argument in American universities and the rise of intolerance and dogmatism. I fear the British mind may be closing too. In my field, international law, there is less diversity now than before. When I say “diversity”, I mean the diversity that matters in a university: not how we look but how we think. In the 1990s, there were Marxist, socialist, liberal and conservative international lawyers in academia. As many studies have shown, however, the range of political opinion in academia has become considerably more limited.

In addition, people holding minority views, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Biggar, are often not argued with—they are denounced. Even in academic international law—can your Lordships believe it?—the bigotry of seeking to denounce and ostracise those who hold different views, whether on migration, empire, sex and gender, the European Union or human rights, has taken hold. It beggars belief that this could happen among academics devoted to the study of the law of nations, which was invented in the early modern period so that nations divided by wars of religion could find common ground. There is a famous alumnus of Hertford College who disagreed with that view, but I hope we will prove him wrong; obviously, that was Thomas Hobbes.

We must remember that universities have not always promoted free thinking and advancements in knowledge. There have been long periods in western history when universities became the guardians of orthodoxy. We should not take too much comfort in international rankings: they do not spot these trends. By the way, while the top British institutions are still performing well, those just below them have been losing ground in recent years. The Government’s White Paper from last October deals with some of these problems and identifies some fixes, but many of the problems that have been debated today still need answers. It would be useful to understand where the Government sit in the range of opinion that has been expressed about the diagnosis of what is going wrong in academia. Do the Government agree that these problems exist and that there is a risk of decline?

It is often said that Britain can combine the best of Europe and America, and in many ways, we did that in the university sector. But the risk is a future where we end up in the opposite place: universities that are European in bureaucracy and overregulation, American in consumerism and levels of student debt, and, especially in the humanities and social sciences, eager to import every illiberal fashion, whether from Europe or America. That risk is real, but by no means a foregone conclusion. But there is no room for complacency. We must act urgently if we want to secure a better future for higher education.