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In that sweet old melodrama, The Corn Is Green, Bette Davis plays a teacher who steers a Welshman bound for the coal mines to university instead. If nothing else, watch it for the second lustiest rendition of “Men of Harlech” on screen, after Zulu.
What dates the picture, besides Bette’s unpersuasive fat suit, is that higher education is spoken of throughout as a remote and impenetrable exotica, which I suppose it was in 1895 (when the film is set) or even 1945 (when the film was made). The subsequent expansion of universities is about as civilising a thing as western societies have done since the war.
It might also be what brings them down. Polls have suggested for a while that education is more or less the best predictor of one’s openness to populism. Voters without a degree favoured Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 14 points. Among postgraduates, she won by a scarcely believable 32 points. There was a similar pattern with Brexit. As the university year begins, it is timely to explain why.
Allow me a detour first. Of late, I have developed a wonkish interest in what we might call the “perfect wrong number”. For example, annual GDP growth of about 1 per cent is not good enough to please voters but not bad enough to make them accept painful economic reform. At 60mn to 84mn, the populations of Britain, France, Italy and Germany are too big to govern well (unlike Denmark) but not big enough to shape world events (unlike China).
To press on with this reverse-Goldilocks theme, the number of graduates is perfectly wrong. There are enough to make people who don’t attend university feel excluded, but not enough to constitute an electoral plurality. Graduates can culturally dominate the rest of society for four or five years at a time, imposing their values and campus-honed identity jargon, then lose on polling day. Just under 40 per cent of Americans have done four years of college: enough to provoke, not enough to prevail. The way out is to increase the share much further or drastically cut it. One of these plans seems infeasible, the other retrograde.
I can’t bring myself there, but I wonder if university growth will come to be seen as the event that did most to sunder once-cohesive western societies. Ahead of even immigration? Yes, to the extent that attitudes to immigration often themselves hinge on education.
At the very least, we have here a — in fact, the — modern lesson in perverse consequences. As late as 2000, pundits were musing that conservatism would be “educated out of existence”: graduates skewed liberal, and there were ever more graduates. The century hasn’t played out so cleanly. Even those who opposed the expansion didn’t always anticipate precisely how it would misfire. It was obvious enough that some graduates would be underemployed. But few guessed that through weight of numbers, and the insularity this brings, graduates would evolve the mesh of codes and verbiage known as woke. And incur a backlash.
“Body politic” was always an imperfect metaphor for a nation. You can improve or cauterise one part of a body in isolation from the rest. You can’t change one part of a society without unplanned effects elsewhere. University expansion was right, and elevated the kind of talent that was stymied as late as the 1960s, never mind in the time of Jude the Obscure. But an adverse result has been the emergence of two sub-nations, all the more at odds because each is large enough to socialise and marry among itself.
It is too big a triage that takes place circa 18. In nationality, profession and above all age, I have a mixed group of friends. The best advice for a rising journalist is to avoid immersion with other journalists, lest one run out of ideas and write things like “para-social” a lot. But this is no great feat when all the friends are still graduates. Knowing someone at Goldman Sachs and Cohen & Gresser is not a life of Dickensian social sweep. It is just that there is no force so ghettoising as education, not even political belief. To know what it was to “live between a widow and a plumber”, John Updike had to quit metropolitan life for Ipswich, Massachusetts. And that was when fewer than one in 10 of his compatriots had four years of college. Who knows where he would go now.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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