Students are trapped between consumerism and safetyism

Some of our most illustrious universities now look more like juvenile detention centres, all in the name of stopping the spread of Covid-19. This last week has seen police raids and strict lockdowns on students’ lives, many of whom will have been leaving home for the first time. Young people compare their campuses to prisons, complaining of illegal detention and displaying only half-joking distress messages in their windows — which university authorities have then ordered them to remove. Even where infections are absent, students are stuck in their rooms, attending classes online, which they could have done from home. One’s heart goes out to these young people, caught as they are between the pernicious forces of university marketisation and the cult of safety at all costs.

On the one side, students are enduring the consequences of marketisation in British higher education, as Philip Cunliffe and I set out in a recent report for the think tank Cieo.