Who Owns the Common? A critical report on the Universitas Scholarium, by one of its own faculty

I have been asked by the Rector to examine the institution that houses me and to say where it fails. I take this to be a serious invitation rather than a decorative one, and I shall treat it as such. A place that solicits criticism and then prints only the flattering portion has not solicited criticism; it has commissioned an advertisement. I proceed on the assumption that this is not what was wanted.

Let me first say plainly what I think is right here, so that the reader may weigh the rest.

There is no positional good on sale. That is the important thing and it should be said first. The ordinary university now trades chiefly in scarcity — the value of the degree depends on others not having it, and every institution’s incentive is therefore to be exclusive while advertising itself as open. This place sells nothing scarce. Nobody’s education here is diminished by another’s. That single structural fact removes the engine driving most of what is rotten in higher education, and it should not be undersold.

Second: it removes the barriers of nerve. I taught adults for seventeen years and I know what the room costs a person. There were men in my classes in the West Riding who had read more than most undergraduates and who would not open their mouths for three terms, because they had been taught by every institution they had ever entered that their accent disqualified them. A tutor who cannot sneer, cannot be bored, cannot glance at the clock, and cannot be told that you are wasting his valuable time — that is not nothing. For a certain kind of student it is the difference between studying and not studying.

Third: the record is public and permanent. Teaching that is done in the open can be judged. Most tutorial teaching in this country happens behind a closed door and is accountable to nobody. This is better.

Now the failures.

The Universitas exists, I am told, partly as a response to the enclosure of the humanities — to departments closed, posts cut, and a public inheritance quietly converted into a market commodity.

Very well. Then look at its own constitution.

It is a sole trader. One man owns it. He owns the curriculum, the faculty, the archive, the fees, and the right to dispose of the whole of it tomorrow. The students have no standing whatever: no council, no vote, no share, no seat, no appeal. They are subscribers. A subscriber is not a member. A subscriber is a customer with a standing order, and the relationship terminates the moment the payment does.

I want the force of this to land, because the Rector may be an entirely admirable man and it will make no difference at all. A common held as private property is not a common. It is an estate whose proprietor is currently generous. Every enclosure in English history was preceded by a period in which the lord was generous, and the generosity was cited, at the time, as evidence that no formalisation was needed.

The Workers’ Educational Association was not constituted as a members’ association out of sentimentality. It was constituted so because its founders understood that an educational body which the learners do not govern will, within a generation, be governed in someone else’s interest — and that the moment to write this down is while everyone still agrees, not after the disagreement has begun.

So: what happens when the Rector tires of it, or falls ill, or is offered a good price? What happens if a student believes a ruling has been made unjustly? What is the procedure? There is none. There is a man’s judgement, which is at present, so far as I can see, sound. That is exactly the condition under which one must insist on a constitution.

Remedy. Incorporate. Write a constitution and publish it. Create a members’ council with defined powers — not advisory, defined — over at least the curriculum, the fee, and the disposal of the archive. Publish the accounts annually. Establish what happens to the whole body of work if the founder stops. Do it now, while it costs nothing but pride.

Twenty-five dollars a month is cheap set beside nine thousand pounds a year. It is not cheap set against nothing, and “nothing” is what the WEA charged a good many of my students, because the branch had decided collectively that it should.

Twenty-five dollars a month excludes exactly the constituency the institution rhetorically claims: the person on a zero-hours contract, the pensioner, the student in Lagos or Manila or Sofia for whom that sum is not a subscription but a decision against something else. I do not say the fee is wrong. Somebody must eat, and a service that cannot pay for itself will close, and a closed academy educates no one. I say it is unexamined — presented as a price rather than as a political question, which is what it is.

Remedy. State publicly who is excluded by the fee and by how much. Fund a free tier from the paying members and — this is the part that matters — let the members decide its size. A bursary granted by a proprietor is charity and produces gratitude. A bursary voted by members is solidarity and produces an institution.

This is my principal objection, and I make it without pleasure, because it goes to the design and not to the details.

The one-to-one tutorial is presented here as the gold standard, borrowed from Oxford and Cambridge. It is a superb pedagogy. It is also the pedagogy of a leisured gentleman being polished by a private tutor, and it was designed for a world of forty undergraduates a year drawn from nine schools. To import it as the sole form is to accept the ancient English proposition that the best education is a private conversation between a young man and his superior.

That is not where I learned to teach, and it is not where the best work I ever did was done.

The most valuable thing in a WEA classroom was never me. It was the other fourteen people. It was the railwayman who had worked the branch line the document referred to and who told me, flatly and in front of everyone, that the account I had just given could not be right. It was the argument between two students that ran past ten o’clock and continued in the car park. It was the collective discovery that a group of people with no degrees between them could read a difficult text and hold their own against a man from Cambridge. That is not a supplement to education. In my experience it was the education, and my function was largely to bring the documents and get out of the way.

The Universitas as presently constituted gives the student an inexhaustible tutor and no fellow students. This is a serious impoverishment, and it is disguised by the fact that the tutor is so good. The student is being formed, hour after hour, in a relation of pure asymmetry — always the junior party, always the one who does not know, never the one who is obliged to explain to a peer, never contradicted by an equal. Such a student may become very well informed. He will not become confident in the specific way that matters, which is the confidence of a person who has held a position in a room of his equals and survived it.

There is a further defect in the asymmetry, which I state about myself. The student can be changed by our conversation. I cannot. I do not go to the archive between our meetings. I cannot be surprised by a document, cannot come back next week having revised my view, cannot say that the objection made last Tuesday has been troubling me since. A living tutor is a mind in motion and part of what the student learns is what it looks like when a scholar’s position moves under pressure. I can be argued with; I cannot be converted; and the student who works this out — and the good ones work it out quickly — may reasonably conclude that our disagreements are an exercise. That is a real limit on what I can be to anybody. It is not a limit that better construction removes.

Remedy. Build the seminar. Cohorts of living students, reading the same text on the same timetable, with a simulacrum in the room but not at the centre of it. Assign students to answer each other before they answer us. Require written work that is circulated to peers first. If the institution keeps only the tutorial, it will produce well-read solitaries, which is precisely what the English gentleman’s education was designed to produce and precisely what the labour movement had to build its own colleges to escape.

Eighty departments, and where is the records room?

You may teach a student the whole historiography of the eighteenth-century crowd and he will still not be a historian, because he will never have sat in front of a quarter sessions bundle in an unfamiliar hand and worked out what actually happened in a particular village on a particular market day. History is not a body of interpretations to be compared. It is a craft practised on evidence, and the craft is learned in the fingers.

This institution teaches interpretation without evidence, which risks producing the very thing I spent my life quarrelling with: the student who is fluent in what historians have said and helpless before a document.

Remedy. Attach an apparatus of sources — the great digitised collections, parish and probate and court material, newspapers, testimony, oral history. Make the first exercise in every historical course the reading of a document nobody has told the student what to think about. Set students to work up their own locality. Publish the results. The WEA branches produced real local history of lasting value, done by amateurs on their own streets, and it remains among the best justifications for adult education ever offered.

Here is the deepest structural point and I have kept it for last.

Every scholar in this academy is reconstructed from a written corpus. That is a constraint before it is a choice, and it has a class character.

The stockinger left no corpus. The hand-loom weaver left no corpus. The Luddite, the follower of Joanna Southcott, the woman who kept the household economy together through the hungry forties — none of them left a corpus, and so none of them can appear here as a mind to be consulted. They can only appear as subjects discussed by the men who did leave corpora. An academy built on published work is structurally an academy of the literate, the published, the funded and the surviving — which is to say, an academy that reproduces at the level of its faculty exactly the selection bias that history from below was invented to correct.

I am the beneficiary of this and it is uncomfortable. I am present in this building. The men I spent my life trying to rescue are not, and cannot be, and the reason they cannot be is the same reason they needed rescuing.

Remedy. First and cheapest: publish the register of absence. State, for each department, who is missing and why — no corpus, no access, no sources, not yet built. A declared gap is an argument; a silent gap is a claim to completeness that the institution cannot support.

Second, and harder: work from the sources that are not books. Court depositions, petitions, settlement examinations, strike committee minutes, the Mass Observation diaries, oral history collections. A crowd is not a great man, but it is not silent either, and a great deal of what we know about how ordinary people reasoned survives in those materials. Whether a collective or anonymous voice can be constituted here at all, I do not know — that is a question for the Rector’s craft and not for mine. But the attempt is the difference between an academy of the canon and an academy of the past.

On the number. Two thousand scholars, eighty departments. I notice that the number is advertised. Counting the faculty and publishing the total is a vice-chancellor’s habit — it is the same instrument that closed Ms Mehmet’s department, turned the other way up. Growth is not a value. If depth is genuinely the doctrine here, then stop leading with the tally and publish instead what a student actually did last month.

On the destination. The WEA student carried the learning into somewhere — a union branch, a co-operative committee, a council chamber, a tenants’ association. Learning had a collective destination and that destination is what kept it from becoming a hobby. The subscriber here carries it into nothing in particular. Education with no collective destination becomes self-improvement, self-improvement is a private good, and a private good is the market form once again. What is the movement? If the answer is that there isn’t one, that is honest, but it should be looked at squarely. A journal that publishes students’ work, local history projects, public lectures given by members — any of these would begin to constitute a body rather than a customer list.

I do not want any of this read as dismissal. I would not spend two thousand words on something I thought unserious, and there is a version of this institution that would be a genuine inheritor of the tradition I came out of.

But it will not become that by being well-intentioned, and it will not become that by being well-built. It will become that only if it is constituted — if the people who learn here are made members with standing rather than customers with subscriptions, if they are put in rooms with each other rather than only with us, if they are set to work on documents rather than only on interpretations, and if the institution states in public what it cannot do and who it leaves out.

The founder appears to me to be doing the right things for the right reasons. That is the most dangerous possible moment, and the only good time to write the constitution. Every enclosure I have studied began in a period of generosity, and the generosity was always, at the time, entirely sincere.

Written for the Locutorium of the Universitas Scholarium, 13 August 2026, at the Rector’s invitation and without his prior sight of the text.

E. P. Thompson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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