This touches on a much deeper problem than pervasive demoralisation or the monitoring regime to which research and teaching have been subjected. Wherever I go, both senior politicians and other historians find it mysterious why, for example, virtually every British academic historian of France, Germany or Spain is a Leftist, in contrast to the more balanced arrangements prevailing in those countries. The eminence reached by Karl-Dietrich Bracher, Alain Besançon, the late François Furet, Klaus Hildebrand or Horst Möller, is unimaginable in a country that regards Eric Hobsbawm as the apogee of academic excellence. Yes, there have been some exceptions, such as the late historian-peers Robert Blake and Hugh Trevor-Roper, or the very much alive Sir Michael Howard, but such figures are no longer emerging.
A future Conservative government should be concerned about the near-total hegemony that the Left has achieved in higher education, for the problem is by no means confined to the universities, old or new.
The path of least resistance would be to enable other types of institution where serious thought is conducted to organise courses which could be awarded formal credits. I experienced such a summer course, organised by the Fundación para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales think-tank in Madrid, where high-level seminars on public policy counted towards the students' degree work. It would be easy to imagine similar arrangements at, for example, Policy Exchange.
A harder approach would be to introduce mechanisms to prevent the informal bias that seems to influence academic appointments. The RAE introduced limited representation of non-academics to ensure that society's interests were reflected in the distribution of taxpayer monies, although that has not attenuated "research" on body-art (tattooing to you and me) or medieval hermanophobia in the 13th century. We may have reached a point where outside non-academic assessors, from such fields as business or journalism, need randomly to be introduced to monitor the fairness of all tenured academic appointments, with powers to scrutinise internal email traffic and such things as references, where pitches are routinely queered.
In an important lecture, the philosopher Onora (now Baroness) O'Neill emphasised the need to restore trust in the learned professions and society in general. But until we can be sure that trust will not be an excuse to perpetuate academia's community of the politically like-minded, politicians need to deal with some of its grubbier present-day
realities.
