My favourite part of the recent BBC2 documentary about University Challenge was the footage from a 1975 edition of the show, when the team from the University of Manchester decided to strike a blow against the establishment. Instead of taking serious part in such a bourgeois quiz programme, they answered every question with the name of a left-wing revolutionary. What's the boiling point of water? - Karl Marx. Who was the 33rd President of the United States? - Che Guevara. And so on. In this way the Manchester students hoped to further the cause of oppressed masses everywhere.
As a protest against the system it was incredibly lame, but still part of me has to side with the students and think "Yeah! You stuck it to them!" And while at least one of the team grew up to be a tame, domesticated Guardian journalist, I've no doubt that at the time the students' intentions were entirely sincere. There's something rather poignant and charming about the whole episode - made all the more poignant by the knowledge that such a thing would be impossible today.
By and large the student body of today is complacent, politically disillusioned and incapable of making even an impotent protest like this. What little radicalism there is - and there is very little - is poorly thought-out, disparate, often dubiously motivated. I can think of more than one 'radical' cause in TCD that abruptly disappeared once its leaders had gained the notoriety they wanted. The careerist taint of student politics makes most sane people avoid it, like they would avoid roadkill on the pavement.
My perspective on the matter may be distorted by having been a student of Computer Science in the late 1990s, making me a member of the least radicalised student body this side of the Kent and Sussex Young Conservatives. In general, the 90s model CS student was immensely satisfied with the way things were. Start-ups were proliferating, dot.com stocks were soaring, paper fortunes were being made everywhere. The student could expect to make a lot of money when he graduated, and more often than not, he did. In a climate like this, why rock the system?
If the students had dollars in their eyes during lectures, they were only reflecting the course material and the academic staff. More than half of our 'Computers and Society' module, for example, was devoted to an uncritical worship of moneymaking. At times the proceedings resembled a charismatic evangelical meeting, with start-up millionaires brought in to preach the word of success from the pulpit. No motivational platitude was too stale for our lecturers to intone, no success story too banal: they were too much in awe of wealth and the wealthy. One guy even started speaking in tongues when the words 'Tony O'Reilly' were mentioned. All in all, a distasteful spectacle.
These lecturers were generally old guys who had already made their fortune in the industry (and didn't they just love telling you how); worse still were the lecturers yet to make their fortune. This group didn't even pretend to be educators: they were just stalling for time, using their university salaries to keep their arses warm until their campus companies took off, using university funds to develop those companies. It was a routine occurrence in TCD for lecturers, even entire research departments, to up sticks for the world of industry as soon as their 'research' became a commercial product. The turnover of academic staff was huge. An attitude like this couldn't help but rub off on the student population.
This wasn't just a worshipful attitude towards money-making, it was an attitude of contempt towards learning. And to see the main reason why the students of today are such a tame bunch, look no further than the decline of universities as places of learning. Sure, there were a few nods to the idea of a liberal education here and there in our course, but for the most part Computer Science was just raw industry training. Here's how to program in object-oriented Java; here's a bit of C++ in Windows; this is a software development cycle; and oh, here's how to do a database, you might need that as well. You may now call yourself a Bachelor of Arts.
To get a bigger slice of the funding pie, universities are now less concerned about educating students and more concerned with selling themselves to industry. Successful campus companies are a useful marketing tool, as are student enterprise competitions. It helps if you orient your research towards something marketable, and indeed most academics do. The influence of industry is also creating an ugly phenomenon - proprietary research. It's not unusual now for a patent application to fly in as soon as an academic paper is finished. It's as if Newton had patented calculus, though of course the material is less earth-shaking.
More and more, the needs of industry are not only dictating university research, but also the the interests of students. How many students would have specialised in Distributed Systems, for example, if there weren't great yawning jobs waiting for them in Iona Technologies? How many would have done CS in the first place if they didn't think they would walk into a 30K job at the end? Many students even think the course is not industry-oriented enough: they complain if at any moment they aren't being taught 'skills' they can flog on the industry meat-market. Any non-engineering course, like Computers and Society, had to be packaged as 'training in communication skills' for these students to buy it.
Needless to say, all this has led to a steep decline in academic standards. There was a time when university graduates had something of a rounded education, but no more. Large numbers of CS graduates couldn't be described as 'educated' in any meaningful sense of the word. Sure, some of them can hack out a piece of code, but they can do fuck all else. They have no informed opinions about anything, they can't maintain an argument, they can't express themselves in writing, and their minds are uncontaminated by the least grain of culture. In short, they are perfect conformist industry dolts.
My tone might seem contemptuous, but in reality I don't blame the students themselves for turning out like this. It's the logical result of the decline of universities. And I wouldn't confine my criticism to Computer Science either - the same thing happens anywhere learning is driven by the needs of industry. In other words, it happens in every university today.
Is there a way out of this? I suggest asking the students of Manchester University in 1975, though they might give a stupid answer.