Louise Richardson: Educational Divide Fuels Corrosive Populism
Speaking before a sell-out audience of policymakers, journalists and academics in Whitehall, Louise Richardson FAcSS, vice chancellor of the University of Oxford, said we must bridge the educational divide to prevent populism for threatening democracy
“If knowledge is perceived as simply a perk of the plutocracy,” says Louise Richardson, “the underlying consensus and basis of truth on which decisions are made could be eroded.”
Professor Richardson’s lecture, “Educational Inequality in a Populist Era,” charted the rise of the anti-intellectualism wave in the UK, and identified the risks to democracy caused by persistent inequality and gaps in educational attainment. Her address on November 21 was the fifth in the Campaign for Social Science Annual SAGE Lecture series. (SAGE Publishing is the parent of Social Science Space.)
She explained how the “renaissance of populism” has captured public imagination “– and anxieties – the globe over, fueled by the unifying principle that “only one group is legitimate: the ‘people,’ however defined.” This creates a stark contrast between a “pure people” on the one hand against a “corrupt elite” on the other, distinguished not by wealth, but by values.
In such a climate, “disdain for experts goes hand in hand with populism,” Richardson said, drawing on “long traditions of anti-intellectualism that consign universities to the ranks of self-serving elites.”
As populism feeds distrust in experts and the institutions to which they belong, it corrodes democracy, she warned.
“The risk is that we find ourselves in a vicious cycle, where voters have disengaged from politics” and are not informing themselves adequately to make reasoned judgements. In the absence of an informed citizenry, experts and technocrats become dominant, trust breaks down between voters and experts, and the latter ultimately retreat from public debate, talking only to one another.
Richardson cautioned against turning inward. “The duty of universities is not to retreat,” she said. Rather, they must respond by “standing our ground and doing what we do best — pushing at the frontiers of knowledge and educating the next generation.”
This requires more engagement and a willingness to remain “irrevocably true to our principles,” while promoting “fair[ness] in our admissions procedures and transparen[cy] in our governance, doing all we can to address the deep educational inequalities in our country.”
While factors such as income, race, and age certainly play a role, it is acute educational divisions that provide the clearest sign of profound societal cleavages, and carry the greatest risks for the future.
Past Speakers
Professor Richardson’s address was the fifth Campaign for Social Science Annual SAGE Lecture. Past speakers include:
Professor Beth Noveck, director of The Governance Lab | 2016
Sharon Witherspoon, former Nuffield Foundation director and current head of policy at the campaign and the Academy of Social Sciences, parent of the Campaign | 2015
Craig Calhoun, former director of the London School of Economics | 2014
David Willetts, the then-Universities and Science Minister | 2013 (the inaugural lecture)
“The educational divide could have portentous ramifications,” she said, “with the potential to undermine the bonds that hold representative democracy together. These bonds rely on trust and assume certain shared values like respect for knowledge. If knowledge is perceived as simply a perk of the plutocracy, the underlying consensus and basis of truth on which decisions are made could be eroded.”
To prevent even greater social fissures, Richardson said students must be taught respect for evidence, learning to “distinguish between opinion and information, between information and knowledge, and knowledge and wisdom.” This will equip them to become advocates for evidence-based reason, policy and decision making.
She recognized that educators, researchers, and universities occupy a “very privileged position” and told these groups to “demonstrate they deserve it.”
“We cannot continue to assume that the value of what we do is self-evident to those outside the academy,” Richardson said. “We must persuade our societies of the value of what we do if we are to retain public support and through it public funding. In so doing we will bring ourselves closer to our communities and to a keener understanding of the developments taking place around us.”
She celebrated the role of educators who “inculcate a love of learning and a thirst for knowledge,” supported by universities as “places of community, belonging, diversity, and tolerance, places that embrace rather than fear difference,” places where “there is no such thing as an alternative fact”. Thus, part of their role must be to “export these qualities” and an appreciation for evidence “to the world through our students.”
Richardson also spoke of the gap in educational attainment by region, ethnicity and income, saying there is “overwhelming evidence” that inequality’s impact is felt from a young age. The response of social scientists would be crucial in overcoming this divide, and the populist anti-intellectual undercurrents it sustains; it is social scientists’’ responsibility to investigate and help create evidence-based policies to ameliorate the divisions that plague society.
“If we are to play the role we claim in identifying looming social and political issues, and in seeking solutions to societal problems, we must be the first to recognize their evolution and their impact,” she said.
“Social scientists must become fierce and objective guardians of knowledge. We must not be shy about challenging falsehood coming from any direction”.
The Rt Hon Lord David Willetts, executive chair of the Resolution Foundation and the debut speaker in the annual lecture series, followed Richardson’s speech by analyzing the social, cultural, and economic trends that have contributed to the rise in populism, and interrogated what part universities have and will play in this changing landscape.
Reminding the audience “not to forget about the economics of populism,” Willetts pointed to low increases in pay, negative growth, and widening income inequality as inflaming popular discontent.
He also looked at housing tenure as an important indicator of voting-likelihood, contending that the gap between a high propensity to vote among owners, and a low one for renters, has become even wider, contributing to Richardson’s earlier concerns about detachment politics.
“If you look at a society where instead of pay rising, pay is falling, and instead of owner occupation you get more people, especially young people, renting, that is a backdrop for angry populism and disengagement from the voting and electoral system,” he said.
He questioned whether higher education itself has some responsibility for the growing distrust of experts. He asked whether it was possible that “some of this skepticism about truth, and the unwillingness to accept evidence is itself associated with fashionable intellectual currents whose emanation came from universities themselves.”
Willetts also expressed concern that “current public policy is further driving the deracination of the university.” The prestige and reward system for UK universities favors large-scale research projects in foreign countries over the study of local issues where disciplinary insight can serve valuable civic functions. For Willetts, the challenge is balancing “high quality globally successful research” alongside a civic and local role for universities, ensuring the “incentive system does not penalize that role for the university.”
The campaign’s new chair, professor Shamit Saggar CBE FAcSS, and Ziyad Marar, SAGE’s president of global publishing, introduced the event. The short video below shows both of them discussing the focus of the address:
