Mere months after the controversial merg- er – or takeover – of the Institute of Educa- tion by UCL, the former is already suffering the indignity of being used as a conference- centre-cum-fiefdom for management. The latest recipient of a ceremonial gladhanding was Chinese president Xi Jinping – in town for his state visit – who, in a gig reminiscent of a fever dream, shared a platform on Bed- ford Way with college’s favourite rent-a-royal, Prince Andrew, and our very own ‘paramount leader’, Michael Arthur.
The appearance raises more questions than it offers answers for London’s Global University. The visit was essentially a con- trived celebration of the work of the IOE’s Confucius Institute – now annexed and branded, of course, under UCL’s year zero approach to their new outbuilding. The lit- tle-known centre provides advice and sup- port to enable secondary schools to teach Chinese, and was taken over from the no- toriously aggressive Specialist Schools and Academies Trust in 2012.
Keen to play the statesman and perhaps eyeing a big-money secondment to one of Xi’s state-run universities, Arthur waxed lyr- ical: “The merger with the Institute of Edu- cation has meant that UCL now houses the UCL IOE Confucius Institute, which is en- tirely in keeping with our global ethos and with the pressing need to support children in Britain’s schools in language learning.”
Indeed, a need so pressing that UCL’s entry requirements lock out those without a GCSE in a modern foreign language – most of them state-schoolers. For those who do make it in having memorised their French oral, UCL’s foreign languages division has been decimated, merged and purged in re- cent years (see CG 24), and despite his in- ternationalist rhetoric, the Provost has done little to improve the lot of the understaffed and overstretched department.
Arthur’s keen enthusiasm to forge a healthy and lucrative working relation- ship with the Chinese government despite widespread criticism of their human rights record (like most of us, he obviously never read that Ai Weiwei interview in a 2014 is- sue of Pi Magazine) will come as no surprise to seasoned UCL axe-grinders. College’s keenness to cosy up to shady and potentially corrupt regimes across the world is positively Blairite (see CG 40): as well as a partnership with Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, an institution named after the country’s al- legedly abusive and corrupt dictator, UCL’s proudly pointless Qatar branch has paid its female staff less than men and reportedly ig- nored the concerns of LGBT+ staff.
Arthur himself told a student Q&A in October 2013 that the human rights record in these places is “so bad we would be deeply worried about associating ourselves with such regimes”, but only after a nauseating aside in which he posited the dewy-eyed claim that UCL’s trusty westerners would civilise the misogyny, homophobia and governmental corruption out of the nasty foreigners. So what gives? A telling answer from the same event appears to confirm suspicions that for UCL, the bottom line is, well, erm, the bottom line.
“I think before we start making decisions about ‘this is bad, this is good’ we need to think about the totality. And China would be another example. It’s pretty simple, I don’t think we can afford to do anything else other than have a working relationship with a country as important as China,” said the Provost, having cited Guantanamo Bay as a get-out-of-jail-free card. In the febrile, marketised world of British higher educa- tion, money talks – and probably Manda- rin at that.