British academia and student ‘sex work’ – a story of an embarrassing secret

Review of Ron Roberts, Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market, Zero Books, Portland, 2018

Many or most people working in academia in the UK realise that the institution has gone very badly wrong. Universities have, over decades, increasingly been transformed into corporations motivated by the pursuit of profit rather than academic inquiry. Academic staff have lost autonomy to aggressive university leadership teams obsessed with control freakery, image management and league tables. Obtainment of research funding by academic staff is prized above actually producing research, while an increasingly conformist, risk-averse, frankly anti-intellectual ethos results in shorter, blander, shallower and more token published academic books. Students are treated as customers or consumers to be satisfied rather than educated, but fobbed off with increasingly dumbed-down courses as universities seek to extract maximum profit from them while lowering the standards to ensure as many of them as possible achieve good grades and are ‘satisfied’. Bad as all this institutional and ethical decline is, there is a still darker side, which Ron Roberts explores in this highly insightful book.

Dr Roberts is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He was for many years a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University, London, and previously held academic posts at the University of Westminster, King’s College Medical School, University College London, St Bartholomew’s Medical School, Queen Mary College and the Tavistock Institute. So he has been able to witness and experience the effects of British academia’s decline at first hand. The first chapter of the book consists of an examination of what Roberts calls the ‘death of the university’, in which he analyses the evolution highlighted above. As he points out, ‘viable research is that which attracts the attentions of academic entrepreneurs and corporate sponsors… The once prevailing view that study and learning was of intrinsic value has been replaced by one in which its value is instrumentalized and costed’ (pp. 13-14). The reader seeking to understand the corporatisation and marketisation of higher education will benefit from Roberts’s summary, in which he cites other scholars who have explored the phenomenon at more length. This chapter serves as a useful bibliographical essay on the subject.

However, the book’s real scoop, and its focus, concerns the subject of students who engage in prostitution and related ‘sex work’ to pay for their higher education. As Roberts highlights, the corporatisation of higher education involves also a rise in ‘sex work’ among students, who do not enjoy the free tuition and maintenance grants they once did in Britain, but are faced with exorbitant costs of study and the prospect of lifelong debt. More sinister still is Roberts’s account of his attempt to research this phenomenon: he found the Kingston University (KU) management obstructed and sabotaged his research out of fear of the bad publicity that would result from the revelation of ‘sex work’ among its students. He describes how the KU ethics committee banned its staff from including KU students in any survey on student sex work, while the KU press office refused to pass on invitations to Roberts from media outlets eager to interview him about this topic, after a Sunday Times article cited him on the subject. The university management was in a bind: it was dependent upon its students engaging in sex work to pay its fees, but aware of the damage to its reputation that would result from this becoming known. Roberts found his pursuit of this research caused him to fall into permanent disfavour with KU management, derailing his academic career.

Roberts is a psychologist, and he brings his expertise and research to bear also on the phenomenon of rising ‘mental health’ issues among students. As he notes, ‘The growth in mental health problems in young people in recent years is better understood, not as an index of personal failure but as a consequence of the brutal economic circumstances which have seen cuts in investment, training and job opportunities for young people, low wages, exorbitant student loans, and tuition fees, cuts to mental health and welfare services, as well as a savage primary and secondary school system where endemic testing has become the norm’ (p. 53). In other words, rising mental health problems are caused by the reality of increasingly harsh economic conditions facing young people, rather than intrinsic psychological issues. Yet there are powerful vested interests in medicalising distress that has economic roots, for this posits the solution as lying not in alleviating the economic conditions for young people, but in providing them with drugs supplied by Big Pharma. Thus, while the university bosses championed the rising tuition fees that drive student mental distress, and the higher education sector is unwilling to address the economic causes of mental health problems, universities provide students with mental health services but with few actual solutions.

There is a contradiction in the conclusions of this excellent book. Roberts correctly attributes rising incidence of student ‘sex work’ to neoliberalism and the corporatisation of higher education, yet attributes the sector’s embarrassment over the subject to what he calls a ‘resurrected moral Victoriana which comes with a return to the naked values of 19th century capitalism’ (p. 40), and students’ own objections to other students engaging in ‘sex work’: ‘the financial restructuring of higher education may be bringing in its wake a more conservative set of political attitudes, in that the more students adopt the identity of an educational consumer the more they absorb and adopt an attitude set, situated within a conservative moral universe’ (p. 31). In this context, he suggests students’ engagement in sex work should be seen as ‘as “an act of resistance to the experience of relative poverty” (McLeod, 1982, p.26) and a marker of rational decision making’ (p. 34). Yet it is contradictory to view students’ ‘sex work’ both as a product of neoliberalism and as emancipatory act of personal affirmation. Individual ‘sex workers’ might like or appreciate what they do, as individual women in other societies might personally be pleased to enter into a polygamous marriage or have their female children genitally mutilated or profit from the abuse or exploitation of other women, but this is not necessarily an indication of whether the phenomenon is positive or not. Ultimately, any normalisation of ‘sex work’ will result in increasing numbers of women being driven to engage in something that for many or most of them is disgusting and abusive, while the commodification of intimate human relations, hence alienation, is increased.

UK university managements’ embarrassment over student ‘sex work’ does not reflect their own conservatism; many of their members themselves sexually exploit vulnerable women. Indeed, at one university at which Roberts worked, a senior university manager was caught having sex with his much younger Faculty Personal Assistant on university premises, with the result that she was forced to resign her post while he remained in his. The embarrassment arises because university managements are aware that public opinion disapproves of the ‘work’ that their students are forced to engage in to survive; in other words, ordinary people are more ‘socially conservative’ than the senior management class. University managements are ready to jump on every ‘progressive’ bandwagon – green politics, Pride, trans rights, Black Lives Matter etc. – and will no doubt publicly embrace ‘sex work’ if and when it is ever socially normalised. Likewise, students disapprove of ‘sex work’ not because they have absorbed the higher education sector’s ‘conservative’ worldview but because they rightly disapprove of the sexual exploitation and abuse of other students. Neoliberalism represents not a return to nineteenth-century capitalism but a new phenomenon in which traditional or conservative values are steadily erased as the market conquers and violates ever more areas of human existence. While under a traditional free-market model, a bank that fails is allowed to go under, under neoliberalism it is bailed out by the state and the taxpayer that are subordinated to financial interests. While William Ewart Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal, famously tried to help prostitutes escape their situation, the neoliberal impulse is to normalise ‘sex work’ in the cause of producing maximum profit.

This is a minor quibble. Roberts has written a highly intelligent, thought-provoking book based on enormous expertise and extensive research that should be read by everyone concerned by the increasing degradation of the academic sector.