"It’s not a good time to be in the universities."

http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/

4 June, 2012 • Issue 19.4 • Interviews • Literature • Politics & Society

An Interview with Terry Eagleton

ALEXANDER BARKER AND ALEX NIVEN

"As a tutor in Oxford over the years, I saw all that—superficially at least—modulate. You know, Etonians with bones through their noses, and Wykehamists carefully dropping their vowels, distressing their jeans and their accents. But at least in those years, the neo-managerial ethos hadn’t exerted its clammy grip, so much, over universities. [Neo-managerialism] is absolutely hideous. I mean, it has effectively brought to an end hundreds of years—at least a two hundred-year-old tradition—of the university as a centre of critique, in a society where critique otherwise is pretty hard to come by. That is a momentous and historic development, and I’m really rather glad, personally speaking, that it coincides with my exit. Everywhere I go, from Peru to Australia, people are very unhappy in what perhaps were once, you know, “the best days of one’s life”."