HEPI’s Preparing for Populism is a profoundly unhelpful document that mistakes capitulation for strategy. Its central recommendation, that universities should actively court Reform UK and adjacent “populist” forces, is dressed in the language of democratic pluralism but in reality represents institutional appeasement of a political tendency that is not sceptical of universities in the way one might be sceptical of a public body’s governance, but is ideologically hostile to the social functions universities exist to perform. Research, critical inquiry, expertise, and the transmission of complex knowledge are not incidental irritants reactionary projects like Reform, but rather they are its targets.
The report’s framing, that universities suffer primarily from a legitimacy deficit rather than a funding crisis, a culture war assault, or a political environment deliberately constructed to undermine public institutions, is a political act that conveniently locates the problem inside universities rather than in the forces attacking them. The proposal for a “legitimacy observatory” to track gaps between “university culture and wider public attitudes” is particularly revealing. It treats the manufactured anti-intellectualism of the contemporary right as a neutral data point to be managed rather than a coordinated political project to be named and resisted.
The authors should also be more careful about their own political positioning. The repeated invocation of “common sense” and “national renewal” as the register in which universities must learn to speak are not neutral descriptors of popular sentiment, they are the organising vocabulary of the British populist right, terms whose current political valence is inseparable from the movements that have made them central. That these phrases appear alongside the explicit and singular nomination of Reform UK as the party universities must engage, not the Greens, not independents, not the various left formations that also harbour scepticism of elite institutions, suggests a partisanship that sits awkwardly alongside the paper’s claims to pluralism. One does not have to attribute bad faith to note that a report urging universities to speak the language of “common sense” and “national renewal” while specifically identifying Reform UK as the political interlocutor they have neglected reads, whatever the intention, as a document with a political direction of travel.
The report’s deeper error is to recast this structural conflict as a technical problem of presentation and outreach, to treat as a matter of communication what is in fact a fundamental incompatibility of interests. Distrust of expertise does not represent a misunderstanding these movements would prefer to resolve but is rather a source of political legitimacy for them, and the engagement of higher education institutions into these bad faith debates cannot be expected to neutralise a hostility that is doing productive work for those who hold it. Legitimacy cannot be strengthened through engagement with actors whose influence is partly derived from contesting it. The authors invoke “democratic realism” to justify engagement with these parties that have shown no reciprocal interest in democratic norms when inconvenient. There is a historical record on what institutional accommodation of the far right produces, and it is not pluralism. Public institutions that recalibrate their public legitimacy in response to fascist populism have never earned protection through appeasement. What the report actually proposes, stripped of its framework language, is that universities become legible to and unthreatening for political forces whose power depends on keeping their constituents suspicious of exactly the kind of thinking universities produce. That is not autonomy earned. It is autonomy surrendered in advance, to those who are fundamentally ideologically opposed to the values that higher education institutions should aim to embody.