Echoing earlier tweets to the same effect, on Tuesday Lord Adonis argued in his evidence to the Lords Economic Affairs Committee that the transformation of polytechnics into ¡°post-92¡± universities as a result of the Further and ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ Act of that year was ¡°a very serious mistake¡±.

Adonis said that ¡°lower-performing former polytechnics¡± should be stripped of their university status to force a renewed focus on ¡°vocational, particularly technical, higher education¡±. Meanwhile, although Theresa May made positive noises about inclusive higher education at the Conservative Party conference, she has also suggested in the past, as ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ noted, that perhaps post-92s should never have been allowed to offer a ¡°full range of courses¡±.

I can¡¯t help but take these attacks on post-92s personally. Like many people I have known born into a low-income family that later broke down and having attended the local ¡°low-performing¡± comprehensive, I didn¡¯t do well at school or college. As a teenager, I was often in trouble both in and out of school, and by the age of 21, following several dropouts and a GCSE retake, I had managed to accumulate only five GCSEs and one A level at grade C.

I had, however, developed a nascent interest in international politics, in part through reflecting on my own experience of structured inequality.

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I was worried that I would be unable to find a university that would take me, but I contacted a lecturer at a post-92 after seeing an advert and was invited to make a clearing application. The university offered me a place, and in autumn of 2003 I enrolled on my degree.

Higher education was a profoundly transformative experience for me. With the intellectual strictures of GCSE and A-level curricula removed, and with the inspiring teaching of a set of passionate and critically engaged lecturers, I flourished. Ultimately, I was awarded a BA in politics, with first-class honours, and went on to achieve an MA in international relations, with distinction, and a fully funded PhD (the latter at a ¡°red-brick¡± university).

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One of the first things I learned as a politics undergraduate was that politics, dixit Max Weber, is also a vocation. So what does Adonis really mean when he laments the loss of ¡°vocational¡± higher education as a result of the creation of post-92s?

While I started my journey in higher education from a position of relative disadvantage, many more students at post-92s are constrained by other, intersecting forms of social exclusion. During and after my PhD, I taught at both a ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ Counties red-brick and at several post-92 universities. Black, Asian and minority ethnicity (BAME) students made up close to (or, in one case, more than) half the student body at the latter institutions, whereas I found most of my students at the former to be middle-class and white.

Older or ¡°mature¡± undergraduates have also been much more common in my experience of teaching at post-92s, as have students from deprived, inner-city local areas in which the universities were based. Many of my students at these universities have been ¨C like me ¨C of the first generation in their family to enter higher education. Adonis¡¯ proposals would disproportionately affect already marginalised and vulnerable social groups.

I now work at De Montfort University in Leicester. Leicester is a ¡°super-diverse¡± city, with no one ethnic group (including white British) constituting a majority. De Montfort broadly reflects this diversity in its student body because, like many post-92s, it is especially attractive to local students who, for a variety of financial and sometimes cultural reasons, prefer to live with their family.

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I was pleased when our vice-chancellor announced at the start of term that, partly in response to attacks like Adonis¡¯, the university would embark on a campaign called ¡°keep universities for the many¡±.

Adonis, and others who seek to take humanities and social sciences courses away from post-92s, are really seeking to deprive working-class, BAME and mature students of the ability to study for the sake of it, for their passionate interest, or for gaining what ?calls ¡°critical consciousness¡±; the skills to critically reflect on the operation of power and politics in everyday life. Indeed, for this very reason, I will now make a point, especially in (the UK¡¯s 30th), of teaching my students about Adonis and his desire to deprive them of their hard-won right to study subjects such as politics.

I will explain that he would prefer that they find alternative ¡°vocations¡±, and I will use his comments to consider in the classroom issues of social class, elitism and race, and to assess current debates around the collapse of ¡°centrism¡±, the rise of ¡°populism¡± and the structures of white supremacy.

Adonis¡¯ thinking is emblematic of a wider way of seeing the world; so all those exasperated at being labelled ¡°¡±?on social media when all they offered were sensible policy solutions should take heed: one white, middle-aged, wealthy man¡¯s ¡°sensible¡± is another person¡¯s lived experience of oppression and inequality. You are merely being asked to wake up to the material and emotional damage that your ways of thinking can inflict.

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Ben Whitham is lecturer in international relations at De Montfort University.