In defence of Middlesex University

According to the Times Good University Guide, Middlesex University is to become the most expensive with the average student seeking a full honours degree paying £8,602, compared with £7,549 at Oxford and £8,034 at Cambridge. But why should people be surprised that an education at Middlesex University could be as good as an Oxbridge education? Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore, Professor Lorraine Gamman of Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, and Janet Lee, editor of the The Culture Show, are all Middlesex Polytechnic alumni who were given grants to study there:

Suzanne Moore: Everything Middlesex gave me happened because I had a grant

When I first started working in newspapers people kept asking me which college I had been to. They then reeled off a list of Oxbridge colleges and when I said "Middlesex Poly" they couldn't or wouldn't hear it. "Well," said one now very illustrious editor, "that must be why you have such an extraordinary view of the world."

Indeed. What could I have possibly learned there? I often wonder, surrounded now as I am in the media by the products of the best schools and best colleges who seem to know a lot of history and dates and have nicer accents than me and are extremely charming.

I arrived in my early 20s at Middlesex Poly as Goldsmiths wouldn't let me in, as I had no A-levels having dropped out of school at 16. I read non-stop, had been round the world, and had done loads of jobs. I took some Bolivian textiles to the interview and ranted on about Eduardo Galeano and Márquez. They took me anyway.

We worked hard. We read everything in the original whether it was Freud or Lévi-Strauss. I was transfixed by scholars such as Claire Pajaczkowska, who wore Doc Martens but were bringing us poststructuralism straight off the press. And Barry Curtis who made us understand that working-class experience mattered. When I got pregnant in my second year, Lon Fleming, an eminent anthropologist, said: "Bring the baby in. What do you think would happen in other cultures?" The idea that I would stop never entered her mind so I didn't. I went on to do a PhD (Theories of Pleasure, natch) but I never finished it as the money ran out. They gave me an honorary doctorate a few years back but I still would like to finish my real one some day.

The point is, everything Middlesex Poly gave me – the friends I still have, a sense of culture as politics, the freedom to think – happened because I had a grant. Because the barriers for my generation were let down. We knew we were lucky. We are the success stories.

I was taught by fine minds to think for myself. To question, and yes, to question Oxbridge notions of excellence. I know people look down their noses at my education because it does not belong to the establishment. Well, it is that establishment with its moral and intellectual superiority (?) that now governs this fine mess and it would not educate the likes of me. I never benefited from the contacts that Oxbridge gives you. I just relied on my own capacity for chaos. You see, Middlesex Polyversity, as I like to call it, taught me critical thinking.

For free.

That is what is being shut down.

Professor Lorraine Gamman: Without Middlesex I'd be trapped the mindset I grew up in

In 1981, aged 24, having worked for seven years as a secretary and having just negotiated redundancies with Robert Maxwell, who took over Macdonald and Jane's where I worked and illegally tried to rescind the pension scheme and who did rename, without irony, our building "Maxwell House", I finally snapped. I still had a job but found myself in a field of daffodils on the Sassoon Estate at Middlesex Trent Park where I made the best decision of my life, to get myself an education. Despite not having A-levels, and despite the burden of a mortgage, and a partner/family that didn't approve of my aspirations, I still managed to convince Middlesex I was worth it and to win a place. Engaging with full time study, struggling to learn – on the DIp.HE and cultural studies programmes – brought with it some of the best teachers in the art and design world, and mentors and friends that I am still lucky to have and proud to know. Getting a first class honours for my BA was important, but more so was the language it gave me to translate my own experiences and those of some of the women I grew up with – including Shirley Pitts, Queen of Thieves, whose oral history was part of my PhD and subsequently a Penguin book. Educating Lorraine at Middlesex enabled me to go on to teach design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where in 1999 I founded the Design Against Crime Research Centre.

What can I say - was it worth the money? Yes, it was, but then the state paid for my BA, MA and PhD and also gave me a small grant to live on. Without it I would never have got an education, or been able to make the choice to change, or experience the joy of waking up each day believing it's possible to redesign the world to be a better place. I may have moved away from the five council estates I grew up on but as Lynsey Hanley rightly says, "the estate is in your head" and without Middlesex I wouldn't have been able to change that configuration, or recognise when I walk around Hackney all the other Lorraines who are unlikely to be afforded the same chances as me.

Janet Lee: My course was more interesting than what LSE offered

I turned up for my interview at Middlesex Poly with a class war attitude, a set of photographs I had taken of communist Russia, and a crap A-level gained doing evening classes in a year where the teacher, astounded at my lack of secondary education, told me to give up. I sat an entrance exam and they said I seemed to know a lot about contemporary culture and took me on. They had high expectations and I loved every minute of it. No one else had ever expected anything. When I told my father I was going to college, he said: "Why?" Without the grant I could never have considered it – I had worked since I was 13 years old and couldn't have stopped. When I got there I read twice as many books as required, attended as many talk sessions at the ICA as I could afford and they told me from the start if you carry on like this you'll get a first – so I did. A friend I had made at the evening classes went to the LSE at the same time. She moaned: "Your course is so much more interesting than mine, you get so much more time with the tutors, your education is better than mine . . ." And I know it was.