Strumpet City is a novel of Dublin in the early twentieth century: between the royal visit of 1907 and the hero’s departure for Flanders in 1914, a servant girl marries her sweetheart; the slum of her employer collapses; three priests contend for hegemony over the allegiance of Dublin’s poor; an ageing rake finds a cause; a labourer falls in love with a prostitute; a raggedy-arsed chorus of beggars are Godoted into comment by the shambles they see about them.
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Derrida and Haynes manuals: why engineers should write properly
Famously, according to Derrida, `il n’y a pas de hors-texte‘, `there is nothing outside the text’. It’s time for engineers to get po-mo.
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A pox on student satisfaction
If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? (T. S. Elliott)
One of the methods used to rate universities, and departments, in the UK is the National Student Survey, based on a questionnaire seeking new graduates’ opinions of their degree courses. It claims to `build a broader picture of the quality of Higher Education‘ by measuring student satisfaction. In the interests of transparency, I should declare that my employer is very proud of having the highest NSS score in the land.
The logic here seems to be that if students are satisfied, the university has done its job properly. Students are invited to think like customers, because they are paying, and because customer satisfaction is the objective of the supplier. Apart from the unexamined assumption that `satisfaction’ is the same thing as good service, for this to work, students need to forget that charging for a service puts a limit on what is to be expected: you can’t get more than you pay for, if you pay in cash, and if you do not invest part of yourself, `satisfaction’ is all you will get from the transaction.
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