Category: Culture

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Paul Potts on Rome

Potts was a Canadian poet who was the last person to talk to George Orwell. This is from his memoir Dante Called You Beatrice.

Rome caught my imagination before I was well out of the station on my first visit as a grown up. I don’t remember it as a boy; all I can remember of that visit was my excitement at seeing the Pope (Benedict XV). I was disappointed. He didn’t look a bit like the way I had imagined God would. He was a thin little man, slightly hunchbacked. Count Sforza in his memoirs says he was the most attractive of the the modern Popes. I find it more difficult to describe a place than a person. I am more concerned with people really. But I love Rome. It is the only natural love affair of my life. It loves me, in the sense that things are always easier for me there than elsewhere. It is like some enormous Latin Dublin. It is in no way like Paris, more like Jerusalem, with wine. In fact throughout history it has had much more to do with the Jordan than it has with the Seine. But even in this I was a rejected suitor, to win a girl you have got to have sex appeal, to stay in Rome you have got to have a “sojorno”.
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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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Christopher Logue on books

And, of course, we loved books. Books were the thing. Portable, durable, inexpensive—a marvel of technology, needing no intermediary save spectacles; that can be exceptionally beautiful, and may become valuable. Above all—free spirited, subversive, difficult to police.

Christopher Logue, Prince Charming.

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Why I ride

[Written for another purpose and not used. May as well blog it.]

According to the relevant chronicles, a thousand years ago Irish monks used to have themselves set adrift in a boat with no sail or rudder, that God might choose where they would end up. You might think that only a devotion to some higher calling would induce anyone to throw themselves at the mercy of fortune’s good graces with no reliable means of setting a heading and such eejits are not to be found nowadays.

In 1932, one Robert Edison Fulton Jr., trying to impress an attractive woman in London, said that he intended to ride home to the United States on a motorcycle. The president of the Douglas motorcycle company was present, and offered him a bike for the trip. When Fulton later regained consciousness in Turkey, he examined the evidence and concluded that the bridge he had been crossing was unfinished. Examining his motorcycle, he found that “the only damage I could find was a slightly bent front fork which thereafter tended to turn the machine in circles to the right.”

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What do they know of education, who only education know?

Scot L. Newstok has proposed the term `close learning’ to refer to university education as we presently understand it:

“Close learning” evokes the laborious, time-consuming, and costly but irreplaceable proximity between teacher and student. “Close learning” exposes the stark deficiencies of mass distance learning such as MOOCs, and its haste to reduce dynamism, responsiveness, presence.

Or, in summary, “to what are they being given access?”

The argument about access to higher education, the ground on which much of the mooc stooshie is being fought out, is based on ideas about social mobility, and meritocracy: in short, going to university will let you make more money and escape the harsh grinding poverty (intellectual and financial) of whatever benighted hole spawned you.
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How do you mooc a project?

`Technology’, pace the scuttering gobsheens of hipsterismo eroico, snug and smug in their rolled-up jeans and heavy-rimmed spectacles, is not the collective noun for the latest beeping, whistling gewgaw from some fruit-monikered design house. It is all of the objects that let us be human. Rejecting technology means eating worms and in-season plants dug from the ground with your bare hands, your naked hairy body kept warm only by a layer of filth. R. R. Wilson famously said of Fermilab that it had “nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.” Technology does not make our society worth defending; it makes our society.
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Antonio Gramsci: The ape people

The ape people

A new translation of The Ape People, from L’ordine nuovo, 2 January 1921.

Fascism has been the latest “show” put on by the urban petit bourgeoisie in the theatre of national political life. The end of the miserable Fiume adventure is the final scene of the show. It can take its place as the most important episode in the process of intimate dissolution of this class of the Italian population.

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Convention for Higher Education: some thoughts

There are some short reports from the Convention for Higher Education, with links to videos of talks, here, here, here, and here. These are some thoughts on the convention itself.

The format of talks from experts, combined with input from university staff and students, worked well. A search on youtube will show the range and depth of the topics discussed, with coverage of issues from the political and economic context, to detailed description of the implementation of management practices in UK universities, and accounts of how this implementation has been resisted. The talks are to be published, and will be worth having and studying.

On the other hand, the convention had a limited range of subject areas represented, mostly from some areas of the humanities, with only four people that I met from science (physics, one), engineering (me, one), and mathematics (two), and none at all from business or management, or from areas such as law or medicine (though this might simply reflect the people I met). This had an effect on the language and style of presentation, which was rooted in the discourse used in the social sciences, and which lays itself open to mockery as `political correctness gone mad’, or whatever phrase the Daily Mail uses this week.

It also affected the type of discussion: `academic freedom’ has a very different meaning to a physical scientist or engineer than it does to a philosopher; the pressures on academics in STEM subjects are quite different to those on staff in the arts and humanities, though not necessarily more intense.

None of this is to criticize the people who attended, or those who did not, but it does mean there is a big gap in the campaign. According to HESA statistics, 18% of university academics are in arts, humanities and education, 63% are in STEM, broadly speaking, and 19% are in `Administrative, business and social studies’, which would include some disciplines represented at the convention but also many which were not. It is clear, however, that about two thirds of academic staff had no representation.

If there is to be a meaningful Charter for Higher Education, it has to be written with the involvement of scientists, and with an eye to their working conditions and ways of seeing the world. A good starting point might be to question the idea of `academic freedom‘ and think about a working, meaningful, definition of the term to which academics in any discipline could subscribe.