Tag: campaign for the public university

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War on the humanities, again

The THE reports that leading historian Professor Peter Mandler has delivered a paper on the “crisis in the humanities”, concluding that there isn’t one. In particular, he says:

It is hard to take too seriously talk of a crisis in Britain when even by the narrowest definition of the humanities the absolute number of humanities students has increased fivefold since 1967, and by the broader definition almost 10-fold.

In the US, over a period of much slower expansion, their numbers have still doubled…Talk of a crisis triggered by a decline in a percentage point or two does seem like an over-reaction that is likely to contribute to rather than ameliorate the alleged problem.

As well as looking at student numbers, we can look at the UK data for academic staff numbers, as a proxy for resource allocation.

hesa-1

The figure shows the percentage of academic staff in STE (Science, Technology, and Engineering), Humanities (shown dashed), and Medicine from 1994 to 2008, using the freely available HESA data sets. The break in the curves corresponds to a change in the reporting of data. The details of how staff numbers were assigned to the three categories are given in a separate PDF.

The first part of the plot shows a drop in the percentage of STE staff, which might correspond to the closure of Chemistry departments over that time (the data for these years are not broken down to subject level), while Medicine rises, and Humanities are fairly steady.

After the change in reporting methodology in 2003, Medicine has about the same proportion of staff as before the change, while Humanities increases markedly and STE reduces. Clearly, this is an artifact of the breakdown of data and does not indicate real changes in the proportion of academic staff in STE or Humanities. The trends from 2003 onwards are validly indicated, however, and show STE and Humanities holding more or less steady.

In summary, the data from 1994 onwards show a sharp drop in STE, a rise in Medicine, and a small drop in Humanities.

Crisis in the humanities? What crisis?

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Paying for education

As seems likely, we in the UK are about to see the price of education hiked by another few grand a year. It turns out that the problem of what to pay for education was solved by William Blake a couple of centuries ago:

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the wither’d field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain

or, if you prefer, fame costs:

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Theodor Adorno and Michael Gove

So there I was, minding my own business, when I discovered that the Frankfurt School was responsible for giving gay men and women in Ireland the right to marry.

“Well now,” says I, “what else might they be responsible for, these gnomes of Frankfurt.” It turns out they have been the source of the “ideas” for education policy in the United Kingdom for decades. From Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Cultural education spread with bourgeouis property. It forced paranoia into the dark corners of society and the soul. But since the real emancipation of mankind did not take place with the enlightenment of the mind, education itself became diseased. The greater the distance between the educated consciousness and social reality, the more it was itself exposed to the process of reification. Culture became wholly a commodity disseminated as information without permeating the individuals who acquired it. Thought became restricted to the acquisition of isolated facts. Conceptual relationships were rejected as uncomfortable and useless effort. The aspect of development in thought, all that is genetic and intensive in it, is forgotten and leveled down to the immediately given, to the extensive. Today the order of life allows no time for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labour markets and to heighten the commodity value of the personality. And so that self-examination of the mind which works against paranoia is defeated. Finally, under the conditions of modern capitalism, half-education has become objective spirit. In the totalitarian phase of domination, it calls upon the provincial charlatans of politics, and with them the system of delusion as the ultima ratio: forcing it upon the majority of the ruled, who are already deadened by the culture industry. The contradictions of rule can be seen through by the healthy consciousness so easily today that it takes a diseased mind to keep them alive. Only those who suffer from a delusion of persecution accept the persecution to which domination must necessarily lead, inasmuch as they are allowed to persecute others.

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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.
Continue reading “A pox on student satisfaction”

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How to write a high impact paper

Academics, in the UK at least, are being encouraged to write papers with `impact’. There is some discussion about what exactly `impact’ means, but these seem to be two papers which can reasonably claim to have had some:

  1. a paper in one of the world’s leading journals, cited 1730 times in fifteen years (according to Google Scholar), which described a previously unknown phenomenon, and led to a massive change in public behaviour.
  2. a paper cited 543 times in three years, which led to changes in government policy world-wide, with far-reaching societal effects.

Paper 1 is Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent Lancet work which found that the MMR vaccine can cause autism. As a result, vaccination rates fell as low as 80% in the UK, with predictable results.

Paper 2 is Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper claiming that government debt above 90% of GDP slows economic growth. The authors made an error in Excel (using it was their first mistake) which led to them leaving out data which contradicted their conclusion. Governments have used this paper to justify their cutting of public services, on which many people depend, with predictable results.

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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.
Continue reading “What do they know of education, who only education know?”

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Convention for Higher Education: IV

The final session began with reports back from the workshop session, followed by talks from John Holmwood, Tom Hickey and Martin McQuillan.

John Holmwood talked about the trajectory of higher education from the Robbins (`social democratic’) to the Browne (`neo-liberal’) report, describing the changes in policy. He rejected the claim that there is a need for cuts in education spending, mentioning the Aubyn report showing that UK higher education is the best value for money in the world, and the Wolf [?] report on aspiration to university.

Tom Hickey discussed the UCU response to the current situation and asked what connection there is between trade-unionism and the vision of a university. Like John Holmwood, he noted that the public strongly supports access to education. On the subject of organization, he pointed out that autonomy is dangerous in a system of privatized universities, and that UCU is the only organization distributed throughout the sector. He proposed that UCU put forward a vision for universities, defending self-managed scholarly activity.

Martin McQuillan took his topic from Tamson Pietsch’s idea of the enclosure of the epistemological commons. He gave an account of the forms of management of English universities such as companies limited by guarantee (which can be taken over). Other models are available, such as the University of California system, or private universities backed by private equity, as in continental Europe. He gave two examples of dangers for university education: `open access’ which is put forward as giving the public access to taxpayer-funded research, but will mainly benefit those (business) who previously paid for data; and MOOCs, which as well as being criticized for their pedagogy, but which are also run by private bodies which want to monetize lectures. The ideological drive is to justify private profit as a public good.

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Convention for Higher Education: III

The second day began with talks from Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor at Salford University, and Terry Brotherstone who had served on the von Prondzynski review of university governance in Scotland.

Using experience from Africa, Martin Hall talked about world cities and the role of universities in understanding the contemporary urban condition. Drawing an analogy with the Manchester cotton trade, he described a process of importing raw data from Africa (East Africa currently generates a disproportionate number of data, especially in medicine) which are then refined and returned as books which cost (literally) the salary of a Kenyan academic. Having come from South Africa four years ago, he described a University of Cape Town study on black students entering university and the disruptive effect it had on their relationship to their home village, and compared it to the similar disruption experienced by `widening participation’ students who are the first in their families to go to university.

Terry Brotherstone described the von Prondzynski review of governance which arose from a union campaign on policy and not simply in defence of terms and conditions. The report, he said, addressed a double democratic deficit, of democracy within universities and of public engagement with universities, so that `autonomy’ was interpreted as management doing what they like. He noted that the report needs a serious critique from the left.

In a workshop session later that day, Harriet Bradley from Bristol and UWE opened a discussion on (mis)management in universities, beginning by saying that it is possible to manage without being managerialist. The main weapon used in imposing this particular management style on universities was devolved budgets where academics were made to feel that another department was getting `our’ money. The introduction of private sector practices in public universities had led to a layer of aggressive middle management, and to universities being run by non-academics (businessmen as dispensers of wisdom, in Priya Gopal’s talk) or by academics who depend on non-academics, such as directors of finance.

The discussion here was especially good with managerialism being explained as a version of the Zimbardo experiment. One piece of advice put forward was that academics should learn to read accounts. With regard to governance, the question came up of who owns our universities, to whom management is accountable (in theory to parliament, meaning in practice, to nobody) and of whether we should look for a maximum wage for heads of universities. A telling statement was that it is common to hear the phrase `I can’t tell who made that decision.’

The question of student engagement was raised, where students are often seen as a threat, due to evaluations and the National Student Survey for example, and the danger of student participation coming close to the student satisfaction agenda. One question which arose was where students are equal and where not (i.e. where should students have, or have not, an equal say with staff?).

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Convention for Higher Education: II

This is the second part of a summary of talks at the Convention for Higher Education, following part I.

The second plenary session was opened by Gill Scott who spoke on twenty five years of the BA in Humanities at Brighton, a successful interdisciplinary (carefully distinguished from multidisciplinary) programme bringing students into critical engagement with the disciplines. The video on the programme’s site gives a better flavour than my account.

The panel for the rest of the session was Thomas Docherty from Warwick, Priya Gopal from Cambridge, and Will Hutton, journalist and now principal of Hertford College Oxford.

Thomas Docherty spoke on the relation of forces (circumstance and nature) in the university, saying that on current trends the university will not even be a marketplace, with all the hubbub and argument that would imply. Finally, he quoted Eisenhower on the military-industrial complex taking over the university.

Priya Gopal spoke on the neoliberal university, making the point that businessmen have replaced intellectuals as the providers of universal wisdom. (This is the stand-out talk of the convention for the combination of style and content.)

After declaring his interest as chair of the Independent Commission on Fees, Will Hutton spoke provocatively on university reforms, claiming that fees have been good for the autonomy of universities. He described George Osborne’s introduction to the government’s new aerospace policy document as something Tony Benn could have written forty years ago. He was heard respectfully.