Vitae have recently released a report "What Do Researchers Do? First Destinations of Doctoral Graduates by Subject" (2003-2007). This is a follow-up to their earlier groundbreaking study "What Do PhDs Do?" The new report is typically concise and neatly presented, so postgraduates should find it easy to find information relevant to their own disciplines. However, here are a few of the headlines that most interested me in relation to the Arts and Humanities:

• Research occupations account for 18% of post-PhD employment for Arts and Humanities graduates, with 14% researching within the Higher Education sector. This is significantly lower than the averages for all PhD graduates, which were 35% and 23% respectively. In other words, graduates from Arts and Humanities disciplines are half as likely to continue in research posts than those from other disciplines. This should not be surprising given the emphasis on post-doctoral research in the sciences and the prioritisation of public funding to STEM subjects or investment in technological research by the private sector.
• Whilst half of all doctoral students continued into employment in the education sector, for Arts and Humanities doctorates, education comprised the career destination for two-thirds of graduates. Again, this is not surprising, given that generally the only careers which will allow continued pursuit of Arts and Humanities subjects in their purest sense will be teaching-related.
• Arts and Humanities doctorates were slightly less likely to find employment or go into combined employment and training than other doctorates. 76% of Arts and Humanities doctorates were employed or training post-PhD, as opposed to 81% of all other respondents. This is good news, in that it suggests that the model of the employable and "useful" sciences graduate, and the unemployable because "useless" arts graduate, is a fallacy, at least at doctoral level.
• At 3.4% in 2007, the unemployment rate for doctoral graduates was consistently lower than for those with just one first degree (6.8%). In my essay on The Value of an English PhD, which worked with data from the earlier study on "What Do PhDs Do?," I noted that the unemployment statistics for English PhDs versus English graduates were marginal, 6% versus 8.2%. The good news for PhD students across the Arts and Humanities is that the value of having that further qualification seems to be increasing, something that would seem logical given that recruiters are increasingly looking for second degrees to distinguish ever-larger cohorts of candidates with first degrees.

On the whole, then, for Arts and Humanities doctorates the report makes pretty positive reading. There is, however, a skeleton in the closet. This report surveyed doctoral graduates from 2003-2007, largely before the credit crunch and certainly before the squeeze on public sector spending that will come in this new parliament.

Investment in science research from the private sector will no doubt have been affected as corporations trim their budgets. However, with the recession being less intense than expected and business being systemically aware of the value of entrepreneurship and innovation, it is likely that the subsequent hit on science doctoral graduates will be restrained. By contrast, since Arts and Humanities doctorates rely so heavily on the education sector, especially Higher Education, to provide their employment prospects, that there seems little doubt that they will be hit by the squeeze on Higher Education funding, which will seek to protect STEM subjects at the expense of those deemed as being of less relevance or "impact." This is especially true of my own subject, English, for which an astonishing 77% of doctoral graduates were subsequently employed in education.

That self-fullfilling cycle, where Arts and Humanities post-graduates are needed to teach future generations of Arts and Humanities under-graduates, is set to slow down dramatically over the coming years, with drastic consequences for the three-quarters of doctorates who rely on the sector for their future jobs.

Labels: careers, credit crunch, spending cuts, University Life, What Do Researchers Do First Destinations of Doctoral Graduates

In the supermarket yesterday, a metaphor for what is wrong with the globalised food industry. I am walking around browsing the veg shelves, when I spot some bundles of asparagus. It is May, coming towards the end of the short growing season, and British asparagus is the best in the world. Without a second thought, I put it in my trolley. It is only when I get home that I discover that the asparagus is actually from Peru. It had never crossed my mind to check the country of origin as I usually do; the Peruvian asparagus industry is not exactly world-famous, after all. I had automatically assumed that the product would have come from somewhere in these native shores.

After reluctantly cooking the stuff - which was nowhere near as sweet as British asparagus, especially having been shipped half way across the world - I was glad, though, to acknowledge that I would never usually face this problem. Normally, I rely on the lovely people from Riverford at Home Farm to deliver an organic veg box every week, confident that the contents will have been grown in the UK where possible, or shipped (not air freighted) from as close to home where not. We had previously had two weeks of delicious, home grown, organic asparagus with no need for me to worry about labels of origin. It was only because I had had to cancel the box this week, due to unforeseen circumstances, that I ended up in the supermarket shopping for my own veg, rather than letting someone else do the work of bringing produce grown close to home, to my home.

Labels: Environment, Riverford

So there I was, about to begin invigilating my first exam of the current season when the strangest thing happened. The students had filed into their room, and were sat itchily at their desks. I had read out the starting script, and asked if everything was OK. With two minutes to go to the due start time, I stood at the front, looking up at the large analogue clock on the wall. These couple of minutes must go achingly slowly for the students, and it always feels awkward for me too: they are in the room, so why not let them begin?

The clock gradually ticked round. With a minute to go, I announced that the exam would start at 9:30 by the room clock, and finish at 11:30. The seconds passed by. Thirty. Forty. Then, at ten seconds to the start time of this exam - indeed, the whole whole exam season - the minute hand stuttered forwards, then back, then forwards, and then stopped entirely. Of course the faces, whose eyes were glued to that clock face, burst into laughter. At best, was this a perfectly ill-timed metaphor? At worst, was this an ill omen? Either way, it offered a mere stay of execution. The laughter died, I checked my watch, and the exam began.

Labels: exams

This past week has to be the strangest of the academic year. My formal teaching essentially finished last weekend, with students departing my room with a look of delayed recognition in their eyes: this really is it, no more teaching and learning, just solipsistic revision and the terror of exams. For me, however, the week represents something of a breather, or more accurately the calm before the storm. Sure the emails ping in, usually trying to clarify the examination rubric, as if in the desperate hope of finding some loophole that will make the exam easier. For the most part, though, my work here is done. No more teaching to prepare. No marking backlog to clear.

However, come next week, invigilation begins, and then the exam scripts will fly in with a ridiculously short turnaround time. I will have seven half-days (because of my other work commitments and inviligation) to mark 75 exam scripts - and that's a comparatively light workload compared to some.

This week just past, then, is a bit like the phoney war. One senses imminent battles with time ahead, but for the moment things are strangely quiet. I try and get things done - namely cleaning the house - because I know that I will have no time from next week onwards. But at a time when students are working harder than ever, I feel generally apathetic. I should be using this time to sneak in a bit of research, maybe read a couple of the books I have to review. But I simply can't be bothered, because I know that what happens next is going to see me back into the horror of a sixty hour week. The only thing keeping me bright at the moment is June 11th: all teaching done, and a World Cup to look forward to.

Labels: exams, University Life

I cannot believe that I have just witnessed David Cameron standing on the steps of Number 10 as the new Prime Minister. I almost came of voting age at the 1997 election, and can remember the relief and celebration that met the arrival of New Labour on the scene, Tony Blair pressing hands through a sea of flags. The present moment seems so very different, no defining instant of change but an elongated process of negotiation, manipulation and indecisiveness, the latter on the part both of the electorate and the elected. Cameron made a powerful, persuasive and humble speech, to the background of boos and jeers. Those noisemakers probably suspect that his moderate words merely gloss over the fundamental values of the party he leads, a dormant ideological beast that is still feared by the public: a party of whom 43% were privately educated, of free-market millionaires, of those who believe that society is fundamentally broken, but that those who are the poorest are the least worth fixing with the aid of the state.

It is of course impossible to predict accurately what will happen next; we don't even know the precise terms of the Lib Dem coalition, or who will comprise Cameron's cabinet. But in a perverse kind of way, I fear that Cameron's government will actually prove to be rather more centrist in this first term that it might instinctively otherwise be. Remember that this is the party that wants to cut inheritance tax for millionaires and that opposes tax rises in order to reduce the squeeze on public services; this is a party that insists that the country is broken; this is the party that is resistant to the forces of globalisation to which they are nevertheless in thrall when it comes with money attached; this is the party that is least likely to impose stronger regulations on the banks.

The ironic thing is that we might well expect all these measures to be qualified or even cancelled under the alliance with the Lib Dems. Surely, one condition of the Lib Dem coalition will be that the tax break for millionaires will not appear in the first budget. Certainly, the vision of the Conservatives (who are, to be fair, certainly less right wing than before the Cameron era), will seem less provocative to the two-thirds of left wing voters who did not endorse the Tories last Thursday, now that they have the Lib Dems in tow.

As I posted previously, I do not see that Nick Clegg had any alternative other than supporting the Conservatives in forming a working government. But, strangely, I fear that Cameron as Prime Minister of a minority Tory party has a better chance of a second term (however soon the next election comes) than Cameron as Prime Minister of a fully-fledged, right-wing, Tory powerhouse. As the muted response to Cameron's place outside Number 10 implies, and as the election percentages clearly indicate, Britain is a progressive place that believes in a substantial and supportive public sector.

Without the Lib Dems, the old Tory party's genetic instincts may well have destined them to erode the latter in a way that might make them unelectable for another decade, as the Thatcherite repressed return in the full belief of their ideological right to govern, privatise and cut. With the Lib Dems tugging them towards the centre, though, the Conservatives may well have become not only feasible, but reasonable.

Labels: Conservatives, David Cameron, general election, Liberal Democrats, Politics

I have just heard Nick Clegg's statement about the election, in which he has repeated his statement that the party with the largest share of the votes, which also has the largest number of seats, has the mandate to govern. Logically, this must be the Conservatives, something Clegg actually openly confirmed by inviting Cameron to form the next government. In the turmoil of this election, and on the spur of the moment, here are a few thoughts about why he has made this manoeuvre:

• Clegg is playing the long game here. To form a coalition with Gordon Brown might be tempting in the short term, but would ultimately be politically disastrous, tainting his party with an allegiance with the old politics that he clearly distinguished the Lib Dems from in the Leaders' Debates.
• By throwing down the gauntlet to Cameron, Clegg may be anticipating that the Tories would be unable to form a working minority government, leading to the possibility of a second election in the not-too-distant future, at which the Lib Dems could hardly be expected to do worse than they have done today.
• Alternatively, if Cameron can in the immediate term get a government moving, he might need to call on Lib Dem support on some issues, against which the Lib Dems can extract the price of electoral reform. One must expect that the Conservatives will be more likely to be amenable to electoral reform now, given that they have gained the same share of the vote as Labour gained in 1997, yet not won the same overwhelming majority. 
• By aligning with the Conservatives at this point - even though it is impossible to see the Lib Dems entering into a formal coalition with them over the coming weeks - the Lib Dems are in an almost win-win situation. Either the Conservatives cannot make a minority government work, making for a swift second election, in which the Lib Dems can hardly be expected to go backwards; or the Conservatives will successfully push through some radical reforms, pulling the plug from public services, but without the large popular mandate required to do so, opening a greater space for the Lib Dems to occupy as the party of genuine change in the long term (especially if Cameron sticks to his plans to cut inheritance tax for wealthy millionaires). 

Labels: general election, Liberal Democrats, Politics

Ballet or dance are not forms with which I am particularly familiar. In fact, my closest affiliation with ballet is the dim memory of dingy nights in the basement nightclub of my former student's union, which bears the ironic name of the Margot Fonteyn Ballroom. So I approached Wayne McGregor's contemporary dance production, Entity, not knowing what to expect, excited but uncertain.

Now, as I sit down to write my thoughts about the performance, I realise just how impoverished my vocabulary of dance is, how hard it is to accomodate it into structures of interpretation that are familiar to me as a literary critic. Having spent the day of the show teaching dramatic theory, throwing around terms like tragedy and metadrama, I feel acutely ill-equipped to say anything appropriate or perceptive about McGregor's production.

Ordinarily, if struggling to review something, I would start with the simple things, recounting the plot, or trying to make my claim for what it is all "really" about. Yet to talk of the plot of such a piece is as useless as trying to say what a Chopin Nocturne, or a Jackson Pollock painting is "about." There is no sense of narrative relationship between the performance and the thing it seeks to represent. It is I suppose (and I fall back on my inappropriate literary vocabulary here) postmodernist, non-referential, purely about the thing itself - the thing in this case being the human body, and its orbit of possible motions.

The sheer movement, litheness, physical range of the nine dancers (five female, four male) is incredible. It is like watching a sustained version of Usain Bolt's power, or a super slow-motion free dive. Their Olympian bodies twist and elongate in ways that should not seem possible, whilst the dynamic lighting pulls out the organic architecture of the pose: the bones of a curved spine, the ripple of muscles on the thigh.

Against a thumping bass soundtrack composed by Jon Hopkins (collaborator with Massive Attack and Coldplay) and Toby Talbot (of the Divine Comedy), the nine dancers interact in strange chain reactions. Someone's leg bumps into another's arm, sending first the arm, then the entire other dancer, spinning in a new dynamic; two dancers at the centre stage create an arch, under which a dancer from the wings suddenly slides, sending all three tumbling into a mass on the floor, which then rises and twists like some emergent statue.

In the opening piece, two male dancers twine together in what seems to be homosexually provocative, until a female slides in and suddenly supplants one of the men, and continues the routine, albeit taking it in a new direction. The five female performers are somewhat androgynous, then, interchanging freely with the male dancers.What we get is a strange deindividuation. The dancers become mere focused forces that set off other other movements in the objects that we might formerly have known as bodies, but that here become abstract forms, shapes, expressions of geometry that just happen to be shaded in pastel skin tones. It is impossible to follow a single dancer and to attempt to interpret their actions as a metaphor for something else. Instead, it is all about the interaction of these dancing parts, that coalesce and interact to form a continually mutating, moving, shifting whole.

The closest analogy I can come to for the overall effect is that it is like staring into a fire and, trying but failing to follow the path of a single flame, one instead projects imaginative patterns onto the smoke that emerges. And just as the fire creates a hypnotic effect that appeals to some primitive instinct deep in the bones of man, Entity too appeals to a bodily instinctive rather than cognitively analytical spectator. At which point, it is impossible to avoid mentioning the other instinctive current that buzzes through the show: the sexual one. For whilst it is by no means crudely erotic, the intimacy of the dancers who connect with others in forceful ways is undoubtedly powerful. Indeed, the only weak point of the production is when the video screen - employed thankfully sparingly throughout - momentarily displays two naked bodies sliding over one another. It expresses something that does not need such blunt envisioning, and underestimates the unconscious sexual power that is cored through the entire performance.

In a sense, then, I suppose that my failure to describe or explain the thing is testimony to its effect. The name "entity" suggests something that simply exists, merely is. And although some of the video projections of scientific equations, spiral charts, running dogs, and animal skins might imply that we are to see the dance as a kind of evolution or expression of the natural world, to place it in such an interpretative vein does not really do it justice. For it is precisely that it taps into our evolutionary sympathies - sex, power, musculature - at a subconscious level, as the bodies come together to form strangely organic but not-quite-human entities, that is the hallmark of its success. I guess.

Labels: dance, Entity, Photography and Art, Wayne McGregor