I've been rereading Huckleberry Finn for the second time in recent years, prior to teaching it in a couple of weeks. It's been hard to pin down precisely what I love about the novel, and why despite sometimes being labelled as a children's book, it merits and rewards multiple rereadings.

Huckleberry Finn, as depicted in the 1884 edition

Certainly, the depiction of the Mississippi is masterful, as the river becomes itself a kind of benevolent character, providing Huck and Jim with food and escape routes in moments of need, and guiding them towards mutual respect for each other - overcoming their racial differences in the process. There are memorable characters, who set up contrasts with each other so as to picture the rich variety of frontier life: against the purely malicious Pa, there are the bungling murderers on the wreck; against Huck's dressing-up as a girl or as Tom Sawyer is the absurd self-dramatisation of the Dauphin and the King; for Tom's gang of outlaws who wield sticks for guns there are the feuding Jackson clan who seem genuinely beyond the formal law. Then there are the dialects, quirks and vernacular language allocated to each individual; Twain styled himself in the Dickensian model of the dramatic novelist, giving lectures and performances of his works, and there is a definite stage quality to the novel, a book for the ear as much as for the mind. Jim's vernacular is different to Huck's, which in turn contrasts with the dialect forms used by different characters on their journey south. All of these aspects are remarkable, and suffice to overcome the novel's obvious flaws, such as its ridiculously coincidental plotting.

Yet what I really like about the novel, what makes it such a pleasure to read, is the contradictory position it puts me in as a reader, forcing me to confront it in two different minds: as the reader who wants to judge Huck's actions with moralising objectivity, and as a more sympathetic reader who sees and hears Huck's experiences from his own eyes and in his own voice, looking out onto an unfavourable world. From the latter perspective, Huck is not the irredeemable delinquent he might superficially appear to be.


The novel opens in a famously self-reflexive way that draws a line between Tom Sawyer, "made by Mr. Mark Twain" who "told the truth, mainly," and Huckleberry Finn as an authentic account narrated by Huck himself. The difference between mythologised fictions of the American frontier, and its actuality, continues to be marked through the first couple of chapters. Having noted this book as a sequel, a correspondingly poignant gap starts to widen between Tom Sawyer, who seems to continue this novel in the vein of the earlier one, leading his gang in harmless games derived from stories, and Huck who, although the same age as Tom, is henceforth thrust into a genuinely violent and frightening frontier world rather than one of literary fantasy.

This divergence between both characters and their eponymous novels also separates the actual reader from their implied double, the reader who experiences Huckleberry Finn's adventures through the first person point of view, from the reader who might be expected to respond to Huckleberry Finn as a novelist's didactic portrait of an unruly juvenile.

The latter, looking objectively at Huck's behaviour, might be expected to judge him unfavourably. From this point of view - a perspective we might expect to be shared by Miss Watson or Judge Thacker as respectable authorities - Huck is irreligious and immoral: this is a boy who runs away from their pastoral care; who fakes his own murder then hides as good-hearted townsfolk search for him; a boy who aids and abets an escaped slave and suspected criminal; who dupes ladies, steals, exploits, lies and cheats. The actual reader, on the other hand, knows Huck intimately through his own point of view as he encounters a world that is largely against him. Seen from this perspective, Huck is merely forced to act on his instincts, adapting his way out of difficulties created by adults, and thus evolving as a complex individual who is simply trying to make the best of a bad world.

By setting up a contrast between one possible, objective reader, who might look in down on Huck from some moral high ground, and the actual reader who knows Huck subjectively, Twain creates in Huck a mirror for our own expectations and desires. We may be as educated and respectable as the judge or the widow, but is there not some small part of us which secretly relishes Huck's rejection of middle-class comfort for the wild capriciousness of life in the frontier? Once we come to know and live through Huck Finn, rather than to judge him by our prior assumptions, what is he but the embodiment of American ideals, the opportunist, the self-made man? And is there not something strangely Puritan in the way in which fate seems to reward these characteristics, which might look bad in another context, with money and security by the end of the novel?

Labels: English Literature, Huckleberry Finn

This is one of a series of posts in which I respond to the Browne review of higher education funding and student finance. Other posts look at the implications of the Browne review for postgraduates, and for the arts and humanities.

Entering into the new higher education marketplace, a logical assumption that students might make post-Browne is that if they are paying more, they should get more in return: more and better teachers, improved IT and library facilities, green and tranquil campus spaces to rival Harvard or Princeton. Had the Browne report been presented in an era before massive cuts to public spending, this might have been the case. A tuition fee market would force universities to compete for students, and to provide higher-quality, more attractive "products" as a result.

However, Browne was instigated before spending cuts became the sole focus of political debate. Launching the review in 2009, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson suggested its aim was to widen participation and simplify student support. By 2010, with the government's spending review imminent, Browne has become reconceptualised. No longer are tuition fees about improving higher education for all, but about making up a potential £4 billion cut in public funding. Exemplifying this change in attitude is Steve Smith, head of Universities UK. Like many VCs of research-intensive universities, Smith had been arguing for a free market in higher education long before the recession; after it, he found in Browne a handy scapegoat. He now argues that "Browne is not the cause of the reductions in state funding; it is an attempt to substitute other funding sources for lost government revenue."

My point in this political aside is not to be polemic (I have done polemic aplenty in my other blogs on Browne). Rather, it is to provide some context for Browne's ambitions for teaching and learning. Browne's headline vision is that:

HEIs actively compete for well informed, discerning students, on the basis of price and teaching quality, improving provision across the whole sector, within a framework that guarantees minimum standards.

In a scenario before spending cuts, improving quality would have been in the interests of universities, students, and government. In the present climate, however, tuition fee rises are necessary simply to keep universities from going backwards, since investment to improve quality will certainly not be available from government, which will distance itself from any complaints about teaching quality once resources reside with universities alone. The risk here is that universities that are already at the top of league tables will be able to sit back on their reputations, knowing that students will always want to come to the big names that are on the tips of employers' tongues: Durham, York, Exeter, UCL; they can thus use tuition fees to make up the shortfall in their income without correspondingly seeking to further improve the standard of their already good teaching. Universities lower down the pecking order, by contrast, which may begin by charging lower fees, will have to indebt themselves in order to invest in facilities and teaching that might potentially attract more students. It is not surprising that many commentators already foresee the closure of several poorer universities.

Aside from further polarising wealthy and poorer universities, what will be the consequences of tuition fee rises within the mainstream student experience? Browne says plenty about a regulatory framework - run by a new Higher Education Council - that will seek to guarantee teaching quality. However, he says little about how increased tuition fees should be spent to improve university education in practice.

One positive thing he does suggest, with which I agree, is that all university teachers should be trained and accredited to HEA standards. It is still shocking to think that it was not until the 1990s that any qualifications for university teaching even existed.

More vaguely, Browne adds that:

Institutions may want to include commitments to students on the minimum contact time with teachers that they will have and promise timely individual feedback on assignments. They may also choose to provide greater detail about class sizes or name the teachers who will be responsible for key courses. 

In the annual National Student Survey, students consistently rate assessment and feedback as the lowest of all the various measures of quality. In the 2010 survey, for example, only 65% were satisfied with the quality of assessment and feedback. However, feedback and assessment are highly intensive on staff time, especially when staff are pulled in different directions, between teaching and research. If marking a batch of class papers means missing the deadline for a major research grant application, then it is the class which is going to suffer. What is likely as a more general outcome of the Browne review is that UK higher education will split along US lines: postgraduate or postdoctoral staff will perform most of the teaching duties, whilst established faculty are employed in research-only positions. Well-known professors may be parachuted in to look good on prospectuses, but in practice teaching and research will be distinct streams. This may indeed improve the timeliness of feedback and assessment, and other direct measures of teaching success, but it will be at the expense of what differentiates holistic UK universities, with their strong tradition of research-led teaching, from their US counterparts.

Also worthy of note is the following caveat:

Students may decide to include commitments on attending a minimum number of classes or completing a minimum number of assessments per term. 

Whilst Browne's meaning here is somewhat ambiguous, I take this to imply that in return for being empowered to hold their universities to clearer standards and expectations, students should acknowledge their responsibility to engage with the requirements of their degree programmes. Whilst one would like to think that no student ought to need to promise to work, in practice some students do see their degrees as a way of subsidising extra-curricular life experiences. It would be hoped that students paying £7000 tuition fees would take increasing responsibility, and prioritise their academic work over their social life. However, things could turn the other way. Why should a teacher demand an essay from a student if that student, who is now a fully subscribed education consumer, does not want to submit it? Why should a student have to attend lectures, if he or she, having freely chosen to pay £7000, does not want to go? This caveat about "commitments" seems to be an attempt to force students to keep to their responsibilities to learn, even as they exploit their rights as consumers. However, even if students sign up to some sort of charter, what would be the ultimate consequences? Can one really see a university expelling a student who has failed one first year exam, and thus losing a potential £14 000 of future income? Under Browne, tuition fees will be paid directly to universities on behalf of students, rather than distributed from a national pool, whilst there will be no cap on the number of students universities are allowed to admit. This may mean that universities become unduly and detrimentally attached to a student's buying power, rather than their brain power, allowing students to resit courses for which they are unsuited when in the past they might have been dismissed from the university with their place taken by a more willing student.

Regardless of the effects of teaching and learning once students are at university, one of Browne's conclusions that I wholeheartedly endorse is the need for students to get more refined information about where their tuition fees are spent:

Most of the investment in higher education goes to institutions through a block grant and students have no sight of what it is buying. We want to put students at the heart of the system. Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education. ...Students will be better informed about the range of options available to them.

As I wrote in my essay on Tuition Fees and Contact Hours, data about student spending is woefully inadequate. For example, an undergraduate in the arts will typically have half as many contact hours as an undergraduate in the sciences. However, the arts student has no way of knowing how much of their tuition fee is spent on the resources that they may make significantly more use of, such as physical libraries. This information has to be made available, to allow students to choose between different modes of study. Some students may prefer more contact time, but correspondingly more proscribed courses without, for example, dissertations; others may like independent working but need to know that the study, library and IT facilities will be made available for them to do this.

However, there is another scenario. At the leading, established university at which I teach English Literature, student contact time is limited but focused. Although students may only have four tutorials per module per year, for example, these take place in small groups of eight rather than in large seminar classes. In terms of its outcomes on student learning, an hour's intensive, small group tuition is almost certainly better than several hours of larger group teaching. Because no student can escape discussion in a group of eight, students build their confidence and oral skills, whilst also learning to criticise authority (that is, myself) and to assert their own views and ideas; they build strong relationships with me, which often conclude in me writing them an informed job reference. Our students seem to recognise this. Although well aware that the amount of contact time they receive is limited, satisfaction scores on the courses on which I teach have not markedly dipped from the era of £1000 tuition fees, up to £3000 fees today.

However, Browne proposes that students discriminate between universities on an up-front basis. In their prospectuses, universities should make clear "Weekly hours of teaching contact time." If this is not tempered by describing the type of contact time as well, one can see the hallowed "contact hour" becoming the sole indicator of return on tuition fee investment. Regardless of whether University X gives 20 hours of lectures a week, whilst University Y gives 5 hours of small group tuition, more will be seen as better. This will be exacerbated as parents become increasingly involved in supporting their children through higher education. Although a student experiences university in a subjective and flexible way - in the case of mine, they recognise that the comparatively little contact time they have still works for them, regardless of what other courses are doing - parents look at their children's education from more objective standpoints. If their son or daughter is receiving less face time with tutors than their peers, parents may start to pressure universities to put quantity of tutor contact over quality.

As with assessment and feedback, it is not hard to envision that research and teaching will be split so as to meet the demand for more contact time. Instead of prominent but busy researchers giving a few lectures over the course of a year, a single teaching-only staff member will run an entire block of lectures on a more regular basis. It may well be that on quantitative measures, this improves the student experience, but it also fundamentally changes the nature of universities in the UK, so that instead of integrating teaching and research such that each university teaches to its research strengths or according to the specialisms of its lecturers, universities deliver formalised curricula in staid and uninspiring formats.

Of course, as with all my blogs on Browne, I may be guilty of an innate, academic conservatism. Just because successful universities have in the past been constituted in certain ways does not mean these are the right or best ways for the twenty-first century; just because I feel as a teacher that the buzz of a small group tutorial is worth more than an entire week of lectures does not mean that my students feel the same; just because students will become consumers of their education does not mean that they will automatically expect to be given easy degrees without having to commit to meet work deadlines or attend tuition. However, without being naive about the scale of the funding problem, I do believe that conservatism is the least worst standpoint when it comes to the UK's higher education sector.

The UK government has traditionally funded higher education at around 1.3% of GDP, compared to an average across OECD countries of 1.5%; the US spends 3.0% of GDP on higher education. Despite this comparative underfunding, UK higher education punches far above its weight in international league tables. In science, the UK is second only to the US in terms of the number of citations, making it by some way the most efficient programme in the world. Limited tuition fees have funded more university places over the last decade, and a record number of students now attend university. According to the NSS, 80% of students were satisfied with their experience in higher education. UK higher education is a flawed system - 80% satisfaction still leaves one in five unsatisfied; thousands of students miss out on university each year because of a lack of places; science is currently suffering from a "brain drain" as academics move abroad - but in spite of these flaws, it still largely works.

Changes certainly need to be made to keep it running this way. In an era before the spending review, government might feasibly have argued that increased tuition fees were necessary to allow public money to be focused on increasingly expensive research, rather than paying for student tuition, whilst a free market would allow the cap on student numbers to be lifted, preventing the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of students missing out on the university degrees that are, so government claims, essential in a modern economy.

After the spending cuts, though, the picture looks very different. Tuition fees will simply allow UK higher education to stand still at best - and may potentially damage a system that works well if imperfectly, at worst. The risks are enormous: a huge debt burden on young people, exclusion from higher education based on social background rather than merit, the closure of poorer universities unable to invest to attract students or unable to justify high fees, the elimination of swathes of courses in the arts and humanities, the severance of the link between teaching and research, an excessive focus on contact hours rather than those methods of tuition that experienced teachers know to be best. If I have one concern that encapsulates everything I have said across my blogs on the Browne review, it is that this risk we are taking with a functioning higher education system is not merited based on the potential rewards in an uncertain future. Will more students be able, even willing to come to university, as Browne promises? Will his reforms really widen rather than narrow access? Will they allow universities to focus their funding on research rather than teaching even as the latter becomes their primary income stream?

Whilst funding cuts changed the nature and outlook of Browne's review from one of markedly improving to simply maintaining higher education, Browne still concludes his report with an optimistic vision:

Our vision is not one of shoring up the current system. Instead we have aspired to propose reforms that will enhance the strengths of the higher education system, while enabling the widest number of students to benefit from the pleasures and opportunities of learning.

My vision is more qualified. With higher education starting from an already high platform of international esteem in research, and of teaching quality for students, it is hard to see how increased tuition fees and the slashing of public funding for higher education will help to elevate UK universities even higher. At best universities will maintain their standards whilst a generation of students takes on £30 000 plus of debt; at worst, our successful, internationally renowned university system will suffer irreversible changes and losses that no amount of future investment can make up.

Labels: Browne review, teaching, tuition fees, University Life

Further to my discussion of the fallout upon the arts from the explosive Browne review of university tuition fees in UK Higher Education, there is an interesting debate going on in the US Chronicle of Higher Education, sparked by English Professor Robert Watson, about whether the arts and humanities actually make money for universities (subscription only Chronicle article here; free reprint from UCLA here). This debate may well have lessons for the UK.

In the US, high student tuition fees have long been a feature of the education system. And, with the recession and budget cuts, funding streams are likewise being focused on business-friendly courses, and diverted from arts faculties. The view of the President of UCLA bears uncanny similarities to the tone of Browne's report, suggesting that the arts must be sacrificed for more applied subjects:

Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. We're doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it. Who's going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that's where we're running into trouble.

As I pointed out in my response to Browne last week, there is plenty of evidence that arts and humanities graduates enter work and, armed with allegedly useless degrees, actually contribute a great deal to the economy. Thus if universities have a role in wider economic life, arts and humanities departments merit public investment, regardless of the local fiscal demands of staff within universities. However, what struck me in the US debate were the details about how much arts faculties actually contribute to universities' internal economies.

Responding to his President, Robert N. Watson, Professor of English at UCLA, did some sums for his university:

Based on the latest annual student-credit hours, fee levels, and total general-fund expenditures, the humanities [at UCLA] generate over $59 million in student fees, while spending only $53.5 million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category). The entire teaching staff of Writing Programs, which is absolutely essential to UCLA's educational mission, has been sent firing notices, even though the spreadsheet shows that program generating $4.3 million dollars in fee revenue, at a cost of only $2.4 million.

This corresponds with evidence at the national level:

Of the 21 units at the University of Washington, the humanities and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences are the only ones that generate more tuition income than 100 percent of their total expenditure. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, recently cited a University of Illinois report showing that a large humanities department like English produces a substantial net profit, whereas units such as engineering and agriculture run at a loss. The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern.

Useful courses such as medicine are not propping up liberal arts courses that are quaint accessories in a market-driven university. Quite the opposite, in fact: with their comparatively low infrastructure overheads, arts courses actually make money for their universities, making more from tuition fee income than science and medicine courses can from business spin-offs or research grants.

Given that Browne's higher education funding shake-up will approximate the US system, we can expect a similar scenario to pertain in the UK. Thus the case of the US should provide us with a pertinent warning: to lose public funding for arts courses now, in favour of science-based degrees, as Browne recommends, will be to risk the closure of departments that in future could actually generate income for universities.

There are other similarities too. In the UK, higher education looks set to suffer around 75% cuts from its block funding grant from HEFCE. Because the sciences can secure more funding from research grants, much of the HEFCE money goes on supporting less research intensive courses, often within the arts and humanities. Thus it is these courses that will suffer most as vice-chancellors tighten their belts, especially if there is a lag between the HEFCE funding cut and the increased tuition fees that should make up the difference. Now replace HEFCE for "discretionary budget" in Watson's report, and the parallels between the US and UK are clear:

Yet because the discretionary budget in humanities goes almost entirely for teaching staff, across-the-board cuts hit our instruction especially hard. The dean of humanities' office at UCLA warned a few months ago that the proposed budget would require programs in this division — already the leanest in staff per faculty — to fire most of their lecturers and teaching assistants, making our curriculum unsustainable.

In quoting the above, I am aware that I seem to be walking headlong into a trap. If public funding of universities is to be slashed, and if tuition fees from popular subjects like English can actually make money for universities, surely this is the best possible argument for raising fees and enabling a higher education marketplace. If students really want to study English at £7000 a year, let them. The English professor can keep his job, supported by his students, whilst public research funding can be targeted at those subjects with the most obvious public benefits, namely science, technology, engineering and medicine.

However, the example of the US illustrates precisely my core point about the Browne review: that to see universities through the eyes of the businessman is to risk ignoring those more subterranean features that make arts and humanities degrees attractive to students, to employers, and to the wider economy. Once a degree programme in the arts and humanities is slashed and burned in funding cuts, it will be unlikely to rise from the ashes. Thus if we absolutely must to enter a higher education marketplace and indebt our young for the basic privilege of learning, we have to make sure that we maintain an open mind with regards to the types of courses we make available to them. As I said in my response to the Browne review, it is naive to assume that the arts perform no economic function in the UK. Likewise, the UCLA President appears to have automatically - and wrongly - assumed that arts faculties prop up the sciences, when the reverse is the case. If university and government leaders simply follow business hunches without looking at the evidence, they will cause UK universities to eliminate arts courses which could actually prove popular and moneymaking in a higher education marketplace, and which are already significant contributors to the wider economy.

Labels: Browne review, English Literature, Politics, University Life

This is one of a series of posts in which I respond to the Browne review of higher education funding and student finance. Other posts look at the implications of the Browne review for postgraduates, and at the possible impact on teaching and learning.

As one might expect of the former boss of an energy company that puts profit before the environment (namely BP), Browne appears to have looked at higher education with dollar signs in his eyes, seeing value in purely financial terms. The value of allowing young adults to immerse themselves for three years in a subject that they are passionate about; the value of the arts, humanities and social sciences in articulating human and moral behaviour; the value of practising the soft skills that underpin all knowledge (reading, digesting information, writing well) rather than specific, scientific knowledge in its own right - these are not values that can be easily quantified, tabulated, charted, counted, economised or budgeted. And so they are not the values which, according to Browne, public funding should pay to support.

As an indication of Browne's priorities, the word "business" occurs 22 times in the report; "science" occurs 6 times; "humanities" does not even appear. Page 27 of the Browne report makes damning reading for anyone concerned about the arts, humanities and social sciences:

There is a critical role for public investment even if students are investing more. There are clinical and priority courses such as medicine, science and engineering that are important to the well being of our society and to our economy. The costs of these courses are high and, if students were asked to meet all of the costs, there is a risk that they would choose to study cheaper courses instead. In our proposals, there will be scope for Government to withdraw public investment through HEFCE from many courses to contribute to wider reductions in public spending; there will remain a vital role for public investment to support priority courses and the wider benefts they create. 

The Faustian trade-off with increased tuition fees is that subjects like sciences typically have a higher infrastructure and teaching cost - more labs, more staff to supervise those labs - than the arts and humanities. In order to limit the price of courses like science and engineering, and hence not deter students from them, they will need some form of public subsidy. This will come by withdrawing funding from those subjects deemed to have no "wider benefits," namely the arts, humanities and social sciences.

I have dealt elsewhere on this blog with the demonstrably false assumption that subjects like these have no social or economic benefit. The creative industries employ 1.8 million in the UK, and if business is so in need of scientists, it is strange that twice as many graduates in science disciplines are unemployed compared to their arts counterparts. As the most recent Prospects survey, What Do Graduates Do?, noted, "Six months after graduation, art and design, media studies and performing arts graduates showed higher employment rates than the average for all first degree graduates (61.4%)."

For anyone who has a broad minded picture of what the UK economy is like, this is not surprising. As with UK universities as a whole, the arts is one area where the UK retains a world-leading status, in spite of underfunding compared to other developed countries. London, for example, is not only a hub for global finance, but for the international art market, publishing, media, advertising, and tourism. Nationally, the creative industries contribute £57 billion to the economy. The roots that underlie this activity are hidden and various - but one of the deepest is in academia. Without graduates who are trained to think creatively, to understand human psychology, to write, draw, paint, design, the creative industries will have to recruit elsewhere; without university teachers - human scientists - who are able to inspire, research and influence our understanding of human thought, politics and culture, we will lose that sense of direction and vision that gave us such social enterprises as the welfare state, or institutions like the BBC. What Browne sees as irrelevant courses, aimless undergraduates, and useless researchers cannot simply vanish, without the withering of one of the UK's most important economic outputs, and without the gradual decline of those millennia-old subjects through which we gain a greater understanding of what it means to be human, beyond quantifiable dollars and often with unforeseeable consequences.

However, to return to those numerical terms that former industrial chairmen can relate to, it is important to recognise that the arts and humanities clearly appeal to business in an indirect way. In my own subject, English, career destinations vary widely. Again, according to Prospects, 8.6% of English graduates go on to become managers; 7.4% enter marketing; 17% go to retail; 18.8% enter secretarial occupations. English students in these workplaces may not on a daily basis demonstrate their understanding of free indirect speech in Jane Austen, or the feminist values of The Color Purple. What they do use, however, are the soft skills that underpin many arts and humanities subjects: the ability to summarise a vast range of reading in concise and rhetorically confident essays (for which read, business reports); the confidence to argue a point in front a group of peers (for which read, making one's case in the board room); the ability to study independently, and to pursue their own research around a subject (for which read, low-maintenance employees).


Browne argues that a fifth of businesses report having a skills gap in their workforce. His report suggests that "there needs to be a closer fit between what is taught in higher education and the skills needed in the economy." However, the economy is not some static entity, but changes and shifts in unpredictable ways. Witness the current push to move away from banking and services, and back into manufacturing, or the advent of the green economy. Clearly, engineering or business graduates are capable of adapting to such changes. But for arts and humanities graduates, too, a degree is not just for three years, but for life. Those abilities inculcated through three years of close engagement with a particular subject are not fossilised in the brain so that the student who studies Austen or anthropology will only ever be able to have a career reading novels or living in the jungle; learning is, rather, an organic form which, once established at university, takes on its own life in the mind of the graduate, and which can be nurtured and adapted to new economic environments.


The other factor missing in this is students themselves. Last time I looked - as I did today in my tutorials - students are not cogs in a wider economic machine. They are individuals who bring to university a wide range of skills and abilities, who possess unique personalities, who pursue their subjects in ways that interest them. Some students, sadly, are not possessed of the brains to do maths or physics; they do not have the synaesthetic capacity to "see" the results of algebraic equations, as good mathematicians do, or the ability to write fluently in the language of computers. Some students, however, do possess a strangely refined empathy that marks them out from many of the general population, an ability that they choose to turn to the interpretation and understanding of human psychology in that vast database known as the novel; some students feel a peculiar sympathy with distant tribes in sub-Saharan Africa, and want to better understand their unique cultural behaviours. Are these students to be told that they must study engineering, not English, must be architects, rather than anthropologists, because their greater duty is to feed the beast known as the Gross Domestic Product?

Whilst tuition fees risk discriminating against students on the basis of their economic background, the equal but unacknowledged risk is of disenfranchising them on their basis of their brains, a kind of market determinism dominating the natural imperative that some people are better and more fulfilled studying and working in certain areas.

In spite of my rhetoric, which cannot help but become heated and defensive in the wake of a report like this, I am not anti-business. Neither am I suggesting that the arts and humanities ought to be of equal importance to the sciences. As someone whose research is in science and culture, I have been happy to lend my signature to  the Science is Vital campaign. I understand if some rebalancing of universities priorities is necessary in the wake of funding cuts and tuition fee rises, and as I wrote in my essay on The Value of an English PhD, the utilitarian socialist in me acknowledges that the arts and humanities often do a poor job of explaining their value, economic and otherwise, to the taxpaying public.

Nevertheless, the Browne report terrifies me for its utter disregard that these subjects might, behind all appearances, have a worth in our national life. The singular failure to mention the arts or humanities, those 22 appearances of the word "business" - this is the voice of the big businessman speaking, and being heard in government, at a time when the potential blindness of big business to human wellbeing - evidenced in banking crises or the environmental disaster in Browne's former company -  ought to be something that concerns us all. To close our eyes to the human disciplines, to pretend they do not even exist in a university, is to forget that the good human is defined by more than money in the pocket. The wealth of the mind is also something worth possessing, and we ought to be prepared as a society to reward students by providing them with three years education in those subjects that most enliven theirs.

Labels: Browne review, English Literature, humanities, Politics, University Life

The Browne Review has little to say about postgraduate funding. Although it was formally within the remit of the committe to consider funding for taught postgraduates (not for researchers), the section on postgraduates occupies a mere page of a 64 page document.

In the evidence that has been presented to us, we do see that participation in postgraduate education by higher socio-economic groups is higher than for others.

It is reasonable to suppose that access to postgraduate education is a function of the socio-economic make up of the undergraduate population – where the same trend exists – rather than anything else. Hence we should focus on improving access at the undergraduate level and that may over time help also to ensure that it is solely academic performance rather than social background that determines entry to postgraduate study.  

Labels: Browne review, postgraduates, University Life

This weekend being the conclusion of Freshers' Week, it seems appropriate to quote the following description of Dixon's hangover, from Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. I am preparing to teach this academic comedy in a couple of weeks to students who will shortly have to emerge from an alcohol haze, and enter their books as term proper begins:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Labels: English Literature, hangover, Lucky Jim