It is pleasing to see that employers have agreed to hold fresh talks with the universities union, the UCU, over the changes to pension provision in the USS scheme. After the employers forced through pension changes - most notably a move to a career average scheme rather than a final salary scheme, which may mean a 25% reduction in net pension for most retirees - the UCU held a botched strike process at the end of the summer academic term. This achieved nothing, save a few images of waved placards in the press. Things went very quiet over the vacation, but the new academic year saw the start of new action.

Over the last month or so, I and other members of the UCU have been "working to rule." This means that staff carry out no tasks or activities that are not explicitly stipulated in their contracts, and work no additional hours beyond those they are supposed to. For the universities this makes it quite a tricky dispute to control, as all it means is that employees do only what the employers have said they should do according to the principle of their contracts.

Of course, in practice, everyone knows that academics work far more than the nominal 35 hours a week and carry out many more administrative tasks than they really ought. If employees are "working to rule" and are unable to perform all their functions within their allocated hours, employers cannot legally force them to do more without admitting, embarassingly, that academics are consistently over-working - which makes the employers' devaluing of the pension look even harsher.

However, "working to rule" is perhaps easier said than done for academic staff on the ground. Beyond refusing to attend voluntary meetings, and beyond emailing a line manager (who themselves may be working to rule) every time you refuse to do something you are not actually required to do, there are few actions that employees can do (or not do) that make a public declaration of support for the union action. Most academics are unwilling to compromise on their support of students, so marking, meeting to support students, responding to emails - things which would be obvious if they were not done - tend to continue as normal. Some academics may leave the office at 5.00 prompt, but as the emails and research requirements continue unabated, will still have to work from home - or else cause themselves trauma further down the line. Additionally, it is hard to define what constitutes "work" in the life of an academic. When I settle down to read Sebald's The Emigrants (a brilliant novel I am teaching later in the year) whilst my other half watches Eastenders, does this count as work I should not be doing? Because of these problems, over the long term "work to rule" has very little substantive impact on the running of a university.

What will have an impact is if academics withold marks from student essays and, worse, exams. This runs the risk of alienating students, but on the other hand the new HE marketplace in which students are consumers can actually work to reinforce the academics' position. Students might rightfully ask why, at a time when they are paying ever more to go to university, the staff who teach them find their salaries effectively being cut (as pensions are a deferred part of salary). If the money is not going to the front line, into which black hole is it sinking?

So my guess is that the fact that the employers have returned to the negotiating table now indicates that they too forsee this awkward question further down the line. Working to rule probably is not having much of an impact in the day-to-day life of universities or academics at present. But it does show that academics mean business now, and thus will not shy away from raising the stakes until student voices start to complain. This is a scenario that everyone, academics who cherish the students they teach and employers who cherish the cash that they bring, will want to avoid.

Labels: pension, UCU, University Life, USS, work to rule

From all the obituaries to Steve Jobs, one common aspect has stood out for me: the fact that he was successful because of, not in spite of, his lack of a conventional educational background in computer engineering.
At his much-cited commencement address at Stanford, Jobs noted that although he dropped out of his college course after just six months, this happily enabled him to drop in to a free class on calligraphy:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

The aesthetic principles that he picked up here would inform Jobs' design philosophy, starting with the typefaces that made the early Mac computers so groundbreaking, and extending to the visual engineering of the iPad. One software engineer reminisced that they would present Jobs with a new piece of software built upon some radical and complex core programming, only to be told to return to the drawing board when he spotted an ugly button or mis-aligned font. This focus on appearance may have been frustrating, but it encultured a unique tech company that was driven to make things that worked beautifully, as opposed to merely functioning.

Job was convinced that it was this commitment to design, borne of putting artistry first and programming second, that led to the success of the Macintosh. There are probably very few computer companies around today that would employ people principally on the basis of their creativity and only secondarily on their ability to program:

The Macintosh turned out so well, because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.

It should not be surprising why comments like this caught my eye, given the ongoing campaign against the reorientation of the UK's university system along market-led, output-based lines. Our universities are increasingly pushed to deliver degrees for those vocational purposes that are immediately useful to the economy. The economy needs more engineers, so universities must produce more people who can design bridges. The economy needs to develop its software industry, so we must have more graduates capable of programming Java. Science has a practical impact on society, so we must increase funding for science and technology research, and slash it for the arts and humanities.

Yet in his Stanford commencement address, Jobs noted of his calligraphy course that "None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life." Those two words, "practical application," might be easily come from the mouths of the technocrats at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (which, not that you would know it from the name, runs our universities). Jobs became one of the most innovative businessmen of the computer era. Yet he did so precisely because he was not rooted in a model of education that sees a direct, casual link between a course and the graduate that results.

Adrian Poole, Chair of the English Faculty at Cambridge, has compiled a list of the current buzzwords in government papers about universities: "operational implications", "outcome indicators", "impact beneficiaries", "incremental significance" and "levels of robustness" are some of the more chilling ones. Steve Jobs' course in calligraphy turned out, ultimately, to embody all of these ideals: it had a practical application, was of more than incremental significance, had operational implications for the IT industry. The trouble is, nobody, least of all the spontaneous Jobs himself, could have foreseen precisely how it would have these effects.
What mattered was that this course existed in the first place, and that none of the educators at Reed College were bothered when Jobs decided to follow his impulses. They allowed him, to use a slogan that the DBIS might do well to adopt, to "think different." The specialism of the university is its pluralistic culture, the type of culture that allowed Steve Jobs to wander out of engineering 101 and into calligraphy for beginners without judgement as to whether this would be ultimately worthwhile for society or the economy.

Jobs reflected on his unconventional and multidisciplinary education that:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

The UK government intends our universities to drive economic growth by delivering courses and research pathways that, it predicts, will matter in the immediate moment. But it is precisely the haphazard, multidisciplinary, unpredictable nature of universities that makes the very best entrepreneurship possible. Here, then, is one prediction: stripping down universities to an applied, utilitarian system might well prevent the next Steve Jobs from encountering the coincidence of disciplines that will lead to the unknown, beautiful technologies to come.

Labels: Browne review, higher education, Steve Jobs, University Life

In 2004, for two months, I travelled across Eastern Europe, from the Czech Republic through to Turkey. As well as being the closest I came to a "gap year," one aspect of the trip was to look at those former Soviet Bloc countries that had recently or were shortly to accede to European Union membership. My overall impression emerging from the journey, which I chronicled in my journal East of Europe, was that the people of these countries were almost unanimously enthusiastic about European membership. Every major city had factories and outlets for major Western brands that would have been anathema under Communism twenty years previously. Shopping malls and supermarkets were springing up everywhere. Although the countryside was far less developed, it was clear that the iron curtain had been well and truly pulled back, and the eyes of the people were looking to the future in the West, rather than nostalgically back to the East.

At the time, the Iraq war was in full swing, and I was feeling a great deal of resentment about the vestiges of colonial militarism that impelled Britain's involvement in the conflict. The period of accession from 2004 to 2007 also saw the insular racism of the tabloid press and of the Conservative right-wing reaching fever pitch. Encouraged by the enthusiasm of Eastern Europeans, and wanting to dissociate myself from little Englandism, I was at my most highly pro-European. I even felt very strongly that Britain should join the Euro as soon as possible, to open our markets to the expanding economies of the likes of Hungary or Slovakia.

Fast forward to 2011, and I have seen that my earlier self was somewhat blinded by enthusiasm, and did not appreciate the problems of the European project that came about with this expansion of its territories and powers. This problem is illustrated by Slovakia and the leading role this small country is currently playing in the current Eurozone crisis.

The Eurozone needs all its member countries to approve changes to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), in order to prevent the collapse of the Euro that has been precipitated by the troubles in Greece. At present, there are just four nations that have not yet signed the new agreement, with Slovakia being the most resistant. The centrist Slovakian Prime Minister Iveta Radicova is keen to sign. But to push the necessary bill through the Slovak parliament she needs the agreement of her right-wing coalition partners, the Freedom and Solidarity party (SaS). They are a small and relatively new party, and are using the issue in order to bolster their popularity among right-wing voters. If they refuse to ratify the bill in parliament as they are threatening to do, not only would this cause a crisis in the Slovakian government, it could cause the collapse of the entire architecture of the Euro.

The issue highlights the problems of the democratic deficit that exists in European government, about which the UK right-wing have long shrilled, and to which I have previously closed my ears. There is an inherent problem in democracy that political scientists have struggled to answer. Parliamentary elections are almost never decided by a single vote, and so no one voter has any ability to change the outcome of an election. Why, then, does anyone bother to drag themselves to the voting booth in large elections?

This question becomes progressively harder to answer as one moves up the scale of government. In a parish council election, my one vote just might make a difference. I may even know the candidates at a personal level, and feel obliged to vote out of friendship. In council elections, I may vote for a local councillor who particularly appeals to issues on my doorstep. In parliamentary elections, in principle (though probably not in the mindset of most voters in practice) I vote first and foremost for a local MP not for a national party, and at the constituency level my one vote just might be sufficient to tip the balance in their favour.

But in what way does my vote count at a national level? No person in the UK voted for a coalition (this would be impossible, since one can only cast one vote in the first past the post system), yet this is what we got. And if this is a paradox enough, in what way can my vote be said to count at a European level? I voted for a European MP, in a parliament which is modelled along the same grounds as a national parliament. But the Slovakian issue illustrates that this parliament is essentially a sham, that pretends to connect voters in individual countries with Europe as a whole when in fact it is individual, national parliaments, voted for by an electorate within those countries alone, which make the most crucial decisions.

No vote I could cast for has any way of influencing the direction of Europe at the present time. Potentially, the decision about the future of the Euro - and in turn the future of the European Union - rests with a minor party, in a coalition government, in a comparatively small country. No vote for any member of the European Parliament, left or right wing, can influence the decision of the SaS, which is appealing purely to its own local voters in threatening to defeat the bill. In much the same way, Nicholas Sarkozy in France is unlikely to support a renationalisation of the French banks, because he is up for re-election next year. In the UK, the right-wing of the Conservative party, which had agreed to put European issues on a back burner in the interests of the coalition, now sees the Euro crisis as an opportunity for immediate renegotiation of our European treaties.

This, then, is the problem of the democratic deficit. This moment of crisis has led me to recognise that actually, economic problems can only be legitimately dealt with at a national level, where people have the opportunity to vote for a government which is thereby licensed to cut public spending by the same electorate who will suffer from that decision. Whilst I remain largely pro-European, and accept that Europe's economies benefit by being joined together, I am, with the benefit of hindsight, glad that the UK remains detached from the Eurozone, where such a connection between a country's voters and European decisions cannot practically exist.

Labels: democratic deficit, European Financial Stability Facility, European Union, Politics, Slovakia