The Pequod

A Pound for Pound: Modernist Elitism

2012-02-15T16:42:00.001Z

As part of my research into a textbook on modernism (about which I keep meaning to blog, whilst failing to find time to do so) I was interested to read in Lawrence Rainey's account of the economics of modernism (in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism) about a series of lectures given by the modernist poet, Ezra Pound.

Modernism was, for its critics, a notoriously elitist affair. That early period of the twentieth century was sandwiched by nineteenth-century authors such as Dickens, who consciously appealed to a buying public, and post-modernism, which happily embraced mass culture and media. Between these two populist movements, modernist authors sought to distance themselves from the crowd. As Peter Carey pointed out in his controversial book on The Intellectuals and the Masses, modernism can be understood as a reaction to the large reading public who were created by the educational reforms of the nineteenth century. Modernist authors sought to be elite and difficult, to form cliques and cabals (most famously the Bloomsbury group) of like-minded intellectuals. To some extent, this persists today. Who outside of the academy reads The Waste Land or Ulysses?

Rainey shows further evidence of modernism's elitist economics in a set of three lectures that Pound gave at the home of a wealthy aristocratic family:

The price for the three lectures was a steep one, £1 1s, slightly less than the weekly wage of the average male industrial worker. The audience was "limited to fifty," as a contemporary program announced, and the site was to be the "private gallery" of Lord and Lady Glenconner, located at 34 Queen Anne's Gate. With no expenses to cover (the event was offered "by the kind permission" of the Glenconners), Pound might earn between £50 and £60. Equally vital, however, was the effort to endow the lectures with an aura of aristocratic glitter, to distinguish them from mere offerings of the contemporary economy. Programs were not posted in public places, but privately distributed; tickets were not commodities to be purchased, but favors to be courteously requested ("TICKETS may be had on application to Lady Low," the program stated; Lady Low lived just off Kensington Gardens and hosted "evenings at home" for a circle of upper middle-class intellectuals including G. W. Prothero, editor of the Quarterly Review).

As a teacher I have qualms about the word elitism, as it risks rewarding mediocrity and undervaluing those who are genuinely more capable than others. But as a participant in literary culture, the anti-elitist trend of the last two decades or so, for which New Labour was condemned, has had great benefits. We could not be further from the conscious exclusivity cultivated by Pound, in our modern era of free museum entry, blockbuster exhibitions at galleries, and programmes of outreach and education that all our cultural institutions are required to perform to receive public funding. It is surely something to be grateful for that I can think of no author today who, wanting to promote their work, would be willing or able to charge the admission fee of an average weekly wage.

University Applications Drop in English Studies

2012-02-03T09:40:00.000Z

A few months back, I published figures that I had extracted from the Higher Education Statistics Agency recording the number of university applicants choosing to study English. My headline finding was that:

From 2008-2009 to 2009-2010, the total number of undergraduates increased by 3%. In that period, the number of undergraduates studying languages also increased by 3%, whilst the number of undergraduates studying English increased by 4%. Thus English looks to be doing slightly better than most of the comparable language subjects. However, it is clearly doing significantly worse than subjects like maths (9% increase) and sister subjects like communications (7% increase).

Official figures published today by UCAS now report on the overall drop in university applications for the year ahead, when higher tuition fees will come into force. The total number of applicants from the UK has dropped by 8.7%. As has been much predicted, arts subjects saw the biggest declines in numbers. Unfortunately, the current data is not as granular as the HESA information, as it lumps together different subjects. However, the "European Languages, Literature and Related" in which English is bundled suffered an 11.2% drop in applicants.

By contrast, Mathematical Sciences, which I used as a comparator subject in my earlier post, saw a 2.8% drop this year.

This seems to be roughly in line with my earlier predictions. In previous years, when university funding was much rosier, English applications increased 4% whilst maths increased 9%, a difference of 5%. This year, "European Languages, Literature and Related" applications dropped by 11.2% whilst "Mathematical Sciences" dropped 2.8%, a difference of 8.4%. My suspicion is that much of the comparative drop in Languages will be in a more abstract subjects, such as media studies. Probably the core subject of English Literature will better withstand any fall. We will know better when the full HESA data is published, discriminating by individual subjects. Nevertheless, it is absolutely clear that against the sciences, the arts are going to suffer a comparative fall in just the same way as relatively speaking they lagged behind during the years of growth in university numbers.

Humanities Graduates Lead the Way. Great.

2012-01-13T10:40:00.000Z

I suppose I ought to be celebrating a report from the New College of the Humanities that shows that 60% of the UK's leaders in business and government possess humanities degrees. Indeed, a massive 65% of our current MPs studied arts, humanities or social sciences; just 10% had a science, technology or engineering degree.

If I was being cynical, though, I could hardly think of a worse manifesto for the value of the humanities. Considering our current and recent leadership in the UK, one hardly feels optimistic about the extent to which liberal values have been instilled within them. Consider:

The humanities encourage one to empathise with those of different cultural backgrounds. George Osbourne (History, Oxford) must have failed this lesson.
The humanities reward creative thinking. Admittedly, there are some FTSE 100 banking chiefs who managed to do a lot of this in relation to financial accounting. Shame they lacked the other core humanities skills of reflexive or critical thinking.
Humanities provide us with historical and fictional narratives about a troubled world, and so allow us to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. Unfortunate that Tony Blair (Jurisprudence, Oxford) never mugged up on his Afghanistan 101.

OK, so I'm being horribly facetious here. But at a time when we are led by a set of socially divisive and market-minded politicians, to herald the humanities as having inculcated a wide and empathetic view of the world in them seems hardly apposite, does it?

PS To be fair to the humanities, our present Tory leaders are acolytes of Margaret Thatcher, who perhaps indicates that it's the political background, not the degree, that determines a leader's view of the world. Her degree: Chemistry.

Estragon's Trousers

2011-12-08T18:03:00.000Z

I was delighted by a small detail in Tim Parks' review of the second volume of Samuel Beckett's letters. Famously (and as this current crop of letters confirm), Beckett refused to participate in the afterlife of his works: he would not attend award ceremonies, he deflected interviews. Beckett thought of his works as "excretions," not creations, something given out from deep within the writer and then, having once been passed out into the world, becoming untouchable. Unselfconsciously fulfilling the myth of the ascetic writer, Beckett was concerned purely with his art, not with the dirtier self-representation of the artist. This rejection, or abjection, of responsibility for a work extended to his plays. According to the letters, Beckett used to send his partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, to check up on the standard of performances.

And in a letter to Roger Brin, the first director of Waiting for Godot, Beckett enquired about a detail which had clearly concerned him such that he had asked Suzanne specifically about it:

There is one thing that bothers me: Estragon’s trousers. Naturally I asked Suzanne if they fall down properly. She tells me that he holds on to them halfway down. This he must not do – it’s utterly inappropriate.

Beckett does go on to add that one reason why it is inappropriate is that Estragon would hardly be worrying about his trousers at the moment when he is preparing to hang himself. This comment belies the perception that his works are utterly unrealistic, or unstructured. Whilst their symbolism and referentiality might be ambiguous to the point of absurd, the works do possess their own internal coherence and logic. But, like Godot itself, as soon as we have one explanation another opens. Beckett continues:

I have lots of other reasons for wanting this business not to be underplayed, but I’ll spare you them. But please … let the trousers fall right down, round the ankles. It must seem silly to you, but to me it’s vital.

Why that "lots of other reasons"? How many reasons can one possibly find for having a character's trousers fall all the way down, as opposed to half way? What is the "proper" way for trousers to fall down? Isn't the mere fact of them falling at least some of the way down sufficient to convey embarrassment and farce?

Yet comical as it is, the letter points sharply towards the demands that Beckett makes of us. It is precisely because Beckett asks us to search for "reasons" in a work from which rationality seems absent that they are so long-lived. Why do the tramps attach so much significance to the potential arrival of Godot who might, or might not, translate as the God whose existence the audience might speculate on? Does it matter that in a play in which, as Vivien Mercer famously alleged, "nothing happens, twice," the tree of the first act is bare whilst the tree of the second has leaves? The anecdote from Beckett above reminds that although there may be some reasons, some of them even necessary ones (the realism of a suicide allowing his trousers to fall) none are ultimately sufficient to contain the play's meaning.

Which feeds neatly into Beckett's wonderful response to a journalist who had written asking for elucidation about the play. Beckett was not, of course, going to provide an answer about this particular excretion (here diminished as a mere "show"); the author gives everything to his work, and nothing more, certainly not cheap reasons:

As for wanting to find in all this a wider and loftier meaning to take away after the show, along with the programme and the choc-ice, I am unable to see the point of it. But it must be possible.

The Value of Literary Research

2011-12-07T09:31:00.001Z

Whisper it quietly, especially if the universities minister David Willets might overhear, but Mark Bauerlein may have a point. In an article for the US Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauerlein, a literary scholar, argues that most literary research is by and large useless.

Using Google Scholar to track citations, Bauerlein points out that most research has only a minimal impact within the academic community, let alone outside of it. Of course, citation indices alone are not a guide to the value of research (something that those designing the Research Excellence Framework for the humanities need to bear in mind, as they strive for a simple mathematical way of assessing the impact of research). After all, it might be that lots of innocuous and largely unnoticed articles feed in to the one rare work which is genuinely groundbreaking and impactful. Below the surface research is essential to build the tip of the iceberg that people (perhaps even the public) take note of. Bauerlein recognises this, but notes that:

If a professor who makes $75,000 a year spends five years on a book on Charles Dickens (which sold 43 copies to individuals and 250 copies to libraries, the library copies averaging only two checkouts in the six years after its publication), the university paid $125,000 for its production. Certainly that money could have gone toward a more effective appreciation of that professor's expertise and talent. We can no longer pretend, too, that studies of Emily Dickinson are as needed today, after three decades have produced 2,007 items on the poet, as they were in 1965, when the previous three decades had produced only 233.

Academic research is notoriously inefficient or unproductive, by any standard economic model. That does not of course invalidate the case for funding it from the public purse. In fact, given that there would be few private sources of funding for free thinking - not only in the humanities but also in the theoretical sciences - this is actually a very strong case for offering public support for research that does not seem, on the face of it, to do much. Nevertheless, especially in the present socio-economic morass, it seems better to admit this head on, rather than pretend that, say, that one's two thousand and first monograph on Emily Dickinson is suddenly going to change everything.

Having said that, the root of the problem is precisely the longstanding imposition of an economic model of value upon disciplines and research activity that simply cannot sustain it. In the US, the sheer quantitative volume of publications is what will guarantee tenure. In the UK, the REF and its predecessor the RAE require an academic to publish a certain number of articles or books in order for them to be judged research-active. Universities, like mass-production lines, are judged to be working well when they are churning out widgets, no matter whether anyone is actually "buying" its widgets, or whether ten low-quality widgets are preferable to one high-quality one.

This is why I largely agree with Bauerlein. On the face of it, his blunt but true statement of the value of the discipline seems to bow to those in government who would have universities focus only on those practical disciplines (such as engineering or medicine) that have an immediate "impact." But thinking more deeply about it, his call for quality over quantity is actually in defiance of the ways in which economic judgements of value have been imposed on the sector for many years, long before the current economic crisis sharpened minds about the degree to which the public should subsidise universities.

On Peer Reviewing

2011-12-04T18:08:00.001Z

I have spent much of the weekend peer reviewing an article for one of the leading journals in my research field. This post reflects on how difficult I found it to act as a peer reviewer at the highest academic level.

I have peer reviewed many times in the past, and even used to edit a journal - but only (and I use that word respectfully) at the postgraduate level. Reviewing at and for the postgraduate level whilst doing a PhD oneself is peer reviewing in the most precise sense of the term, "peer." My inclination as a postgraduate peer reviewer was to be sensitive to the author, knowing how I would want to be treated were I in their shoes. That is not to say that I was anything less than rigorous. However, the value of a postgraduate journal lies more in giving the submitter valuable career experience, than in contributing to the general field of knowledge. After all, work which is genuinely groundbreaking probably ought to be pitched at a professional-level journal, not a postgraduate one. Thus, to my mind, a peer reviewer for a postgraduate journal ought to be prepared to pass submissions that may not be the most groundbreaking or innovative work. Tacitly, then, I would approach a postgraduate review with a friendly, open-mind, as opposed to a critical, rejecting one.

But reviewing at a higher level for a top journal was a somewhat less amenable experience. I felt that it was my duty, in order to uphold the prestige of this particular journal, not simply to recommend the article on its face value. Yet at the same time, to suggest changes to the article meant myself, as an early-career academic, commenting and critiquing the work of an author who was, in all likelihood, not a peer but a superior, someone considerably more established and experienced in the field.

Peer reviewing requires one to have a total confidence in one's abilities and insights. I am not wholly sure I possess this. If I struggled to understand something, was this due to the author's phrasing, which I should therefore recommend for correction? Or was it simply due to my own ignorance? Where the author had missed out a potentially relevant citation or piece of literature, were they doing so because the connections would simply be - to a more established reader - self-evident? Where I was unsure about the author's use of particular terms and their conceptual overview, was this just me nit-picking for the sake of looking like I had commented carefully on the article?

I ended up making three substantive recommendations. Articulating these was itself quite a fraught process. I wanted to make it clear that I had on the whole found the article well worth publication. On the other hand, I wanted to reassure the editor that I had looked at it with sufficiently informed perception so as to request some well thought-out changes. Surely no article ever passes straight away, and surely most can be strengthened in some way through a second opinion (part of the value of the peer-review process). So I made my opinions felt in 1500 words of commentary, way more than I have ever received on my work, and more than I ever gave in a postgraduate review.

When I have been on the receiving end of peer review, there has been nothing worse than a vague or ill-formed suggestion from a reviewer, which complains about a problem but offers little in the way of possible solutions. But maybe I went too far the other way in my own delivery of a 1500 word review. As I was writing my mini-essay, I felt myself adopting the mentality of a teacher, not only diagnosing errors but also recommending cures. Maybe I ended up patronising the author with clear cut suggestions and solutions, rather than leaving it up to the author as to what to do to resolve the problems. Just a brief comment on a problem might have been self-evident for an established academic.

I am aware that I am being very vague in the above comments; so as to protect the blind peer-review process I cannot quote any specific examples of the article's problems or my solutions. It will be interesting to revisit this post once the article is published, to see if any of my comments have been taken on by author or editor. For now, I'd like to ask the academic community. Do you act in a deliberately sceptical way, knowing that a journal's value depends on its accepting only high-quality papers and not publishing dross because peer reviewers are too scared to condemn it? Or do you try to act like a friendly teacher towards a star pupil, noting errors and nudging them towards solutions which, you suspect, they already know?

Strikes Today for the Children of Tomorrow

2011-11-30T15:30:00.001Z

The strikes on November 30th are about many things, which lurk behind the superficial reason for action which is the failure to agree a new deal on pensions. In part, they are about whether working conditions in the public sector should be held to the same standard as in the private sector, where things such as salary-related pension schemes have long since been abandoned. In part, they are about the wealth gap between the 1% of executives on huge six figure pensions and the 99% of the rest. In part, they are about the cutting of the public sector in order to resolve a crisis created by the financial industry.

But to myself, having just returned from a picket to protest against changes to our Universities Superannuation Scheme, the fight is primarily about intergenerational justice. It is important to remember that many of those on the picket lines will not be badly affected by pension changes. Certainly everyone will have to contribute more salary as the cost of a longer age of living - and most of the unions, including our own UCU, have accepted this in their negotiations. But this aside, those already established in pensions will be largely unaffected. Those employees who are already in USS will still keep their gold-standard, final-salary link. Those in public sector pension schemes who are within ten years of retirement will still retire at the same age, with pensions at the same level as they are currently.

Our local union leader is already part-retired. He has pointed out that because his pension is linked to the higher rate of inflation, and is final-salary, then within seven years (assuming inflation stays around 5%) he will be "earning" as much through his pension as a junior lecturer just entering the profession will receive in salary (assuming that wages stay flat). What he is fighting for, then, is not to protect his own pension, but the rights of younger workers. In particular, he is fighting for the right to link pensions to final salary rather than career-average earnings. Why does this matter so much to younger members? If they have long and sustained careers, won't they still be well-rewarded in such a scheme? Well consider this. If a young woman enters the profession today, she might want to take a career break so she can have children. Such a break will dramatically affect her career average earnings. Younger women will have to face choices that women of an earlier generation had fought successfully to resolve, or so we thought.

Those of that baby boomer generation, like our local union leader, have lived through a post-war world rich in state entitlements and private sector growth: a free NHS, a public university education, rising house prices, a bulging stock market. For the generation under thirty, when they reach retirement, none of these things will exist to the same degree.

Many of the government's attacks on the deficit have been assaults on the young: the removal of EMA, scrapping youth unemployment schemes, tuition fees, and now the removal of gold-standard pensions. The government has claimed that cutting the deficit through changes like this is necessary in order to keep interest rates down, which in turn suppress mortgages and thus improves household income and overall welfare. This is fine, if you have a mortgage. But the average age of a first time buyer is rising steadily, now standing at around 38. Those under 30 face increasing rental costs, not decreasing mortgage costs. The government would argue, though, that long-term they too will see the rewards. But consider this. My parents bought their first house for around £10 000. They now live in a house worth £250 000. If someone around the age of 30 manages to buy an average house today, at £160 000, they would need to have that house become worth £4 million by the time they retire in order to realise an equivalent boom to that enjoyed by the older generation.

By the time they reach retirement, then, today's young can expect to be asset poor and, now, pension poor as well. They are bearing the burden of cutting the cost of the deficit now, and they will not live to see the rewards tomorrow. To those parents grumbling about having to sort out childcare because schools are closed, remember this: it primarily for these children of tomorrow that we are taking a stand today.

Working to Rule in the USS Dispute

2011-10-30T18:25:00.000Z

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.

Steve Jobs: Lessons for Universities

2011-10-07T09:44:00.000Z

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.

The Slovakian Problem: The European Union and the Democratic Deficit

2011-10-03T11:04:00.004Z

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.

Flatlining University Applications in English Studies

2011-09-27T09:12:00.003Z

The Higher Education Statistics Agency has just released details of undergraduate numbers for 2009 to 2010. These are important, because they give some indication of how different subjects will fare as tuition fees increase next year. According to The Guardian's dissection of the data, the headline news is a big increase in numbers of students applying for maths, business and engineering degrees compared to five years previously:

Mathematical sciences recorded the biggest percentage increase on the previous year as 26,225 students opted for the subject in 2009/10 - a 26.3% increase on 2005/06.

Business & administrative studies, mass communication & documentation, and engineering & technology saw the biggest rises after mathematical sciences for full-time undergraduate students.

This seems to bode well for the government's (misguided) hope that a market in tuition fees will lead students to become more discerning consumers, so that they choose courses which offer them the best chance of a payback in their eventual career. Business and engineering seem to offer higher potential salaries.

Naturally, I am most interested in the possible implications for English Studies, so I went to the HESA website and grabbed the subject data for undergraduate applications. Unfortunately, previous years of data simply give the total numbers of students studying any one subject at a given time - thus it includes second and third years, rather than showing us how many first years alone applied (which is a better indicator of how new student choices are panning out). The table below shows the total number of undergraduate students (both full time and part time) opting to study English over the last five years. It also indicates the number of English students as a percentage of the total population of undergraduate students doing all subjects.

Period	Total Undergraduates	Total English Undergraduates	Percentage Studying English
2005-2006	1790745	51635	2.883%
2006-2007	1803425	53195	2.950%
2007-2008	1804970	55990	3.102%
2008-2009	1859235	54025	2.906%
2009-2010	1914710	56185	2.934%

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that English has been a steady subject choice for the last five years. It has not significantly gained students, but neither have significant numbers of students been put off from choosing English, despite the (false) perception that English does not offer a direct route to a specific career in the way engineering might.

However, against the backdrop of increasing overall student numbers, this stasis does not look especially promising. From 2008-2009 to 2009-2010, the total number of undergraduates increased by 3%. In that period, the number of undergraduates studying languages also increased by 3%, whilst the number of undergraduates studying English increased by 4%. Thus English looks to be doing slightly better than most of the comparable language subjects. However, it is clearly doing significantly worse than subjects like maths (9% increase) and sister subjects like communications (7% increase).

Over the previous five years of stable tuition fees, with each subject charging the same flat rate, English has just about held its own. However, we might expect it to be less robust with subsequent cohorts of students. In the immediate term, most students will be paying up to £9000 tuition fees. However, in the future, students may be able to pay reduced fees for taxpayer subsidised subjects that are perceived to be more economically necessary (such as engineering or medicine). They may not want to pay a high fee for a general subject such as English that does not, on the face of it, seem to be a pathway to an obvious career, and they may prefer to spend their money on a more applied qualification such as communication studies (which incorporates journalism, advertising and so on).

Voltaire's Candide and the War on Terror

2011-09-20T10:39:00.001Z

It is strange how one sometimes starts to read a novel that was published centuries ago, only to discover the fictional events resonating with immediate events in one's own time, so that each seems mutually to inform upon the other. There is, of course, nothing mysterious about why we might reinterpret a historical novel in the light of present experiences. Even so, when a historical novel seems to speak to our present - as if it somehow anticipated it - this can be unsettling and exciting. As Alan Bennett imagines it in The History Boys, it is as if the hand of someone long dead has reached out, and taken your own.

Such a grip from past to present has been holding me as I have been reading Voltaire's eighteenth-century Candide in the same week as the tenth anniversary of September 11th. The connections I outline below are by no means firm or convincing. Nevertheless, I've been unable to avoid feeling them as I have been reading.

Which is worse, the plague or the earthquake?
Voltaire wrote Candide, or Optimism (1759) at a time of religious and political persecution, during the pan-European Seven Years War. Among other things, Candide offers a critique of the philosophy of Leibniz, which claims that we inhabit the "best of all possible worlds." According to this principle, which Leibniz labelled as optimism, the world has been designed by God, such that any event - no matter how bad it seems to human eyes - must play a positive role in his ultimately benign master-plan. Although the meaning of the word "optimism" has been over-generalised since Leibniz coined it in the eighteenth century, his original principle is today best known through the figure of Dr Pangloss who features in the novel. No matter what befalls him, Pangloss believes that everything must happen for the best.

Dr Pangloss is tutor to Voltaire's hero, Candide, but his disciple finds his belief severely tested, as he lurches from one disaster to another. Candide is evicted from his noble household (and separated from his love, Cunégonde), is enlisted into the army, fights battles, suffers injury, and in his long escape and effort to be reunited with Cunégonde, witnesses injustice, torture, rape, avarice, hypocrisy. Time and again, though, as Candide encounters disaster and begins to think himself unfortunate, he suddenly meets someone whose story seems to be so much worse. Mid-way through the novel, having survived an earthquake and the Inquisition, he is briefly reunited with Cunégonde, who it appears has been serially raped and disembowelled. Lest this surfeit of violence not be enough, an old woman, who has helped Candide and Cunégonde escape, then complains that their horrors are nothing compared to her own. She was, she says, the long-suffering daughter of a Pope, who was captured by pirates on the night of her wedding: from this point on, she "had been exposed to poverty and slavery, had been raped almost daily, had seen her mother torn to pieces, had endured war and famine, and was now dying of the plague in Algiers."

The old woman turns to Cunégonde, who has survived an earthquake, and asks if she has ever suffered the plague. Cunégonde replies that she has not, at which the woman says that "you would have to admit that it is far worse than any earthquake." The old woman's challenge seems to be that which the reader is asked to answer in relation to the novel as a whole: whose character has suffered the most? which is the greatest misadventure? what is the worst form of suffering in this allegedly best of all possible worlds?

The reader might use his detached perspective to try to answer such questions, but as we are dragged along with Candide's adventures, we quickly realise that making such absolute judgements is ridiculous. We are continually invited to judge whose experiences do most to discredit Pangloss's naive optimism. However, just as we think we have reached a conclusion, another thing occurs which changes our frames of reference. We thereby recognise the fallacy of making cool and objective assessments of good and bad, and of trying to weigh individual suffering against the unwitting part it may play in God's plan. Leibniz's interpretation of suffering through the lens of philosophical abstraction does not do justice to how humans perceive their own suffering in the here and now. Just as Candide does not present believable, realistic characters but tortured caricatures, so Leibniz treats humans as divine devices, not individual agents with immediate thoughts and feelings.

Selfish though it may be, in the realm of actual human experience, we can only provide one answer to the old woman's implied question: that which is worse is that which happens one's own self. Whilst I may try to sympathise with the suffering of another, I will ultimately judge my own case as being the worst, because it is happening to me. Much though we admire Candide's perpetual, good-humoured optimism, we see that his Panglossianism fails to do justice to the complexity and horror of his own suffering with which we sympathise. It is only at the close of the novel, when he is reunited with his old tutor, that Candide appeals for the right to selfishly indulge in his own suffering, not to have to perceive it in relation to some bigger scheme that God has ordained. As the characters have finally achieved a comfortable life on a farm (though in a malicious touch, Voltaire has Cunégode become hideously ugly), Pangloss, in his schoolmasterly way, asks Candide if he is now satisfied with the idea of optimism. After all, Pangloss points out, if it had not been for all the previous disasters, he would not be here today. "All events form a chain in this," he says, "the best of all possible worlds." In the novel's famous concluding line, Candide retorts, "That is well said, but we must cultivate our garden." Faced with a complex, bewildering world of violence and terror, all the individual can do is look after number one, and not think about how they fit into a bigger chain of existence.

What, then, can this sort of vision, this tension between the unique sufferings of the self and the surplus sufferings of the world, possibly have to do with the wake of September 11th, and the ongoing War on Terror?

Making any connections between a novel and life runs the risk of equating actual historical suffering with its merely fictional cousin. However, September 11th and the subsequent War on Terror have been visualised and narrated with much the same tempo and tone as the crazy events of Candide. The last ten years have delivered a constellation of multimedia images that have flashed before the eyes too quickly to interpret: airliners above New York and F16s in Iraq; carbombs in Kabul and phone bombs in Madrid; twisted trains in Delhi and torn buses in London; police raids in Birmingham and grief in Wootten Bassett. The acceleration of the violence has been as relentless, and consequently baffling, as that of the novel, which in 100 pages crams in a bewildering array of horrifying events, some natural but most man-made.

It would clearly be unjust to say that the post-September 11th world has the comic quality to it which Voltaire's novel ultimately has, with its excess of violence. Nevertheless, there has been a similar sense of the levelling of disaster in both the comedy of the novel and the history of the real world. In Voltaire, everyone from princes to paupers seems to suffer in ingenious ways that make it hard to evaluate who has suffered more than whom. We barely have time to register one character's fate, before we move on to that of another. The novel has a breathless farce about it. The events of the last ten years seem likewise to be paced not according to the amenable plod of Whiggish history, but by the stream of consciousness of a novel (or movie). Just as in Voltaire, we have not been accorded time or stable frames or reference to evaluate which events have been worse, where the most suffering has been caused. There have been too many, too disparate acts and types of violence. Making fine-tuned evaluations has been a perpetual challenge. There have been uncountable judicial and moral issues to consider in the unsettling first decade of the twenty-first century, which have thrown up questions equivalent to those of the old woman of Voltaire's novel: Which is worse, the plague or the earthquake? Which is worse, September 11th or the War in Iraq? Which is worse, waterboarding a terrorist suspect or being unable to extract information that could save hundreds of civilian lives?

One answer would be that none of these comparative questions matter, so long as these bad events ultimately lead to a better world. In a version of Panglossianism, Neo-Conservatives argue that September 11th was some kind of bifurcation point in history. Democracy was threatened with an existentialist challenge that needed to be confronted. For Leibniz bad things have to happen in order to fulfil some ultimately good plan. For the likes of the authors of the Project for the New American Century, September 11th could be presented in a theological light as a providential opportunity: this was a moment that confronted liberalism with its failures, and that legitimised instead the use of force to assert values, such as democracy, that are allegedly universal and benign.

In the effort to achieve the best of all possible worlds, the world where every country is a democracy, Neo-Conservatives maintained a philosophical abstraction in their view of the War on Terror that circumnavigated individual suffering. They held fast to the conviction that a few would have to suffer in order to prove a democratic ideal. Their language itself embodied this view, the phrases "collateral damage" or "enhanced interrogation techniques" being chilling euphemisms designed to justify civilian casualties or torture. Had he been alive today, Voltaire would no doubt have provided an acerbic satire on words such as these, and their Liebnizian spirit: they try to neutralise the suffering of the individual, in order to situate it as part of a wider and more positive narrative about the advance of democracy.

With this, I seem to be making a classically liberal, relativist argument that opposes conservative absolutism. However, Voltaire's novel is useful because it reminds liberals (yes, including myself) of why the conservative view exists. The Panglossian narrative of the War on Terror - indeed, that very universalising term itself - offers a neat answer to a complex, globalised world where terror takes many different forms and has many different causes. It is tempting to encapsulate all the individual experiences of terror under one umbrella heading, as part of one grand confrontation between ideals that should ultimately conclude with the universal triumph of democracy. Candide acknowledges that this approach to suffering, and this sort of optimism, does at least encourage the self to look forwards, beyond their immediate moment, to imagine a better life beyond. Readers much cherish Candide for his perpetual, cheery hopefulness, which is only enabled by his faith in his Pangloss's view. Indeed, for all that Candide at the end of the novel rejects Pangloss's take on their adventures, the novel's plot does in fact lead the characters to a positive conclusion which seems to validate Pangloss. All events, it turns out, did form a chain in this novel, and the characters' happy life on the farm at the end is financed by the money Candide has gathered through the course of his epic, but tortuous, adventures.

However, when such plotting and chaining is done by a novelist in such a neat way that it seems unrealistic and caricatured, this makes a strong argument for saying that the world cannot be seen this way in actuality. Taken as a whole, Candide seems to warn that for all it may be tempting to gloss the sufferings of the individual in favour of the optimism of an ultimately better world, this is not a sustainable way to live an unpredictable existence.

Voltaire confronts us with violence and suffering taken to an extreme, ridiculous universality. Everyone seems to be suffering in some way in Candide, and in this world it is impossible to judge fairly who is suffering most, or whether there is any explanation for each person's fate. The messy milieu of the War on Terror - the threats to justice and human life, the high-tech warfare and guerilla terrorism - has seemed so chaotic that violence and suffering has become a universal force in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Yet Voltaire reminds us that, when confronted with a surfeit of violence, we can only feasibly think about how this bad world looks for the individual, not try to explain suffering in terms of a naive, bigger picture (democracy versus terrorism, for example). The old woman's question is absurd and unanswerable. Sticking to large Panglossian ideals leads us to ask the wrong sorts of questions, and to search for answers in abstractions and universals. The only sort of question it is reasonably possible to answer, though, is the more selfish one: how am I suffering, in the here and now?

Thinking like this demands empathy, of the sort we extend to Candide, as we perceive he does not do justice to the horror of his own plight. We need to think about how the world looks from the point of view of the terror suspect detained without trial. Of how it looks from the point of view of the civilian who has lost a loved one in an airstrike. Of a British soldier fighting in the heat of Basra. Of an impoverished Afghan farmer. Of the family of a dead firefighter in New York. All these people are suffering in their own way. The best those of us who are spectators of the War on Terror can do is to adopt a position like that which readers of Candide are required to take. We must acknowledge and understand the legitimacy of each person's claims to suffering, and not try to compare one against the other. Controversial though it may be, the terror suspect who has subsequently been released without charge has suffered, and we have to accept that their suffering may be, for them, worse than that of the victims or families of September 11th.

We must, in other words, sympathise with selfishness. We should not try to ask absolute questions about suffering, such as posed by the old woman, and should not seek to provide ultimate answers, of the sort provided by Leibniz. To conclude that the wrongly-accused terror suspect paid a "price worth paying" as a means to a democratic end is to behave as Pangloss does at the climax of Candide. Unlike the characters in Voltaire's novel, people in the lived moment do not perceive themselves as links in a chain of events towards a definite, optimistic end. To believe that they do can lead one to treat real people like characters in a novelistic plot, to move them at will in order to realise one's master plan. This, ultimately, is what likens the Neo-Conservative view to that of naive Pangloss, the view that we can - if only a few are willing to suffer airstrikes or torture, plagues and earthquakes - realise the best of all possible worlds.

Memories of September 11th

2011-09-11T16:35:00.001Z

I was at that time living in rural Shropshire, above the village shop that my dad runs. I was staring out of the window onto the street outside, marking the slow tempo of community life. Probably, I had just seen Mr Pollard hop on the 2.00 bus to the next village, having done his daily shop. Probably, silver-haired Mrs Morris and Mrs Jones had tottered past, clutching their afternoon shopping, humbugs no doubt secreted in the corner of their mouths as they chattered. Likely, towards the end of the university holidays, I was supposed to be working, but on this lazy day of late summer I had the radio on, tuned to Simon Mayo's programme on Five Live.

Probably it was only out of the corner of my ear, as my eye drifted over life wandering past outside, that I caught the breaking news that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. In my ignorance, I did not realise then that the World Trade Centre was a skyscraper, though I did register that it was in central New York. I ran downstairs, to where my dad was working in the shop, and turned the radio on. "Listen to this," I said, as he was busy with a customer, "a plane has crashed in New York." The radio suddenly announced that a second plane had now hit the other tower. The delay between the two reports was so short, separated only by the time it had taken me to run down the stairs, that it seemed like the two events must have been causally linked. They must have occurred simultaneously, and the news had simply been slow to register. "A mid-air collision," was my initial thought. "Something has gone badly wrong in air traffic control." I visualised two planes, shortly after takeoff from JFK, somehow on the same trajectory, somehow just clipping wings and somehow, bizarrely, conspiring each to hit a different tower.

I called again to dad to listen to the radio, and then went to the next room to turn on the television. Because of the way in which a whole gallery of images has since become so familiar, I can't remember exactly what the first clip I saw was. I imagine by that stage it must have been of both towers on fire. Only later did the footage of the second plane hitting the tower, which had actually struck fifteen minutes after the first, come through. In my confusion, then, even when I saw those early images, I was still imagining this to be an accident. Then they flashed news of a third plane hitting the Pentagon.

Suddenly, the events seemed not to be a mere accident. The very word "Pentagon" brought to mind a hundred action films and conspiracy theories, and so my frame of reference for the events shifted into the surreal. Afterwards, people would agree that it was "like watching a movie." The moment the Pentagon was hit, I thought of the film Independence Day, and the way in which the alien invasion is relayed in a realistic fashion through news reports, as American institutions like the White House and the Pentagon explode. (Strangely, some years later, I would write an academic article on the way in which it was impossible to see Independence Day, with its narrative of the assault on American cities and democracy, in the same way after September 11th.) I watched, then, as if these real events had the pace and urgency of a cinematic thriller. Shamefully - but I suspect not uniquely - my interest was not at this stage in the human casualties. If this was a film, then they surely were mere extras, anonymous fodder for dramatic explosions and apocalypse. Rather, my attention was for what would happen next. What had the director - whoever he or she was in this revelatory masterpiece - planned to keep us on the edge of our seats? How would the web of explanation begin to untangle itself?

I cannot remember in what order events did subsequently unfold, but I know that each newsflash seemed to occur with the cliché of a Hollywood thriller. Another flight had crashed in a field. F16s were being scrambled. The President was in Air Force One. Canary Wharf in London had been evacuated. The Prime Minister was due to issue an emergency statement. At some point in all this, I sent texts to my friends: "Turn the television on. I think we may be witnessing World War Three." I did not then know, of course, that the subsequent years would indeed become defined, rightly or wrongly, as an epoch: the War on Terror, the twenty-first century equivalent of the First and Second World Wars. A friend texted back: "Stop pissing around." Then he texted again: "Holy shit."

It was only when pictures came in of small, black specks dropping down the side of the towers that the human aspect of things began to register again. With an empathy that cut through the epic vista of the events, I recognised that each of those dots plummeting was an individual person who had to confront a horrible choice. The last few hours had been executed at a dehumanising, global scale. But this was not, after all, an apocalyptic film. Each of those dots was not a pixel but a unique person, with frail flesh and a terrified mind. This would be painfully recollected in subsequent days, as radio and TV played the last voicemails left to relatives. As Ian McEwan put it in a remarkable essay shortly after the event, all of them said some version of "those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you." Such words uttered in a film or pop song are clichéd. In the context of actual life, they are an inarticulate but necessary truth. It was precisely because these words and actions seemed like movie clichés but were not that they testified eloquently to the individual lives within the scale of the spectacle.

Then, live on air, entirely unexpectedly, the first of the towers collapsed. A billowing dust cloud charged towards the camera. Firefighters and medics, civilians and reporters, turned and ran, hands clasped to their mouths. It was these images, the view of those on the ground rather than the thrilling but dehumanising vistas shot from the news helicopters, that would come to define the event most poignantly and powerfully.

The second tower fell shortly after. Their terminal collapse seemed to punctuate the end of the immediate events of September 11th, even though it ultimately began a new sentence of wars in foreign deserts. For now, the news began to repeat itself, and then to drift into dissatisfyingly speculative analysis. I headed out in the car, to do dad's paper round. Radio 1 was playing sombre music by Elbow and Norah Jones. Chris Moyles, usually edgy and energetic, was restrained. He spoke little, only to introduce each song.

I returned home. Dad had long since turned the radio off. He was still under the impression that it had been an accident. I told him to let me close up shop, whilst he went and watched the television. By now, the reports had been neatly packaged into segments which put the whole thing into some kind of narrative and geographical order. The reporters talked of how events had "unfolded." But that word did not seem to capture the anarchic nature of the last three hours; even though the events had been plotted in one sense, from some cave in the Tora Bora mountains, and even though they had seemed to unravel like a scripted movie, they had also been inexplicable, and without a neat conclusion.

Life in the village would go on much as before. Mr Pollard would continue to catch the bus, which would still arrive punctually at 2.00. Mrs Morris and Mrs Jones would still chew on their sweets. Although the gossip around the school gates would be different for a while, it would soon return to grumbles about the price of petrol. This corner of Shropshire would not really be touched by September 11th, except through the passing airwaves of TV and radio. Beyond, though, in mountainous regions of the Middle East, in prison camps erected to protect democracy, in Asian communities in Bradford and on buses and tube trains in London, things would continue to be as messy, anarchic and unpredictable as those three hours that interrupted a mundane summer day.

Open Academic Publishing

2011-08-31T16:17:00.000Z

George Monbiot offers a caustic critique of the way in which publicly funded research is exploited for profit by large journal publishers. Much academic research is paid for by taxpayers. Journal editing and peer reviewing are labours of love conducted by academics for little financial reward. Yet the research publications that result are often not freely available, but are locked behind paywalls:

Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.

Of course, if you are lucky enough to work for a good university, you can access these via your institution. But for the university, the costs are huge, and squeeze other library resources such as IT facilities or book funds:

The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I've seen, Elsevier's Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy.

It is not surprising, then, that journal publishers and their shareholders are doing very nicely indeed:

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

Clearly, much is morally and economically wrong with this model. Monbiot offers some characteristically liberal solutions:

In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating – along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität – a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.

One might justifiably ask why change has not happened already. For good and bad, from Wikileaks to Open Government, from Piratebay to Flickr, the internet has seen data and creative ideas circulating freely. It has similarly enabled the creation of numerous open-access journals, which are published online without any of the overheads of print publications. Whereas paid-for journals need to appeal to a broad audience within a discipline, open-access journals can be narrowly focused for a particular subject group, and thus can achieve high visibility with those peers who are most relevant in an academic's field. On the other hand, rather than being accessible only by those with university subscriptions to the journal, anyone can in principle view open-access articles. And, typically, open-access journals do not tie their authors into long-term copyright agreements, so that they can freely republish their research on their own websites, in edited books, or in public and university databases, again giving it potentially greater scope and influence.

Since academics do not get paid by the publishers for submitting their research in paid-for journals, why then do they not readily submit their research to open-access publications?

One answer within UK universities lies in something called the Research Excellence Framework (formerly known as the Research Assessment Exercise) which allocates research budgets to institutions according to the quality of their academics' work. One key judgement of quality is the citation index - the number of times a researcher's paper has been referenced by his or her peers. The assumption is that the better or more ground-breaking a paper, the more often other researchers will want or need to build upon it (think how many times Einstein's special theory of relativity must have been mentioned by physicists over the years). Established, paid-for journals such as Nature have a high visibility in the academic world. If your article gets into Nature, the chances are that more of your peers will see it, will be influenced by it, and will cite it. Thus academics are encouraged by their institutions to set their sights on publishing in well-known journals with good citation ratings, even though their own libraries will then be extorted to access them.

This market ideology equates prestige with cost. Paradoxically, the more expensive a journal is, the more it is perceived to count when research gets published there: the thinking goes that such journals and their articles must be good if institutions and academics still want or need to access them despite their seemingly prohibitive costs. Further, many subscription journals continue to be published in paper form as well as digitally, whereas online-only, open-access journals can have issues of theoretically limitless length. Paid-for journals thus need to exercise greater editorial exclusivity in order both to sustain paper publication, and to justify the high price of their product - hence why more articles are rejected from paid-for journals than from open-access ones. For an academic to publish in an open-access journal can look suspiciously like an admission that his or her research is only second-rate.

It is not hard to see why, in this circumstance, large publishers have been doing well out of academia. Publishers have indeed fallen over themselves to help the Research Excellence Framework assessments by handing over citation data for their journals, whilst open-access journals can struggle to offer the quantitative indicators of impact (price of the journal, number of citations) that Whitehall number-crunchers like.

However, much as it riles that corporations like Elsevier can make profits from publicly funded research, market determinants do have some role to play in academic publishing. Monbiot imagines a world where we have a single global archive of academic literature and data. But we already have a similar sort of place. It is called the internet - and it is anarchic. Trying to separate out top research from less ground-breaking or flawed research that happens to appear at the top of a Google search is a nightmare for everyone in academia, from students to professors. Unless their editors happen to be outstanding at search engine optimisation, results for open-access journals are similarly jumbled amongst the noise. Although their articles are still rigorously peer-reviewed, they are the same one click away as trivial public commentary. So when in my Google search I spot a result locked behind Modern Fiction Studies, I make the extra effort to follow this result, even though this means going circuitously via my library to logon. Subscription journals, which have a vested financial interest in being selective as to what they publish, do at least ensure a fine-grained filtering of their material, even if what passes through is then locked behind a paywall.

Paid-for journals can also do a better job of publicising research than open-access journals or a single, vast public database could do. The media offices of Elvesier or Springer have a hotline to the science editors of news outlets: just consider the number of stories that appear based on innovative research published in the likes of Nature (a quick search on BBC News turns up 1500 reports). This ensures that high-quality research gets high-quality coverage both with other researchers who can build upon it, but also with the public who have the right to understand how the research they fund is influencing their lives.

Finally, by bundling together lots of different journal titles within their databases, publishing conglomerates have undoubtedly created an efficient, electronic ecosystem in which to conduct research. Articles are often tagged and hyperlinked to give easy access to similar research topics in comparable journals; publishers' archival functions allow researchers easily to call up back issues when once they would have needed to scour dusty library shelves.

But all these positives do not mean the situation as it stands is satisfactory. Monbiot cites a Deutsche Bank study that suggests that publishers do not offer enough of the above forms of added value to justify their 40% profit margins. We certainly need some changes.

We could start by reconsidering the Research Excellence Framework and its too-simplistic linkage between citations, journal value (whether value is assessed as its price or prestige) and research quality. Perhaps especially in the humanities, groundbreaking or thought-provoking research might not be that which is read and cited by a few scholars, but that which influences a more general public. Publications in blogs, websites, public databases and open-access journals ought to count as having an impact by virtue of the large audience they can potentially reach.

Secondly, copyright laws need to be revisited to encourage the portability of research. At present, I am technically breaking the law every time I copy music from one of my CDs onto my MP3 player. This aspect of nineteenth-century copyright law is soon to be changed to allow for the transfer of creative data, and we need to create a similar kind of multimedia environment for publicly-funded research. In its immediate moment, top research might still be best published in a high-visibility journal. If the research is groundbreaking enough, it will have its impact there and then; to protect the value that paid-for publications can bring by making such research highly visible to the academic and wider community, there does need to be some copyright restriction on it. There is, though, a law of diminishing returns, with research being less significant as subsequent research builds on the old. I am sure that few contemporary physicists would now bother citing Newton's Principia. As research diminishes in its immediate influence, so it ought to be liberated back to the sphere of the public which originally funded it, and placed in the sort of central repository Monbiot envisages. The government should ensure that no publicly funded research is locked into an arcane 75 year copyright held by the journal which happens to be the first to publish data or ideas; such research ought to be automatically released after a set period (five years, say) in a rights-free, digital form to be redistributed by national copyright libraries.

Finally, academics should be offered development opportunities to educate them about the diverse publication media now available, from blogging to open-access publishing. Academics themselves should recognise the power of open models, as well as the limitations. Research published freely online can easily get lost amongst the detritus. But flag up that research to one's close academic community through the likes of Twitter or Academia.edu, and suddenly that research can have more of an impact with both selected peers and the general public than it could if locked in a subscription journal. Once academics themselves start to take the initiative, to set up their own open-access journals rather than simply peer reviewing for wealthy publishers, to promote the free circulation of ideas rather than happily editing journals which lock research under prohibitive copyright, then the big publishers themselves will have to revisit their current, exploitative model.

Annotating Books

2011-08-30T09:19:00.000Z

Over at the New York Times, Geoff Dyer has been wondering about what readers do to books:

There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books). I don’t mean on the reputations or royalties of the authors who wrote the books but on the actual physical objects themselves.

Once a book is finished, readers will have absorbed into their own minds the information that the book alone once held. But the process of reading is not just a mental one, but a physical one, with readers marking a text as they go. They fold down corners, crease and buckle pages, spill coffee and tea, tear covers, and annotate in the margins. These are the archaeological imprints that turn any one book from being a collection of textual characters - one is reprinted identically in thousands of different editions or in a digital form - to being a unique object that is possessed by one particular reader. George Steiner wrote that an intellectual is someone who can’t read a book without a pencil in his or her hand. One can only truly know the contents of a book by engaging in a dialogue with it, marking its pages as one turns.

So does this mean that I am not an intellectual? Because ever since I have been studying literature professionally, I have rarely marked my books. I hardly ever annotate the margins, and at most I might fold down a page or put a sticky note to bookmark a relevant passage. On the face of it, it might seem as if I am a book fetishist. I respect the integrity of a book, and cherish it like a precious china tea set that can only be used once before being put away forever for safekeeping. So books sit neatly on my shelves, spines slightly broken from one reading, but otherwise unsullied by their encounter with me.

And yet precisely the opposite is the case: far from fetishising books, I treat them as mere tools of my trade.

I live in a small house. The only places I can store books are in two small two bookshelves and two boxes that can slip under my bed. My collection of books is limited to around 250 at any one time (I know this, because I diligently catalogue them using Endnote). My collection is thus less like a permanent record of my reading, and more like a transitional library reflecting my interests and needs at any one time. Many of the books on my shelves, for example, are those that I am teaching, or those that I need to read imminently. Once I read a book, if I do not think I will need it again I will pass it on to a charity shop, or take it to a book exchange. Books have a provisional status in my life. I may buy a particular text one day, but unless it assumes an unusual or practical significance, I will let it drift out of my house without giving it a second thought.

I rarely mark my texts, then, because they feel to me less like possessions and more like lent tools, temporarily passing through my hands so that I can borrow the words from the page, before the object itself journeys elsewhere. Always conscious that I might one day need to resell or donate my book to a new reader, I do not want to influence their first experience by requiring them to look at my marginal commentaries. As Jeff Dyer observes, whilst he is happy to mark books, he will never buy a book if it has been previously annotated.

But what of those books I choose to keep, and do not want to pass on? Besides those books I need for teaching, another factor that determines if I will keep a book is if it has been especially influential on me, taking a place in my affections or intellect such that I think I might want to read it again. Once I have given it a permanent place on my shelves, the elected book becomes a canonical giant in my necessarily small collection. Why not mark even these books? I think it is because I like the sense of secondary surprise that re-opening a once-read book entails. To mark a book the first time around (when of course I do not know whether I will ultimately decide to keep it or not) would be to risk conditioning my reading experience for any potential second reading. My adult self, re-reading Wuthering Heights ten years hence, might not want to remember my teenage self's hormonal identification with Heathcliff. My mature self reading Moby Dick for pleasure is not interested in the psychoanalytic insights my naive undergraduate eyes spotted the first time around. Marginal comments can distort the delicious uncanny that comes from re-reading a cherished book, its sense of familiarity but also newness, of things once seen dimly now seen in a different light.

Given the nature of my reading experience, the fact that I read books but rarely interact with them, one might imagine that I would be happy to venture into the world of e-books. If, for me, books as printed objects are transitional, then books as digital texts would be usefully ephemeral. They ghost freely through the internet or are beamed onto a Kindle, but can then be deleted as soon as their purpose is served. They do not need to take up any space on my shelves. I can digitally annotate a text as much as I like, whilst still having access to a clean copy. However, as yet I have been unwilling to get an e-reader.

This is partly for the practical reasons of my profession. Since many of my physical books are those I need to teach, and since students are asked to buy print editions, I need to keep hold of the same copies as they will be using. I could certainly use an e-book, but I would still need to own the hard copy as well.

The price of e-books is also a deterrent. Once you accept that you will only keep a book temporarily, rather than preserving it on your shelves for years to come, you become quite happy to buy whatever tattered, third-hand edition happens to lurk in Oxfam. You do not feel the need to splurge on a pristine £15 hardback because you know that you will want to archive it forever. And one needs to buy an awful lot of 99 pence paperbacks to make the economies work in favour of a £100 e-reader.

And, in part, I resist digital books because I take some pride in pruning my library. I have academic colleagues who have offices stacked with thousands of books. These unruly tumbles represent the fertile gardens through which their minds have roamed over many decades. But I guess as an intellectual I am neater, more selective. I own fewer books, but those books I do possess are the ones that I need to own. My small, neat bookshelves are an extension of my mind, trim and focused rather than wild and abundant. Every time I choose to send a book to a charity shop, I put a neat, privet hedge around an area of research or a writer that I do not want to pursue further, and this clarifies those areas and writers who I do want to survey some more. To look at my shelves is to reflect on my own direction and purpose, much as a writer's selected prose or poems summarise their literary life. But if I were to keep my collection digitally - with the unlimited storage of the internet - I would never need to do any of this sort of weeding.

So contrary to George Steiner, to read a book without a pencil in one's hand can also be a mark of intellect. Every time I take an uncut book from my shelves, I know that its ultimate fate will see it sent it to a charity shop, or archived in my selected canon. By not annotating as I go, I keep either option open: I can pass it on to a fresh reader, or will preserve the original text so that I can encounter it with clear judgement second time around. This process of evaluation is a serious one, a cutting Solomon's choice. I may not take in as much information as I would do if I was an active reader, marking and commenting in the margins as I go. But this misses the point. If a book is worthwhile, it surely does not just deserve momentary commenting - it deserves a complete re-reading, to absorb its ideas and characters for a second time, and in full.

Academic Anonymity

2011-08-25T14:44:00.002Z

I blogged recently about some of the cosmetic changes I've made to The Pequod over the summer. However, one of the more significant changes is that I am no longer publishing here under a pseudonym. My real identity, Alistair Brown, now graces the banner of every page.

When I first started The Pequod, I was a fresh-faced graduate. The site began as a whimsical little project to try to sustain my writing skills whilst I did a "normal" job for a year, before returning to study. I was conscious that much of the material that was on here was what literary historians might classify as "juvenalia," the early jottings and experiments of a young writer, before they enter the adult world of paper publication. Thus it seemed right to publish under the pseudonym Ishmael, in keeping with the site's general Moby Dick theme, in order to acknowledge - partly to others, more importantly to myself - that nothing here represented my writing as I wanted it to be remembered. Work that would once have been kept in dusty boxes in the attic might in the twenty-first century be made publically available on the internet, but it should still be somewhat concealed by a pen name.

As I later became a postgraduate, first taught and then researching for a PhD, this distinction between my real self and my Pequod self became even more important. Partly I wanted my real self to be judged as an aspiring academic only on the basis of work that was my best (such as my thesis or journal articles) not anything I happened to churn out on a whim. Even at that not-so-distant time, academic bloggers were a rarity, with most forms of online publishing seen as a diversion from "proper" academic work which was published in paper journals. To present a carefully researched paper at a conference, and then to have an esteemed professor read about my views on fish and chips in Whitby, might have been counterproductive.

Additionally, as I took on some teaching duties, and began to blog about my early experiences as a way of reflecting on my development, I was conscious of the need to maintain a barrier between myself and my students. One controversial statement about a student (even if not named) that they subsequently found and complained about, could have had serious consequences for my fledgling career.

However, as time has passed and The Pequod has expanded, these two have become less significant issues.

Firstly, much of the work that is now on here has been previously published elsewhere, in academic journals or on edited review sites. Rather than being an attic of juvenalia, The Pequod is now more of an academic archive. Whilst respecting copyright principles, it seems logical that I should use this site to collect together anything I have published, along with material that may be not quite in publishable form, but still worthy of distributing amongst the academic community.

Secondly, on reflection, most of my posts on teaching and higher education are not in any way controversial or scandalous. As my recent posts on the tuition fees issue show, I hold very strong and forthright views - but these are views with which the majority of my academic colleagues would probably agree. Recently, the Open University, for which I work part-time, updated its terms of employment to include its lecturers' usage of social networks. The contract explicitly states that:

You are free to publish material in any space which is not related to the OU and does not bring the OU into disrepute

And that:

You are free to post your thoughts or comments about the OU. However you should take care to avoid activity that enables or promotes plagiarism, infringes another person's privacy (e.g. by posting their contact details without permission), makes untrue statements about the OU or OU material, infringes the OU's copyright or intellectual property.

Looking back on the various blog posts I have published about my OU and other university experiences, I am happy that nothing I have said in the past breaks the OU's own guidance. Most of it is, in fact, highly complimentary, both about the OU itself and its (my) students.

To hide behind my pseudonym therefore seems to suggest that I have no conviction in the legitimacy of my own views, arguments and ideas - which seems entirely anathema to the way in which an academic should work and behave.

The final thing which caused me to come out into the open was the advent of Twitter. Of all the social networks, it is Twitter that has most radically changed the ways in which public voices channel their private views. Politicians express opinions on Twitter with a forthrightness that would be unbecoming if heard within the chambers of Parliament. BBC correspondents are happy to tweet their own attitudes on current affairs, whilst retaining their impartiality in their formal reports under the institutional banner. There is a growing chorus of academics on Twitter who complain about their students or make fiery statements that they would temper if lecturing within the university walls. Most make clear on their online profiles that their ephemeral tweets are wholly personal, and that they do not necessarily reflect the views of their institutions. And, a few high-profile cases aside, most readers seem able to understand that the voice of someone on Twitter is not necessarily identical to their voice when they put on the suit of the newsreader or the gown of the don.

When I joined Twitter, I decided to tweet under my own name rather than my pseudonym. Partly, this is because many of my Twitter friends are colleagues and acquaintances who are relevant to my research and teaching. For them to receive Tweets from some Ishmael from a novel would have been confusing and affected. Partly, using Twitter to post links and updates related to my work, higher education and, yes, to trivial issues about what I had for breakfast, might help to boost my profile amongst the milieu of academics also on there.

I also decided that as tweeting is a form of regular but abbreviated blogging, it made sense to link this blog to my Twitter account and vice versa, through posting my Twitter feed in the sidebar of The Pequod. This led to the bizarre scenario in which some of my tweets under my own name linked back to my blog posts which were published pseudonymously, whilst anyone happening upon my pseudonym on my website could easily find my real identity by following me on Twitter.

It has become a cliché that the internet is changing the ecosystem of publishing in rapid and unanticipated ways. When I started publishing The Pequod, it seemed that relatively few academics bothered with blogging or tweeting. Today, though, the virtual ivory towers ring with tweets and blogs, opinions and ideas, inane chatter and informed comment. Indeed, publishers have come to expect that academics will have some form of online presence and that they will be willing to build their book-buying audience through social networks.

As The Pequod rides this turbulent sea, with its captain hoping to arrive at the destination of a full-time academic job and book deal, it therefore seems antiquated and foolhardy not to toss Ishmael overboard, and to let Alistair Brown take the helm.

The Higher Education Fail

2011-08-19T07:59:00.000Z

On the day that students hope to pass their A-Levels, let us remember that today also marks the failure of Higher Education in the UK, as the next cohort of A-Level students will be the first to pay for their university education under the new tuition fee regime. I have blogged many times about why the government's plans for universities are flawed, so I will largely hand over to Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books, who provides an acute dissection of the bloody mess that is the Higher Education White Paper. Each of the "subjects" below were the originally intentions behind the Browne review proposals. Each of them, though, has failed in its implementation. The quotes are Collini's.

Subject: Decreasing costs for taxpayer. Grade: Fail.

The original intention of the Browne Review was to find a way to square a circle: allow more students to attend university, whilst decreasing the cost to the taxpayer. We will come to the former issue in a moment. But with respect to the latter, it seems clear that the immediate costs to the taxpayer will actually increase. As Collini points out, it is strange that the supposedly independent Browne review managed to recommend slashing public spending on universities just before the coalition announced its own spending plans. But it is a disaster that, ultimately, the government's reforms will actually increase public spending:

We now know that when the decision was taken to replace the block grant with a loan system, the Treasury (presumably the real driving force behind the change) calculated that the initial expenditure on loans would more or less match current expenditure on the teaching grant if the average fee were no higher than £7500. But the Treasury had assumed that the Office for Fair Access (Offa), which oversees universities’ admissions policies, had the legal power to dictate how much a given university could charge, ensuring that fees would be kept down to the desired average level. But Offa has no such legal power, as its director was obliged to ‘remind’ the government. A great many universities were setting fees of £9000 (as anyone could have told the government they would). It slowly dawned on the government that not only was the scheme not going to reduce expenditure; it was actually going to be a lot more expensive than the present system. Whether one is broadly in favour of the new fee regime or not, there can be no denying that the policy-making process in the last eight months has been a shambles.

Subject: Increasing university funding. Grade: Fail.

The above would be just about acceptable if it were to mean that universities would be better resourced than they can be through the public purse. Although there are problems with the government's fixation on world university rankings - and especially the American model - in its interpretation of what UK universities can achieve after they are effectively privatised, nevertheless any increased income to universities can only be a good thing. Except this will not happen. The government has claimed that the new regime will see university income increase by 10% by 2015. This seems unlike, as Collini points out:

Willetts has proudly maintained that this policy does not represent a cut to universities, but a boost to their income of around 10 per cent by 2015. It’s just that from now on, he says, the money will be ‘channelled’ through students. But by 2015 the Treasury won’t have recouped a penny of the money it will have given out in loans since 2012, so that this 10 per cent rise must therefore be an increase in government expenditure on higher education above the cost of maintaining the present block grant (even though a loan is an asset not a cost in accountancy terms). After 2015, some students will start to pay some of their loans back, at varying rates, when they start to earn more than £21,000. On the most optimistic figures, it will take 30 years for the Treasury to recoup 70 per cent, at most, of what it provides in loans each year (other economic analysts think the government will never recover more than 50-55 per cent of the amount loaned). And the official figures are based on the Treasury’s assumption that the average fee would be £7500, which even the government must now realise will not be the case. Whatever else is said in favour of this policy, it cannot be maintained that it represents a saving in public expenditure in the short or medium term, even though in the longer term it does amount to a significant shift from public to private funding.

Subject: Increasing access for students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds. Grade: Fail.

As a consequence of the increase in the up-front cost to the treasury, the government had to row back on its plans to allow universities to accept unlimited numbers of fee-paying students. Rather than lifting the cap on the total number of students able to go to any one university, the government has actually had to maintain it, only allowing some flexibility at the "margins." At one margin, universities which set significantly lower fees will be allowed to take more students. At the other, universities will be able to take any number of students with top A-Level grades, so-called "gold dust" consumers. Collini states the consequences of this rigged-market approach very well:

In keeping with its wholly phantasmal conception of competition, the White Paper declares confidently that the new system ‘should allow greater competition for places on the more selective courses and create the opportunity for more students to go to their first-choice institution if that university wishes to take them’. But the two parts of this assertion must be in contradiction: if there really will be more competition for the most sought-after places, then by definition opportunities for applicants to get their first-choice places will be reduced, not increased. The actual effect of the changes will be to make the distribution of resources for institutions match more closely the distribution of A-level scores. Just on fee income alone, students at institutions with an AAB offer or better will be better resourced, by quite a long way, than students at institutions with lower entry requirements. This is a naked example of the use of state power to entrench hierarchy in the name of ‘market principles’. By effectively ruling that a large number of universities must charge considerably less than the level it has legally permitted institutions to charge, the government is constructing a system that is bound to reinforce existing social inequalities.

Subject: Allowing universities autonomy. Grade: Fail

Universities have long cherished their autonomy from government policy, being the one public space where research and discourse can be conducted free from the requirement that they give immediate returns on investment. Collini speculates that this is why the government has been so keen to bring universities to heel, as it dislikes the idea of the funding public institutions which do not necessarily have a direct or quantifiable impact on the economic wellbeing of the nation (as if economic wellbeing is the same thing as being of social value). This autonomy looks set to be removed, as government will be able to set recruitment priorities and access requirements, despite the fact that it is primarily students who will be paying for higher education in the long term.

This plan is designed to produce a rigged market in which the ‘top providers’ will do well and there will be the usual race to the bottom at the lower end. The government has introduced de facto price controls, laying bare the hypocrisy in its proud affirmations that universities are ‘autonomous’, that admissions are ‘a matter between the student and the university’, that the government cannot dictate what fees universities set and so on. And it has done this after universities have already set their fee levels for 2012. Universities believed the system would operate by one set of rules, but now they have been told the rules have changed, and that some of them will be punished for decisions they were forced to make by the government’s own rushed timetable.

Subject: Exam Preparation. Grade: Fail

It is worth noting that most of the government's failure in the test of university reform derives from its lack of careful revision. Revision, that is, of the Browne Review.

The usual way for government reviews to work their way into government policy and then into legislation is this: the initial review will outline the general scope of what needs to be improved and the government will announce a consultation period based on its findings; Parliament and other interested parties (such as universities and students) will have an opportunity to make their comments heard, which will then result in a White Paper being set before Parliament, for further discussion; Parliament and the House of Lords will then draft and redraft legislation, putting the White Paper into practice.

However, the government decided to ignore this usual revision timetable. The government announced that it "accepted" the recommendations of the Browne Review, then legislated for its recommendations to be put into practice, telling universities to set their fees under the new proposal; only six months later did it publish the White Paper which contained the fine discussion of the legislation long since announced. Except it turned out that the White Paper did not just formalise a process that had already started. Instead, it quite radically changed its direction. As the government realised that universities were setting more or less maximum fees in an attempt to recoup their cut in central funding, the White Paper added all sorts of qualifications and provisos, such as effectively reinstating a cap on student numbers - something the new marketplace in tuition fees was originally going to see lifted. This led to universities setting fees and putting in proposals to maintain access, without knowing how the final scheme would work.

The government - led by "two-brains Willetts" - seems a bit like a student who has sat up all night cramming for one exam, only to realise the next morning that the exam in front of them is not the one they were expecting to sit. The government intended its reforms to facilitate a free market in higher education, which, they dogmatically assumed, would automatically entail increased quality and value in teaching as students were enabled as "consumers." But in the final test, they have set a policy which is anything but a free market, which restricts student numbers and sets the burden of payment not primarily on students (though they will be impacted in the long run) but on the public purse. The government has failed, ultimately, to realise that some things - such as education - simply are not marketplaces, but need to be publicly funded.

Susan Greenfield and Autism

2011-08-08T14:14:00.005Z

I was interested to read today that a leading neuropsychologist, Dorothy Bishop, has criticised her fellow Oxford professor, Susan Greenfield, after the latter claimed that the rise in internet use has led to an increase in cases of autism. In an open letter to Greenfield, published in New Scientist, Bishop said she was "dismayed by the way in which your public communications have moved away from science." Bishop suggested that her views depended on a fundamental (perhaps deliberate?) misreading of the evidence, since the rise in cases actually precedes the widespread adoption of the internet, and is best accounted for by a change in diagnostic techniques.

Greenfield's skewing of the evidence to make a point seems to tally with what I felt in my review of Greenfield's ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. So many of the arguments in this book seemed to be unsubstantiated, deriving from her ideological opposition to new technology, rather than from careful scrutiny of the scientific and social data.

We often bemoan the state of science reporting in the mass media. It does not help when scientists like Greenfield seek to become the story themselves by making lavish and apocalyptic pronouncements about the way in which games, social media and so on can affect the health of children.

Gold Dust Students Need Gold Standard Universities

2011-08-01T09:41:00.001Z

The outgoing head of Universities UK, Steve Smith, has suggested that universities will try to "buy" top-performing students in an effort to increase recruitment. Such students will be "gold dust" as universities will be allowed to accept them in unlimited numbers.

When it implemented the Browne review recommendations, the government envisaged that the market in tuition fees would enable universities to expand and to accept as many students as they could attract (in contrast to the current situation, where each university is allocated a fixed number of government-funded student places). However, the government naively underestimated the number of universities that would choose to charge the top £9000 tuition fee, in order to compensate for drastic cuts in central funding. This fees benchmark would be unsustainable for the treasury, which has to pay tuition fees up front, and so the government is likely to be forced to reduce student numbers below the current cap, leading to the worst of both worlds: a higher cost to the taxpayer, with fewer student places. The one caveat is that in order not to deter the brightest students, universities will be allowed to take as many top-grade AAB students as they like; such students would be what Smith refers to as "gold dust."

This would be fine for elite universities charging the full £9000, which currently accept and receive a high proportion of applications from such students. But Smith predicts that middle-ranked universities that would usually not expect AAB quality applicants will start to dangle generous bursaries or reduced tuition fees in order to fish students from this uncapped pool. The government has responded by celebrating the fact that "Universities need to meet tough new criteria for attracting the brightest students from lower income backgrounds, including offering fee waivers and bursaries. These additional scholarships will help universities to attract the brightest and the best students."

However, this is where the government's shambles of a policy on access to higher education is exposed. Consider the case of two students, both predicted top AAB grades at A-Level.

Student A (let's call him Gordon) attends a decent but unspectacular state sixth form college. His AAB grades are significantly above the average for his peers. He comes from a comparatively poor background, and will be the first of his family to attend university. His careers adviser tells him that with these grades, he could get in at a top university - York or Durham, maybe Oxbridge. But these are all charging £9000, and he would need to live away from home. Alternatively, he could go to a middle-ranking university that will offer him half-price fees, because he represents a "gold dust" uncapped place; he could commute there on the train, and save himself living costs. His family, naturally, encourage him to opt for this place.

Student B (let's call him Cameron) attends a good private school and sixth form college. His AAB grades are clearly very good, but many students from this college are coached into earning these top marks. Both his parents went to university, and it is naturally expected that he will attend a "red brick" like them. His parents, being comparatively wealthy, have saved enough to pay some of his fees up front, meaning the £9000 charge from a top university is not too much of a deterrent. There is never any thought, or reason, for Cameron to go to his local university, despite the temptation of cut-price fees. He will go to the university that is best for him, given his underlying abilities and educational credentials.

Gordon attends his good university, which offers him a decent experience. OK, he has to sit in some remedial classes for his first year (because most of his fellow students are there on C grades, and are not quite up to the required standard in his subject). Staff-student ratios are high; there are few tutorials or seminars, and mostly he is taught through lectures by hard-working academics, who are not quite leading names in their field. He comes out with a good degree, though having been surrounded by those just looking to achieve solid 2:1 degrees he has perhaps not been pushed by his peers or his teachers to achieve the First Class result he was capable of. He looks for work, although not having attended an especially well-known university he has to work hard to explain to employers the value of his degree, compared to that from a brand name institution.

Cameron, meanwhile, has been to his top university, surrounded by equally bright peers and taught by leading academics; he has been pushed intellectually and achieved a very good degree, perhaps a First. He has cultivated skills in debate and gained confidence by the small group teaching that is more prominent at this leading university. His university is also a well known name in the graduate employment world, with the likes of KPMG and Accenture eager to pluck students like Cameron clutching their degrees and to take them into a well-paid career. On the other hand, his university is also a research-led institution, and keen to offer postgraduate places and bursaries to entice its best students to stay on for further study.

Both of the above scenarios are, of course, caricatures, although league tables make some of this sketch legitimate: some of the key markers between top and middle universities are their staff-student ratios, proportion of students with Firsts, small group teaching, and employability prospects. For the record, the student I most resembled back in my day is Cameron (though I never wanted to become a corporate clone at the end), and one of the universities I now work at pitches itself in exactly this league. I know from personal experience how the system entrenches privilege, taking a high proportion of students from excellent family and educational backgrounds, and sending them out to work for high powered, high paid companies, or enabling them to pursue further research (as happened to me). None of this is Cameron's fault. He certainly has every right to attend a top university with his grades, regardless of the good fortune of his private education. But there is an evident problem in the fact that Gordon's choices were governed not by which university would be best for him academically, but by that which offered the best value financially.

The government has been working hard to explain to students how the system of bursaries, and up-front payment of tuition fees, will mean that they should have a free choice as to their university, and should be able to access the institution that is best for them. However well-meaning, though, the lifting of the cap on top-performing students will actually serve to limit - or at least determine - student choices so that they are made for financial rather than academic reasons. No student, especially no student coming from a weaker educational background, should have their aspirations halted by the ceiling of debt; no top student should be encouraged by the promise of a cut price to attend a university of a lower overall quality (no matter how good that institution is for less academically capable students). Yet this is the prospect that Steve Smith raises.

Changes to The Pequod

2011-07-27T07:41:00.000Z

Some watchers of this site may have noticed that I have taken advantage of the academic vacation to (metaphorically speaking) scrub the decks and coil the ropes of The Pequod, tidying up some aspects of the website. I last had a major play with the look back in 2007, so this was long overdue. Some of the key changes are:

Redesigned banner area, with the title now linking to the home page (allowing me to delete the 'Welcome' tab. A Google+ button is now available, whilst I have deleted the the Print and Save buttons.
More white space at the top of the page, making it easier to distinguish between navigation elements and the main content column.
Removed some of the minor links to the Sitemap and Accessibility Information from the top of the page, and grouped these under a new About tab.
Book reviews were originally placed within the Essays section. These have now been separated and given their own Reviews tab. I have also added book cover images and links to each review.

The other major change, which is indicated by the fact that my real name now appears at the top of the website, is that I have decided to drop the pseudonym Ishmael that I have published under since I started this website in 2004. I will give the reasons for this in a separate post.

Cats, Monkeys, and The News of The World

2011-07-12T07:50:00.003Z

The now-defunct News of the World used to have on its masthead the slogan "All human life was there." The slogan sounds fairly Biblical, which might be appropriate given that the tabloid's headlines often pronounced some righteous revelations of epic proportions. The quote actually comes, though, from Henry James' short story "The Madonna of the Future." In full, it reads "Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats, all of human life is there."

The speaker of the quote is a Florentine artist who creates tasteless statuettes of animals (one imagines the chintzy sort of thing advertised at the back of the Radio Times); the narrator of the story does not approve:

They consisted each of a cat and a monkey, fantastically draped, in some preposterously sentimental conjunction. They exhibited a certain sameness of motive, and illustrated chiefly the different phases of what, in delicate terms, may be called gallantry and coquetry; but they were strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women. I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me. I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar. Their imitative felicity was revolting.

Although the News of the World no longer used this masthead by its end, the source still seems appropriate. Murdoch's press came to view celebrities and crime victims, politicians and soldiers, as little more than performing monkeys for the "preposterously sentimental" delight of the masses; stories were written with a semblance of realism, all the while being cynical and vulgar. The News of the Worlds claims to have hacked blagged in the "public interest," but its pretensions to imitative truth were ultimately baseless, tasteless, and, yes, revolting.

After the Students, the Diggers

2011-07-06T11:23:00.000Z

There is a philosophical riddle which asks ""If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" At the end of the academic year, I wonder whether departing undergraduates (philosophy students or otherwise), ever pause to consider a variant of that question: when the students leave, does a university continue to exist?

The answer is that it does, though in a somewhat reduced form. Although academics potter around, conferences are held, laboratories whirr into life with intense Summer research projects, a sense of vacancy pervades a university and its town. Pubs and libraries alike become emptier, lonelier places. Libraries and department offices close at five o'clock, instead of at ungodly hours into the evening. Mrs. Morris's flowerpots suddenly seem less prone to vacate her front garden and move to number 32 up the road. Traffic cones appear more rooted to their roadworks, rather than being alternatively employed as loudhailers.

Yet even as the last student crams his duvet into an overburdened car, or shuts the door of his halls of residence for the final time, even as a hush begins to descend, other noises and movements take the stage. As if they have been waiting in the wings for exams to finish, suddenly bright yellow diggers charge onto campus; traffic and pedestrian diversion signs redirect you from your accustomed routes to work; scaffolds scale the sides of buildings for painters and window cleaners to remove grime; the buzz of drills and the hum of electric generators takes over the air from the chatter of students.

Pinned to those tall, temporary builder's fences across campus, glossy boards appear with promising computer images of new lecture halls, extended libraries, bigger sports halls. These are, the vice-chancellor explains in his thrusting, visionary emails, all enhancements to that ephemeral but vital thing in the tuition-fee era, the "student experience."

But what of the experience of those of us left behind? Through thin walls in the library, strange bangings and clatterings can be heard, sounds which would never be allowed to disrupt the silence of revision time. Signs appear on the ends of book stacks, forcing one to decipher the cryptic rearrangements of shelfmarks that are suddenly taking place. Computers get taken away without warning, for upgrades and repairs. It would be tempting to grumble about academics being less important than the student body during this three-month summer programme of refurbishment, rebuilding, rearranging. On the other hand, it is one more reason to take advantage of one of the special privileges of academic life, and work from home (preferably in the garden, under a July sun).

But today I have to make a rare trip in. As I walk past a drab, concrete, 1960s lecture hall, a secretary wheels a trolley overburdened with files, which topples onto the pavement. Helping her collect the strewn papers, it appears that they are being removed because a ceiling has just collapsed in the Modern Languages Department. This is, I would like to imagine, a post-Browneian implosion, as the building reacts to the government's abrupt withdrawal of funding support for the arts and humanities from next year. More realistically, however, this concrete monolith has breathed a sigh of relief that during this three month hiatus it can reveal its true, mouldering age, safe in the knowledge that a lick of paint and fresh plasterboard will restore its respectability in time for the new cohort of students in October.

Sex and Perrier

2011-07-05T10:57:00.000Z

In his chapter about his early experiences as a homosexual, Alan Bennett in Untold Stories provides a sardonic and persuasive metaphor that puts paranoia about homosexuality in its proper place.

Throughout a chapter called "Written on the Body," Bennett recounts his awkward shyness as a young man, his slow adolescence, and his struggles to both articulate and act upon his sexual feelings. More than anything, he simply wanted to find companionship and to enjoy sex, without necessarily being voracious or public about it. He did not choose his sexual orientation; it is just something that seems to have happened to him at school, almost unnoticed.

At a party hosted by Ian McKellen in 1989, to support the abolition of Clause 28, Bennett relates the following anecdote about one of his readings at the event:

I introduced the extract, saying that to enquire (as McKellen had done) if I was homosexual was like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water.

Just as the man in the desert wants water, and its precise variety is irrelevant, so any individual wants (is even at times desperate for) love, sex and companionship. It is - or ought to be - irrelevant whether this need may be satisfied by attachments to those of the opposite sex, or of the same sex. This humanitarian observation is one that those religious conservatives who are petrified of homosexuality would do well to take note of. To be concerned about sexual preference is to miss the bigger picture of why sex and relationships matter in the first place, as necessary as water to the full and nurtured human life, and not something which anyone should be deprived of or chastised for.

Two Thoughts on Twelfth Night

2011-07-02T08:30:00.001Z

I went to see a cracking production of Twelfth Night at the Ludlow Festival last night. Two very brief thoughts occur to me now (I was too busy laughing last night at a superbly fast-paced, comic production).

Firstly, is Sir Toby Belch not a kind of less critical iteration of Falstaff from Henry IV? They bear many similarities - both are larger than life (both physically and wittily), both are archetypes of the lazy squire, both are attached cloyingly and inappropriately to a court (Olivia's) or royalty (Henry).

The difference comes in the judgement made of them on stage. In Henry IV, Part 2, Hal - now King Henry V - repudiates his former comrade in drink, his "old lad of the castle":

For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.

By contrast, in Twelfth Night, Belch's horrid manipulation of Malvalio, which leads to Malvolio's outcasting as an apparent lunatic, goes unpunished. Whilst the comedy of marriage and disguise is neatly concluded - Viola revealed as a woman so she can marry Orsino, Sebastian able to marry Olivia - the comedy of bawdy humour that takes place at Malvolio's expense does not get resolved.

Right at the end the clown continues to mock Malvolio - mimicking his famous lines about "greatness" even as he confesses to playing his part in his downfall.

Clown. Why, 'some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.' I was one, sir, in this interlude; one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one. 'By the Lord, fool, I am not mad.' But do you remember? 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? an you smile not, he's gagged:' and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

What is this whirligig of time that will bring in his revenge, morally chastising those, such as Belch, who have usurped and satirised the social order? In Henry IV we find out; later history tells us that Falstaff could not participate in Henry V's heroic and honest court to come, and so the play must make this judgement too. But in Twelfth Night Malvolio simply exits the stage muttering "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you"; the play ends on a song. As Twelfth Night was the Elizabethan festival involving the antics of a Lord of Misrule, it may seem appropriate not to have Belch punished on stage, just as there is no option but to judge Falstaff in the history play. Nevertheless, one still feels that in Twelfth Night, which is a set in the hyperbolically fictional world of Illyria which allows for much metatheatrical irony, it is the audience who are encouraged to recognise and reflect upon the limits of the comic genre for offering judgement on the world.

The second thing which occurs to me is just how deliciously lewd and bawdy Twelfth Night is. Next time you read a Daily Mail columnist muttering about the decline of moral values on television, or swearing, or sexuality, consider these lines from Twelfth Night, when Malvolio picks up a love letter he believes to be from Olivia:

By my life, this is my lady's hand these be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's.

It may look innocuous on the page, but when delivered by a good comic actor (and Malvolio last night was played by John Challis of Only Fools and Horses), the lines' audacious bodily humour can still draw a gasp from a middle-class audience in the twenty first century.

Table Talk

2011-06-29T08:44:00.000Z

The solidly alliterative phrase "table talk" seems like it ought to originate in a novel or poem. In fact, surprisingly, it derives literally from the stomach.

According to Steven Shapin, the 15th century scholar Ficino wrote that "it is bad to strain the stomach with food and drink, and worst of all, with the stomach so strained, to think difficult thoughts," whilst an 18th author of a treatise on occupational diseases noted that "all the men of learning used to complain of a weakness in the stomach." From Thomas Carlyle, described as a "martyr" to dyspepsia, to Charles Darwin, who avoided public engagements because of his embarrassment about his belches and farts, there has been a strong association between intellectuals, and digestive suffering. Although modern medicine eventually downplayed this theoretical link between the hard-working mind and the ill-suffering gut, the sense of connection was enough to establish the etiquette of table talk, which was, Shapin explains "light, airy and undemanding stuff that didn't draw the vital spirits away from the stomach's proper work. It was a courtesy medicine paid to manners."

Perhaps this university lecturer, musing on the difficulties of organising an academic dinner party, ought to take note.

Susan Greenfield's ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century

2011-06-24T16:10:00.015Z

I have just posted a review of Susan Greenfield's ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. It is a strange and in some ways interesting book, not for the science it contains but for what it tells us about Greenfield herself. Her complaints about the impact of technology on society lead this leading neuroscientist to make a series of absurd hypotheses and unsubstantiated arguments. It amounts to a middle-aged grumble about the pace of social change, rather than a rigorous study of the neurological effects of technology.

The full review can be read here: ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century.

Philip Davies and the Minimum Wage for Disabled People

2011-06-22T09:26:00.000Z

Some part of me wants ironically to celebrate the recent comments of Conservative MP Philip Davies, in which he argued that disabled people should be allowed to work for less than the minimum wage. It reveals that for all the folksy charm exuded by the Conservative party leadership, the party remains rooted in free market ideology, with an accompanying disregard for social welfare.

In a Commons debate, Davies argued that:

Given some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, cannot be as productive in their work as somebody who has not got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable given the employer was going to have to pay them both the same they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk...My view is that for some people, the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help.

This is a comment that on many levels rejects the best social policies implemented by the previous Labour government.

The Disability Discrimination Act compels employers to make reasonable allowances to the working environment so that employees with a disability are able to work at a comparable level to those without. Davies' assumption that the market should determine what it is willing to pay for labour - with anyone with a disability automatically less valuable than anyone without - is a hideous extension of Thatcherite liberalism. I notice that, unsurprisingly, Dominic Lawson, son of Thatcher's former chancellor, has now written an op-ed in The Independent in support of Davies.

Disabled people ought not to be seen as cheap or inferior labour. With a bit of thought and through the legislative encouragement of the state, employers can make adjustments to ensure that disabled people can offer equal labour-value to anyone else. Of course, there will always be a limit to the changes employers can make, and some jobs for which some disabled people will always be excluded. But the laissez-faire economic attitude that says we should not even worry about trying to place disabled people on an equal footing in the workplace is fundamentally immoral.

Then there is the issue of the minimum wage, something the Tories reviled when Labour introduced it in the 1990s. They fed us scare stories about how it would decimate employment. In fact, the minimum wage has had little impact on overall employment, other than to prevent the exploitation of low-skilled workers and to ensure that work pays sufficiently to allow people to live in economic security. The minimum wage is precisely that, a living minimum. Would Davies be happy to work for, say, £4.00 an hour, earning £100 a week? No disabled person should feel compelled to do this.

Finally, there is the assumption that people with a learning disability "clearly, by definition" cannot be as "productive" as those without. But learning disabilities come in various guises; they do not automatically entail a lack of productivity (as if such a person is a broken machine).

Can someone with Down's Syndrome really be incapable of working in a workplace where they have to face the public? Might someone with dyslexia not actually learn to transcend their disability (I know of two university English professors who have dyslexia)? Might someone with autism not actually be superior in jobs with require mathematical or logical thinking? History is littered with examples of people with "disabilities" who have turned these to their advantage, or for whom the disability is just a small part of a whole person who has excelled in their chosen field: the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, the artist Alison Lapper, the physicist Steven Hawking.

If Davies' vision is followed to its logical conclusion, the market should be allowed to freely discriminate among those people it has conventionally regarded as weaker, less capable, or more awkward workers: ethnic minorities, women, those with disabilities. Perhaps Davies would prefer it if women were allowed to work for less than the minimum wage - acknowledging the "disablements" caused by their childcare demands that have, traditionally, led employers to discriminate on gender grounds. Perhaps Davies feels that black people should be allowed to offer their services for a less - acknowledging that employers are doing them a favour by employing a group (allegedly) prone to crime and violence. I am sure, in fact, that even Davies and his Conservative ilk, much though they loathe the human rights act and discrimination legislation, would vouch for neither of these things.

Why then should employers be allowed to discriminate against someone with a weaker body or a differently constituted mind? It would certainly be a good thing to get more disabled people into work. But doing this should not require the individual to adapt to the exploitations of the market, but the market to change its notion of what constitutes a "productive" human being.

Choosing to Die

2011-06-14T08:05:00.001Z

Terry Pratchett's controversial film on assisted suicide, which featured the death of a British man, Peter Smedley, at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, has only confirmed my belief that legalising such supported deaths would be a moral and humane thing to do.

As was invoked often in the film, the European Convention on Human Rights enshrines both the right to life, and the right to liberty and self-determination. Fundamental human rights do not act independently of each other, but intertwine, often in complex - sometimes conflicted - ways; witness the recent tension between those celebrities who claim a right to privacy, and those in the press who claim the right to free expression in publicising their affairs. In a similar way, campaigners against assisted suicide argue that legalising it would infringe upon the individual's right to life by encouraging people to take their own lives because the option of a "good death" is available, when they might ordinarily continue to want to live, perhaps in comfortable hospice care or supported by loving families. But surely the right to life also entails the right to a certain quality of life, something implied by the coexistence of other rights such as the right to liberty or freedom of thought. It is not enough simply to live, biologically; one also has the right to live a good life, emotionally. As part of this, the right to express oneself and act freely as an individual surely includes the right of the individual to choose when to die.

Looking at the rigorous manner in which assisted suicide is carried out in the Swiss system, it seems clear which is the worse scenario. With numerous legal checks and the opportunity for the individual to pull out of the process of assisted dying at every stage, the risk that legalising assisted dying would encourage suicide seems slim. This is something borne out by the Swiss case, where there was no evident increase in the suicide rate, whether conducted by the self or in clinics, after the legalisation of assisted dying. Indeed, one of the most telling statistics in the programme was that 70 percent of those who register in preparation for a death with Dignitas ultimately do not choose to pursue assisted suicide; it seems that the very existence of this option allows many people to go on living happily in the knowledge that, if it their feelings change, they may also end their own life in a guaranteed, humane way.

Currently, whilst the lack of legal assisted suicide in the UK is said mainly to protect the right to life, its absence seems more seriously to infringe upon the right to life which is powerfully intertwined with the right to liberty of conscience and action. Whilst the risks of legalising it upon the right to life seem slim and not substantiated by the Swiss case, the humanitarian inadequacies caused by not legalising it are evident. In Pratchett's programme, we witnessed two men paying £10 000 to travel to Switzerland in order to receive a gentle death of their own choosing. This expensive option is not available to those who are less wealthy, and a democracy surely has to embrace a democracy of dying, as well as of life choices, and allow anyone regardless of income or character, to have that opportunity available. If our National Health Service embodies the right to universal care, those same values of universality - regardless of social status - ought to be extended to the right to death as well. Indeed, it is precisely because we have a supportive, public health system in which individuals will be treated as long as possible, regardless of their predicted outcome or their ability to pay, that their decision to opt out of that healthcare support can be made freely. Their decision to die will be determined not by a guilty feeling that the state is unwilling to continue to treat them, but by their overwhelming wish to die despite knowing the healthcare opportunities that are available for them.

Again, I understand those campaigners who argue that the state should not imply that it would like actively to help the terminally sick or disabled to die, because this suggests to the disabled or sick person that they are an unvalued nuisance, that the state would prefer to kill those whose ongoing burden is too costly. Those who invoke Nazi genocide as the logical extension of state-sanctioned dying are clearly going too far, but I can appreciate the principle behind such views.

Nevertheless, again on balance it is preferable for the state to protect the individual's right to self determination. In Pratchett's programme last night, both the men who killed themselves did so against the wishes of their families. The pressure on the suffering self to live through that suffering in the hopes of a cure or continued happiness, is immense, deriving from deep-rooted - and admirable - cultural values of heroism against the odds. There is also a selfish aspect for families, a fear of seeing their loved ones go peacefully with themselves left behind to cope with the more difficult bereavement and loss. But these external pressures, which the two charismatic men in the programme happened to be able to resist, are again why the state needs to make available the possibility of assisted dying. The fact that families, quite naturally, may tend to pressure the individual not to die, ought to be balanced by alternatives which enshrine the right of the individual to stick to their own view against the wishes or opinions of the majority immediately around them. Such an alternative can only exist at a dispassionate, non-familial, state level.

The worst case I can imagine is where someone is no longer in a position to kill themselves, but the family refuses to assist them in their desire to die. The state regulates how families must behave after the death of someone who can quite literally no longer speak for themselves; families must respect the wishes, will, financial settlements of the dead person. But the state does not at present protect the right of an individual who is similarly voiceless and helpless in the immediate run up to their death. The moment one is dead, paradoxically one has more state-protected rights to exercise their free will than in the moment before.

This knowledge is what leads to the dissatisfying scenario we have at present, where individuals with degenerative neurological diseases - such as Pratchett's own Alzheimer's - are forced to enact their own deaths before they might ordinarily be ready, whilst they are still cognitively and physically capable of doing so. Fearing that there may be no family members or doctors willing and permitted to help them die after they become too ill to express their own desires, people take their own lives before it may be their ideal time. All deaths which end early, in car accidents or illness, in degenerative diseases or in suicide, offend our sense of the natural time to die. By legalising assisted dying, the state does have the opportunity to step in and prevent one type of premature death. Ensuring that people can choose when and how to die will help to ensure they will only go when the time is right for them.

People should be able to choose when and how they die, regardless of their ability to pay; they should be free to choose between ongoing, free healthcare leading to a natural death, or the immediate release of assisted suicide. In the twentieth century, the maturing humanitarianism of the British state developed universal welfare and healthcare; in the twenty-first century, it is time to recognise that the state is sophisticated and adult enough to facilitate a democracy of dying, as well as of life.

New College of the Humanities

2011-06-07T14:52:00.004Z

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about A.C. Grayling's brainchild, the New College of the Humanities. On the face of it, its £18 000 a year fees smack of elitism; the left-wing academic Terry Eagleton has described it as "odious." However, by assembling a glittering array of Professors and teaching staff such as Richard Dawkins and David Cannadine, the College seems to be seeking to be an elite institution, equivalent to Oxford and Cambridge, or the Ivy League, where comparable bodies of internationally-renowned academics already exist. And as their US counterparts already do, Oxford and Cambridge would quite happily charge £18 000 a year for this privilege were the government to allow them.

Grayling's New College is, then, simply a dystopian vision of where the coalition's privatisation of Higher Education will lead us in five or ten years time, when the cap on fees will, no doubt, be lifted altogether for our top-level institutions. The fault lies in the principle of privatisation that has been instigated by the government, not the consequences which Grayling is now seeking to put into practice.

Let's not be naive about this. Of course, the headline Professors of the New College of Humanities will likely pop over for morning coffee only once a year, gracing the prospectus but rarely to be seen inside a tutorial room. But then that's not wholly different to how the US system currently works, with star, tenured academics giving a few headline lectures and adjunct, doctoral or postdoctoral staff doing the bulk of the teaching week to week. And it's not unlike what will presumably happen in the UK system, with part time, temporarily contracted teaching staff responding on an ad hoc basis to student - sorry, consumer - numbers. Again, Grayling's new model institution is a precursor of what is to come.

And, on this basis, a part of me can't quite help admiring the fact that in the post-Browne climate where the arts and humanities are generally deemed to be of no economic worth, Grayling is sticking two fingers up to the economists by asserting the value, both financial and humanistic, of a liberal arts education. Combining studies in the conventional humanities with required courses in Science Literacy, Logic and Critical Thinking, and Applied Ethics, the New College of the Humanities might - just might - demonstrate that the arts and humanities have a role to play as the applied sciences of human life.

The economics of class in Charles Dickens, the lessons of the history of the Crusades in the era of Islamic terrorism, metaphor and simile in scientific communication. Maybe, just maybe, and in an ironic and paradoxical way, the New College of the Humanities offers us a vision not only of the decline of the public university in the twenty-first century, but also of the reassertion of the liberal arts education that underpinned the first mass expansion of universities in the nineteenth century.

Cost Efficient Universities

2011-05-19T14:44:00.000Z

At last, someone who can play the government at their own economic game with Higher Education. Howard Hotson provides some facts and figures to expose what anyone working within British universities has known all along: we punch above our weight in research, in teaching, in efficiency, and in access; and the government’s reforms to improve the efficiency and reduce the public spend on UK academe will actually make matters worse.
The government is obsessed by the American neo-liberal model of privatisation, and continually turns to the world university league tables in an attempt to prove that the private, US model of higher education is more successful than our central, publically funded one. With thirteen US universities in the top twenty of the Times World Rankings, and with all bar one of these private institutions commanding tuition fees of around $20 000 per annum, UK policy is guided by the assumption that there must be an equation between the privatisation of higher education and the international standing of an institution.

But the fact that the UK already has four universities in the top twenty Times World Rankings shows the esteem in which UK universities are held in spite of everything. Partly, this is due to tradition. The Ivy League models itself on Oxford and Cambridge; but even whilst the trans-Atlantic sons of British universities have long since outstripped their parents in terms of the resources they wield, that ancestry leaves a reverse kind of inheritance. American alumni who study at Oxford and Cambridge provide geneous philanthropic support that continues to subsidise a highly inefficient teaching and collegiate system, conscious that they would have been expected to do the same had they attended their Ivy League relations. Consequently, Oxford and Cambridge, who of course supply the UK's top two places in the international leagues, has funding more on a par with American institutions, and maintains a "reputation" in the eyes of scholars worldwide, a key measure on the Times Higher Education league tables. But the Oxford and Cambridge effect alone does not account for how well UK higher education performs against its international counterparts. Another key factor is the sheer hard work and dedication of UK academics across the board, who commit to long and underpaid hours to scholarship and teaching. Far from the Cameronian caricature of the public servant lounging on the public purse, researchers and lecturers have been tied to the profession by vocation, not by money.

The figures Hotson helpfully marshals demonstrate quite clearly that the UK’s academy outperforms, pound for pound, person for person, its wealthier US counterpart:

Yet all those journalists and politicians who have leaped so nimbly from league tables to university policy have apparently overlooked the fact that the US is larger than the UK: its population of 311 million is five times the UK population of 62 million. Already, the American three-to-one lead in the World University Rankings looks far less impressive. In fact, over the past seven years, the UK has had more top 20 universities per head of population (one per 15.5 million) than the US (one per 23.9 million). And since the UK institutions in the top 20 are on average slightly larger (20,500 students) than the US ones (17,300 students), almost twice the proportion of the UK population has been studying at top 20 universities (1 in 756, compared with 1 in 1383). In economic terms, the two countries differ by an even larger margin: US GDP (at $14.658 trillion) is 6.5 times larger than UK GDP (at $2.247 trillion). For the past seven years, the UK has been maintaining fully twice as many top 20 universities as the US for each unit of financial resource.

Hotson goes on:

According to the OECD, the UK spends 1.3 per cent of GDP on tertiary education, precisely the EU average. The US, on the other hand, spends 3.1 per cent, far more than any other country in the world. So America not only has 6.5 times the UK’s financial resources, it also spends 2.4 times as much of those resources on tertiary education. That adds up to more than 15 times as much investment in higher education in the US than in the UK. And yet, according to these world rankings, that 15-fold investment nets barely a three-fold return in educational excellence. The UK has somehow managed to maintain top-ranked universities for only about a fifth of the US price.

The game of privatisation currently being played with higher education is scary, but it would be just about acceptable if those involved within it - teachers, researchers, students, society - thought that it would actually improve things. Hotson's argument makes a convincing economic case for saying that it will not. US universities may look smart and manicured, with their faux-Oxbridge halls and towers, but beneath the skin is a vast swathe of administrative bureaucracy, and trivial enticements for fee-paying students: athletics tracks rather than lecture halls, saunas in bedrooms rather than books in a library. Less John Henry Newman, and more the Great Gatsby.

The trouble is, David Willetts only has two brains: one of these thinks in terms of free market competition, the other in terms of efficiency, and both are ideologically repelled by the nineteenth-century idea that publically funded universities might actually perform efficiently, contribute to the national economy and social wellbeing, and sustain a diverse portfolio of research beyond the purely “impactful” – and that they might do this without draining the life savings of generations of young students.

My Political Birthday

2011-05-11T16:19:00.002Z

It is twelve months since the coalition came to power, but on this anniversary, I feel that this also marks my own political coming-of-age, from my more naive kind of adolescence.

My teenage years correspond with the election of New Labour in 1997, the first major political event that I understood would affect me directly. Before then, all the turbulence I had lived through as a younger person - Thatcherism, the collapse of the USSR, Black Wednesday - had been filtered through my family. My abiding memory of the coup against Boris Yeltsin, for example, is not of the event itself. It was of accompanying Granddad to buy a newspaper, something he never ordinarily did. I felt it was important, because he must have done; but I did not discuss the events in Russia in any informed way. I knew of the recession of the early 1990s not through statistics about inflation, but because my dad had bought our family's first computer one week, then was out of a job the next. By contrast, in 1997, I remember sitting on the school bus listening to the news reports on the radio, and knowing that something had happened that would alter my world directly; I also knew that come the next election, I would by then be old enough to vote.

Beginning the New Labour years as a teenager, though, I recognise now that this period corresponded with a kind of idealistic immaturity on my part, lasting until the coalition's election last year. Over the past decade, I shouted at the news on a daily basis, angered by New Labour's failings on the environment, on PFI, on taxation; I blustered at the affected charm of Tony Blair, and the machinations of spin; and, of course, I marched against tuition fees and the Iraq war. There had to be a different way, an alternative, a party that would govern by principles of fairness, not the populism of the focus group.

So when I came of voting age, I turned repeatedly to the Liberal Democrats, with the belief that they were a party founded upon ideals that I agreed with: utilitarian, progressive, secularist. The more academic I became through university, the more I felt their methods were not dissimilar to mine: thinking through the prism of evidence rather than ideology, conscious of history but not blinded by it. The evidence of the present says that our possession of nuclear weapons is no longer necessary, and I welcomed the Liberals' courage in wanting to do away with Trident, rather than maintaining it as the last vestiges of our Imperial prowess. The evidence showed rehabilitation was better than prison, and this is what the Liberal Democrats stood for, not some Tory right-wing fantasy that criminals are somehow genetically different to the rest of society and so should be locked away for a jolly long time. The Liberal Democrats seemed to aim for government by reason, not by retrospect.

Yet throughout this time, for all my loud antagonism to New Labour and preference for the Liberal Democrats, the constant whisper in the background was that no party offered a genuine alternative. I was told that there was no difference between the left and right wing. Every party governs from the centre. The Tories too would have done much the same on Iraq, on fees, on the privatisation of healthcare.

It now appears that the whispers spoke a truth that ran deeper than I then suspected. With the coalition government, it seems that not only are the sides of red and blue actually two shades of grey; the yellow of the liberal Democrats turns out to be politically monochrome as well. This has been the first, nasty lesson I have learnt. In our area last week, there were no elections for local government. Had there been, though, I would certainly not have ticked the Liberal Democrat box as I have in the past, in what I previously considered to be a thoughtful, genuinely alternative vote.

I have learnt more advanced lesson as well. The divisions between the three parties are ideologically and practically very slight. But I reflect now that precisely because of this, I should have read the New Labour years more patiently and moderately than I did, and thought more about some of the subtleties to be found in the ebb and flow of politics within a government's time in office. In a way typical of adolescents, I felt everything during those years of my political maturation must be cast in black and white. PFI in healthcare was a bad thing and should be stopped. Tuition fees were wrong. School league tables were a farce. Green policies were trumpeted but never implemented. There are some aspects of the New Labour years which, even now, I still see in such absolute terms. With the Gulf War, I was told, I was either with the Blair-Bush axis, or against them. I was and remain against.

But I now recognise that even if the parties themselves had few wholesale ideological differences during the New Labour years, there were still patches and shades where different colours did come through. New Labour did develop the Sure Start programme to help social mobility from a young age, a programme the Conservatives are slowly eroding. PFI may have put the public health system in a devilish relationship with the private sector, but new hospitals did get built. Class sizes did go down, teacher numbers did go up, education did improve. Patients continued to die in hospital corridors, but patients also were increasingly likely to survive cancer and surgery, had to wait less time for a minor hip operation or knee replacement.

As historians will no doubt tell us in hefty books to come, the thirteen years of New Labour's rule were a political epoch. It is one which aptly mirrors my own growth: I began those years as a teenager, I emerged on the cusp of middle age. I realise now, then, that politics is for the long term, and that across that term ideals have to suffer, get bent or twisted. The media, operating on a daily cycle, are always exposing the hypocrisy and failures of the immediate moment; no daily news headline runs with the words, "On sudden reflection, over the last two years..." What matters most in politics, though, is not the disputable headlines of the day-to-day, but the definitive changes of the year-to-year.

This is the lesson I have learnt, then: political patience. Whether my patience will last over the next four years of the coalition so that I emerge ready to vote Liberal again at the next election we will have to wait and see. At this stage I somehow doubt it. Living and working in a university environment, my sector is crumbling into dust under the misguided hammer of the coalition's policies. I doubt that the edifice of higher education will have been sufficiently restored over the next four years, over the long term.

Faulty Faculty Towers: Coming to an English University Near You?

2011-05-09T07:25:00.000Z

Reading William Deresiewicz's long discussion of the crisis in US graduate schools, I am left feeling that this is the dystopia coming soon to the UK, with its now quasi-privatised university sector. In the US system, PhD programmes are aimed at those wanting to become university lecturers and researchers; given that gaining a PhD can take nine years, rather than the three or so it takes in the UK, the US PhD is more focused on training for the university culture, rather than providing a higher class of transferable skills for industry as it can be in the UK.

With the advent of higher tution fees in the UK, we can anticipate that in future most of those who choose to stay on in postgraduate education will be sponsored by industry or will be focused on PhDs as a vocational training option for a specific career. For the rest, those who are either wealthy enough, or foolish enough, to want to continue in a PhD for academic reasons, things look pretty bleak on the basis of the US experience Deresiewicz writes about.

The problem with US graduate programmes is that there are simply not enough decent university-level jobs to go around for increasing numbers of PhD graduates. Deresiewicz describes the job situation as a "bloodbath"; as a professor, he reckons it successful if half of his students gain academic jobs - and that's his students from Yale, no less. And even those successful ones are not entering tenured, full time, permanent posts, but are acting as casual, transient labour. As the US higher education market expanded in the late 1990s, rather than taking on full-time academic faculty:

Departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty.

I have previously predicted that post-Browne that we can expect UK higher education to fracture teaching from research along the US model. A relatively small pool of faculty will focus on research, competing for whatever funds happen to be available in the public budget (with research satisfying the demands for public "impact"); some of these well-established academics will be recruited as brand names to gloss prospectuses, and may teach a couple of exotic modules. But the majority of university staff will be teaching-only, satisfying the more immediate demands of students - now consumers - of higher education. And the grunts bearing the load of basic module teaching will be the postdocs, teaching-only staff, and casual lecturers recruited in accordance with fluctuating demand. Unlike tenured academics, these are easily sacked when the income from student numbers falls.

This is why universities in the US continue to "sell" postgraduate programmes to naive ranks of graduates, even as the proportion of decent academic jobs that indicate the ultimate value of these programmes is falling:

You’d think departments would respond to the Somme-like conditions they’re sending out their newly minted PhDs to face by cutting down the size of their graduate programs. If demand drops, supply should drop to meet it. In fact, many departments are doing the opposite, the job market be damned. More important is maintaining the flow of labor to their domestic sweatshops, the pipeline of graduate students who staff discussion sections and teach introductory and service courses like freshman composition and first-year calculus. (Professors also need dissertations to direct, or how would they justify their own existence?)

It suits universities to continue to pitch the notion that a PhD will lead naturally and easily to an academic career. On their graduation day, as cohorts of postgraduates face joblessness, any alternative such as casual, teaching-only work is welcome, partly to bring in some sort of income and partly to sustain the fantasy that their shiny new PhD was, after all, worthwhile as preparation for an academic career.

Which leads onto another issue. Universities in the US justify the sweatshop conditions in which postgraduates and postdoctoral staff teach, with the word "training":

Teaching is part of the training, you hear a lot, especially when supposedly liberal academics explain why graduate-student unions are such a bad idea. They’re students, not workers! But grad students don’t teach because they have to learn how, even if the experience is indeed very valuable; they teach because departments need “bodies in the classroom,” as a professor I know once put it.

This is something that is already sadly familiar in the UK, which looks set to get worse. The UCU's campaign against fixed-term, hourly-paid postgraduate or postdoctoral staff continually butts up against the argument that they are not really staff at all; in fact, they should welcome the opportunity to teach for a pittance, with limited employment rights (such as contracts that can be reduced in line with student numbers without invoking redundancy), because they are being "trained" for a full time academic career that allegedly awaits at some putative point in the future. Such arguments do not only come from university managers. I have heard them being made from the same tenured academics who are supervising the PhDs of students suffering under poor working conditions. Far from protesting against the system, the words "Be thankful for what you can get" are the mantra circulating on university campuses from both PhDs and academics alike.

The Harrods Model of Higher Education

2011-03-28T16:20:00.001Z

If the stakes - the potential decimation of the UK's world-leading Higher Education system - were not so high, it would be tempting to feel a sense of schadenfreude at the way in which universities are setting their next generation of tuition fees. Every day brings news of the latest university to announce where it will set its tuition fees, and as virtually every university has set fees at or near the maximum £9000 mark, it is hard not to imagine the government squirming a little more uncomfortably in the hole they have dug for themselves.

If the majority of universities charge at or near the maximum, the high cost to the treasury, which bears the up-front burden of tuition costs until loans are repaid, will make the government's plans impossible to execute in their original form. When the traditional, research-intensive universities like Oxford and Cambridge, or Durham and Exeter, announced £9000 fees, few would have expected anything less; high fees here do not disturb the government - if anything, they prove that our top universities are prepared to pitch themselves as the premium product in the Higher Education marketplace. But now the likes of Aston and Leeds Metropolitan are pursuing similar figures, the writing seems to be on the wall for the whole sector. And the edifice gradually being built does not conform to the government's free market architecture for Higher Education: universities seem less like branches of Tesco, where discerning Higher Education consumers pick and choose from a range of degrees to their taste and wallets, some premium and others better value, and more like a single large store of Harrods, where there is still lots to choose from, so long as it costs the earth.

Should fees at or near to £9000 prove to be the norm rather than the exception, this will prove how muddled and counter-productive the government's Higher Education strategy has been, with everyone losing out in this new system. The public finances will have to contribute more up-front into Higher Education than would have been the case with more direct public subsidy; in a saturated graduate jobs market where salaries are suppressed, loans will not be repaid rapidly; students will be deterred from attending university, to the detriment both of social mobility and the economy that is allegedly calling out for graduates; and universities will still face a funding shortfall due to the government's savage cuts to HEFCE grants, which even the highest fees only partially offset. The ideology of free-market Toryism has been exposed here: some institutions only work through public funding, and the monopoly of public finance is not necessarily a bad thing, if the alternative is a fixed-price monopoly facing the "consumer," in this case, the student.

When every university charges the same as each other, this is not a market, but a ransom to younger students. If a student wants to go to university, he or she cannot shop around for the "best value" degree, because there will be no such thing. When more than the anticipated number of universities charge above the ideal £7500 average, the government will be forced to cut the number of student places nationally: this will make a mockery of the claim (one which originates with New Labour) that tuition fees will open up Higher Education, churning out the increased numbers of graduates necessary to match our competitor economies. And when those fees apply across the board at a university rather than differentially to subjects of different economic value, this will not encourage more students to go into engineering or accountancy, but just to do those subjects they happen to be good at and to hell with the job prospects (not that those under the age of 25 have many in any case).

Browne's free market vision of a flexible intertwining of business and Higher Education, such that business would tell universities what skills they wanted in any given moment, with students queuing up to pursue only those degrees most in need at a particular time and thus of lowest cost, has failed. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how the situation can be recovered. Tied to its ideological cuts agenda, the government is unlikely to find any additional, central money for universities to allow them to lower or vary their fees. The last regulatory thermostat which the government retains, having turned Higher Education into a free market, is the number of students it permits nationally to enter universities each year.

Sadly, this has implications for the arts and humanities in particular, which were already hamstrung by the withdrawal of central teaching funding. If the Higher Education marketplace had, somehow, actually worked, then even despite the reduction in teaching funding arts and humanities courses at some red brick universities could actually have benefited. For example, at my own institution we have around 30 students for every place we can offer. Freed from government stipulations on student numbers, we could have expanded our English Department - with degrees that are cheaper to deliver than those in the sciences - tenfold (admittedly, we would probably have narrowed our socio-economic student profile by the same amount). However, if the government has to operate the last control it has, student numbers, in order to check the burgeoning loan bill then it is all but guaranteed that it will suddenly forget its free market beliefs and order that priority for places has to be given in science, technology, engineering and medicine subjects. In the Harrods of Higher Education, you will be able to have any degree you want, so long as it is STEM, and so long as it is exclusively expensive.

Simulating Apocalypse

2011-03-17T11:28:00.001Z

Watching the news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami unfolding early on Friday morning, the spectacle seemed to develop into an exquisitely cruel plot, as if nature herself was some sort of orchestrator in a theatre of destruction: the first act being the shaking of the earth, the second the wave of water, the third the fire, the fourth the frozen weather – and now, days later, the final, human authored act has begun, in the form of a nuclear meltdown.

But even as this dramatic metaphor began to take root, the feeling that this was somehow a creatively designed destruction reawakened in me a peculiar memory from my childhood that led me to frame it in terms that were, on the face of it, wholly inappropriate. The sense of nature’s play reminded me of my own child's play, my computer games, when I used to spend hours absorbed in Sim City. In this game, one would craft a utopian metropolis along rational lines, zoning organised blocks of residences and industry, initiating complex urban transport schemes, laying down a web of electrical and water infrastructure. Gradually, out of a flat, brown map, skyscrapers and chemical plants, factories and high speed railways modelled into an urban ideal – a world that, like the popular image of Japan itself, was precise, engineered, technologised.

Yet as the game went on, such utopianism came to seem too easy, and a little bit dull. The constrained architecture of town planning gave way to the freedom of destruction. Alongside the palette of planning tools lay another palette to undo all that careful work: earthquakes, fires, floods, nuclear meltdown and, bizarrely, a Godzilla-esque monster could be unleashed in sequence. That delicate network of roads and districts would shake, then turn red with fire, then blue with water. In those early days of computing, the sequential animated disasters would push my processor to its limit, and eventually the game itself would crash in a final eschatology that pulled one sharply out of the game world, and back into a mundane reality.

Watching those news reports, then, I could not help but feel that peculiar sense of omnipotent sadism that I had once before encountered through a technological lens. This time, the menu bars of Sim City had been replaced by multiple ticker tape overlays, as the BBC news carried live feeds from local channels, which in turn carried amateur video footage. The lower, local news feed gave word of a tsunami, whilst the higher-level and delayed BBC feed was still just scrolling across details of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake; like my old computer, the screen could not keep up with events. From this point, information flashed past at an exhilarating rate, with a sequence of disasters just like those I used to combine as a kid. And even if I was not in control of this real, human-world chaos, I understood the thrill of unleashing apocalypse in perverse ways – water causing fires, boats floating down streets, in one string of tweets on the internet, whether comic or serious or just mistranslated, warnings of a possible mutant caused by the nuclear meltdown.

Nature, it seems, like my cruel childhood self, has a twisted humour. Yet hers was also a bewildering narrative, perhaps explaining why I alighted on a seemingly inapt memory in order to try to structure the events. Looking on at a distance through the television media, it was so hard to connect the local and the global, the small and the large: to connect those tiny cars scurrying along highways away from the tsunami, with the human lives they must have contained; to connect that initial cresting wave rolling across the calm blue of the Pacific (so that one almost expected to see a miniature surfer at its head) with that sludgy brown mass that bullied cars, houses, ships across fields; to connect the decay of atoms in a reactor to the vast evacuation radius that has become the target for nuclear meltdown. It is, of course, making such connections that would be performed by a deity – or by belief in one. And it is not surprising that such apocalyptic events form the ash out of which religions arise.

Yet this is not how it can work for an irreligious person like myself. Instead, like a true humanist, I turned to a secular narrative from our digitised modernity. In his book on The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode saw in religious stories of apocalypse some of the qualities that make us want to write and read literary narratives: authored works impose the order of plot on the chaos of the world, and provide the random with some form of explanation, making sense of the ending. This is why, although it seemed so inappropriate in the moment, I naturally turned to my memory of my computer game, where I got to play town mayor, city planner and, in destruction, God. Recollecting that sense of control and logic that I once authored through the game allowed me to establish some order behind the chaotic entropy being suffered by one of the most engineered, technologised nations on Earth.

Marks, Please

2011-03-13T18:27:00.001Z

In teaching students in a subject like English Literature at university level, one of the hardest challenges is to encourage them not to fixate on marks. At A-Level, students get given a fairly tick-the-boxes marks schema; if they do certain things right, they will get awarded a certain number of marks. This is why marks of 90% at A-Level English are not uncommon, whereas they would be once-in-a-lifetime beasts at university.
Understandably, such students arrive at university with uncertain expectations, and often struggle to know what is required of them to produce a good university-standard essay. They will almost certainly be aware of our marks schemes, but as I commented before on this blog, it is sometimes inevitable that the marker resorts to intuition rather than exact standards:

Marking criteria in a subject such as English are notoriously problematic. Whilst the rubric has obviously to be carefully considered, how is one to judge the difference between "well focused work" (65% to 69%) and "relevant work" (60% to 64%)? The mark schemes can only be taken up to a point, from where intuition takes over, the sense of a First as opposed to Two-One class work; this indefinable difference leaves high Two-One students seeing through a notorious glass barrier between a 69% and 70%.

Especially at the high Two-One end, students new to university think that there must be a certain additional number of boxes they can tick to get those extra percentage points to tip them over the 70%. And even beyond this level, I have heard students want to know the qualitative difference between a 72% and a 74% on two consecutive essays.

In this environment, giving effective and workable feedback to students is sometimes difficult. Students are used to thinking about marks in a rationalistic, even computational, way: input x and get a grade of y. At university, we want them to work on the principle of the writer, to be able independently to reflect on the quality of their own work and thought, and to be able to work according to an academic standard whilst retaining a sense of individuality in their responses to literary texts. Thus I can never say to students that if they do a particular something next time, this will guarantee a specific grade of improvement, though it may help towards it. Nor can I say that the difference between a 72% and a 74% is definable according to certain criteria; different essays may vary by two percentage points for a host of unspecifiable reasons.

To my mind, what should matter most to a university student is not their quantitative mark, but my qualitative assessment of how they could improve. One of the benefits of the traditional university at which I do some of my teaching is that we still also have one-on-one consultations with our students, to explain the finer points of their essays (though I have little doubt that in the brave new Higher Education world of market efficiency, these will soon be scrapped).

In these sessions, my marking strategy is always to conceal the actual mark from the student until towards the end, after I’ve had a chance to discuss their work in a general sense. Some get agitated, and if they start to tip over into anxious (or even floods of tears: not unknown) I do end up telling them their mark to settle them down. I’ve generally found this approach works well, allowing me to focus on areas that could be developed, without inviting the potential apathy that the essay was still a decent grade. Some students are perfectly satisfied with a 2:1, and I fear that the moment they are told they can get this, they would be less interested in the things I can tell them to do to aspire - with a bit more effort and directedness - to a First.

However, in my latest round of essay returns one student confronted me outright on this policy, having seen right through it. "What I really hate about your marking sessions," he said (tongue slightly in cheek) "is that you always tell me lots of things I could have done differently, but then end up saying it was actually all right." This is, in essence, absolutely true. But the comment has caused me to reflect on my own practice. My principle has been to avoid marks fixation by stating the grade only at the end. But maybe, once my strategy becomes transparent to students, this has the opposite effect: they know that I will get to their mark eventually, so they simply wait patiently but disconnectedly until I finally get around to what they have come along to hear.

I would be interested to hear what other teachers do, if they have similar one-to-one feedback sessions. Do you announce the mark at the beginning? Or do you wait until the end of a session to get most out of it? Which elicits the best response from students in the immediate setting of the teaching session, and which do you think will elicit the best response over the longer-term in encouraging development?

In this Together

2011-03-08T08:37:00.000Z

Sometimes, for all that the government tries to spin and control the release of news to the media, two stories coincide to reveal its underlying direction.

Today, Stephen Hester, chief executive of state-owned bank RBS, receives a pay settlement worth around £7.7 million, assuming he meets share price targets (which he will, assuming the stock market continues naturally to trend upwards, something entirely beyond his control).

Today, a review recommends that police pay be cut, whilst the Association of Chief Police Officers warns of up to 28 000 job losses. The latter is likely to be scaremongering. But, the maths speaks for itself.

Front-line police starting salaries are £22 000. Stephen Hester earns £7.7 million. That makes Stephen Hester worth the work of 350 police officers. Can we, the taxpayer, can they, the government, really believe that one banker is worth that number of people working to preserve social order?

Normal Service Will Be Resumed Shortly

2011-02-21T14:04:00.000Z

I'm aware that I haven't posted anything on this blog since Christmas. Indeed, I haven't even sent so much as a tweet. The trouble is the proverb tattoed onto the foreheads of all academics: I've just been too busy.

Shortly after Christmas, I got appointed to teach on a second Open University course. This is a largescale introduction to the arts course, covering everything from literature to music to the history of art to religion. As such, I've been doing much mugging up, and lots of preparation to get my teaching off the ground. This has been fun (and obviously it's another toe in the academic door that is oh-so-slowly creaking open before me) but also a lot of additional and unexpected work.

I've also had to get on with writing an annual report for a major research institute, as well as dealing with a whole pile of marking that I managed to put off over the Christmas holidays.

Things are, though, starting to clear slightly, and so normal service should be resumed quite shortly. Indeed, I feel the urgent need to reawaken those dormant neurons that I use for writing, and with no chance to get any academic projects underway during term time, I want to push out a number of quicker and easier blog posts that have been lurking in the back of my mind over the last month or so.

Training in Class

2010-12-22T09:24:00.001Z

Trains, like motorway service stations, airport lounges, and Tescos on a Saturday, are one of those rare places where different English classes, usually kept apart by leylandii hedges or multiple flights of apartment block stairs, are forced together. Sitting on a northbound train from Southampton, I find myself sandwiched between two different slices of English society (I realise this is a bad metaphor, thinking of the array of pre-packaged sandwiches mouldering in the chiller cabinet of Basingstoke waiting room, for it presents me as the writerly equivalent of soggy tuna mayonnaise.)

At the table in front of me, a large woman swathed in brown furs commands her family in a loud, plummy voice. Her perfectly-permed blonde hairdo jiggles slightly as she talks with her son, clad in a wax jacket and waxed RAF moustache. "I was, I will admit, a bit dubious when you suggested going by train," she announces. "I mean, one never want to get stuck in a carriage with the wrong sort of people, but I have to say that since I last travelled" - which, perhaps, was when carriages were wreathed in steam rather than buzzing with electric - "it is positively polite." This last comment being based on the fact that a tannoy has just declared that a catering trolley of light refreshments is passing through the train. Indeed, shortly afterwards it arrives with an exhalation of tea fumes, sadly not bearing the silver-plattered cream cakes that one imagines the word "refreshments" may have conjured in the mind of our intrepid user of public transport.

"Is it, perhaps, as good as the car, mother?" enquires her son, this last said with a curl of the lips that testifies to numerous arguments down the telephone over whether to take the Mercedes or risk the South West Trains service to Waterloo. "Well it depends on who one is travelling with, of course," qualifies our lady. "I mean car journeys can be interminable, too, with the wrong sort of company."

Her son now tries to demonstrate his equal open-mindedness. "Well I must say, when we went to Las Vegas, Penny and I looked around ourselves at the airport and were surprised by the quality of the people" - as if people can be judged like joints of beef - "because one thinks of who might be travelling to Vegas, to get married and the such like, and..." "Well darling," interjects his wife, "one man was drinking beer. From a can." This last qualification a potentially interesting sociological observation that one's status is defined not by the choice of drink, but by the vessel which conveys it: the delicate china teacup or the sturdy mug designed for the building site; the pint glass nursed over hazy summer days at some riverside pub or the can swigged swiftly in terminal five.

As the conversation in front drifts into the decline of the English country pub as a metonym for the sorry state of the country generally, I become aware of music being played somewhere further down the carriage behind me. Turning quickly, I note it emanates from the pocket of a leather jacket, belonging to a burly man - the sort whom might happily find himself with a can in hand en route to Vegas. He is equipped with the arms of a nightclub bouncer.

Yet, to prove one's assumptions are prejudiced, I realise that this unwelcome public broadcast from his mobile phone is looping through the greatest hits of Cher - who may, in her own way, have some masculine qualities, but who is not often the music of choice of butch males. As I am surprised by this, aging plum starts up again, proving to be more forward-looking than I had at first conjectured. "I do hate, Skype, don't you? When I use it I can see right up the inside of Ben's nostrils."

Review of Seeing Galileo, by Jason Lee

2010-12-18T08:08:00.001Z

Now up on The Pequod is a long review of a book of contemporary poetry, Jason Lee's Seeing Galileo. This is a provocative and complex book that combines essays, poetry, photography and drama. Although not a poetry of simple, affective feeling, it intellectually examines the relationship between traditional (religious or literary) and modern (scientific or photographic) ways of looking at the human world.

Seeing Galileo is published by Gylphi, a specialist arts and humanities publisher. The discount code GALILEO2010 will entitle readers to a discount of 10% when you order your copy of Seeing Galileo online from http://www.gylphi.co.uk/galileo before 31 December 2010.

The full review is available here: Review of Jason Lee, Seeing Galileo

The All-Nighter

2010-12-16T15:50:00.000Z

This end of the academic term, students and teachers alike are faced with a cluster of deadlines. No matter how carefully one has planned, the writing or marking of assignments seems to lead to a last-minute rush before Christmas. Even so, I was still surprised to read a recent tongue-in-cheek article on Guardian Education, written by a university lecturer of all people, that offers some tips on how to pull the infamous "all nighter" to get those last essays done. I was, though, sadly unsurprised by the comments on the post, many of which seem machoistically to advocate the idea of doing things at the last minute.

As a marker, I do not automatically worry about an essay written late at night (and believe me students, it only takes a glance at File Properties to figure that one out). I appreciate that some people genuinely do work better under pressure. Some students dare to do such unproductive, degree-distracting pursuits as charity fundraising, drama, arts, sports coaching - all of which are more likely to get them jobs than a standard 2:1 degree alone. Contrary to popular belief, many students do intense degrees with a full-time burden of lectures and assessment. And some students - not least those I teach with the Open University - have to juggle part- or even full-time jobs to fund their education.

However, for every well-intentioned student who is forced to work into the early hours of the morning through no fault of their own, there are far more for whom, I suspect, this is not only a bad habit but a required rite of the university experience. I do worry about a university culture where the ability to do an essay at the last minute is a sign of bravado or "working the system," as was implied by many of the posts on the Guardian article, or as I detect in my work with mainstream university students (by contrast, I know full well quite how hard my Open University students work, even if they too are, by necessity, forced to work late into the night).

Doing an all-nighter may focus one's mind to look at internet resources and hash together notes with great efficiency (which may indeed be useful for the harassed office environment), but this does not necessarily lead to a student developing a thorough and cultivated knowledge of a subject (and those three years before students step through those office doors are the only time when this precious opportunity will be available).

In my experience those students who plan their work well ahead may not automatically get better grades than the all-nighters, but they do perform better than they personally might if they were not so enthusiastic and capable of planning their work around other commitments; conversely, I mark many all-nighter essays which I know full well do not represent a student's potential, even if I still award them a decent grade. Whilst all-nighter essays are usually coherent, focused and well-written, they often lack the attention to detail, careful proofing, and editing needed for the first class marks - marks which I am certain more of my students could, but don't, achieve.

I sense that students are increasingly swayed by an anti-"geek" attitude, such that those who work hard are frowned upon by those who can pull things out of the bag at the last minute to get equivalent marks. Indeed, I have first-hand experience of good students who find it genuinely difficult to cope with the campus atmosphere where it is only the end that matters, not how hard one works to get there. From the point of view of a diligent student, it can be intensely demotivating if they "only" receive the same mark as someone who can churn work out at the last minute (even if, in the long run, the former student will likely turn out to be better educated).

The idea of doing assignments just to "get enough marks" is precisely the sort of utilitarian principle that underpins Browne: the sole measure of the value of a degree is how much money you can earn at the end of it (or the mark you get on graduation).

As I wrote in my post on the implications of Browne for teaching and learning, when the student becomes a consumer of their education this fundamentally changes the idea of what that education is about, namely an end product rather than a means. As a teacher, I know that the best thing for my students is to motivate them sufficiently so that they actively want to do their subject, rather than suffering its interminable assignment demands just to get the degree at the end of it. But this may become increasingly difficult to achieve in an education marketplace. Browne suggested that student-consumers should be required to sign a contract, which include "commitments on attending a minimum number of classes or completing a minimum number of assessments per term." Why should students who are paying for their degrees have to do any work at all? After all, you don't buy a happy-meal in McDonalds, only to be told you have to cook it yourself. Thus I can see that the culture of all-nighter bravado which, let us admit, has always been there in university life, is going to get more prevalent, as students seek - or are even encouraged - to do as little as possible to get the reward, the degree result, they have effectively purchased.

Aimlower: The Coalition Targets the Young and the Poor

2010-11-26T09:24:00.000Z

I am too busy to be blogging right now, but this morning I am in a particularly bad mood; nay, fury is bubbling in my brain, and must be safely vented before I can get any productive work done.

The cause for my anger is, unsurprisingly, the government's education policies. After the second national protests on 24th November, it seems that some sort of serious momentum is gathering against the cuts to higher education, the imposition of massive fees on students, and the scrapping of Educational Maintenance Allowance. However, with the news today that the government is to demolish Aimhigher, it is hard not to feel that we are trying to march up a slippery slope of inequality, tilted against the youngest and poorest members of society.

Aimhigher was set up by the Labour government - after their wrong-headed invention of tuition fees - to encourage aspiration among those who might not otherwise aim for a university education. It ran mentoring schemes which paired up university with A-level students; provided summer schools for children from local schools; top universities, previously guilty of elitism, ran schemes to allow youngsters from weaker educational backgrounds to apply to university with reduced grade requirements, provided they could demonstrate their potential by attending workshops.

As I blogged back in September, I had the privilege of working for one such scheme in my university. My university has an undoubted elitism problem. Situated in the northeast, which has some of the worst unemployment and poverty in the country, my university nevertheless takes around 50% of its students from independent schools (and up to 75% in my own subject of English). It is viewed as a bubble world by the local community, who believe that only those with London accents are allowed to break through its glass barriers and join in the quaint rituals of gowns and academic processions.

However, through the efforts of a small team of students and staff, supported by those at the top, things were changing. Funded by Aimhigher, the schemes in which I briefly participated had, over the past two years, really begun to make a difference. Those children I met on the scheme bowled me over with their raw enthusiasm and ability which, though that alone may still not have sufficed to give them the three As that are a common entry requirement of my university, would nevertheless have amply compensated for their less strong educational background were they still allowed to start their degrees.

Scrapping Aimhigher and the university schemes it funds, at a time when the popular understanding is that both rich and poor alike are going to have to stump up £30 000 to study at university, sends out entirely the wrong messages, and can only narrow rather than widen access. I can already hear the voices of privilege echoing ever louder in the corridors and tutorial rooms of my university over the coming years.

Compounding this is the government's cutting of Educational Maintenance Allowance for 16 to 18 year olds. The tabloid press and coalition spin doctors would have us believe that this £30 a week, given to those poorest students who opt to stay on in some form of further education or training, was being frittered away down the pub. However, my experience is very different.

My partner works for BTCV, an environmental charity which, among other things, provides training in practical conservation skills for this age group. In a scheme she ran last year, she took out eight lads who had dropped out of college, but who had volunteered to spend 25 hours a week working out in cold and soggy nature reserves, mending fences, laying paths, and layering hedges, serving both the community and their own skills in the process. For coalition millionaires, £30 a week might seem like loose change, so scrapping it won't make much of a difference. However, for lads like these, that £30 often provided a necessary support to help them buy food or pay for heating; without it, their parents would have demanded they return to the dole, where they could get more money on benefits.

However, more important than the money itself was the message it sent out, one that should have been music to the ears of Iain Duncan Smith: work pays. It may have been far below minimum wage, but for their 25 hours a week outdoors these lads received some form of recompense. They were in constant touch with careers advisers and (at least before the spending cuts hit) could see the sorts of jobs to which their training would give them access: council work, conservation work. These may be poorly paid, but are £15 000 a year better than benefits. I am not surprised that recent surveys suggest up to 60% of England's poorest students would drop out of education or training without EMA. Would you want to spend 7 hours a day up to your ankles in mud, mending fences without any kind of financial reward?

My recent blog posts on the Browne review show how concerned I am about the proposed rise in tuition fees. Yet my concern is tempered by my awareness that were I faced with them when I was a child, higher tuition fees would have had little effect on my life, only on my bank balance. Born in a middle class family, my dad came back from the library every weekend laden with books for me to read, before taxiing me off to my music lessons and drama clubs. I was supported every step of the way through my education, and there was never any doubt that the final one would lead to a good university. The prospect of £30 000 of debt might have caused a brief tut, as I strode through the oak doors of my traditional university, which had been held open from moment of my birth into the middle classes.

I am sad at the financial situation I would be facing had I the misfortune to be born a decade later. But my anger, my real fury, is reserved for the way in which the coalition has targeted those who have the misfortune to be born into the wrong sort of lifestyle: those who have the temerity to grow up in households where no one has previously been to university, which is seen as a privilege not a right; those who have the gall not to consider becoming bankers or lawyers, but to do practical, outdoor jobs. In their different ways, Aimhigher, and Educational Maintenance Allowance encouraged people to put the fluke of their birth behind them, and take the opportunities of training and development that the state could place there. To cut off these opportunities at the root is to destroy that fragile seed that ought to be nurtured to fruition in all young people: aspiration.

Kicking The Habit of Art

2010-11-19T09:43:00.000Z

There are many interesting things one could say about Alan Bennett's thoroughly enjoyable play The Habit of Art. One that struck me most, however, was the way in which a faintly retrospective air hangs over the whole thing: looking at a stage set in a backstage rehearsal room, it is almost as if this play is a reflection on Bennett's career and the public perception of him as a dramatist.

This is, more than anything, a play about playing. It has a multi-layered quality, so that we see actors playing the part of actors, who are rehearsing for a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, who are in turn playing up to the personalities that the public expect them to possess: Auden the untidy, dishevelled but loquacious poet; Britten the inspiring conductor who is suffering from composer's block at the end of his career. This reflexive quality is exacerbated by the touring production which I saw. Firstly, performed in Newcastle's Theatre Royal, there is an ironic edge to the fact that the rehearsal is supposedly for a play for the National Theatre; this makes us think about the way in which theatres themselves impose expectations on actors, the audience of the National expecting to see only big name stars and intelligent productions, both aspects of which are somewhat lacking in the play within The Habit of Art. Secondly, Desmond Barrit plays Auden in the touring production, but he is highly conscious of Richard Griffith's inhabiting of that role in the original National Theatre one; thus Barrit plays as Griffiths playing as Fitz, the actor who plays Auden.

All these metadramatic elements frame one of the key themes of the play, the question of who owns a role: is it the playwright, is it the actor, or is it the character he or she is playing? Fitz objects to the depiction of Auden as being more concerned with the ideals of the body - bluntly, oral gay sex - than with those of the mind and the language. Contrary to Fitz's protestations, the writer of the play insists that the corporeal, sexualised Auden is validated by his letters, though it is hard to ignore the fact that the writer himself might have been mislead by his reliance on another artificial rehearsal of Auden's life, in the form of Humphrey Carpenter's biography of him (Carpenter too forms part of the play, though the actor playing him objects to his mere bit-part chorus role).

It is within these contexts, then, that we can start to see the play as a reflection on Bennett himself, and the way in which as an established (and establishment) playwright, Bennett too may seem to play a role, and that rather than writing about and influencing public life, Bennett is increasingly conditioned by that same public's perceptions of him. Although unlike in Bennet's earlier plays about the process of drama, such as The Lady in the Van, Bennet himself does not make an appearance, the characters of slovenly Auden and neat and tidy Britten are his analogues.

Quick-witted but camp, gay but faintly melancholic, the late Britten and Auden are surrounded by a faded mythology. Britten made his name as an avant-garde composer, but his place at the leading edge has been assumed by Tippet (and we are conscious that Britten today is a staple of that most populist of musical variety shows, the Last Night of the Proms). In the 1940s Auden emigrated New York in search of artistic freedom, and to escape the War, and has returned to Britain full of tales of the sexual freedom and poetic acclaim he had found in the United States, only to be seemingly half-disappointed that Britain in the meantime has become a sexually tolerant place, whilst his poetry is at best respected (by the BBC, no less) rather than greeted with ovations. Auden hates his own poetry being quoted back at him, which adds another layer to the dramatic role-playing: Barrit plays as Griffiths playing as Fitz, who plays a poet struggling to avoid inhabiting the role that he once defined, and that now defines him. Living in the cosy semi-retirement offered by Christ Church, Oxford, both Auden and Britten want to recuperate the controversy that attached itself to their earlier gay personas and artistic avant-gardism, and to avoid donning that dressing gown for the evening of their lives which has two damning words sewn into it: National Treasure.

Bennett himself, soft-spoken Northerner, mildly camp but not self-congratulatorily homosexual, possessing the dubious and simple virtue of having been around for a long time, is often talked of in just such terms. As Michael Billington complained, they make him "sound like a theatrical Queen Mum radiating beneficence over a grateful populace." However, this satirical observer of the foibles of national life deserves more than to be treated as the doyenne of the W.I. In another light, the self-reflexivity that many of his plays exhibit, none more so than this one, might a few decades ago have been seen as sharply postmodernist; as a realist writer true to the ironies of common conversation, he is unsurpassed.

The Habit of Art, then, is something of a paradox. This play could be seen as dominated by the anxiety of his own influence, about the formulaic repetition of old parts, stale dramas, hackneyed writing. Yet it also, paradoxically, must rank among Bennett's finest, for whilst this is a play about the habits of art, it also kicks against the habits of a lifetime in an ironic, self-conscious way that is poignant, metadramatic rather than melodramatic.

Minstrelry, Huckleberry Finn, and the X Factor

2010-11-16T11:10:00.000Z

I have returned to preparing Huckleberry Finn and (helped mainly by Stephen Railton's outstanding resource, Mark Twain in His Times) have been thinking about its use of the tradition of minstrel shows. Minstrel shows were variety acts, featuring light song and comic performances, by white actors made-up in black face (more on that in a moment).

In Huckleberry Finn, Railton convincingly argues that Twain introduced aspects of the minstrel tradition, most evidently in the "King Sollermun" exchange between Huck and Jim, where Huck becomes frustrated at Jim's inability to understand the Biblical parable. Here, Twain clearly evokes - but alters - the format of the comic skit common in minstrelry, in which an educated "interlocutor" demonstrates the idiocy of a black fall guy. Often, this would entail the black fool missing the point of a common joke (see this example of the skit "Bones in Love"), and thus becoming someone we laugh at rather than with.

In Huckleberry Finn, Twain plays with this archetype. Here, Jim and Huck argue about the significance of the story of King Solomon, who was prepared to chop a child in half in order to determine his true mother. Their rapid fire exchanges evoke a minstrel skit, with Huck assuming the role of the educated interlocutor, and Jim the idiot who cannot understand the obvious point of the story. For Huck, the moral of the story - taught to him by Miss Watson - is that King Solomon was a wise man; he finds it both humorous and frustrating that Jim does not see this. For Jim, though, the "real pint is down furder":

You take a man dat's got on'y one or two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be waseful o' chillen? No, he ain't; he can't 'ford it. He know how to value 'em. But you take a man dat's got 'bout five million chillen runnin' roun' de house, en it's diffunt. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey's plenty mo'. A chile er two, mo' er less, warn't no consekens to Sollermun, dad fatch him!"

Whilst an ordinary man would value his own child, a man who has "five million chillen" would not be so troubled by the death of one. The thoughtful reader can see that for Jim, the allegory, derived from his experience as a slave, is that a slave owner with many metaphorical "children" would not put a price on the head of a mere negro. This is reinforced later in the novel, when Aunt Sally asks whether anyone was killed in the steamboat accident, and Huck replies, "no mum, just killed a nigger."

There is a really complex racial politics at work here, as a familiar Biblical parable seems to encode a very different moral depending on whether one looks at it from the point of view of a black or white man. The two ways in which Solomon can be interpreted therefore make it uncomfortably different to the way a minstrel show was viewed, which directed the gaze of the audience to see themselves as unambiguously superior to the black performers.

In a minstrel performance, a black man is shown to miss the point of a well-known story or joke in a comic way. In itself, this would suggest the idiocy of the black race. However, exacerbating this, all the parts were actually played by white actors, wearing black make-up. Thus the comic skits reinscribed racial differences for the white audience in a more extended way: the white man in black face can wipe off his make-up and return to being a white man, whereas by implication the true black man remains black and – according to the evidence of the performance – stupid and ignorant, defined by his racial otherness rather than able to transcend it. Whilst the white man playing the black role can return to his white origins after the show, true blacks always retain the stupidity and inferiority which the white actor has only fleetingly and self-consciously demonstrated.

With no such visible indicators of skin in the novel genre, Twain employs the minstrel spat in order to confound our expectations. Whilst initially readers familiar with the Solomon story will assume that this exchange likewise shows up the clever and educated Huck versus stupid, black Jim, in fact we realise that it is Huck, not Jim, who has missed the point of the story when the context of slavery is taken into account. The roles they play in the spat are not defined by the colour of their skin - which is invisible in the textual form - but rather by the way their colour has determined their lives and experiences: slavery in Jim's case, some sort of education in Huck's.

Here, then, is evidence of Twain's humanitarian agenda. As a child, Twain had seen his father trade in slaves, and became an advocate of the anti-abolitionist cause. In Huckleberry Finn, as the example above shows, Twain exposes the hypocrisy of white superiority founded on Christian values. However, herein lies a rub.

As one of the great literary personalities of his era, Twain - like his contemporary Dickens in England - was a showman as well as an author. He took his novels on tour, lecturing and reading to large crowds in popular performances. As the image to the right shows, he often headlined evening shows that also featured minstrel acts. Far from being uncomfortable at accompanying the sort of performance he so carefully adapts in Huckleberry Finn, Twain loved minstrelry, describing it as "the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show," "the show which to me had no peer," "a thoroughly delightful thing." Indeed, Railton explains that this "King Sollermun" episode was actually performed as a stand-alone act on a bill that also encompassed minstrelry.

It is hard to reconcile the two aspects to Twain. How can a man who so consciously manipulated the minstrel tradition in order to show how racial categories defied simple stereotypes have delighted in a show designed precisely to reinforce racial differences?

In trying to come up with an answer to a question I envisage being asked by a bright student, I alight upon the X Factor by way of analogy. It seems to me that this "light entertainment" occupies a similar position to minstrelry in nineteenth-century culture. Both are formulaic and rely on our recognition of "actors" temporarily inhabiting stereotypes.

In the case of the minstrel show, it was the stupid black man who unselfconsciously fails to get the point of a common joke, thereby making him the butt of another one; rather than laughing at the joke itself, minstrel viewers laughed at the stupid black man who could not understand it. In the case of the talent contest, we watch the early auditions with a sense of schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the failure of singers to live up to the talent they believe they possess. Rather than entertaining us with their singing per se, it is their lack of ability that is amusing; the contestants' failure to recognise their own lack is the source of the entertainment here.

Yet just as the minstrel audience ignored the complex racial issues behind their shows, we fail to reflect on the class politics that underlie such a performance. Most of the contestants on talent shows like X Factor are working class. It says something starkly depressing about modern society that for many working class kids it is celebrity rather than education or graft that is perceived as the way to raise their social and economic status. According to surveys, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, most children today say "sportsman," "pop star" or "actor." Celebrity has become a means to an end, rather than the end itself, in a society where hard, professional work may not be fairly rewarded with good pay or broad respect.

When we watch X Factor, then, we are really watching people with often low aspirations and underemployment, prospects from which five seconds of television fame seems to offer an escape. When we mockingly commiserate their failure to perform with any real talent, we also celebrate our apparently superior status as viewers who do not need to reduce ourselves to playing their role. Through rapid cuts and editing, each contestant has a limited space to demonstrate their talent - or lack of it - and this imposes a sense of transience that allows the viewer to feel superior to those on display. The ad break is to X Factor what make-up was to the minstrel. By seeing those performances of lower class or inferior races as being temporary, we are reasserting the permanence of our superiority.

My point here, then, is partly to show just how effectively light entertainment by definition does not encourage us to reflect on the complex conditions (racial or class hierarchies) on which it often depends; even an author like Twain, so conscious of race in his writing, celebrated the populist minstrel show. We only ever see the stereotypes light entertainment presents as being conventions of the stage, without reflecting what in reality those stereotypes reflect. In both cases, the crucial aspect is the temporary nature of the performance. In the case of minstrelry, once we think carefully about it, the use of blackface make-up seems ultimately to reinforce racial differences, because it implies that the true black man could not pass for white in the reverse direction; however, in the moment of performance, even for a sympathetic viewer like Twain it may also seem paradoxically less racist, because the actor is white not genuinely black, and it is a white clown, not a genuinely black individual, who is the target of laughter. Similarly, the editing style of a TV talent show aims to give contestants five minutes of fame, and no more. Being de-individuated, as just one contestant among a constantly changing stream of them, we can safely laugh at them without worrying about the class values that ultimately unite them. Because the actor in the minstrel show is white, not genuinely black, whilst the performer on the talent show is never allowed to reveal too much about their actual background and (lack of) aspirations, we see only the show as a role-play of stereotypes, not as presenting the actual people (black, lower class) who are being stereotyped.

Huckleberry Finn

2010-10-25T16:25:00.000Z

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?

The Browne Review: Teaching and Learning

2010-10-20T07:57:00.000Z

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.

Do the Arts and Humanities Make Money for Universities?

2010-10-18T09:48:00.001Z

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.

The Browne Review: Implications for the Arts

2010-10-14T07:42:00.007Z

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.

The Browne Review: Postgraduates

2010-10-13T07:50:00.004Z

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 will look at the implications of the Browne review for the arts and humanities, and at the possible impact on teaching and learning.

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.

Browne rejects the idea that postgraduates should receive similar support to undergraduates. Partly, he suggests that many postgraduates have access to private investment for their studies, whether through business, industry, or employer-supported schemes. It is certainly true that postgraduate students do have access to different types of funding to undergraduates, as well as to commercial loans (known as Career Development Loans) which do not charge interest for the period when the postgraduate is studying.

However, Browne's blanket appraisal that some postgraduates have access to funding and that therefore "there is no compelling case for removing investment from undergraduate students to give it to postgraduate students" seems very odd. If the main result of the review of university funding will be that the costs of education are pushed from the state to the student, with universities having more autonomy to decide what to do with their income, then I fail to see how there will not be a potential pool of liberated investment - not tied by HEFCE to supporting one group or another - that could be in part redirected into postgraduate study.

And, despite what Browne says about postgraduates having access to private funding streams, there does need to be some public subsidy at the postgraduate level, if access is to be widened. Browne himself notes that:

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.

For example, whilst only 7% of the general population have been privately educated, 14% of undergraduates and 17% of postgraduates have had this privilege.

This seems to suggest that those private sources of funding are not as widespread as he earlier made out, and that as a consequence many postgraduates are self-funded; naturally, these will tend to be those who have the support of wealthy family or parents, or who have already got established careers. Browne's next conclusion is thus wishful-thinking at best, perhaps even naive:

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.

Can we really believe that increased tuition fees at the undergraduate level, even if they do somehow, remarkably, widen access here, will filter their effects up to postgraduate level in such a positive way? Over the last few years, the number of students seeking postgraduate qualifications has markedly increased, by around 20% between 2002 and 2009. Much of this is out of the necessity of an increasingly competitive jobs market, where first degree graduates realise that they need a second degree to differentiate themselves from their peers. Additionally, for those who can afford it (which is often true at the privileged university where I teach), I know from experience that with the graduate jobs market having slowed down during the recession, many undergraduates and their parents are taking the sensible step of self-funding an additional year of study, rather than spending time sitting on the dole.

Given these factors, assuming that the free market in higher education will see the cost of postgraduate courses increase in line with or even beyond that for undergraduate courses, but without being accompanied by appropriate maintenance support, postgraduate courses will remain biased towards the wealthy. To be fair, Browne does go on to call for postgraduate participation to be carefully monitored. However, Browne's belief that over time it will be "solely academic performance rather than social background that determines entry to postgraduate study" is hard to credence, given the budget cuts that are set to hit the research councils, which currently fund precisely those students who are academically most capable, generously supporting them through postgraduate study and into research careers.

Although the issue of fees and postgraduate support (or lack of it), is naturally the predominant focus of the Browne review, there is one other aspect that is worth noting for postgraduates. This is Browne's call that all university teachers ought to be qualified to teach only after taking an HEA accredited course. Whilst my own university is excellent at training postgraduates adequately before allowing them to teach, I know that not all postgraduates are so fortunate. Making training into a statutory requirement can only be a good thing, enhancing the skills - whether subsequently retained within academia or transferred out of it - of the postgraduate community. Of course, the question remains an open one of who is going to pay for training postgraduates, if support bodies like Vitae are going to see their funding hammered in the spending review, whilst there will not be - if Browne's proposals are followed - any reconsideration of how postgraduates are funded.

That Saturday Morning Feeling

2010-10-09T11:48:00.010Z

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.

Elitist English?

2010-09-28T08:25:00.002Z

An article in The Guardian has just caught my eye, reporting on a study that shows that the wealthiest students dominate the arts and humanities, with poorer students opting for science or vocational degrees. The figures on which the report is based, provided by the Sutton Trust, are not quite as extreme as the paper's feature writer would like to make out:

31% of those who graduated in 2008 with degrees in history or philosophy were the children of senior managers – the socio-economic group with the highest income. Across all English university courses, an average of 27% of graduates were from this group.

And:

Language graduates were also disproportionately from the wealthiest homes, with 30% from the highest income group. In comparison, non-arts and humanities courses – with the exception of medicine and dentistry – had far fewer students from the highest-income group. Just 17% for education, 22% for computer sciences and 23% for business studies were from the wealthiest homes.

That 4% difference between those children of senior managers who graduated in history, and those offspring of top professionals who graduated in other subjects, is hardly a statistical gulf. Nevertheless, it does chime with my own experience - both as a student and as a university teacher - that the arts (I'm talking English specifically, of course) attract a certain type of student.

In my own personal experience, coming from a middle class home with two parents who had already been to university, I was always encouraged to study what I enjoyed, which might or might not be most valuable as an ultimate career option. As I moved to A-levels, my college's timetable allowed me to study either physics or history; in the end, I opted for history, which was essential to my application to read English at a top university. It is not hard to imagine that, coming from a different background, I would have been pushed towards the subject that might see me enter university with a vocational career in mind, rather than towards arts A-levels which, at the time, would have had an uncertain exit point from university even if they were pleasurable to do. With different parents, I could have been another victim of the UK's unusual funnelling in further and higher education, which sees UK students forced to specialise in their subjects far earlier than their continental and transatlantic counterparts. It is easy to imagine A-level students who love English but who happen to be good at a science subject being pushed by their parents into studying the latter, when if they were allowed to study a broader spectrum of subjects for a longer period, the students themselves rather than parental background would determine which subjects they enjoy, which should be a factor in which subject to choose at university.

In the present day reality, though, as a teacher I do perceive that students who start English degrees tend to come from a narrow social class mix. At the top-ten university at which I teach (which shall of course remain nameless), across the arts and humanities 48% of students came from independent schools, whereas only 33% of students in the sciences came from that educational background. In English, an astonishing 65% of students came from independent schools. Our tutorials echo with the voices of privilege. Ben Knights, director of the English subject centre, has worried that "There could be a progressive gentrification of arts and humanities." I agree - although my fears here are tempered by my experiences teaching for the Open University, which attracts a much more diverse mix of students.

But regardless of the facts here, we do run the risk of creating a fallacy if we draw an association between the social class of students and the types of degree they do. The Guardian article (and many of the commentators below it) seem to be making the pejorative assumption that if wealthy students (or students of wealthy parents) are doing arts degrees then the degrees themselves must be self-indulgent and ultimately worthless. This is entirely false.

For a start, the arts sector is a large scale employer in the UK. According to Prospects, the UK's official careers website, 6.2% of graduates went into careers as arts, culture and media professionals; marketing, sales and advertising (another common destination for arts' graduates) comprised another 4%. According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the creative arts sector employs 1.8 million people in the UK. Even assuming that not all jobs in this sector will require a traditional arts degree, it is clearly wrong to assume that the arts and humanities are soft and self-indulgent subjects which have no socio-economic benefit.

As for employment, although the present recession sees uncertain prospects for all graduates, 7.9% of Arts' graduates were unemployed six months after graduating, whereas 8.5% of science graduates were unemployed after the same period. Now, in the longer term it may be true that science graduates can expect to earn more than their arts counterparts, but again it is a myth that arts graduates are doing economically unviable subjects.

Supported by figures like these, it is vital that the economic case for the arts is made with conviction and clarity. In the past, a story about the class bias in degrees might simply be an ideological footnote to be picked up by a left-wing paper like The Guardian. But in the present economic climate, the stakes are much higher. Whitehall officials are considering slashing the Higher Education teaching budget by 75%. Having been told to protect "strategically important" subjects such as science and technology and engineering, budgets for subjects in the arts and humanities look likely to be hardest hit. Stories about the wealthy class of students these subjects attract will make them seem a tempting double-target, not only seen as strategically unimportant but also as an opportunity to bash the sons and daughters of all those wealthy but worthless bankers and lawyers, the liberal elites who got us into the recession in the first place.

Such tabloid prose is of course absurdly simplistic. But then so too are governments (I include New Labour here too) which bean counts the impact factors of university research, and the perceived direct correlation between the number of engineers and accountants in an economy, and gross domestic product which has become the sole measure of the success of our national culture.

Tuition Fees and Contact Hours Calculator

2010-09-20T15:51:00.000Z

The Guardian's Comment is Free section has recently seen a spirited debate between science and arts students about whether the respective contact hours they receive at university are a fair reflection of the tuition fees they pay. The contact hour is an imperfect but useful focus for a discussion about value for money in higher education. As a prelude to Lord Browne's university funding review, which is likely to see both tuition fees increase and accompanying requirements for universities to be more transparent about the quality of teaching they deliver, the raw contact hour provides the best handle by which current students can grasp the relation between fees, and the education for which they pay.

As an English graduate under the £1000 per year tuition fee model, and now as someone who tutors part time in English, I have long weighed into the debate, blogging grumpily about my belief that the current levels of teaching are inadequate and that the universities have ample capacity to deliver more teaching with their tuition fee money. However, to my shame as an academic research, I realised that my prejudices were not informed by detailed evidence. I therefore developed a "contact hours" calculator, which would help to work out precisely how much a contact hour costs a student in different subjects.

This contact hours calculator is now publically available on The Pequod. It is an Excel spreadsheet with a user-friendly front-end (please enable macros to run it): Download the Tuition Fee and Contact Hours Calculator.

Accompanying the calculator, I wrote a long essay explaining the limitations with the notion of the "contact hour," whilst also running with it to test the relationship between tuition fees and contact hours. The headline results were surprising. Firstly, many contributors to the debate (including myself) have failed to account for the proportion of the "tuition" fee that universities spend on what the Higher Education Statistics Agency labels "Academic Support" (the likes of careers services, counselling and administration) and "Facilities" (accommodation blocks, sports halls, libraries) rather than teaching contact. This infrastructure spend - currently only listed in the Complete University Guide league table - often accounts for half of the tuition fee total.

Once the proportion of the tuition fee that gets spent on infrastructure is deducted, a student in chemistry at a top UK university might be paying as little as £3.00 per student, per contact hour, seemingly outstanding value for money. A student in English at another top university might give double this, £6.00 per student, per contact hour. A lecture delivered to 150 science students contributes £500 to the university. A small group seminar delivered to 20 English students contributes £130.

It is important to note that this is the figure for one hour of face-to-face contact, per student. It does not include the time a lecturer or tutor must spend in preparing teaching materials or marking work. Conversely, a lecture delivered to 200 students will accumulate a greater proportion of the tuition fees than a small group tutorial. Nevertheless, looked at from any perspective, objectively both the English student and chemistry student seem to be getting a good return on their tuition fees, even if from a comparative point of view the chemistry student has more contact time.

The unanswered question is about the quality of different types of teaching environment. Does an interactive, small group tutorial develop an English student's academic, interpersonal and study skills twice as much as a science student's large group lecture?

The calculator also raises issues to do with the accessibility of data. The "tuition" fee is a misnomer, as a significant proportion goes on infrastructure rather than direct teaching. The English student might naturally expect some of their money to be diverted to a well-stocked university library, which also provides adequate facilities for private study. But the HESA "Facilities" and "Academic Services" components lump together spending on academic facilities with extra-curricular ones, such as sports, whilst it does not discriminate between the amount an arts student contributes to the resources that might most benefit them (such as a well-stocked library and private study facilities) and the amount a science student contributes to their relevant resources (such as laboratory equipment).

This blog post represents the public launch of the tuition fee calculator. You are invited to read the essay in full, which explores its implications in more detail, whilst prospective students and interested commentators should find the tuition fee calculator useful as a way of better understanding how tuition fees are currently spent.

Style in Contemporary Fiction

2010-09-17T15:08:00.004Z

According to Elif Batuman's LRB review, Mark McGurl's book about the influence of creative writing schools on literary fiction, The Program Era, makes an interesting proposition. This is that as in technology or sport, "systematic investments of capital over time have produced a continual elevation of performance" in the sphere of writing. With regards to style alone, Batuman agrees:

If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust.

Such improvements will not, of course, be universal across all writers; but neither should they be limited to those who have directly been taught creative writing. Any amateur tennis player must perceive that because Roger Federer has overturned the assumption that the preceding generation of Sampras and Agassi would never be bettered, so too it ought in principle to be possible for the most modest player to supersede their own expectations; couple such inspiration with practical developments in sport science, and you have a potent formula for improving sportsmen across the board. Similarly, in creative writing, when the existence of writing schools is linked with the persistent if outdated New Critical doctrine that aesthetics can be understood and judged in absolute and even scientific terms, a powerful notion must take root in the mind of any aspiring novelist. That it is possible to to learn the techniques that make for well-written literature, coupled with the living examples of those successful graduates of such schools (McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Naomi Alderman, to name some of the graduates of the University of East Anglia alone), puts paid to the myth that creativity is somehow god-given but untutored, a kind of demonic possession. So McGurk's central thesis that the mere existence of academies for writing, the professionalisation of the form, should see attendant improvements in the state of the art generally is a fairly reasonable one.

Certainly, as I am reading a lot of contemporary literature at the moment in preparation for a course that I am about to teach on post-war fiction, I think it is hard to find examples of bad writing, which goes hand in hand with many of the influences of the achieved practice of creative writing. Pat Barker's Regeneration offers my most recent example. Early in the novel, there is a conversation between the psychologist, Rivers, and Robert Graves, who has tried to manipulate his friend Siegfried Sassoon into admission into Rivers' psychiatric hospital. Graves at first tells Rivers that the reason Sassoon had let himself be admitted was that:

"He couldn't go on denying he was ill."
Rivers didn't reply. The silence deepened, like a fall of snow accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed.
"No, it wasn't like that." Graves's knobbly, broken-nosed boxer's face twitched. "I lied to him."

The snow metaphor separating Graves's initial statement from his true admission is quite admirable. It works literally to fill the time and silence between the two pieces of direct speech, padding out the dialogue in a dramatic fashion, but also as a figure of time and silence in the abstract. Yet there is something not quite right about it. No - "right" is the wrong word to use, but it is precisely the problem: the metaphor is too right, too polished and perfect. The steady, successful poetry of the image contrasts with the next description, of Graves's "knobby, broken-nosed boxer's face." The idea of Graves, a war hero, as a mere broken-nosed boxer rather than one scarred by his actual experiences on the front, is slightly comic but also therefore poignantly incongruous. In this short passage I see two elements side by side. In the first, one can almost read the sign on the door of the creative writing workshop: "Day One: Metaphor." In the other, the more intuitive, naturalistic writer with the untutored eye for a telling detail that adds a nuanced and ambiguous definition to her character.

Perhaps I am being unfair here. Style is a subtle, tricky spirit and, of course, no one can finally identity which elements of it have been bottled and then taught, and which are the outcome of a more intuitive process. What one can say, though, is that across the board of much contemporary literature, it is hard to identify radical differences in style. The contrast here is with the modernists. A passage of writing about nature in D.H. Lawrence would be recognisably distinguished from a passage by E.M. Forster; Henry James's and Virginia Woolf's representations of consciousness take very distinct registers and narrative points of view. Not only is difference noticeable, it is - or was - also divisive. It is not particularly surprising or iconoclastic to hear of Evelyn Waugh complaining that "Lawrence had very meagre literary gifts," in the way it would be surprising to hear the same sort of thing said by Colm Toibin on John Banville. The two earlier writers are at different extremes, stylistically, and it is not surprising to see such literary opposition, even if today both writers can be incorporated as canonical. Indeed, modernism generally was unified more by its reaction against what was perceived to be the homogenously realist style of Victorian literature, than by a common agenda to produce its own, equally homogenous new style.

Some sort of homogeneity, though, does seem to be at work in contemporary literature, which lacks either a sense of what it is for or what it is against. Across my most recent reading list, there is a heavy debt to modernist authors, techniques, even basic plots. Smith's On Beauty reworks Forster's Howards End; Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty is indebted to The Great Gatsby; Regeneration uses the psychoanalytic dialogue to dramatise its characterisations of therapist and patient; McEwan's Saturday presents a contemporary Bloomsday, whilst Atonement ventriloquises Virginia Woolf; across her oeuvre, A.S. Byatt speaks back to any number of Victorian and modernist aesthetes. Most of these novels rely on the conventions of realism, but although they use omniscient narrators they do not ("Writing Workshop Day Two: Suspect Narration") succumb to a naive objectivity; events are always suspected, focalised through different points of view, contrasted against historical facts as we know them.

Although postmodernism still bickers at the ragged fringes, and makes occasional incursions (usually sneaking in via metafictional devices) the main crowd of literary writers flow onwards, combining a general realism with gentle pastiche, and giving assenting nods to readerly needs such as plausible and intriguing plotting. The voices of characters - by now of course multicultural and cutting across classes - speak accurately off the page. At the Chatterley trial the prosecuting barrister, Griffith-Jones, read aloud a passage of conversation that Malcolm Muggeridge had recently deemed “the most hilariously fatuous dialogue ever to be written in the English language":

Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd..."How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?"
"Good!"
"I’ll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh, holy saints!" He rolled his eyes to heaven. "But you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right."

Griffith-Jones asked, "Do you think future generations reading that conversation would get anything approaching the kind of way in which Royal Academicians conducted their conversations?" Griffith-Jones may have had prudish motives in pointing this out, but there can be little aesthetic defence here; it sounds awful, even to a modern ear, a kind of Wildean pastiche of how one imagines the upper classes might talk. There would be no excuse for such a failure in the era of television and the internet. Every novelist has their ear to the soap opera (probably sneakily overheard whilst they pretend to read The Guardian) and as a consequence can do everyone from the toff to the toe-rag in plausible voices. Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, for example, has the upper class affectations pitch perfect, and human, without ever descending to the unwitting caricature Lawrence produces. Compare the following conversation between the rich Toby and his friend Nick, about Toby's failed engagement to the daughter of even more wealthy Maurice:

"Of course he blames me for not hanging on to her, Maurice does. He thought it was a good match."
"It was a good match, darling, for her: far too fucking good."
"Mm, thanks, Nick."
[...]
"I suppose it wasn't all that great, you know, the sexual side of things."
[...]
"Oh..."
"You know, she called it 'doings'."
"That's not very promising, I agree."

There's a lot in here that convinces, particularly the reticent awkwardness of Toby's "the sexual side of things," which then becomes relegated to "it," which compares with his fiancee's even more embarrassed "doings." But as well as this recognisably human pitch, there are moments of class consciousness, most obviously in the "darling" but also in Nick's final "That's not very promising." Down the pub, told this story, my reply would be "Well that's a bit pants." Nick's eloquence at this moment between two lads talking about sex testifies to his Oxford education. Realism is the order of the day, and unlike Lawrence's, this works, presenting these two characters as at once similar to but differentiated from "ordinary" people. Whether this is a hallmark of the writing school ("Day Three: Dialogue") is beside the point; the point is that we cannot imagine any practiced writer making such a hash of the speech patterns of anyone, upper or lower class, as Lawrence does, and remaining a respected writer, because readers - themselves attuned by television to a broad variety of speech styles - would so immediately pick up on it. Only rarely can dialogue rupture at the seams of credibility and the author survive as a literary writer. Lawrence gets excused, because he is descriptive rather than dialogic, writes of the mind rather than the direct voice; the contemporary author must learn to do both.

As a final test of my thesis - no, less a thesis on the basis of my limited evidence, more a hunch or feeling - ask yourself this. In fifty years time, will we use the words McEwan-esque, Barnesian, Ishiguran, in the same way as we apply Lawrentian, Woolfian, Joycian, Jamesian (with a fair idea about what the latter signify)? Of course, I am being selective here. It is just as possible to tell a piece of Rushdie's playful magic realist writing from A.S. Byatt's style laden with learned references as it is to tell Gertrude Stein from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel that there has been a smoothing of stylistic differences. This is indicated by my readerly tastes. I would happily read both Rushie and Byatt, or both Amis and McEwan into the small hours, but would never take Stein away from my teacher's desk and into my reader's bed. Like supermarket wine, it is today hard to find a bad example of modern literary writing (though turn to the lager aisle, of course, and you will still find your Dan Browns and Jilly Coopers on discount).

However, lest this all sound like Lee Siegel's lament for the death of the great American novel, let me make myself clear. Immersing myself in contemporary fiction has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I correlate my enjoyment of a book with the ache in my back, caused by the pathologically slouched position my six foot frame adopts when I am living in the world of the book. And my back has been very sore, these last few weeks. The novel has been, since its birth, the democratic genre that opens its welcoming arms to a mass audience, whereas poetry seeks to secrete itself in the mind. Before politics, before demands that it represent the greatness of a nation through the adventure of its form, the novel has sought to make itself popular. And if stylistic invariance - if a consistent, educated way of writing that simply works - is the price of the persistence of literary fiction in an age of competing narrative multimedia, so be it.

Proust's Subject

2010-09-15T12:11:00.000Z

Continuing my occasional self-help series on great writers who struggled to write (which began with Hugh Trevor-Roper), I was pleased today to find the following quote from Proust:

Since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was time I knew what I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, trying to find some subject … my mind would cease to function, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or that perhaps a malady of the brain was hindering its development.

I know how you feel, mate, as I sit procrastinating at my computer with numerous projects or subjects I feel I should be capable of writing on before the start of term, but which seemingly convert into large, vacant spaces the moment I try to think of them. But at least you managed to make up for lost time in the end; as for me, I only have three weeks until the start of the teaching year in which to get any serious writing done.

The Pope's Visit

2010-09-15T08:47:00.001Z

I was going to blog a couple of weeks ago about the fact that the Pope is to hold a state visit to the UK, when it first began to hit the headlines. However, I did not get around to doing it back then - and I am glad that I waited, because in the interim the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has exposed how absurd it is that the Vatican can trace its "statehood" back to the Lateran Treaty, a 1929 concordat signed with the Fascist dictator, Mussolini. Whilst the Pope has every right to visit the UK, based solely on the suspect and ad-hoc political status of his "state" it ought not to cost the British taxpayer £12 million to host him. Would we be prepared to pay a similar amount for, say, the Prince of Liechtenstein? As happens with football matches, concerts, rallies and protests, the costs of policing and overseeing his visit ought to be borne, in part, by the evangelising Catholic Church.

Another good reason for waiting, which makes it a more appropriate time to blog about the Papal visit now, is that I am currently preparing Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty for teaching next term.

This is his fictional account - sprinkled with some fairly poorly disguised actors standing for actual historical figures - of homosexual life in political society in the years of Thatcherism. It is full of explicit gay sex scenes featuring the protagonist Nick, a recent graduate who is intellectually advanced but sexually adolescent and socially naive. Every man he sees (especially those who happen to turn around to present particularly pert buttocks, be they straight or gay or ambiguous), is focalised as if they are a potential snare for his bedroom. His sexual fantasies and exploits are slightly but not directly camp, are certainly very funny, and sometimes quite touching. The one thing sex is not in the novel is distinctly bad, although the Aids crisis looms towards the end of the novel. The more significant ethical judgements are reserved for Thatcherism and the class conflict caused as insular, upper-class Tory grandees systematically dismantle the state whilst scooping enormous sums of money for themselves, despite being neither bright nor talented. As one civil servant merrily puts it at a party, champagne in hand, "The economy's in ruins, no one's got a job, and we just don't care, it's bliss."

When they come into contact with other classes of people - ethnic minorities, cleaners and taxi drivers, gay lovers - they react with disgust. Against the social issue of the entrenched attitudes of the ruling upper class, the gay lifestyle, though omnipresent in the mind of Nick, is also a historical and ethical irrelevance.

Not so for the Roman Catholic Church, for which sex in general is terrifying, subversive, always potentially immoral and irreligious. No one represents this more dogmatically than the present Pope, referred to as God's Rottweiler as head of canon law. The religious think tank, Theos, recently conducted a survey of British attitudes to the Pope, which asked about the public's support for his social agenda as expressed in his third encyclical letter. A large majority of people agreed with his statements such as that "technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption," that "investment always has moral, as well as economic significance," or that "food and access to water are universal rights of all human beings." I would agree with these statements too. But then, I would agree with them even if Kim Jong-il had made them. However, do such statements really represent the full spectrum of the Pope's social teaching?

Leaving aside - so far as such a mass human crime should be pushed to the margins - the child abuse scandal, would as many people have agreed with some of his following statements:

That Aids is a tragedy that cannot be alleviated by condom use, but that is actually exacerbated by it.
On the rise of feminism, that "Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women, in which the identity and role of one are emphasized to the disadvantage of the other, leading to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family."
That homosexuality is insidious and dangerous, and it is as important to save the world against homosexuality as it is to prevent environmental catastrophe.

This last point is particularly pertinent in relation to the view of ethics and sex inscribed in The Line of Beauty. Throughout the novel, there is an ironic counterpoint playing between the personal importance Nick attaches to his developing gay life, and our wider social consciousness that the gathering momentum of Thatcherism is ultimately what will prove the ongoing legacy of the novel's 1980's setting. To put it bluntly - in terms the novel itself might use - whilst Nick goes around filling holes, of more significance is the gaping one in the text, as The Lady remains a notable absence, often whispered about in adulatory terms, but never directly seen. By 2004, when the novel was written, homosexuality is an issue about which most people - including a significant proportion of ordinary Catholics - could not care less, whilst the social legacy of Thatcherism is something we are still struggling with today.

The Roman Catholic Church takes the opposite perspective. Making grand environmental pronouncements that amount to a positive social agenda is all very well, but it is only ever its bigoted stance on homosexuality, its sexism, or its hypocritical and conspiratorial abuse of children, that people will attend to.

One might of course argue that as an atheist, I cannot possibly understand the Pope's moral hierarchy that equates homosexuality to the destruction of the rainforest, or that is more concerned with ensuring Africans do not use contraception, than in preventing their unnecessary death from HIV. Were I to subscribe to the timeless standards of the Holy Book that the Pope uses, the Word of God himself, I should see that the Pope has things the right way around. Well, novelists too are graced - a word I use deliberately - with an insight into the interaction between human psychology, sexuality and social forces. Hollinghurst's novel shows the web of relationships that lead human nature to respond to moral values, and in turn to change them for better or worse. In this web, homosexuality, for example, is tenuously at the edges, whereas class conflict is right at the centre, leading society down paths that are sometimes unjust.

This is the line along which the novel is beautifully cut, with the good humour (though growing struggle with Aids) of gay life on the one hand, and the false pretences of inherited and freely acquired wealth on the other. However, by wittily exposing the problems of a hypocritical political class indirectly through the contrast with the self-serving but somewhat ridiculous pursuit of sex by Nick, the novel does not outrightly condemn anyone; it adopts a Jamesian perspective (Nick's thesis is on Henry James), using gentle mockery to allow the reader to see the flaws in the Tory toffs. It is in that sense a humane novel, and a humanist observation on social reality, and the things which actually matter in people's public and private lives. The Pope, by contrast, has his priorities skewed, to the point of his being un-humanitarian.

Academic Diaries

2010-09-13T13:38:00.000Z

I just received word of a Higher Education Academy funded project, Sharing Practice, which is investigating "how academics represent, share and change their practices." One aspect of the project asks academics to keep diaries of their "everyday lives and normal routines," recording their activities on the 15th day of every month. For any academics out there who currently blog, this ought to be an interesting and easy project with which to get involved.

Sex in the Ivory Towers

2010-09-06T14:20:00.000Z

Zadie Smith's hilarious but touching familial drama, On Beauty, is in part set on a university campus. It features a professor of aesthetics whose late career finds him emotionally, intellectually and sexually stagnant.

Having read it recently, I cannot help but wonder if one of the principle reasons for the existence of Arts departments is so that they can provide fictional settings for sexual encounters between sagging academics and nubile young students (as happens in On Beauty), in campus novels which are written by graduates of such departments in real life (such as Smith). So many times - even in the novels of excellent, realist writers such as David Lodge, JM Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith - balding professors are irresistibly tugged into bed by stunningly bright and beautiful eighteen year old girls.

In my experience, this is such stuff as fiction is made on - and is not something I have ever known to be true of actual academic life (or at least, not in the furiously passionate way depicted in most campus novels). Nevertheless, let's keep this myth alive, as if hot blood really does pump through the gossipy corridors of the ivory towers, as if every closed door with a brass nameplate on it conceals illicit sexual liaisons. At least it gives departments of literature and their like a reason to exist, if only so that their graduates can go off and write bestselling fantasies about them.

Back to School

2010-09-01T15:37:00.000Z

Having taught at university level for six years now (I know, I can't believe it either), I'd like to think that I know what I'm doing. I may not give a perfect tutorial every time; I may mismark an essay now and again; but on the whole, I am in my comfort zone when I am confronted by university students.

However, as the television adverts would have you believe, teaching younger kids is a unique challenge. Only those who can, teach students under the age of eighteen. Over the last year, my teaching credentials have been tested in this wholly different way, as I have run workshops for my university's Gifted and Talented programme for pupils aged 11 to 16, and for its scheme to encourage talented students from underprivileged backgrounds gain entry to what is a fairly elitist institution. I found that there was indeed an appreciable difference between teaching at university and junior levels, though not in a way I expected.

Neither workshop was particularly strenuous in terms of its material, the one being a practical session on how to write a blog, and the other involving a series of fun creative writing exercises. But both left me exhilarated in a way I do not get from university teaching. Teaching university students is a great privilege: they are (on the whole) motivated, highly intelligent, articulate. The atmosphere in a good tutorial room is one that can best be described as cultured enthusiasm. Whilst students and the tutor are usually passionate about the material, and hold strong views on it, these are expressed in ways that are intellectual and refined. We use theory to support out arguments, select evidence to explain a text. Our voices never get raised in anger or pleasure. We take it in turns to talk, and listen to each other carefully. The baser emotions of passionate feeling trickle through our words which are delivered with thought and care - as they rightly should be at an academic level.

Not so at the junior writing workshops. With twenty students in the room, these were noisy, bustling affairs. The kids chattered over each other, and although no one misbehaved, conversations happily drifted off the topic I was teaching. However, they were also utterly delightful, with delight meant in the most literal sense. They made me laugh, smile, joke with them. I know a conventional university tutorial has been successful when I come out of a tutorial room with my adrenaline pumping as if I have just been on a run, chasing down mazes of eager enquiry. Even after the best tutorial, though, I've never laughed out loud at the work we have done. Yet the junior scholars were genuinely entertaining, playing my word games and writing fake blog entries with imaginative abandon, joking with each other and with me as they did so. Both workshops were for students who are at the top of their classes, and I am under no illusions that their ability and good nature would not be uniform across a failing comprehensive. Nevertheless, it is good to know that the pleasures of teaching and learning can be sustained at all levels, from the very old (I taught a lady in her nineties for the OU last year) to the very young.

The Coalition Government: 100 Days, and Counting

2010-08-20T17:53:00.000Z

Over that long night and the strange following days of the general election, I blogged a few thoughts about the advent of a Liberal-Conservative coalition. With the media churning out editorials on the fact that the coalition has survived its first 100 days, I thought I would add my brief review to the mix.

Back then, I predicted that Cameron's government would prove to be more centrist than it might otherwise instinctively want to be, as it was kept in check by the Lib Dems. Yet - and I say this as a Lib Dem voter at the election - I have been baffled and disappointed by how little impact the Liberals are able to have on the Tories. Aside from a progressive increase of the income tax threshold to £10 000, I can think of no headline policies that have emerged from the Lib Dem side. Partially, this may be due to the fact that the two parties have indeed found a deal of common ground around the centre, especially with regard to civil issues. The classic example came when Kenneth Clarke, one of the more leftist Tories, revealed plans to reform the prison service, something the Lib Dems have long called for. When Michael Howard criticised the plans, he served to triangulate the coalition, away from Thatcherism, away from Labour's big state, and towards a more liberal civil society. Frankly, anything that Michael Howard rejects is likely to find favour with me.

Sticking with the positives, I have been surprised by how statesmanlike Cameron appears to be, supported by William Hague as Foreign Secretary, whose undoubted eloquence plays well on the international stage. On Afghanistan, in defending BP in the United States, in adopting a more forceful attitude towards Pakistan's partial permission of terror, Cameron and Hague have come across well.

However, to focus on civil liberties or foreign policy is to be talking about a mouse, when the elephant is dominating the room. On the issue of cuts, I remain quite pessimistic. Although I accept the premise that cuts have to be made, it is impossible not to imagine that the 40% knife is being wielded not with solemn determination, but with a degree of glee in some corners of the Conservative party. I also dislike the mantra of "efficiency savings" and "cutting waste" that comes from the political top. On the ground, an efficiency saving means a parent losing their job; what may be waste to the politician is a serious and valuable responsibility to the person performing a role.

But regardless of the language that smooths the great gashes in public spending, I have a very real fear that the cuts are making their marks most deeply on the young. Cuts in Connexions and the Future Jobs Fund will hurt those at the very bottom of the ladder, who may have dropped out of education prematurely, but who have not yet unfairly piggy-backed on a lifetime of benefits.

In a different area, the government's Higher Education funding policy is a mess, and the fact that 150 000 students will miss out on a university place threatens not only these individuals, but also the whole ethos - admirably developed by New Labour - that Higher Education should be accessible to all. On the news last night, I heard a young lad in tears, who had achieved two As and an A* at A-Level, but who had not been offered a place on the medicine course he wanted. He had no hope of getting an alternative place through clearing. The first in his family to aim for university, he had been promised that it offered the route to a premium career. He maintained his side of the bargain by getting excellent results; this government (and, to be fair, the last year of New Labour's) has not kept theirs. What message will this send out to those from poorer background who have never before seen university as something to aspire to, and who may not now do so again?

It seems to me that the big risk of cuts like this is that they are barbed with no possibility of reversal. Cut jobs in the civil service, or hospitals, or even schools, and staff can be re-recruited once the economy recovers. But cut funding for university places (or for for the environment and sustainability, another major concern of mine) and you cannot simply backpedal. Those who miss out on university this year, may end up never going; rural areas left to degrade and species left to decline may simply never return to their present state.

Nevertheless, at 100 days, it is fair to recognise that we are in the early phases of the government. Many of the "cuts" exist at the moment as paper hypotheses, and it is not until the October Spending Review that we will see more clearly what the future four years hold in store. Whereas Blair and Alistair Campbell seemed to follow each election by immediately planning for the next in pursuit of that "historic third term," the present government faces shorter hurdles, coming at an unprecedentedly rapid rate. The coalition has survived its first 100 days fairly well. But the next hurdle looms with the Spending Review. Then, as cuts bite early in the next financial year, it will arrive in the form of figures that show or deny a double-dip recession. In this fast moving political climate, the only thing that is sure is that the next checkpoint will arrive sooner than 100 days hence.

Ropey Writing

2010-08-12T08:44:00.001Z

In the London Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes about the historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of the most influential public historians of the post-war period. Trevor-Roper was despatched to Germany to verify the death of Hitler on the back of which he wrote his most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler, although he is, unfortunately, perhaps more infamous for his verifying the forged Hitler diaries as being authentic. He is somewhat redeemed by his victory in a spat with Margaret Thatcher, when he refused to share her hostility to a reunified Germany.

Yet for all his public and political renown, Trevor-Roper's ultimate academic credentials suffered from his "serial failures to complete a full-length work of history." The only full-length book he produced was his first, on Archbishop Laud. Others were extended journal supplements, collections of essays and lectures, and journalism. His defining achievement was supposed to have been a three-volume work on the Puritan Revolution, which never appeared. Trevor-Roper explained this as being due to writer's fatigue:

I am interested in too many things, and I write so slowly, so painfully slowly, that by the time I have written a chapter I have got interested in something else.

Many researchers will surely identify with this opera of academic adultery. As the initial excitement of a new research project gives way to the tedious days of diligent scholarship and writing, it is more tempting to look for something new than to see the old relationship through to its conclusion.

Ascherson also finds another reason for Trevor-Roper's serial failure to see projects to their conclusion:

It could be that the ‘brilliant examinee syndrome’, the private terror of public failure, had something to do with it as well. No book, no devastating book review.

Trevor-Roper was a notoriously harsh, even malicious, reviewer. Writing about a new work of biography, for example, he declined to discuss its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ So used to serving up vitriol, Trevor-Roper was afraid to receive it himself: better to publish nothing, and not risk a taste of one's own medicine.

Now whilst few researchers will be so amusingly negative in their reviews, the underlying anxiety that the great historian suffered from is one with which many will sympathise. Whilst no academic today could get a cosy Oxford professorship - or even a first job at a former poly - without copious publications behind them, we all understand the trick of avoidance that Trevor-Roper serially pulled off. Better to procrastinate and continually revise that journal article, rather than risk the rejection of peer review; preferable to work on a new book project, rather than suffering the ignominy of having one's revised PhD thesis rejected by a publisher. It may not be a good thing for one's career to suffer from a terminal failure to complete projects, but it should be a relief to know that one is at least in good company when this happens.

60 to 0 in A Month

2010-07-27T13:10:00.028Z

As regular readers of this blog will know, my life during university term time can get somewhat hectic. In various states of play, at any one time I can be holding down six different jobs: I teach part time at a mainstream university and at the Open University; tutor in a residential college of a university; work in a university library; write reports for a major research institute; and do a bit of publicity work for my department. With all these cards in play, during the term time my six or seven day working week can easily equate to the 60 hours of this blog title.

The price I pay for this game of life is that I don't have much of one (a life, that is) outside of work during term times. The other price is that I have been unable to keep up with my research. I have a number of projects and papers that I might be working on, not least being editing my thesis for a book proposal, since I am unlikely to get a full-time academic post without that first publication. However, these all go on hold until the Summer.

With the vacation, my formal working hours drop to less than ten a week, with even these being done from home as and when I want. This time last year, I had grand plans for what I would do with all this spare time. I started on a leisurely little paper on empathy in Ian McEwan's Atonement, until I realised that to discuss empathy and the novel was to open a mass of existing research that I had never known existed, and that would need to be read before I could hope to do justice to my incidental ideas. Instead, I wrote a couple of book reviews. I built myself a jazzy website for my academic teaching the coming year. I filled in numerous job application forms. And then, towards September, when I was appointed to my Open University post, I found myself busy doing all the preliminary reading and administration for this new course.

Largely, though, time dripped through this fragile web of productive work. Bike rides, sorting the garden, painting the house, reading for pleasure, sprucing up The Pequod - all became reasons not to work as much as I might. I justified this to myself on the basis that, having only passed my PhD viva in April, I merited a bit of a break from four years of graft. And, of course, I could not possibly bear to do any more work on my thesis or put together a book proposal when I had so recently waved goodbye to my academic child. That could wait until next year.

Next year has now become this year, last Summer has morphed into this Summer. Over the past teaching year, in what time I could spare of my 60 busy hours, I hatched plans for research that I would definitely do in these comparatively lazy days, especially with regards to my thesis. The only trouble is, I can foresee this Summer passing me by again. Partly, this is due to a couple of quite traumatic and unforeseeable personal circumstances, which have already eaten into the first six weeks of the vacation by forcing me to spend it away from home. However, I can see that, now that I am back at my desk, I will struggle to get the necessary motivation to make up for this lost time. Partly, the stress of term is still relatively close, and I feel resentful of doing intensive, unpaid research now, when I know that September will bring a return to poorly paid, time-consuming teaching. Do I not deserve to live life at a more normal pace for at least these three months?

Anyone in the real world would say "yes." But I am not naive enough to believe academia to resemble the real world. I fully understand and am prepared for the fact that it is a beyond full time job that one does for the pleasure of it rather than for the money. So where has that pleasure of research that motivated me through my PhD gone to? In part, I think I lack a research plan. There are no meetings with a supervisor to aim for; I cannot afford to attend and present at more than a couple of conferences a year. Without these signposts through the year that were present in my PhD life, it is hard to find a direction through the next three months.

This leads me to something of a vicious circle, as I feel I have lost my inspiration - something critical to a literary and intuitive subject such as English. In plugging away at my PhD research, I'd often encounter interesting but tangential ideas, books, connections that were worth following through with a paper or conference presentation. By the end, writing my thesis became a comparatively tedious exercise to fill the day, whilst it was the shorter research questions that were not really related to it that became more interesting to explore.

With my current plan not featuring anything long term as another thesis or book, however, I find myself doing the reverse: I will plug away at a few journal articles, but because these are self-contained it's hard to see how they can lead me in significantly new, unexpected and exciting directions. Without the daily grind of a longer research project, then, it becomes harder to get inspired to write impulsively in response to other things that interest me. The loop is closed, because without some moment of excitement that I have discovered an unanswered question, I'm not going to be able to construct any proposals for post-doctoral research. This is where, I suppose, this blog becomes a bit of a writer's lifeline, because I can at least write in response to things in the media and cultural sphere, even if not really "research"; my recent article on Inception, which somewhat fits with my critical interests, is an example of this kind of excuse against sustained academic endeavour.

What I need to do is that first year PhD student's trick of setting up a nice looking timetable. It may get thrown out of the window by the end of the first week - indeed, if it did not I would be disappointed: only boring research is predictable. However, it would at least place me under some sort of necessary pressure. When I reflect on how much I am able to do during the teaching year, juggling my various commitments, I realise that I am someone who thrives on a bit of stress, who needs to feel the pressure of a looming deadline (and there is no pressure like having to stand before a class on To the Lighthouse having only read it the week before) to work to my capacity. Probably, if I were primarily a writer, I would do better in journalism, with its incessant, nick-of-time deadlines, than in academia, with its organic research agendas.

But it is the latter in which I find myself, and so I need to discover a way to respond to the 60 hours of a teaching term not by frittering it away with zero hours during a research Summer, not by reacting angrily to the amount of work I have to do during term time, but by taking the same energy and motivation that allows me to survive - even sadistically enjoy - the teaching year, into these last three months of Summer.

More Accurate Student : Staff Ratios

2010-07-26T07:43:00.000Z

I've just received an interesting (currently unpublished) UCU report on Student : Staff ratios (SSRs). In the absence of detailed information about contact hours being built into league tables, the measure of the allocation of staff to students at universities (which is taken into account by most of the major university guides), is a vital indicator of teaching quality for prospective students.

However, currently SSRs are calculated using data provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. It is a raw measure of the number of staff employed to the number of students attending a given institution. What the UCU report did was to take a different data set (the Transparent Approach to Costing, which indicates the staff time spent on different activities). This shows that on average in the UK, academics spent 41% of their time on teaching, 24% on research, 3% on other activities, and 32% on administration.

However, far from being average, Higher Education contains a broad spectrum of institutions, from those which focus intensively on research, to those whose main emphasis is on teaching. Correspondingly, the report indicates wide variations in SSRs across different types of institutions when the TRAC data is used instead of the raw HESA measure of the number of staff employed. It also shows a substantial discrepancy between SSRs according to HESA statistics (which are the numbers published in university guides) and SSRs according to TRAC, which takes into account how much time staff at each type of institution can dedicate to teaching.

For example, on average the top Russell Group universities had one staff member to around 11 students when using HESA statistics; however, after adjusting for the proportion of time allocated to teaching as opposed to research (the latter being intensive at this band of universities), the SSR rose to around 33 students to the teaching proportion of staff time. In predominantly teaching institutions, SSRs according to HESA data were around 19 students to each member of staff; using the refined TRAC data, SSRs rose by around a third to 33.

This is quite interesting, and puts some statistical flesh on a common hunch. Wealthy, research-intensive universities typically have a larger number of staff than smaller, teaching-intensive ones. This seems to be reflected in the HESA statistics, which support the general impression that the Russell group universities and their ilk are better all round, not only for research but for teaching too. Remember that the Russell group SSR on HESA data was 11 students per staff member, whilst at the smaller teaching institutions it was almost double this. However, naturally at Russell group universities a greater percentage of staff time will be allocated to research. This means that when the TRAC data is used, there is more parity between teaching and research-intensive institutions, both being around 33:1.

Especially at higher ranking institutions, students often complain that whilst their prospectuses showed leading researchers at their institutions, their actual contact time with the stellar names was more limited. This UCU report goes to show that students certainly need to be provided with more refined information about the actual amount of contact they can expect to have with academic staff, rather than the raw number of staff employed at an institution. If you only ever see Professor X in his photo on the front of the prospectus, because his actual self is always off running research groups around the country, you have the right to be disappointed. This new information, then, also endorses one of my key findings in my Contact Hours Calculator, which is that the lack of transparency and accessibility of Higher Education statistics is woeful.

Latitude Festival

2010-07-25T07:24:00.001Z

Just a quick word - I supposed the hip word would be "shout out" - for the Latitude Festival, where I found myself this time last weekend. For a young, alleged intellectual, such as myself, this has to be the best festival on the calendar, with its vast programme of artistic, theatrical and literary events, to complement a really good music line-up. Just to illustrate, I know of no other festival where one can go from eating lunch whilst watching Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake on a beautiful stage suspended above water, to seeing Julie Birchall (who was a little disappointing and inarticulate, a bit like the silly schoolgirl who suddenly finds herself on the debating team), to releasing one's inner child of the '90s by jumping to James.

Other highlights included seeing Tom Jones (just to say I've done it); a brilliant Belle and Sebastian set, in which they played some old favourites and a great cover of Jumping Jack Flash, rather than doing their usual trick of sticking to esoteric tracks that only the most cultish of fans will know; listening to the tremendously entertaining Jane Bussman, a celebrity journalist with a moral heart and wicked sense of humour; realising that poetry is not dead after all as I applauded the hip-hop and poetry act of the Dead Poets; and emerging from Vampire Weekend's great headline act to chill out in the film tent with a haunting documentary about the decline of the Thames docks.

Sadly, Latitude will have grabbed the headlines because of two rapes. Largely, though, this was the friendliest festival I have been to, with none of the rampaging teenagers that blight Leeds/Reading, and more depth to its music acts than the mainstream V festivals. Of course, it is peaceful because it is utterly middle class. In this country park in rural Suffolk, I listened to Swan Lake with a hummus wrap in one hand, whilst the man next to me read The Times beneath his straw hat.

Inception

2010-07-23T07:55:00.000Z

I've just posted up my review-cum-essay of Christopher Nolan's new film, Inception. In in it, I focus on the way in which it closely references other Hollywood movies in its representation of dreams. By this, it uncannily blurs the boundaries between dreams and reality, fiction and truth, for the cinema audience.

"Clearly, Inception is a highly accomplished movie - for a Summer blockbuster. No one can possibly be so dulled to the dazzle of special effects and stellar cast, and the fast-paced action sequences, not to appreciate it at some level. The question that Nolan's unusually intelligent thriller wants us to ask of it, however, is whether this is a good, thought-provoking film by any standards, not just Hollywood's own seasonal one." Continue reading this essay on Inception.

Review of Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

2010-07-22T07:16:00.000Z

Just posted a short review of Donella H. Meadow's posthumously published introduction to systems theory, entitled Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Check out the full review here.

The Graduate Tax

2010-07-20T08:46:00.000Z

I'm picking up on this potential policy shift quite late, as I have been away at the Latitude festival over the weekend (more on this in the next blog post). However, based on my arguments on this blog and in my tuition fees and contact hours calculator, it should not come as a surprise to learn that I am a supporter of Vince Cable's proposal retrospectively to tax university graduates, rather than requiring them to pay for their tuition fees up front via student loans.

Aside from the question of whether tuition fees and graduate loans deter working-class students from university, there are two inequalities built into the current model whereby student loans are repaid whilst working. The first is that, in effect, the student loan has an interest rate applied to it. Although the interest rate is linked to the inflation rate, and therefore is supposed not to represent a real-terms increase, in practice salaries do not automatically increase with inflation, which means that lower earners will find it difficult to pay off the capital on the loan, instead merely paying off the annual interest. Connected with this problem, the student loan does not discriminate between those on larger incomes who work for the private sector, and those who opt to work for generally lower salaries in the public or charity sector. Because of the inflation interest rate, those who take their publicly-subsidised education into public sector work may well pay disproportionately more for their tuition than those who use their education for their own or private financial interest.

This is something that is not recognised by the old mantra that graduates earn on average £100 000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates, which seems at first glance to justify blanket payback for public education. The flaw here is in the focus on averages. Average salaries in the UK are around £24 000, and it might be reasonable to assume that graduates will be more likely to earn at or above this average than non-graduates. However, the median income is only around £20 000. About two thirds of people in the UK earn less than the average income. A comparatively few high-earners skew the figures; since graduates will comprise a significant proportion of those mega-earners, the idea that the average graduate earns £100 000 more than a non-graduate is probably also flawed. As more and more people attend university, the average graduate is not the city banker, but the moderately paid teacher, journalist, accountant, sales rep, engineer. These are more akin to the average school leaver who works their way up the career ladder.

However, the student loans model does not take into account what actual earnings are, because it is predicated on the assumption that all graduates will earn more than the average non-graduate. This is where a model of repayment linked to actual incomes is inherently fairer. I have no problem with the notion that graduates should pay some additional contributions towards their university education. Although in an ideal world the government would have a holistic vision about the benefits of greater education for all, and hence would provide universal and free university education, I recognise that especially in the current economic climate, such a vision is utopian and untenable. I can also see that tuition fees have successfully funded the expansion of higher education, although I retain many qualms about whether they deter the type of lower-class student who should be the very first in the queue for the education that will enable social mobility.

Where I do have a problem, though, is in disproportionately penalising those who work in public vocations on lower salaries. As Cable has argued, the graduate tax should help to reduce this unfairness: "if you're a school teacher or a youth worker you pay the same amount as if you were a surgeon or a highly-paid commercial lawyer. I think most people would think that's unfair."