Thursday, May 27, 2004
On Israeli Actions - THES on 28 May 2004
| Israeli actions The Times Higher Education Supplement - Published: 28 May 2004 | ||||
| We at Brighton, Sussex and other universities feel we cannot remain silent about the Israeli aggression against Rafah in the Gaza Strip. This has continued unabated for three and a half years and caused the ruination of hundreds of Palestinian families. The situation is now at crisis point. In the past week, tanks and bulldozers have gone deep into the city demolishing houses and killing 25 people. As academics, we have a responsibility to help fellow academics and students everywhere and to defend academic freedom. At present, education of any kind is impossible in Rafah. We call on the Israeli government to put an immediate halt to the killings and demolitions in Gaza, and we ask people everywhere in the world to join us in calling for an end to the war crimes in Rafah. Andrew Chitty Judith Watson On behalf of more than 340 academics
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Are you (a) depressed or (b) depressed?
| Are you (a) depressed or (b) depressed? Barry Schwartz The Times Higher Education Supplement - Published: 28 May 2004 | |
Increased choice appears to allow us to shop for the perfect life, yet it doesn't make us happy. Barry Schwartz explains why students, in particular, are glummer than ever. Citizens in industrial democracies are awash with choice - in the products they buy and in virtually all other aspects of their lives. Increasingly, people are free to choose when and how they work, how they worship, where they live, what they look like (thanks to cosmetic surgery) and what kind of romantic relationships they have. Further, freedom of choice is greatly enhanced by the increased affluence of modern developed societies, which gives people the means to act on their goals and desires, whatever they may be. Does increased choice and increased affluence mean we have more happy people? Not at all. In America, the number of people describing themselves as "very happy" has declined 5 per cent in the past 30 years, which means that about 14 million fewer people report being very happy today than in 1974. And, as a recent study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association indicates, the rate of clinical depression has more than tripled over the past two generations. In the UK, as in almost every developed country, suicide rates are up. And both serious depression and suicide are occurring at younger ages than ever before, confronting universities with rising demands for psychological services. In the UK, a recent report from the Royal College of Psychiatrists shows that up to one in four students has some kind of emotional problem during their time in higher education. Research in the US suggests that increased choice may be part of the problem. My colleagues and I, along with other researchers, have begun amassing evidence that increased choice can lead to decreased wellbeing, especially among those who feel the need to get the "best" in every decision. The research indicates that, as the number of options increases, people become increasingly likely to choose "none of the above", whether they are deciding on a variety of gourmet chocolate or retirement fund. And when people do select something, they tend to be less satisfied if there are many options than if there are few, even when the large set of options may enable them to do better. We have identified several processes that help explain why greater choice decreases satisfaction. Choice increases the following: * The burden of gathering information to make a wise decision * The likelihood that people will regret the decisions they make * The likelihood that people will anticipate regretting the decision they make, with the result that they can't make a decision at all * The feeling of missed opportunities, as people encounter the attractive features of one option after another that they are rejecting * Expectations about how good the chosen option should be * The chances that people will blame themselves when their choices fail to live up to expectations. After all, with so many options out there, there is really no excuse for a disappointing choice. What are the implications of an abundance of choice in higher education? What happens in the US may be an omen of what is to come in the UK, as marketisation sweeps through the system, turning students into consumers who are given carte blanche to pick their higher education options off the shelf. In the US, the choice problem begins before university, as high-school juniors and seniors struggle to find the "perfect" school, and then deform their lives (with considerable encouragement from parents) in an effort to convince their chosen school that it simply must have them. This process has done much to stunt the intellectual and emotional development of adolescents, making them less interesting to teach even as they look ever so much better on paper. Then they start university education and discover a world so laden with choice that for many it has become overwhelming. In America, the modern university has become a kind of intellectual shopping mall. Universities offer a wide array of different "goods" and allow, even encourage, students - the "customers" - to shop around until they find what they like. Individual customers are free to "purchase" whatever bundles of knowledge they want, and the university provides whatever its customers demand. In some institutions, this shopping-mall view has been carried to the extreme. In the first few weeks of classes, students sample the merchandise. They go to a class, stay ten minutes to see what the professor is like, then walk out, often in the middle of the professor's sentence, to try another class. Students come and go just as browsers go in and out of stores in a mall. When I went to college 35 years ago, there were almost two years' worth of core course requirements that all students had to complete. We had some choices among courses that met those requirements, but they were rather narrow. You could be fairly certain if you ran into a fellow student you didn't know that the two of you would have at least a year's worth of courses in common to discuss. In the shopping mall that is the modern university, the chances that any two students have significant intellectual experiences in common are much reduced. And, at the advanced end of the curriculum, universities offer dozens of majors and the student's path through many of them is remarkably unstructured. For students with interdisciplinary interests, these interests can be combined into an almost endless array of special majors. If that doesn't do the trick, students can create their own degree plan. Also, within classes, the digital revolution has made access to information unbelievably easy, but this can also be a curse. With so much information so readily available, when do you stop looking? There is no excuse for failing to examine all of it. There are many benefits to expanded educational opportunities. The traditional bodies of knowledge transmitted from teachers to students in the past were constraining and often myopic. The tastes and interests of idiosyncratic students were often stifled and frustrated. In the modern university, each individual student is free to pursue almost any interest without having to be harnessed to what his intellectual ancestors thought was worth knowing. Moreover, the advent of the digital age has opened up the intellectual world to all students, even those at resource-poor institutions. But freedom comes at a price. Now students are required to make many choices about education that will affect them for the rest of their lives, and they are forced to make them at a point in their intellectual development when many lack the wisdom to choose intelligently. For example, students ask me to approve course selections that they themselves can't justify. They are eager to have double or triple majors, partly to pad their résumés, but also because they can't figure out which discipline they really want to commit to. In addition, they are trying to figure out what kinds of people they are going to be. Matters of ethnic, religious and sexual identity are up for grabs. So are issues of romantic intimacy. Students can live and work anywhere after they graduate, and in a wired world they can work at any time, from any place. Of course students have always had to make these kinds of life decisions. College is an unsettled, and often unsettling, time. But in the past, in most of these areas of life, there was a "default" option - such as marriage and having children - that was so powerful that many decisions didn't feel like decisions, because alternatives to the default weren't seriously considered. Nowadays, almost nothing is decided by default. The result is a generation of students who use university counselling services and antidepressants in record numbers. Choice overload is certainly not the only reason for the anxiety and uncertainty among modern college students, but I believe it is an important one. By offering our students this much freedom of choice, we are doing them no favours. Indeed, I think that this obsession with choice constitutes an abdication of responsibility by university faculty members and administrators to provide college students with the guidance they badly need. Though all this choice no doubt makes some people better off, it makes many people worse off, even when their choices work out well. Universities should acknowledge the role they have played in creating a world of choice overload and move from being part of the problem to being a part of the solution. The "culture wars" over the "canon" that rocked college campuses in the US for years have subsided. They subsided in part because giving students choice seemed like a benign resolution of what were sometimes virulent conflicts. Some choice is good, we thought, so more choice is better. Let students choose and we never have to figure out what to choose for them. But offering more choice is not benign. It is a major source of stress, uncertainty, anxiety - even misery. It is not serving our students well. They would be better served by a faculty and an institution that offered choice within limits, freedom within constraints. I think we are less likely to turn our students off the life of the mind if we offer them curricular options that are well structured and coherent than if we simply let them choose whatever they want on their own. Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. His new book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, is published by Ecco/HarperCollins. | |
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Monday, May 24, 2004
Why I ...think no rational person should become an academic in Britain
Published: 31 May 2002
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| 'In the 1960s, the bargain was a good one. Now you get Margaret Hodge, John Randall, Howard Newby and a salary that City firms would hesitate to offer their receptionists.' Alan Ryan |
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I am taking off to California for 2002-03. That is not much of a news item. Even in these straitened times, most academics take one year off in seven as sabbatical leave. What has surprised me is that everyone assumes I am not coming back.
Perhaps it is because of my increasingly public irritation with the present state of British higher education. I am sure I will return after a year in the academic paradise of Stanford, but my advice to anyone young enough and unencumbered enough to do so is indeed to get out and stay out - out of academic life, or if not, out of the British academic system.
British academic life has become unviable. It is ill-paid, overmanaged and increasingly uninteresting. For someone who can marry an investment banker, and/or be given a large house by their parents, it is just about financially possible; but even then, it is increasingly uninteresting as an intellectual exercise, and it has lost just about everything that made it worth pursuing 40 years ago.
In the 1960s, the bargain was a good one; you gave up the chance of wealth, power and fame and got the life of the free spirit in exchange. Now, you get Margaret Hodge, John Randall and Howard Newby, and a salary that City firms would hesitate to offer their receptionists. In the 1960s, professors were paid much the same as GPs, MPs and under-secretaries in the civil service and, by the end of the decade, most of Camden Town could be purchased on a lecturer's salary. But you didn't expect to be a lecturer much beyond the age of 30 anyway. Following the Robbins report and the expansion of the university sector, you could have tenure at 24 and a chair at 30. Nor was fame entirely given up. Young sociologists at the London School of Economics were vastly more glamorous then than even their director is today.
More crucially, what was on offer was freedom and optimism; and what has replaced them is a deep, sullen pessimism. The post-Robbins assumption was that it would be possible to create new universities that would run rings round Oxbridge: on the one hand, liberal arts colleges, and, on the other, the British offspring of Berkeley. Nobody in 2002 could read Albert Sloman's Reith Lectures in which he imagined that Essex might be the Berkeley of the UK system without realising that it is not only money that the present higher education system has run out of.
The contrast between the 1960s promise of indefinite expansion of new courses and new institutions, coupled with an influx of enthusiastic and well-qualified new students, and the contemporary world of reluctant and ill-qualified students filling crumbling, ill-equipped institutions, is too obvious to need belabouring. Oxbridge students in 2002 receive in real terms the funding of Essex students in 1979; and Essex students in 2002 have had the money spent on them cut by a third. Whether more means worse is arguable; that more means less well provided for - is undeniable.
In those distant days, the much-reviled "binary" system presented university lecturers with a spectacle of how the other half lived - teachers in polytechnics were at the mercy of local authorities, put upon by their principals and departmental chairs, by the chairmen of education committees and managers of very modest abilities. Now, the binary line has gone, and this is the fate of the entire sector.
Asking why anyone who could bail out to the US doesn't do so in the face of all this is a bit like wondering why Marx never quite gave up on the revolution. On the one hand, it is impossible to believe that rational human beings will go on making such a mess of a not entirely unmanageable system and on the other hand, anyone who worked in the system before it was wrecked finds it hard to walk away from the wreckage rather than hanging around to try to save something in the hope of better times ahead.
Alan Ryan
Warden
New College, Oxford
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Passion dies for bride of the state
Published: 02 August 2002
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| 'We are drifting into a classic feature of despotism, which is marked by the fact that power does not have to do anything specific to get its way. It merely has to drop a few hints and the slaves rush to obey.' Kenneth Minogue |
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There's an unmistakable touch of menace in the way Lord Sainsbury reported extra cash for universities. They will, he remarked, "have no excuse for getting into financial difficulties... after this week's spending review." Any shortfalls, he added, would be the responsibility of the university concerned. Translation: Go away and stop bothering us. Ah, were it only a matter of cash! The universities are now so environed by government policies that they can hardly move without permission from their masters. They cannot even charge fees if they choose. Better than that - or perhaps worse - is the fact that ministers are free with good advice about how they should conduct themselves.
The chancellor of the exchequer, we remember, took time off from his labours in making us all prosperous to tell Oxford dons how they should run their admissions policy. There is worse than menace around. There is contempt for academic wisdom in running our own affairs. There was a time when governments stuck to governing and dons to the cultivation of scholarship. Universities in those days did not have to be beggars, any more than theatres or railway companies had to be. They had money of their own to spend, and for the rest they received, on a long rein, quinquennial money from the University Grants Committee. Then at the end of the 1950s, in a whirlwind romance, everything changed. Dons became brides of the state. An ageing but irresistibly powerful suitor seduced them with money, flattery and a stream of rich gifts called "new universities". Promotions were in the air and salaries went up. The promise was that this bride would restore the groom's economic potency.
Alas, like many romances, this one soon settled into a rather tyrannical version of humdrum marriage. The rich gifts seemed to bring no discernible economic benefits. Scholars are often not much good as entrepreneurs. The disappointed groom soon began demanding precise accounting for every penny spent. Worse, he demanded that the bride learn the art of better housekeeping. The state no longer trusted this bride with any kind of competence at all. She couldn't even teach the children properly, and had to be inspected by an inquisition that conducted an "academic audit". This was particularly necessary because the state kept adopting increasing numbers of rather backward children who weren't quick at picking up what they ought to be doing in academia. The state demanded that dons spend more of their time looking after this increasing number of children, but the dons were often impatient about being expected to dot every "i" and cross every "t". They had been used to better children. The miserable bride soon found that her allowance would be forthcoming if she looked after the children in a highly regimented way.
The problem arose in part because the state had little conception of what a university actually was. It thought that university teaching was the same experience as education in schools, a transmission of information. Since it believed that every activity was a "skill" and that every skill could be done more efficiently, it weighed in with the appropriate machinery. The dons, by contrast, knew that an expression such as "university teaching" was just a metaphor. What students could get from dons was a good deal more subtle than mere information. Aldous Huxley thought that lectures were merely an inefficient form of information conveyance, hangovers from medieval times when books were few and costly. The state's educational bailiff, the ministry of education, took a rather similar view. Lectures were information transfers, and dons should proceed at a measured pace, with precisely specified readings, so that students would not have to waste their time by reading anything irrelevant to the coming examinations. The examinations then had to follow quickly lest the student should forget what he had learnt. The element of mechanisation was remarkable. The Cambridge law faculty, by report, was advised: "More eye contact, but not below the neck."
The name for this domestic tyranny was "quality assurance" but, like many bureaucratic euphemisms, it actually meant the opposite: "quality decline". Universities had to become mechanical, predictable and homogeneous. In squeezing what it called "slack" out of the system, the state was also discouraging spontaneity. No place here for new ideas. But the state had already thought of that. It had taken a serious interest in research, and everyone was graded in their production of the stuff. The bride was to be tested in her skill in thinking up new ideas.
It is time to drop the imagery - but not before remarking on something that every feminist knows: dependence on other people for one's cash can be a humiliating and demeaning experience - especially where the provider demands services to outside parties, and won't allow the service provider freedom to charge for them. Such dependence might have worked between married couples in the past where the bond might have been love, but governments are (as Charles de Gaulle once remarked) "cold monsters". The commoner rule is that providers develop a certain contempt for their dependants. I presume that this contempt is most vividly experienced these days by vice-chancellors, but they are the ones who deserve it. They have never shown the courage needed to stand up to the brutes in Whitehall. In any case, universities are not alone in being rather despised. In modern Britain, the government seems riddled with contempt for all its subjects. It doesn't trust them at all. It doesn't trust parents to bring up their children because the parents might smack the children, might give them the wrong kind of food or not make them go to school. As for retailers, the government hates "rip-off Britain". Farmers get it in the neck from the government when they are not suffering from the controls of Brussels. The Home Office is at war with the professions. The Department for Education and Skills has a plan to teach children how to love politicians in order to facilitate democracy. It is called "political literacy". The trade and industry secretary advised employers what to do when a World Cup match was on, and found time to advise Wimbledon tennis how it ought to distribute its prize money. There is no end to the wisdom of our rulers. As a spokeswoman for the drinks industry remarked last week, if we regulate ourselves, then "hopefully" the government won't bring in legislation. In other words, we are drifting into a classic feature of despotism, which is marked by the fact that power does not have to do anything specific to get its way. It merely has to drop a few hints and the slaves rush to obey.
Kenneth Minogue is emeritus professor of political science at the London School of Economics. He has just published, with the think-tank Civitas, Civil Society and David Blunkett , £3.00.
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Why we hate Bush's America
| http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=92821&state_value=Archive Why we hate Bush's America | |||||||||||||||
Travelling by train, reading the recently published book Why Do People Hate America? , I was confronted by a florid American who said, politely enough: "Excuse me, sir, would you mind telling me why you bought that book?". I panicked, and was glad I had left my other book, Michael Moore's Stupid White Men , in my case. I tried to explain that because one wished to study a phenomenon, it did not mean one necessarily approved of it. I explained that I certainly did not hate Americans. Europeans of my generation (I was born in 1932) are very conscious of the fact that America saved our bacon in two world wars and protected us from possible communist invasion. It seemed to work, as my American interlocutor returned to his seat apparently contented. The truth is that my affection for "old" America is being increasingly strained by the appalling actions of George W. Bush's administration. As a member of Pugwash, I spend much of my time at international conferences discussing the consequences of America's rightwing lurch towards unilateral policies in foreign affairs. I have to admit, though, that at these conferences the papers that are the most carefully researched, and that expose most vividly the folly of much of America's foreign policy, are almost invariably by American authors. These critics come from numerous well-endowed research and political analyses centres, such as the Monterey Institute, the Stimson Centre and the Carnegie Endowment. Some two years ago, two such American research organisations, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the Lawyer's Committee on Nuclear Policy, launched a study of US attitudes towards security-related international treaties. The outcome is an outstanding book titled Rule of Power or Rule of Law? An Assessment of US Policies and Actions Regarding Security-Related Treaties . The editors, Nicole Deller, Arjun Makhijani and John Burroughs, acknowledge assistance from various experts on particular treaties. The treaties covered by the survey include those the US signed and ratified: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); those the US has refused to enter into: the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Treaty Banning Anti-Personnel Mines (TBAPM), the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Kyoto Protocol; and finally a treaty from which the US has unilaterally withdrawn: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT). The NPT, with its 186 state parties, is the most successful multilateral arms treaty in history. All five of the original nuclear weapon states, the US, the USSR (now Russia), China, the UK and France, are required under the treaty to take positive steps towards the complete destruction of their nuclear weapons. While some nuclear arsenals have been reduced in size, there is no evidence of any serious attempt to abandon nuclear weapons altogether. Most disappointingly, the US Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 made strategic nuclear arms reductions reversible, expanded the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states and provided for the development of "earth-penetrating" tactical nuclear weapons. All these proposals flew in the face of the NPT. Another requirement of the NPT is the banning of all nuclear tests and hence conformity with the CTBT. Sadly, in spite of strong support from President Bill Clinton and US public opinion, the US Senate voted in October 1999 to reject ratification of the CTBT. Bush also now appears to oppose the CTBT and will not resubmit the treaty to Congress for a further attempt at ratification. As far as the CWC is concerned, three presidential administrations supported it but again the Congress agreed ratification only after rejecting vital terms of the treaty relating to inspections, which destroyed the purpose of the convention. Something similar has happened with the BWC; this time inspections were objected to because they would reveal America's defence secrets and damage its companies' commercial interests. This inauspicious litany continues. Although Clinton was the first world leader to call for the "eventual elimination of landmines", he demanded that certain types of anti-personnel mines be permitted. These demands were rejected and hence the US declined to sign the TBAPM treaty. The US signed and ratified the UNFCCC and Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, but Bush has rejected the protocol altogether. Concerning the trying of war criminals, the US voted against the Rome statute of the International Court in July 1998, but nevertheless Clinton signed the statute. Bush has said the statute will not be ratified and the US will assume it has no legal obligation arising from Clinton's signature. President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defence experiments cost more than $60 billion but came nowhere near providing an effective system. In spite of this, the Bush administration has launched an expanded missile-defence programme and used this as an excuse to withdraw unilaterally from the long-standing US-Russian ABMT. This is an act of sheer folly in the view of many commentators. This is an excellent book for expert and layperson alike. It was published before the latest Iraq war, but this is something of an advantage because it provides an uninterrupted insight into the mind and motivations of those responsible for initiating the war. The title of the book, Rule of Power or Rule of Law? , poses a question. I think recent US behaviour is all to do with the rule of power. Next time an American accosts me on a train, I shall be less accommodating. Jack Harris, FRS, is vice-chairman of British Pugwash and co-author of a Pugwash briefing on nuclear terrorism. | |||||||||||||||
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Why I think we should end apartheid between English and cultural studies
| http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=93553&state_value=Archive Why I think we should end apartheid between English and cultural studies | |
| Catherine Belsey, Professor of English at Cardiff University and chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory. She will give a plenary lecture at the "English - The Condition of the Subject" conference at the University of London this week. Once upon a time, everyone knew what English was about. There were poems, plays and novels, traditionally regarded as great, and students would be better people for reading them. But things began to change. Feminists added forgotten writing by women, not necessarily for its virtue so much as for what it revealed about the hidden lives of half the population; a multicultural criticism took account of works by and about the lives of ethnic minorities and slaves; queer studies looked for pointers in fiction to whatever lay beyond a prim heterosexist propriety. As English departments move towards the analysis of culture in this way, the isolation of written texts no longer makes much sense. If gender relations are the issue, for instance, then portraits, domestic spaces, costume, rituals or popular songs might all be just as revealing. This material is no longer there as simply explanatory background to the great texts. On the contrary, it too asks to be interpreted. English specialists, remorselessly encroaching on all the other humanities disciplines, are in the process of becoming cultural critics. Some of the impetus for their expansionism has come from cultural studies. This discipline was born in the 1960s of a dissatisfaction with the elitism and conservatism of English and the literary preoccupation with high culture and the past. What arose was a subject that focused on popular culture in the present. The ironic consequence of arguments for expanding English was the division of cultural analysis between two disciplinary camps, cultural studies (brash, up-to-date and lively) and English (posh and stuffy). Now that English has let go of its stuffiness and embraced diversity, that disciplinary division begins to give way at just the moment when the distinction between high and popular culture is no longer so clear. Baz Luhrmann marketed his film Romeo+Juliet to an audience that would never have thought of going to Stratford upon Avon. The tabloids do not hesitate to pronounce on conceptual art. At the same time, the middle classes don't see themselves as slumming when they view Hollywood movies by Quentin Tarantino. Nor was the past as resolutely stratified as we like to think. Shakespeare's plays, performed at court, were also great popular successes well into the 19th century. Why, then, maintain apartheid between English and cultural studies? I propose that we reunite the territory under the name of cultural criticism. We shall need a period of truth and reconciliation, when English struggles with its residual impulse to give authors grades and cultural studies reflects on its difference from sociology. And then the future will belong to cultural criticism, as the present does already for many English scholars. In Cardiff seven years ago, we decided to offer undergraduates the same scope we were so happily appropriating for ourselves in our research. Cultural criticism began as a half-degree, but from September it will be available as single honours. The syllabus excludes nothing cultural: we look critically at Canaletto and cornflakes boxes, old tombs and The Tate Modern. All aspects of culture, past and present, are our province. We focus on cultural objects and texts - visual, oral, aural and written - and the demanding range of skills involved in interpreting them. Of course, no degree could cover the whole of culture. But most English departments have long since given up on coverage. And no single teacher could possess all the skills involved. But we're learning. The enterprise is explicitly collaborative and the course is selective and differentiated. Above all, it is held together by what English departments do best: detailed, attentive, critical reading of the material. | |
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A victim of vocabulary
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| 'It is too dangerous to have our universities controlled by the public sector. The last thing a politician wants is truth, excellence, freedom and elegance.' Andrew Oswald |
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The term "university" is becoming increasingly debased. New Labour, whose University of the Labour Party is launching this autumn, is guilty. But it is not unique. Anyway, words are just collections of symbols and lots of concepts get debased. It is not the end of the world if the British people use the word university in ways that get more and more misleading.
But it is not sensible to allow indefinite broadening of the notion of a university. A reason to care about linguistics is that when words lose their exact meaning it can presage a blurring of the role and usefulness of the objects to which they attach. In other words, if we ruin the word university, then that may one day help ruin the physical university.
Indeed, this is actually happening. Bit by bit, the strength of our universities is being reduced, and one of the reasons is a dilution of the intellectual standards required of an organisation for it to be allowed to call itself a university. Of course, it is unfashionable to say this. It is unfashionable to stick up for standards and anything that smacks of elitist taxonomy. The fashion in 2002 is to be inclusive, not exclusive. Unfortunately, when everything is included in a category, you no longer have a category. You have an inefficient, all-encompassing blandness.
Real universities are research institutions. They are primarily places for discovering how our world works. Real universities are not, repeat not, primarily places of teaching. This is why promotion in universities has always been based on research ability.
People who object to this view usually fall into two groups. One is politicians, who have little idea of what universities are for. Deep down, they view universities as giant, greying high schools. The second is those who work in teaching institutions, including high schools, who, very naturally, have not usually given much thought to where knowledge comes from and who are, in some cases, threatened by the implication that what they do - teaching rather than discovery - might be viewed by some as of lower status than they desire. We all aim to protect our self-esteem, often without realising that that is what we are trying to do.
I expect my view will upset some. I am sorry for that. But it is not my job to minimise people's upset or maximise their internal feeling of certainty or self-esteem. My job - the job of everyone who works in a university - is to stick up for what is true. Real universities are vital for teaching. Real universities' ideas fill the textbooks that everyone else reads.
It follows immediately from all of this that the university of life, the university of new Labour, the university of industry and all the rest, are at best a watering down of the clarity of the English language. At worst, they distort people's understanding.
First, universities are in the truth business. This matters enormously. Every other organisation in a society has axes to grind and propaganda to sell. Real knowledge is almost always discovered first in a university. True, the average person in Britain has never given this a thought. So we have to go out and stick up for the idea of a university.
Second, universities are in the excellence business. They must choose the best students and teachers. Again, this is likely to upset politicians, who usually prefer egalitarianism to meritocracy.
Third, universities are in the freedom business. They are part of the checks and balances that hold together democracies. Freedom is important but frightening.
Fourth, universities are in the elegance business. Although it will frustrate politicians from now to eternity, university researchers pursue beauty and symmetry out of instinct, not because they are searching for something useful.
All these things make it clear why Britain needs independent universities. It is too dangerous to have our universities controlled by the public sector. The last thing a politician wants is truth, excellence, freedom and elegance. A politician wants practicality, soundness, well-behaved citizens and cheapness.
Andrew Oswald is professor of economics at Warwick University.
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Pennies for your thoughts
Published: 16 August 2002
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| 'Thinking is unauditable. Thinking is the business of the university. How could one audit the work of Socrates, Michelangelo, Blake, Kant or Heidegger?' Martin McQuillan |
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Let us say right from the beginning that the closure of the Centre for Contemporary British Cultural Studies at Birmingham has nothing to do with the current state of cultural studies. But it certainly presents us with a moment for reflection on the condition of cultural studies and British universities in general. I do not wish to intrude on personal grief or to offer ill-informed speculation regarding the centre under the guise of journalism. But the story of university "restructuring" following disappointing research assessment exercise results, and the subsequent failure by the government to fund those results adequately, is a familiar one.
I took over as head of the school of fine art, history of art and cultural studies following our own RAE trauma of slipping from a 5 to a 3a. Like the CCBCS in Birmingham, the school of fine art in Leeds has been historically associated with revolutionary developments in its constituent areas: defining the very idea of theory-practice, practically inventing the social history of art and, in later years, pioneering cultural analysis in the UK. Unlike the CCBCS, we were met by a sympathetic university management and have been able to offset the results of RAE 2001 by substantially increasing our undergraduate student base.
Since the RAE results, the school has been rated the number one department of art and design in higher education league tables, completed the first year as the Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History, and attracted the 2003 conference of the International Association of Philosophy and Literature. A string of results that make a mockery of our 3a.
We have been fortunate. Other departments in other universities, of which the CCBCS is only the most noticeable example, have not been so lucky. But it has to be said that this situation was inevitable from the moment the RAE was introduced. Thinking is not auditable. Thinking, the business of the university, should be inimical to categorisation, measurement and commodification. Thought should disrupt and transform, opening new directions in knowledge and experience. How could one audit the work of Socrates, Michelangelo, Blake, Kant or Heidegger? The moment that the articulation of thought is reclassified as "research" (a "product" that is auditable) then thought itself is compromised by the conditions under which it can emerge. It emerges - and can only emerge - not as speculation but as product. It has always seemed absurd to me that an auditing system can account for and grade a book of deconstructive theory. Yet this is what has been happening in British universities for more than a decade, with little dissent from an academy saturated by the very theory that this audit takes such delight in measuring but that it could never truly account for. For example, fine art "research" (what we used to call practice, sometimes simply art) has been on a path of "university-fication" since the 1970s (the PhD in fine art is a recent invention). It is now inextricably caught up in the research audit as a condition of its production. Newer "disciplines", such as creative writing, will follow the same path and soon research-as-practice will be forced to compete in an apparatus that will determine and transform the object it captures.
Books have been written on audit culture (then no doubt submitted to the RAE for inspection), individuals have left these shores vowing never to return and many thousands have left the academy either in disgust or as victims of the prevailing ethos of survival of the research-active fittest. Of course, this is a situation created by consecutive governments in thrall to monetarism, but academics must also bear a responsibility here for not having resisted this nonsense more vigorously. It is a bit late in the day for disappointed departments to turn round and denounce the silliness of the RAE. This should have been the position of the unions and professional organisations from the very beginning. Funding from the RAE is now so crucial to the structures of university finance that it is hard to see a way by which some form of research audit could be abandoned. This is why, when research funding goes awry, as in the case of the CCBCS, it is so difficult for individual departments to correct.
Academics, university managers and the government have been complicit in imprisoning thought in an audit culture. Fortunately, thought, being more porous and unmanageable than this system imagines, somehow manages to survive. After all, doesn't the general inflation of RAE grades in 2001 demonstrate this? In this respect, the RAE has failed. It set out - let us not pretend otherwise - to separate the old universities from the new and in this regard has not only spectacularly failed to do so but has shown itself to be a system in decline unable to make good on its own promises.
Competition, audit and the market are not an effective strategy for nourishing real thinking and the intellectual enterprise of universities. This is not a plea for an Humboldtian Eden. Rather, if speculative thought requires monetary speculation, and Enlightenment requires exchange value, then the transformation of British universities into technologised transnational universities located within the global economy cannot be done on the cheap.
The closure of the CCBCS has nothing to do with the condition of cultural studies and everything to do with the simple fact that British universities are not funded properly. The government's most recent ruse of lifting the cap on undergraduate student numbers under the guise of widening participation will solve little. It will enable old universities to poach students from the traditional catchment of the new, forcing the new into closure, merger and restructuring, while transforming the nature of provision, for good or ill, in the old. Again the unions and professional organisations remain silent.
Meanwhile, the future of cultural studies has never looked brighter. Cultural studies seems to have won all the battles it has had to fight. The canon has been complicated, theory is the mainstream across the western humanities, otherness and difference are the watchwords of the academy, interdisciplinarity is everyone's preferred modus operandi . Once, the CCBCS made an intervention into the academy to challenge those who laid claim to dominant culture; now the vocabulary of cultural studies is the language of power. This is something we should welcome. It is also something that should worry cultural studies greatly. We might pose this dilemma in the form of the question: why at the moment cultural studies has achieved a certain intellectual hegemony within the academy should the CCBCS close down?
If cultural studies began as a political intervention into a stratified university system then such an intervention cannot be allowed to ossify into a thematic concern. Cultural studies as a political intervention is not reducible to a set of revised reading lists or the valorisation of popular forms. If this were the case then it would only have reproduced the conditions of disciplinarity it set out to challenge. Rather, cultural studies must be the vigilant crafting of an intellectual practice that holds open a space for thought (a space that allows thought to be imagined otherwise) within the academic system into which it intrudes. This is what the CCBCS did in its early years.
Apart from the obvious distress of those involved (students as well as staff - this should be felt as a wound to all academics in Britain), I am not particularly concerned about the passing of the CCBCS, anymore than a neutral might mourn the inevitable closures of, say, a Preston North End or a Burnley. This sort of intervention and thinking has long since left Edgbaston. What is important for cultural studies is that its spirit of intervention is not exorcised by the emerging transglobal university.
To this end, the greatest respect that British academics could pay to the historic work of the now deceased CCBCS would be to campaign vigorously for a dismantling of the audit culture in our universities and for the full funding of the sector. If universities in the UK are not financed properly, the humanities will go the way of the dinosaurs and the CCBCS will be only the first of many casualties.
Martin McQuillan is head of the school of fine art, history of art and cultural studies at the University of Leeds.
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What are we thinking about?
| http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?ispopup=1&story_id=87324&state_value=Archive&x=25&y=11 What are we thinking about? | |
| Brenda Gourley says shallow soundbites have replaced considered opinion when we need it most. We are at a serious time in our history - a time when we should be thirsting for the considered, informed, disinterested, profound, and all the best that a public intellectual can bring to us, a time when the issues are so large and so important that they demand serious and disinterested research by our best intellectuals. Yet this is a time when we routinely use the term "intellectual" in a pejorative way. The word "academic" has come to have much the same low value, and we reinforce that by paying academics as little as possible, thereby ensuring that fewer and fewer of our brightest young people aspire to their ranks - certainly in the western world. Instead, we have succumbed to a "celebrity culture", in which our media celebrates the rich, the beautiful, the strong - but certainly not the serious and intellectual. The writer Susan Sontag has commented that our most intelligible and persuasive values seem to be drawn from the entertainment industries. What role should "public intellectuals" such as Sontag, Onora O'Neill and Edward Said play? The most exemplary of such intellectuals would offer discerning, disinterested comment on issues of the day and thus contribute to a well-functioning democracy and informed public opinion. This contrasts with how so-called experts or "pundits" are often brought in to perform in media debates but are given little time to explain and almost no time to explore the issues properly. The soundbite mentality, combined with the fashion to call in random opinion via telephone or emails from listeners or viewers with no expertise at all, renders any intellectualisation around an issue an impossibility. There is an important distinction between the non-intellectual and the anti-intellectual. The three pillars of anti-intellectualism highlighted by Richard Hofstadter in his seminal work on the issue remain true: evangelical religion, practical-minded business and populist political style. It is difficult to avoid comparing these influences with the present White House administration and balk at the unprecedented power it exerts in this way. However, individuals who may well be non-intellectual rather than anti-intellectual nevertheless end up feeding the anti-intellectual end of the spectrum. They are overwhelmed by the information explosion, the complex technological culture, shaky economic structures, ecological complications and so on, and they retreat under the weight of all this. Retreating, in fact, amounts to opting out of a responsibility imposed by being a member of a democratic state. More than that, it is also retreating from membership of a global citizenship that demands we understand our interdependence and act accordingly. All is not lost. There are still ways in which our public intellectual life can be revived. Remember what Aldous Huxley told us in Brave New World : what afflicted the people was not that they were laughing instead of thinking but they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking. I cherish the hope that we will rally to the cause, understanding that the capacity to be exemplary intellectuals is given to only a few of us and that the rest of us should be only too happy to come to their defence. Brenda Gourley is vice-chancellor of The Open University. She delivered the Robbins lecture "In Defence of the Intellectual" at the University of Stirling this week. | |
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Teaching-research split threat to drama
| Teaching-research split threat to drama Tony Tysome Published: 13 June 2003 | |
Drama departments are under threat from government plans to divide higher education into a small number of elite research universities and a "large tail" of teaching institutions, the discipline's representative body has claimed. Separating teaching from research is likely to have a "disastrous" effect on small but highly popular drama and performing arts courses, according to the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments. In its response to the white paper, Scudd says teaching and research are "inextricably linked" in drama, more than in most other subjects. This is so much so that if the two were separated, most drama departments would "disappear from view". It says: "In our discipline, creative work is often the locus of both teaching and research; where practical exploration is concerned, the resources used for both purposes are often the same." It adds: "It is difficult to see the discipline continuing to develop the practice-based methodology that has been the very cornerstone of its success to date if the implied separation of teaching and research is effected." Scudd says drama has "great potential" for helping to meet government higher education targets. Courses attract a large number of applications, often from poor students who fall into widening participation categories. The discipline is also demonstrating its usefulness to the economy by setting up a working group to look into how drama departments interact with the creative and cultural industries. Mick Wallace, professor of performance and culture at Leeds University and a member of the working group, said: "Research involves engagement with industry partners, and that provides the important infrastructure that supports students' experience of the real world of the creative and cultural industries. It would be disastrous if we were to lose that." Scudd chair Carole-Anne Upton, drama lecturer and deputy dean for arts and social sciences at Hull University, said: "The government seems to have a very narrow understanding of research activity and what is useful. The result is that the public perception of a discipline like ours is damaged and its profile lowered." | |
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