Universities - Quo Vadis?

Looking through the text on BBC News for the regions in that for London saw a report about the London Metropolitan University (LMU) that is considering a major reorganisation. It was the words they used to describe their purpose and how they hoped to achieve it that were illuminating.

The phrase that lurched into my mind was the Dr. Spock quote from Star Trek (no I am not a trekky but in the days of three channels if the kids wanted it I had to have it) which runs “Its life, Jim, but not as we know it”. Clearly, the world of university and higher education has moved on in the last decade.

I quote from the LMU , “financial sustainability”, “much more competitive environment”, “consolidate its portfolio”, all in relation to the proposals to reduce the number of course from 557 to around 160. The unions looking at the impact on staff are saying that this is “unprecedented and unjustifiable”.

Their view is understandable being at the wrong end of the P45’s but things like this have happened before, sometimes violent, sometimes not. The Dissolution of the Monasteries is one but there were many others.

In the 1970’s the old Colleges of Education for the training of teachers were dealt with, some becoming departments of other institutions, some becoming part of a base for other higher education and some shut down altogether. A great many of their academic staff found themselves being moved on if they were lucky or with busted careers if they were not.

All the cuts and shuffles and expansions of the past though regarded higher education as an entity in itself in relation to the worth and usefulness of the various fields of study. As so many UK ones depended on state funding directly or indirectly they were at the mercy of the shifting views of often shifty politicians.

Within this was the view that as in the mid 20th Century so many people had taken courses and studies that were demanding and led on to work that needed qualified and able staffing this should be recognised as graduate in the later part of that century.

Certainly, many I knew with then non-graduate qualifications had studied at a high level and then succeeded in demanding and highly competitive examinations. It would have been wrong to think any the lesser of them because their calling had not entailed a degree in the process.

By the turn of the century, however, the mark of a university became the right to award a degree for its courses but the courses need not have the “universality” that had once been the defining character. At the same time it was decreed that up to half the age cohort should be “entitled” to university and hence a degree.

The statistical problem of ensuring that 50% of a student population could all eventually have above average incomes did not occur to the politicians. Also, the idea that all these people could go away to study, then be guaranteed jobs and would find the experience of being in mass education huge institutions great fun also had drawbacks.

One was cost and another employment implications. To remove half the labour force in the age range say 18-22 and insist almost all the others being in training until 18 meant taking out very many potential workers. Necessarily, they had to be found from somewhere and be people who were reconciled to being the future bottom 50%. It was all going to be very costly.

So the government and our new elite came to the conclusion was that in company with the rest of the economy and public service, destined to take many of these new graduates, the whole lot should be debt driven within the context of establishments which operated on the basis of all the latest management dogmas.

This had the benefit of taking a lot of it off balance sheet and shifting the burden to the unseen masses as well as deferring the real costs into long term debt.

So whatever a university is or might be meant to do, a degree is a commodity, a product to be sold and bought. The late Fred Halliday, sometime Professor at LSE put the issues very clearly in 1998 as Open Democracy has referred to in the last few days. He and his ilk were ignored.

Now we have the usual mess of the second decade of this century. It is an academic mess, it is a functioning mess and the whole business of access and purpose bears no relation to social or economic functions. In the meantime scientific research has been distorted to fulfil purely commercial ends.

Let us hope that there may be some places left who can escape the curse of modern management techniques in higher education that might in the future provide the seed bed for a saner and better reality.

But I am not hopeful.

Finding The Future What?

Long ago when the world was young, both knees were working and I could contemplate eighty minutes of continuous activity often my place was on a muddy wet stretch of ground with posts and a cross bar usually about half way up. How many times did I smell the wind, place the ball and hope the kick was right?

Amongst the many places where this strange ritual occurred were colleges of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They were not favoured places to go to on the whole. Often the baths were cold, the food disgusting and such beer that they were allowed to consume thin, expensive and close to goat’s products and not milk.

Also, the local entertainment was not up to much and female company nowhere in sight. I and the other members of the team were very glad to be on the coach as quickly as possible to make it back to London.

On the other hand when we entertained a team from one of these colleges it was almost pathetic to see the sense of wonder they had at the delights of metropolitan living.

Which is why so many of my class and background never considered going to these colleges in the first place. However, some did and many had school examination results that were very scruffy indeed. It did help that they were very good at one sport or another and potential blues and in some cases had unusual military service.

Even then there were those at “Oxbridge” who were mindful that historically many colleges had made provision for poor scholars. In the 1970’s tutors roamed the Yorkshire mining districts trying to persuade pupils in comprehensive schools to apply without success, for more or less the same reasons that my generation did.

This is all a long time ago and in the 21st Century there are other matters that we consider important. Oxbridge does not quite fit, but then it never did. Looking back down the centuries it always seemed to be “out of sync’ ” with the wider world outside. Why this is necessarily “bad” is a mystery.

The problem seems to be that the political media class of the UK looks at itself (it spends most of it’s time doing this) and decides that it is not typical and should have more of “them” or at least allow entry. But the problem there arises after University and the way that class is formed and recruited.

Oxbridge has other functions, which in the scale of human affairs may be more important. Science, medicine, engineering, astronomy and a range of other fields of study form the critical mass. The motley bunch of lawyers and political history students have always comprised the intellectual backside of Oxbridge, so what changes?

Leave mad social engineering to the former local technical colleges now styled universities and ensure their studies and degrees are good for real work in the real world and doubtless if their graduates are good enough they will go far enough.

At least they will get better beer and balanced company.

How Many Ways To Kill A Cat?

In the 1950’s when motoring became possible for all buying new cars in the face of current credit restrictions was very difficult. Consequently many bought cars that were old. Often an ancient heap was the only choice a student of the period might be able to afford.

Mine, a 1934 Austin 7, had a worn clutch, shiny tyre treads, brakes that might or might not work, unreliable steering and gears that were not synchromesh. This meant as well as all the other operations you had to “double declutch” on every gear change.

The lights also were prone to fail so I kept a couple of cycle lamps and wire to fix them to the front whenever needed. The MOT tests introduced in the 1960’s brought this age of the freedom of the road to an end with a clamour of complaint.

There were a number of similar vehicles in the area, some better, some worse but in our innocence we called them “accidents waiting to happen”. For many we did not have to wait long. I sold mine when reliable transport was needed and I “invested” in a Vespa 125 Scooter. It was much more restricted but at least functional.

Looking around our public services, systems of government, legislation and all the procedures and guidelines, I see again a great many accidents waiting to happen and it seems that most of them are happening at once. For the tax system see the 10 November item The Anatomy of a Service Delivery Disaster on:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/

Whatever you may think about The Coalition or the policies or personalities of those at the head and their performance it is difficult not to believe that they are on a loser. Given the nature of the political class we are afflicted with it is possible that their personal interests and ambitions will ensure that we are all the losers

There are too many major problems and unpleasant consequences in train for them, or anyone, to cope with. The row over university fees, costs, provision and future is a classic of its kind. The mess is so bad that possibly it can never be fixed.

It has been coming a long while largely because key decisions that should have been made in the last fifty years never were. There are too many to list here, make your own, but if on the back of an envelope make it an A3 one.

The reality has been that when an academic hullaballoo starts over financing or expansion governments have thrown money in the direction of the loudest noises.

I have argued before that it is possible to have situations where “There is no right decision” only a choice between inconvenient or unpleasant alternatives. It would be possible to go into a long and intricate debate about the history of the present crisis in higher education and all the injustices of how one generation has benefited at the cost of another.

It will not be any use and in fact would simply obscure what the problems of the immediate present are never mind those of the several possible futures that we might or perhaps not enjoy. The latter seems the more likely.

One crucial blunder has been to allow a university system to develop whose institutions, with few exceptions, depend on immediate revenue funding from the state, sponsors with their own agendas and student fees.

As the liabilities both for the institutions and the potential students now seem to greatly exceed revenue or realisable assets we have the serious potential for a “crash” situation.

During the financial troubles at the turn of the 1830’s in 1831 Benjamin Fitt of the Priory Farm, Selborne, Hampshire (see Gilbert White “The Natural History of Selborne") issued a summons against the President and Fellows of Magdalen College of Oxford to have them gaoled at Winchester over issues concerning leases and rents. The year before his family connections and their friends had burned down their local workhouse.

Schrodinger of The Cat question of quantum indeterminacy was a Fellow at Magdalen for a time.

So in 2010 does Captain Swing ride again or is it just another academic car crash?

Learning By Numbers

When I became a teenager my Grand Uncle John from the Scottish Presbyterian part of the family told my parents that he could fix me up with a job in the Corporation Tramways. If I was sensible, obedient, reliable and hard working then if I achieved the rank of tram driver I might ascend to the giddy heights of inspector and live in a semi-detached house. These were not personal qualities that were evident and as there had been an unlucky business with a milk float my parents were nervous about letting me loose anywhere near wheeled vehicles.

As time went by and attempts to find work for me ended in conspicuous failure I continued in education by default with a spell in the Army. My Grand Uncle and my parents were not sure of the point of it all. What use was a degree unless there was a specific vocation or occupation demanding long intensive study that would justify it? They belonged to generations where a university degree had limited currency.

My Grand Uncle was a good and in many ways a wise man who had never seen the inside of a secondary school. He was very well informed, read a great deal and had a critical faculty that was as sharp as a razor. In our town few men of commerce or business or occupying senior positions needed a degree and if anything time spent on this kind of study was a waste in pursuing any real career. Essentially, you worked your way up, often by part time vocational study.

How things have changed. Higher education is now becoming a commercial activity with notions of throughput, target meeting and added value in terms of financial return. This item from “Current Archaeology” Issue 242 of May 2010, “Sherds” by Christopher Catling tells us of what the world of learning is now about and it is not learning.

Quote

Academics tend to be an unhappy bunch these days. No longer do they just have to be good at teaching and research, but they now have to earn their own keep and contribute to the fat-cat salaries and grandiose building schemes of the new breed of professional university managers. One way to do this is to take on more and more students, and to mark them positively, so that the university rides up the league tables.

Many more first class degrees are being awarded now than in the past, even though standards are widely held to have fallen as a result of a decline in pupil/teacher ratios and face to face teaching.

Departments that cannot increase their income are closed down, no matter how highly they are held in international regard. This was the case with Southampton’s Textile Conservation Centre, and is the likely fate of the Departments of Palaeography and Byzantine Studies at King’s College, London. One King’s College apparatchik described this as “strategic disinvestment” aimed at “financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment”.

Academics also complain of loss of tenure and the feeling that “I cannot now even read a book in the Library without being required to secure a grant to cover the cost.”

For all these reasons there is widespread, if muted, satisfaction in the recent victory of Professor Paul Buckland over his former employer, Bournemouth University, which must reinstate him or pay compensation for loss of income, having been found guilty of constructive dismissal. As Professor of Environmental Archaeology, Paul failed 18 out of the 60 second year undergraduates who took examinations in 2006.

He did not do so out of elitist disdain: one student attributed the decline of elm trees to diseases passed on by dogs; another said that the eruption of Pompeii in AD 79 “changed the pattern of human evolution”. When the university re-graded the papers without his knowledge, he felt he had to resign to protest against what he called “an unequivalent affront to my integrity”.

In the Court of Appeal in February 2010, Lord Justice Sedley ruled that the University had undermined Professor Buckland’s status and it was the “inexorable outcome” that he had been constructively dismissed. The University had responded by saying that this is entirely a matter of employment law and nothing to do with what Professor Buckland called a “much larger process of dumbing down”.

Academics disagree; they see it as a small but important victory in the battle to stop what Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the University and College Union, calls the “marketisation” of university education.

Unquote

What was it that Gerald Ratner said about the wares in his shops? “We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?" I say, "because it's total crap".

So what happened to Ratners?