November 30, 2010
Windbag
Nick Clegg appears to be descending into a world of fantasy and illusion.
Last week he delivered a seriously confused lecture on how raising university fees and slashing higher education budgets – as well as abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance – will boost social mobility.
He also had the audacity to suggest that opponents to the Browne review haven’t understood it, because if they did they’d know supporting Browne’s proposals is unquestionably right. Call me elitist, but I can’t help thinking Cambridge professor Stefan Collini possess the analytic acumen to analyse the Browne proposals and come to a valid – hostile – conclusion. Ditto the numerous distinguished academics recently condemning the report in a letter to The Telegraph.
Yet Clegg is already back up on his patronising high horse, insinuating that student protestors themselves are a threat to more equal university access:
“However, I also believe that all of us involved in this debate have a greater responsibility to ensure that we do not let our genuinely held disagreements over policy mean that we sabotage an aim that we all share – to encourage people from poorer backgrounds to go to university.”
Put aside Clegg’s apparent inability to grasp the causal relationship between the policies he’s supporting and the substance of the opposition they’re arousing. Ignore the rather insulting implication that poor students are so stupid they’ll just rule-out university because they saw some protests on the telly.
Focus instead on what connects today’s statement with earlier ones: Clegg’s repeated insistence that everything that’s going wrong is everybody else’s fault, and that if they just listened to him they’d see the light.
Now also recall his response to the Institute For Fiscal studies condemnation of the Comprehensive Spending Review as deeply regressive. Namely, to accuse the independent and highly respected IFS of using the wrong (i.e. non-Cleggist) understanding of regressivity in the tax and benefit system.
A pattern, it seems, is emerging. One that has precedent.
By the end of Tony Blair’s time in power – particularly after the full nightmare of Iraq was under way – he had clearly descended into a world of fantasy. One in which the Mesopotamian Adventure had been a triumphant success. Where Britain was safer – despite the heightened risk of domestic terrorism. Where the Middle East was stabilised – despite increased Iranian bellicosity and justified regional paranoia. Removing Saddam was A Good Thing; those who didn’t agree were moral hypocrites merely using Iraq as a beating stick.
For Blair, this was clearly a psychological coping mechanism. Living in his world of fantasy, he remained the champion of Goodness and Light. Outside that world he was the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Nick Clegg appears to be treading a strikingly similar path. The problem, he insists, is students and an unreasonable public. He correspondingly shut-outs the fact he has systematically betrayed his party grassroots and (former) principles. He ignores the fact he’s reneged on core, vote-winning promises with the likely result of electoral decimation and a return to the political wilderness for his party.
He pretends he’s not the man enabling the most viciously right-wing and socially-destructive government in Western Europe; a Government now launching a drastic programme of enormous, ideologically-motivated cuts far removed from liberal democratic principles. Cuts which Lib Dem voters expressly did not vote for.
What perhaps differentiates Blair and Clegg’s trajectories is the sheer speed with which the latter has descended into fantasy and blame-gaming. But, ultimately, they both come out as pathetic – if increasingly damaging – political figures. These are men who, as Max Weber put it so well, lack the true calling for politics; a calling which depends upon taking self-reflective responsibility for one’s actions. They parse the maxims:
“ ‘The world is stupid and base, not I’, ‘The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon the others whom I serve and whose stupidity and baseness I shall eradicate’. ”
They are “windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensation”.
November 25, 2010
Cambridge Demo: Policeman Punches Student in Face
Yesterday afternoon a spokesman for the prime minister said:
“Our position is that people have a right to engage in lawful and peaceful protest, but there is no place for violence or intimidation.”
No doubt the PM sincerely believes this, as regards the actions of protestors. More troubling is the extent to which “violence or intimidation” is employed overtly by the police.
Yesterday I took part in the anti-cuts protest in Cambridge. Starting with a demo and city-centre march, the protests began in good spirits with a calm and pleasant atmosphere. At least a thousand people attended the march, and a considerable number of them were from local sixth form colleges protesting against the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance. Most of the rest were students at Cambridge University. There were also a handful of lecturers in attendance. And best of all, school children in uniform with their teachers.
After the main march, about 500 students climbed over railings and occupied the grounds of the Senate House building on the King’s Parade road. Occupations, of course, are a long-standing method by which students attempt to force university authorities to pay attention to their demands. Occupations are also completely legitimate, because they are effectively the only way for students to realistically guarantee that university authorities will pay attention to their views and concerns (especially as the aim is not to cause damage, but simply to disrupt).
After discussion, students decided to attempt to occupy the inside of the Senate House building. As students walked slowly en masse to attempt to gain entry, the police blocked their approach and drew batons. From there the situation rapidly deteriorated. Baton-strikes were very quickly made by the police. But this simply had the effect of heightening tensions dramatically.
Of course, the situation is difficult and we should try to see both sides. The police were seriously outnumbered at first, and it was clear that some of them were very scared. Others, however, obviously relished the confrontational nature of the situation, and were taking delight in striking students whilst shouting “Fuck off”, “Get fucking back” and “Fuck you”.
Unsurprisingly, this did not make the situation calmer. Rather a fight mentality quickly descended, as angered students pushed harder to gain entrance to the building. Given how tense the situation rapidly became, it was quite impressive that most students continued to shout “stay peaceful” and did not give-in to the temptation to hit back at the police. The same cannot be said, however, for those officers who allowed the situation to escalate further by (for example) shouting “I’m going to get you” at students near the front, and in some instances closed-fist punching them. Don’t believe me? Watch the final frames of this video [unfortunately you'll need a Facebook log-in to watch; hopefully this will be sorted out in due course and I'll embed directly here].
Ultimately, dealing with protests is a very difficult and delicate operation. From the perspective of the police on the front line, protestors can appear intimidating and aggressive. And given that few members of Cambridgeshire Police can have much experience of dealing with protest, inexperience on their part no doubt was a factor in making things worse. But yesterday it was quite clear that sections of the force deployed to control an initially peaceful student demonstration were overly-eager to use “violence and intimidation”. It was, effectively, the same situation (on a smaller scale) to that which I witnessed in London in 2009.
The media talks a lot about “hardcore anarchist” groups “infiltrating” peaceful protests and “hi-jacking” them to start violence. It does not talk anywhere near enough – if at all – about the role of the police in creating confrontational and aggressive situations. The way police handle protest in this country is simply wrong-headed: it escalates and exacerbates tension and confrontation, when it should be doing the exact opposite. As a basic start on the road to improvement, perhaps the authorities could in future teach their officers not to punch people in the face.
November 19, 2010
Tuition Fees, Social Justice and Social Mobility
Long-winded attempt to articulate some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for a while. Apologies for the lengthy post – but this one is complicated, and so needs the more detailed treatment.
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There’s a lurking problem in much of the opposition to increased university tuition fees, and it’s a deep one.
Most student campaigners oppose increased tuition fees at least partly on grounds of social justice (i.e. in addition to worries about the wholesale restructuring of academia as a private rather than a public good, plus wider concerns about the Coalition cuts to wider society more generally). Specifically, campaigners typically claim increased fees will deter the poor from applying to university. (Some early evidence seems to support them.) This outcome is taken to be morally bad and unfair in itself, as well as carrying the further and significant negative consequence of reducing social mobility between class and income groups.
At a certain level I am (heavily) sympathetic to opposition of this form, because I agree that reforms which disadvantage the poor and reduce social mobility are undesirable. But focusing on this level alone risks missing deeper and more serious issues.
It is broadly speaking true that university education significantly increases earning potential. So a straightforward thought goes: if more poor kids go to university, then we should see more poor citizens moving up to higher income and class brackets. (In practice of course this didn’t really work, because New Labour increased the absolute number of people going to university, and thereby inadvertently triggered what we might term “degree inflation”. Employers who previously differentiated between “degree/no degree” increasingly now differentiate between “good degree/less good degree/no degree”. Thus, the income stratifications that are at least partly a function of people’s educational differences continue.)
Given the socio-economic structure of our society, there will always be jobs that pay more than others (though how much more is an interesting question; Martin O’Neill reminds us that things weren’t always as extreme as they are now). Further, it’s a brute fact of existence that some people will always be cleverer than others. Given the structure of late capitalism, it tends to be the case that the cleverer get better paid jobs than the poorer. (Things are obviously complicated by the fact some people are cleverer because they were better off to begin with, i.e. had the benefits of bed-time reading, domestic stability, and access to higher quality primary education which all make a dramatic difference in early childhood development. But let’s ignore those complicating factors today).
Now, much opposition to fee increases broadly centres on social mobility claims: that fee increases must be opposed because university-access is a key mechanism whereby some members of the poorest demographics can leapfrog out of their class into the higher echelons of society. But the flip-side of this position is that other people have to travel downwards, and take the places of those who have leapfrogged them. Focusing on social mobility arguments alone therefore neglects to pay attention to the underlying fact of inequality between socio-economic income groups that makes the “trading-places” approach to social justice possible in the first place.
Of course, that socio-economic inequality between classes might in principle be something we can identify, accept, and decide to tolerate. This might be the case if, for example, such income and class inequality is sufficiently restricted and/or corrected for because (say) income differentials between top and the bottom are fairly circumscribed, perhaps due to established redistributive measures put in place to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Yet this is manifestly not the situation in Britain at present (at least from the perspective of most leftist social justice campaigners and egalitarians). In Britain, the gap between the top and the bottom has grown enormously over the past 30 years – and is set to get even bigger thanks to the regressive measures of the current government.
Ironically, by focusing on the detrimental impacts to social mobility that fee-increases will elicit, student campaign groups do not pay much attention to what is arguably the more fundamental and pressing social justice issue at play: that the enormous wealth and income differentials between socio-economic classes experienced at present are what underpin the social mobility view which takes a university degree to be a golden ticket for leapfrogging out of the lower classes into the higher echelons (or in many cases, to stay put and avoid trading downwards or being leapfrogged). In the process, questions about who is left behind in the great game of leapfrogging (because there are, after all, a finite number of golden tickets to be had), and why there is such a gap between classes to begin with (and why the gap is continuously tolerated), are quickly obscured from view.
Now, I certainly don’t blame student campaigners for this situation – it’s clearly a profound, society-wide phenomenon that’s been in effect since before I was born. And in particular, student campaign groups have to pick winnable battles, both in terms of ambition and of what will resonate with the public and with policy-makers. Given the times we live in, campaigning on grounds of social mobility certainly seems more likely to succeed than challenging the fundamental inequalities characterising our society (and which anyway go far beyond issues specific to higher education).
But here come two final ironies. Firstly, by working within the “paradigm” of social justice as a model of individuals leapfrogging between classes – rather than reducing the differentials found between classes themselves – anti-fee campaigners focus on what is surely a relatively superficial aspect of a deeper social justice problem: the existence of significant class and income differences to begin with. In turn, campaigners inadvertently allow that deeper problem to continue going unaddressed and unconsidered in wider debates, even though it generates the social justice issue that they take themselves to be preoccupied with. The rub, of course, being that it’s hard to see how campaigners could do anything else, at least at present.
Secondly, social mobility campaigners somewhat unwittingly accept and perpetuate the “discourse” within which university education is increasingly seen as an instrumental economic good (e.g. one that facilities inter-class mobility). Yet the cumulative effective of this is presumably that it makes it ever harder to argue for the value of higher education as something worthwhile in itself. Correspondingly, this makes it more difficult to defend (in particular) the arts and humanities when the politicians come a-cutting: by over-investing in the language of social mobility, opponents of higher education reform find themselves increasingly locked-in to the instrumentalist economic views that motivate much of the current reform programme itself.
The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.
November 11, 2010
In Praise of Riots
“I say that those who condemn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs, appear to me to blame those things that were the chief causes for keeping Rome free, and that they paid more attention to the noises and shouts that arose in those tumults than to the good effects they brought forth…And if the tumults were the cause of creation of Tribunes, they merit the highest praise, for in addition to giving the people a part in administration, they were established for guarding Roman liberty.”
So wrote Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discorsi, perhaps the first great work of modern political theory.
It would be misleading to extrapolate too much from Machiavelli’s concerns about the governing of a 16th century Italian city state. But regardless, like Machiavelli I have no inherent problem with “tumults” – or as we would now call them, riots.
Machiavelli’s core point is that rioting safe-guarded freedom. It was because the Roman plebs took arms against the nobles that the latter remembered not to push things too far. That made rioting a useful corrective, and a check against the abuses of the powerful.
It’s not clear that anything has changed today. If a party is elected to government on a series of manifesto pledges, and then reneges on them systematically, it may be no bad thing if the betrayed express their discontent via physical public unrest.
Indeed, Machiavelli also held a connected and crucially important view:
“If the object of the Nobles and the People is considered, it will be seen that the former have a great desire to dominate, and the latter a desire not to be dominated and consequently a greater desire to live free…so that the People placed in charge to guard the liberty of anyone, reasonably will take better care of it; for not being able to take it away themselves, they do not permit others to take it away”
Those in positions of power will seek to dominate the weaker. To defend freedom of the (city-)state, the ruled must possess the ability to strike back at the rulers.
You can see where this is going, even if it needs updating by 500 years.
If the NUS organises a 50,000-strong rally in London, and sections of the protest attack physical property owned by the powerful Conservative Party, then forcibly confront the police, this is not an inherently bad thing – and especially if nobody is seriously hurt.
Of course, the usual suspects sitting in their usual swamps have already spouted the tired old clichés about “a few troublemakers” and the importance of “peaceful protest”. But I disagree when the implication is that rioting can never be justified. There is no fail-safe reason why the populi cannot, at times of extreme discontent, employ physical force against the mechanisms of an authority which is committing violence against them.
And I do mean violence. Because when a government decides that (for example) the seriously diabetic are not “really” disabled, and can thus have their disability allowances halved over-night, rendering many unable to meet the rent – that is a form of violence.
When generations of young people suffer government policies rendering higher education more exclusive whilst reducing employment prospects for the millions already out of work – that is a form of violence.
When the unemployed are to be compelled into slave-like forced employment schemes (or rather, ultra-expensive hypocritical gimmicks aimed at a tiny minority of tabloid hate-figures) – that is a form of violence.
In short: if government systematically attacks the interests and well-being of citizens, this constitutes a form of violence. That such violence is achieved by bureaucratic mandate and the mechanisms of officialdom is irrelevant. The policies of the current Coalition Government are attacks of violence upon the fabric of British society, and the British people themselves.
Yesterday, tens of thousands of students gathered in London. Some of them fought the police, and attempted to damage the property of both the state and the Conservative party. Good. British citizens should do it again and again, until our lords and masters understand.
If rioting secured the liberty of Rome, perhaps it can salvage the welfare state of Britain. After all, who else is going to bring this radical and destructive juggernaut to a halt? Not Nick Clegg, that’s for sure.
October 14, 2010
Divide and Rule
Chris Bertram’s excellent article on the Browne Report’s proposals for raising university tuition fees makes an important point:
“On the other hand, I have the sense that some of my colleagues will be somewhat relieved by Lord Browne’s report . This is understandable. In the current climate many academics fear for their jobs and the gradual erosion of state support has been tipping many university managements into cuts, hiring freezes and the threat of compulsory redundancies.”
Indeed, I must myself confess to a sort of guilty relief that student fees may be increased.
In three year’s time I will be looking for a job in academia. Yet with planned cuts of 20-25% my future is potentially bleak. That kind of assault on higher education, if not off-set, will lead to departmental closures and massive job freezes. Not only will I be competing against other post-docs for fewer places, I’ll also be competing with established academics boasting long lists of published works, who have been turfed-out of other institutions.
Yet if universities are able to off-set central cuts with fee increases, the devastation may be considerably mitigated. That’s good for academics, who do far more than just teach undergraduates. They are primarily researchers, who only teach as a secondary role in their professional duties and need to protect their primary research-bases accordingly. Thus, whatever the social injustice of raising fees – and the long-term impact on British social mobility – academics worried for their own skins may (understandably) be somewhat relieved at the prospect of fee increases.
Crucially, they may therefore not support student protests against these increases in any meaningful way. Call me cynical, but I don’t much rate the power of British students to block government policy. This is not the France of ’68. And the NUS is nothing but a talking shop of aspiring lobby fodder whom the government can easily ignore. Assuming no unanticipated mass protests by the students of today (acting on behalf of those of tomorrow) breaking out and bringing the country to a standstill, student resistance to fee increases will likely fail. To make a difference, my estimation is that student opposition would have to be backed by significant numbers of academics and vice chancellors, all willing to display a united front against fee-increases.
It looks like the Coalition thus has the advantage of a divide and conquer situation. But it’s worth asking: who laid the groundwork for this?
After all, many academics are of leftist persuasions. In the 20th century student protests on issues of social justice were often backed by their professors, both on and off campus. Even with the threat of cuts today it’s not clear that this alone would determine academics to save their own bacon at the expense of students.
What may well tip the balance, however, is a fairly deep-running resentment against central government. It comes off the back of 13 years of target-setting hoop-jumping philistine managerialism spearheaded by New Labour. Many academics are sick of being told that they must deliver economic “impact” from their taught courses and professional research (Impact of what? Measured how? By whom? Taking place how quickly?). They are sick of being told that research is worthless unless it has immediate and measurable economic pay-off. They are sick of having to jump through the hoops of the frankly insane Research Assessment Exercise.
If universities don’t take government silver, they can resist dancing to government tunes. For many that is a very attractive prospect – meaning that even those vice chancellors who are not pusillanimous government stooges may refrain from fighting fee rises.
So if it’s true that a divide-and-rule dynamic – pitting academics against students – allows the Coalition to push through fee reform, it’s worth remembering who helped foster the possibility of such a dynamic in the first place.
August 26, 2010
The Banality of Institutions
I’m increasingly interested in the role of institutions in people’s lives, and the way those institutions affect the moral choices and outcomes people find themselves committed to – or implicated in.
In particular, I think we should pay attention to the ways in which people find themselves compelled to do questionable acts, or participate in dubious programmes, because of institutional allegiances they’ve already committed to.
I have two examples in mind.
Nick Clegg now finds himself in a sticky situation. Having played king-maker and put the Conservative Party into office, the Lib Dems are complicit in a programme of “austerity” heavily criticised by the Institute for Fiscal Studies for being deeply regressive. (Indeed it’s worth stressing – as Larry Elliott does – that George Osbrone’s “emergency budget” is set to hit the poor hardest not just proportionally, but in straight cash terms).
Clegg’s is faced with holding together a party most of whose members would never have agreed to the Coalition if they’d known this would be the outcome. The Lib Dems were supposed to be a “moderating” influence on the Tories – but this increasingly looks like a naive, self-serving fantasy the Liberals told themselves to justify a share of power.
Nonetheless, many senior Lib Dems are committed to supporting policies they deeply disagree with. Even if only by remaining silent, figures like Vince Cable and Charles Kennedy are compelled to support ends they would rather oppose. To figures like Clegg, the burden falls heavier. He must go into print, publishing a nonsense attack on Britain’s leading impartial economic think tank (which he’d formerly heaped praise on). Clegg must ludicrously claim that regressive impacts on the poor will be offset by job creation, despite Osborne’s emergency budget being most likely to increase unemployment.
But the phenomenon goes wider than politics, and here’s another example. Increasing numbers of my friends are training to become teachers. Some of these friends – though of course not all – have previously been known to indulge in some light substance recreation. Usually just a spliff here and there, or maybe the occasional E on special occasions. No scenes from Scarface, just party prescriptions.
None of these friends ever died, killed anybody, raped anybody, committed serious crimes or did anything untoward when under the influence. They simply had a good time, left everybody else alone, and went about their evening. Yet when these friends become teachers, they will be compelled – by the institutional system they marry into – to stand in front of dozens of teenagers every year, and lecture them about the life-destroying evils of illegal drugs.
In other words, my friends will have to become systematic liars and hypocrites. Yet their lies will be disbelieved by future generations of kids, whose personal experiments will teach them far more than the propaganda of the school room. More widely, the bizarre social hysteria about recreational substances – other than violence-inducing alcohol, of course – will go on. Those who know very well that society’s attitude to drugs is founded on bullshit, will become the proverbial bulls.
As regards Nick Clegg’s dubious actions, we can perhaps be harsh. He played king-maker, this is politics, and now he must live with the consequences. We might, however, have more sympathy for more reluctant coalition figures like Cable and Kennedy. Surely not even in their worst nightmares did they expect it to be this bad after just a 100 days. Nonetheless, Lib Dem members who ever believed their party could be a force for social justice ought now to be considering their positions.
As regards my friends who must become hypocrites, they’ll no doubt learn to live with it – just as their own teachers did before them. And yet the consequence of everyone learning to live with this hypocrisy is the perpetuation of a drugs policy exhibiting collective social madness.
Hannah Arendt famously concluded that evil is characterised by banality. She was talking about something far worse than what I’ve drawn attention to today. But nonetheless, insofar as we want to understand life’s little lesser evils, and the banality that lies behind them, an examination of the commitments individuals find themselves reluctantly fulfilling because of the institutions they’ve pledged allegiance to will take us a long way.
August 13, 2010
Status Hunger
Exam season over, it’s time to laugh at the thickos.
After all, that is the purpose of the yearly Times Higher Education feature on student howlers. You’d already heard of the dunce who described Christopher Columbus’s circumcision of the globe. Now you can split your sides once more, learning of the twit who railed against “anus crimes” and the fool’s dissertation on “complimentary medicines”.
It’s all good fun, laughing at the thickos. Right? For a start, it makes us feel better about ourselves. No matter that, given how many hundreds of thousands of students take exams each year, it’s inevitable that some stupidity will occur. Indeed, even if most of the THE examples were one-off typos, most of us would probably still prefer to laugh at the stupids.
What does this tell us?
Tim often claims that status – and the pursuit of more of it for ourselves – is an irreducible aspect of human conduct. Accordingly, we might read our collective amusement at the thickness of the thickos as a manifestation of status-affirmation. We all get off on feeling cleverer than others.
This may well be true. But what may not be true is something like Tim’s claims that status-hunger is an irreducible aspect of human conduct. As Chris points out in this thread – to much subsequent misunderstanding – it’s not at all clear what the true cause of widespread status-hunger actually is.
I’m not an anthropologist – and neither is Tim. But should we really rule-out a priori the possibility that other human societies, of which we are ignorant, were/are able to dispense with status-hunger? Or, perhaps more likely, were able to find systems of organisation which drastically reduced the extent of status-hunger, and lived in structural situations where the pursuit of status was massively discouraged, especially compared to the levels observed in modern Britain?
And even if no such society ever existed, does that mean that status-hunger is nonetheless an irreducible feature of human behaviour? Perhaps (again stealing from Chris) it’s just that the contingent facts of human society thus-far have been uniformly characterised by some basic features that have always produced status-hunger. For example, all human societies to date have been characterised by the need to allocate scarce resources amongst agents whose needs and desires cannot all be satisfied simultaneously. In a hypothetical world in which this was not so, perhaps much status-hunger would end?
But let’s suppose that’s not true; let’s even suppose that as some evolutionary biologists suggest, what I’m calling status-hunger is essentially ineradicable from human conduct, because it is rooted in our success as reproducing organisms, and thereby inescapable.*
Even conceding this, there’s something objectionable about Tim’s usual reasoning, which goes: “status-hunger is irreducible, therefore we shold largely accept that and live with it”. People like Chris and myself don’t buy this as it stands. We think the correct reasoning is rather: “even if status-hunger is irreducible in human beings, status-hunger is still frequently objectionable in itself, and can often have very nasty consequences, for example if losers are trampled underfoot by the victorious.”
Whereas Tim apparently tends to think that the “fact” of status-hunger is to some extent the end of the matter, Chris and I tend to the belief that this is really the start of the story; that the onus moves to mitigating the effects and extents of status-hunger. For example, by designing institutions which limit it and compensate for its effects, or by cultivating a social ethos that downplays self-promotion.
Prima facie it therefore looks like leftists and rightists are (partly) delineated by their respective reactions to status-hunger.
The former resist the idea that status-hunger is inevitable, and think it needs to be significantly curbed when it raises its ugly head, often using the power of the state.
The latter are less resistant to the claim of irreducibility, and are less keen on attempting to extensively mitigate status hunger’s via the power of the state, and perhaps with good reason. (Rightists will, of course, accept some status-hunger mitigation; that’s the price of living in any functioning society).
Which perhaps indicates – as I’ve argued previously – that left/right divisions are about more than just equality, in any straightforward sense.
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* FYI, I believe this to be bullshit. But that’s not important today.
August 8, 2010
Compulsory Ethics?
The Times Higher Education supplement carries an article about the recent spate of “bad behaviour” cases in US universities. These range from financial impropriety to sexual assault.
However, the article also contains a rather silly (implicit) suggestion:
“Professor Hamilton said universities do too little to encourage ethical behaviour, beginning with their training of doctoral candidates.
“The professoriate has chosen not to acculturate our members in a serious way into the ethics of the profession,” he said. If it acted like the legal and medical fields, he added, “we could be keeping track, state by state, of how many complaints are being made about violations, how many have been found to have probable cause, how many went to a hearing and how many resulted in disciplinary action”.
I have no problem with the latter idea – that institutions track and record complaints – for this seems sensible policy for all the obvious reasons.
What I find suspect is the notion that universities don’t do enough to encourage “ethical behaviour”. Although there’s always the risk that Professor Hamilton has been taken out of context, the idea that “the professoriate” has “chosen” not to “acculturate” new members into the “ethics of the profession” seems suspect.
For surely it’s silly to suggest that doctoral students should somehow be deliberately and consciously “acculturated”. Why? Because conscious, deliberate and formal “acculturation” could only take the form of compulsory ethics courses, which could presumably be of only two kinds:
Option 1: a course in moral philosophy and theory. This would be similar to what most undergraduate philosophy programmes offer; a trudge through Aristotle, Hume, Kant and the rest, with dollops of abstract meta-ethics or (if you’re really unlucky) “applied ethics” focusing (if you’re really, really unlucky) on the work of Peter Singer.
Option 2: a course not of moral philosophy, but of quite literally telling doctoral candidates what is right and what is wrong. Lessons could include “Do not launder university funds”, “Do not sexually exploit your undergraduate students”, and “Do make sure the money for poor kids really does go to poor kids, and not your mistress”.
The problem with option 1 is that knowing lots about moral philosophy is no guarantee of securing good ethical behaviour. We all know (of) highly accomplished moral philosophers who are anything but good people.
The problem with option 2 is that it’s really, really dumb. People either know the difference between right and wrong by the time they get to doctoral level, or they don’t. (Or possibly they know the difference, and choose to ignore it when they think they’ll get away with it). If people haven’t got their heads around acceptable ethical behaviour by the time they are doing a PhD, then a compulsory course is hardly likely to fill the void.
And it seems no reply to argue that established professionals ought to do more to explain-by-example that certain behaviours – y’know, sexual exploitation, embezzlement, abuse of power – are unacceptable. If this isn’t already being spontaneously communicated by the profession, then it seems highly unlikely that encouraging professors to “set a better example” will succeed. I mean, we’re talking about pretty basic cases of right and wrong here.
To be fair to Hamilton, elsewhere in the article he quite reasonably draws attention to structural factors which likely generate opportunities for wrongdoing within academia. And he’s written a big book which (from a superficial glance) explores such factors in detail.
But why not leave it there?
Unless, perhaps, there is a hidden assumption that academics are somehow special; that they ought to be less vulnerable to corruption and temptation than others because of their big brains. That just by reminding academics of their special status this will be enough to halt naughty behaviour.*
Which looks, of course, both pretty unlikely and already empirically disproved.
But it might be a nice story for academics to tell themselves. And, indeed, maybe that’s why Hamilton tells it, to the THE especially.
How human, all-too-human that might turn out to be.
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*Annecdotally, I’ve noticed a greater tendency amongst academics – especially moral philosopher academics – to deny the possibility of what the Ancient Greeks called akrasia, i.e. knowing that something is wrong and then doing it anyway. This may be of relevance.
August 3, 2010
On Plagiarism
Norm thinks plagiarism is wrong. He’s right (obviously). The “moral-legal” point accepted, however, I’d like to return to the “sociology of belief” Norm puts to one side.
Apparently the “number who [believe] that copying from the Web constitutes ‘serious cheating’ is declining”. The New York Times reports:
“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”
Hmm.
There’s no doubt that cheats have always been around; plagiarism is as old as the hills. And it isn’t just undergraduate students that indulge. I have a strong hunch that an article in a well-respected Cambridge University Press compendium is heavily plagiarised. But let’s nonetheless focus on students, where the bulk of cases can be found.
Imagine a world in which the dominant ethos of undergraduate study was as follows. Students understand that they must work hard, consistently and conscientiously or they will not develop their own ideas, their own arguments and ultimately their own minds. Coursework, dissertations and exams are viewed not as battles with evil examiners but as opportunities for learning and self-development. “Do the work, and do it well” is every student’s motto because it is understood that university is not just about receiving a qualification, but about personal self-improvement.
Would there by plagiarism in such a world? Undoubtedly. Cheats will always exist, and sometimes people plagiarise out of desperation not just simple cynicism. But it seems reasonable to suppose that there would be rather less plagiarism than in the following possible world.
Here university is predominantly seen as a series of hoops to jump through so as to pick-up a qualification. This qualification is increasingly socially expected and is a pre-requisite to acquiring reasonably well-remunerated employment. However the university experience also comes with lots of cheap cash. This means the opportunity to consume copious amounts of alcohol and drugs, to sleep with similarly inebriated people, to upload the photos onto Facebook, and generally have a cracking good time. The educational hoops still have to be jumped through, of course. But because they’re just hoops surely there’s no harm in finding ways to pull the wool over the hoop-examiners’ eyes?
It would hardly be surprising if plagiarism was increasingly a problem in such a world. No prizes for identifying which one is closer to the world we actually live in.
In Britain increasing numbers of students view a university degree as something they are entitled to simply because they are paying for it. They are the consumers and they expect suppliers to reciprocate. And in a way you can’t blame them; when you go to McDonalds you don’t expect your burger to be conditional upon your working hard. Viewed this way around, plagiarism appears not only excusable but virtually acceptable. If the customer is always king why can’t he cheat if that’s what he feels like?
Sadly many universities are effectively complicit. It’s astonishingly hard to get kicked out of most institutions even for egregious cases of plagiarism. A friend of mine teaches at a Russell Group university, where a girl made a complaint(!) because she’d copied her friend’s essay but received a lower mark. Was she kicked out? Don’t be silly. Universities can’t get a reputation for academic exclusion, or the consumers will go to the competition – and government funding will quickly follow. The same underlying factors ensured that another academic acquaintance saw piles of failed and 3rd-class essays returned by the department, repeatedly, until they were given the 2:2 grades management desired.
In a world where both students and univeristies are complicit in quietly tolerating plagiarism (however unwillingly in the cases of most academics), attempts to excuse the practice by blaming external factors should be entirely unsurprising. That way hard questions about the worrying trajectory of higher education can be conveniently avoided. It surely won’t be long before we hear cries of “blame the internet!” on these shores too.
August 2, 2010
Choice and Empowerment
Embarrassing for Michael Gove:
“Michael Gove faced fresh accusations of exaggerating the level of interest in his education reforms yesterday after it emerged there had been just 62 applications for his “free schools” policy.
Before the election the education secretary said he wanted hundreds of parent-and-teacher groups to open their own schools. Once in government he told parliament there had been 700 expressions of interest to the New Schools Network (NSN), a charitable organisation helping to set up the scheme.”
I’ve previously made my dislike of Ed Balls known, but he’s got a point:
“The vast majority of parents just want a well-funded good local school and do not have the time or the wherewithal to set up their own.”
Quite.
When I was working in Parliament last year, a group of Lib Dem MPs were convinced that a top priority should be allowing NHS patients to own their medical records on portable USB sticks. The rationale was that this would allow patients to change GP surgeries and hospitals at whim, rather than being tied to one. This would allegedly increase “choice” and be “empowering”, and was accordingly a “liberal” policy.
But what appears “empowering” to busy MPs regularly commuting between Westminster and their constituencies might look rather different to others. To those struggling to hold down day-jobs, bring up the kids and pay the bills, owning medical records on little USB sticks might be rather lower on the list of health priorities.
By contrast having a safe, reliable and free health service is likely to be very “empowering” indeed. Such a thing frees people from the stress and worry of providing in times of ill-health. It allows them to devote time, energy and resources to more enjoyable or rewarding activities – secure in the knowledge of a guaranteed safety-net should things go wrong.
Concentrating on improving the provision of guaranteed health-care to the point where people don’t have to think about it at all thus appears far more “empowering” than pouring billions into IT systems that would allow people to own their medical records on data pens.
The same goes for schools. The “choice” that parents want when it comes to schools is apparently not that of setting up and running the damn things themselves. By contrast what would “empower” most British families would arguably be a society in which whatever school parents chose for their kids, sufficient funding and provision would guarantee high-quality education.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, “choice” and “empowerment” are complicated ideas, as all interesting concepts are. Different perspective on what “choice” and “empowerment” mean, or which senses of “choice” and “empowerment” should be deemed most important, can thus directly affect policy-making.
Yet for at least the past 20 years British politics has been dominated by a rather narrow, short-termist view of choice and empowerment which effectively treats citizens as economic consumers. Citizen needs and requirements have become increasingly viewed as equivalent to the tastes and preferences of rational economic consumers demanding goods and services from suppliers.
Out of this attitude has quite naturally grown a view by which the important “choices” are the ones that resemble market transactions. So the “choice” assumed to matter to citizens when it comes to education and health is that of picking competing hospitals or schools (perhaps even helpfully ranked in official league tables). Correspondingly the view of choice outlined above – the wider view pertaining to what is made possible when basic quality of things like education and health are guaranteed – increasingly drops-out of the picture. Similarly “empowerment” is assumed to be whatever policy promotes short-term consumer-style choice in service provision, rather than what citizens are enabled to do when living in a society where the worry and stress of (for example) health and education provision are taken care of.
“Choice” and “empowerment” are two of the watchwords of modern British politics; they dominate policy-making, debate and thinking. Yet the dominant understanding of both these concepts is clearly not their only possible interpretation. This matters.
In a parallel world where consumer-style understandings of “choice” and “empowerment” were laughed out of the room, Michael Gove’s free schools would never have made it past the focus groups (not least because politics in such a world might not tolerate focus groups either).
Of course that world might also have significant problems. The state can be a clunking, heartless and overly-bureaucratic provider, and there are good arguments for checking those tendencies too. But the point, as I’ve argued before, is that in politics ideas matter precisely because it’s ideas that shape the decisions we make.
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Hardcore enthusiasts can enjoy some further reading of my views on the issue of “choice” in politics here and here.
