December 20, 2010
The Conservative Party and Britain’s Universities
When the Browne Review was greeted by the Conservative-led government as a welcome model for higher education reform, it was possible to believe it wasn’t anything personal against Britain’s universities.
Sure, Lord Browne knew nothing about higher education before being appointed. (Though he had been forced to quit as boss of BP after, er, lying in court.) And the rest of the committee consisted of two policy wonks, a journo-turned-economist, a banker and two vice-chancellors…but no student or working academic representatives.
Yet this was a Labour-appointed committee. And if a Labour-appointed committee argued for the tripling of tuition fees and the thorough marketisation of higher education, it was surely harmless co-incidence that such proposals fitted the ideological preferences of the Tory Party like a glass slipper.
When the Conservative immigration cap kicked-in – causing administrative chaos at British universities – it was natural to assume that the Tories just hated foreigners. (“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”) Indeed, when the Home Office website recently appealed for ideas on how to prevent foreign students entering the UK – even though foreign students pay vastly more in fees, and contribute enormously to academic research – this conclusion looked pretty certain.
And when the Browne Review fee-hike was recently passed, it could be similarly concluded that this Government just dislikes the poor. That whilst lecturing us on the unfairness of passing debt to future generations, the ConDems could nonetheless square a cabinet of millionaires (who received their university educations for free) saddling tomorrow’s students with £40,000 of financial obligation.
Thus, the willingness to introduce this headline figure of debt (despite the prospects of dettering those from lower income backgrounds) could be explained under the mechanisms of good, old-fashioned, top-down class war, as waged by the traditional party of privilege.
But when it was revealed that universities would be facing overall cuts of 40% – with 80% cuts to most teaching budgets – it became harder to keep believing that the present government is simply motivated by a ferocious ideological preference for marketisation, plus a desire to kick foreigners and disregard the poor.
Indeed, with the latest announcement that University funding is to be slashed several months before the fee-hike kicks in – leading to a massive shortfall in funding, and some institutions warning they will face bankruptcy – the obvious conclusion seems increasingly unavoidable.
That despite offering fantastic value for money, being consistently rated amongst the top institutions in the world, and playing host to no less than the top-ranked bastion of learning on the face of the planet, this Conservative-led government simply hates Britain’s universities. And quite possibly wants to destroy them.
Or is there some other, more irrational explanation? One perhaps better-fitted to the manic character of this most unconservative Conservative party.
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 29, 2010
The Revolution Will Be Tweeted
Until very recently I was deeply sceptical about the role of “social media” in real-world activism. If anything, I thought the option of typing self-indulgently into Twitter, Facebook or WordPress was likely to be harmful to activist causes. Because by shouting into the web, people experienced the sensation of involvement and action without achieving anything of substance.
The past week has changed my mind completely, as I’ve watched social media play an enormous part in organising, sustaining and strengthening student protest against Government cuts and education fee rises.
Last Thursday, a thousand-strong march took place in Cambridge alone, organised mostly via Facebook. With relatively little effort and expenditure on behalf of those spreading the word, lecturers, graduates, undergraduates, sixth-formers and sympathetic members of the public converged to voice collective discontent.
On Friday, a small group of Cambridge students occupied the 500-year old Senate House building, the nerve-centre of the University administration. Although the original occupation was begun by around just 20 people, within hours dozens more arrived after being contacted or alerted via Facebook, Twitter, text and email. Over the past three nights, at least 60-80 students have self-organised to occupy Senate House continuously, whilst numbers in the daytime are steady between 150-200.
Blogging platforms have allowed students in the occupation to set-up instant bases of information and communication. Email petitions and mailing lists were up and running within hours. Facebook is an easy-access source of information, communication and encouragement, as everybody participating logs-on to spread the word.
Indeed encouragement is key. Rather than feeling isolated, the Cambridge occupation has been able to communicate easily with demonstrations taking place in universities all across the country. As well as messages of solidarity, information is exchanged on how to co-ordinate occupations and keep them going, as well as to offering advice, experience and legal tips. The sense of being connected to a national – even global – movement is a huge boost to everybody involved. Indeed, the ease of modern communication enables occupiers to even bring in performing artists and bands, turning occupations into a protest-cum-parties, with spirits kept high and positive.
Via Twitter, email and Facebook, the Cambridge Occupation was rapidly endorsed by over 150 academics at the University, adding their support in a co-ordinated letter in a matter of hours. The letter is today being presented to the Vice Chancellor of the University. Similarly, an international petition was quickly set-up which attracted over 350 signatures. The morale-boost of hearing that Noam Chomsky had pledged his support was (unsurprisingly) considerable.
Email and Facebook have enabled occupiers to bring-in visiting lecturers and speakers. Use of Skype meant the occupation could host a discussion with Dr. Priyamvada Gopal (who has organised the academic support) even though she is currently away from Cambridge. Twitter kept people around the country updated on what was happening, whilst YouTube enabled recordings of lectures to be shared instantly.
Of course, social media will never replace feet on the ground; it can only be a means to an end. But this past week has shown that it can be a very effective means indeed. Whilst earlier predictions of “Twitter revolutions” in non-democratic states have patently failed to materialise (mostly because repressive state authorities quickly exploit the mine of information freely supplied by dissenters), the story is very different in western countries. For my generation and the next, the use of the internet is second nature. As the Coalition’s cuts politicise ever more young people, the role of social media in organising their resistance will become ever more prominent.
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 23, 2010
CFP
*** CALL FOR PAPERS ***
Politics, Order, Law:
2011 Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History
University of Cambridge
21-22 March 2011
Paper proposals are invited for the fourth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, to be held on 21-22 March 2011 at the University of Cambridge. The theme of the 2011 conference will be “Politics, Order, Law”, and papers dealing with any period and tradition in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present will be considered. Papers which bring an historical perspective to bear on problems of contemporary political theory are welcome. A keynote address will be given by a senior member of the Cambridge Faculty of History. In previous years keynote addresses have been delivered by Quentin Skinner, Raymond Geuss and Gareth Stedman Jones.
The conference theme should be interpreted broadly, to cover the various senses of “law”—including civil, natural and scientific—as well as differing conceptions of order in politics. Up to eight papers will be accepted. Panels will be led by a discussant from Cambridge, who will offer comments on each paper before general discussion with Cambridge faculty and conference participants. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Accommodation will be provided for speakers from outside Cambridge.
Abstracts of up to 500 words are requested by 6 December 2010, with accepted papers to follow in full by 7 March 2011. Please submit abstracts, along with your name and a brief C.V., to ptihconf@hermes.cam.ac.uk.
Registration will close on 25 February 2011; those wishing to attend the conference without presenting a paper should write to the above address with their name and institutional affiliation before that date.
2011 Conference committee:
Teresa Bejan
Dom O’Mahony
Tom Parry-Jones
Paul Sagar
Diana Siclovan
Sophie Smith
Waseem Yaqoob
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 1, 2010
Markets, Power and the Browne Report
Stefan Collini’s dissection of the Browne Report on higher education reform is both excellent and depressing.
Unquestionably, the Browne proposals are a dramatic threat to this country’s ability to foster learning and culture for their own sakes, regardless of whether such worthwhile activity promotes national output and growth.
As Collini makes clear, Browne’s suggestions for university finance have ramifications far beyond the present debate about what graduates should eventually pay for their degrees. Rather, the report champions a wholesale transformation of the British post-war settlement on higher education.
In short: rather than university education and research being a public good financed by public money, Browne envisages education as a private good financed by the preferences of private consumers.
The axes upon which the entire report turns are the claims that “students are best placed to make the judgement about what they want to get from participating in higher education”, coupled with two further beliefs: that “student choice will drive up quality”, and that the measure of quality is “student satisfaction”.
The model is that of a competitive market. Courses, and eventually entire departments, will only survive if they can keep attracting students who are willing to pay the fees demanded. Students, however, will likely assess courses not only (or even primarily) on whether the teaching is good and the learning offered worthwhile in itself, but whether graduates of such courses tend to go on to successful (i.e. highly-paid) careers.
Collini explains why this is a very bad idea at length, and I agree with him. But to focus on just two things:
Firstly, students are very poorly placed to make decisions – especially at 17 – about what a good university course offers, even simply in terms of its actual teaching. That’s something experienced academics are placed to correctly judge, because they know what is important for students to learn and struggle with even if students at the time don’t always like it.
Secondly, if significant numbers of students pick courses because of expected long-term economic pay-off, then smaller subjects and departments – doing valuable research and offering excellent educations to students interested in more niche areas – will end up being closed-down because the “market demand” isn’t there to sustain them. But that will show only that the market has failed, insofar as it is drastically insensitive to values and goods not directly appreciated or preferred by a particular group of “empowered consumers”.
And that last point is the one I really want to get draw attention to: that the Browne Report is very much about power. Under the Browne proposals, instead of experienced academics having the power to determine teaching – and eventually in turn, departmental research – provisions, power will be handed to students acting out the role of market consumers.
Now the zealot wing of the Market Defence League may think this is fine and dandy: that turning university education – and by chain of consequence, university research – into a function of what 17 year old children demand is exactly how it should be. If they truly believe that (somehow) “student choice” just will “drive up quality” and that “quality” is unproblematically defined in terms of “student satisfaction”, then they will no doubt be happy that power is being shifted in this direction and welcome it in full consciousness.
By contrast academics, and those who see the capricious market-demand of 17 year old children as a poor method of securing the myriad complexities of quality higher education provision, will lament such a transfer of power.
But what I strongly suspect is that Lord Browne and the co-authors of the Browne Report would be quite surprised by my claim that this is about power at a pretty fundamental level. I suspect they would likewise be bemused by my connected insistence that the Report is therefore a deeply political intervention, insofar as it seeks to re-arrange power distributions in foundational ways.
And if I’m right, the Report’s authors may actually posses – possibly without knowing it – a specific and deeply-seated conception of what power is. Indeed, this wouldn’t actually be surprising, given that the conception I have in mind has been ascendent in Britain for some time: namely, that consumer power in a market framework is not simply the only power that should exist, but the only form of power that really can exist.
For those of us who find that last sentence to be profoundly misguided, the Browne Report may prove deeply worrying on a great number of levels.
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 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.
