The English Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is back in the news once more, attracting more unfavourable and damaging attention for no necessary reason.
There is now a very real possibility that assessors of research proposals will shortly begin to resign en masse to protest against its policies; opposition Labour party politicians are, finally, beginning to badger the government about interfering with research, and the minister in charge of universities, David Willetts, has signalled that he is unsupportive of the Council’s approach.
A few months back the council, which distributes research money to academics in the humanities, became the subject of controversy. It badly mishandled press reports about its intention to pour some of its limited resources into a specifically political area of research, using public funds to flesh out the Conservative party’s “Big Society” slogan, and turn it from a catchphrase into something which had meaning.
One of the reports overdid it and said that the AHRC had been pressured by the government into this action. A mistake such as this is regrettable, but in this case it proved to be something of an unintended blessing. The authorities in English higher education have a general policy of never replying to any criticism; for the most part they do not even acknowledge its existence, and the funding structure is set up in such a way that they do not have to.
But in this case, the AHRC spotted an easy triumph: it put out a tetchy statement (rumoured to have been written by the chief executive, Rick Rylance, and presumably at least authorised by him) denouncing the suggestion, and assuring academics that the decision to back a party-political slogan had been entirely voluntary.
It says a great deal about the people who now rise to positions of influence in the education system that it never occurred to the AHRC that this would make things even worse, that there is a difference between enforced compliance, and voluntary collaboration. Indeed, they seem to have expected congratulations for a cunning ploy to win favour from the new administration.
Many academics did not see it that way. 4,000 of them signed a petition in protest; more than 30 learned societies issued a statement backing the petition, and the AHRC was deluged with hundreds of letters and emails. There was no upsurge of support from the ranks defending the AHRC's policies.
The protests had not the slightest effect, so now some of those who assess projects are planning to resign, a move organised by Thom Brooks, to indicate that this is a serious matter of academic integrity, not a temper-tantrum that will blow over if the AHRC sticks to its guns.
Equally, the Labour opposition is demanding to see correspondence between the Ministry of Business and the Council to find out what actually happened – probably not in the expectation of discovering anything truly sinister, but to cause annoyance and keep the issue bubbling.
For the government, this is a nuisance it can do without at a time when its policies on Higher Education are mired in controversy. It has already been forced to retreat on a raft of measures – selling forests, prison policy, the National Health Service – and it needs a display of resolve if it is not to be deemed weak-willed and spineless. Higher Education, unfortunately, looks as though it will be the sector called upon to provide that proof.
The government does not need its position weakened by a controversy for which, for once, it is not responsible -- although when the AHRC presented its plans, it could easily have told the council not to be so silly. The move to back the “Big Society” does indeed seem as though it was little more than a piece of amateur manoeuvring of the sort normally associated with student politics. It was neither necessary, nor required to gain funding – the ESRC won its money without a display of servility -- and it is now a political liability.
So David Willetts signalled as clearly as politicians ever signal anything that he wants the AHRC to close the matter down. In an article the Times Higher Education Supplement at the end of May, he wrote:
“Our commitments on teaching and research also respect the autonomy of universities and have avoided any pernicious temptation to steer the money towards ministers' pet priorities (although the research councils will doubtless want to reflect on the hazards of referring at all to current political slogans!).”
Only the head of a research council could fail to take the meaning in Willetts' remark -- not least because if one of the architects of the "Big Society" can refer to it as a political slogan, it becomes that much more difficult to maintain that it is, in fact, a serious subject for academic research.
The AHRC duly demonstrated its limited ability to interpret texts. Professor Rylance announced that he didn't really want to reflect on it at all: the council had no intention of removing the references to the Big Society in its plans. The Chairman, Sir Alan Wilson, added that he didn’t see why people were getting worked up about it – although I assume that, if he asked, they would have been happy to explain.
The main reason given for this stance is that it would be a bit of a bother, and involve discussions with the ministry. There is, however, no particular reason to think that these could not be disposed of over morning coffee, as it is clear that the government wants the tiresome business brought to an end swiftly.
It needs more controversy like a hole in the head at the moment. Several ministers – including the heavyweight justice minister, Ken Clarke – have learned that it can be quite ruthless about slapping down people who cause it problems.
Professor Rylance – who was not elected, is not a political heavyweight and was not even appointed by the Conservative government -- has little reason to expect political cover for decisions which are causing embarrassment, and which increasingly look like little more than a collective reluctance to lose face. Indeed, there is a growing risk the AHRC will end up causing the very damage it was trying to avoid.
-- Iain Pears
note: Simon Jarvis, Professor of Poetry at Cambridge, this evening wrote an open letter calling on Rick Rylance to resign. He said Professor Rylance was an "inappropriate person" to be head of the AHRC because of his conduct over the Big Society business, and that, if the references were not removed, then resignation would represent his "only legitimate course of action."
note 2: 23. June: 42 academic members of the peer review panel did say that they would resign from their positions on Monday if the AHRC did not change its mind. They will join two who have already done so. The idea is, I believe, that if this produces no result, then another group will resign, and so on.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Friday, 17 June 2011
Private Virtues?
There has been a great deal of fuss in England over the past couple of weeks about proposals by the philosopher A.C. Grayling to set up a private college, the New College for the Humanities, to teach fee paying students and, he maintains, defend the humanities in an age when they are under attack from governments obsessed by economic growth.
The disdain subsequently heaped on the heads of those who originated the scheme has been remarkable. Terry Eagleton, a literary critic and erstwhile Marxist theorist, described the plan as odious. A large portion of academics from Birkbeck college, Grayling’s own institution, wrote to denounce it. The head of Royal Holloway College put out a statement of disapproval about the courses, the head of New College, Oxford, put out another disapproving of the name. A meeting to discuss the idea was disrupted by a miniature riot, complete with smoke-bombs. Arguments in favour have appeared in the Financial Times and from the (conservative) Mayor of London; arguments against primarily in the Guardian.
The locations indicate the political split of the argument: so far it has been along almost classical left/right lines. Grayling (who rather regards himself as a pinko) was clearly taken aback by the response, but then took to the comments pages as well to mount a defence.
His point about the need to protect the humanities, for academics to get back to their knitting and pay attention to students has some considerable merit, of course, although he is scarcely the first to make it.
The humanities have indeed been targetted as economically unproductive; the vital freedoms to research have been undermined; government policy is to force academics into devoting more time to research because of the funding structure, then to criticise them when they do so. Pressure (real and implicit) has been put on research councils to divert money into government approved projects. And the new, complex fee structure based on loans is to be accompanied by a staggering new level of regulation which will extinguish most of the remaining autonomy that universities possess.
There is thus a case to be made that the biggest danger now to academic freedom, and the continued surivival of the humanities, is the government itself, which has switched in the past 30 years from being the acknowledged guardian of intellectual freedom to its greatest and most powerful enemy. Unless the humanities – or a section of them – break the stranglehold somehow, then the prospects will be bleak indeed. Some form of autonomous status does, at least, need to be thought about as a component of any solution -- although universities, of course, are already supposedly private institutions.
So far so good; or at least defensible. Up to this point, Professor Grayling scarcely deserves the intensity of the assault which has greeted his actions. Nonetheless, there are deep flaws in the idea behind NCH, and these seriously compromise the validity of the whole scheme.
From a perfectly reasonable starting point, the arguments rapidly become less appealing. In his Independent article, for example, definitions seem a little loose. Professor Grayling also insists that his critics argue to his strengths, rather than their own, which is rather disingenuous of him. It is only a legitimate plea if he, in turn, is prepared to argue on his critics’ strong ground as well, and this he does not do.
To bolster the case for the new college, two main comparisons have been deployed; one is the example of private American universities, the other Oxford and Cambridge. Both have their problems.
Nobody doubts, of course, the impressive nature of the American private universities. The big seven have been staggeringly successful, and the many private liberal arts colleges also have an exceptionally high reputation. Were NCH to emulate them it could make a significant contribution – although the vast cost, the continued social exclusivity and the consequently unhealthy concentration of resources into a few places (more even than the Oxbridge/the rest divide here) would be hard for the more collectivist British ever to accept.
But NCH is not going to be another Amherst or Williams – even geographically, as a metropolitan bias is likely to impose crippling overheads before it is even off the ground. Most of the American liberal arts colleges are buried deep in the country for a reason: it is cheaper there. NCH will be competing for space in some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Financially, a small market town in the north of England would have been more sensible – although less chic.
Nor will NCH provide an intellectual community, its own facilities or even its own degree course: it will be teaching bits of the London University external degree syllabus like any tutorial college. Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr do not, I think, download their curricula from the internet, nor do their students pop off to the local state university if they want something to eat.
Rather than being a high-end liberal arts college, NCH as currently set up is a bare-bones profit-making company, and in this sector the record of equivalent organisations in the U.S. has been both dismal and, recently, mired in controversy. NCH has shareholders, investors and all the rest of it, and I know of no example anywhere or at any time when such an organisation has achieved anything of note. Obscuring the distinction between non-profit and for-profit in the general term “private” is not helpful.
Equally, the college has been decidedly vague over what the "profit" bit actually means: is it a merely legal convenience, or are they seriously expecting to extract revenue? The lack of precision here leaves the entire venture open to suspicion as to the ultimate motives. Indeed, in his article in the Guardian, and another in the Independent, Professor Grayling never even mentions the word "profit," let alone deals with the very real issues aroused by a profit-seeking educational company.
The second comparison – to Oxford and Cambridge – is also dubious. This is not entirely Professor Grayling’s fault; he at no time suggested that he was going to try and rival the two universities; that was the gloss put in it by the newspapers. Nonetheless, he did rather bring it on himself by saying the NCH would emulate the experience of the students with the one-to-one tutorial which is the jewel in the crown of the Oxbridge system.
I am doubtful about this aim, not because it is unworthy, but because I think that it misses the entire point about the tutorial system and why it is both so successful -- and so difficult to reproduce anywhere else.
The tutorial system is both expensive and time-consuming. Fellows of Oxford colleges typically teach 12 to 15 hours a week, and in addition give lectures and seminars, so that there is a basic load of around 20 hours teaching, plus marking plus setting exams. They have no secretaries and so do much of the administrative work themselves, and matching up teachers and students individually can take large amounts of time.
On top of that they spend much time in meetings of both college and whatever faculty they belong to, take their turn at college offices (Dean, finance, admissions and so on) and, finally, produce research to satisfy government requirements.
This is an unusually heavy load, and is not significantly better paid than jobs anywhere else in the Higher education sector. It is maintained primarily because of a sense of ownership: fellows are members of the governing body of the college, and are the trustees of their organisation. Even heads of house have very little power in comparison. The decision to work harder than they need is theirs alone, despite the best efforts of government and university to take that power away.
The point is that only an extraordinarily powerful collective spirit can maintain a system which is wearisome and frequently subject to outside attack, and it is this which is likely to be absent from the New College of the Humanities. How could it be otherwise? The grand figures who are the shareholders will not, it appears, be getting down and dirty with undergraduates day after day. The teaching staff equally will have no sense of ownership or control – because they will have neither.
Even junior research fellows in many Oxford colleges are on the governing body with an equal vote to everyone else. Will NCH emulate this egalitarian practice? If it does not, any comparison to the "Oxbridge experience" will be ephemeral window-dressing, and although the documentation is so far hazy, it appears that all effective power will in fact be concentrated into the hands of founders and investors, with little going to the people doing the work.
Professor Grayling suggests that his college will, in the long term, be able to sustain a financially (though not educationally) inefficient teaching system in a structure designed to maximise profit, and also be able to attract teaching staff who will be simultaneously high quality and mere employees.
It may be that some ingredient has not yet been mentioned, but as it stands I do not see how this can work, especially in an organisation with unnecessarily high fixed costs and no endowment. Tutorials are sustained by the underlying structure of the colleges: it will be exceptionally difficult to graft them onto an entirely different format.
This points to a further problem underlying both the outraged response to the proposed college and the bemused failure to understand that response. It was presented, from the start, as a celebrity venture: rather like a fantasy football team, heavy emphasis was placed on the high-profile figures involved. The first thing a visitor to the website sees is a large photograph of Professor Grayling; click a link, and there is another one...
This was a terrible mistake. The English have a profound distrust of such people – celebrity academics, I fear, have not the slightest idea how much they are disliked almost on principle. Much of the new professoriate is based in the U.S., which is even worse, and collectively made the error of assuming the venture would be well-received because of their participation. In fact, it was the main reason for the violence of the reaction.
This may be a national failing, but not taking it into account was very foolish: on its own it guaranteed that the new venture would be perceived as an initiative by a bunch of grandees dismissive of their erstwhile colleagues and ready to profit from their misfortune.
Subsequent reports that some of the partners would only be jetting over from the East Coast to give a couple of lectures every year did not help either: paying £18,000 to be taught in tutorials by the likes of Niall Ferguson is one thing; paying that amount of money to see him a couple of times at the far end of a lecture theatre when you can watch him on the telly for nothing is another.
The founding fathers of NCH, in fact, lack the collective spirit which a venture like this must have if it is to succeed in the long term. Many of them were, at one time, fellows of Oxbridge colleges; nearly all left, often enough because they were not suited to the (very real) constraints on their own liberty that being a tutorial fellow involves.
Equally, they are, for the most part, old men – only Ferguson is under 50, most are over 60, and one is 80. Three decades of feminism has resulted in one woman being involved. There is nothing wrong with the wisdom of age, of course -- indeed, I find it more compelling with every year that passes -- but I doubt they will surprise their students with new ideas. And it does pose the problem of what happens next.
Even if founded with the most honourable intentions, what about their successors? How is that transition to be made? If a shareholder wishes to sell up, what is to stop the institution falling into the hands of people who are seriously keen on the idea of maximising profit? Members of the governing body of an Oxford college are not there, after all, because they buy their seat, and do not expect a return on any investment.
Good will and intentions are rarely, in the long term, a match for money, and he who controls the money, controls the organisation. The idea that academic freedom can be maintained without an overwhelmingly powerful mechanism to limit the influence of outsiders is a naive one – as, indeed, the fate of public universities has demonstrated in the past 30 years.
A simple point illustrates this: several of the leading figures are evangelical atheists, with a highly contemptuous view of religion. How will NCH teach history, which cannot be understood without an extremely sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon? What place, and what guarantees, will there be for any young, untenured, historian with a more nuanced view?
The professoriate presents, in any case, an unusual view of the humanities: a quarter of them are scientists, but there is no-one who has much interest in anything other than the Anglo-Saxon world. There will be a compulsary course on scientific awareness, including evolutionary biology, but, it seems, no art, no languages, only a superficial glance at the classics and ancient history and no literature except for English. Nor, of course, is there to be even an optional module in understanding religion.
If the cultures of France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain scarcely exist, the rest of the world is entirely absent. Of the three historians on the board, two write only about England, one writes predominantly on England. The subject convenor is also an English historian.
It may be that a system of checks and balances has been concocted and its profile will become less parochial as it evolves. But it would have been a good idea to highlight this from the beginning, rather than giving the impression that the students would be primarily taught by a bunch of labourers controlled by absentee landlords.
A venture set up by a younger generation of academics, with Grayling et. al discreetly in the background acting as godfathers, might have received a warmer reception, and might have been demonstrably stable institutionally. But it is not a characteristic of many of the founders to shun the limelight.
And that, perhaps, is the final, and greatest, problem with the new venture. Professor Grayling is acting because he considers the battle within the national university system to be over. But for many in that system it has only just started, after a long and shameful delay.
It was the duty of his generation to fight that battle, but it did not. Had serious opposition been mounted 10 or 20 years back then there would have been a very much better chance of success.
But collectively, his generation let it happen, and fell back instead on gaming the system. A few took the opportunity to get as much celebrity as academics can in a culture which cares little for scholarship.
Such people should not now be delivering lectures about saving the humanities: they had their chance to do so, and they blew it. It is time they stood aside. A little more activity when they were in their prime and the humanities might not have needed saving; a little more humility now and the reception given to their proposal could have been radically more favourable.
Indeed, their response is still that of their generation: a world weary belief that nothing, really, can be done. Government policy can never be changed. No effective argument to defend the humanities can be made, and the only thing to be done is to cocoon them in a setting where no defence is needed. You have to adapt to power, not challenge it, for there really is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher said all along.
It is a fatalistic, and gloomy outlook. And the greatest problem with NCH is that it is a monument to that belief.
-- Iain Pears
Note: it is a pity that the NCH website has already adopted the tendency of businesses to report only good news about themselves. "NCH in the news" http://www.nchum.org/who-we-are/nch-in-the-news does have a somewhat selective account of its media representation -- despite the widespread criticism, not a single link implying any negative reaction has been put up. This is not the best way of establishing your credentials as the defender of open debate.
23rd June: Credit where credit is due; the website now has a much fuller list of news comment, and includes a few of the unfavourable ones.
29th July -- no; they're gone again. Now only neutral or positive comments (or complaints by Professor Grayling at his ill-treatment) appear on the web page.
The disdain subsequently heaped on the heads of those who originated the scheme has been remarkable. Terry Eagleton, a literary critic and erstwhile Marxist theorist, described the plan as odious. A large portion of academics from Birkbeck college, Grayling’s own institution, wrote to denounce it. The head of Royal Holloway College put out a statement of disapproval about the courses, the head of New College, Oxford, put out another disapproving of the name. A meeting to discuss the idea was disrupted by a miniature riot, complete with smoke-bombs. Arguments in favour have appeared in the Financial Times and from the (conservative) Mayor of London; arguments against primarily in the Guardian.
The locations indicate the political split of the argument: so far it has been along almost classical left/right lines. Grayling (who rather regards himself as a pinko) was clearly taken aback by the response, but then took to the comments pages as well to mount a defence.
His point about the need to protect the humanities, for academics to get back to their knitting and pay attention to students has some considerable merit, of course, although he is scarcely the first to make it.
The humanities have indeed been targetted as economically unproductive; the vital freedoms to research have been undermined; government policy is to force academics into devoting more time to research because of the funding structure, then to criticise them when they do so. Pressure (real and implicit) has been put on research councils to divert money into government approved projects. And the new, complex fee structure based on loans is to be accompanied by a staggering new level of regulation which will extinguish most of the remaining autonomy that universities possess.
There is thus a case to be made that the biggest danger now to academic freedom, and the continued surivival of the humanities, is the government itself, which has switched in the past 30 years from being the acknowledged guardian of intellectual freedom to its greatest and most powerful enemy. Unless the humanities – or a section of them – break the stranglehold somehow, then the prospects will be bleak indeed. Some form of autonomous status does, at least, need to be thought about as a component of any solution -- although universities, of course, are already supposedly private institutions.
So far so good; or at least defensible. Up to this point, Professor Grayling scarcely deserves the intensity of the assault which has greeted his actions. Nonetheless, there are deep flaws in the idea behind NCH, and these seriously compromise the validity of the whole scheme.
From a perfectly reasonable starting point, the arguments rapidly become less appealing. In his Independent article, for example, definitions seem a little loose. Professor Grayling also insists that his critics argue to his strengths, rather than their own, which is rather disingenuous of him. It is only a legitimate plea if he, in turn, is prepared to argue on his critics’ strong ground as well, and this he does not do.
To bolster the case for the new college, two main comparisons have been deployed; one is the example of private American universities, the other Oxford and Cambridge. Both have their problems.
Nobody doubts, of course, the impressive nature of the American private universities. The big seven have been staggeringly successful, and the many private liberal arts colleges also have an exceptionally high reputation. Were NCH to emulate them it could make a significant contribution – although the vast cost, the continued social exclusivity and the consequently unhealthy concentration of resources into a few places (more even than the Oxbridge/the rest divide here) would be hard for the more collectivist British ever to accept.
But NCH is not going to be another Amherst or Williams – even geographically, as a metropolitan bias is likely to impose crippling overheads before it is even off the ground. Most of the American liberal arts colleges are buried deep in the country for a reason: it is cheaper there. NCH will be competing for space in some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Financially, a small market town in the north of England would have been more sensible – although less chic.
Nor will NCH provide an intellectual community, its own facilities or even its own degree course: it will be teaching bits of the London University external degree syllabus like any tutorial college. Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr do not, I think, download their curricula from the internet, nor do their students pop off to the local state university if they want something to eat.
Rather than being a high-end liberal arts college, NCH as currently set up is a bare-bones profit-making company, and in this sector the record of equivalent organisations in the U.S. has been both dismal and, recently, mired in controversy. NCH has shareholders, investors and all the rest of it, and I know of no example anywhere or at any time when such an organisation has achieved anything of note. Obscuring the distinction between non-profit and for-profit in the general term “private” is not helpful.
Equally, the college has been decidedly vague over what the "profit" bit actually means: is it a merely legal convenience, or are they seriously expecting to extract revenue? The lack of precision here leaves the entire venture open to suspicion as to the ultimate motives. Indeed, in his article in the Guardian, and another in the Independent, Professor Grayling never even mentions the word "profit," let alone deals with the very real issues aroused by a profit-seeking educational company.
The second comparison – to Oxford and Cambridge – is also dubious. This is not entirely Professor Grayling’s fault; he at no time suggested that he was going to try and rival the two universities; that was the gloss put in it by the newspapers. Nonetheless, he did rather bring it on himself by saying the NCH would emulate the experience of the students with the one-to-one tutorial which is the jewel in the crown of the Oxbridge system.
I am doubtful about this aim, not because it is unworthy, but because I think that it misses the entire point about the tutorial system and why it is both so successful -- and so difficult to reproduce anywhere else.
The tutorial system is both expensive and time-consuming. Fellows of Oxford colleges typically teach 12 to 15 hours a week, and in addition give lectures and seminars, so that there is a basic load of around 20 hours teaching, plus marking plus setting exams. They have no secretaries and so do much of the administrative work themselves, and matching up teachers and students individually can take large amounts of time.
On top of that they spend much time in meetings of both college and whatever faculty they belong to, take their turn at college offices (Dean, finance, admissions and so on) and, finally, produce research to satisfy government requirements.
This is an unusually heavy load, and is not significantly better paid than jobs anywhere else in the Higher education sector. It is maintained primarily because of a sense of ownership: fellows are members of the governing body of the college, and are the trustees of their organisation. Even heads of house have very little power in comparison. The decision to work harder than they need is theirs alone, despite the best efforts of government and university to take that power away.
The point is that only an extraordinarily powerful collective spirit can maintain a system which is wearisome and frequently subject to outside attack, and it is this which is likely to be absent from the New College of the Humanities. How could it be otherwise? The grand figures who are the shareholders will not, it appears, be getting down and dirty with undergraduates day after day. The teaching staff equally will have no sense of ownership or control – because they will have neither.
Even junior research fellows in many Oxford colleges are on the governing body with an equal vote to everyone else. Will NCH emulate this egalitarian practice? If it does not, any comparison to the "Oxbridge experience" will be ephemeral window-dressing, and although the documentation is so far hazy, it appears that all effective power will in fact be concentrated into the hands of founders and investors, with little going to the people doing the work.
Professor Grayling suggests that his college will, in the long term, be able to sustain a financially (though not educationally) inefficient teaching system in a structure designed to maximise profit, and also be able to attract teaching staff who will be simultaneously high quality and mere employees.
It may be that some ingredient has not yet been mentioned, but as it stands I do not see how this can work, especially in an organisation with unnecessarily high fixed costs and no endowment. Tutorials are sustained by the underlying structure of the colleges: it will be exceptionally difficult to graft them onto an entirely different format.
This points to a further problem underlying both the outraged response to the proposed college and the bemused failure to understand that response. It was presented, from the start, as a celebrity venture: rather like a fantasy football team, heavy emphasis was placed on the high-profile figures involved. The first thing a visitor to the website sees is a large photograph of Professor Grayling; click a link, and there is another one...
This was a terrible mistake. The English have a profound distrust of such people – celebrity academics, I fear, have not the slightest idea how much they are disliked almost on principle. Much of the new professoriate is based in the U.S., which is even worse, and collectively made the error of assuming the venture would be well-received because of their participation. In fact, it was the main reason for the violence of the reaction.
This may be a national failing, but not taking it into account was very foolish: on its own it guaranteed that the new venture would be perceived as an initiative by a bunch of grandees dismissive of their erstwhile colleagues and ready to profit from their misfortune.
Subsequent reports that some of the partners would only be jetting over from the East Coast to give a couple of lectures every year did not help either: paying £18,000 to be taught in tutorials by the likes of Niall Ferguson is one thing; paying that amount of money to see him a couple of times at the far end of a lecture theatre when you can watch him on the telly for nothing is another.
The founding fathers of NCH, in fact, lack the collective spirit which a venture like this must have if it is to succeed in the long term. Many of them were, at one time, fellows of Oxbridge colleges; nearly all left, often enough because they were not suited to the (very real) constraints on their own liberty that being a tutorial fellow involves.
Equally, they are, for the most part, old men – only Ferguson is under 50, most are over 60, and one is 80. Three decades of feminism has resulted in one woman being involved. There is nothing wrong with the wisdom of age, of course -- indeed, I find it more compelling with every year that passes -- but I doubt they will surprise their students with new ideas. And it does pose the problem of what happens next.
Even if founded with the most honourable intentions, what about their successors? How is that transition to be made? If a shareholder wishes to sell up, what is to stop the institution falling into the hands of people who are seriously keen on the idea of maximising profit? Members of the governing body of an Oxford college are not there, after all, because they buy their seat, and do not expect a return on any investment.
Good will and intentions are rarely, in the long term, a match for money, and he who controls the money, controls the organisation. The idea that academic freedom can be maintained without an overwhelmingly powerful mechanism to limit the influence of outsiders is a naive one – as, indeed, the fate of public universities has demonstrated in the past 30 years.
A simple point illustrates this: several of the leading figures are evangelical atheists, with a highly contemptuous view of religion. How will NCH teach history, which cannot be understood without an extremely sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon? What place, and what guarantees, will there be for any young, untenured, historian with a more nuanced view?
The professoriate presents, in any case, an unusual view of the humanities: a quarter of them are scientists, but there is no-one who has much interest in anything other than the Anglo-Saxon world. There will be a compulsary course on scientific awareness, including evolutionary biology, but, it seems, no art, no languages, only a superficial glance at the classics and ancient history and no literature except for English. Nor, of course, is there to be even an optional module in understanding religion.
If the cultures of France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain scarcely exist, the rest of the world is entirely absent. Of the three historians on the board, two write only about England, one writes predominantly on England. The subject convenor is also an English historian.
It may be that a system of checks and balances has been concocted and its profile will become less parochial as it evolves. But it would have been a good idea to highlight this from the beginning, rather than giving the impression that the students would be primarily taught by a bunch of labourers controlled by absentee landlords.
A venture set up by a younger generation of academics, with Grayling et. al discreetly in the background acting as godfathers, might have received a warmer reception, and might have been demonstrably stable institutionally. But it is not a characteristic of many of the founders to shun the limelight.
And that, perhaps, is the final, and greatest, problem with the new venture. Professor Grayling is acting because he considers the battle within the national university system to be over. But for many in that system it has only just started, after a long and shameful delay.
It was the duty of his generation to fight that battle, but it did not. Had serious opposition been mounted 10 or 20 years back then there would have been a very much better chance of success.
But collectively, his generation let it happen, and fell back instead on gaming the system. A few took the opportunity to get as much celebrity as academics can in a culture which cares little for scholarship.
Such people should not now be delivering lectures about saving the humanities: they had their chance to do so, and they blew it. It is time they stood aside. A little more activity when they were in their prime and the humanities might not have needed saving; a little more humility now and the reception given to their proposal could have been radically more favourable.
Indeed, their response is still that of their generation: a world weary belief that nothing, really, can be done. Government policy can never be changed. No effective argument to defend the humanities can be made, and the only thing to be done is to cocoon them in a setting where no defence is needed. You have to adapt to power, not challenge it, for there really is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher said all along.
It is a fatalistic, and gloomy outlook. And the greatest problem with NCH is that it is a monument to that belief.
-- Iain Pears
Note: it is a pity that the NCH website has already adopted the tendency of businesses to report only good news about themselves. "NCH in the news" http://www.nchum.org/who-we-are/nch-in-the-news does have a somewhat selective account of its media representation -- despite the widespread criticism, not a single link implying any negative reaction has been put up. This is not the best way of establishing your credentials as the defender of open debate.
23rd June: Credit where credit is due; the website now has a much fuller list of news comment, and includes a few of the unfavourable ones.
29th July -- no; they're gone again. Now only neutral or positive comments (or complaints by Professor Grayling at his ill-treatment) appear on the web page.
Friday, 1 April 2011
Willetts Speaks; so does the AHRC
David Willetts, Minister in charge of Britain’s universities, commented on the AHRC affair in a written answer to the House of Commons.
The Labour MP Tristram Hunt had also tabled a question, but this was not called. Willetts instead answered a friendly lob from his own side, a gentle question posed by Julian Huppert, a Liberal Democrat member of the coalition who has been tweeting recently to publicise the AHRC’s defence.
Huppert’s question was an invitation for Willetts to ignore the substantial issue, and Willetts duly accepted. He reiterated the AHRC’s response that it had not been pressured by the government to include the “Big Society agenda” as a research priority. Apart from the Observer, however, no-one has ever said it had been. He did not deal with the question of whether it was appropriate for a research council to align itself so closely to party doctrine; nor did he mention the very real pressure that was put on the British Academy to abandon its highly effective small research grants.
Separately, the AHRC itself has decided to go for the same tactic. Research Fortnight quotes an email exchange with the AHRC head, Rick Rylance, saying it will not consider removing the "Big Society" from its delivery plan. Like Mr Willetts, he concentrated on the "confusion" caused by the Observer article which, he implied, was the only reason there had been protests.
He also said that the "Big Society was not a research priority."
It is hard to see how this statement can be made. The BIS booklet (Allocation of Science and Research funding) specifically states "AHRC will direct a significant part of its funding into six strategic areas:... communities and big society..."
It continues: "AHRC will systematically address issues relating to social cohesion, community engagement and cultural renewal contributing to the "Big Society" initiative."
-- Iain Pears
The links are here:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2011-03-31a.50063.h
http://exquisitelife.researchresearch.com/exquisite_life/miriamfrankel.html
The Labour MP Tristram Hunt had also tabled a question, but this was not called. Willetts instead answered a friendly lob from his own side, a gentle question posed by Julian Huppert, a Liberal Democrat member of the coalition who has been tweeting recently to publicise the AHRC’s defence.
Huppert’s question was an invitation for Willetts to ignore the substantial issue, and Willetts duly accepted. He reiterated the AHRC’s response that it had not been pressured by the government to include the “Big Society agenda” as a research priority. Apart from the Observer, however, no-one has ever said it had been. He did not deal with the question of whether it was appropriate for a research council to align itself so closely to party doctrine; nor did he mention the very real pressure that was put on the British Academy to abandon its highly effective small research grants.
Separately, the AHRC itself has decided to go for the same tactic. Research Fortnight quotes an email exchange with the AHRC head, Rick Rylance, saying it will not consider removing the "Big Society" from its delivery plan. Like Mr Willetts, he concentrated on the "confusion" caused by the Observer article which, he implied, was the only reason there had been protests.
He also said that the "Big Society was not a research priority."
It is hard to see how this statement can be made. The BIS booklet (Allocation of Science and Research funding) specifically states "AHRC will direct a significant part of its funding into six strategic areas:... communities and big society..."
It continues: "AHRC will systematically address issues relating to social cohesion, community engagement and cultural renewal contributing to the "Big Society" initiative."
-- Iain Pears
The links are here:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2011-03-31a.50063.h
http://exquisitelife.researchresearch.com/exquisite_life/miriamfrankel.html
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
More on the AHRC
Protests against the willingness of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s decision to join up to the Government’s Big Society idea in order to safeguard funding are gathering pace.
A petition against the AHRC’s idea of research priorities has received more than 1600 signatures in less than a day, including some of the most senior figures in British Academia. Not only members of the AHRC’s peer review panels – who would have the job of apportioning money according to the Council’s priorities -- but also several Fellows of the British Academy, Fellows of the Royal Society and Professors from many universities have signed.
Such signings indicate considerable disquiet at the AHRC’s policies. The question is, how will it respond? It has three choices. The first, and most likely, is to take up the usual defensive crouch of all embattled institutions: go silent, ignore all protests and wait.
The second option is to put out another obfuscating statement: the AHRC notes the protests but, sadly, feels that all the signatories are misinformed. As it has explained, it did not cave in to government demands...
This option would take the line that the signatories are just too ignorant to know what is going on, and so their opinions can be passed over. Whether it is possible to accuse all these Academicians and Professors of being gullible and get away with it would be an interesting experiment.
The point of such a tactic would be to deflect concern away from the fact that many people feel that voluntarily signing up to an ideologically-inspired government programme is, in many ways, worse than being forced to do so, that there is a difference between active collaboration and passive acquiescence.
The third option is actually to do something: this is the least likely, as it would not only involve the AHRC saying it had a mistake, it would probably result in a lot of awkward conversations with the government. Also it is difficult to see how the head of the AHRC, having at least signed off a defence of the Big Society business, could possibly reverse position and remain in post.
So why are people so upset? Judging by the comments attached to signatures, it is partly because the sight of one of the most important institutions in the Arts and Humanities prostrating itself before power is embarrassing and undignified. The AHRC should at least have put up a show of independence, if only to demonstrate that its councils remembered something about the nature of academic research and what it is supposed to be.
Partly it is because it is acquiescing in academics being seen, and treated, like servants: the government coins the phrase “big society,” but hasn’t got the faintest idea what it is. So the AHRC volunteers to toss a few coppers at academics, and tell them to come up with something that sounds convincing.
Partly it is because relying on the fickle nature of a politician’s attention-span is a dangerous tactic. Most remember perfectly well that Tony Blair got himself all enthused about the “Third Way” when he came into office, then dropped the whole idea after a year or so. How will academics fare if they sign up to “Big Society” research programmes and then find that this government has lost interest, or has found a new slogan?
Not only would their funding be at risk in mid-project, no-one would then be interested in their results. Research done under the aegis of the Big Society will have a shelf life of a year or so – as temporary, disposable and as forgettable as the concept which gives it birth. Academics should not be, and do not consider themselves to be, cut-rate consultants for hire, but this is how the AHRC’s stance appears to cast them.
But most importantly it is because of reputational damage.
There is not much left in Britain that is world class – the car industry, shipbuilding industry, steel and cotton and machine tool industries are all gone. Our Navy will shortly be going into battle with an aircraft carrier, but no aircraft to put on it. Our soldiers have had to buy their own boots. Heathrow is a disgrace, the public transport system is Third World and the banks are bust. Even the House of Commons has been mired in a squalid scandal.
But the universities, and the academics who inhabit them, are world class. A lot of this depends on reputation: British universities, and academics, enjoy a higher reputation than the actual level of funding should warrant. Despite spending much less than other advanced economies, Britain produces a disproportionately large number of universities in the lists of the top 100 higher education institutions – more than the rest of Europe combined. They are highly thought-of, and this sustains their ability to attract the best academics, the best students and external research funding which can then be turned into real achievement.
Reputation is a delicate business, and has been built up over the decades and the centuries. It needs to be nurtured and protected, but has instead taken several hard knocks of late: the unedifying debacle at King’s, London, the Ghaddafi money saga at the LSE are only the most prominent. When reputation is lost it is hard to retrieve, and the antics of the AHRC are another blow. An academic or institution whose research is no longer clearly and unimpeachably objective will be damaged. Remember Caesar's wife.
Jane Austen might have said (had she been an academic or a blogger) that “loss of virtue in a university is irretrievable -- that one false step involves it in endless ruin -- that its reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful, -- and that it cannot be too much guarded in its behaviour…”
The AHRC has not been guarded at all in its ill-considered willingness to court political favour. It has, instead, been behaving towards the universities with all the cavalier recklessness of Mr. Wickham to one of the more vulnerable members of the Bennet family.
And that is why people are signing petitions.
-- Iain Pears
A petition against the AHRC’s idea of research priorities has received more than 1600 signatures in less than a day, including some of the most senior figures in British Academia. Not only members of the AHRC’s peer review panels – who would have the job of apportioning money according to the Council’s priorities -- but also several Fellows of the British Academy, Fellows of the Royal Society and Professors from many universities have signed.
Such signings indicate considerable disquiet at the AHRC’s policies. The question is, how will it respond? It has three choices. The first, and most likely, is to take up the usual defensive crouch of all embattled institutions: go silent, ignore all protests and wait.
The second option is to put out another obfuscating statement: the AHRC notes the protests but, sadly, feels that all the signatories are misinformed. As it has explained, it did not cave in to government demands...
This option would take the line that the signatories are just too ignorant to know what is going on, and so their opinions can be passed over. Whether it is possible to accuse all these Academicians and Professors of being gullible and get away with it would be an interesting experiment.
The point of such a tactic would be to deflect concern away from the fact that many people feel that voluntarily signing up to an ideologically-inspired government programme is, in many ways, worse than being forced to do so, that there is a difference between active collaboration and passive acquiescence.
The third option is actually to do something: this is the least likely, as it would not only involve the AHRC saying it had a mistake, it would probably result in a lot of awkward conversations with the government. Also it is difficult to see how the head of the AHRC, having at least signed off a defence of the Big Society business, could possibly reverse position and remain in post.
So why are people so upset? Judging by the comments attached to signatures, it is partly because the sight of one of the most important institutions in the Arts and Humanities prostrating itself before power is embarrassing and undignified. The AHRC should at least have put up a show of independence, if only to demonstrate that its councils remembered something about the nature of academic research and what it is supposed to be.
Partly it is because it is acquiescing in academics being seen, and treated, like servants: the government coins the phrase “big society,” but hasn’t got the faintest idea what it is. So the AHRC volunteers to toss a few coppers at academics, and tell them to come up with something that sounds convincing.
Partly it is because relying on the fickle nature of a politician’s attention-span is a dangerous tactic. Most remember perfectly well that Tony Blair got himself all enthused about the “Third Way” when he came into office, then dropped the whole idea after a year or so. How will academics fare if they sign up to “Big Society” research programmes and then find that this government has lost interest, or has found a new slogan?
Not only would their funding be at risk in mid-project, no-one would then be interested in their results. Research done under the aegis of the Big Society will have a shelf life of a year or so – as temporary, disposable and as forgettable as the concept which gives it birth. Academics should not be, and do not consider themselves to be, cut-rate consultants for hire, but this is how the AHRC’s stance appears to cast them.
But most importantly it is because of reputational damage.
There is not much left in Britain that is world class – the car industry, shipbuilding industry, steel and cotton and machine tool industries are all gone. Our Navy will shortly be going into battle with an aircraft carrier, but no aircraft to put on it. Our soldiers have had to buy their own boots. Heathrow is a disgrace, the public transport system is Third World and the banks are bust. Even the House of Commons has been mired in a squalid scandal.
But the universities, and the academics who inhabit them, are world class. A lot of this depends on reputation: British universities, and academics, enjoy a higher reputation than the actual level of funding should warrant. Despite spending much less than other advanced economies, Britain produces a disproportionately large number of universities in the lists of the top 100 higher education institutions – more than the rest of Europe combined. They are highly thought-of, and this sustains their ability to attract the best academics, the best students and external research funding which can then be turned into real achievement.
Reputation is a delicate business, and has been built up over the decades and the centuries. It needs to be nurtured and protected, but has instead taken several hard knocks of late: the unedifying debacle at King’s, London, the Ghaddafi money saga at the LSE are only the most prominent. When reputation is lost it is hard to retrieve, and the antics of the AHRC are another blow. An academic or institution whose research is no longer clearly and unimpeachably objective will be damaged. Remember Caesar's wife.
Jane Austen might have said (had she been an academic or a blogger) that “loss of virtue in a university is irretrievable -- that one false step involves it in endless ruin -- that its reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful, -- and that it cannot be too much guarded in its behaviour…”
The AHRC has not been guarded at all in its ill-considered willingness to court political favour. It has, instead, been behaving towards the universities with all the cavalier recklessness of Mr. Wickham to one of the more vulnerable members of the Bennet family.
And that is why people are signing petitions.
-- Iain Pears
Monday, 28 March 2011
The AHRC, The Observer, and Mr. Haldane’s Principle.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) today issued what it terms an important statement about an article that appeared in the Observer newspaper on 27th March. (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News/Latest/Pages/Observerarticle.aspx)
The statement is unusual, in that it is rare for anybody connected to Higher Education in Britain to respond in any way to public criticism. In this case it issued a vehement denial of suggestions that it is falling into line with a politicisation of research in the U.K.
As I have also written of similar things, most recently in the London Review of Books, and the next Observer doesn’t come out for another week, I thought it would be a good idea to look at this response. The main difference between the Observer article and my own is that, while I note the AHRC directing funding into the “Big Society,” I do not claim this was the result of a direct government order. Nonetheless, the Observer's proposition is defensible: even though the AHRC may have volunteered to adopt the Big Society as one of its own in negotiations, by the time the commitment was put in the BIS directive it had indeed become something of a contractual obligation on which funding depended.
(One detail which should be mentioned in passing is, yet again, the habitual mangling of language which seems to be compulsary amongst educational administrators these days. The statement does not, as it says, "refute" the allegations made in the Observer: to refute is to convincingly disprove, and the AHRC offers no evidence to make its case. It merely rejects the allegations, which is a different matter.)
The first thing to note is that the AHRC attacks only one of the points made in the Observer article, and passes in silence over everything else. It suggests that, by simple good fortune, the government’s discovery of the Big Society merely happened to coincide with its own interests, which are of longer standing.
Left entirely untouched is the fact that the AHRC is increasingly becoming the executive agency of government whim, and that even the poor sums given to the Humanities now have to be harnessed to central priorities. There is not the slightest suggestion in anything that the AHRC has ever said to suggest that it might consider this to be detrimental to independent, internationally-esteemed research: indeed, the idea never seems to have occurred to it.
The response continues to say that “If academic peer reviewers do not feel the research is excellent, and of sufficient importance and value for money, it does not get funded.“ The implication of this is that the Arts and Humanities Research board, without any prompting, decided off its own bat to “focus the main thrust of its impact strategy on the creative economy,“ as the document on its funding settlement states. This decision means, as it also says, moving funding away from what is normally considered to be arts and humanities into “new media, computer games...fashion...and television.”
These protestations are unconvincing. The AHRC funding document refers to “the Big Society” in a way which can only mean government ideology, as no-one but the government has ever used the term to any great extent. Moreover, it describes it as one of the “highest priorities in the arts and humanities.” We are asked to believe that its reaching this conclusion, and the arrival of the new government, were entirely coincidental events.
The funding document – which originates in the Ministry of Business, not the AHRC -- then goes back in the next paragraph to refer specifically to the task of “contributing to the ‘Big Society initiative’” in a way which can only mean fitting in with party political concerns.
Does the AHRC really think that such an initiative would remain one of the highest priorities in the Arts and Humanities even if the Labour party came back into power? How long after Ed Miliband became Prime Minister does it think it would take for this long-standing interest to be quietly shelved or rebranded? Would the AHRC defy a Labour Business Minister and insist on continuing with Research into the "Big Society?" The question merely has to be posed; no answer is really necessary.
For all that, there does seem to have been a mistake in the Observer article, which the statement exploits for the purpose of shading over the other points it contains. It does confuse the AHRC with other organisations that did indeed come under considerable pressure to toe the government line.
In the case of the AHRC, little pressure was necessary: its leadership was all too ready to indulge in sycophantic pandering. Whether that makes the matter any better is for others to decide. It should be noted that the ESRC – whose work in the Social Sciences is a much more obvious place to locate research into the “Big Society” – managed to get its funding without being so ostentatiously obliging. Its settlement refers to “A Vibrant and Fair Society,” without feeling any need to signal its subservience in quite such a conspicious manner.
-- Iain Pears
The AHRC's "Delivery Plan 2011-15" (see its website) contains the following statements:
...Connected Communities will enable the AHRC to contribute to the government’s initiatives on localism and the ‘Big Society"...
...recent speeches on the ‘Big Society’ have made use of key behavioural or evaluative concepts that can be difficult to pin down...
... We will focus on issues such as the ‘Big Society’...(and) national security (with the Security Services)...
... The contribution of AHRC plans to the ‘Big Society’ agenda are described in section 2...
...In line with the Government’s ‘Big Society’ agenda....the AHRC will continue to support...
*********************
NOTE: There is now an on-line petition to remove "the Big Society" from the AHRC's priorities. If you wish to sign, the web address is here:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/thebigsociety/signatures
*********************
NOTE: The Times Higher Education Supplement has reported that Bob Brecher, Professor of Ethics at the University of Brighton, has resigned from his position on the AHRC's Peer Review College in protest at what he termed the AHRC's "collaboration" with the Government.
The statement is unusual, in that it is rare for anybody connected to Higher Education in Britain to respond in any way to public criticism. In this case it issued a vehement denial of suggestions that it is falling into line with a politicisation of research in the U.K.
As I have also written of similar things, most recently in the London Review of Books, and the next Observer doesn’t come out for another week, I thought it would be a good idea to look at this response. The main difference between the Observer article and my own is that, while I note the AHRC directing funding into the “Big Society,” I do not claim this was the result of a direct government order. Nonetheless, the Observer's proposition is defensible: even though the AHRC may have volunteered to adopt the Big Society as one of its own in negotiations, by the time the commitment was put in the BIS directive it had indeed become something of a contractual obligation on which funding depended.
(One detail which should be mentioned in passing is, yet again, the habitual mangling of language which seems to be compulsary amongst educational administrators these days. The statement does not, as it says, "refute" the allegations made in the Observer: to refute is to convincingly disprove, and the AHRC offers no evidence to make its case. It merely rejects the allegations, which is a different matter.)
The first thing to note is that the AHRC attacks only one of the points made in the Observer article, and passes in silence over everything else. It suggests that, by simple good fortune, the government’s discovery of the Big Society merely happened to coincide with its own interests, which are of longer standing.
Left entirely untouched is the fact that the AHRC is increasingly becoming the executive agency of government whim, and that even the poor sums given to the Humanities now have to be harnessed to central priorities. There is not the slightest suggestion in anything that the AHRC has ever said to suggest that it might consider this to be detrimental to independent, internationally-esteemed research: indeed, the idea never seems to have occurred to it.
The response continues to say that “If academic peer reviewers do not feel the research is excellent, and of sufficient importance and value for money, it does not get funded.“ The implication of this is that the Arts and Humanities Research board, without any prompting, decided off its own bat to “focus the main thrust of its impact strategy on the creative economy,“ as the document on its funding settlement states. This decision means, as it also says, moving funding away from what is normally considered to be arts and humanities into “new media, computer games...fashion...and television.”
These protestations are unconvincing. The AHRC funding document refers to “the Big Society” in a way which can only mean government ideology, as no-one but the government has ever used the term to any great extent. Moreover, it describes it as one of the “highest priorities in the arts and humanities.” We are asked to believe that its reaching this conclusion, and the arrival of the new government, were entirely coincidental events.
The funding document – which originates in the Ministry of Business, not the AHRC -- then goes back in the next paragraph to refer specifically to the task of “contributing to the ‘Big Society initiative’” in a way which can only mean fitting in with party political concerns.
Does the AHRC really think that such an initiative would remain one of the highest priorities in the Arts and Humanities even if the Labour party came back into power? How long after Ed Miliband became Prime Minister does it think it would take for this long-standing interest to be quietly shelved or rebranded? Would the AHRC defy a Labour Business Minister and insist on continuing with Research into the "Big Society?" The question merely has to be posed; no answer is really necessary.
For all that, there does seem to have been a mistake in the Observer article, which the statement exploits for the purpose of shading over the other points it contains. It does confuse the AHRC with other organisations that did indeed come under considerable pressure to toe the government line.
In the case of the AHRC, little pressure was necessary: its leadership was all too ready to indulge in sycophantic pandering. Whether that makes the matter any better is for others to decide. It should be noted that the ESRC – whose work in the Social Sciences is a much more obvious place to locate research into the “Big Society” – managed to get its funding without being so ostentatiously obliging. Its settlement refers to “A Vibrant and Fair Society,” without feeling any need to signal its subservience in quite such a conspicious manner.
-- Iain Pears
The AHRC's "Delivery Plan 2011-15" (see its website) contains the following statements:
...Connected Communities will enable the AHRC to contribute to the government’s initiatives on localism and the ‘Big Society"...
...recent speeches on the ‘Big Society’ have made use of key behavioural or evaluative concepts that can be difficult to pin down...
... We will focus on issues such as the ‘Big Society’...(and) national security (with the Security Services)...
... The contribution of AHRC plans to the ‘Big Society’ agenda are described in section 2...
...In line with the Government’s ‘Big Society’ agenda....the AHRC will continue to support...
*********************
NOTE: There is now an on-line petition to remove "the Big Society" from the AHRC's priorities. If you wish to sign, the web address is here:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/thebigsociety/signatures
*********************
NOTE: The Times Higher Education Supplement has reported that Bob Brecher, Professor of Ethics at the University of Brighton, has resigned from his position on the AHRC's Peer Review College in protest at what he termed the AHRC's "collaboration" with the Government.
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
How the Humanities -- a talk given a Birkbeck, November 2011
I feel that in addressing this meeting I am preaching to the converted. I doubt there are many people here who do not believe already that the arts and humanities are worthwhile, and that they deserve their place in British Higher Education. Many other people here have spoken and given their reasons. I would like in my alloted time to speak from the standpoint of someone who spent many years analysing corporations, and a fair amount of time in the last few months looking at universities and their often strange ways. Then I wish to put all of that into the context of what is going on all around at government level. Not Why the humanities then, but how the humanities.
The first point to bear in mind is that there is a certain futility in talking about education when discussing Higher Education policy, as that has long been of only minor importance. Politics and power have, for the last 30 years, been of much greater significance. It was not out of a desire to improve universities but to discipline them that the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s chipped away at tenure and university autonomy. John Major’s decision to double the number of students without funding them in the early 1990’s had more to do with massaging down youth unemployment figures than producing an educated population. The abolition of the binary divide was more concerned with driving down costs and exploiting the opportunity to corporatise the polytechnics than to give university degrees to all. The Lambert report under Labour was primarily occupied with making universities more useful to business. And the creation of the likes of hefce had as much to do with strengthening central control as it had with ensuring that the best research was funded well.
Now universities are to be hit by another tsunami of reform, and all the signs are that it is a worthy successor to past initiatives in the sense that it is ill-conceived, will be badly executed, and has little to do with the question of educating the population. This is perhaps inevitable for a review conceived by Labour as a means of securing more funding for universities without paying for it, modified by the Conservatives to be a means of facilitating cuts, and modified again by the Liberal Democrats to appease their backbenchers. In such a scramble, educational priorities slipped down the rankings, and the question of precisely how English universities are to maintain their remarkably high level of achievement has been largely forgotten. The result seems to be an actual cut in universities’ income instead of an increase, delivered in a complex and inefficient fashion, and laden down with so many conditions that any benefits will be more than offset by new burdens and obligations. One thing seems clear, and that is that although the government might not be willing to pay for the humanities, it will not, as a result, be surrendering any of the power it has over them.
The general incoherence is, this time, on an epic scale. For the last few years, we have been told that our great problem is that we have individually taken on too much debt, so the government is adopting a policy which will make a larger proportion of the population take on higher debts than ever before; this is known as choice. We are told the country’s future depends on a well-educated workforce, and then the government takes measures to reduce the appeal of that education by tripling its cost.
And above all, we are told that market disciplines will be introduced, but the result is to be a system of such tangled complexity that market forces are the very last thing which will apply.
In the grand scheme of things, a overall cut of 10 per cent or so to the total budget might not be so bad. Most companies, after a decade or so of interrupted growth could deal with such a thing relatively easily. Costs invariably can be reduced; it is in the nature of organisations to become a little flabby over time. It is where those cuts fall which is crucial. A well-run company will go after unnecessary overheads first of all. Management structures are simplified, expenses squeezed, all to protect the core activities which are the essential engines of growth and profit when the economy turns.
With the universities, much could be done here. Vince Cable could do more than issue limp begging letters asking vice-chancellors’ nicely if they wouldn’t mind being a little bit more restrained on the pay they give themselves. His department could ban daft schemes which divert funds into Ozymandias-like ventures into the sands of Araby. It could insist that all peripheral activities, like sponsoring rugby teams, building sports centres, acquiring palaces, stop immediately. Universities could do away not only with the fatuous mission statements and glossy strategy documents, but also with the people who write them. They could accept that employing about a thousand people in public relations departments might be a misuse of funds. The government could demand that the central administration budget be cut down drastically and immediately. It has instead been notably silent on the issue.
Not to be too polemical, King’s College London this week launched an appeal for £500 million. If treated as endowment at the usual yields, this would produce about 16 million a year, not even enough to cover the increase in central administration costs since 2002. Whether prospective donors will be told what they will be in effect paying for remains to be seen.
At the same time as revenue will drop, even with the rise of student fees, costs will also be driven up inexorably. Universities are charities, and do not pay tax, but they do pay VAT, and this is going up to 20 per cent next year, enough on its own to blow a hole in the budget. There is talk of a compulsary employers’ levy to make up a deficit in the pension fund, which will also be expensive, and possibly very expensive. Many universities are going to be forced into spending more on fund-raising, but with no change to the tax regime for donations, they will all be competing for the same pot of money, spending more in an expensive beggar-thy-neighbour policy. Nor is sending alumni out into the world laden with debt going to increase their generosity in later years. Equally, costs will be driven up by the business of administering a complex fee structure, and complying with whatever directives come from the new super-quango the government sets up. Best of all, perhaps, it seems as though the government is going to cut the teaching grant before the increased revenue from fees starts flowing, risking a quite unnecessary short term funding crisis that could well doom many courses, and even institutions, that might otherwise be viable.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of British Higher Education policy.
Why is this happening? One reason is that, if you commission a report, the answer you get depends on the question asked, and the person you ask. The question was limited to that of student fees, and so the answer did not touch on the greater structure of university funding, much of which comes from research monies. The remit of the committee was carefully designed so that it did not look at why it was reasonable to stop subsiding students, while continuing with much larger subsidies to businesses by allowing them to get a great deal of research on the cheap. It did not ask whether, if it is fair for students who benefit to pay for their education, it might not be reasonable to ask companies, who benefit from an educated workforce, to pay more as well. It did not deal with the question of why, if bankers can threaten to leave when their finances are threatened, the best and brightest students might not adopt the same reasoning, and go abroad if their education can be had under better circumstances elsewhere. Nor did it deal with the consequences for the much-vaunted “knowledge economy” if these students don’t come back again.
And the question was asked of Lord Browne, whose successor carried the can for the Gulf of Mexico disaster while trying at the same time to strip out “the unacceptably high overhead costs” “arteriosclerosis and bureaucracy” which weighed BP down during the period Browne was in charge of it. Lord Browne was a highly successful businessman, but he came to the task of reviewing fees with predictable ideas, attitudes and responses. Putting a question to a man wedded to “flash and fluff,” as the Economist phrased it, guaranteed that the one thing that would not be part of the answer would be a critique of the hugely expensive bureaucratic structure that has grown up over the past few decades. Indeed, he ended up recommending a system which will require much higher administrative costs.
All this will happen under a programme billed as introducing market forces into higher education. It would have been preferable if it had done so. I am, in general, quite keen on market forces in their proper context, and have a high regard for well-managed companies. But I do not believe that market forces have much of a role in situations where the market has to be artificially created, and is then interfered with before it even starts operating. With markets, it is all or nothing, and in the case of universities under the current arrangements, it is not going to be all, so would be better if it were nothing.
In a completely free market, the humanities would clean up. Faced with a choice between an arts degree costing £8,000 a year, and one in science costing upwards of £30,000 a year, then history and philosophy would suddenly become very popular for everyone except those determined to work as scientists. But it is not to be. The natural cost advantages that the humanities enjoy will be erased by continued subsidy to the sciences, while the natural disavantages of the humanities – their lack of access to research money – will continue unchanged.
Charging for what used to be free is not going to be balanced by an ability to become more flexible. Universities will be exposed to some of the pressures of a market system, but their responses will be limited by government directives. To put it simply, many departments may well close not because there is no demand for places, and not because students would not pay higher fees, but because the government will not let supply and demand meet up in a market driven fashion. This would be fine if it was prepared to pay to make up the difference, but it won’t do that either. It is after all possible that greater access and stability could be achieved by increasing fees still further. Personally I would disapprove strongly, but if a university could charge £15000, and divert a large portion of this into a needs-blind admissions policy in the Harvard manner, this might work for some institutions. But we will never know. Rather, universities are to be forced into an ill-fitting straitjacket designed purely to triangulate the political needs of the governing parties.
The market to be introduced is so rigged that, were it to be implemented in the City, the fraud office would soon enough be fingering the collars of the perpetrators. Every reference to market forces is disingenuous in the extreme. Universities will not compete against each other, but will rather operate as a cartel, or a series of cartels targetting different market segments. The normal market disciplines on managements will not apply, as there is no means left of effectively challenging or criticising their decisions. The choice available to students will be converted solely into what level of debt to incur. Internal costing of departments will remain opaque, random and arbitrary.
One thing that those in the arts must beware of is being bamboozled by arguments that their subjects are non economic, loss-making, sub-critical or whatever term may be in fashion. People in the humanities are not generally very good at reading balance sheets and financial statements, but they really should get into practice. As pieces of creative writing, the average university accounts are marvels. For exercises in the analysis of texts, they offer perfect study material. What they say, what they do not say, what they emphasise, what they hide away in dank little corners on page 23 are wonders of obscurantism. They should be read carefully, not least because of the pleasure that can be derived from sending in Freedom of Information requests to get the information left out.
The most important thing to remember is that however many numbers and statistics are deployed to give an impression of precision and rigour, these are all fiction at departmental level. A decent accountant could make any faculty show a profit or a loss simply by juggling the figures to get the result desired. All the highly complex and sophisticated accounting techniques brought in over the past decade or so are essentially fraudulent, because they are based on entirely subjective assumptions. To take an example, the philosophy department at Middlesex was closed because it made a loss, and this fact was dutifully reported in the newspapers. But it only made a loss because the university creamed off more than 50 percent of its revenue in central charges, and those charges were not only set more or less at random, they were beyond the control of the department to influence. An entirely independent faculty, which could negotiate a fair price for use of rooms and libraries, and which had some control over other outgoings – like a say in the vice-chancellor’s magnificent salary – could easily have managed to show a profit. The sin of Middlesex philosophy was a failure to meet an arbitrary internal benchmark determined by the needs of the administration for funds, not being a financial basket case.
Another thing to note is the extraordinary nature of the loans system being proposed, which is that students will be charged at 3 per cent plus inflation for a very long period of time once they hit a certain level of income. This is sheer profiteering disguised as fairness. Essentially, the government will be requiring individuals to issue 30-year index-linked bonds on their own balance sheets, rather than do it itself. A few sums shows what this might mean. For the government will raise the money to advance the loans on a flat rate basis. It will, in other words, borrow the money at about 2.5 per cent, and lend it out at 6.1 per cent, more if inflation increases. While it will enjoy the benefit of seeing its real debt eroded by inflation, the student will not be permitted the same escape route. If only half the total number of students take out a loan of £7000 every year, then that would amount to a transfer from the state’s balance sheet to those of individuals which stabilises over 30 years at about £110 billion. The government would pay a peak £2.75 billion a year in interest for this, and receive peak income of £6.75 billion back, as wage inflation will ensure within 12 years that most graduates earn over the £41,000 benchmark which triggers the maximum levy, and there seems to be no provision for this to be index-linked.
Even Barclaycard would applaud such audacity, not least because there are measures to guarantee this income stream by imposing financial penalties on anyone who wishes to pay off their debts early – a unique and almost feudal arrangement, where individuals are going to be forced to remain in debt, effectively to provide the government with cash flow, for most of their working lives. I know of no other case of a government requiring its citizens to be in permanent debt. The argument that this is just like a mortgage is specious, as mortgages are not index-linked, there are a wide variety of different time periods available, individuals have a choice of which ones to take, and they are secured on hard assets which have traditionally risen in value over time. None of these conditions apply to student loans.
It should be noted that this does nothing for total debt levels; it merely shuffles them around, massaging down the government portion by increasing the private portion. It is financial jiggery-pokery similar to that of the Private Finance Initiative. And already there have been suggestions that this be taken one stage further, that the government might try to raise money by selling off the student loan book -- George Osborne mentioned this as a long-term aim in his last budget (Guardian 22 June 2010).
If such a thing happens, then we will at least be able to console ourselves with having witnessed a stupendous feat of financial wizardry. Having transferred liabilities from banks’ balance sheets onto the public accounts because of the financial crisis, student loans will progressively transfer public debt onto individuals. If the loan book is then sold to financial institutions, the banks will have successfully transmuted their liabilities into assets in a way which makes turning dross into gold seem almost commonplace.
For all that, the changes that are coming need not be bad for the arts and humanities, although the dangers are so clear and considerable that they need little elaboration from me. All crises present opportunities, but the ultimate outcome depends on who siezes those opportunities. The rise in student fees is a devious manoeuvre which is fundamentally unfair and profoundly inefficient. But it will inevitably switch more attention back to teaching and away from research, which will play to the humanities’ strengths. For the past 30 years, the desire to squeeze the arts into a scientific research-heavy model of funding has forced them to compete on a field where they cannot win. There is no way that they can raise the sorts of money in research grants that the sciences can collar, no way that they can justify themselves in terms of direct and measurable contribution to economic growth. Nonetheless they have been required to try, and have been all too easily depicted as a redundant indulgence as a result.
Training the minds of the young effectively and efficiently is another matter, and the area where the humanities excel. With luck, the whole system may begin to be rebalanced, and teaching may come back to enjoy equal status once more. In this, the students are natural allies, quite likely to join any protest against the idea of their fees being diverted to other things. They may be willing to stump up for their own education, they may not be quite so keen to fund a vice-chancellor’s pay rises. They may want to know where their money is going, and how it is spent. As most humanities departments operate on a shoestring, this natural curiosity in the young is a characteristic which should be encouraged.
Many years ago, the historian Alfred Cobban gave an interview in which he talked about getting his Professorship at UCL. He was taken aside by the head of the college and told that, while UCL would be quite happy if he wanted to do any research, he must realise it would be in his own time. He was being paid to teach, and nothing else, and would he please remember that. This did not prevent him from producing a large number of high quality books and articles, and indeed his entire generation produced vast amounts of research without having to be bullied or bribed into doing so. Very few people now can even imagine how such a system could work, so used have we become to managerial insistence that without incentives and penalties, league tables and assessments, nothing would ever get done. But it did, and I suspect it would work just as well now. When academics have something to say, they rarely have to be forced or cajoled to say it.
But they can only do so if they have time, and in the humanities time is often more precious than money. Many research grants in fact are used up literally to buy time. A proper response to the changes coming down the line would be to begin the process of stripping out the vast amounts of busy work that have accumulated over the past few decades. It would abolish the RAE for the humanities, dispose of the constant internal assessments, cancel huge numbers of committees, get rid of professional heads of departments and return them to the ranks where they could pull their weight as teachers – in short, dispose of everything which was not immediately and directly related to teaching, leaving more space for doing research at other times. Linked to an administration that was genuinely committed to stripping out other unnecessary expenses, then the humanities could live under the new regime and even prosper in a world that was simpler and less subject to random manipulation. It will never be easy to deliver a high quality education on a quarter of the income per head that a major American university gets, or a third of the amount that Eton charges, but it would then be do-able, just about. At least there would be the possibility of surviving until some future government comes along and launches yet another review to unravel the mess made by the last one, as will inevitably happen. But my concern is that unless a very real amount of genuine soul-searching is undertaken by everyone from government down – a reexamination far more substantial that the superficial tampering of the Browne report – then by that stage irreparable damage may have been done.
-- Iain Pears
The first point to bear in mind is that there is a certain futility in talking about education when discussing Higher Education policy, as that has long been of only minor importance. Politics and power have, for the last 30 years, been of much greater significance. It was not out of a desire to improve universities but to discipline them that the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s chipped away at tenure and university autonomy. John Major’s decision to double the number of students without funding them in the early 1990’s had more to do with massaging down youth unemployment figures than producing an educated population. The abolition of the binary divide was more concerned with driving down costs and exploiting the opportunity to corporatise the polytechnics than to give university degrees to all. The Lambert report under Labour was primarily occupied with making universities more useful to business. And the creation of the likes of hefce had as much to do with strengthening central control as it had with ensuring that the best research was funded well.
Now universities are to be hit by another tsunami of reform, and all the signs are that it is a worthy successor to past initiatives in the sense that it is ill-conceived, will be badly executed, and has little to do with the question of educating the population. This is perhaps inevitable for a review conceived by Labour as a means of securing more funding for universities without paying for it, modified by the Conservatives to be a means of facilitating cuts, and modified again by the Liberal Democrats to appease their backbenchers. In such a scramble, educational priorities slipped down the rankings, and the question of precisely how English universities are to maintain their remarkably high level of achievement has been largely forgotten. The result seems to be an actual cut in universities’ income instead of an increase, delivered in a complex and inefficient fashion, and laden down with so many conditions that any benefits will be more than offset by new burdens and obligations. One thing seems clear, and that is that although the government might not be willing to pay for the humanities, it will not, as a result, be surrendering any of the power it has over them.
The general incoherence is, this time, on an epic scale. For the last few years, we have been told that our great problem is that we have individually taken on too much debt, so the government is adopting a policy which will make a larger proportion of the population take on higher debts than ever before; this is known as choice. We are told the country’s future depends on a well-educated workforce, and then the government takes measures to reduce the appeal of that education by tripling its cost.
And above all, we are told that market disciplines will be introduced, but the result is to be a system of such tangled complexity that market forces are the very last thing which will apply.
In the grand scheme of things, a overall cut of 10 per cent or so to the total budget might not be so bad. Most companies, after a decade or so of interrupted growth could deal with such a thing relatively easily. Costs invariably can be reduced; it is in the nature of organisations to become a little flabby over time. It is where those cuts fall which is crucial. A well-run company will go after unnecessary overheads first of all. Management structures are simplified, expenses squeezed, all to protect the core activities which are the essential engines of growth and profit when the economy turns.
With the universities, much could be done here. Vince Cable could do more than issue limp begging letters asking vice-chancellors’ nicely if they wouldn’t mind being a little bit more restrained on the pay they give themselves. His department could ban daft schemes which divert funds into Ozymandias-like ventures into the sands of Araby. It could insist that all peripheral activities, like sponsoring rugby teams, building sports centres, acquiring palaces, stop immediately. Universities could do away not only with the fatuous mission statements and glossy strategy documents, but also with the people who write them. They could accept that employing about a thousand people in public relations departments might be a misuse of funds. The government could demand that the central administration budget be cut down drastically and immediately. It has instead been notably silent on the issue.
Not to be too polemical, King’s College London this week launched an appeal for £500 million. If treated as endowment at the usual yields, this would produce about 16 million a year, not even enough to cover the increase in central administration costs since 2002. Whether prospective donors will be told what they will be in effect paying for remains to be seen.
At the same time as revenue will drop, even with the rise of student fees, costs will also be driven up inexorably. Universities are charities, and do not pay tax, but they do pay VAT, and this is going up to 20 per cent next year, enough on its own to blow a hole in the budget. There is talk of a compulsary employers’ levy to make up a deficit in the pension fund, which will also be expensive, and possibly very expensive. Many universities are going to be forced into spending more on fund-raising, but with no change to the tax regime for donations, they will all be competing for the same pot of money, spending more in an expensive beggar-thy-neighbour policy. Nor is sending alumni out into the world laden with debt going to increase their generosity in later years. Equally, costs will be driven up by the business of administering a complex fee structure, and complying with whatever directives come from the new super-quango the government sets up. Best of all, perhaps, it seems as though the government is going to cut the teaching grant before the increased revenue from fees starts flowing, risking a quite unnecessary short term funding crisis that could well doom many courses, and even institutions, that might otherwise be viable.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of British Higher Education policy.
Why is this happening? One reason is that, if you commission a report, the answer you get depends on the question asked, and the person you ask. The question was limited to that of student fees, and so the answer did not touch on the greater structure of university funding, much of which comes from research monies. The remit of the committee was carefully designed so that it did not look at why it was reasonable to stop subsiding students, while continuing with much larger subsidies to businesses by allowing them to get a great deal of research on the cheap. It did not ask whether, if it is fair for students who benefit to pay for their education, it might not be reasonable to ask companies, who benefit from an educated workforce, to pay more as well. It did not deal with the question of why, if bankers can threaten to leave when their finances are threatened, the best and brightest students might not adopt the same reasoning, and go abroad if their education can be had under better circumstances elsewhere. Nor did it deal with the consequences for the much-vaunted “knowledge economy” if these students don’t come back again.
And the question was asked of Lord Browne, whose successor carried the can for the Gulf of Mexico disaster while trying at the same time to strip out “the unacceptably high overhead costs” “arteriosclerosis and bureaucracy” which weighed BP down during the period Browne was in charge of it. Lord Browne was a highly successful businessman, but he came to the task of reviewing fees with predictable ideas, attitudes and responses. Putting a question to a man wedded to “flash and fluff,” as the Economist phrased it, guaranteed that the one thing that would not be part of the answer would be a critique of the hugely expensive bureaucratic structure that has grown up over the past few decades. Indeed, he ended up recommending a system which will require much higher administrative costs.
All this will happen under a programme billed as introducing market forces into higher education. It would have been preferable if it had done so. I am, in general, quite keen on market forces in their proper context, and have a high regard for well-managed companies. But I do not believe that market forces have much of a role in situations where the market has to be artificially created, and is then interfered with before it even starts operating. With markets, it is all or nothing, and in the case of universities under the current arrangements, it is not going to be all, so would be better if it were nothing.
In a completely free market, the humanities would clean up. Faced with a choice between an arts degree costing £8,000 a year, and one in science costing upwards of £30,000 a year, then history and philosophy would suddenly become very popular for everyone except those determined to work as scientists. But it is not to be. The natural cost advantages that the humanities enjoy will be erased by continued subsidy to the sciences, while the natural disavantages of the humanities – their lack of access to research money – will continue unchanged.
Charging for what used to be free is not going to be balanced by an ability to become more flexible. Universities will be exposed to some of the pressures of a market system, but their responses will be limited by government directives. To put it simply, many departments may well close not because there is no demand for places, and not because students would not pay higher fees, but because the government will not let supply and demand meet up in a market driven fashion. This would be fine if it was prepared to pay to make up the difference, but it won’t do that either. It is after all possible that greater access and stability could be achieved by increasing fees still further. Personally I would disapprove strongly, but if a university could charge £15000, and divert a large portion of this into a needs-blind admissions policy in the Harvard manner, this might work for some institutions. But we will never know. Rather, universities are to be forced into an ill-fitting straitjacket designed purely to triangulate the political needs of the governing parties.
The market to be introduced is so rigged that, were it to be implemented in the City, the fraud office would soon enough be fingering the collars of the perpetrators. Every reference to market forces is disingenuous in the extreme. Universities will not compete against each other, but will rather operate as a cartel, or a series of cartels targetting different market segments. The normal market disciplines on managements will not apply, as there is no means left of effectively challenging or criticising their decisions. The choice available to students will be converted solely into what level of debt to incur. Internal costing of departments will remain opaque, random and arbitrary.
One thing that those in the arts must beware of is being bamboozled by arguments that their subjects are non economic, loss-making, sub-critical or whatever term may be in fashion. People in the humanities are not generally very good at reading balance sheets and financial statements, but they really should get into practice. As pieces of creative writing, the average university accounts are marvels. For exercises in the analysis of texts, they offer perfect study material. What they say, what they do not say, what they emphasise, what they hide away in dank little corners on page 23 are wonders of obscurantism. They should be read carefully, not least because of the pleasure that can be derived from sending in Freedom of Information requests to get the information left out.
The most important thing to remember is that however many numbers and statistics are deployed to give an impression of precision and rigour, these are all fiction at departmental level. A decent accountant could make any faculty show a profit or a loss simply by juggling the figures to get the result desired. All the highly complex and sophisticated accounting techniques brought in over the past decade or so are essentially fraudulent, because they are based on entirely subjective assumptions. To take an example, the philosophy department at Middlesex was closed because it made a loss, and this fact was dutifully reported in the newspapers. But it only made a loss because the university creamed off more than 50 percent of its revenue in central charges, and those charges were not only set more or less at random, they were beyond the control of the department to influence. An entirely independent faculty, which could negotiate a fair price for use of rooms and libraries, and which had some control over other outgoings – like a say in the vice-chancellor’s magnificent salary – could easily have managed to show a profit. The sin of Middlesex philosophy was a failure to meet an arbitrary internal benchmark determined by the needs of the administration for funds, not being a financial basket case.
Another thing to note is the extraordinary nature of the loans system being proposed, which is that students will be charged at 3 per cent plus inflation for a very long period of time once they hit a certain level of income. This is sheer profiteering disguised as fairness. Essentially, the government will be requiring individuals to issue 30-year index-linked bonds on their own balance sheets, rather than do it itself. A few sums shows what this might mean. For the government will raise the money to advance the loans on a flat rate basis. It will, in other words, borrow the money at about 2.5 per cent, and lend it out at 6.1 per cent, more if inflation increases. While it will enjoy the benefit of seeing its real debt eroded by inflation, the student will not be permitted the same escape route. If only half the total number of students take out a loan of £7000 every year, then that would amount to a transfer from the state’s balance sheet to those of individuals which stabilises over 30 years at about £110 billion. The government would pay a peak £2.75 billion a year in interest for this, and receive peak income of £6.75 billion back, as wage inflation will ensure within 12 years that most graduates earn over the £41,000 benchmark which triggers the maximum levy, and there seems to be no provision for this to be index-linked.
Even Barclaycard would applaud such audacity, not least because there are measures to guarantee this income stream by imposing financial penalties on anyone who wishes to pay off their debts early – a unique and almost feudal arrangement, where individuals are going to be forced to remain in debt, effectively to provide the government with cash flow, for most of their working lives. I know of no other case of a government requiring its citizens to be in permanent debt. The argument that this is just like a mortgage is specious, as mortgages are not index-linked, there are a wide variety of different time periods available, individuals have a choice of which ones to take, and they are secured on hard assets which have traditionally risen in value over time. None of these conditions apply to student loans.
It should be noted that this does nothing for total debt levels; it merely shuffles them around, massaging down the government portion by increasing the private portion. It is financial jiggery-pokery similar to that of the Private Finance Initiative. And already there have been suggestions that this be taken one stage further, that the government might try to raise money by selling off the student loan book -- George Osborne mentioned this as a long-term aim in his last budget (Guardian 22 June 2010).
If such a thing happens, then we will at least be able to console ourselves with having witnessed a stupendous feat of financial wizardry. Having transferred liabilities from banks’ balance sheets onto the public accounts because of the financial crisis, student loans will progressively transfer public debt onto individuals. If the loan book is then sold to financial institutions, the banks will have successfully transmuted their liabilities into assets in a way which makes turning dross into gold seem almost commonplace.
For all that, the changes that are coming need not be bad for the arts and humanities, although the dangers are so clear and considerable that they need little elaboration from me. All crises present opportunities, but the ultimate outcome depends on who siezes those opportunities. The rise in student fees is a devious manoeuvre which is fundamentally unfair and profoundly inefficient. But it will inevitably switch more attention back to teaching and away from research, which will play to the humanities’ strengths. For the past 30 years, the desire to squeeze the arts into a scientific research-heavy model of funding has forced them to compete on a field where they cannot win. There is no way that they can raise the sorts of money in research grants that the sciences can collar, no way that they can justify themselves in terms of direct and measurable contribution to economic growth. Nonetheless they have been required to try, and have been all too easily depicted as a redundant indulgence as a result.
Training the minds of the young effectively and efficiently is another matter, and the area where the humanities excel. With luck, the whole system may begin to be rebalanced, and teaching may come back to enjoy equal status once more. In this, the students are natural allies, quite likely to join any protest against the idea of their fees being diverted to other things. They may be willing to stump up for their own education, they may not be quite so keen to fund a vice-chancellor’s pay rises. They may want to know where their money is going, and how it is spent. As most humanities departments operate on a shoestring, this natural curiosity in the young is a characteristic which should be encouraged.
Many years ago, the historian Alfred Cobban gave an interview in which he talked about getting his Professorship at UCL. He was taken aside by the head of the college and told that, while UCL would be quite happy if he wanted to do any research, he must realise it would be in his own time. He was being paid to teach, and nothing else, and would he please remember that. This did not prevent him from producing a large number of high quality books and articles, and indeed his entire generation produced vast amounts of research without having to be bullied or bribed into doing so. Very few people now can even imagine how such a system could work, so used have we become to managerial insistence that without incentives and penalties, league tables and assessments, nothing would ever get done. But it did, and I suspect it would work just as well now. When academics have something to say, they rarely have to be forced or cajoled to say it.
But they can only do so if they have time, and in the humanities time is often more precious than money. Many research grants in fact are used up literally to buy time. A proper response to the changes coming down the line would be to begin the process of stripping out the vast amounts of busy work that have accumulated over the past few decades. It would abolish the RAE for the humanities, dispose of the constant internal assessments, cancel huge numbers of committees, get rid of professional heads of departments and return them to the ranks where they could pull their weight as teachers – in short, dispose of everything which was not immediately and directly related to teaching, leaving more space for doing research at other times. Linked to an administration that was genuinely committed to stripping out other unnecessary expenses, then the humanities could live under the new regime and even prosper in a world that was simpler and less subject to random manipulation. It will never be easy to deliver a high quality education on a quarter of the income per head that a major American university gets, or a third of the amount that Eton charges, but it would then be do-able, just about. At least there would be the possibility of surviving until some future government comes along and launches yet another review to unravel the mess made by the last one, as will inevitably happen. But my concern is that unless a very real amount of genuine soul-searching is undertaken by everyone from government down – a reexamination far more substantial that the superficial tampering of the Browne report – then by that stage irreparable damage may have been done.
-- Iain Pears
Monday, 9 August 2010
On the Workings of Groups
The supporters of the management of King’s College have been advancing the line that setting up a working group on Palaeography – which recommended a new post in “palaeography and manuscript studies” demonstrates the purity of the college’s motives over the eviction of the current incumbent, Professor David Ganz.
Under this reasoning, the removal of Professor Ganz is compensated for by the fact that King’s is willing to give house-room to a replacement as long as someone else picks up the tab. King’s commitment to palaeography is on the condition that it cost the college not a penny.
Left unexamined are the questions of how much time the College will devote to the matter of fund-raising, considering it already has some £200 million in debt that needs to be dealt with; why anyone would want to give money to a college that has acted in such an unusual way; and why palaeography cannot be subsidised while managers, sports facilities and palaces next door can be.
The argument in favour of King’s – most cogently and reasonably advanced by Mr Steven Rhodes, a former member of the King’s council, in comments to the THES – is that the question of Professor Ganz, and the question of Palaeography, are two entirely different matters. That is, getting rid of Professor Ganz has nothing to do with the issue of replacing him.
From an outsider’s point of view, it is difficult to see how anyone can think that Professor and Professorship can be separated, but that seems to be the line of argument. So let us look at the working group -- composed mainly of senior academics of some considerable distinction -- which accomplished this separation. It was set up by management after the storm of protest caused by the College’s announcement that the subject was going to be axed.
One of the most striking things about the report it produced is that, in 11 pages devoted to the subject of palaeography at King’s, Professor Ganz is mentioned by name only once, and then only in passing. The state and nature of palaeography as it currently exists at the College is scarcely mentioned; indeed the committee writes almost as though there were a blank slate, and that the subject was being called into existence for the first time. There is much on what courses might be offered; all but nothing on what courses currently are offered. There is no sense that they would be building on the efforts of the Professor – who, after 13 years in the post, must have had some impact on the subject.
The report (published on June 30th) says that "members agreed to serve on the understanding that the Group's work could proceed only when issues surrounding the current post-holder had been negotiated and resolved" – which presumably means when the fate of Professor Ganz was decided one way or another. This makes perfect sense, as there would have been no point worrying about his successor if the current Professor was, after all, going to stay put.
However, it then goes on to state that it proceeded -- with the first meeting of the group -- on 31 March 2010, (page 2 of the report) which suggests that at this point, presumably, the members considered that the issue of Professor Ganz had indeed been “negotiated and resolved.”
Except that it hadn't. Professor Ganz only signed his voluntary severance agreement shortly before June 7, two months later, and his letter of April 17, posted on Facebook, clearly suggests that he, at least, thought there was a possibility of keeping his job – the letter refers to axeing palaeography being still a proposal, albeit management policy. Even had he known that was how it was going to end, up until the moment he signed he could have decided to put up a fight and dig in his heels.
He may, as I am told, have been presented with a severance contract on March 31 -- coincidentally, no doubt, the same day as the first meeting -- but he had not signed or agreed to sign it: his position had been neither negotiated nor resolved, except, perhaps in the collective mind of management, which seems to have developed a sort of idee fixe on the subject of getting rid of him. But an argument that an issue is resolved when one side of a discussion decides it has been is scarcely tenable, not least because it would cast doubt over the nature of the consultation process which lasted until May 18th.
Even more strangely, the statement put out on May 18th to mark the end of the consultation said:
“The working group made its initial report to the Head of School on 31 March 2010 (my emphasis) and confirmed the continuing need for the study of Palaeography at King’s. The working group indicated that it would be recommending a re-defined Chair of Palaeography, incorporating Manuscript Studies, with a wide remit…”
Which is to say that -- if you compare report and press release -- the committee not only began work before the fate of Professor Ganz had been resolved, it effectively finished it the day it started -- for that was the major recommendation and everything else was merely filling in the details. March 31, it appears, was a busy day all round. This suggests -- the press release presumably means what it says -- either that the recommendations weren’t very deeply thought through, or that the groundwork had already been done elsewhere and in advance.
The final report defines the new post in a way which fits Professor Ganz’s skills to a tee (p.4) – languages, with latin as a core; a remit covering documentary and archival material (an odd distinction: what do archives contain except documents?) and medieval vernacular; meeting demands from a range of constituencies and “engaging with the digital environment” – (a rare lapse into gobblydegook) all of which Professor Ganz has been doing with great distinction, if little ostentatious fanfare.
The report never even considers the possibility that the current Professor might be the ideal person to do the job, even though he was actually doing it while the working party's meetings were taking place. Equally, the statement that palaeography cannot pay its way and must be endowed omits any discussion of why, in that case, the college needs to found a new chair at all, and could not merely seek an endowment for the existing one.
The periodic excursions into managerialese suggests two hands at work: when talking about Palaeography, the report appears to have been written by academics, as it is for the most part clear and straightforward. Elsewhere it lapses into puffery, unable to resist a boosterish adjective or two: thus scholarly traditions are of the highest, administrative departments are energetic. (p.6) And Vision makes its usual cameo appearance.
While the report finds space to praise managerial energy, it does not, however, trouble to define what “manuscript studies” actually are, although the implication on page 5 is that it is palaeography for people with no language skills and who cannot, therefore, read the manuscripts they are studying. Another hint comes from the mention of ivy league summer school students, which suggests that the new requirement will be for someone who can entertain high-paying preppies, a group university administrators in the UK now regard as the ultimate cash-cows. (p.5) If this is th case, then it may well be that Professor's Ganz's real sin was to be too serious a scholar, and the fact that there was no palaeographer on the committee would not have helped.
A further hint of the purpose behind all of this comes from the frequent references to computing – another area where the managerial style becomes dominant (“London offers a robust infrastructure …connections to Super JaNET…” and so on p.7). This connects to the current main squeeze of management, which is the idea that by changing from using computers as a tool, to seeing information processing as an end in itself (the digital humanities) King’s can not only seem cool, but also lay claim to the sort of hefty grants that normally go only to scientific subjects.
So how does leave this working party? Its achievements should properly be assessed by the choices it made; by what it did not do, as well as by what it did. Its schedule implied the assumption that Professor Ganz would leave long before he agreed to do so. It could have said – hey, why not keep Ganz? it’ll be cheaper – but didn’t. Individual members could have refused to serve unless they could shape the remit, but didn’t.
They could have protested at the treatment of a colleague, but chose not to do so. They could have acknowledged the Professor's contribution to college and discipline, but did not. They could have tried to link the cost of palaeography to other areas of expense at King's, but didn’t.
They advanced the notion that there is some difference between manuscript studies and palaeography without explaining the distinction between the two. They defined a new job, but skated over the task of saying where it differed from the old one. They turned their back on the fate of an individual to concentrate on the preservation of a position.
They dutifully answered the questions set by management, but chose not to wonder whether different questions should be posed. The course of events illustrates the thesis I have advanced over the past couple of months, which is that control of universities in effect lies the ability of managements to set the agenda, and the unwillingness of academics themselves to challenge it. This is a perfect example of the process in operation.
Either way, the working party allowed itself to be put in the position of providing a distraction – by concentrating attention on the resurrection of palaeography in the future, it served to divert attention away from its untimely death in the present. Its report permitted the "palaeography saved" headlines which obscured the fact of Professor Ganz's eviction. It separated professor and professorship in a way that the management on its own could not have achieved.
And it allowed King’s to pass in lofty silence over the question of why it cannot find £25,000 a year to fund the shortfall in palaeography, but can find the £62,000 required to fund the Principal’s pay rises over the last couple of years.
It is, after all, a question of priorities within the university: and this is something which, it appears, is now much too important to be the concern of academics, however senior or distingushed.
-- Iain Pears
Note -- This account derives from reading the report of the working party side-by-side with the various press releases put out by management in the past few months. That is to say, if there are any errors of dates, then these lie in the documents themselves. If there are any mistakes, however, then I will gladly correct them, as usual.
Dissident academics requiring anonymity, by the way, generally go via Facebook. So, indeed, do recalcitrant managers.
Under this reasoning, the removal of Professor Ganz is compensated for by the fact that King’s is willing to give house-room to a replacement as long as someone else picks up the tab. King’s commitment to palaeography is on the condition that it cost the college not a penny.
Left unexamined are the questions of how much time the College will devote to the matter of fund-raising, considering it already has some £200 million in debt that needs to be dealt with; why anyone would want to give money to a college that has acted in such an unusual way; and why palaeography cannot be subsidised while managers, sports facilities and palaces next door can be.
The argument in favour of King’s – most cogently and reasonably advanced by Mr Steven Rhodes, a former member of the King’s council, in comments to the THES – is that the question of Professor Ganz, and the question of Palaeography, are two entirely different matters. That is, getting rid of Professor Ganz has nothing to do with the issue of replacing him.
From an outsider’s point of view, it is difficult to see how anyone can think that Professor and Professorship can be separated, but that seems to be the line of argument. So let us look at the working group -- composed mainly of senior academics of some considerable distinction -- which accomplished this separation. It was set up by management after the storm of protest caused by the College’s announcement that the subject was going to be axed.
One of the most striking things about the report it produced is that, in 11 pages devoted to the subject of palaeography at King’s, Professor Ganz is mentioned by name only once, and then only in passing. The state and nature of palaeography as it currently exists at the College is scarcely mentioned; indeed the committee writes almost as though there were a blank slate, and that the subject was being called into existence for the first time. There is much on what courses might be offered; all but nothing on what courses currently are offered. There is no sense that they would be building on the efforts of the Professor – who, after 13 years in the post, must have had some impact on the subject.
The report (published on June 30th) says that "members agreed to serve on the understanding that the Group's work could proceed only when issues surrounding the current post-holder had been negotiated and resolved" – which presumably means when the fate of Professor Ganz was decided one way or another. This makes perfect sense, as there would have been no point worrying about his successor if the current Professor was, after all, going to stay put.
However, it then goes on to state that it proceeded -- with the first meeting of the group -- on 31 March 2010, (page 2 of the report) which suggests that at this point, presumably, the members considered that the issue of Professor Ganz had indeed been “negotiated and resolved.”
Except that it hadn't. Professor Ganz only signed his voluntary severance agreement shortly before June 7, two months later, and his letter of April 17, posted on Facebook, clearly suggests that he, at least, thought there was a possibility of keeping his job – the letter refers to axeing palaeography being still a proposal, albeit management policy. Even had he known that was how it was going to end, up until the moment he signed he could have decided to put up a fight and dig in his heels.
He may, as I am told, have been presented with a severance contract on March 31 -- coincidentally, no doubt, the same day as the first meeting -- but he had not signed or agreed to sign it: his position had been neither negotiated nor resolved, except, perhaps in the collective mind of management, which seems to have developed a sort of idee fixe on the subject of getting rid of him. But an argument that an issue is resolved when one side of a discussion decides it has been is scarcely tenable, not least because it would cast doubt over the nature of the consultation process which lasted until May 18th.
Even more strangely, the statement put out on May 18th to mark the end of the consultation said:
“The working group made its initial report to the Head of School on 31 March 2010 (my emphasis) and confirmed the continuing need for the study of Palaeography at King’s. The working group indicated that it would be recommending a re-defined Chair of Palaeography, incorporating Manuscript Studies, with a wide remit…”
Which is to say that -- if you compare report and press release -- the committee not only began work before the fate of Professor Ganz had been resolved, it effectively finished it the day it started -- for that was the major recommendation and everything else was merely filling in the details. March 31, it appears, was a busy day all round. This suggests -- the press release presumably means what it says -- either that the recommendations weren’t very deeply thought through, or that the groundwork had already been done elsewhere and in advance.
The final report defines the new post in a way which fits Professor Ganz’s skills to a tee (p.4) – languages, with latin as a core; a remit covering documentary and archival material (an odd distinction: what do archives contain except documents?) and medieval vernacular; meeting demands from a range of constituencies and “engaging with the digital environment” – (a rare lapse into gobblydegook) all of which Professor Ganz has been doing with great distinction, if little ostentatious fanfare.
The report never even considers the possibility that the current Professor might be the ideal person to do the job, even though he was actually doing it while the working party's meetings were taking place. Equally, the statement that palaeography cannot pay its way and must be endowed omits any discussion of why, in that case, the college needs to found a new chair at all, and could not merely seek an endowment for the existing one.
The periodic excursions into managerialese suggests two hands at work: when talking about Palaeography, the report appears to have been written by academics, as it is for the most part clear and straightforward. Elsewhere it lapses into puffery, unable to resist a boosterish adjective or two: thus scholarly traditions are of the highest, administrative departments are energetic. (p.6) And Vision makes its usual cameo appearance.
While the report finds space to praise managerial energy, it does not, however, trouble to define what “manuscript studies” actually are, although the implication on page 5 is that it is palaeography for people with no language skills and who cannot, therefore, read the manuscripts they are studying. Another hint comes from the mention of ivy league summer school students, which suggests that the new requirement will be for someone who can entertain high-paying preppies, a group university administrators in the UK now regard as the ultimate cash-cows. (p.5) If this is th case, then it may well be that Professor's Ganz's real sin was to be too serious a scholar, and the fact that there was no palaeographer on the committee would not have helped.
A further hint of the purpose behind all of this comes from the frequent references to computing – another area where the managerial style becomes dominant (“London offers a robust infrastructure …connections to Super JaNET…” and so on p.7). This connects to the current main squeeze of management, which is the idea that by changing from using computers as a tool, to seeing information processing as an end in itself (the digital humanities) King’s can not only seem cool, but also lay claim to the sort of hefty grants that normally go only to scientific subjects.
So how does leave this working party? Its achievements should properly be assessed by the choices it made; by what it did not do, as well as by what it did. Its schedule implied the assumption that Professor Ganz would leave long before he agreed to do so. It could have said – hey, why not keep Ganz? it’ll be cheaper – but didn’t. Individual members could have refused to serve unless they could shape the remit, but didn’t.
They could have protested at the treatment of a colleague, but chose not to do so. They could have acknowledged the Professor's contribution to college and discipline, but did not. They could have tried to link the cost of palaeography to other areas of expense at King's, but didn’t.
They advanced the notion that there is some difference between manuscript studies and palaeography without explaining the distinction between the two. They defined a new job, but skated over the task of saying where it differed from the old one. They turned their back on the fate of an individual to concentrate on the preservation of a position.
They dutifully answered the questions set by management, but chose not to wonder whether different questions should be posed. The course of events illustrates the thesis I have advanced over the past couple of months, which is that control of universities in effect lies the ability of managements to set the agenda, and the unwillingness of academics themselves to challenge it. This is a perfect example of the process in operation.
Either way, the working party allowed itself to be put in the position of providing a distraction – by concentrating attention on the resurrection of palaeography in the future, it served to divert attention away from its untimely death in the present. Its report permitted the "palaeography saved" headlines which obscured the fact of Professor Ganz's eviction. It separated professor and professorship in a way that the management on its own could not have achieved.
And it allowed King’s to pass in lofty silence over the question of why it cannot find £25,000 a year to fund the shortfall in palaeography, but can find the £62,000 required to fund the Principal’s pay rises over the last couple of years.
It is, after all, a question of priorities within the university: and this is something which, it appears, is now much too important to be the concern of academics, however senior or distingushed.
-- Iain Pears
Note -- This account derives from reading the report of the working party side-by-side with the various press releases put out by management in the past few months. That is to say, if there are any errors of dates, then these lie in the documents themselves. If there are any mistakes, however, then I will gladly correct them, as usual.
Dissident academics requiring anonymity, by the way, generally go via Facebook. So, indeed, do recalcitrant managers.
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