The lonely suicide of education

I've just been to an open staff meeting with our esteemed Vice-Chancellor.

We are all going to be efficient. Centralisation will also be a feature of our institution. Efficiency will be centralised, and centralisation will be efficient. We will centralise efficiently, and we will be efficient because we will be centralised.

In the middle of all this rather retro management gobbledygook (it was like listening to an NHS manager appearing on Just A Minute), she sneaked in the death of the university. Obviously, she didn't phrase it like that. What she said was 'We are past the age, and past the ability, for staff to design small modules. What we will do is buy in course material from providers such as the OU or Pearson'.

So there you have it. We won't need PhDs or experts to teach courses. We'll just need people to switch on the computers, hand out the books and press play on the DVD machine. Obviously having people who've written books, revolutionised their field or conducted in-depth research is a drag on resources. Knowing stuff costs money. Employing monkeys to hand over shrink-wrapped courses designed somewhere else for profit is much easier. And of course, all students are the same and have exactly the same needs so we won't need to design courses by getting to know people, reading their work and adapting to their needs. (Meanwhile, they're telling us that we'll have more time for research. What the fuck for? Nobody will ever hear it).

It's also the end of critical thinking (educational values weren't mentioned once). We'll end up with Law, Business and apprenticeships, when what we need are humanities graduates and other critical thinkers who'll challenge this narrow, employer-fixated, managerial, imagination-free vision of education and life in general as a process of ramming individuals into complacent work-unit boxes. What's happening is exactly what Ritzer said would happen: courses like English, Cultural Studies, languages, history etc. will be taught at élite universities to élite kids who'll continue to run the world and never, ever, have to meet an oik from Wolverhampton in the corridors of power again. Our lot will learn to hold meetings, operate Powerpoint and do what they're told without question. Do we improve society by churning out obedient drones? No. We reify existing inequalities.

Do I sound angry? I know that underneath this mild exterior is a Stalinist waiting for his chance, but this is insanity. Educationalists (the Institute for Learning Enhancement, or the V-C's Gestapo, as nicknamed by a much more senior figure at my university) are actually, gleefully, joyfully, seriously doing their very best to remove the few remaining vestiges of humanist, Enlightenment values. They're like the Khmer Rouge, who were nominally communist but actually did all they could to destroy communist values. They're entryists, wreckers, anti-intellectuals, managers and technocrats hellbent on deifying 'efficiency', rationality and all the qualities Bauman said lead to Auschwitz. This is perhaps what makes me angriest of all. The people who are meant to be on our side are the destroyers. They have no faith in the power and purpose of education because they're rightwing loons obsessed with the appearance of authority. They despise the experts, those scruffy readers who spend their time thinking about stuff rather than buying Armani and finding ways to 'maximise income streams'.

They're cowards and they are traitors, and so are we for not standing up for the educational values we believe in. Students: do you want me to spend my time mechanically reading out a lecture prepared by some under-paid graduate in a Slough office and faxed to me that afternoon, or do you want me to spend years reading books, thinking about them, writing about them, then talking to you and listening to what you think? I know what I'd rather have.

I didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge. I went to a small, kindly, serious institution (Bangor University). It wasn't perfect, but there was no fudging about what constituted education. It wasn't the delivery of preconceived ideas. Education was a matter of thinking, arguing with, talking to and listening to academics who knew what they were on about, but who were also interested in how we saw the world. That's my bottom line, and it's how my colleagues here feel. I don't want to end up parrotting somebody else's line, then marking your work according to what a distant company thinks is a 'right' answer - we may as well deliver a degree by online surveys and e-mail.

Mind you, facsimile / fax-machine education is damn cheap.

Set reading for today: Ritzer's 'The Mcdonaldized University'.