A wonderful opportunity

If you were one of my students this year, you'll have been exposed to the delights of Welsh literature written in English: Lewis Jones, Gwyn Thomas, R. S. Thomas and others. So, desperate to explore this world further, you'll all be applying for an AHRC-funded PhD in the field at Bangor University, won't you?

It's a top quality university, and your options are: bilingualism, cognitive linguistics, Arthurian literature (one of my hobbies) and Welsh Writing in English, though other proposals are welcome. And at £13,950 per year, the scholarship is a lot better than the £6000 I survived on.

Apply today!

The old order fadeth

Another of my university teachers has passed away. Margaret Locherbie-Cameron was a teacher who truly was of the old school: she took an MA and worked at the University of Wales, Bangor (in its various incarnations) for her entire career.

In some ways, she was the classic academic as you find them in 1950s novels: horsey, quietly committed - and hardworking - to the Anglican/Church in Wales denomination, rural, and rather terrifying in a patrician manner until - without you ever knowing when or why - she decided that you'd risen above the level of amoeba and were actually worth talking to.

Beyond the horizons of the dumb teenager I was when I first knew her, she was a highly respected scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature and an inspirational teacher. To us though, she was the tall, forbidding figure to whom lazy students were sent for her to put the fear of God into. I never received the full blaze of Locherbie-Cameron fury (I was appallingly well-behaved) but several of my friends were made to stammer out their pathetic (and usually untrue) excuses before her steely gaze, before leaving the room sadder, weaker people.

When I went back to Bangor for an MA, I appeared to have passed the ML-C test and I discovered a woman of enormous generosity, kindness, wit and intellect and regretted not taking more of her courses as an undergraduate.

I don't think she'd have thrived as an academic now: large classes, pressure to publish any old thing to suit metrics, pedagogical fads, funding cuts, buzzwords and bullshitters would not have been to her taste.

Rumours that she is the Margaret Locherbie-Cameron who wrote such 1950s romances as Will Madam Step This Way and Nurse Kathleen: A Romance of Hospital Life are sadly unconfirmed.

More pictures of not-Wolverhampton

This is the Shakespeare Chimney! Dan and I lived here. It's the remaining chunk of the Archbishop's Palace, in which the Bishop of Bangor and Owain Gyndwr plot, in Henry IV part I.

Just for Dan

Racism never dies. It just moves to the seaside.

Tranquil, huh?

It's not Norman. It's a Victorian pastiche built by the local aristos off the backs of the slate miners. Very unpleasant family. Some of the national art treasures were stored there in WW2 until it was discovered that they were being abused.

I'm rather pleased with this one.

Bangor Cathedral with the University in the background

Fishermen's cottages by the Menai Straits, by the Pier

Bangor. It's no Wolverhampton.

Bangor, like all proper Welsh towns, is a mix of the jaw-droppingly beautiful and the prosaic, not to say seedy. Wolverhampton isn't a mix. Surrounded by sea and mountains, I managed to spend almost none of my time there up one or in the other, which was a terrible waste. Instead, I wrote the union paper, sat in meetings, drank beer and even read the occasional book. What a way to spend my youth.

Now, whenever I go back, the heart lifts on the way, and sinks back again on my return to the Black Country. Here are a few shots of what you've missed (and a lot more here, including the Super Furries gig). Click on the pictures for larger images.

Penrhyn Castle

Penrhyn Castle 2

North Wales coast and mountains from Bangor Pier

Ms. Aimée Lloyd

SFA - a few more pictures

So. Were the Super Furry Animals actually any good?

I've seen them 12-15 times over the past fifteen years. You never know whether you'll get the Rock Super Furry Animals, the Hippy Super Furry Animals, the Nosebleed Techno Super Furry Animals or something else.

This time, we got a cool, relaxed, friendly amalgam of all three. Most shockingly, we got the Beardy, Blues, Fleet Foxes version - under the synths and lasers were blues riffs and gentle harmonies. All conversation from the band was in Welsh, and Gruff waved a succession of increasingly cryptic posters. He also is apparently still as desirable as he was in 1994, according to my comrades Aimee and Vicky. The first half showcased their pastoral, mountain-man side, and the second amped up the volume and the tempo considerably: their subversive hit 'The Man Don't Give A Fuck' got the crowd surfers up and the room, friendly enough already, became euphoric.

Euphoric, that is, except for the guy in front of me, who was engaged in text warfare with his ex-partner, who seemed to believe that he wasn't taking the welfare of their daughter seriously. Perhaps she was right - his final text was 'Whatever. Can't text left-handed. Beer in my right hand'.

The support act was Cate Le Bon - we saw only a few minutes, but enough to convince me that she's worth checking out.

It was one of the best gigs I've ever been to. The crowd was cool, amiable and remarkably diverse (in age - almost everybody was a Welsh-speaker, and Bangor seems to have become much more Cymru Cymraeg since I was a student there). The band were clearly relaxed and happy, determined to make sure everyone had a good time, and they weren't at all self-indulgent, as a band coming home might have been. A triumph.

…the day we went to Bangor

Sorry. Terrible Fiddler's Dram reference there.

My heart lifts when I get catch the train to Bangor. Well, after Crewe, anyway. The landscape turns from pancake flat to coastal and mountainous, one horizon expands while the other towers dramatically. In the foreground, tatty caravan parks in places like Rhyl and Towyn have a seedy charm of their own, while mighty Eryri appears from behind the clouds (if you're lucky). The sun shone for me on Saturday - crossing Conwy harbour, it warmed the walls of the medieval castle and sparkled off the sea. I saw a massive heron lazily perched on a small boat, waiting for dinner to fin past.

Bangor itself is not dramatic or overly picturesque, though it nestles in a narrow strip between the Menai Straits and the foothills. A faux-Norman castle, a lovely old pier, the Cathedral and the university provide some drama and relief from the pebbledash, but it has a small-town charm of its own.

The sunny day wasn't exactly wasted, but Ms. Owen, Ms. Lloyd and I spent it in a sophisticated bar, largely gossiping until Vicky drove us up to the Premier Inn, a soul-destroying place if ever there was one. From the carpark onwards, you could have been anywhere in the world - even the trees weren't local. To emphasise the alienation, Vicky and Aimee forced me to watch something called Animals Do The Funniest Things while we got ready. Sorry to spoil the suspense, but they don't.

In contrast, we headed to the Greek Taverna for a drink. Quite literally, it is a shaggy, maze-like stone-built Greek Taverna hidden in a row of old houses in Upper Bangor - a unique place. The beer is just about bearable, the food is lovely and the atmosphere stunning.

Super Furries review up next - with some photos

Yo! Bumrush the show!

Good morning, children. I can almost see light at the end of this week's tunnel, and what a week it's been. The latest on the redundancy front is that the uni has threatened to advance the compulsory redundancy phase if we keep saying nasty things about the vice-chancellor (such as calling on her to resign). Oooh, scary!

Neal turned up last night, tired, hungry and beardy after spending a week with the hippies at CAT, eating lentils and building his test walls (he's doing an MSc. in sustainable building). I fed him meat, made him use a cup and saucer as part of my drive to live in a civilised fashion, and he's probably still asleep. I wish I'd spent the week in Wales with hippies!

Rather shamingly, I found the passport I'd lost 5 or 6 years ago. Having blamed my former landlord for accidentally chucking it out, it turned up as a bookmark in a biography of Samuel Beckett…

Tonight, a little more culture: The Revenger's Tragedy at the Arena theatre in Wolverhampton, followed by curry with my sophisticated and suave colleagues Ben, Frank and Hilary. It's by Thomas Middleton (it used to be attributed to Tourneur), was first performed in 1606 and is still considered shocking, dark and violent. Highly recommended.

Then tomorrow it's off to Bangor University, for its 125th anniversary: there's a discussion between novelists James Hawes and Philip Pullman which I might not arrive in time for, then Super Furry Animals performing in the main hall. My friends Aimée and Vicky are also attending, so we'll have a good gossip as we haven't got together in a very long time.

Thursday's a big day

Not only are Australia going to retain the Ashes tomorrow, there will be other results to celebrate.

Yes, it's A-level results day for England and Wales (Scots do Highers at 17 years old). Cue the usual howling voices about dumbing down, and the inevitable Telegraph and Daily Mail pictures of attractive blonde schoolgirls celebrating. Apparently nobody else does well.

Are A-levels dumber than previously? They're certainly different, and they aren't as wide-ranging as the rather good International Baccalaureate, but I'm just not equipped to judge. I do, however, feel that we spend a lot of the first year encouraging independent thinking and trying to undo the psychological damage caused by the secondary system.

However, don't despair if you haven't achieved what you needed. I was rubbish in school, only doing well in the things I enjoyed, and even managed to misunderstand the instructions for one subject, resulting in a lower grade. My headmaster, a very unpleasant man, even used my university reference as an opportunity to recommend that I not be given a place at university.

So I ended up using the clearing system to find a place at Bangor University (then University College of North Wales) and it was the making of me. In between sport, writing for the union paper, boring people to tears on committees, making lifelong friends, going on demonstrations and drinking perhaps more than was healthy, I ended up with a few prizes and a first-class degree, then an MA, and now a PhD.

This isn't meant to be boastful - I'm still amazed I passed my BA - but to remind you that all exams are artificial: being bad at them doesn't mean you're thick. Using Clearing isn't a mark of shame, and you might find that the new atmosphere at university is exactly what you need to shine.

The important thing is this: find a subject you love, and you'll stick to it. It might not even feel like work, as mine didn't: I just wanted to read books, and an English degree demanded little more than literacy and an opinion.

Once you get there, remind yourself that just like you, everybody else is keeping quiet because they think they'll sound stupid. I'm horrendously shy, but forced myself to speak in seminars and to ask for clarification during lectures.

I hate the fact that you're having to pay for this, and you'll be surrounded by people talking about employability blah blah blah. Bollocks to that. You've got three years to think about, read, talk about and write about things in a way which won't happen again for the rest of your life. Grab it. Once you're there, you can change courses, clothes or personality as often as you need. After the first week, nobody cares what you got for your A-levels, or your background. You're free.

If, after a lecture, you don't feel like your head's been messed with, you haven't been listening. A good education should change you profoundly - but it's your responsibility as much as it is mine and my colleagues'.

Good luck for tomorrow.

As I won't be around for a Friday or even Thursday conundrum, here's a themed one: what are the best and or worst teachers/educational experiences you ever had? I'll add my many pages when I get back from Oslo in a few days.

At last, he's back

Good morning, one and all. How was your Tuesday?

I spent it in Chester, which is a big tick on its own - the place is a Roman/Medieval/Georgian beauty near the Welsh border. Better than that, I went there to meet Victoria, one of the very first people I made friends with at Bangor University in 1993. We ate fine foods, walked by the river, bought an awful lot of books (hard to believe, I know) and generally set the world to rights. All in all, the perfect anecdote to spending months in Wolverhampton.

And on the way back to the station, I bumped into James, who's moved to that fair city. He was a bit miffed that I didn't stay to go drinking with him, but we are going walking on Friday and then spending the weekend carousing in Chester.

Everything you know is wrong. Discuss.

Maurice Charlesworth was my philosophy lecturer at Bangor University. He was, to me at least, something of a legend. He came to work dressed in a brown suit with brown shirt, tie, socks, shoes and briefcase. He was perhaps the world's only Tasmanian nationalist, had a dry and cruel sense of humour which he directed particularly towards the Christian section of the student body, and told us that he took a few minutes during his wedding reception to prove the non-existence of God to his new mother-in-law. He also dealt with people signing in as Donald Duck by undertaking graphological analysis of the entire class. His favourite illustration of the degenerate nature of our times was to remind us that whereas he used to employ a psychologist in his philosophy department, he was now the philosopher in the psychology department.

All this is tangential, however. The abiding memory I have of Maurice is his mantra that a class has failed if the participants think they understand what's just happened, and that the world is just as they thought. He always managed to leave me exhilarated, confused and inspired - the mark of a great teacher, I think. Every session left us drunk with intellectual curiosity and wonder.

Maurice's philosophy colleague, Ed Ingram, was equally bizarre and brilliant, though totally contrasting. Ed wore shorts and vomit-inducing Hawaiian shirts. He clearly had an absolutely brilliant time in the 60s or 70s, and had barely recovered. He was a former computer programmer who handled all the science-related philosophy with amazing precision and joy. We'd turn up, have our heads completely messed up by quantum physics and the like, then go for a soothing drink. We'd then meet Ed in the street and he'd ask us things like where he lived, or what day it was. Between them and Tony Brown, my learned, kind and wise English tutor, these people made teaching a potential avenue for me - shame the only quality I share with them is a gift for sarcasm…

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'.

We think we've got problems

Over at Cardiff Uni, they're savagely slashing continuing education courses and jobs - mostly in humanities. It's clearly a matter of profit-seeking rather than being committed to the intrinsic benefits of education. With the posh universities, extramural/continuing education are tempting targets because they hardly see themselves as part of the local community in the way that Wolves Uni does. Who cares about a few poxy beginners' Welsh courses if you can spend that money on importing a Nobel laureate? I'm a double graduate of the University of Wales (Bangor), which took a completely different view, and managed to attract students and staff from across the globe while simultaneously caring for the needs of the local community. Why can't Cardiff do the same?

Sounds fair…

My first university was overwhelmingly white - but Bangor University is in North Wales, which has virtually no ethnic minorities other than English. Still there was a fairly substantial non-white cohort. My current employer, Wolverhampton Uni, must have one of the most diverse student populations in the country, both from British-born students and international ones - it's one of the institution's strengths, though I'm never quite sure how well the different groups mix.

In any case, we're much more welcoming than certain universities - these figures are so shocking that it can't simply be written off as a problem with school-level education of black children:

Across all years and subjects, Oxford's student population of 20,000 has around 380 students from a black background, including mixed race, of whom just 175 out of 11,900 are undergraduates.

Cambridge is no better. Perhaps it's partly explained by the greater poverty in minority groups: 40% of Cambridge and Oxford students went to private schools, despite only 7% of children attending such schools. Mmmm…egalitarian