All The Noose That's Fit To Print

One of the disputed joys of being an academic is the constant self-criticism. Whatever the field, academics hold that claims are contingent: we get attached to our current interpretations while hoping for new ones. We live in a state of professional doubt in the best possible sense, knowing that there's always more we could be reading, teaching and thinking about. The down side of this, perhaps more pointedly for those of an Eeyorish disposition, is the concomitant feeling of inadequacy. 75 years is not enough time to get through all the primary texts, let alone understand the critical theory sufficiently. And that's not counting all that time spent sitting on Review of Reviews committees (I kid you not).

My point is that this week's furores (furora? furori?) over Oxford and Cambridge's white posh intake and white literature curriculum are both welcome and vile. The obvious temptation from my end of the see-saw is a smug feeling of superiority: my institution's BME intake is roughly 40%, whereas some Oxford and Cambridge colleges haven't accepted more than one or two black students in 15 years. My curriculum, too, is diverse: we're teaching works by Equiano, Bernardine Evaristo, Monica Ali, Ralph Ellison, Gil Scott-Heron, Armistead Maupin and Jackie Kay just in the next few weeks, while postcolonial and queer readings inform our discussions of canonical texts as a matter of course.

But on the principle that academics are never allowed nice things, there's no reason for this smugness. One could quite easily see our diverse student intake as a property of structural racism: educational and employment outcomes are poor for BME groups, as is access to 'élite' higher education institutions, which means that we benefit from society's dysfunction because we have a mission to widen participation and they clearly don't. There's also the issue of the white curriculum: I have friends and acquaintances in Cambridge and Oxford faculties who are horrified at the accusation that they are individually or collectively racist, and who lead the field in theoretical diversity: Priyamvada Gopal, who has been monitored by the Telegraph and the Mail is a shining light of our discipline. It's also true, though, that blaming social failure (such as the secondary school system) feels like a cop-out. If my colleagues and I work hard to develop our curriculum despite being well ahead of these so-called elite institutions, we need more recognition from them that there really is a problem. In my more mean-spirited moments I wonder if Cambridge and Oxford will soon reach a point of equilibrium at which the number of BME students will equal the number of BME-authored texts on the curriculum.

What brings us together, however, is the lynch mob mentality of the Telegraph and the Mail. Hearing of a request from students for faculty to widen the English canon, they used it as the opportunity to indulge in a bit of Black Panic: while the online version of the story has been hurriedly altered, the Telegraph used the term 'forced' and pointedly used a portrait of Cambridge University Students' Union Women's Officer Lola Olufemi to evoke Confederate-era fears of a slave rebellion.

I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of links to an article outraged at the idea of asking students to read texts by black people with one robustly defending academic freedom:

The Mail, meanwhile, having spent recent years mocking students' perceived opposition to free speech, decided to add university lecturers to the list of Enemies of the People, aided by an epistoholic Tory MP who apparently dropped out of my very own university and devoted the rest of his career to persecuting anyone using polysyllabic words.

Funny how cultural position changes your perception: I look at that list of 'Lefties' and see some rich white liberals who have sold out by accepting jobs looking after most rich white kids: not many socialists think that taking a mansion and lots of cash from a massively rich training ground for the social and political elite (50% of whom come from the 7% of privately-educated children) is an act of insurrection. Although their students will be suffering some of the same individual hardships mine face, I very much doubt that many of them will submit work late due to homelessness, deportation, hunger or poverty, as happens here fairly regularly. Much as I admire Rowan Williams's literary criticism, for instance, or Will Hutton's economic analysis, I see their jobs as the Establishment's gold watch for good and faithful servants who haven't said or done anything to scare the hedgies or hunters. But perhaps that's the politics of envy talking…

Not being in the direct firing line means that I've had a lot of fun teasing Heaton-Harris, the Mail and the Telegraph but it isn't really a laughing matter. These unaccountable organs, owned and run by offshore shell companies for the benefit of tax-avoiding barons, are spending an awful lot of time hunting down people who think of themselves as public servants, and they're going for women and ethnic minorities first. The differences between me in my ex-poly and them in their medieval quads are nothing compared with moneyed racist élite and the ordinary people whom they're attempting to whip up into a xenophobic, mean-minded fury.

Universities and the people who constitute them are meant to be critical: of social structures, of cultural instruments, and of themselves. Sometimes we fail to be self-critical enough (out teaching body and management cadre looks nothing like the student body, for instance) and sometimes our obsessions with critique seem esoteric or frivolous, but far from being negative, critique speaks of a belief in progress and improvement, as John Stuart Mill knew:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

The Mail and the Telegraph are pigs. They believe that they've achieved the right answers to pretty much every question, and are satisfied. Once such an attitude is adopted, its proponents start to draw up lists. Earlier this year it was judges. This week it's black intellectual
women and Remain-supporting academics. Who knows who will be next? It certainly won't be rich white newspaper-owners.

Dead tree news

I've massively cut down my book purchasing over the past couple of months in an effort to read more than I buy. It's working: I'm down to buying a couple of books per week and reading three or four. And of course some of those I buy are for work rather than pleasure. Amongst those, I've received today two political novels for an eventual project on contemporary political fiction. I made sure that these two were second-hand copies, as I wanted to be certain the authors wouldn't receive a single penny of my money. You'll understand when I tell you.

Boris Johnson, Seventy Two Virgins
Simon Walters, Second Term.

Yes, Boris Johnson the unpleasant and bafflingly popular part-time mayor London, who wrote a comic novel about Islamic terrorism – something a better man might now regret, though I doubt he gives it a moment's thought. Still, I assume there are some vigorous sex scenes and some top-quality Latin gags. The other novel is also a peg-on-the-nose job: it's a thinly-veiled attack on Labour by the political editor of the Mail on Sunday. Actually, that's putting it kindly. When I think of the Mail, in all its vicious, lying, distorted, racist, misogynist, hypocritical, self-interested, vicious, paranoid, humourless 'glory', Simon Walters' byline is the one that floats in front of my eyes. I am not, shall we say, looking forward to reading this work. Though I have no doubt it will be interesting, in the same way that some historians find Goebbels interesting.

You can spot the poor quality of Second Term by the plugs on the back: none by literary critics of course, but praise from the frankly disgusting Amanda Platell (you'll enjoy that link), reactionary tabloid blowhards Peter Oborne (now elevated to the Telegraph, which says more about that paper's decline than it does about Oborne) and Trevor Kavanagh, and Norman Tebbit, a man who would have fitted well into an Oswald Mosley administration.

Perhaps it's a week for bad books. I've just read Margery Allingham's The China Governess, which I thought was a baffling mixture of dubious ideas, convoluted plot, social mores which I found baffling and good writing, and Veronica Roth's Divergent and Insurgent. The latter two I read as part of my ongoing attempt to consume every post-apocalyptic teen novel available (for eventual articles). They're decent page-turners, with a dislikeable protagonist, which I perversely enjoy. But like too many of these authors, there's no indication she's read any other authors' works to acquire a modicum of style or elegance. It's just one damn sentence after another. What she has read are the Harry Potter novels and The Hunger Games: the basic plot merges a divided America and a society based on the Sorting Hat. Everyone's divided into affinity groups at 16 through tests: Amity (nice, non-confrontational: Hufflepuff), Erudite (arrogant, too clever for their own good: Slytherin or Ravenclaw), Abnegation (self-sacrificing: Gryffindor/Hufflepuff), Dauntless (thrill-seeking, brave, none too bright: Gryffindor + Slytherin) and Candor (total emotional honesty whatever the cost). The plot isn't much cop either: some terrible sciencey woo basically designed to mirror the on-off mostly-chaste romance between the 'troubled' protagonists and showcase Tris's conflicted emo psyche. Then added to that: a background hum of Christian proselytising (not hugely obtrusive, but I was far from surprised to see God profusely thanked in the endnotes) and frequent and blatant endorsements of guns and the death penalty. Roth's the new big thing in American teen dystopias – looks like the Tea Party has its youth outreach program working overtime.

And in case you think you can escape: it's going to be a big film trilogy with Kate Winslet as one of the Big Bad Characters made by Lionsgate, producers also of the Hunger Games and that despicable reactionary religious propaganda Ender's Game.

I have to say that having grown up in the last days of the nuclear shadow (I'm still a proud member of CND) and living my adult life under the very real threat of catastrophic climate change, I'm getting rather bored by the stream of mostly-American far-fetched dystopic novels. There are some clear, politically-informed ones, such as Paolo Bacigalupi, Canadian Cory Doctorow and others, but the ones like Roth's which perpetuate extensions of tired old Big-State paranoia and promotion of Guns'n'God are looking less and less relevant. Give me, instead, the quiet beauty of Rosoff's How I Live Now, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Oryx and Crake series, JG Ballard, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, anything by Gwyneth Lewis, Malorie Blackman (the new Children's Laureate), Adam Roberts, Simon Morden, Ernest Cline, S. D. Crockett, Philip Reeve, Ken MacLeod, Marcus Sedgwick and even Stephen Baxter.

The pressing issues I see are climate change, social segregation due to capitalist exploitation and information science/misguided corporate techno-utopianism/surveillance (no, not Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and yes, this week's headlines are proving me right). The authors whose works I rate deal with the social, personal, cultural and economic effects of these with a sense of urgency and – mostly – leftwing ideology which I think is appropriate, whereas Roth and co present individualist worlds in which the State is automatically repressive, individual freedoms (basically, the freedom to consume and shoot people) are paramount and which deliberately retail political mythology rather than confront pressing issues, which is what SF is for.

It's not that I don't see the aesthetic qualities in fiction by right-wingers: I'm a huge fan of Evelyn Waugh, for instance. It's just that the sheer wrong-headedness of rightwing speculative fiction gets in the way of my appreciation of the writing.

What's wrong with this picture?

As you may know, I'm an enthusiastic Twitterer. I follow and converse with all sorts of people: journalists, academics, readers, politicians and anonymous interesting people. I've found it invaluable in my academic work and in helping political campaigns. It's also a great outlet for my sarcastic and unfunny one-liners.

But the strengths of Twitter are also its weaknesses. Speed is a strength, but also a serious weakness, particularly in the case of breaking news. Yesterday, someone hacked Associated Press's feed, announcing a bombing in the White House. Cue panic on the stock markets. In the aftermath of the Boston bombing, thousands of Twitterers posted pictures of Sunil Tripathi, claiming him to be a suspect: one racist assumption led to the demonisation of a man guilty of nothing more than being brown in a public space. He is now missing, and some news outlets are claiming that police think a body pulled from a river could be his.

A few months ago, a Conservative lord was named in thousands of Tweets as a predatory paedophile without a shred of evidence. On a lighter note, last week saw liberal Twitterers claiming that the Sun was faking pictures of the Thatcher funeral crowd, because a building in the background looked like the unfinished Shard, which opened months ago. In fact, it was another building entirely.

So we know that the desire to jump on a bandwagon can – maliciously or not – lead to terrible consequences. Twitter isn't the forum for mature reflection: it's about instantaneous, widely-disseminated reaction. In the hands of non-professional news-gatherers, it should be accorded the same reliability as gossip overheard in the pub: sometimes true, often inaccurate, usually fascinating.

But professional news organisations have a different duty. In the days when newspapers appeared weekly, then daily, writers had the opportunity to investigate a story, establish the facts, consider the implications. 24 hour news sped up the process, and errors started to creep in, as well as hoaxes taking advantage of the media's desperation to fill up the space. Getting there first became far more important than getting things right. Where TV goes, newspapers follow – on the internet, there's little distinction.

Which brings me to the Daily Mail. Its owner, Lord Rothermere, whose Wiltshire mansion is actually in France for tax purposes (very patriotic), said this to Journalism Weekly:

Twitter is a major form of primary source material for us and the guys on Mail Online try and turn around stories from Twitter in about three minutes. So the timeliness of news is becoming much more important and journalists have to learn a lot more different skills in understanding that – and they are.

Sadly, the noble Lord fails to explain what these skills are. But this statement worries me. Certainly Twitter is a useful network, but it can only be a secondary source. As far as I'm aware, journalists' jobs include going out there to find stories. But in Rothermere's model, the stories come to people sitting at HQ.

The idea that a news story can be researched, verified and written in three minutes is antithetical to the notion of informative journalism. There's no reflection, no consideration of implications – not even time for a phone call to verify, or to check a story with the in-house lawyers. It leaves the newspaper entirely vulnerable to the whims of a mischievous public. There's no actual journalism at play: simply desperate reaction to whatever's caught the eye of the Twittersphere.

If I were running a newspaper, on- or off-line, I'd be running a mile from this rubbish. Sure, it gets lots of people clicking on the Mail's misogynistic website, and makes the advertisers very happy. But in this race to the bottom, the Mail can only lose over the long term. A newspaper should play to its strengths: verified news, supported by informed comment by experts written when the facts are in. Any idiot can spread rumours, whereas a newspaper has the people and resources to be authoritative (if it wants to be). Otherwise it's just a shell and a list of hyperlinks with no authority whatsoever. More than that: the Mail's new model is dangerous. It leads to witch-hunts, panics and untruths. No doubt the Mail is careful to use lots of 'according to' and 'claims that', but they'll be legally responsible for whatever they print. Their lawyers must be terrified by Rothermere's new approach.

But the truth is that the Mail and papers like the Mail don't care. They want hits: if that means error and distortion, so be it.

The Mailbox Always Beeps Twice

I mailed some of you personally this morning (that's how many readers I have): you won't have received it because outgoing e-mail is down and likely to be so for several hours. Brilliant.

I've just returned from swimming - 30% slower today thanks to the pain and stiffness incurred during yesterday's fencing marathon, but the swim helped. As did the toasted bacon and egg sandwich at Jay's afterwards.

The Map Twats apparently had a good time in North Wales - drinking whiskey all night round a camp fire waiting for the solstice. Apart from James, an early lightweight casualty.

Feels like I've lost a limb

IT services have managed to fiddle with the servers so that Mac users can't send mail out - so don't feel snubbed if I don't reply to you today. The utter gits.

You can still send me mail, or post to my blog.

Back now - all the mockery from IT services about Macs was worth it because it was their fault!