Astonishingly, that's a quote from Peter Mandelson, supposedly a Labour politician, in negotiations with the Liberal Democrats before they decided to go with the Tories: the Lib Dems toyed with an extra tax for those who owned houses worth more than £2 million.
The simple answer from those of us who don't habitually hob-nob with the super-rich is that they appear not to have suffered at all. Bankers' bonuses are going to be around £7 billion pounds this year. On the other hand, the poor are going to suffer an awful lot.
This is why Mandelson's hated in the Labour Party.
Meanwhile, the National Union of Students has come up with a cunning wheeze. The Lib Dems proposed a recall election if 10% of a constituency signed a petition, so the NUS are planning to recall all the Lib Dems who lied about tuition fees. If the government doesn't bring in the law, they'll look like cowards. If they do, many Lib Dems might lose their seats and the government may fall. Excellent.
Also: support the national day of action on campuses, 24th November.
Showing posts with label Mandelson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mandelson. Show all posts
Monday, 15 November 2010
Friday, 12 February 2010
Mendacious Mandelson
Little Peter's up to his old tricks again. He was on Radio 4 last night describing anyone who complains about the £500m cut in university funding as an 'enemy of progress'.
Now, one of my areas of speciality is Communist literature, and this phrase seemed very familiar. Enemies of Progress are to be shot. Anyone who doesn't want to be shot is and Enemy of Progress and will be shot… It reminds me of the language used by those forcing through Enclosures, Native American reservations, or the Highland Clearances. We're the peasantry, deported to make way for sheep because that's 'progress'.
It is Orwellian in its redefinition of Progress as Massive Funding Cuts. There's just no logical link. Throwing money at a problem isn't necessarily progressive, but there's no way you can describe course closures, student rejections, bigger classes and huge numbers of redundancy as progressive. Though no doubt management will describe it as 'efficiency', which in their tiny and non-contextual world counts as a good thing.
So remember, when you get the sack, you're going over the top in the name of Progress. Then you'll feel better. The clocks will strike thirteen and you'll be trouble by false memories no more. You'll love the Leader.
Now, one of my areas of speciality is Communist literature, and this phrase seemed very familiar. Enemies of Progress are to be shot. Anyone who doesn't want to be shot is and Enemy of Progress and will be shot… It reminds me of the language used by those forcing through Enclosures, Native American reservations, or the Highland Clearances. We're the peasantry, deported to make way for sheep because that's 'progress'.
It is Orwellian in its redefinition of Progress as Massive Funding Cuts. There's just no logical link. Throwing money at a problem isn't necessarily progressive, but there's no way you can describe course closures, student rejections, bigger classes and huge numbers of redundancy as progressive. Though no doubt management will describe it as 'efficiency', which in their tiny and non-contextual world counts as a good thing.
So remember, when you get the sack, you're going over the top in the name of Progress. Then you'll feel better. The clocks will strike thirteen and you'll be trouble by false memories no more. You'll love the Leader.
Sunday, 27 December 2009
Feed up with all this
The latest people to weigh in on the university funding debate are Professor Danny Blanchflower and the Observer's editorial writers.
Blanchflower is the genius economist who consistently made the right calls as the recession unfolded, when he was on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee. He was, of course, ignored. Now, he's suggested that universities should charge rich people £30,000 to attend university, to subsidise the poor, as in the US. The argument is that it's a matter of fairness. After all, many of the rich happily shell out this sort of money to make sure that their kids only meet other rich kids at private schools.
Beguiling idea… but:
Rich kids and poor kids don't tend to go to the same universities. Bar a few who are cherry-picked by the Russell Group of élite universities, poor kids go to local universities, and to the former polytechnics. They tend to be connected to their local communities by obligation (family responsibility, for instance) and less desperate to rise out of, rather than with, their class. If Oxford starts charging £30,000, it will happily fill up with the rich and won't lift a finger to attract the poor. It's over 50% privately-educated students now, despite only 6% of the school population attending such schools. That's a massive public subsidy to the rich, but Blanchflower's solution alone won't help.
I would suggest distributing these massive fees centrally to fund all universities, rather than let the Russell Group cheat while starving places like mine.
or
tax people properly so they don't have this kind of cash lying around. Obviously I'd spend it on state schooling etc. so that they don't feel the need to avoid state service.
Blanchflower's model is thinly disguised dog-eat-dog capitalism. He suggests that students will choose only 'employable' degrees: so what happens to theoretical mathematics, Anglo-Saxon, pure physics and the like? We'll end up with a nation of lawyers and Business Studies graduates without an original thought in their heads. Choice will only be available to the rich: 'unfashionable' universities won't be able to charge high fees. They'll lose the best staff and the best students and the two-tier system will be entrenched for ever.
The Observer likes Blanchflower's idea, without even mentioning any drawbacks. But at least it's conscious of the pressures now facing universities under Mandelson's malign tutelage:
Blanchflower is the genius economist who consistently made the right calls as the recession unfolded, when he was on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee. He was, of course, ignored. Now, he's suggested that universities should charge rich people £30,000 to attend university, to subsidise the poor, as in the US. The argument is that it's a matter of fairness. After all, many of the rich happily shell out this sort of money to make sure that their kids only meet other rich kids at private schools.
"What is crazy is that people are prepared to pay all that money to send their kids to private school – almost £30,000 a year to go to Eton – but they are not prepared to pay the money to go to university," Blanchflower said. "Universities are strapped for cash and need more money. So you make the rich pay the market price and use that money to fund the poor."
"The poor have been subsidising the rich. And now the rich are shouting because they are losing their subsidy – because they are paying £3,000 to go to Oxford and they should be paying £30,000." Under the system he was proposing, top universities might charge tens of thousands of pounds but others would ask for much less. Students would have to consider the cost against the potential rate of return.
At Dartmouth, Blanchflower claimed fees helped to "focus the mind", with students turning up to lectures, not dropping out and more likely to choose subjects that made them most employable.
Beguiling idea… but:
Rich kids and poor kids don't tend to go to the same universities. Bar a few who are cherry-picked by the Russell Group of élite universities, poor kids go to local universities, and to the former polytechnics. They tend to be connected to their local communities by obligation (family responsibility, for instance) and less desperate to rise out of, rather than with, their class. If Oxford starts charging £30,000, it will happily fill up with the rich and won't lift a finger to attract the poor. It's over 50% privately-educated students now, despite only 6% of the school population attending such schools. That's a massive public subsidy to the rich, but Blanchflower's solution alone won't help.
I would suggest distributing these massive fees centrally to fund all universities, rather than let the Russell Group cheat while starving places like mine.
or
tax people properly so they don't have this kind of cash lying around. Obviously I'd spend it on state schooling etc. so that they don't feel the need to avoid state service.
Blanchflower's model is thinly disguised dog-eat-dog capitalism. He suggests that students will choose only 'employable' degrees: so what happens to theoretical mathematics, Anglo-Saxon, pure physics and the like? We'll end up with a nation of lawyers and Business Studies graduates without an original thought in their heads. Choice will only be available to the rich: 'unfashionable' universities won't be able to charge high fees. They'll lose the best staff and the best students and the two-tier system will be entrenched for ever.
The Observer likes Blanchflower's idea, without even mentioning any drawbacks. But at least it's conscious of the pressures now facing universities under Mandelson's malign tutelage:
The government's arbitrary demand for 50% of the population to attend university was a virtuous aspiration as India, America and China churn out ever more graduates, yet the expansion was never properly funded and the result increasingly seems to be overcrowded lectures, distant professors, high dropout rates and inflated degree results.
Mandelson offered the solution of two-year or part-time courses, but that looks less than convincing. The mass production of McDegrees will only devalue their place in the jobs market and lead to a surge in postgraduate applications. What is more, the broader merit of a university education – the formation of friendships, the exploration of ideas, the rounding of character – would be weakened. Of course, such aspirations were never going to survive the move of higher education to the department for business.
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Oh Mandy, you came and you took without giving…
Unfortunately, the Guardian's editorial agrees with my gloomy prognostications about education funding. If anyone can think of an institution more vulnerable, do let me know. All this on top of a massive fine and managerial stupidity…
The decision to protect research funding, maintaining a pledge which Gordon Brown gave in 2004, means the impact of the cuts will be concentrated on capital spending and on teaching. In plain English, it is teachers and students who will suffer most.
Now that the tap is being turned off again, the threat of a return to the pre-1997 regime is grave, and will become more so as the likely long restraint of spending continues. The most immediate victims of Labour's stop-go policies, however, are young people. There will be fewer students in 2010 than in 2009 and they will each command fewer resources than their predecessors. Universities' overdependence on foreign students' fees means that UK undergraduates will bear the brunt.
Universities face a grim choice. They must either turn students away or look after their needs less well – perhaps both. That means larger classes and less tuition in a system already fraying at the edges.
Universities with little research funding will be particularly squeezed. Courses and colleges are in danger. All these pressures mean participation will be narrowed, and that fairer access – another Labour success story – is put at further risk, while social mobility is suddenly a luxury for another day. The university cuts graphically illustrate the wider truth that waste savings only go so far. Real cuts hurt. These ones are real all right. And there are more to come.
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
A Christmas Gift from Peter Mandelson
Lord Mandelson is Secretary of State for the Department of Business and Universities. There's a whole list of reason's why he's an objectionable individual, starting with his status as a peer: he can't be turfed out of the legislature and he's not answerable to the House of Commons.
I also hugely object to the existence of a department which yokes together Business and Universities. Yes, obviously there are shared interests, but there are also (and must always be) conflicts. The role of universities is at least in part to challenge the hegemony, which at the moment is capitalism (despite the total collapse of the banking system - bankers discovered socialism as soon as government handouts were on offer). We shouldn't be content with churning out oven-ready work drones, prepared to do whatever it takes to make money for a bunch of shareholders. In the long term, businesses shouldn't want these yes-men and women either: innovation comes from critical and independent thinking. Sticking 'and universities' on the end of the department's name implies a strategy which sees education as solely training for work, subject to the demands of the market. It's wrong, wrong wrong.
So what's Pete done to us today? He's announced funding cuts amounting to £533 million, including fines for universities which over-recruited this year. What an odd decision: he likes markets, unless universities respond to market demand by recruiting more students. My Hegemon over-recruited, rather stupidly, so we can add another few millions to the several millions we're already being fined for misleading the government over student completions.
I'm not for breakneck expansion of university places. In institutions like mine, where jobs are being slashed, we're already increasing class sizes and losing face-to-face contact with students - this is, without any doubt, worse education. However, I do think that in a massive recession, with jobs being lost, encouraging people to reorient themselves through study is a massive public good. This government has claimed a return to Keynesian economics (spending public money to keep the economy alive during recessions): why not fund more university places as part of this, rather than give it to banks who don't pass it on, but use it to reinflate their reserves? What would these students have done instead? Claimed unemployment benefit, lost skills and motivation, and potentially condemned themselves to a much longer period of unemployment, contributing to the economic slump.
Petey's big plan to square the circle is to massively expand the provision of 2-year degrees. We run a few of these, called foundation degrees. What's missing is the third-year, which should be the culmination of the traditional degree: independent thinking and study, a dissertation, more specialisation. The alternative is three-year courses taught in two years - which obviously means missing out the time required to read, think and discuss ideas. What you'll do on these courses is repeat what the lecturer said, mechanically.
Mandy's plan is to turn places like mine into American Community Colleges - fine institutions in their own right, but a long way from the university ideal. Goodbye, any courses which analyze society or have intrinsic appeal: English literature, philosophy, politics, cultural studies, media studies, blue-sky scientific research, women's studies, most languages, history… all the interesting ones which might generate some critique of what we're up to as a society. Hello nursing, business (great job so far, guys) and legal studies.
Underlying this is, of course, class. Labour's élite are a social élite. They're largely very rich people, often privately educated, and almost all graduates of Oxford, Cambridge or sometimes one of the other élite universities (Gordon Brown was an early entrant to Edinburgh University). I'm completely convinced that - consciously or unconsciously - they have no regard for the legitimate aspirations of the working classes. To them, the poor are call-centre fodder, ASBO-bearers, salesmen and women: an undifferentiated mass who actually shouldn't aspire to a life of the mind, who shouldn't attract the same educational provisions as the traditional middle and upper class university entrants. The political class looks after itself, regardless of party. It sees the poor and can't help thinking that such people must have willed themselves into low status, that they somehow deserve to remain as they are. Its own offspring are encouraged into medicine, the law and other professions, are driven into the prestigious universities, while the proud parents ascribe this success solely to individual effort rather than to the possession of a huge set of advantages derived from wealth and social status.
Once you start from that perspective, you just know that these funding cuts are going to hit institutions which devote themselves to the education of the working classes, the poor and those with chequered educational backgrounds. No Cambridge student will find themselves condemned to tutorials of two students to a tutor. Oxford colleges won't have to forego that desktop hadron collider or the finest wine cellars in Christendom. Their teachers won't find themselves landed with more teaching and less research time.
Here, on the other hand, we will suffer. Already understaffed and undergoing more redundancies, we'll face another round of sackings, course cuts, bigger lectures, larger seminars (already so huge that individual students almost never get to speak), less research time (I haven't done any serious research in two years), poorer libraries, costs passed on to students in sneakier ways, and nastier halls of residence (but you're guaranteed that senior management won't get any less well-fed). Sure, we'll put a brave face on it. We'll pretend that replacing face-to-face discussion with online activity is modern, progressive, go-ahead pedagogy - but we'll all know the truth.
Ritzer was right. Élite-educated politicians are prepared to drop the pretence of humanist education - for the poor. We'll train the poor to do the drudgery, while even the soi-disant representatives of the working classes pull up the drawbridge and entrench their class privileges for ever.
Here's a little project for you. Try to find out how many children of politicians, company directors and other élite people went to a) state schools and b) former polytechnics and non-Russell Group universities. I'd bet a large amount that the answer is 'almost none'.
Ritzer said, amongst many other things, that universities are becoming machines for the consumption of education - whereas the model I hold dear is one in which students educate themselves through lectures, debate, reading and argument. The consumption model is clearly implied in the fast-track system: education becomes a list of facts and a certificate, rather than an intellectual and emotional experience.
You can't unwrap a proper education, shove it into your gob and swallow it. A proper education is upsetting, challenging, difficult sometimes, exciting and passionate. It changes you (hopefully for the better). It's not like a burger, or a spanner, something 'you' 'use'. It's a process in which you discover yourself and your world, and it never ends.
Thanks Peter. You turncoat. You traitor. You sinister functionary for moneyed scum. I know you're just the unconscious mouthpiece of deeper forces, but you seem to relish every attack on humanist values and collective will.
Bye-bye, education. Hello, training.
I also hugely object to the existence of a department which yokes together Business and Universities. Yes, obviously there are shared interests, but there are also (and must always be) conflicts. The role of universities is at least in part to challenge the hegemony, which at the moment is capitalism (despite the total collapse of the banking system - bankers discovered socialism as soon as government handouts were on offer). We shouldn't be content with churning out oven-ready work drones, prepared to do whatever it takes to make money for a bunch of shareholders. In the long term, businesses shouldn't want these yes-men and women either: innovation comes from critical and independent thinking. Sticking 'and universities' on the end of the department's name implies a strategy which sees education as solely training for work, subject to the demands of the market. It's wrong, wrong wrong.
So what's Pete done to us today? He's announced funding cuts amounting to £533 million, including fines for universities which over-recruited this year. What an odd decision: he likes markets, unless universities respond to market demand by recruiting more students. My Hegemon over-recruited, rather stupidly, so we can add another few millions to the several millions we're already being fined for misleading the government over student completions.
I'm not for breakneck expansion of university places. In institutions like mine, where jobs are being slashed, we're already increasing class sizes and losing face-to-face contact with students - this is, without any doubt, worse education. However, I do think that in a massive recession, with jobs being lost, encouraging people to reorient themselves through study is a massive public good. This government has claimed a return to Keynesian economics (spending public money to keep the economy alive during recessions): why not fund more university places as part of this, rather than give it to banks who don't pass it on, but use it to reinflate their reserves? What would these students have done instead? Claimed unemployment benefit, lost skills and motivation, and potentially condemned themselves to a much longer period of unemployment, contributing to the economic slump.
Petey's big plan to square the circle is to massively expand the provision of 2-year degrees. We run a few of these, called foundation degrees. What's missing is the third-year, which should be the culmination of the traditional degree: independent thinking and study, a dissertation, more specialisation. The alternative is three-year courses taught in two years - which obviously means missing out the time required to read, think and discuss ideas. What you'll do on these courses is repeat what the lecturer said, mechanically.
Mandy's plan is to turn places like mine into American Community Colleges - fine institutions in their own right, but a long way from the university ideal. Goodbye, any courses which analyze society or have intrinsic appeal: English literature, philosophy, politics, cultural studies, media studies, blue-sky scientific research, women's studies, most languages, history… all the interesting ones which might generate some critique of what we're up to as a society. Hello nursing, business (great job so far, guys) and legal studies.
Underlying this is, of course, class. Labour's élite are a social élite. They're largely very rich people, often privately educated, and almost all graduates of Oxford, Cambridge or sometimes one of the other élite universities (Gordon Brown was an early entrant to Edinburgh University). I'm completely convinced that - consciously or unconsciously - they have no regard for the legitimate aspirations of the working classes. To them, the poor are call-centre fodder, ASBO-bearers, salesmen and women: an undifferentiated mass who actually shouldn't aspire to a life of the mind, who shouldn't attract the same educational provisions as the traditional middle and upper class university entrants. The political class looks after itself, regardless of party. It sees the poor and can't help thinking that such people must have willed themselves into low status, that they somehow deserve to remain as they are. Its own offspring are encouraged into medicine, the law and other professions, are driven into the prestigious universities, while the proud parents ascribe this success solely to individual effort rather than to the possession of a huge set of advantages derived from wealth and social status.
Once you start from that perspective, you just know that these funding cuts are going to hit institutions which devote themselves to the education of the working classes, the poor and those with chequered educational backgrounds. No Cambridge student will find themselves condemned to tutorials of two students to a tutor. Oxford colleges won't have to forego that desktop hadron collider or the finest wine cellars in Christendom. Their teachers won't find themselves landed with more teaching and less research time.
Here, on the other hand, we will suffer. Already understaffed and undergoing more redundancies, we'll face another round of sackings, course cuts, bigger lectures, larger seminars (already so huge that individual students almost never get to speak), less research time (I haven't done any serious research in two years), poorer libraries, costs passed on to students in sneakier ways, and nastier halls of residence (but you're guaranteed that senior management won't get any less well-fed). Sure, we'll put a brave face on it. We'll pretend that replacing face-to-face discussion with online activity is modern, progressive, go-ahead pedagogy - but we'll all know the truth.
Ritzer was right. Élite-educated politicians are prepared to drop the pretence of humanist education - for the poor. We'll train the poor to do the drudgery, while even the soi-disant representatives of the working classes pull up the drawbridge and entrench their class privileges for ever.
Here's a little project for you. Try to find out how many children of politicians, company directors and other élite people went to a) state schools and b) former polytechnics and non-Russell Group universities. I'd bet a large amount that the answer is 'almost none'.
Ritzer said, amongst many other things, that universities are becoming machines for the consumption of education - whereas the model I hold dear is one in which students educate themselves through lectures, debate, reading and argument. The consumption model is clearly implied in the fast-track system: education becomes a list of facts and a certificate, rather than an intellectual and emotional experience.
You can't unwrap a proper education, shove it into your gob and swallow it. A proper education is upsetting, challenging, difficult sometimes, exciting and passionate. It changes you (hopefully for the better). It's not like a burger, or a spanner, something 'you' 'use'. It's a process in which you discover yourself and your world, and it never ends.
Thanks Peter. You turncoat. You traitor. You sinister functionary for moneyed scum. I know you're just the unconscious mouthpiece of deeper forces, but you seem to relish every attack on humanist values and collective will.
Bye-bye, education. Hello, training.
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
No, Peter, of course it isn't.
Peter Mandelson, silky sinister unelected eminence grise of New Labour turned silky sinister unelected eminence grise of Labour, has announced that today's supertax on bankers' bonuses isn't a punishment for their greed, hypocrisy, destruction of the economy, arrogance and failure to acknowledge that we've saved their skins.
He's right in a way: it's also a cheap and easy way to make New Labour look like it's on the side of the people for a change (it was Mandelson who said that he was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes' in response to a question about the ever-widening gap between rich and poor - despite leaving massive gaps in the tax regulations and selling the Inland Revenue's offices to a company based in a tax haven!).
It's a cynical piece of electoral politics which won't make much of a dent in the national debt. I still support it though. Many of the banks are state-owned and almost all of them are propped up by state guarantees and asset swapped. The bankers need punishing. They mentally decoupled the real economy from the financial services sector. They've bankrupted their institutions and nearly bankrupted the country, evade tax, award themselves massive bonuses and are generally partying like it's 1928.
This 50% tax on bonuses is nothing: supertax on the very highest sums once reached somewhere in the 90%+ range in the late 70s, and Thatcher only gradually reduced it.
The bankers will no doubt redouble their efforts to get the Tories re-elected. Cameron will make tutting noises about bankers until he's elected (because the Daily Mail isn't happy with them either), then resume his position (kneeling before a pinstriped crotch, mouth open). Will some bankers leave the country? Maybe. Where will they go? Somewhere the banking system's in rude health, with no angry citizens protesting over their continued beggary at the hands of financial whizzkids.
Oh dear. There's no such place. Poor bankers.
He's right in a way: it's also a cheap and easy way to make New Labour look like it's on the side of the people for a change (it was Mandelson who said that he was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes' in response to a question about the ever-widening gap between rich and poor - despite leaving massive gaps in the tax regulations and selling the Inland Revenue's offices to a company based in a tax haven!).
It's a cynical piece of electoral politics which won't make much of a dent in the national debt. I still support it though. Many of the banks are state-owned and almost all of them are propped up by state guarantees and asset swapped. The bankers need punishing. They mentally decoupled the real economy from the financial services sector. They've bankrupted their institutions and nearly bankrupted the country, evade tax, award themselves massive bonuses and are generally partying like it's 1928.
This 50% tax on bonuses is nothing: supertax on the very highest sums once reached somewhere in the 90%+ range in the late 70s, and Thatcher only gradually reduced it.
The bankers will no doubt redouble their efforts to get the Tories re-elected. Cameron will make tutting noises about bankers until he's elected (because the Daily Mail isn't happy with them either), then resume his position (kneeling before a pinstriped crotch, mouth open). Will some bankers leave the country? Maybe. Where will they go? Somewhere the banking system's in rude health, with no angry citizens protesting over their continued beggary at the hands of financial whizzkids.
Oh dear. There's no such place. Poor bankers.
Thursday, 26 November 2009
The animals looked from the pigs to the men…
How's this as a marker of how the party of the people has become merely part of the international élite, leaving behind all conscience?
Mandelson parties with Gadaffi's son
Peter Mandelson, Gadaffi's son and Cherie Blair all went on a shooting trip hosted by Lord Rothschild. Mandy and Blair didn't heft any guns themselves, just consorted with this aristo riff-raff. Rothschild's a Tory bastard, Gadaffi's a mad dictator (and their children never turn out to be lovely people), Mandelson's 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich' and Blair is a social-climber who never turned down a freebie.
Why I'm still angry after so many years of this government, I don't know. They jettisoned socialism 20 years ago (a conservative estimate), but it's the shamelessness of this particular junket that gets me. It's exactly like the party held by the pigs and men at the end of Animal Farm. The poor have no protection from the dictators and capitalists if the people's party simply wants to join in the feast.
By Toutatis, I'm actually steamingly furious about this. Really, really angry. It's just so symbolic.
Mandelson parties with Gadaffi's son
Peter Mandelson, Gadaffi's son and Cherie Blair all went on a shooting trip hosted by Lord Rothschild. Mandy and Blair didn't heft any guns themselves, just consorted with this aristo riff-raff. Rothschild's a Tory bastard, Gadaffi's a mad dictator (and their children never turn out to be lovely people), Mandelson's 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich' and Blair is a social-climber who never turned down a freebie.
Why I'm still angry after so many years of this government, I don't know. They jettisoned socialism 20 years ago (a conservative estimate), but it's the shamelessness of this particular junket that gets me. It's exactly like the party held by the pigs and men at the end of Animal Farm. The poor have no protection from the dictators and capitalists if the people's party simply wants to join in the feast.
By Toutatis, I'm actually steamingly furious about this. Really, really angry. It's just so symbolic.
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Oh look, Peter Mandelson's still a rightwing wanker!
Depressing headline of the day:
Universities to enter consumer age
This won't, of course, apply to the elite universities. Oxford, Cambridge and the institutions to which the élites send their children, will carry on in their own rather lovely way. Instead, Mandelson is determined to make universities the equivalent of McDonalds.
Let's be clear. Universities shouldn't be consumerist. Students should come here to educate themselves, with help from us. The customer-shop relationship means that they will - already do - expect to be provided with facts to be recycled, leading to a certificate.
This is just wrong. Education is a mutual process of discovery and self-discovery. The qualification is a by-product. I don't want to churn out obedient work-units, shrink-wrapped for a dumb job doing what they're told. I want to encourage bloody-mindedness, critical thinking and a thirst for intellectual exploration. Consumerism is utterly abhorrent to me, though it's hard to resist: it's passive and ideologically loaded. Universities shouldn't be forced to fall into line by an intellectual mediocrity like Mandelson, who never met a rich man he didn't like.
Mandelson says that universities should follow the demands of business rather than being closed circles: nonsense. Businesses are machines which express ideological and cultural positions. Universities should lead business, because we're the people paid to give serious thought to social concerns.
What Mandelson really wants is what this institution is hell-bent on providing: web-based learning and a craven, grovelling structure in which students are made happy by making everything easier.
Web-learning is weak. Real learning is a product of face-to-face argument and discussion, not the passive delivery of powerpoints or online fora. Real people, discussing things in real time, to each others' faces, is a profound experience. It's also expensive.
I want my students to be happy. However, the 'consumer-led' model means 'the customer is always right'. They're not always right. One of the deepest, most productive experiences of my student life was the (frequent) revelation that there are multiple viewpoints on any subjects, and that my position was stupid, weak or ill thought through. My tutors were never that unkind, but the discovery of your own ignorance is a seminal moment. Paying customers don't want to be contradicted - good students want to hear opposing and alternative views.
The other problem with fees and the consumer model is that it implies that the only beneficiary of the education available is that one individual student. In the humanist tradition, we all benefit from an educated individual. The learning spreads through the community via that individual's daily life and work - and so we should all appreciate, and pay for, that education, knowing that the cash will be returned via a) the higher tax paid and b) the social good done throughout the individual's life. Learning must not be a selfish, greedy experience - it should be undertaken for the public good.
And like I say, all this will only impact places like mine. Ritzer's right - it's one kind of education for us, and the old model for the élites who impose this stuff on everybody else. It doesn't matter though. Resistance is utterly futile.
On a lighter note, wasn't University Challenge easy last night? I even got the question about Laplacean mathematics right!
Universities to enter consumer age
This won't, of course, apply to the elite universities. Oxford, Cambridge and the institutions to which the élites send their children, will carry on in their own rather lovely way. Instead, Mandelson is determined to make universities the equivalent of McDonalds.
Let's be clear. Universities shouldn't be consumerist. Students should come here to educate themselves, with help from us. The customer-shop relationship means that they will - already do - expect to be provided with facts to be recycled, leading to a certificate.
This is just wrong. Education is a mutual process of discovery and self-discovery. The qualification is a by-product. I don't want to churn out obedient work-units, shrink-wrapped for a dumb job doing what they're told. I want to encourage bloody-mindedness, critical thinking and a thirst for intellectual exploration. Consumerism is utterly abhorrent to me, though it's hard to resist: it's passive and ideologically loaded. Universities shouldn't be forced to fall into line by an intellectual mediocrity like Mandelson, who never met a rich man he didn't like.
Mandelson says that universities should follow the demands of business rather than being closed circles: nonsense. Businesses are machines which express ideological and cultural positions. Universities should lead business, because we're the people paid to give serious thought to social concerns.
What Mandelson really wants is what this institution is hell-bent on providing: web-based learning and a craven, grovelling structure in which students are made happy by making everything easier.
Web-learning is weak. Real learning is a product of face-to-face argument and discussion, not the passive delivery of powerpoints or online fora. Real people, discussing things in real time, to each others' faces, is a profound experience. It's also expensive.
I want my students to be happy. However, the 'consumer-led' model means 'the customer is always right'. They're not always right. One of the deepest, most productive experiences of my student life was the (frequent) revelation that there are multiple viewpoints on any subjects, and that my position was stupid, weak or ill thought through. My tutors were never that unkind, but the discovery of your own ignorance is a seminal moment. Paying customers don't want to be contradicted - good students want to hear opposing and alternative views.
The other problem with fees and the consumer model is that it implies that the only beneficiary of the education available is that one individual student. In the humanist tradition, we all benefit from an educated individual. The learning spreads through the community via that individual's daily life and work - and so we should all appreciate, and pay for, that education, knowing that the cash will be returned via a) the higher tax paid and b) the social good done throughout the individual's life. Learning must not be a selfish, greedy experience - it should be undertaken for the public good.
And like I say, all this will only impact places like mine. Ritzer's right - it's one kind of education for us, and the old model for the élites who impose this stuff on everybody else. It doesn't matter though. Resistance is utterly futile.
On a lighter note, wasn't University Challenge easy last night? I even got the question about Laplacean mathematics right!
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
The Sun scuttles back to the Tories - good
As the other media outlets have trumpeted today, The Sun has, after 12 years, returned to the Conservative Party fold, with a front page declaration festooned with a Union Flag (are they suggesting that Labour isn't British?).
All this is very self-important. The Sun likes to think and say that it wins elections for whichever party it supports - it's an equally convincing argument that The Sun supports whoever it thinks its readers support. Lots of data here
The Sun recommended that its readers vote Labour for the past three elections, but it never supported Labour. Its reasons were always hedged and reluctant, and often negative - based on the disarray in which the Conservative Party found itself. Essentially, The Sun supported Tony Blair and his clique, rather than Labour values. The Sun was and is racist, selfish, consumerist, nationalist, anti-green, homophobic, militaristic and misogynistic. For a few years, New Labour captured the Labour Party and catered, shamefully, for these positions. The Sun didn't change - Labour did, and deserves opprobrium for its shameful capitulation to the worst aspects of British culture.
Will readers of The Sun be better off under the Tories? I wouldn't think so. They're working class individualists - not natural supporters of the Etonian land-and-inherited-wealth toffs who really, really don't give a fuck about the poor. Sure, they'll toss some selfish, racist red meat to white van man, but they don't have the interests of the working class at heart. Sun readers like the NHS for instance - the Tories hate and fear it.
But that's irrelevant - The Sun and all the News International papers don't care about their readers either: their writers care about the opinions and commercial interests of Rupert Murdoch, who wants to run the world and wants to run it as a capitalist oligarchy free from competition by boring old state-funded, objective BBC - exactly what the Tories will give him. That's why the declaration was today, and not during the election campaign, as usually happens. It came out the day after Brown and Mandelson made good, fighting speeches. Rather than reporting news, The Sun decided to ruin the Labour conference and help the Tories by intervening in the political process. Mmm…ethical.
Fuck The Sun (sorry, I'm quite angry). It's too stupid to be as evil as the Daily Mail, but it's still a cancer on the public sphere.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Education educashon educashun
Kate reminds me that there's now no government department with the word 'education' in its title. So much for 'education education education'. Instead, Mandelson's Business department is now responsible for research as The Guardian notes, so if you aren't designing weapons or commercial stuff, you may as well give up. How very Thatcherite.
Thursday, 26 February 2009
My huge piles… of books
Yet again, Santa brings me more books. If Mandelson's evil plans about the Mail slow down the flow then I'll have is head on a spike. Two more 'histories' of Britain (Layamon's Brut from about 1215 and Nennius's Historia Brittonum from c. 833) and l'Abbat's 1734 The Art of Fencing - might pick up some interesting forgotten moves.
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Hazel Blears: shut up and feck off
Oh goody, Hazel Blears is in The Guardian telling us that it's the fault of the 'commentariat' that public political discourse has been weakened. Now as it happens, I've met Hazel twice this year, once at a party policy forum, and once randomly at Birmingham New Street Station. At the forum, she and her henchmen refused to acknowledge any dissent and made it clear that mere party members were there to support the government and nothing more, and when I talked to her at New Street she was astonishingly disloyal to Gordon and suggested we should get Alastair Campbell back (how prophetic).
What really annoys me about this is that New Labour took several outdated lessons from the Democrats: that party members are less important than donors, that opinion polls serve only to help repackage predetermined policies, and that debate should revolve solely around marketing rather than ideology. Think on this: Howard Dean's 50 state strategy has won today. He said that Democrats should get activists out on the street in every state, not the 5 or 6 which were seen as battlegrounds. For that, you need enthusiastic volunteers and party members who aren't treated as embarrassing relics to be tapped for cash when your favourite hedge fund managers are short of a bob or two.
She also says that 'commentary has taken over from investigation or news reporting' - hardly surprising given politicians' reluctance to face anybody less cuddly than Richard and Judy. I'm so bored with Radio 4 having to say 'no minister was available for comment'. Let's be honest, Hazel. You'd rather have your awful ministerial blog and David Cameron would far rather concentrate on the toe-curlingly embarrassing Webcameron than be filletted by a decent interviewer or reporter - any defence of the political high ground from you is sheer cant.
I know I'm starting to rant now, but this got to me even more. Remember, she's having a go at journalists: 'And if you can wield influence and even power, without ever standing for office or being held to account by an electorate, it further undermines our democracy'.
Er… Peter Mandelson - Baron of Foy and Hartlepool. Now has a senior ministerial position without ever facing the electorate. He has a vote in a legislative chamber for the rest of his life, and never has to face MPs. Lord Adonis - the most malign influence on education since Margaret Thatcher snatched free milk from little children when she was an education minister. He's there for ever too. Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre appear to have their own keys to Downing Street: not much accountability there. The list goes on and on and on - so it's a bit rich of this appalling representative of the worst clique the party has ever seen to tell us that it's the journalists who are distorting the public sphere.
Most astoundingly, Hazel doesn't know what she's talking about. She declares that the vast majority of political blogs are rightwing Tory sites (when actually they're just the ones that rightwing newspapers cite a lot). She's clearly not familiar with the blogosphere at all. 'Mostly', she writes, 'political blogs are written by people with a disdain for the political system and for politicians…'. She got that right: her useless and no doubt adviser-written blog lacks any passion or any sign of ideological commitment. I despise the Tory bloggers she names (Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes etc), but her rant is just the eternal cry of the know-nothing. She could start here
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