The Education White Paper Through The Medium Of Tory Cartooning

We're off on strike tomorrow in defence of our 'gold-plated' pensions, alongside such subversives as the ATL (first strike in 127 years) and their Eton College members.

I didn't get a full-time job until I was 32, thanks to the system of extra qualifications and university understaffing. I'm now 35 and still don't have a permanent post, so can't raise a mortgage etc. So my pension contributions won't furnish me with a gold-plated hearing aid, let alone a heli-pad.

I was looking for a cartoon by Matt of the Daily Telegraph (I have very reactionary parents) from the 1990s to illustrate the ways in which universities will now have to recruit. In it, two men walk past a doorway festooned with flashing lights and signs reading 'Girls Girls Girls' and 'Free Drinks'. One says to the other 'Careful: it could be a university'. If you've got it, PLEASE scan this in for me - it's not on the web anywhere.

Like America, there'll be sectors. Some will target the Swot Pound: oak panelling, libraries full of leather-bound books, cloisters. We'll call this Hermione Granger University. Others will market themselves on the en-suite jacuzzis in the accommodation and the hotness of the undergraduates. Giggs College. Yet more will advertise the lifestyle available in the bustling metropolis (in my institution's case, 'All The Grey Peas You Can Eat'. Our former use of a football stadium for teaching might yet be a selling point.

But there's a serious point. Ritzer's 'The McDonaldisation of the University' posited an HE sector in which everything becomes easier and more casual (our essay submission office is named - without irony - 'Here2Help'). No student will ever be made to feel like they've not worked hard enough. The glitz and luxury will take centre stage. Glossy brochures and peripheral attractions will replace the serious business of educating yourself.  Education is to become a consumer experience like a gap year with a few books sneaked in - not a process in which the adventure and the adversity is that of the intellect learning to make sense (or often not making sense) of oneself and the world.

This theme-park education will inevitably lead to exclusion. The poor and the black will come to places like mine to do business-friendly qualifications which gain them entry into the exciting world of data-entry and call centres. To these students, we won't be native guides in the forest of learning: we'll be the surly checkout assistants who impede their progress.

The mavericks will go to a small number of high-powered élite institutions before living meaningful lives in Silicon Valley or CERN. And the dim, over-privileged children of the Permanent Ruling Classes will carry on doing Fine Art in cloistered, honey-walled universities with a fleet of servants and punts for their leisured hours, secure in the knowledge that the House of Commons, Sothebys and the investment banks will welcome them with open arms.

Delightful, no?

Should I worry?

The central quad at The Hegemon is littered with Asbestos Removal vans. I'm tempted to point out that there are more poisonous ideas and people sickening us all, but that would be bitter, wouldn't it?

Oh, well. I escaped for lunch with the department's counterculture (Zoot and his sidekick) and some books have arrived in the post: Ritzer and Atalay's Readings in Globalization (a free inspection copy), Mike Salter's The Castles and Moated Mansions of Shropshire (for walking purposes) and two books by Homi Bhabha which I've read but never got round to buying, Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture - great postcolonial theory texts.

Cameron's coming for YOU!

David Cameron has announced his big plan for 'saving' the state education sector (i.e. the one he has no personal experience of, having attended Eton).

"With our plans, if you want to become a teacher – and get funding for it – you need a 2:2 or higher. And we will also make sure we get some of the best graduates into teaching by offering to pay off their student loan. As long as you've got a first or 2:1 in maths or a rigorous science subject from a good university, you can apply."

1. Nobody with a third-class degree will be accepted onto teacher-training courses. I'm fine with that.
2. Nobody from former polytechnics will be accepted.

Oh dear. That's all my students. It implies that anybody studying at a former poly is thick. Only… some subjects were and are specialities of ex-polys. They weren't lesser universities, as they're treated now, but specialist institutions.

Many people attend such institutions because they can't or don't want to move away. They have family commitments, or jobs (part-time students are much more common in ex-polys). Staying at home is also a logical response to poverty - not everyone has Cameron's money to support their kids. Likewise, we specialise in second-chance education for mature students, whereas Cameron's vision of education is one of lithe young 18-year olds playing croquet (for some) and surly poor and ethnic students learning the rudiments of plumbing in dour Northern towns (for the rest of us). There's no vision of education as liberation or empowerment here - instead it's a means of entrenching privilege. Sure, a few outstanding poor students will be plucked from Skid Row to prove that the system works, but there sure ain't any commitment to raising the sky for everybody.

It's perfectly possible to end up at a low-entry institution thanks to poor quality schooling or personal failings. I did rather badly at A-level and got into my university (Bangor) via the Clearing system, then finished by first degree top of the year (3 prizes too). Some people blossom late: Cameron will condemn you to the mistakes of your teenage years.

What the hell does Cameron define as a 'good' university? I suspect it's very easy to get high degree results from rich kids with all the resources in the world, who've been trained to assume that they can do whatever they want if they work hard enough and who've always been treated as golden children. It's harder to motivate and equip students who have children, a job, a difficult educational background and still manage to study. I'm hugely more proud of those of my students who've struggled against huge disadvantages and gained a 2.2 than I am of those who stroll in, do no work and get a 2.1.

But no. For the Conservatives, a 'good' university is one with a rowing club, lots of privately-educated students and a good deal of prestige.

The Tory plan (explained in this article) is that the division between polytechnics and universities will be reinstated. On the face of it, that's fine. The polytechnics specialised in high-quality teaching, often of vocational and science-based courses. Many of them did these better than the universities: my own institution was nationally famous for the range and quality of its languages teaching. Then in 1992, they were forced to become universities, and started to look like 2nd-class cousins - judged for the quality of their research output despite never having been funded or encouraged to pursue research before, judged for their 'low' grade intake, despite having a commitment to their local communities and widening participation.

The Tories don't want to reinstate the potentially useful division of labour between universities and polytechnics. Instead, they want a two-tier system in which rich posh kids go to prestigious places to become leaders of society, and the rest go to their local community college to become call-centre drones and mobile phone salemen. Yet again, Ritzer's McDonaldisation thesis is proved accurate.

Cameron's plan is nothing more than thinly-disguised class war.

Now that Kate's instituted it, I nominate David Cameron as Wanker of the Week 2.

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.

Neigh thank you…

Many thanks to the anonymous individual who sent me a sparkly pink book entitled Katie Price's Perfect Ponies. I'm not sure who. Someone noticed Animal Stories for Under-Fives and Animal Stories for Girls on my shelves (no, I don't know how they came into my possession) - perhaps that's who it was. The other possibility is Cynical Ben. A full review will follow.

I confess myself confused. 'Fess up!

In other book news, I've received a replacement for my missing The Day of the Triffids, Angela Carter's Shadow Dance (to my shame, I thought I had everything she wrote) and a free copy of George Ritzer's Globalization: A Basic Text, which will be good for students.

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'.

Dark waves wash over me

It's becoming quite a depressing week: bad class yesterday, evidence of grade inflation, management machinations are reducing the space for creative and flexible subjects, meetings are springing up all over, I was told a disgusting anecdote about a student's trip to a zoo and there's no end in sight.

Still, another book turned up in the post today. Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society - it summarises what's happening to this place perfectly.

No moral compass

Some evil bastard at my university has sent me a flyer inviting me to a conference on foundation degrees called 'Investing for Success'. The keynote speaker is Tesco's personnel director of education, talking about the Tesco degree in retail (outsourced, of course, to some opportunistic bullshitters). What do they think I can learn? How to dumb down? How to subjugate all academic and ethical concerns to the mighty dollar? I suspect that the Retail Foundation Degree doesn't mention union rights. I wonder if it includes modules on systematic £billion tax evasion using the offshore economy? That's not exactly investing…

Leicester University should be ashamed of its behaviour in legitimising this kind of astroturf. It's exactly the kind of limiting, reductive fodder for proles that our governments have decided is good enough - a simulation of education which (Ritzer's McDonaldized University) ensures a compliant supply of drones (sorry, flexible workers) to keep corporate Britain in school fees and gymkhana kit. The minimum-wage, benefit-dependent proletariat think they're being educated while the nobs are getting sherry in tutorials down in Cambridge. Why shouldn't the poor get a share of the sherry, a couple of hours' personal attention from an academic at the top of her or his game? Perhaps with that kind of 'investment', they'd get a lot more out of it than an overconfident toff with all the advantages.

Ian McEwan imagined this dystopia in skin-crawling detail years ago in The Child In Time, as did John Christopher in The Guardians.