Rhodes: bang to rights

One of my favourite writers can be found over at Days of Enlightenment. He's an Eeyore-ish character: grumpy, depressed and misanthropic. The only person he find more disappointing than the broad mass of humanity is, well, himself. It makes great reading.

Today, he has managed to break through the miasma of self-criticism to spend a few minutes contemplating the output of Peter Rhodes, the world's worst local journalist, in pursuit of a forlorn plea for love thinly disguised (like a decent Renaissance sonnet) as a rejection of the romantic chase:

talentless, self-Googling, weasel-faced, regional hack Peter Rhodes; a woman-hating, over-the-hill-that-never-had-a-gradient, bullying, benign tumor of a man spouting half-baked toytown reactionary opinion so uninspired that it makes you think that maybe Littlejohn isn’t so bad after all. To be fair, I shouldn’t knock Rhodes. He provides a valuable service for which I am eternally grateful. Namely that I often think the person I hate most in the world is myself. Then I remember that pointless prick is still breathing and things don’t seem quite so bad after all. So thanks for that, Pete.

'Day's is usually a gentle sort. He reminds me of Moley in The Wind in the Willows: shy, retiring and a thoroughly good chap. He's worth devoting a few minutes of your time to.

Happy Christmas, love Vole

On the abortive but fun Map Twats walk yesterday was the author of Days of Enlightenment - which is a brilliant read, nothing like mine. He told me that his father was reading the copy of David Peace's GB84 that I'd given Mr Enlightenment for his birthday. I was pleased that somebody I don't know was enjoying it, and it made me wonder about the afterlives of all the presents we give.

I usually give books, sometimes music, sometimes other things, but I always think carefully and try to suit the gift to the person - sometimes with a private joke shared only by us or me. This may not always be successful. So what happens to all these gifts? Is a book read, re-read and treasured? Is it read once and kept only because it was a present? Or is the gift considered to be the experience of receiving and the object and unimportant symptom? Perhaps the book is lent on, passed around on reccommendation, given away or lost, the inscriptions fading and becoming more puzzling the further it gets from the original giver and recipient.

I have several thousand books, many presents or second-hand, and many of these are dedicated to unknown people with names found only in the past: Mabel, Flo, Edwin and Gladys, all presumably dead, all of whom recieved books as tokens of love, respect, passion, commiseration, achievement, perhaps even spite or rejection - puzzles to be considered in conjunction with the texts. Why give someone a work of critical theory for their birthday? Why is a guide to the gravestones of famous people a cheery Christmas present? Why did Clinton give Walt Whitman, the rampantly homosexual poet of America, to Monica Lewinsky? (There's a PhD in that). Then there's the question of disposal. Have I acquired all the books that speak of passion between people of bygone generations because, symbolic exchange complete, the texts are mere husks to be discarded? Perhaps some illiterate or ashamed children threw them out, or the love dimmed and the books could no longer be tolerated.

In each of these short declarations, there's a story. I assume that you write in all the books you give away - I do. If I really don't like them, I buy them a whodunnit and copy the last line with the murderer's name onto the flyleaf: it's even more annoying than tip-exing the killer's identity on the last page. Another piece of one-upmanship is to give them a book in a language they don't know and affect surprise: 'Really? Of course my pronunciation's a little rusty these days, but I thought everybody had a smattering of Basque. I still have the receipt…'

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'.

An alternative view of Wolverhampton Wanderers

It's safe to say that 'Days of Enlightenment' isn't a fan, judging by his splendidly written invective.