You're Fired. Enjoy your summer.

Hi all. It's Friday afternoon and it's been a mixed week, to put it politely.

Last weekend was rather glorious: a trip to The Globe for a matinee performance of As You Like It with my students (and ex-students, and their kids) and colleagues. I have to confess to having a heart of stone when it comes to Shakespearian comedy, despite being well aware (before you all write in) that comedy = happy endings in those days. However, this performance was a triumph. It was already ahead of last year's Antony and Cleopatra because lightning and thunder were conspicuously absent. All the coincidences and unconvincing doubling were played up and the knob gags and so on were done like panto, which I thought really worked. The actors from star to bit part were seriously impressive, doing everything from saucy bits to tenderness so well: I could even see a few people wiping away tears as the couples got hitched and Rosalind was reunited with her father (sorry to ruin the ending for you). I definitely wasn't one of them. Not at all.

So that was good: fine theatre, Greek food with friends, catching up with our graduates and then driving home past Walsall Stadium in the rain where – I found out later – Elton John was performing to the more tasteless of some other friends. I wasn't sure whom to feel sorriest for: them for preferring Elton John to – for example – rolling around in shattered glass, or Elton John for going from private jets and global fame to standing in the rain next to a motorway in the shabbiest, tiniest football stadia for miles. It's no dignified way to end a career.

After that, the week nosedived quite significantly. There were high points - presenting a preliminary version of the politicians' novels project to our staff conference and seeing other colleagues' research (one paper on Victorian prisoners was called Pros and Cons: I do love a good pun), and meeting our external examiners, who think we do a marvellous job. If only our management would say the same. Sadly, however, and with some truly wonderful exceptions, it's beginning to feel like there's nothing we can say or do which would persuade them not to treat us as some kind of incomprehensible enemy. There's an awful lot I can't say in public, but it's been one of those weeks in which jobs.ac.uk has been refreshed constantly.

My own worries aside, most of the week was taken up by preparing for and representing my professorial colleagues, 19 of whom have been shortlisted for redundancy. Why 19? Because 20 triggers a range of legal responsibilities which might impede management's (ahem) 'determined' style. It's been a long time since this institution felt or behaved like a collegiate body united by a set of educational values. Instead we get corporate platitudes and a 'leadership' (they love that word, and attend seminars on what it means) which derives its tactics and sense of self-worth from episodes of The Apprentice.



This time some of the professors are in line for the sack and others are up for bonus payments (as are lots of the senior management team, who consume lots of carrots but never catch sight of a stick). I have bored a lot of them with my views on this, and intend to carry on (what's the point of being a governor otherwise?) but I may as well rehearse the arguments here. Why stop at boring those around me when I can do it to The Internet?

In the corporate world, ordinary employees receive a salary for doing their jobs well, and get sacked for not doing them well (or, thanks to the Tories, for pretty much any non-existent infringement). The senior executives get massive salaries but can't be expected to do their jobs well without even more massive bonus payments. These are supposedly performance-linked, which has led to – inter alia – the banking crash. If you're offered a bonus for hitting targets, you're going to suggest short-term ones which are easy to fix rather than ones which are good for the organisation. Nor, if you're a bonus recipient, should you ever mention your sneaking suspicion that success is rarely attributable to individuals.

However, if you temporarily forget that corporate stupidity affects the wider economy and society, you might just about justify this on free-market capitalist grounds. My problem is that academia has been invaded by these corporate blackmailers, in person or in spirit. Fewer and fewer senior educational managers are academics, and those who are have sold out to the discourse of leadership and reward. It's below-inflation pay settlements for the workforce, and retainers and performance bonuses for themselves. These are, of course, in case they take their talent elsewhere. Personally I would invite anyone making such veiled threats to try their luck, but I'm heavily outnumbered on the board and the decisions are made in private sub-committees by people who speak the same language.

What is success in relation to a Higher Education institution? Is it increased recruitment? We could pack them in - but we might not be able to serve their needs successfully. Is is 'student satisfaction'? We have the National Student Survey, invoked in hushed terms at every meeting. We could ace that: just give everyone high grades and replace the library with a corporately-branded coffee area (this is why in the US the American Football coach is more highly-paid than the vice-chancellor). Is it attainment? We can fiddle with the grading algorithm like all the other universities. For every Key Performance Indicator, there's a way to fiddle the result so that someone gets a fat cheque at the end, as though any achievement – meaningful or not – is the result of one go-getting Leader.

So far, so seedily familiar. That boat has sailed. We all expect academic executives to behave (dress, speak) like those they see as their peers in the private sector. Whenever I say anything like this to them you can see the eyes roll as they wonder if I've just arrived from a WEA class circa 1937. But even though I'm not and never expect to be a professor, I want to weep at this extension of corporate amorality from administration to education (and oh yes, my appraisal includes the category 'appearance' but not 'intellect'):

In fact it's worse: the executives find ways to blame everybody for failure, while jealously guarding the rewards of success. With the professors, they're getting both carrot and stick. Nobody here doubts that some the profs may be exhausted, burned out or distracted (some might even just be plain lazy), but the management's decision to arbitrarily select a couple of appraisal points without any critical judgement smacks of contempt. It implies that professors are educational colossi, striding across the pedagogical landscape without any involvement with the rest of the place. It suggests that their achievements are the result of heroic solo labour, and their failures are purely personal. Never mind that the benchmarks are artificial, that research funding is not distributed fairly either here or in the sector as a whole, that other duties other than grant income or REF-able research is valuable and essential. Never mind that giving a Prof all the time needed for those papers requires everyone else to do their teaching and pastoral work, and diverts resources from collective effort to the Heroic model.

No: let's treat them as isolated demigods, masters of their own fates, regardless of local or wider conditions: educational, financial or emotional.

I'm reminded of a cheap TV show from some years back: Pets Win Prizes. This is what bothers me most about the Night of the Long Professorial Knives. Despite the protestations of fair play and impartial criteria, it seems to me that the twin approaches of the sack for some and cash rewards for others is the final power-play by an administration (not just here) that has got above itself. In theory – very much in theory, sadly – the Professors are the academic conscience of a university, particular one that isn't run by the academic staff. Their reputations and body of work enables them to contribute to the fundamental values and direction of the institution, informed by long experience and critical abilities. The title of 'professor' contains within itself a statement that what they do is more than a job: they profess a set of beliefs or values which transcend their formal terms of employment.

All this goes out of the window once the professor is left wondering whether the next phone call is to had her the price of a good holiday or summon her to an exit interview. Who will challenge (constructively or not) anything that happens when their are such serious consequences? You'd have to be hard as nails to resist the tide in this way or – like me – resigned to finding fulfilment in my small but steady academic niche rather than in the warm glow of management's regard. It's not good enough. My colleagues and I are summarily dismissed as union hacks: we would say this, wouldn't we? We no longer have any impact because the academic staff, like all the others, are no longer colleagues of the executive but work for it and should just shut up. This is why some of the executive refers to 'the university' when they mean themselves. I was always under the impression that 'the university' includes students, academics, support staff, the executive and all sorts of other people. The point of having a confident, self-critical and autonomous professoriate is that they can keep a check on the executive's schemes without being dismissed – as I and my UCU colleagues are – of being the 'usual suspects'. They might not always live up to this role, but they never will if they can be fired at will or be handed tips by an avuncular VC.

Last night, I went to Symphony Hall to see Andris Nelsons' last performance as conductor or the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Between the pieces, members of the orchestra spoke movingly of their relationship with him, and afterwards Nelsons gave a lovely speech about them, and the value of music and the arts to society. It was blindingly obvious that to him, the old model of the conductor as some sort of musical Mussolini bending the orchestral peons to his will was completely outdated. Instead, Nelsons built on the existing skills of the orchestra and introduced them to new ways of seeing music, to new repertoires, to new horizons. With collective goodwill, both he and the members of the CBSO part company improved by the experience.

I think it's time university executives shook off the embarrassing management models of Enron and Lehman Brothers. Universities have been around a hell of a lot longer than these corporate monsters, and contain enough collective wisdom to succeed on their own terms. These fads come and go, and we should rise above them. Let's learn from the orchestra, the convent, the commune rather than fall for every airport self-help huckster breezing through.

Last night was a transcendent experience. This morning I sat next to a dignified and professional man as he begged for his job, his livelihood and his personal and professional pride, watched across the table by a man in a suit who kept saying that he didn't have time for this. For all the abstract points I've outlined above, this is what it comes down too: sleek bonus-seeking sharks forcing honest people to justify their existence in the most reductive terms.

Progress, eh? Anyway, I'm off to a funeral, which in this context seems about the right way to end the week.

Despatches from the picket line

So here I am, back at my desk after our first 2 hour strike in pursuit of our pay claim. In case you haven't been following it, we've been awarded 1%. Given that prices are rising at at least double that, it's a pay cut. Not the first one either: inflation's been up to 4% and our pay awards have been as low as 0.5%. When inflation is taken into account, my salary is back to 2008 levels, though my duties are very much of 2014 vintage.

To make matters worse, our pensions have been cut, our pension contributions increased and our retirement dates extended far into the future. So far, my retirement date is 2048, and it will be extended further than that before then. I fully expect to be commuting to work on a jet-pack, as a bag of bones hanging limply from a sentient metal exoskeleton, while some robot Vice-Chancellor demands to know why I'm not using the 24 hour telepathic feedback system installed for the Martian exchange students. What really depresses me is that we'll never recruit a new generation of academics. Students graduate with massive debts to pay off, and won't be attracted by a profession in which research and teaching (the good bits) are rewarded by ever-decreasing salaries, while becoming a sharp-suited upper-management axe-wielder attracts vast pay, perks and prestige.

And as if to ad insult to injury, the university's management ha budgeted for below cost-of-living settlements for the next four years, which means that teaching staff will have got poorer for an entire decade. Is the same true of senior management? Of course not: rather a lot of them are on £100,000+, while the VC is on significantly more than £200,000. They negotiate their contracts individually, making a case to a hand-picked bunch of chaps and chapesses just like them. They need to be 'retained' by massive salaries of course: shame they don't value our service just the same. Take the Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, who had a handy little pay rise to cover his gas bill this year: this charming gentleman is offering 1% to academic staff and refuses to raise support staff salaries to a living wage. Thankfully his new salary enables him to keep body and soul together – Sir Keith has gone from a pitiful £269,000 to a more reasonable £374,000, a modest increase of only 39%. No wonder there's nothing left in the kitty for the cleaners and teachers.

So, off we went for our strike today. In an additional burst of petty spitefulness, our Executive decided that our 2 hour strike would be punished by docking an entire day's pay, so we'll be seeing them in court very soon, as I cheerily informed the head of HR when she calm skulking round. Hoping to see a pathetic, reduced turn-out, she was greeted by a large rumbustious group which was receiving a lot of support from students despite the vile and disingenuous propaganda circulated by the management and students' union, which is sadly little more than a marketing wing of the university. Management claimed that our strike was 'disruptive' - failing conspicuously to recognise that locking us out for a full day is rather more disruptive than 2 hours of action.

Interestingly, the head of HR told the governors that they were sticking to the 'nationally agreed' 1% settlement. Now, call me a pedantic old teacher of English literature and communications, but I was under the impression that an 'agreement' needed two or more parties,

a negotiated and typically legally binding arrangement between parties as to a course of action

rather than the various members of UCEA, the employers' association , and that the poor illiterate must have mistyped the word 'imposed'. Either that, or she was deliberately misleading the governors, and I wouldn't like to believe that.

We're on strike again next week, and again the week after. Another day's pay lost, more disruption for students. We don't like it, but it's nothing compared with the tatty, demoralised, exhausted and downgraded condition higher education will be in if we let these grasping bureaucrats turn what used to be a collegiate profession into a low-rent, low-trust, low-quality service industry.

Oops: almost forgot. Kittens for the local paper.

'What do we want? Fair pay in HE!' Best picket line ever. 

Return of the Son of the Friday Conundrum.

One of my colleagues posed an intriguing question yesterday: if we were asked to nominate one book that all humanities, law and social science students should be given when they arrived at the university, what would it be?

It appealed to my deeply nerdy list-making side - a bit Desert Island Discs, a bit High Fidelity. The honest answer is the that question induced a state of indecisive paralysis. All students? If it was a different book for each subject area, that would be easy. Catch 22 or Fahrenheit 451 for the War Studies, Uniformed Studies and other military subjects. Thoreau's Walden for philosophers. Ben Goldacre's Bad Science for the social scientists, or perhaps some Goffman or Durkheim. Barthes' Mythologies for Cultural Studies, Flat Earth News for the broadcasting and journalism kids. Everyone would get Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing of course, but that's a guide rather than something that would blow their minds and mark the end of school and the start of a new educational adventure. I'd love to give them a radical history of Britain and its neighbours, because all the wonderful bits of British history are excluded from school curricula: the Chartists, Tolpuddle, the Luddites, Rebecca Riots, Tonypandy, the General Strike, the Lollards, Jack of Kent, the Commonwealth, John Lilburne, Winstanley, the rebellions and the workers' organisations, 1798, the Wild Geese, 1916, Y Mudiad Cymraeg, the Plough and the Stars, the NUWM, the Clearances and so on. Likewise the evils of the British polity are never mentioned: the Empire is presented as a cuddly social club and foreigners as largely puzzlingly ungrateful.

That's really the important point for me. So many schools now are exam factories – despite the best efforts of the teachers at the chalkface – in which the league tables and the school's reputation massively outweighs the purpose of education: not to inculcate facts in a robotic fashion, but to encourage weirdos, rebels and free-thinkers who might just come up with new ways of living and new ways of loving. But no. Instead, from Eton to Scumbag Comprehensive, the emphasis is on Knowing Your Place, whether that's at the top or the bottom. There's a direct link between Etonian Cameron not having a single unorthodox economic idea despite doing PPE at Oxford and hordes of young folk leaving school fit only to serve coffee or sell mobile phones. It's not an accident: the plan is to produce a workforce of limited, obedient drones grateful for the minimum wage while the elite jealously guard their privileges. Eton might have better facilities but its purpose is identical to the poorest school: to maintain the status quo.

The population you eventually get from children who have spent 20 years training to pass exams is not one which will change the world: if you look at the inventors, economists, theorists, scientists and philosophers who have done it, you'll often find that they didn't fit very well into the sausage machine, but carved out enough space to retain their weirdness, while finding sympathetic allies, teachers and mentors who encouraged them to reach beyond the mundane. If my students are trained to hope for nothing more than mundanity, this country will become a stagnant pool of mediocrity and wasted talent. Look at the economy: crashed and burned by two generations of economists and city types buried deep in standard mathematical models who either couldn't or wouldn't see the obvious truth – that their models would impoverish us all for decades to come. There were dissenting voices, but nowhere influential. The finance ministries, boardrooms and (sadly) the universities were stuffed with people keen not to rock the boat while they and their friends got rich. No wonder Manchester University's economics students are in open rebellion, and all power to them.

When they get to university, a lot of these students have had their natural curiosity ground down. They're often not sure why they're here at all, so automatic has the process been. The effect is depressing: without the enthusiasm which comes with choices freely made and dreams potentially fulfilled, university feels like school, a place attended on sufferance. Too many students expect to be given answers suitable to passing exams, rather than seeking out questions which will expand their consciousnesses and their sense of cultural and social place. Not all of them, of course: there are always lots of lateral thinkers, odd-bods and weirdos restless and curious enough to want something more. My sense of the student body twists in the wind depending on whether today's seminar consisted of passionate arguments or total silence from a bunch of people who haven't bothered to do the reading.

So back to the books. What we need is a book or small selection of books which definitively communicate a new start, a new intellectual mode to incoming students. Ones which will start the process of widening their horizons and flexing their cerebral muscles. I asked my contacts on Twitter. Suggestions included Kafka and Camus, Chuck Pahlaniuk's Fight Club, George Orwell's essays or 1984, Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen to avoid Death By Powerpoint, Bleak House (I'd go for Hard Times over that if I had to choose Dickens but excellent bookshop owner Dave makes a compelling case), The Selfish Gene, Bartleby the Scrivener, AP Herbert, Douglas Adams (me), Caleb Williams, Middlemarch, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (tempting, but enormous), Midgley's The Myths We Live By, which I would second whole-heartedly), Ant and Dec's autobiography (thanks, head of the university press office) and the Quran. In the United States, lots of colleges ask students in every subject to read the same book as an introduction: Random House's selection (thanks for the link, @RobertaWedge) is a little too triumphalist and/or soft-centred for my tastes.

My personal favourite is Walden but lots of these appeal. So, over to you: if you were asked to administer a swift literary kick to the head to a diverse bunch of students taking a massive range of subjects, what would it be?

From the highest of horses: a sermon to a plagiarist.

I got an email this morning from a student who failed her first assignment and partially plagiarised the re-sit. Because I'm in a preachy mood, I sent her a long, personal and emotional email about the value of education and in particular, of doing an English literature degree.

Obviously now I'm cringing at the thought of it being passed round for the cynical amusement of my students, but there's always the possibility of my words striking a chord. Embarrassing as it is, here's what I said to her, lightly edited to avoid identification.

I really want you to think about why you're here. Nobody's making you take a degree, and we operate under the assumption that you're enthusiastic about studying literature, even if individual texts aren't your favourites. If you see modules as obstacles to get over (or around), then trying to cheat or take shortcuts makes perfect sense, but we will catch you. We don't want you to treat your time here like that. We want to help you widen your intellectual horizons, to enjoy the process of learning more and thinking more. Cheating doesn't help with any of this. It might get you a degree certificate if you evade detection, but you won't come out of it educated. We aren't your judges: you should be your own judge. Ask yourself these questions:

• Am I here for the right reasons?
• Have I fulfilled my own potential?
• Am I thinking about study in the right way? 
• Are reading and writing changing me? 

At the risk of being extremely boring, let me tell you about my first degree. I got to university (not this one) on the Clearing system. I'd done well at English but never felt I was particularly good at anything and assumed everyone else was better than me. But I was lucky in one regard: all I ever wanted to do was read and think about books. Before long, I decided that to get anything out of my time at university, I had to talk about books too, in lectures and seminars and tutorials: a horrible thing for someone naturally very quiet. But enthusiasm and determination got me through: a good degree, an MA, a PhD and finally a job in academia. 

But all these things are far less important than one fact. Doing an English degree changed me in every way possible. I read more. I thought about what I'd read in lots of different ways. That meant that in a sense I knew less – because the things I assumed were totally true were revealed to be contingent on context and background. Finding new ways to think about poems and plays and novels soon meant that I had new ways to think about people, ideas, politics, belief, love, hate, sex, death, the past and the future, communities, and everything in the world about me. The world was revealed to be a much more interesting place: more difficult, sometimes terrible, always hard to understand and always changing, but definitely more interesting.  

Perhaps this sounds ridiculous to you, and on the screen maybe it is. But I know one thing for sure: if I'd copied and pasted from the web on an essay, I'd still be the idiot I was when I started my degree. So what I'm saying is: it's OK to find a lot of it difficult. It's OK to struggle, it's OK to absolutely hate some of the texts we ask you to read. It's OK to find it hard to balance academic work with all the other things in your life. We understand all that and we can help. But it's not OK to treat your time here – an opportunity to transform yourself into someone even more wonderful than you might already be – as a game with a prize at the end. Forget the degree certificate: that's just a piece of paper. It's what happens to you in-between that really matters. Give yourself a chance to be changed and amazing things will happen. I know: it happened to me, and that's why I'm in this job.  

I know this sounds really preachy and heavy-handed: you just caught me on a day when all these things are on my mind. But I and all my colleagues really want you and all the others on the course to grasp the opportunity. The worst thing for me is sitting on stage at Graduation Day and not recognising some of the people who are collecting their degrees, because they've never made an impression on us, or seeing students who could have done really well but chose not to make the effort. Don't be one of those people. You've failed this module, but you have every chance of fulfilling your potential. 

You just have to want to. 

Wonder what the Employability and Retention units will make of that? They're probably tying a noose as we speak…

Going Forward?

Good afternoon everybody.

I've spent the day in meetings. Lots of meetings. Mostly meetings about the student experience (I suspect that should be plural) and the recent staff survey's exposure of how my colleagues feel about life in this institution.

Lots of what we talked about was very positive, thoughtful and interesting. However, I found myself listening very carefully to the language deployed by various groups. It became clear quite quickly that there were two language communities in the rooms, representing two different cultures. I'm reluctant to give the groups names because one or both would sound pejorative, even though everyone there was present to contribute seriously.

However, one group talked about students, and teachers, and admin staff and how they experienced the university. The other group talked about outcomes, and KPIs and descriptors: you know the kind of thing. I want to stress that I'm not attacking the individuals. But: it is part of a general discursive turn which indicates major cultural and ideological shifts. I'm going to lift some ideas from Ben Knights's forthcoming chapter on 'The Politics of Enhancement' (thanks to him for sending me his work), allied to my reading of Norman Fairclough's New Labour, New Language, and my experience of the Postgraduate Certificate in Further and Higher Education.

Look out for Ben and his colleagues' work in The Politics of Literature and the Literature of Politics edited by Deborah Philips and Katy Shaw (Palgrave, forthcoming).

In the beginning, there were students and their teachers. Many of the teachers were expert researchers and very few were qualified teachers. The classroom experience was largely unexamined, and university lecturers didn't pay much attention to the origins and experiences of their students. We did, of course, just not in a systematic way. There were some pedagogy researchers, but they didn't impinge on the rest of us very much. So in English, for example, we had lectures, followed by seminars. Students were tested in exams or through essays. It was assumed that 'good' students read books, turned up, listened, thought and handed in their work. 'Bad' students did some or none of those things. Their problem. But gradually, we got a bit more sophisticated. Devised more varied ways to talk about and investigate books. More searching or purposeful assessments tailored to the kinds of students previously just considered 'bad'. This was called 'student-centred learning' and it was definitely a Good Thing (and a product of the New Left's democratic impulses). Apart from anything else, there were plenty of limited, or lazy, or floundering teachers out there, while students' views often went unconsidered. Students, like teachers, are weird. They have all sorts of different starting points, cultures, beliefs, behaviours etc. which affect what and how they learn. In English, this is easy: we know all about the Death of the Author, about Reader-Response Theory and the generation of multiple meanings within the reader's current context.

Meanwhile, something called New Public Management started to infect business, politics and public services. It seemed to hold that if something couldn't be represented on a spreadsheet, graph or by the deployment of buzzwords (employability; flexibility; solutions; going forward; customer-centred), it wasn't worth doing. Studying English (Icelandic, quantum physics, whatever) couldn't be just A Good Thing. It had to be a Quantifiable Good Thing. Similarly, the process of mastering any of these things had to be quantifiable. Suddenly teachers had bumper stickers: 'How's My Pedagogy?'

Quantifying enjoyment (click to enlarge)

It's hard to avoid being sucked in to the discourse, although you can resist:

What the resulting spreadsheets couldn't measure was the messy, glorious, unquantifiable nature of true education: everything else is just training. As I say to my students: a successful class is when you leave the room and the world has slightly changed. If you don't feel your head has been messed with, either you haven't been listening or I'm failing you.

There's no room for this subversive nonsense in the New Public Management world. Instead, there's a Maoist process of permanent revolution. This is reflected in the language: if you aren't Going Forward with Vision on a Mission, then you're a Curator of the Past, as a colleague was told. Thinking Outside The Box doesn't mean what you think it means: it actually means conforming to the elite managerialists' discourse, rather than critiquing it. The result of the Spreadsheet Model of pedagogy is that the students are extruded from a sausage machine. They have a certificate. They can use Powerpoint. They can write a CV and turn up to work on time. Can they tell you what a postmodern reading of your company's activity might be? Or what Little Pip would say about working in the photocopying room? Maybe, but that's not what employers and the Spreadsheet Cadre want. 'Deep knowledge' is far less important in a market economy than the superficial skills required to join a low-wage, disempowered workforce.

Even worse: those of us who passionately care about our subjects (why else would we be here?) and think that they're inherently beneficial get dismissed as the reactionaries. Which is wrong. A student who graduates equipped for an unfulfilling job furthering the malevolent ends of a rotten system isn't empowered. Instead, we've set them up for exploitation. Whereas one transformed by cellular biology, French Lesbian Poetry (which that idiot James Dyson snidely blamed for Britain's Decline) is already a winner, whether they draw on those specific things ever again or not.

Which is wrong. If business wants identikit drones who'll agree with everything, business will get them. But business won't last very long. What you need to succeed is wit, style, contrariness and intellect, tied with a willingness to stand up to those who want a predictable life: none of which qualities show up on a spreadsheet. All this talk of visions and missions is deceptive. What's wanted by the managerialists (note that I'm not saying 'managers', because there's a difference) is people who can be controlled and kept at arms length from power. If you can't speak the lingo, you don't get to play. This is why I wonder whether those fluent in Bullshit are not bullies but cowards. Individually, they may not know what all this stuff means, but they know that if they don't speak it, they'll be out. Even worse, they might be asked to explain what they mean by pesky people like us.

Rather than being empowering, the discourse of NPM is profoundly disempowering, rendering discussion about education impossible outwith the paradigm of individualistic, atomised consumer capitalism. As Knights points out, New Labour and the Tories are as one on this: 'managerial populism' (which includes treating students as customers) isn't liberating, it's a means of enforcing control down to the slightest detail, 'replacing a culture of trust with one of contract': no space for serendipity educational weirdness there! My immediate managers and my students are largely resistant to this rubbish, but their instincts are at odds with the structure. The culture of measurable learning outcomes, satisfaction surveys and the like encourage us all to view education as a quantifiable and portable personal good, like an iPod, with a discrete outcome (a certificate).

Conversely, according to Knights, lecturers are encouraged to withdraw all the off-balance-sheet effort we actually put in. Why stay late (as I do most nights, getting regularly locked in the building), put on an extra tutorial, go and sit with students at lunchtime to talk about the books a bit longer, attend their bands' gigs and all the other things we do for fun if none of this shows up on a Workload Allocation Form? Instead the culture of audit makes us feel exploited and under surveillance. On my deathbed, I won't breathe my last satisfied that my students' grade averages increased by 2.7%. I'll be pleased to hear that they're picky, critical readers, lovers, parents, teachers, colleagues, guerrillas and rulers. Find that on a spreadsheet!

I'm not saying that university lecturers are a special breed who should do whatever we feel like behind closed doors. But we should be free to share our abilities with each other, to educate each other, to learn from other teachers' ideas and practices, on an egalitarian basis (which is how the old Subject Centres worked: now abolished). Look at school-teachers. League table culture leads many of them to cut corners or produce students who (and I'm not joking) have never read in full the books they studied at A-level. Schools, and students, have been ruined by a culture of cynical results-driven pseudo-education. We inherit students who think that 'key chapters' can be used to extract 'the message' of any given text. My job in part is to teach them to read again: slowly, thoughtfully and critically. Turning students into customers doesn't 'empower' them: it demeans them and implies that they are the passive recipients of our 'product', rather than travellers on a quest.

A spreadsheet culture in universities will lead to teachers and students collaborating to game the system: short-term statistical success quickly followed by national, cultural and economic failure as we realise that certificates do not = education. Teachers will be pressured to 'produce results' or lose their jobs, and we'll end up as the last 'quick civil servants' to be enfolded into the capitalist embrace. Subject deemed 'inflexible' or not contributing to 'transferable skills' will be dumped unceremoniously.

Except, of course, in the kinds of universities our rulers attend. You know that, don't you? The discipline of the market is only applied to the poor. Northern Scum surely don't have any use for Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. Whereas the children of the élite have the delicacy of mind required. They'll find work whatever they do. The Russell Group universities even proposed to the Quality Assurance Agency that they don't need inspection because they're Good Chaps - only us oiks because it's our job to cope with the unwashed masses. It's Transferable Skills for the future photocopier salesmen of the world, Medieval Philology for the nobs who seem to find cosy Ministerial positions administering government departments without ever worrying about their transferable skills or knowing anything about their field. When was the last time the Department of Health was led by a doctor? Which is a shame, because there are many potential Medieval Philologists in my classes and on the streets of the Dark Place.

I'm sorry that this has turned into another classic unfocussed, rambling Vole Rant. I'll end with Ben Knights's fine words. Buy his book when it comes out:

…while tribal narcissism is self-evidently a bad thing, in the current historical moment there is a pressing need to defend the social and institutional bases that make critical dialogue possible. In short, we cannot afford to join in running down or de-skilling any community that preserves the seeds of knowing, thinking and behaving differently. 

Update: got an email from management today, asking why staff don't believe that 'the university offers quality service to its customers'. 'FFS', as I believe the kids say these days.

What do we want? More lectures?

Another day, another survey pointing out that students are getting barely more time in lectures, weakly tied in with unexamined claims that a) they want more b) this is a disgrace given the fees charged and b) this is a good thing.

Sigh.

The easy bit first. You students are paying a lot more for your education. BUT: universities aren't getting any more money under the fees system. Some are getting a lot less. The government has stopped paying universities the shortfall between the lower fees and the real cost of running institutions. You pay the lot now. So you're paying more and we're getting the same or less. As you can imagine, that doesn't help staffing levels, infrastructure updates etc. It just puts consumer pressure on us.

I can see why lots of supervised class time is essential in medicine, pharmacy, engineering etc. After all, I spent my time in metalwork classes making weapons of various types, thanks to the benign neglect of a teacher subsequently sectioned for trying to blackmail a major supermarket. But that's another story. You need medical students in class sawing up bodies under the close eye of an academic. It's when they take their work home with them that problems arise.

But I teach English in one department and Cultural Studies in another. The demands of the courses aren't the same. What we're trying to inculcate is critical skills. How to read carefully. Analysis. Looking for deeper cultural structures. Sensitivity to nuance. Awareness of the ideological, political, hegemonic and cultural paradigms in which texts and audiences exist.

These things require reflection and research. Lectures and seminars exist to provide students with the tools required to improve their own practice, and to point them in the right direction. We show them the ways in which texts can be examined, do some practice, test some of the critical perspectives and send them home to try it for themselves.

Personally, I'd like to see less of my students.

Let me explain that. Although a lot of my students are diligent and well-prepared, a lot aren't. Even at the end of the year-long modules I've just taught, significant numbers of students are turning up to classes without even bringing copies of books they openly admit they haven't read. They then waste the time of the prepared students by demanding back-to-basics discussions: who characters are, plot details and so on. In the media classes, we get students who can't name a newspaper or don't know what differentiates the BBC from commercial channels. Personally, I don't see how more contact hours with someone who hasn't made the slightest effort to prepare helps anyone. I can extol the virtues of active self-education and the joys of intellectual inquiry until I'm blue in the face, but we'll both go home depressed and resentful. Even more than usual.

What we want is students coming to class and saying things like 'I've been reading X's book and her theory is different from yours because…'. It does happen. Not very often, but it does. In the humanities, lectures and seminars should be the starting point for an unseen iceberg of private study. If we can engage the students' interest, it happens. But too often, students have been trained (by schools, and by a general consumerist ethos) to assume that classes are where we tell them 'the answers', even though the key truth of postmodern humanities is that there are no true answers.

Furthermore, although I love teaching and never feel I've understood anything until I've taught it to others, there's a limit. I'm drained and exhausted at the moment. Any more teaching and I'd have to stop reading, which means dumber and more limited lectures. It means spending a few minutes less on each essay. It means never having the chance to learn your names and get a sense of your childcare problems, your financial difficulties and your interest (or otherwise) in the material. Of course some universities have solutions for this. In some posh ones, the postgraduate students do proportionately more of the boring teaching while the more single-minded professors have the intellectual fun out in the archives and at conferences. It disgusts me. Come to The Hegemon, where active researchers share their work with undergraduates every day. The other solution, which poor, big and cynical universities like, is shifting everything online. Video lectures, MOOCs, buying in pre-packed courses and the like. Again, it's a pile-em-high, shut-them-up solution. You get what looks like an education because you're watching someone talk about stuff, but it isn't really. When you kill someone in World of Warcraft, they're not dead. It's just pixels. When you 'attend' an online lecture, you're not really getting an education. You can't put your hand up and make a point. The lecturer doesn't know what your last essay said, or what you've been reading. You can't propose a new idea to your class for them to pull it apart or adopt it themselves. In cyberspace, nobody can hear you think.

League tables, SATs and all the paraphernalia of the pseudo-scientific pedagogical system has persuaded students that there are simple truths and that they can be acquired at the feet of an adept. It's authoritarian and it's wrong. It's anti-educational because it removes the student's agency and duty of enquiry.

My university is currently trying desperately hard to improve attendance. I support that: attending classes improves students intellectually and on paper. Talking to me and talking to other students is the route to success, however that's defined. But simply herding people into classes on the basis that £X in fees should = X hours at a desk is ludicrous. This isn't a gym in which X hours on a treadmill burns x calories. What they're paying for (and what the state should be paying for instead) is access to wisdom, resources, evaluation and above all time to educate themselves, with our help. Seriously: skipping class to read a book is a far better use of your time than sloping in, slumping at the back, signing in and checking Facebook.

Do students really want more lectures? If they came to everything available, I might believe them. But we're all used to half-populated lectures, to a bunch of students disappearing between lectures and seminars (brainwashed into thinking that only the lecturer has anything useful to say rather than their peers too) and months in which office hours – the only time they'll ever get one-to-one discussions here – see not a single student.

Education's really simple. Read the set texts. Read the secondary material. Read anything else that catches your eye. Come to class and talk. Ask questions. Make observations. Talk in seminars. Ignore the people who roll their eyes or call you a swot. If your lecturers aren't putting in the effort, make a fuss. If there aren't enough teachers (and there aren't), say so: to your teachers, to your Students' Union, to the Vice-Chancellor, to the National Student Survey.

Above all, don't be a consumer. Be a participant. Educate yourself with our help. Don't just turn up and expect a certificate.

The educational fish rots from the head

I've got two book reviews to write today, so I need to get my brain working and my typing finger warmed up. What better way than to have a pop at Michael Gove?

(This is going to get text-heavy and ranty. If you fancy the funny, beautifully-pitched graphic version, Paul Bernal's got it right here). 

If you think I need a reason, let's start with this. Yesterday, I excoriated my own university for its uncritical acceptance of entrepreneurial discourse, and the way it falls over itself to pay shysters for their snake-oil. 

A little later yesterday I chanced upon a Freedom of Information request by one Janet Downs, to whom a statue should be erected by public subscription, preferably outside the Department for Education. Intrigued by Mr Gove's assertion (in the Mail on Sunday, naturally) that:

"Survey after survey has revealed disturbing historical ignorance,with one teenager in five believing Winston Churchill was a fictional character while 58 per cent think Sherlock Holmes was real."

I should be grateful if you could give me details of these surveys: who ran them, what questions were asked, when the surveys took place, and size and make-up of samples. 

she pressed the DFE for details. After all, the Government's education minister must be drawing on the talents and research skills of the very best academics and civil servants in the land, right? These surveys will be rigorous, extensive, statistically-significant and representative. Won't they? After all, Mr Gove is continually telling us that standards must be raised. 

Back came the reply, revealing that Mr Gove's commitment to 'outsourcing' and small government reaches the parts other ministers cannot reach:

Dear Ms Downs 

Thank you for your email of 26 March, requesting details of a survey about teenagers’ lack of historical knowledge.
Unfortunately, I am not able to provide you with the details of the survey as it was commissioned and conducted by UKTV Gold.  I would advise thatyou contact UKTV Gold direct, as they should be able to assist you on this matter.
Yours sincerely
Emma Seymour, Curriculum Policy Division

That's right. The Secretary of State for Education, the scourge of lazy thinking, relies on surveys conducted for promotional purposes by a TV repeats channel. What's on today? Multiple episodes of Last of the Summer Wine, Only Fools and Horses and (curiously for a channel seemingly shocked by historical inaccuracy), Goodnight Sweetheart, whose central device is a time machine used by a chap to conduct romances both in the present and in 1940s Britain (and about which I've often been tempted to write an academic paper or two).  

But at least we can rely on the accuracy and rigour of UKTV Gold's research, can't we? Er… apparently not. Grahame Whitfield kindly pointed me towards the Local Schools Network's analysis. Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie me. They unearthed the actual poll, which dates back to 2008, and found a few teensy, weeny problems. Firstly, it didn't test 'teenagers' specifically, but 3000 'people'. Which might lead one to think that Mr Gove is rather disingenuous. Or lazy. One could further assume that many of those adults were educated during his own party's 18 years in office from 1979-1997. 

And that's not all. Poor UKTV Gold seems to be labouring under some historical misapprehensions of its own. As the LSN points out, 

the survey listed Lady Godiva as fictional and said 12% believed she was real. But the 12% were right – Lady Godiva endowed monasteries at Stow and Coventry. And the 47% who thought “fictional” Eleanor Rigby was real were no doubt thinking of Paul McCartney’s anecdote that he found the name on a gravestone.

Looking at the company's PR-driven report, it becomes clear that they really don't know very much about history, or indeed historiography. 

most people believe that fictional figures such as King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby really existed. 

King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood top the list of fictional characters that Brits are most likely to confuse with fact 

Now it's true that there's no archaeological evidence for Robin Hood and King Arthur, but there's no shortage of cultural artefacts, such as the 6th century Welsh poem Y Gododdin. No doubt the 'real' Arthur and Robin (there were several possible Robin models) are nothing like the representations purveyed by UKTV Gold, but they aren't exactly fictional. For a bracingly sceptical Arthur survey, I recommend Guy Halsall's Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages (OUP 2013). For Robin, start with Stephen Knight's Robin Hood: a Mythic Biography. 

Let's look at UKTV's Top Ten:

Top ten fictional characters that the British public thinks are real

• 1) King Arthur – 65%

• 2) Sherlock Holmes – 58%

• 3) Robin Hood – 51%

• 4) Eleanor Rigby – 47%

• 5) Mona Lisa -35%

• 6) Dick Turpin – 34%

• 7) Biggles – 33%

• 8) The Three Musketeers – 17%

• 9) Lady Godiva – 12%

• 10) Robinson Crusoe – 5%

So: Arthur (dubious); Holmes (fictional); Robin (dubious, and yet UKTV Gold has shown Robin TV series, contributing to our ignorance); Eleanor Rigby (definitely real); Mona Lisa (a portrait with several strong candidates); Dick Turpin (real), Biggles (fictional) the Musketeers (a real military formation, with whom d'Artagnan really fought in the 17th century), Lady Godiva (real) and Robinson Crusoe who, though fictional, was closely based on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk.

The whole thing is rather incoherent:

Nearly half of us (47%) have no idea who Richard the Lionheart was; even though the historical figure has featured in numerous films throughout the 21st Century. 

Perhaps, UKTV Gold, people don't watch these films much. When was the last film about Richard? Are you subtly suggesting both that a) fictionalised films are reliable history and that b) we're thick because we watch too much TV? Better switch off UKTV Gold then!

And one more thing. In your Top Ten Real People Britons Think Are Mythical:

10) Charles Dickins - 3%

Suddenly UKTV Gold is looking thicker than its survey participants. 


But Ms Downs was not satisfied by the DfE's reply (one curiously unashamed that its positions are unsupported by substantive research). She went back for more:

Thank you for your reply saying that one survey about teenagers'lack of historical knowledge was done by UKGold.
I should be grateful if you could let me know when the survey was undertaken.
Michael Gove referred to "survey after survey". This indicates that there was more than just one. But you have given me the name of only one.
Would it be fair to say that there was actually only one survey and not several as Mr Gove said?

And we're very grateful for her tenacity, because the DfE reply moved from UKTV Gold to purest Comedy Gold:

As advised previously, you would need to contact UKTV Gold to find out details of their survey, including when it was undertaken.
The other survey’s the Secretary of State referred to include:
·        a survey of 2000 11 to 16 year olds by Premier Inn;
·        a study commissioned by Lord Ashcroft of 1000 children aged 11 to 18 to mark the unveiling of the Bomber Command Memorial in London;
·        a report by Professor Robert Tombs for think-tank Politeia;
·        an article by London Mums Magazine[1] http://londonmumsmagazine.com/2013/with-...
·        research carried out by the Sea Cadets to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/edu...

Let us pass over the apostrophe abuse lightly: there are bigger fish to fry. For lo! Mr Gove's instinctive fear that the kids are being thickened rests on more than a TV company's PR stunt. Why, a budget hotel chain ran a survey. Sadly, they won't tell us who did the research, how they selected their participants, what the question were or anything else: their Facebook page links only to the Independent's space-filling summary, an article clearly written by PI's PR team, and which uses the (new to me) word 'cruelness', which makes the adults look more stupid than the kids. What Premier Inn's motivation is, beyond cheap publicity, is beyond me – but I hope they're proud to contribute to official government policy. 

What of the other 'research'? Well, Lord Ashcroft is the very strange, tax-evading billionaire who ran his survey as a publicity stunt for his memorial to the men who flattened Dresden and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. His memorial is notable for a) its terrible architecture and b) the prominence of its donors' names, not a notable feature of previous war memorials: also engraved on the wall is the name of Bee Gee Robin Gibb, someone else who has translated childhood war games into adult triumphalism. At least the actual data is available, though again, it hasn't been contextualised in any way and he uses it to promote Gove's 1950s Greyfriars fantasy. 

Moving on. Robert Tombs (Prof in French Political History) and Politeia. Well, let's just say that Politeia is a political think-tank which exists solely to justify any given Conservative policy initiative. Its work is not peer-reviewed or published in academic journals, and is therefore not reliably rigorous. The good Professor's co-authors are interesting: one teaches history in private boarding school (qualifications unknown) and the other has a PhD in the history of history teaching but appears not to have any further public presence or job. The report insists that 'British history' must be taught from Hadrian onwards, as though 'British' is a meaningful term that far back.  It happily cites 'newspaper reports' as evidence for serious accusations about the integrity of the exam system, and claims that because other countries have a narrowly nationalist curriculum, the UK should too! 

The report is certainly dubious, but it makes some points which Mr Gove could usefully digest:

emphasize the academic values rooted in each subject. These can only be properly understood by those versed in the subject: the teachers, who should be allowed to teach in accord with their judgement, and the academic subject specialists, whose lifetime of study qualifies them to propose the curricula and set the examinations 

Especially given that several reports suggest that Mr Gove wrote the entire proposed history curriculum himself (that's according to the distinguished historian Richard Evans who, though Gove praises him, describes the new curriculum as a 'pub quiz'), having discarded the suggestions his own Tory friends gave him. Certainly not my idea of academic freedom. But this paragraph implies that Prof Tombs and Co should rather disapprove of a Minister who bases his assumptions on cheap TV channel PR stunts. 

As to the rest: a magazine article and a newspaper report? No disrespect to London Mums, the Sea Cadets and the Telegraph (amusingly, the first comment attacks American ignorance while spelling 'Runnymede' incorrectly), but really. The London Mums article claims that 63% of children can't spell 'achievement', and lists several other howlers. Their source? A commercial exam revision website which just might have an interest in persuading parents to part with extra cash by making stark claims about their kids' ignorance. Sadly, they don't provide any details about their survey: questions, sample size and collection: nothing reliable at all. It's a pub quiz dressed up as research. Ironically, the London Mums article critiquing kids' illiteracy is replete with stylistic and grammatical errors, sweeping unjustified assertions (the dates 'everyone' used to know, for example). Worst of all, the author thinks that 'mumpreneur' is a word. For which she deserves a painful and public punishment. 

I teach at a rather good, though unfashionable, university. If my students submitted work which turned out to be based on this kind of rubbish, we'd fail them. I have a big sign on my wall which reads:

THE PLURAL OF ANECDOTE IS NOT DATA

We spend a lot of time explaining to them the difference between serious research and 'stuff you can Google'. This is a whole other level. We're talking government policy which will affect the lives and opportunities of millions of children. Anecdotes based on PR stunts cannot form the basis for policy. MUST. DO. BETTER. 

What really annoys me is this. Michael Gove is an intelligent man. He knows this behaviour is wrong. That gives him a moral responsibility to behave better. But for reasons of pure cynicism, he actively chooses to distort, cheat and mislead. This isn't accidental: it's a strategy.

No wonder my university thinks it's OK to hire charlatans when this is the example set by Whitehall. 

Update: Gove has turned his attention to English, invoking the spirit of FR Leavis to attack 'narrow' curricula by calling for a return to the 'transcendent' 'Canon' of 'Great' literature, by which he means dead white British authors, which seems pretty narrow to me: if Gove had been alive in the 19th-century, he'd have moaned about junk like Dickens and advocated a return to Plato and Empedocles, in Greek of course, and to the use of the Mr Men to explore Hitler's rise and fall in history classes. 

You good people have read quite enough of my ranting, so I'll be brief on this bit. Reading doesn't always have to be 'educational'. People discover texts at different times in their lives. I was forced to read Dickens too young, and it took 15 years before I realised for myself that he had a lot of charm and profundity (still not reconciled to the supposedly comic stuff). FR Leavis, the eminence grise of Gove's worldview didn't include Dickens in his original canon, because canons are just indicators of the current hegemony's concerns, and not guides to Eternal Truths About Life, the Universe and Everything. People read for entertainment. For enlightenment about their own cultural context, not just history. People read for comfort and above all to discover themselves and others. People might start with Twilight and discover books that you and I consider better. Others might read Twilight AND 'the greats'. 

For instance, as an undergraduate, I was taught by one of the world's greatest Arthurian literary scholars, Professor PJC Field. He was, we thought, a snob. Then I met him in WHSmith's. He was buying a pile of Dick Francis novels. Spotting me sniggering in a superior fashion, he announced that 'Man cannot live by Arthurian literature alone' and departed. For a long time, because I was an insecure and uptight teenager who couldn't relax with matters cultural in case someone caught me out, I thought I'd won that exchange. It was only later, when I'd read some critical theory, got something approximating a life and matured considerably, that I realise he'd won. He wasn't ashamed or insecure of his cultural choices, and I was. I learned a lot from that. So should Mr Gove. 

The idea that literature is 'transcendent' is just embarrassing nonsense. 'Transcendent' isn't a critical term: it's an anti-critical term. If I asked my students why Shakespeare is great and they replied 'because he transcends time and cultures', that would be the end of the conversation. Whereas replying 'Shakespeare is great because he took all the concerns of his period and cultural position and made ambiguous, complex drama out of them which can be read in the following ways…' is the start of a fantastic, life-long conversation. 'Transcendent' is the product of one quite recent critical position. It's not a historical one either: Shakespeare wasn't particularly popular for a long time after his death, and the Victorians joyously tacked happy endings onto the tragedies to suit their needs (they didn't like the lack of cosmic justice involved in Cordelia's death, for instance). 

Canons are repressive concepts. They tell you what an élite thinks you should know, rather than what everybody read: Dickens was outsold by several people whose works you never hear about now. I've no problem with making value judgements - but I do object to people who disguise their value judgements as universal truths. It's dishonest and oppressive. 

What he doesn't mention – and you'll have seen this coming – is that the Mr Men example isn't some widespread, pernicious dereliction of duty committed by the Marxist Enemies of Promise he frequently evokes. It's mentioned on a lesson plan. A lesson plan made available on a commercial website. For the iGCSE, Gove's beloved semi-O-Level used by a lot of snobby private schools. 

Yet again, he's smearing all teachers by resorting to selective quotation and nonexistent attribution. 

Papal bull

Here's a song that could have been written for the Papal Conclave which as you know, vents white smoke when a Pope has been elected and black smoke when a ballot is inconclusive.



It's Tindersticks' 'Black Smoke'. 'I told myself I was greedy for it… checking out my reflection' – rather appropriate for the red-hats jockeying for power in the Church. 

What else has caught my attention today. Well, I've got lots of preparation and marking to do, but I'm finding it hard to concentrate. It doesn't help that my colleague kept hold of my marking pile for a whole week but still wants them done within the time limit. Not helpful and not conducive to me turning to the pile first. 

Instead, I've been reading, teaching Paradise Lost (today's question: is it as misogynist as one might think?) and opening parcels of books. Mostly a pile of Jim Crace novels for a research project, plus a reprint of Alec Waugh's The Loom of Youth, fuelling my 1920s-1930s obsession. In pursuit of this, I've also been reading the interesting James Laver's 1933 collection of mock-epic satires, Ladies' Mistakes. It's a knowing and witty homage to Pope's work, full of film-stars, trips on the underground and weedy young gentlemen transformed into studs by a moment's dalliance. It's also very funny, and beautifully illustrated by Thomas Lowinsky. Highly recommended! It felt quite strange to be reading Bright Young Thing poetry in the utilitarian atmosphere of the works canteen. 

What else? Well, I read an appalling report pitch on the virtues of online education by one Sir Michael Barber and his chums Donnelly and Rizvi, who basically thinks that online videos mean everyone can be taught by 'celebrity academics'. As he said to that reactionary know-nothing John Humphries on Radio 4, 

Why would you go to the quite ordinary lecture by a quite ordinary lecturer when you can get Niall Ferguson online?

Er… Mostly because 'celebrity academics' have stopped thinking by the time they get famous. They hit on a big idea. Then they make TV programmes about it. The producers ask them to cut out all the waffly bits and sharpen the lines. Complexity and ambiguity are lost. They start to believe their own reviews and get suspicious of alternative or newer approaches. They certainly get fed up with the 'ordinary' academic's cycle of writing, submitting to peer-review, rewriting and re-submitting. What do these people have to say to a Celebrity Academic? Niall Ferguson is an ideal case in point: his books are largely polemic these days, facts and opinions shaped to suit his ideological perspective rather than exploring events or ideas. 

I have another anecdote which may explain why you might prefer the 'quite ordinary lecture' to the superstar. A young friend of mine was sent off to an Oxford study weekend as part of his preparation for university applications. Simon Schama was dangled in front of the aspiring scholars as bait. 'What shall I say to him, Dad?', my chum asked his father, who had been taught by the good professor in the early 1980s. 'Ask him if he's read and marked my essays yet', replied Dad. 

Anecdotal, it's true. But the Celebrity Academic (and quite a lot of high-flying non-celebrity academics) rarely trouble themselves with undergraduate lectures, tutorials, and marking. After all, what are hourly-paid PhD graduates and post-grads for? You're more likely to find the Celebrity Academic in the departure lounge or Radio 4's Green Room than slaving over a module guide or attending the Staff-Student Forum. 

But what of the other element of Barber's rather silly claim? Why not watch a video at a time of your choosing from the comfort of your own home? I've gone on about this rather a lot in the past, but nobody's listened so I'll say it again. A video lecture is a very useful resource. You can play it and replay it and stop it to make notes and extract a good deal of wisdom from it. But what you can't do is put up your hand to ask a question, or make a point, or disagree. The online video implies that you have no role other than to accept what's put in front of you. This is particularly true of the Celebrity Academic Video, which is more like an MTV pop promo than an educational event. Here is a Star, it says. Worship it and a few flakes of star-dust might fall about your shoulders. 

What's entirely absent is the glorious possibility that you, yes YOU might have something to say, and that all the other people watching might equally have something interesting and intelligent to say about the subject in question. That you might speak to each other, and pursue the lecturer's thoughts. If you watch a video, you're part of the mass audience. If you come to a real-life lecture, you're a participant. You can stop me to ask for clarification, to propose another idea, to put me right (these things happen to me all the time) and I will respond, often delighted that somebody's listening and thinking. The Celebrity Video Star will never, ever be halted mid-flow by somebody else's idea. Additionally, the Video Star can never tell you you're wrong, or that you need to work harder, or read more. You're the consumer, the customer, and you are Always Right. That's why the real-life encounter is Education and the online video is a simulation of education in which the Celebrity is simply 'product'. 

Of course, the most eminent researchers are not always the best teachers, nor is fame an index of quality either: where I work, many quiet, modest teachers earn their students' respect without showiness. In the brave new world, they'll be discarded or reduced to the level of piece-work marking machines. Despite this, they'll still know when a student is struggling, or has worked the night-shift to keep the family fed, or has a particularly personal response to a text or loves one special critical approach: all the things about which the remote Celebrity Academic will not give one solitary hoot. 

The Celebrity Academic is the grinning, styled face of a pyramid scheme Victorian in its outlook: that Great Men (and women) deliver Enlightenment from on high (hence my application of Capitals to this blog post) to the undifferentiated masses. This is of course what's known technically as 'bollocks'. Take my Milton class today. Afterwards, I went downstairs to Ye Olde Slopperie for some gruel and spotted a group of the students slurping sugary drinks and pointing at bits of Paradise Lost. They were educating themselves and each other: hopefully agreeing with bits of the lecture and disagreeing with other bits. You don't get that from watching a video in your home or on your phone. 'No man is an island', some clever bloke once wrote, and it's never more true than in education. You don't simply absorb a lecture's words and become educated: you think about them, talk about them, test them in debate. Then you're educated - but that's not a very profitable model. It requires buildings and staff and libraries and all those things – particularly emotional and intellectual commitment and bravery – which can't be assigned an IP address and be billed via Direct Debit. And that's ignoring the issue of control. Who do you want decided on the curriculum? Some TV-friendly bloviator and his corporate chums, or people you know personally, and know you?

But we shouldn't expect Sir Michael to acknowledge this: he's the Chief Education Adviser at Pearson, a company betting the farm on replacing Ordinary Lecturers You Can Talk To with Celebrity Academics' Greatest Hits, for money. He is, simply, a salesman. 

Will the children of Barber and Co. be educated via video-link? You bet your ass they won't. They'll be buying physical access to the Dreaming Spires like all the rich kids. Video's for the plebs. Which is what really annoys me. Educational technology can be brilliant. Look at the Open University and the wonderful things it does. I personally use forums and Twitter and all sorts of lovely toys in my teaching. What I don't do is employ shiny things to disguise the fact that what Pearson, Clay Shirky (who thinks video-Ed is the educational Napster) and their friends in government want isn't better education: it's cheaper education for the great unwashed. 

But don't just take my word for it. Here's Andrew Ng on the value of classroom interaction:

“If you think about your favorite teacher you had back in college and the conversations you had with him or her, there’s just no way to replace that with a computer,” Ng said. “But you need to figure out the economics and the logistics to hire more teachers to deliver those sorts of amazing interactions.”

Who he? Only the founder of Coursera, one of the world's biggest (and most interesting) online-education providers. 

What's the link between my original subject (the Papal conclave) and the Barber report? Simple: they're both hierarchical models which valorize the linear transmission of uncontested truths to the obedient masses without any possibility of the masses contributing, let alone seeking their own way to enlightenment. I may have been brought up a Catholic but when it comes to education, I'm a thoroughgoing Protestant. 

Education for Dummies (i.e. the Minister for Education)

Amongst the many idiocies perpetrated by Michael Gove, that state-funded troll, is his decision to focus on

"the great works of the literary canon"

in the English GCSE. The what now? Other than 'the' and 'of', pretty much every other word in that phrase is objectionable.

What determines whether something is 'great'? Is it fame? That depends on marketing and distribution. Is it age? There's plenty of very old dross about. It's less than 100 years since English Literature itself was considered worth studying: before that only Latin and Greek texts were considered sufficiently 'great'. Are there no 'great' works in other languages? Or is English the only vehicle for literary greatness. Are 'great' works only novels, plays and poems?

What of non-fiction, or comics, or radio dramas or TV? Song lyrics? What, in fact, qualifies as a 'work', and why do we employ such a grinding term.

What's a literary canon? Big-sellers? Who determines what it is? We used to know the answer to this one. Matthew Arnold in 1869 airily defined culture as 'the best that is thought and known in the world'. Thomas Babington MacAulay announced that 'a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'. This from a man who lived in India as a colonial administrator but never learned any of the native languages. F. R. Leavis actually produced a list of canonical texts in The Great Tradition. It starts like this:

"The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad."

The list expands, but not by very much. Few non-aristocrats, foreigners, working-class types, northerners, homosexuals or ethnic minority writers. And certainly no non-realists. I happen to like all these writers, but there's a whole world out there. Canon-building is by definition exclusionary and dubious. I teach English literature. I have to choose what my students read - I am a canon-builder. But what are my criteria? I try to represent as many walks of life as possible (something Gove would object to) but I (usually) want to engage the students by giving them texts I think are 'good' and 'relevant': both very subjective terms. It's a fraught experience. There's a limited amount of time. Who do we heave overboard when something new comes along? Should we leave a text for a decade or two after publication to see whether it's still 'important'? What if some of the readers find it offensive?

What I suspect Gove means by a canon is texts which appear not to have any subversive political or social content. No lesbians or uppity minorities. No lefty authors or chippy proletarians. He'd be a fool though: Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad are profoundly critical of their own societies, more or less openly. Away from Gove's office, we hold that meaning is created in the space between text and reader: Gove might restrict the texts students read, but he can't limit the ways in which they read them.

What's on the list now? Shakespeare will stay, despite virtually every play examining the abuse of power (shh, don't tell Michael). Of Mice and Men will have to go: Lenny will never pass the CRB check and its author was a notorious lefty. Mister Pip and Purple Hibiscus are about Johnny Foreigner and To Kill A Mockingbird is soft on crime and promotes multiculturalism. The Modern Prose section will have to go: too many of its authors are a) alive b) keep moaning about libraries and c) don't promote boarding schools and corporal punishment. Some of them may even be Guardian readers. Dylan Thomas is too Welsh and would have objected to minimum unit of alcohol pricing. Duffy is way too lesbian, JB Priestley is the kind of do-gooding liberal hand-wringer we can do without, Lord of the Flies appeals to the Hoody Fraternity whom we are no longer hugging. Arthur Miller's The Crucible is clearly unsuitable for an interventionist government which does believe in persecuting minorities, the mentally ill and women in the cause of 'mainstream society'. Out with them all!

In with? Obviously Andy McNab. Don't you know there's a war on? For the girls, obviously some Louise Mensch, some PD James and some Jilly Cooper. Biggles of course, and liberal (ho ho) amounts of Enid Blyton's boarding school novels (note: no Rowling. Subversive lefty rubbish with girls in er yah boo sucks to you). Commando comic for the dyslexic boys. Some Jeffrey Archer ('a real page-turner, you know: none of that arty-farty stuff'). And eventually, Michael Gove's memoirs, perhaps packaged as a Little Red Book to be distributed to every 5 year old on their Micro-chip-Fitting Day.

I'd love to know how this canon will be chosen. Will he just consult his old school exercise books (you just know he's got them preserved with every gold star lovingly uncreased on the page)? Or will he outsource the work to his Special Advisors on Books What Are Good For Learning You Morals And Stuff? Perhaps they could helpfully provide a list of Non-Canonical Texts. We could call it the Index Prohibitorum. Or just substitute the pensioners' Winter Fuel Allowance with a delivery of verboten books for efficient disposal. The libraries are being closed down anyway…

Finally, canons don't preserve 'the best that is thought and known'. They pickle them. They wrap them up in cotton wool. They stick books on pedestals and pretend that the books – and the societies that conserve them – are static and eternal. This is an unhealthy form of cultural onanism. Tell a kid that a book is Important and s/he will be bored by it. Put a book in its cultural context and it will appeal. Imagine giving a 15 year old a Henry James novel… ridiculous. They'll never go back to that great author again. The easiest way to kill off a book is to tell people it's Improving. And what of the texts not on the canon? Is a great work by a modern author going to be considered rubbish because Michael Gove's Panel (and you can bet it will consist of Spads, Tory Donors and Celebrity TV Talking Head From Central Casting) hasn't read it or doesn't understand it?