For sale: one university. Very, very cheap.

The annals of junk science are long and storied: one only has to look at the work of Ben Goldacre, David Colquhoun and Edzard Ernst amongst many others to realise that there's a lot of it about, and a surprisingly large amount of it is generated by universities, i.e. institutions that should know better. 

There's bad science, junk science and straight-up, built-to-order findings-for-cash, and I have a doozy of an example for you. Imagine, if you will, a university that issues an official press release ending with this line:

For Takeaway Trauma support, please visit www.chicagotown.com/takeaway-saviour. 

What, you may ask, leads an institution which promises that it is 

Maximising opportunity through generating knowledge, innovation and enterprise.

and develops

Skills and Knowledge for Economic and Social Transformation

informed by 'values':

We will behave respectfully and ethically, in all that we do. We will be inclusive and fair in our interaction with each other and with our wider community. We will act professionally, transparently, confidently, collaboratively and challengingly when engaging with our communities locally and globally.

to encourage the public to get 'support' for 'trauma' from a manufacturer of supermarket pizzas.

The answer, of course, is money.

The headline to this offence is

“TAKEAWAY TRAUMA” IS RECOGNISED AS AN ACTUAL CONDITION

By whom? We are not told. 

THE stress of ordering and waiting for a takeaway can bring out the worst in all of us, but today it’s been identified as an actual condition, Takeaway Trauma, following scientific research.

Can it? How do we quantify 'the worst'? Should we really be saying 'all'? How many gun massacres have there been following a delayed pizza delivery. Who determines what's an 'actual condition'? My guess would be NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which incorporates the British National Formulary, the prescribers' bible. Sadly, 'Takeaway Trauma' is not listed amongst the many medical and social ills.

So, let's look at the underlying scientific research:

A University of Wolverhampton study, in partnership with Chicago Town, found that the average heart rate increased from a baseline or relaxed 70 BPM to 87 BPM in the period following ordering a pizza, while tense arousal scores - or stress levels - saw an increase with the length of time that participants waited for an order from a baseline 17.25 to 18.38 BPM.

In partnership, we can assume, means that Chicago Town looked around for an institution that would put the stamp of institutional credibility on a public relations stunt designed to get press coverage encouraging people to buy pizzas in supermarkets. Did it work? Their PR company certainly thinks so:

I can't help thinking that if I worked at a university and got a call from an organisation called 'Brazen PR', I might be a little suspicious. Mind you, if I were the Biosciences department and I got a call from a PR company I might think it an odd route for a scientific project to be born. 

Sorry, I said we were going to look at the science. But we can't, because there isn't any. Some students were put on a hospital trolley, wired up, then a pizza was ordered, and they answered a questionnaire. 

The experiment by the University’s biomedical sciences department involved participants ordering and waiting for a takeaway pizza while wearing heart rate monitors to measure pulse fluctuations, as well as monitoring stress levels using the psychometric questionnaire and the UMACL - UNWIST Mood Adjective Checklist - which measures tense arousal scores.

How many subjects? We don't know. How long did they wait? No idea. Would being wired up to a heart monitor and asked questions in a university laboratory affect their heart rates? Nothing is said about this. How was the test group selected? Are there age, gender, ethnicity, educational and class differences between their 'responses'? Who knows? What was the control group doing? We don't know that there was one. Might there be other causes for a slightly increased heart rate? What toppings were ordered? 

Let's look at the peer-reviewed research findings that came out of this project. 

Sorry. There isn't any. Instead, they hired

Behavioural Expert Darren Stanton, who analysed the results of the experiment, classified the condition in four stages: fidgety, anxious, irate and lost.

Curiously enough, and no doubt entirely coincidentally, the first letters of each 'stage' make up an acronym: FAIL, used to describe 'symptoms' on the pizza company's website. Should you be relying on a pizza company to diagnose heart conditions? I suspect not. But we should all relax. Darren Stanton is on the case. Professor Stanton – as he isn't known by anyone – describes himself as 'TV's Human Lie Detector' and was a police officer, but I'm sure that he does a lot of peer-reviewed, serious science on the side. Google Scholar says not, but he has done a TED talk. His Wikipedia entry, which doesn't sound like he wrote it at all, lists no qualifications or research (though Nottingham Trent University proudly describes him as an alumnus in another guessing press release), but does give details of his book:

Stanton has published one book to date. Project Jam Jar is a psychological self-help success book. It aims to empower its audience by introducing them to tried and tested techniques that allow readers to make changes that last a lifetime.

Peer-reviewed? It's print-on-demand! Certainly there's no indication that Stanton belongs to any of the professional bodies which regulate scientific research and analysis. Why was he needed? Surely the university has psychologists and biomedical scientists capable of analysing findings? How did Wolverhampton University find him? Well, the deeply cynical side of me wonders if he was introduced by Brazen PR (for money) to add a tinge of media stardust to this farrago of nonsense.

Anyway, on with the science. 

As stress levels increase further, circa 40 minutes after ordering, a lack of clear communication, the tardiness of deliveries, curtain twitching and the driver going the wrong way heightens emotions and results in a state of being visibly irate, with loved ones often bearing the brunt of this.
The final stage is one of absolute despondency. Frequently after waiting for a long time – around 50 minutes - the wrong order arriving or the food being of a disappointing quality makes people feel lost. During the experiment, participants had a lower heart rate than when they initially ordered, contradicting expectations that they would feel joy upon receiving the pizza they had waited for.

Eh? Can someone lying on a gurney or waiting in a house know that a driver has gone the wrong way? How did the experiment find that 'loved ones' bore the brunt of ire? Were they also in the room? Was ethical clearance received for all this cruelty? What does 'lost' mean? Or 'joy' for that matter?

Said the UoW scientist involved:

the experience has a real impact on stress levels and our heart rate

The experience of being wired up in a lab surrounded by loved ones, maybe. And even then, only slightly. The experience of food being delivered tardily: not so much. But let's see what the Principal Investigator made of all this:

Darren Stanton said: “People order a takeaway as a treat – a way to reward themselves after a long week at work and to enjoy a relaxing night in with loved ones. This study shows that it can be the opposite of this. However, with the four stages we’ve identified as fidgety, anxious, irate and lost, it’s easy to recognise the symptoms of Takeaway Trauma, so we can help others suffering from the condition.”

Sentence 1: 3 imaginative conjectures. Sentence 2: cannot be proven through this experiment. Sentence 3: equates mild cheese-related anxiety with AIDS, Ebola, depression and cancer as a 'condition'.

But don't worry: a cure is at hand thanks to 'boffins' at Chicago Town:

Rachel Bradshaw, Senior Brand Manager at Chicago Town said: “It was really interesting to work with the University of Wolverhampton and Darren on this experiment. Both the physiological and psychological effects clearly demonstrate that Takeaway Trauma is real, and we’ll all identify with the various stages having gone through them ourselves.
“A much more satisfying alternative would be to pop a Chicago Town The Takeaway pizza in the oven at home. With its unique dough rising before your eyes, the freshly-baked pizza delivers a real, takeaway taste straight from your freezer in just 20 minutes – which never disappoints.”

Note the subtle 'work with', which again means: we hired these people to record a video supporting a nasty-minded little sales technique. And then it's back to my opening line:

For Takeaway Trauma support, please visit www.chicagotown.com/takeaway-saviour.

Now you might think that I'm breaking a butterfly on a wheel here, and not being very supportive of my colleagues. Fair enough, but any university has a higher duty to the social good, and to the principles of science. This shady little endeavour has rented out scientific and institutional credibility to an advertising campaign. I don't know if the researcher in this case was forced to do this – my university's annual budget for 23,000 students and 4000 staff is c. £140m, only £10m more than smaller Cambridge University's annual endowment loot ,and money talks – but places like mine, with a pretty poor reputation (unjustified, I might add) should be working harder to claim our place amongst the ranks of the serious. In accepting this money, staging this stunt and then using medical terms in a press release, the university has forfeited any right to be considered trustworthy. It has left all its research staff high and dry and rendered its ethics procedures null and void. I know that I will be accused of being holier-than-thou, and have my rather limited external funding record raised, but these things really matter. We can't develop a reputation of being for hire. It's not fair on the students, their eventual employers or the staff who work here.

Still, it's all a bit of a giggle isn't it? And it did get a lot of press coverage. Impact matters people!

Update: we're so delighted that there's another university story plugging this (not sure if it's viewable) but the video is well worth watching though my one-person experiment demonstrates 'quite profound effects' on my heart rate on the back of a BBC interview (and yes, the BBC should be ashamed too). It's a curious mix of boosterism and self-defence.

“There were some effects but we are not saying, ‘don’t order a takeaway as something really serious might happen’!
“It is just worth remembering that everyday things can sometimes lead to profound effects over time.
People might ask why we carried out this study but a part of my job at the University is trying to create conversations about science.
“If people are out there in the community thinking about health, thinking about their body, thinking about any aspect of science, then I think we are doing our jobs right!”

They might be thinking 'why are my taxes paying for this rather than a cure for malaria, for instance?'.

Bought and sold?

A while back, I sat in the audience while a friend gave his professorial inaugural address (the closest I'll ever get to one). A business studies scholar, his final assertion was that Business Schools should be 'about', rather than 'for' business. Critical distance is essential: without dispassionate critique, neither businesses, the systems that generate them nor the public good are served. The evidence to the contrary is clear for all to see in the great recession: a global finance system populated by MBA-holding elites, advised by academic consultants from the most prestigious universities, and yet not one of them saw the contradictions inherent in the system. Here's a striking discussion from the documentary Inside Job:



A couple of things reminded me of this today. One was seeing that Warwick University's Business School has a satellite unit in the Shard. No doubt to their management and neoliberal staff this looks like a prestigious address close to those with money to burn consulting them. To me it looks like a public declaration of love and fealty to the money rather than a critical and independent perspective. It also looks like willy-waving competitiveness of the kind only the silliest institutions engage in.

The other conflict of interest that caught my eye today was the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Education Journalism Awards. This afternoon, I taught a Media Ethics class about PR: its origins, its methods, its motives and the ethical context of public relations. It boils down to one thing: money. Public Relations operatives are answerable to their employers and the law. Anything not illegal is therefore permitted in pursuit of profit, with the caveat that one should not get caught.

As Nick Davies' Flat Earth News demonstrated several years ago, PR success is measured in news column inches. If you can get your promotional activity reported as news, you've won. It's relatively easy now: journalists are time-poor, resource-poor and under pressure. They are hosed down daily by a shower of easy 'stories' which are actually adverts. One of the jobs of journalism is to filter out the PR guff. And yet: I watched Twitter tonight as reputable journalists from the Times Higher Education Supplement – people whose work I respect – celebrated winning awards from an organisation whose job it is to fool them. The EJA Awards themselves are a PR stunt to make the industry look more reputable, and it's working. They also attempt to close the distance between journalism and PR copy, which is disingenuous to say the very least.

As far as I can see, a journalist waving a CIPR award is a journalist who doesn't mind being tamed: the trophy may as well be a collar with a bell on it, plus a tag with 'If found, please return to CIPR'. They're being used to dignify a dubious organisation and they've lost critical distance in the same way that Warwick has sold out to finance capitalism and that economist sold himself to the corporations. How can we trust an article by a journalist who has accepted such an award? How confident can we be that they'll apply their critical judgement to material that crosses their desks?

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm in the process of writing a commissioned article for the THES. I wonder if this blog post will magically lead to its withdrawal…

I have read and agree to the terms and conditions…

Today's Media and Ethics class explored the fascinating world of Codes of Conduct. No, wait! Come back! Specifically, we looked at the basic issue of what they're for and whether we need them at all. We examined the National Union of Journalists' code, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations one, and the Student Charter that they all sign when they join the university.

Not one of the students know that they've agreed to adhere to a charter setting out their rights and responsibilities. That's instructive in itself: we all tick licence agreements and terms and conditions online without ever looking at them. Can we be said to have consented to them? Or should we accept the responsibility and read every line? Certainly the student code is a rag-bag of ideas drawing on Kantian and utilitarianism and ranges from the bleedingly obvious to the staggeringly impractical. Our students commit to things ranging from keeping their contact details up to date (which isn't an ethical matter) to committing to 'celebrating diversity'. This is a bit shocking to me. Without knowing much about it, the students have agreed to a particular ideological viewpoint. Now, I'm as anti-racist as anyone, perhaps more so, but I'm a bit concerned about this. Are we saying that racists can't study here? I'd be happy with that, but I'm not sure it would stand up in court and if we are saying so, we should make it clear, rather than shoving in a list which includes a commitment to speak up in seminars and do the reading. I have a strong suspicion that few of them actively 'celebrate diversity', partly because it's a completely meaningless formulation, so they're all in breach of the Code. The law doesn't ban racism or paedophilic impulses because that's an impossibility: it bans racist and paedophilic behaviour. I'm such a wet liberal that I don't want to ban racists from getting an education here. In fact I think it's imperative: a good education will stop them from being racists. Nor do I think that ticking a box agreeing to a Charter will turn a racist into a non-racist.

The fact that the students didn't know they'd agreed to it implies that the charter is little more than PR, or a trap for anyone of whom we wish to dispose. 'You signed the charter', we can say, 'and now you've broken the rules'. In theory, at least: no sanctions are mentioned, which led to a discussion about whether any code is worthwhile if there are no consequences to breaches of that code. On the other side, a Kantian might say that behaviour dictated by fear of consequences can't be ethical at all. Another point against codes of conduct is that they outsource ethical consideration to a finite list: whether it's intended as a minimal or maximal formulation, it encourages the individual to rely on prescriptions rather than close consideration of their own actions.

Certainly the NUJ code is an idealistic wish-list which assumes a working culture of fairness and respect: not that of the News of the World and its sister papers. The Nuremburg Trials banned the 'only following orders' defence on the grounds that some crimes are so manifestly unethical that the individual should have been able to recognise their innate evil. The NUJ code ends with this:

The NUJ believes a journalist has the right to refuse an assignment or be identified as the author of editorial that would break the letter or spirit of the NUJ code of code.

Which is lovely. But imagine yourself in the busy newsroom of a Sunday tabloid on Saturday night. You don't have a proper contract, a thousand people want your job, you have kids to feed and the editor is demanding that you hack a phone (this is a hypothetical scenario, you understand). What happens to you when you point to the NUJ site and decline that order? Security pop round, dump your I Heart Rupert mug in a cardboard box and escort you from the building, and you're replaced by a meaner, hungrier hack in minutes. The NUJ code is all very nice, but lots of newsrooms don't even recognise the union, and even fewer give a damn about the moral qualms of its staff. Codes of Conduct don't recognise the structural and institutional context of ethical decision-making, even the ones that aren't deliberately written to leave massive loopholes. 'No man is an island'? Not until you're being asked to take the ethical weight of the world entirely on your shoulders while your erstwhile colleagues shrug and look away.

One school of thought holds that codes of conduct are just advertising - a way to dignify your profession. Occupational lobbyists look at the respect we have for doctors and lawyers (in theory) and decide that the way to join them is to have a Code of Conduct - a public list of rules. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations is so grand that it has a Council which approves the Code of Conduct. It talks about 'professional standards' and 'other professions' a lot, which rather strongly implies that being a PR agent is a profession. Actually, it isn't. Professions are those occupations in which the individual practitioner has a duty to 'the public interest', 'the public' or some abstract concept which outweighs the requirements of the practitioner's client or self-interest. Put simply: if you're a professional, you'll sometimes have to make decisions which hurt you or your client because they're right but inconvenient. The journalist (yes, we're still talking ideal situations here) has a duty towards 'truth' and 'the public interest' and should therefore present the facts as objectively and fully as possible ha ha ha ha ha. But it's something to aspire to and that's what makes journalism a profession. PR operatives aren't. They can be honest and hard-working and fair, but they don't have a permanent, unbending requirement to act according to the public interest. The original CIPR code did say this, but it got taken out by 2011 and replaced with this:

deal honestly and fairly in business with employers, employees, clients, fellow professionals, other professions and the public

which is less about ethics and more to do with efficiency and practicality. The public is tacked on at the end and 'honestly and fairly' is very, very vague. In any case, none of this is about behaving ethically: the purpose of the CIPR code is simply a matter of marketing:

Reputation has a direct and major impact on the corporate well-being of every organisation, be it a multinational, a charity, a Government Department or a small business.

It is, essentially, PR for the PR industry. What are the sanctions for people who break the code? Well, you might get thrown out, though Max Clifford is a member and never got disciplined whatever lies he told the press. If you do get thrown out, nothing happens. If a lawyer or doctor breaks their oaths, they never practice again: CIPR membership is voluntary and 80% of practitioners aren't members, so  it's a piece of window-dressing.

Anyway, that's the kind of thing we talk about in my Ethics class. Recruitment is open for next year and we have plenty of space. All you need to do is sign the Student Charter…

What a piece of work is a man

Firstly, a word with Mr Peter Rhodes about 'news values'.

I made a passing comment recently about my university restructuring its departments, resulting in a Faculty of Arts. People have been referring to it as FArts, which isn't very funny but is fairly predictable. My preference would be for the more accurate Faculty of Arts and Humanities, but I'm just not that bothered.

Although I can't link you to his column in the Express and Star as it isn't considered worthy of webspace, Mr Peter Rhodes thought that my comment was a) worth repeating (without payment) and b) 'whistleblowing'. Then again, he does think that the term 'school lunch' is bourgeois political correctness. Unless he's joking. I can no longer tell these days.

Whistleblowing is when you reveal dangerous, illegal or unethical activity in the workplace. It's worth column inches. I'm very pleased that Mr Peter Rhodes is a regular reader of Plashing Vole, because he might learn something. Not because I'm particularly well-informed, but because he's even less well-informed. It's just a shame that he feels it's important to recycle lame fart gags rather than reconsider whether, for instance, supporters of equal marriage are 'fascist', as he claims (clue: fascists put gay people into concentration camps and make them wear pink triangles, rather than legalising marriage between same-sex couples).

Anyway, that's as much space as Mr Peter Rhodes deserves. But I'm afraid I'm going to upset him again by telling you all what I did in class today.

The first class of the day was a two-hour lecture on Shakespeare, with me as the boss's minion. Or lovely assistant, depending on how myopic you are. An introductory session, we spent a lot of time talking about the cultural blocks around having a rich and dynamic relationship with Shakespeare. We talked about the way Shakespeare has been appropriated by the state and cultural authority as in some way emblematic of Englishness and Britishness. For instance, this 1944 Olivier version of Henry V was clearly part of the patriotic propaganda drive:



But it needs some editing to make it Glorious Brits versus Evil German Scum. Principally, the lines in the next scene in which Henry orders 'every soldier kill his prisoners' are cut - we can't have a king of England, or English people, committing war crimes (even though they did, and do, quite a lot).

We talked about Shakespeare as a businessman, as perhaps being Catholic, perhaps being homosexual, of definitely being a creation of each age. There is no Shakespeare, we said: there are Shakespeares. There's the man churning out bums-on-seats material and negotiating the political vicissitudes of a dangerous period. There's the uncouth dullard who slipped into obscurity for 150+ years after his death,  to be revived in cut-down versions and tragedies with happy endings (really: in one popular staging, Romeo and Juliet wake up and live happily ever after). There's the prophet of Empire (the Victorians saw The Tempest as justifying Empire as a means of civilising the brutes and the anti-Imperial Shakespeare, such as the Irish seashore version I saw this summer which played The Tempest as an examination of the evils of invasion and colonisation. There's Straight Shakespeare and Gay Shakespeare, all working off the sonnets, and there are Conservative and Lefty Shakespeares. Most of these send the guardians of conservative culture off the deep end, but they're all there in the texts, waiting to be uncovered. That's why Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) are so fascinating. Yes, you end up less certain at the end of the course than at that start, but I consider that an intellectual victory.

Our point was that you could easily do a degree in Shakespeare Studies without even opening a copy of the plays because in the absence of authorial intent, all texts and especially plays, can be read (or not read) in a variety of ways. Shakespeare didn't leave manuscripts, didn't do interviews in the Sunday papers, didn't arrange publication of the plays (the cash came from performances, and he co-owned a production company). There's no Authorised Version, only varying texts cribbed from actors' notes and friends' memories. Hence the Shakespeare Industry, which puts him up on a pedestal. World's Greatest Playwright. Timeless. Immortal. Always Relevant. Englishman of the Ages.

All crap. This stuff gets in the way of close, informed readings of the texts. Resistance to Shakespeare is often a result of this patronising guff, most often found in education ministers' speeches and little-Englander editorials in the Daily Mail. Once you've cleared all this cultural undergrowth, you can start reading the texts: asking how (and whether) they work on stage and on screen, what the cultural context was, what perspectives are being privileged and which are being silenced. I'm with Derrida: the author's dead. His opinion no longer matters, but the words he (probably) wrote do, and so does the relationship the reader and audience have with those words.

What we want to do is strip away the unthinking hierarchisation of Shakespeare v other authors, English Literature versus Others (such as MacAulay's assertion that a single shelf of European literature was worth 'the whole native literature of India and Arabia') and get back to texts and contexts. Down with Great Men. This is what the know-nothings refer to as Cultural Relativism and Political Correctness Gone Mad. We need to do this: there's nothing intellectually stimulating or informative about constructing league tables of playwrights. You can't compare The Frogs, Hamlet and Shopping and Fucking in qualitative terms: what you can do is compare technique, staging, setting, their relationships to each other and their contexts and learn things through those comparisons. This isn't controversial in my world, but there are plenty of reactionaries (most of whom haven't seen a play since they were the Third Ass in their primary Nativity) who think this is treason, subversion and filth.

As an encore, I went straight into a class which pulled apart the concept of universal morality based on utilitarianism, Bentham and Mill's formula which problematically relates ethics to a complicated calculation of pleasure, pain-avoidance and consequences while covertly relying on very subjective ideas (we don't agree on what constitutes happiness, nor on how to acquire it). We successfully demolished conventional bourgeois morality in one two-hour slot and thus it was a day well-spent.

Peter: if you're lacking material for next week's column, you're welcome to turn up at any of my classes.

Too Big To Jail?

A couple of years ago when the banking collapsed made us angry rather than weary and depressed, we used to talk about the banks getting away with it because they were 'too big to fail': they'd come to dominate the global economy so much that governments had to save them rather than letting them shut down as a consequence of their criminal and reckless behaviour. This, of course, led to 'moral hazard': if the banks knew they'd be bailed out by taxpayers, there was no incentive to modify their behaviour. And so it came to pass.

We're now into a new phase of banking Yesterday Standard Chartered paid the American authorities £500m for helping finance various terrorists and crime gangs, while HSBC paid £1.2bn to settle American accusations that they'd happily turned themselves into the accounting arm of the Mexican drug cartels. In both cases, the banks pay a fine and escape without any criminal penalties corporately or personally. Which is lucky for Lord Stephen Green, the ordained minister and Government Trade minister (!) who was… er… head of HSBC while it worked for the cartels.

Breuer was pressed on why the US authorities had agreed to a deferred prosecution deal for the bank. He dismissed accusations that prosecutors had not been hard enough and said that the Justice Department had looked at the "collateral consequences" to prosecuting the HSBC or taking away its US banking licence. Such a move could have cost thousands of jobs, he said.

Why no criminal record or prosecutions? Because the American authorities have decided that as well as being 'too big to fail', HSBC and other banks are 'too big to jail'. Essentially, the authorities have decided that Justice should remove her blindfold and decide who gets punished depending on how important they are. No doubt the corner boys who sell the product which made HSBC and the cartels so much money will continue to get decades of jail time for pitifully small amounts of crack or whatever. But the bank which turned an underground industry into a multibillion global concern (and there's a strong argument that drug money helped keep the money markets liquid during the credit crunch, thus earning the gratitude of banks who decided not to be too sniffy about the money's origins) gets off free and easy. £2bn is nothing - epecially compared to the bonuses paid out.

I teach a class on ethics for students of media and religious studies. We give them two basic ethical frameworks, Kant's and the utilitarians' approach. To Kant, an action is immoral or moral regardless of purpose, motivation or outcome. To the utilitarians, the morality of an action is determined by its effects.

The US banking authorities have decided that the short-term consequences of prosecution – lost jobs and a depressed share price – outweigh the consequences of properly prosecuting HSBC. They've plumped for a utilitarian version of justice. I think they're wrong. We now know that justice is officially dependent on economic weight. We always knew that corporations don't suffer the same consequences of their actions as you and I might, but it's never been stated as a legal good. HSBC and its competitors now know that some loose change is as good as a get-out-of-jail free card. Why would they bother complying with any laws when they can simply pay the equivalent of a parking fine later?

More worryingly, the public may (should?) cease to comply with the legal and justice system in future. The point of both is that they're impartial, offering protection and punishment on an equal basis to all. This is no longer true. If corporations can escape the consequences of their actions, why should we invest in the concept of state justice any more? We already know that taxes are only paid by the little people: now it seems like criminal liability has gone the same way.

The weekly Wednesday wobble

Morning all. And what a grey, dreary morning it is here. Perhaps it seems even greyer because I looked through my sister's wedding photos last night. She got married on an escarpment overlooking Wellington, New Zealand - mountains, the sea etc. And the tables at the reception were named for various typefaces, which is exactly the kind of thing I appreciate. I'd like to think that the more annoying guests were placed on the Comic Sans table, out of earshot.

Today's plan is both simple and exhausting: 3 hours on King Lear with the second year students, then straight into 2 hours on deontological ethics and subjective/objective phenomena (utter Kant) with a different set of second years, then I'll haul what remains of my sorry carcass off to fencing. I know that 5 hours of continuous teaching sounds like a doddle to anyone who has a physically demanding job, but it's mentally draining - out in front of the class there's no opportunity for mentally recharging. Switching between two subjects (I teach in two departments) without a break even for a cup of tea is a challenge too.

You have to constantly review how things are going, be alive to every nuance of what the students are saying, feeling and thinking, and never stop paying attention to them. When it goes well, it's the best feeling in the world - but it's still exhausting. I wouldn't want to do anything else. When it's not going well, it's utterly demoralising - such as when they haven't bothered reading a text, or don't feel like talking about it. I've occasionally walked out of a class in exasperation, but it's not a solution.

Anyway, the Lear class should go well - they've had lectures on it already and they should be prepared. As with last week's class, we'll talk about the Nahum Tate 'happy ending' version of the play, the history of performance, the plays' differing moral universes and see how it goes. Attendance has so far been high and they've all been talkative.

The ethics class is trickier: the students are from a wide range of subjects, the concepts are both new and difficult, and most of them appear not to have any interest in the core applications. While they engage quite well with the philosophical concepts, the application of ethical thinking to media production and consumption still seems beyond their mental landscape. News media are at the core of today's session, but I'm hampered by the fact that they literally do not watch TV news, read newspapers or listen to news radio. Last week they hadn't heard of Jimmy Savile, for instance. I know this makes me sound like a whinging old duffer, but it really does bother me: they're mostly media students and they all have the vote.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls

We're having a big staff meeting about the state of our school and plans for further recruitment under the cosh of the Tory/Lib Dem attack on education. Cakes and bottles of wine are tantalising us. I just hope it's not a surprise goodbye party for people made redundant in the next hour. My colleague next to me thinks it's a test: anyone who chooses wine over orange juice is marked for defenestration. I'm more optimistic: given 5 bottles of wine between 60+ people, anyone who gets a glass displays the commitment, drive, determination and sharp elbows which marks them out as natural survivors. I got mine!

Actually, it's not apocalyptic. Some things look bright and others are less promising.

I'm doing my bit. I'm renaming my Media, Communications and Ethics module. From now on it's called The Only Way Is Ethics.

(I should confess that when I tested this on the students, atoms clashing on the surface of the sun could have drowned out the laughter).

*Note to readers less 'down with the kids' than me: there's a popular 'scripted-reality' show following the lives of some shrieking know-nothing narcissists called The Only Way Is Essex.

Try Me, Hire Me

The evil eminence grise of anti-science and feral capitalism, Charles G. Koch, has managed to buy an entire university's integrity for the knock-down price of $1.5m. Compared to the larger sums Gaddafi laid out to buy business, his son's PhD and a good deal of credibility at the London School of Economics, it's a bargain.

Koch handed over the money with the proviso that his hand-selected advisory team could choose 2 candidates for employment: Florida State University therefore abandoned any academic integrity, and Koch got tame academics who are guaranteed never to challenge their sponsor's extremist ideas.

I'm all for it. I work in an impoverished institution and I'm on the latest in a series of temporary and insecure jobs. My fields are Welsh literature, 1918-1939 culture, political fiction and children's literature. If you've got £1m, I'll take it. I may wake up every morning with a screaming conscience, but doubtless the butler will soothe my furrowed brow. Your donation gets your books on my reading lists - leading to increased sales, positive reviews and academic credibility. Publishers, and Alan Apperley: get in touch!

My top compromised institutions (highlights only, the list is endless, and the Hegemon is involved in very murky dealings with oppressive regimes and our tax-avoiding Chancellor has been suspended from the House of Lords and thrown off the Privy Council for expenses corruption):
LSE: now a wholly-owned subisidiary of Libya.
Nottingham University - their International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility: funded by British American Tobacco.
Oxford University: the Said Business School is named after and funded by a major arms dealer with presumably remarkably few scruples given his involvement in the corrupt Al-Yamamah deal.
Durham: has signed a cosy 'memorandum of understanding' with those cuddly and doughty defenders of human rights, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

London School of Economical with the truth

LSE used to be one of the best universities in the country, despite being the alma mater of Jim Hacker.

But like so many competitive institutions, it's rather keener on money than morals: it took large amounts of money from the Gadaffi family and in return gave Saif Gadaffi a PhD (on liberal values!) despite the thesis being plagiarised, and showered praise on Libya's 'democratic' principles - as this film shows, even Saif couldn't help joking about it in a public lecture at LSE.

The LSE's former director Anthony Giddens obligingly cast Libya as the future "Norway of north Africa," writing in the Guardian, "Will real progress be possible only when Gaddafi leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite."

Saif's also friends with the Blair, the royal family and Peter Mandelson. What scintillating parties they must have.

Still, LSE isn't the only institution to have sold its soul: Nottingham University has an International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility. Who pays for it? Why, British American Tobacco of course. (File that one under 'you couldn't make it up'). I wonder if they run courses on Educational Institutions' Social Responsibility.

Meanwhile Oxford University has the Saïd Business School.

The School is dedicated to developing a new generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs, and conducting research not only into the nature of business, but the connections between business and the wider world.

The who business school? Wafic Said: billionaire tax-evader who made his money by attaching himself firmly to the Saudi dictatorship and becoming their main weapons dealer, particularly in the infamous Al-Yamamah arms deal, a byword for corruption and deceit so appalling that Tony Blair personally intervened to stop the police investigating it.

Having made billions supporting repression and dealing in death, the honours are pouring in:

 In 2003 he became the first recipient of the Sheldon Medal, which had been newly established by Oxford University to honour exceptional supporters of the University. He is also a member of Oxford University Court of Benefactors, Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In April 2005, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Damascus University for his "important philanthropic contribution for Higher Education in Syria".

And like tax-avoiding Lord Ashcroft, he has a tame Caribbean nation to give him a diplomatic passport and somewhere to hide his cash:

Saïd is Ambassador and Head of the delegation of St Vincent and the Grenadines to UNESCO since 1996 (hence his entitlement to the style 'His Excellency' chiefly used in the context of his diplomatic role)

A model citizen. Large amounts of his money also go to support the Conservative Party.

But who am I kidding? The Hegemon would have given Hitler and honorary degree if he'd forked out some cash. After all, we've given one to

His Highness Lieutenant General Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan

deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister of the UAE because he is:

a pioneer in the realm of change and development and has made an outstanding contribution to society

Of course he is. And not just because we signed a contract to train this dictatorship's police forces. Is he a bad man?

Well, let's just point out one example of the UAE's approach to policing and justice under His Highness's guidance: his half-brother Sheik Issa filmed himself and his underlings torturing a man with a cattle prod up his anus, pouring lighter fluid over his testicles then setting them alight, shooting him with automatic weapons, beating him with nail-bearing planks and literally rubbing salt into the wounds, then killing him by running him over with a Mercedes. The man was a former business associate the Sheik suspected of stealing $5000 worth of grain.

You can watch some of the tape here: Youtube pulled it because it's too horrific.

But surely this honoured 'pioneer in the realm of change and development' made 'an outstanding contribution to society' by making sure justice was done?

The UAE government concedes that Sheik Issa is the man shown in the video but says he did nothing wrong. “The incidents depicted in the videotapes were not part of a pattern of behaviour,” the Ministry of the Interior said in a statement, according to ABC. 

“All rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly.”

The Interior Minister is Sheik Issa’s half-brother. They are among the country’s 22 royal sheiks.

Makes me proud. I wonder if UAE will see protests in the current wave.

No ethical problems here

I remarked a few weeks ago on how disappointing and ironic it was that some of my students cheated on their ethics essays.

It seems this is part of a wider social problem: a study reveals that books on ethics are stolen at twice the rate as other philosophy texts. Perhaps they're all utilitarians who see the understanding they'll gain as more positively consequential than the damage done by the theft. Kant, on the other hand, is spinning in his grave.

Putting the Boots in

It's not just a shop for buying razor blades, aspirin and hot water bottles. It's a multibillion pound international pharmaceutical company, and when it doesn't like the results of research it paid for, it stops at absolutely nothing to suppress them.

Go here for a tale of intimidation and dirty tricks: lawyers, non-existent ethical objections, private detectives… even an in-house re-analysis of results which - surprise surprise - came to the opposite conclusions to the academic researchers, claimed that no such research existed and was published in a journal controlled by this in-house team.

All hail Dr. Dong of University of California San Francisco. Boo to all the medical societies which failed to support her - because they're funded by Boots/Knoll.

the fears induced by the increased part industry is playing in the funding of research are not dispelled. And before we decide the danger is past, workers at Carnegie-Mellon University reported that in their sample of university-industry research centers, 35% of the signed agreements allowed the sponsor to delete information from publication, 53% allowed publication to be delayed, and 30% allowed both

This is what happens when capitalism meets science. I work in literature - it's unlikely that anything other than my own laziness prevents me from publication, but I have a huge amount of sympathy for the pressures facing my scientific colleagues.