As predicted

I suggested yesterday that the proposed New College of Humanities (profit-making, £18,000) per year would be a sham.

I was right: it's offering the same University of London External degree, lots of the course content is stolen, and the celebrity profs are merely window-dressing:

In another blow to the fledgling institution, it was reported today that two of the high-profile academics involved – historians Sir David Cannadine and Linda Colley – will only teach for an hour each in the institution’s first year.

Anyone who goes there will get what they deserve.

Need some help? Think Humanities!

Thanks to my new hero, Worst Professor Ever (oh yeah? Try my classes), I'm led to this article in the - of all places - Harvard Business Review. It makes we want to storm our management suite, prop open the VC's eyes á là Clockwork Orange and force her and her minions to read it over and over and over and over and over and over again. Then I'd slip down to London and read it out loud to David Willetts (universities minister, recently blamed feminism for ending social mobility) and Michael Gove (moronic education minister) while emphasising every syllable with swift kicks to their tender parts.

Some extracts:

Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities

This is because our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to control, predict, verify, guarantee, and test data. It doesn't teach how to navigate "what if" questions or unknown futures. As Amos Shapira, the CEO of Cellcom, the leading cell phone provider in Israel, put it: "The knowledge I use as CEO can be acquired in two weeks...The main thing a student needs to be taught is how to study and analyze things (including) history and philosophy."

People trained in the humanities who study Shakespeare's poetry, or Cezanne's paintings, say, have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can't be analyzed in conventional ways. 

If you want out-of-the-box thinking, you need to free up people's inherent creativity. Humanists are trained to be creative and are uniquely adapted to leading creative teams. (A case in point: Steve Jobs, who openly acknowledges how studying the beautiful art of calligraphy led him to design the Macintosh interface.) 

In defence of humanities

The core of the Tory Scum-Lib Dem attack on education is a denial that it's a public good - especially the humanities.

I'm very well aware that signing petitions doesn't do anything (a million people marched against the Iraq war), but it's a gesture of opposition. So please do sign this one:

We are a group of academics, students and business people who are campaigning for recognition of the humanities and social sciences as an invaluable public good that should not be abandoned to market forces.

If you think that university degrees should enhance employability, then the Humanities and Social Sciences matter because they develop crucial skills, including:

* Critical thinking and analysis

* Capacity to understand and negotiate cultural difference

* Creativity and imagination 

For the universities to offer contemporary relevance tomorrow, or in ten years’ time, they need to be in a position to decide what they teach today on intellectual grounds, not on the basis of whether or not a subject happens to be “popular”.

The UK government is currently preparing a White Paper on higher education. We urge them to reject the impoverished vision of higher education outlined in the Browne report, which surrenders everything to market forces. This is not only an impoverished vision of the role of universities in society, but also an impoverished vision of the future of Britain as a democracy, a society, a culture – and an economy.

We urge them instead to pursue a bold vision, to recognise the humanities and social sciences as a public good, and to invest in their future rather than leaving them to the vagaries of the market. 

Meanwhile, in la la land

Clive Bloom, whoever he is, thinks that humanities research is a total waste of time, 'hobby' activity conducted 'in a comfy chair' while sipping cappuccinos. Well done, Clive. Obviously, human society is very simple and can be explained simply by biology and associated sciences. You fecking moron.

He adds insult to injury with gems like this:

No academic that I've ever met works nine to five, five days a week. With three months of holiday and every weekend free…

I just wonder if we need a body to dispense largesse to projects that are quite so facile and obscure or those that are the personal pet of some very small clique who believe in the centrality of the oboe to 21st-century culture, or those who are governed by the most fashionable thinking on heritage or the cultural primacy of modern dance, or the digital future of everything. As for the literature projects so in need of funded buyouts, they could either be done at the author's leisure or not at all, rather than splashing their spurious claims of importance across the AHRC's website as success stories.

That's hit quite a raw nerve. I'm exhausted at the moment. I'm always in the office 9-5 and many days I'm in for much longer. My institution's teaching hours are 9-9. I've been in the office until gone 10 p.m. (that's 13 hours) most of this week and last week. Next week will be the same, despite this research showing that doing 3 hours overtime a day leads to a 60% rise in heart disease. I work weekends because I teach so many modules and so many big classes that's it's the only way to mark work in the ridiculously short period of time available. Research basically doesn't get done - which means I'll never get another job. As to a three month holiday - it's bullshit. We have exam boards, resits to mark, clearing hotlines to staff, modules to design, even try to squeeze some research in…

I've rarely read such a vacuous and reactionary piece of rubbish. I think humanities research is important because it helps us to understand human relations and human behaviour. Why he'd reduce this to a hobby is completely beyond me.

The lonely suicide of education

I've just been to an open staff meeting with our esteemed Vice-Chancellor.

We are all going to be efficient. Centralisation will also be a feature of our institution. Efficiency will be centralised, and centralisation will be efficient. We will centralise efficiently, and we will be efficient because we will be centralised.

In the middle of all this rather retro management gobbledygook (it was like listening to an NHS manager appearing on Just A Minute), she sneaked in the death of the university. Obviously, she didn't phrase it like that. What she said was 'We are past the age, and past the ability, for staff to design small modules. What we will do is buy in course material from providers such as the OU or Pearson'.

So there you have it. We won't need PhDs or experts to teach courses. We'll just need people to switch on the computers, hand out the books and press play on the DVD machine. Obviously having people who've written books, revolutionised their field or conducted in-depth research is a drag on resources. Knowing stuff costs money. Employing monkeys to hand over shrink-wrapped courses designed somewhere else for profit is much easier. And of course, all students are the same and have exactly the same needs so we won't need to design courses by getting to know people, reading their work and adapting to their needs. (Meanwhile, they're telling us that we'll have more time for research. What the fuck for? Nobody will ever hear it).

It's also the end of critical thinking (educational values weren't mentioned once). We'll end up with Law, Business and apprenticeships, when what we need are humanities graduates and other critical thinkers who'll challenge this narrow, employer-fixated, managerial, imagination-free vision of education and life in general as a process of ramming individuals into complacent work-unit boxes. What's happening is exactly what Ritzer said would happen: courses like English, Cultural Studies, languages, history etc. will be taught at élite universities to élite kids who'll continue to run the world and never, ever, have to meet an oik from Wolverhampton in the corridors of power again. Our lot will learn to hold meetings, operate Powerpoint and do what they're told without question. Do we improve society by churning out obedient drones? No. We reify existing inequalities.

Do I sound angry? I know that underneath this mild exterior is a Stalinist waiting for his chance, but this is insanity. Educationalists (the Institute for Learning Enhancement, or the V-C's Gestapo, as nicknamed by a much more senior figure at my university) are actually, gleefully, joyfully, seriously doing their very best to remove the few remaining vestiges of humanist, Enlightenment values. They're like the Khmer Rouge, who were nominally communist but actually did all they could to destroy communist values. They're entryists, wreckers, anti-intellectuals, managers and technocrats hellbent on deifying 'efficiency', rationality and all the qualities Bauman said lead to Auschwitz. This is perhaps what makes me angriest of all. The people who are meant to be on our side are the destroyers. They have no faith in the power and purpose of education because they're rightwing loons obsessed with the appearance of authority. They despise the experts, those scruffy readers who spend their time thinking about stuff rather than buying Armani and finding ways to 'maximise income streams'.

They're cowards and they are traitors, and so are we for not standing up for the educational values we believe in. Students: do you want me to spend my time mechanically reading out a lecture prepared by some under-paid graduate in a Slough office and faxed to me that afternoon, or do you want me to spend years reading books, thinking about them, writing about them, then talking to you and listening to what you think? I know what I'd rather have.

I didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge. I went to a small, kindly, serious institution (Bangor University). It wasn't perfect, but there was no fudging about what constituted education. It wasn't the delivery of preconceived ideas. Education was a matter of thinking, arguing with, talking to and listening to academics who knew what they were on about, but who were also interested in how we saw the world. That's my bottom line, and it's how my colleagues here feel. I don't want to end up parrotting somebody else's line, then marking your work according to what a distant company thinks is a 'right' answer - we may as well deliver a degree by online surveys and e-mail.

Mind you, facsimile / fax-machine education is damn cheap.

Set reading for today: Ritzer's 'The Mcdonaldized University'.

We think we've got problems

Over at Cardiff Uni, they're savagely slashing continuing education courses and jobs - mostly in humanities. It's clearly a matter of profit-seeking rather than being committed to the intrinsic benefits of education. With the posh universities, extramural/continuing education are tempting targets because they hardly see themselves as part of the local community in the way that Wolves Uni does. Who cares about a few poxy beginners' Welsh courses if you can spend that money on importing a Nobel laureate? I'm a double graduate of the University of Wales (Bangor), which took a completely different view, and managed to attract students and staff from across the globe while simultaneously caring for the needs of the local community. Why can't Cardiff do the same?