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.

Help yourself…

I've just been to three papers by colleagues in advance of their appearance at a massive international Cultural Studies conference in Paris this July. The linking theme was that of self-help or self-actualization, and the way these ideas have over the past century started to underpin surprising areas of cultural activity.

A key theme of Pelmanism

The first presentation dealt with the institutional framework of 'personal development' and the covert introduction of therapeutic 'learning about learning'. The argument goes that since the Dearing Report, an ideological narrative has developed (not matched by empirical research) which envisages a future in which none of us get 'careers'. Instead, we subsist on a series of short-term jobs in multiple fields. The neo-liberal attractions of this are, of course, low pay and the impossibility of ever developing class consciousness: a mobile, transient workforce can't unionise, for instance.

The concomitant educational requirement for this ultra-atomised workforce is flexibility and transferable skills. Nothing subject-specific will be relevant to your working life for more than a few years straight out of college. So instead, teachers and students will focus on 'learning about learning': oodles of self-reflection and interrogation. What follows from this is a sense that it's not what you know or think, but how you feel about it that matters: the installation of narcissism at the heart of the system. I don't, frankly, care how you feel about semiotics/terza rima/revisionist historiography (though I'd like you value them): I want to know whether or not you understand it. Students will be ordered to work on their feelings until they fit the dominant narratives - despite the supposed liberation of self-actualization, it's a deeply authoritarian narrative.

This stuff is already here: most primary schools and an increasing number of secondary schools are using a model called SEAL, 'Social and emotional aspects of learning', which is based on a bog-standard self-help book called Emotional Intelligence. Now, I'm not saying that feelings aren't important: your emotional state is directly linked to your capability to learn. That's not what this stuff is about. All these pedagogical self-help mantras are deeply reactionary. They emerge in the post-Romantic, anti-Rationalist era: Rousseau, Herder, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault and co. all contribute to a discourse not of a stable objective self (and I'm with them on this), and instead posit a self which is self-created and in permanent flux: Rousseau claimed that one could recover the self by listening to the internal 'voice of nature'. I wouldn't accept that there's a natural self, nor an independent one: we're formed by social structures. What the self-help people do is claim - like Rousseau - that there's an essential and powerful, better 'you' in there, and s/he can be liberated not through social activity, work or intellectual labour, but through emotional narcissism (preferably via lucrative courses). Whether it's Scientology or pedagogy, there's an expensive course with your name on it. You can see the effects by walking into any airport bookshop or trawling the web for very sinister NLP-based Dating Secrets, all of which promise that by constantly working on your Self, you can mould the world to your desires. They promise agency in a socio-economic situation which appears to deny the possibility of any such thing.

Closer to home, this narrative is appearing at the university in the guise of 'educational coaching', such as I'm undergoing at the moment. The 'consultant' I'm meeting every two weeks turns out to be an 'occupational psychologist' who specialises in 'positive psychology', hence the 'are you happy?' questionnaire I did online. She happens to be an interesting and likeable person, but I have serious reservations about the ethics of management not mentioning in advance that she's a psychologist, and about the grounds of the activity. Yes, I can improve my academic life by being less lazy and defeatist, but there's more to it than that: my institution and the wider system has structural and systemic problems which won't be solved by me being a bit cheerier about them. My students will still be denied decent time and resources, despite paying more and more for their education. Cash, equipment, research time and prestige will still be reserved for the elite universities. Modules will still be too general. But the premise of 'positive psychology' is that sorting out the state of my soul will help me overcome these obstacles.

This stuff is being introduced to students in the form of the Personal Development Portfolio, something they'll be expected to maintain from next year. It's a form of self-reflection designed to encourage them to recognise how they learn (or not) and what they've achieved other than subject-specific knowledge (which is so passé). The problem, of course is that once it's a public, assessed record, it becomes a performance. I remember going to Confession as a 12-year-old Catholic. I knew that I was expected to have committed 'sins'. I didn't really think I'd committed any, but I knew the sort of thing they wanted to hear, so I made them up. To be really meta, I should have confessed to falsifying my confession. It's the same for PDP's: they'll all look the same. Just look at the online forums we ask the students to do: when they're finding it difficult, every post starts with 'I really like what you said about X'. PDP won't be a searching examination of an individual's intellectual condition: it'll be another box-ticking exercise as the students adapt to another form of discourse.

It's reactionary because it individualises the self, even if it claims the end result is a subject ready to contribute to the greater good. The individual's successes and failures are ascribed to your internal emotional condition. Structures: capitalism, race, sex and so on are no longer held to have any sway over your trajectory. So if your kid comes home crying because she's never going to be an astronaut, tell him to stop whinging and work on her emotional intelligence: that's all that's stopping him. When you lose your job, don't blame the banks! It's your fault for not being emotionally intelligent and nimble enough.

The other two papers were equally fascinating. One explored the post-religious movement/business of the Art of Living ('personal peace, world peace'), which takes Hindu-originated ideas such as yoga, removes the stuff about Enlightenment and getting off the wheel of reincarnation, and sells courses designed to change the way you respond to the world. Once you're calmer and more accepting - through yoga - you exert a positive effect on those around you, ushering in a new society. Rather than going out to change the world in the way a political activist would, you first have to seek inner meaning… whether there's any time left to change the world would seem unlikely, though the emphasis on 'service' implies that there is a degree of concern for others at the movement's core.

The final paper gave a potted history of the 'unused brain' theory. Apparently it's popularly - and erroneously - believed that we only employ 10% of our brains, and belief originating in 19th-century neuroscience and psychology. All sorts of techniques and movements sprang up claiming to have the secrets to tapping into this latent power: business theory thanks to Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People and the thousands of subsequent variations, the Theosophists, the Pelmanists, the General Semantics crowd (who seem to have been early deconstructionists, claiming that language interferes with your access to reality, but their exercises help you break this barrier), the Ayn Rand lot (recognise the Objective reality of the world, accept Selfishness as the only possible response and FEEL THE POWER) and the Scientologists, who use a pseudo-science called Dianetics to 'actualise' your inner powers (and disperse the spirits of the galactic prisoners dumped on earth by Xenu).

Common themes over the three papers were the ways in which these ideas have been peddled in serious spheres, such as education. They are all post- or anti-Enlightenment, yet all of them employ pseudo-scientific discourse to justify themselves, and all deny the effect of social structures. This is what bothers me most. I'd like you all to be happy all the time. But I don't think it's possible, given the state of the world. If you use psychological techniques to make yourself happy, you're deluding yourself and others. Dissatisfaction is a powerful driver. I want my students to be 'Socrates, dissatisfied rather than a pig, satisfied': they should be searching for new ideas and new solutions. They should question their abilities, knowledges and attitudes - as should I - rather than seeking acceptance of external and internal statae quo.

No way!

Our esteemed leader has informed us that American software to mark essays is nearing completion - so clearly I should feck off and retrain at McDonald's because there's no need for actual learning, experience, ambiguity, creativity in either the teaching or studying process. This guy isn't worried - he clearly thinks it's a brilliant idea. I seem to remember Huxley's Brave New World positing a similar educational system.

The application I've found discussed on the web works on 'semantic similarity' - so that doctor/operate is linked by the computer to an answer which contains 'surgeon/scalpel'. Hmmm