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.

Action stations

Morning all. Very busy day today, so you won't be hearing too much from me (a nation celebrates). Today is another day of action by students protesting the imposition of £9000 fees, massive cuts in teaching provision and the appalling abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, which keeps 16-18 year olds in education.

Will anything happen here? I don't know. It's an institution of 20,000+ very diverse students. Those who rarely turn up to classes aren't bothered by politics (or the worries of anybody else). Those who do split between the determined who've grabbed their chance and won't let it go for anyone and those who are more relaxed. Also, the student body is hugely fractured - there's little sense of a student body or political leadership. I'm sure a few students will do something, but the rest of us won't notice.

For what it's worth, I'd love it if nobody turned up, or if a building was occupied - a bit of backbone after all these years would be very welcome.

Follow the day's events here.

Facing down the apocalypse

If you're up for some philosophy and fighting talk, read this excellent piece on our current political and economic condition. 

Ask your MPs: was your education free? Find out what your MP’s degree was in. If they are a Lib-Dem, ask them how they can sleep at night. Ask them whether they want to be re-elected next time. Tell them everyone regards them as a traitor and a hypocrite – unless they do the right thing, unless they vote the right way. If your MP is Conservative, ask them whether they want to be re-elected. Ask them: is this vandalism ‘conservative’? Is it ‘big society’? If they are Labour, ask them whether they want to be re-elected. They can reverse this.

Also tell them this: the theoretical and ideological underpinning of right-wing economic theory and ideology since Thatcher has been based on the classical economics of Adam Smith. Which is great. This is because, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith argues that education falls into the category of a non-economic institution that must nevertheless be funded by the state, because the economy can’t fund the right sort of education (namely, putatively ‘useless’ education); and without an artistic and cultural education society and the economy will fall into a vicious circle of decline and be unable even to provide a workforce, let alone ‘lead the way’ in a ‘global knowledge economy’.

But if they don’t care about other people and other places, then tell them this: if you kill a city or a town’s university, you rip millions upon millions of pounds out of that place’s local economy. You devastate its infrastructure. So it’s not just others who are hurt. You may lose your ‘Marksies’ Food Hall, your Jamie’s Kitchen, your theatre, your art galleries and your ‘cheaper car insurance’.

Tomorrow is meant to be a national day of action - sit-ins, teach-ins, school walkouts: if nobody turns up to my class, I won't be too sad.  

Liberal…with the truth

Well, well well. Who'd have thought the Lib Dems would learn the Dark Arts of grown-up politics so quickly? We really should commend them for their speed-learning.

It seems only 6 months ago that every single Liberal Democrat MP and candidate publicly signed big pledge cards promising to vote against increasing university fees, and to seek ways to abolish them completely. Not just the odd ones - all of them. Someone called Nick Clegg, who turned out to be their leader, even called potential fee increases 'a disaster'.

Nick Clegg signing a statement reading 'I pledge to vote against any increase in fees…'

Well, it was a long time ago. Now the government's adviser, Lord Browne (the massively rich BP chairman who had to resign because he'd committed perjury) has recommended unlimited fee increases and loans charged at commercial rates - that'll get people flocking to teaching, nursing and social work.

Of course, the coalition will find some way to soften the blow: they'll use Browne as a fear-inducing option before doing whatever it was they already wanted to do, but the bottom line is that these Lib Dem MPs will find themselves voting to increase fees, making liars of them and fools of us all.

This is no surprise to me of course. The Liberal Democrats were founded in treason: the SDP consisted of Labour MPs who decided they could no longer stay in the room with smelly proletarian types with their working-class fixations, and bailed out to campaign for better coffee and plusher sandals. Then they merged with the remains of the old Liberal Party, and the rest was bullshit history, right up to the 2010 election, when they appealed directly to students to vote for them to stop Labour and Tory fee increases.

There's a simple lesson. The Tories are honest scum. They'll stab you in the front so they can see your face. The Lib Dems have built a political machine on stabbing people in the back. They can't stop now.

Students: has your loan come through yet?

I think the student loan system is despicable. I think selling the loan book off to corporations is utterly despicable, and I think that the massive delays in getting the cash to 150,000  students was reprehensible and despicable.

I've now run out of adjectives for the massive bonuses for Student Loan Company bosses announced today. Perhaps you should come up with a few, and put them on a postcard to:

Student Loans Company
100 Bothwell Street
Glasgow
G2 7JD

Give us your feckin' money

University fees up to £3,200: grants and loans stay where they are. David Lammy, the minister in charge (ho ho) says 'difficult choices have to be made'. Students will have to make difficult choices about whether to bother with university or not. Difficult choices by almost universally-Oxbridge educated ministers have been avoided: Trident, higher taxes for the rich, more inheritance tax etc. etc. etc: none of these difficult choices have been made.

Rich kids won't notice a few hundred more - everybody else, like Wolverhampton students will struggle, especially as jobs will be scarce.

Another blow to the proletariat from the Labour Party then. Fucking shameful.