David Roberts

This is my last posting, since I’m off to another job. Thanks for reading, if you have been.

I’ve just had the novel experience of being abused in the letters pages of the Times Higher. Someone who used to work here has been tracking my own letters to that esteemed paper (there are times when reading and stalking seem like similar activities) and has written to describe them as all kinds of things, but mostly unworthy of Newman’s name. I don’t recognize his description of my letters, but if there’s one thing worse than being talked about, it’s not being talked about, as Oscar Wilde said. Even so, while I’ve a long history of learning from honest criticism of my published work, in this case the noise of personal axe-grinding is distracting. It turns out that the person concerned was a notorious practical joker while employed here, and I wondered whether he might be responsible for the anonymous threat I reported in this blog a while ago. So, if you’re so interested, my stalker-reader, why not let me know? You’re probably reading this now.

My latest letter to the Times Higher (June 11 issue) concerns an article published last week by University of Kent sociologist Frank Furedi. In Furedi’s view we live in a ‘complaint culture’ which discourages students from taking responsibility for their intellectual development. The origins of this situation, he argues, go back to a plethora of ‘charters’ published in from the 1980s onwards which were designed to foster higher standards in the public services. The result, in Furedi’s view, is a sysem where students feel entitled to complain about anything – especially their marks – without reference to how hard they tried, how able they are in the first place, to lecturers’ own principled views about the process and value of education, and to what he calls ‘the relationship of trust between tutor and student.’

Furedi’s figures don’t suggest this is the widespread problem many academics might think. The number of referrals to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator is still relatively small, and the majority that get there are not upheld. I’m also suspicious of the way he refers to that ‘relationship of trust,’ which appears to consist in his view of lecturers saying to students, ‘trust us – we know what’s good for you.’ Students, he claims, often don’t know the difference between good education and bad, and are apt to be seduced by such wicked commodities as Powerpoint shows or what Furedi dismissively calls ‘a friendly atmosphere.’ In other words, he would have us all say, ‘trust us – we know you’re ignorant.’

Trust, as anyone knows, has to be mutual. If we can’t entrust students with the sense to be able to distinguish a good tutor from a poor one, there’s something wrong with our sense of professional purpose; if we believe we have no responsibility to foster a friendly atmosphere for the sake of the thousands of students who will benefit from it educationally, we need to think about why we are in the profession at all. If there is a ‘culture of complaint,’ generalised moaning like Furedi’s is as much a part of it as any student convinced that their mark in the mid-forties should have earned sixty.

This week’s Times Higher has a number of features on the threat to the tutor-student relationship in the modern university. Newman memorably said that a university should be an ‘Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one,’ not a ‘foundry, mint or treadmill,’ and he probably would have been appalled by the idea of staff-student ratios of 1:30, limited contact hours, extensive arrangements for staff research leave, and all the other factors that make the Times Higher features timely. These days we simply have a different model of learning, and if we did not have more sophisticated electronic tools to cope with larger cohorts the situation would be beyond desperate.

The THE features implied that students are constantly craving more personal attention, but that’s not quite the whole truth. Many students struggle to make ends meet and are grateful for a cut-down timetable that allows them to do outside work in order to fund their studies. It’s notoriously hard to persuade some students to attend just for the sake of a personal tutor meeting that has no bearing on their assessment. The sad thing is that our under-funded system gives them a vested interest in reduced contact time.

The same is true of staff. The pressure to produce research of the highest quality means that tutors become more and more reluctant to stray outside their specialisms when it comes to teaching. ‘I can’t teach the 1640s,’ said one lecturer, ‘because I’m working on the 1630s.’ Anyone who has tried to run an academic department knows that the only way you can make a personal tutor system work is by having colleagues teach their personal tutees throughout their course, but it’s impossible to do that if the course reflects a narrow range of research interests. Increasingly, graduates of such courses are not equipped to teach across a wider range of subjects.

Letter on this to appear in this week’s THE.

One interesting controversy to have sprung from the pages of the Times Higher recently concerns the ‘usefulness’ – or, at least, public accountability – of research projects in the arts and humanities. A couple of issues ago, Peter Barry (Professor of English at Aberystwyth and a man universally liked and respected among peers and colleagues) took to task the Arts and Humanities Research Council for insisting that grant applications include a public dissemination strategy. No longer is it enough – for example – to trace the influence of French fiction on Henry James’s early fiction in a series of scholarly articles or a monograph; now the AHRC wants to see how the work will have a broader public appeal, so applicants need to think about web legacies or partnerships with museums and other arts organisations. In Peter Barry’s view, such a requirement is inimical to real research, which might by definition have to be tentative or difficult if it is to stretch the boundaries of its field. The AHRC, he contended, was caving in to the service mentality which has, arguably, taken over swathes of university life already.

Enter a furious (and about to step down) Professor Philip Esler, AHRC Chief Executive and biblical scholar. He accuses Barry of contempt for the public, of political naivety (these days we all need to justify our call on the public purse) and of disregard for the tax payers who stump up the money for his salary. Enter also a happy AHRC award winner who thinks, more damagingly, that the council does fund risky projects, and he has one of them; perhaps his letter to the Times Higher on the subject became part of his dissemination strategy.

I’ve never been happy with the ‘tax payer’ argument and don’t think people associated with universities should use it too often. It’s another version of the ‘customer’ mentality among students that as a Head of Department I tended to resist by telling students that one of the things they were paying for was to have someone like me telling them they were wrong, could do better, etc etc. The function of universities in a liberal society is stand at a distance from government, and that’s one reason they are worth funding. We are in danger of losing sight of that paradox, and if universities merely dance to a governmental tune, they will cease to innovate.

There’s another problem with the AHRC’s ‘dissemination’ approach, which is that most ideas for dissemination are based on guesswork and gestures. They are not informed by research in the same way as the proposals they are intended to publicise, and are often profoundly unoriginal. How can you prove that mounting an exhibition will attract sufficient people, or that a website will be used? Such problems tend not to apply to the kind of dissemination most academics are used to, and which has a much better chance of success – the sort that happens in lectures and seminars informed by the latest ideas in the field. The impact of research cannot be measured by the number of people who read a scholarly article or book; the key question is how you develop cultures in which the important questions, tentative or difficult though they may be, get discussed.

If opinion polls are to be believed, it is very likely that 2010 will see a Conservative government elected. The world awaits a clear view of what its policies might be, but universities have particular cause to be anxious. When even the Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman bemoans the cost of the government’s 50% participation rate target for higher education, we can feel the ideological tide turning.

You can get a glimpse of Conservative thinking in a document recently published by Policy Exchange, a free market think tank, link as below (copy it and paste it into your browser):

http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/pdfs/Sink_or_Swim.pdf

It’s called ‘Sink or Swim’ but its main emphasis on the first of those alternatives. The authors, Anna Fazackerley and Julian Chant, are concerned that many universities are poorly run, carelessly audited and unclear about their mission. They point to examples such as the institution found to be at risk of bankruptcy soon after it had declared a clean bill of health and, inevitably, London Metropolitan University, with its multi-million pound clawback that resulted from over-declaring completion rates (there’s another essay to be written on what really happened there). They are also concerned that many of the 27 university mergers of the past couple of decades have been badly planned and managed. But their chief concern is that universities appear to have got themselves into a position where they cannot be closed down because of (i) their legal standing, (ii) their importance to local and national economies, but chiefly (iii) the mealy-mouthed way in which HEFCE goes about its business.

To keep ourselves from despair or mass protest, we have to assume that there will be more to Conservative policy than calculating how many universities could be shut. For the time being, consider this report’s five main recommendations:

1. The authors concede that a university closure outside London would have disastrous economic and social consequences, so for the regions merger is the best option where universities are struggling – as long as the mission and procedures of the new institution are fully worked out. This is one of those recommendations that sounds radical but which in fact not many people would argue with. It’s been happening, more or less successfully. London is a different matter. There are 42 organisations providing university courses in the capital, so we could do without one or more of them, in the report’s view. Making such a judgment on the basis of the number of institutions is, of course, pretty naïve; it needs to be done on the basis of fundable places, and the impact on universities expected take up the ones lost through closure.
2. It’s at that point that the private sector enters the equation. As in other public sectors, private providers such as the College of Law would be allowed to pick up the slack and – for the first time – attract HEFCE funding for doing so. They would be contracted to ‘deliver’ courses and even rent campuses for the duration of the agreement. The example of the University of Buckingham, which consistently scores very high in student satisfaction surveys, is usually held up as an example of the benefits of private intervention. But there would be profoundly negative side effects: a shrinking of the curriculum to cover only directly vocational courses; staff working FE hours and so unable to refresh the curriculum properly; a diminution in universities’ ability to tackle inequality.
3. Private sector providers are assumed to be good at management and oversight of quality. HEFCE, and a minority of Vice Chancellors, are represented as impotent fools who can’t spot trouble in their own back yard. Therefore HEFCE needs more power to intervene in the management of universities, strangely counter to the private-sector logic of the rest of the report’s proposals.
4. From this it follows that there should be more regular auditing of HE institutions, which will seem an incredible proposal to most staff who work in them. The report comes up with the idea that different interest groups in the sector (Million +, Russell Group, Guild HE etc) should exercise responsibility for auditing their constituent members; a sop to those who feel their autonomy threatened by more intensive audit, and very unlikely to be adopted for obvious reasons.
5. The sting, inevitably, is in the tail. Universities must ‘define their missions’ better. What the authors mean by this is that post-92 universities should not waste their time and tax-payers’ money on that mysterious activity known as research, which should only be carried out by a select number of older institutions. If universities have diverse missions, that’s because universities are diverse entities. Successive RAEs have shown that post-92 institutions can be world-leaders in some subjects, even ones thought to be the preserve of their older brothers and sisters. Their students deserve to see the benefits of that success as much as anyone else’s.

Dan Brown didn’t invent it, but he certainly gave it new currency: anti-monasticism, loosely translated as the fear, suspicion or hatred of communities that choose to set themselves apart from the world in pursuit of aims that cannot be squared with the prevailing pursuit of material or physical satisfaction. ‘Fear’ because of an inherited tradition, born of the Protestant Reformation and perpetuated even now by Brown and others, that monasteries harbour forces opposed to the state. ‘Suspicion’ because of lurid imaginings of sexual indulgence (fuelled, admittedly, by a few shameful cases in real life). ‘Hatred’ because of the calling monasteries pursue somehow casts adverse judgment on the rest of us – that it is ‘higher’ than ours.

Anti-monasticism has a long history, pre-dating the Reformation. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is full of jokes and stories told at the expense of monks. The invention of the printing press saw a mass of anti-monastic texts and images circulated across Northern Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. If anything, the ‘enlightenment’ of the Eighteenth Century intensified the campaign. The 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ led to the exclusion of Catholics from the English throne, a measure which is only now being reviewed, and the end of the Eighteenth Century saw the most debased anti-Catholic text in all literature: Matthew Lewis’s 1795 pot-boiler, The Monk, with its ludicrous anti-hero, Ambrosio. As in Brown, the bad guy is easy to spot: he’s the one in the cassock.

But anti-monasticism is not confined to monks and nuns. It’s reached education. You can tell from walking around. When new buildings are planned, staff offices are often designed out. They are akin to ‘monastic cells,’ so staff are herded instead into ‘academic work pools.’ Most new buildings are sheathed in glass, so we can keep an eye on everyone. It’s no longer enough for the curriculum to emphasise the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Instead, we must instill in our students ‘employability skills’ in the hope of making them ‘future-proof.’ At universities, research is often said to have no value unless it is ‘applied’ and so contributes to that vague concept, the ‘knowledge economy.’ All in all, it is a systematic revolt against ‘monastic’ values in favour of the ‘real world.’

Atheist or believer, Catholic or agnostic, anyone can work out that what people call the ‘real world’ is a dangerous illusion. Believing only in the material demands of that ‘real world’ makes human beings selfish, competitive, blinkered, stunted and irresponsible. Whatever our walk of life, we need a sense of higher calling to make us think about the value we could attach to life if we really tried – if we denied ourselves easy pleasures, if we truly wondered about the lives of others, if we committed ourselves to a more sensitive kind of talking, listening and meeting. If we are to do that, whether through education, spirituality or both, we need to think more carefully about the value of being, somewhere in our lives, pro-monastic.

I prefaced what was supposed to be an Easter break with a trip to London. There was a board meeting for the National Academy of Writing and I met my friend Barry Turner beforehand for lunch. A couple of hours talking to him and the Garrick Club archivist, and my dreams of a PC free Easter vanished. Barry suggested I write a one-man play about the subject of my forthcoming CUP biography, while the archivist, a brilliant young art historian called Marcus Risdell, pointed out the existence of a letter by the same man which all previous students have managed to miss. I wrote the play in a couple of feverish days over the weekend, thinking it would never get done if I hung around, and turned out an article on the letter which I’ve now sent to the TLS. Further tinkering on my CUP manuscript will follow soon.

I don’t know yet whether either play or article will succeed, but if they do they will be splendid publicity for Newman and (yes) for me. The exercise served as a reminder that the notion of a standard contract in academic life is, for most academics I know, an irrelevance. Once you get the bit between your teeth in preparing or researching something, it’s impossible to let go. Even the call of right-arm muscle spasms through over-use of the mouse is no deterrent. I’ve worked at places where there was a very literal approach to booking leave, with every half day outside normal working hours subject to bureaucratic scrutiny, but that system took no account of the nature of academic work, starting as it did from the assumption that academics, like clerks, turn their labours on and off. We don’t, and if we are treated as if we do, we will be less effective and productive, and less likely to come up with fresh ideas (which is, after all, supposed to be our job).

My Newman inaugural lecture is coming up fast – April 28th at 6.30. The invitations have gone out and before long I’ll discover how many of my colleagues, friends and family can stand the idea of my holding forth for fifty minutes. I fondly imagine that students haven’t found it too painful an experience over the past 25 years, so I live in hope. Anyway, I’ve been here before so I feel like exclaiming, with Meryl Streep, Mamma mia, here I go again. To celebrate my second inaugural I wrote a piece for the Times Higher, which is included at the bottom of this entry.

The Newman inaugural is going to be different from my first one, which I gave at Birmingham City University in 2005. Then, because of pressure of time, I decided to do something straight out of my research top drawer – a wide-ranging piece on sleep in Shakespeare which was subsequently published by The Cambridge Quarterly and entered for the RAE. For the purposes of the occasion, I divided it into thirds: an introductory bit which I thought anyone could follow; a contextual section which turned the screw a little; then some close readings of Shakespeare which I thought would probably be too much for non-specialists. That’s pretty much how it worked out, except that my children, then 13 and 11, were bored witless by the whole thing. Four years on, the memory is strong enough to deter them from coming again! Soon I’ll find out how many veterans of that day feel the same.

This time I have a different brief. Because of my title and responsibilities I have to stray outside my academic comfort zone, a challenge I welcome. We should all have to do it some time. I have to talk about issues in higher education with particular reference to J.H.Newman, while trying to make the evening as entertaining as possible. I’ve chosen space in HE. As you’ll see from the article below, I think the first duty of a novice professor is to sound professorial, so while I’m planning a nice slide show I won’t be going out of my way to dilute the content in the name of entertainment. I’ve seen people do it, with disastrous results. I’m more concerned, since I’ll be talking about something of general interest, that I might sound amateurish or obvious. After the event I’ll post the text on this site and you can let me know.

Here’s the article::

It’s the most disputed method of teaching but when it comes to showing off a new professor, nothing else will do. The inaugural lecture is one of those fine academic institutions that, like graduation ceremonies and honours classification, unites universities old and new in the common cause of advertising learning to the world.

‘Unites’ is perhaps an exaggeration. Players with lesser roles on the higher education stage might hold an inaugural every year or so unless they routinely award professorships for diligent committee service, in which case the profs concerned are usually exempt from analysing in public the semiotics of action plans or the history of the bullet point. Many of the big boys, by contrast, have a whole series of inaugurals every year as part of a public lecture programme. In fact, you begin to suspect that the number of conferments each year might be decided in some universities by the PR department.

Here’s what one university says is the purpose of it all: ‘to inaugurate the post of a new professorial appointment, enabling the post holder to present an overview of his or her research to a general audience, consisting of members of the University community and of the general public. It is an excellent opportunity for members of the University to hear about research that is going on within their community and also for members of the general public to access information about the latest developments in science, technology, arts and humanities, medicine, law and social sciences.’

If that describes pretty well the noble ideals of the inaugural lecture, it also captures perfectly its pitfalls. ‘An overview of his or her research’ – we’ve all seen what happens when that’s taken too literally. The inaugural turns into an oral CV, a live blog about Prof X’s personal journey from jejune graduate student to questing time lord. At its worst, it discourages Prof X from doing what Prof X is supposed to do best: trying out something new.

Then there’s that time-honoured phantasm the ‘general audience,’ a heady cocktail mixed by Jurgen Habermas and Lord Reith, and here assumed to include both existing professors and the general public. Professors who are also exceptional teachers persuade you that the concept of a general audience exists; those who aren’t leave you feeling glad that you are in another part of the university or attached to none. By the end of the evening, whatever stereotypes you have about professors may well be intact.

With a ‘general audience’ to face it’s easy for the novice prof to succumb to the lure of multi-modality, in the mistaken belief that people likely to be bored by fifteen or so dense pages of script will swoon at a Powerpoint show or warm to a favourite song or film clip. They are more likely to conclude that for all your wizardry, you’ll never be the next Niall Ferguson or Bethany Hughes.

The biggest challenge faces the increasing number of professors who hold their title for achievements in learning and teaching. They had better be good. You could argue that if they rose to eminence by decrying the lecture, they have an excuse, but that only encourages some to subvert the assumption that lecture audiences are passive. The resulting games and other interactive episodes can leave visitors wondering whether university is so different from school after all. After one such occasion which I was thankfully unable to attend, I asked a former colleague whether the new Professor of Learning and Teaching had set out to undermine the officially suspect lecture format. His grim reply: ‘We were made to hold up plastic bananas.’

With all the pressures of time academics face, there’s one sure-fire and economical way of doing an inaugural. In fact, professorial committees could insist on it as part of the appointment process. Use the opportunity to do something in the line of normal duty that will maximise your contribution to the REF or whatever targets have been set for you. That is, scope your next project as if you were explaining it to an editor or funding council. If the project has any chance of success, it will have some basis in your previous work and appeal to those outside your discipline. That’s as personal and as general as you need to be in order to sound like the thing you now are (and, in case you were wondering, that’s your first duty).

Alan Ryan, Warden of New College Oxford and Times Higher columnist, has applauded John Denham for cottoning on to the ‘real’ issue facing university policy makers: how to ensure that post-92 universities stick to their ‘traditional’ business of teaching students with lower ‘A’ level grades or from unconventional academic backgrounds. Subtle observer he may be of university politics and policy, but when it comes to the post-92 universities, Ryan likes his slogans as much as the next minister. He quotes the VC of Central Lancashire – an institution he cites so often that its existence seems to offend him – as saying that there will be an almighty fuss if Denham’s proposals see light of day. In other words, says Ryan, there will be ‘a terrible display of wounded vanity’ and ’self-deceiving nonsense.’ Like many other observers of higher education, Ryan is upset that those upstart crows, the post-92s, have done too well out of the RAE.

Among other things, he has a curious sense of tradition. If post-92 universities are to ‘focus on teaching their traditional clientele,’ perhaps the same should go for (a) those pre-92 universities that failed to demonstrate research excellence until some way into the history of the RAE, and (b) the others that struggled to match the achievement – and the return on public investment – of their parvenu rivals in 2008.

If the rest of us are to join Ryan in applauding John Denham for at last proposing that ‘different sorts of universities should do what they are good at,’ we’ll simply have to give up reading the Times Higher. There are just too many upsetting stories about the research and knowledge transfer successes of post-92 universities. As for Ryan’s suggestion that a ‘terrible display of wounded vanity’ would follow the implementation of John Denham’s Daily Mail musings, he can presumably reassure us that that isn’t what we’ve seen from numerous pre-92 VCs since the RAE results were published, and that the research policies of the same VCs since 2001 should not be classified as ‘self-deceiving nonsense.’