More anecdotal evidence of the pernicious influence of student fees.
A short but sobering post after a bruising Friday in the bear-pit of academia.
In a seminar at the start of the week I was encouraging undergraduate students to be more forthcoming with their ideas, opinions and findings. I explained to them that they are part of an academic community and that as such their contribution is important and valued. I highlighted how I’d incorporated research carried out by dissertation students into my own teaching. I explained that some of the ideas raised on the module were not actually the result of my own genius but had emerged in conversation with students like them. In short, I was ‘bigging them up’; trying to instill a little confidence in them, when one student asked in a jovial but pointed fashion: ‘Why should we contribute anything? We’re paying for you to teach us? Did any of them other students whose ideas you ripped off see a penny for them?’
Well, what do we expect if we’re going to commodify knowledge?
Who cares whether the poor go to university or not?
It looks increasingly likely that most universities will set their fees at the top rate of £9000. As Mike Baker explains here, this is because universities will have to charge at least £7500 just to maintain current levels of income once the teaching grant gets slashed, but most will opt to add another £1500 to that figure because none will want to appear cut price and second rate when compared to other institutions.
This is bad news for the government. It is literally banking on price ‘differentiation’, since its projected figures on the cost of funding student loans rest upon the assumption that the average fees will be somewhere between £8000 and £8500. But Mike Baker suggests that students themselves would prefer to be at a university that charges the full whack because, well, who wants a degree from higher education’s equivalent of Poundland? And who wants to be at an institution that charges less and therefore spends less on your education?
Baker argues that this is were the whole fees affair gets interesting because if most universities charge £9000 then this will leave the government out of pocket since the cost of funding student loans will exceed the anticipate £3.6bn As a consequence it’s threatening to ‘claw back’ money from institutions that charge the full 9k by reducing further their teaching grant.
All of which begs the question: if you’re a forward thinking, entrepreneurial university, why don’t you just tell the government to take its teaching grant and stick it up its arse? You could go private; charge what you like and free yourself from the dead-hand of government bureaucracy and its stultifying audit culture. The very thought of new lean, mean, private universities probably sets some Tory pulses racing. Dear God, it even makes this looney lefty’s heart flutter a little, such is my contempt for the endless, worthless administration that I associate with government regulation.
But back to the substance of this post. What does all this mean for students from low income families? Well, apparently universities charging more than £6000 may be fined or forced to reduce their fees if they fail to reach their quota of poor people! But who really gives a fuck about the poor (they are after all, always with us)?
We live in a class ridden society and education plays a crucial role in reproducing social stratification, with people striving to acquire qualifications, which they hope will give them competitive advantage over others in the job market. Someone has got to be poor, so just be glad it isn’t you… or perhaps it is you, in which case you may find some consolation in the notion that your relative poverty is a sort of public service that allows others to get on.
Graduation Day at Gradgrind College
All the government cant about ensuring places in higher education for people from low income families is becoming tiresome. It serves a similar function to charity in the minds of the affluent. It salves the conscious while licensing ‘business as usual’.
I suppose that what I’m suggesting is this: the government’s insistence on universities providing opportunities for young people from low income families is all a bit cosmetic. Why would Tories care whether the poor go to university or not? In pure economic terms (the only terms the Tories seem to understand), what would be the advantage of putting low income students through higher education? In fact, given the potential costs of funding student loans in the future, the government may feel that there is a better economic case for keeping the poor out of universities.
The more pointed question is why does the Left want to encourage working class and low income families to consider university as a viable option? Social mobility? Economic prosperity? Do me a favour! Social mobility is encouraged by the redistribution of wealth not education. And there is little evidence that putting more people through HE makes us all richer.
The Right, deep down in its fetid subconscious, may not give a flying fuck about the poor and whether they get a higher education or not. But the Left has got to come up with a convincing argument about why education matters and what education is for, that doesn’t rely on stupid platitudes about social mobility and prosperity.
Cameron calls for a strengthened sense of national identity instead of failed ‘state multiculturalism’
The UK’s Prime Minister, David Cameron says ‘state multiculturalism’ has failed and in its place we need ‘muscular liberalism’ and a stronger sense of national identity.
I think he’s probably right about state sponsored multiculturalism, which is inclined to exaggerate difference and the homogeneity of various communities, while simultaneously aggrandizing self-appointed ‘community’ spokespeople. So the state should tread lightly here. Britain (and everywhere else, for that matter) manages to be multicultural without the intervention of the government. In that respect, saying that you’re in favour of multiculturalism or against it is akin to taking a political position on the Earth’s atmosphere.
In any case, what Cameron has in his sights isn’t really multiculturalism at all, it’s what he defines as Muslim extremism. Although quite where this begins and ends in the Prime Minister’s mind is hard to tell, since any manifestation of Muslim opposition to western foreign policy or assertion or Arab self-determination is likely to be labelled ‘militant’ or ‘extreme’ these days.
Cameron argues that young Muslims find it hard to identify with Britain and apparently this is because ‘we’ have weakened our sense of national identity. I can’t find where Cameron sets out how the British might strengthen their sense of national identity. Perhaps they could coalesce around a collective suspicion of Catholic Europe? Or build an empire? Or go to war with Germany? Or (God forbid) build a welfare state. All of these worked at various times in the past.
Or maybe the British could demonstrate their collective genius by espousing fair play and decency, while pretending that these values are somehow exclusive and distinguishing national characteristics. (Does anyone know of a country that prides itself on cheating and indecency?)
Or perhaps the PM knows a way to conjure a warm sense of horizontal comradeship from the socially divisive policies currently being implemented by his government. Certainly the quickest and most effective way to strengthen national identity in these straitened times is probably to identify some perilous threat to ‘our’ way of life… like… err… Muslim extremists, for instance. Identities, after all, are defined negatively, in relation to what they are not. That is to say, the most important thing about being woman is not being a man; the most important thing about being a Glasgow Celtic fan is not being a Glasgow Rangers fan; and the most important thing about being Tory is not having a soul.
So I can’t see how prescribing national identity will remedy Muslim alienation. National identities are by definition exclusive. Not everybody can belong. Not everybody would want to belong. And the angry young Muslim men, referred to by Cameron in his speech in Munich, have probably already encountered and witnessed some fairly robust versions of Britishness. It’s probably what alienated and disillusioned them in the first place.
I never imagined that a lecture on feminism could be so provocative…
I’m a little late on this one: I’m sure everyone has already read Suzanne Moore’s piece on feminism in the Guardian’s Comment is Free and moved on. But I couldn’t let it pass without saying something about it. And I would have done it sooner were I not overwhelmed with work at the moment, so here goes…
Suzanne Moore has written an article for the Guardian’s Comment is Free pointing out that men do horrible things to women and it is time women ditched post-feminism and got angry about it again. Judging from the comments that follow Moore’s piece it looks like the Patriarchy Police were swiftly alerted and came out in force. Here’s a flavour:
I know what feminism is – I have to teach aspects of this nonsense at university – and it certainly isn’t intellectual anything. It is an interest lobby founded on resentment and misplaced envy, seeking privilege for one half of the population generally, and for its own proponents. Those who espouse its doctrines should be regarded as at best misguided and, at worst, deluded, and then ignored.
Christ, I’m horrified that such a wanker is teaching anybody but his attitude is one I’m familiar with. I give a lecture on feminism and popular culture and it really seems to upset some people. Mostly young men, but not exclusively so.
Maybe it’s the way I tell ‘em, although I don’t think I’m didactic or dogmatic and when I first planned and delivered the lecture it really never occurred to me that it would be particularly provocative.
In the lecture I pose a question. I refer to research carried out at the University of Bristol and the NSPCC in 2009, that found that 1 in 3 teenage girls has suffered sexual abuse and that a quarter of girls had suffered physical abuse at the hands of boyfriends. Then I show a selection of contemporary advertisements.
I ask: could there be some relationship of correspondence between the sort of abuse uncovered by the Bristol/NSPCC research and the representation of women in the advertisements like those above and in other media? Or more broadly, is it conceivable that the media and cultural representation of women make violence against women seem somehow permissible? It is an invitation to discussion but the reactions of some students can sometimes be very hostile.
Admittedly most of the class exist on a sliding scale somewhere between having their curiosity piqued about feminist ideas to being politely disinterested. (I rarely encounter any student who would call her or himself a feminist.) But it’s the group that greets the lecture with sullen resentment or outright hostility that intrigues me most. For them the very suggestion that society’s dice is weighted in favour of men is tantamount to dropping your trousers and taking a shit at the front of the lecture theatre.
I’ve encountered students who sat slack jawed and comatosed through every other class, who suddenly could barely suppress their anger at the suggestion that in general men earn more than women and tend to occupy all the top jobs.
I’ve had a student who wrote a vitriolic essay in obvious reply to my lecture, completely disregarding all the evidence and research that pointed to women’s subordinate position. Instead he quoted approvingly one of those angry, white guy websites that argue in all seriousness that women are in the process of taking over the world and are more likely to be the perpetrators of domestic violence than the victims.
Then there is an interesting phenomena in some seminars where young men ‘police’ the debate, sniggering at and disrupting the contributions of anyone who is even slightly well disposed towards feminist arguments. So, to complain about the sexist covers of men’s magazine’s or misogynistic advertisements and pop videos is to risk being accused of being ‘uncool’, stupid or lacking a sense of humour.
I don’t buy all this postmodern, ironic laddism for a moment. If it looks like old fashioned sexism and sounds like old fashioned sexism, I figure, it’s probably old fashioned sexism. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not prudish. I consider myself to have a fairly liberal attitude to pornography, for instance. It can’t all be bad, can it? And I think we have to learn to live with the fact that men find naked women fascinating and arousing, and for the sake of the the species this is a good thing. Indeed, I’m sure that woman also have a sexual imaginary, although I can’t speak with any authority on this. I will happily rant about all manner of things about which I know little but female sexuality is not one of them!
And so I’m confused about why women are not raging about the casual misogyny and sexism that runs through so much contemporary popular culture. My own introduction to these issues came through listening to the arguments in the 1980s over The Sun’s page 3, when even as a teenager I found its images of topless women trivialising, objectifying and utterly bloody sexless.
Now as the father of two young boys I worry that they’ll grow up in an environment where debates about gender are suppressed and they’ll take on all the ignorant attitudes I’ve encountered when lecturing on feminism and popular culture. Of course, I’ll sit them down and try to offer them some good instruction, but frankly who listens to their parents?
‘Now, listen to me children. There are evil, powerful men who seek to control two key aspects of human life: the first is the means of production and the second is the means of human reproduction. That’s why we fight to wrestle the commanding heights of the economy from their perfidious grip, while at the same time insisting upon the liberation of the female body. Got that? Good. Now who wants a politically correct bedtime story?’
That aught to do it…
Talkin’ ’bout my generation
Well everybody else seems to have something to say about it, I might as well offer my tuppence worth. I’m talking about the Laurie Penny /Alex Callinico’s debate, of course, which seems to have highlighted inter-generational tensions in the campaign against the cuts.
In her Guardian, Comment is Free (CiF) piece, Laurie Penny argued that: ‘The young people of Britain do not need leaders, and the new wave of activists has no interest in the ideological bureaucracy of the old left.’ This seems to get to the essence of the dispute: a young, energetic and ‘deregulated’ Left, doesn’t want to be shackled by an older generation of leftists who appear wedded to centralised and sectarian political models.
I’m sure the battle-lines must seem obvious if you’re Alex Callinico’s and Laurie Penny’s respective ages, 60 and 22. But if like me you’re stuck somewhere in the middle (40-ish), things look less clear cut. Perhaps it has something to do with my own political formation.
I missed the cold war, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and big industrial battles of the 80s. I was just too young. And so it wasn’t until the 1990s that I grew to political consciousness and after very little consideration threw myself into the fray and joined one of the Trotskyite variations. I did this mainly because… well… they asked me, and I wanted to feel that I was doing something. This was after all the era of general political inertia, when John Major secured a forth successive Conservative election victory simply by not being Neil Kinnock and nobody dared talk about class anymore. Class was the politics that dare not speak its name, superseded by the altogether cooler politics of identity. In this climate the hard left’s language and rhetoric sounded hopelessly dated, even to me.
I stayed for a while but I hated selling the party paper. It was uninspiring to look at and turgid to read but it was worthy.
I hated the interminable meetings; listening to older, better-read comrades without ever feeling I had the confidence, experience or knowledge to contribute anything useful myself.
I could see no sign of the great leap forward since we seemed always to be in retreat – less avant garde than rear guard. We were always defending a world that was being eroded away from under and around us.
I was disinterested in the sectarian rivalries of the Left. I knew little and cared less about the historical enmity that existed between the various sects and fragments, although disinterest was no guarantee of immunity. I once met an old Stalinist in bar after a Mayday demonstration, who casually informed me that while he’d enjoyed having a drink with me, if the moment arose when he felt that some Trot (like me) needed a bullet in the head, he wouldn’t hesitate. It was probably bravado, but this was pre-ceasefire Belfast and I thought it best to err on the side of caution. I made my excuses and left.
So I can understand Laurie Penny’s apprehensions about the old Left. Twenty years ago it seemed bureaucratic and archaic to me. Its organisations looked no match for the agility and pace of contemporary capitalism then. If each phase of capitalism produces its own potential gravediggers, I couldn’t see how Left organisations formed a century before could possibly be fit for that purpose.
Despite all this I admire many of the individuals in those organisations. They were substantially right about the big questions, and when nobody else much cared they kept the torch of political dissent and protest burning. Every time there was some new threatened privatisation of public services or the war clouds gathered, it was they who provided the organisational backbone and many of the foot-soldiers at protests and demonstrations. None of this should be forgotten or dismissed. Also, who knows when you’ll find yourself in the sort of jam where a Stalinist pensioner with a gun might be more use than a student with a smart phone? There are always horses for courses.
Still, the new networked activism is an important weapon in the Left’s political arsenal and we all need to learn from it and adapt. It’ll certainly change the old organisational structures since communicative forms play an important role in how societies are imagined and shaped. Actually perhaps it’s changing them already. Isn’t the evidence of that the online dialogue taking place between a 60 year old grandee of the Left and a 22 year old blogger?
Forty-somethings like me, on the other hand, might be a lot less anxious about the the whole ‘deregulated’/bureaucratic Left dichotomy. Many of us are likely familiar and comfortable with social networking online – facebook, twitter, blogosphere etc – and we may still be members of the traditional Left’s battalions – parties and trade unions. For us, how we combine these two forms of social and political organisation will be the key question, not whether we chose one over the other.
Humbled, diminished and embarrassed. What did Vince Cable do? Wake up hung-over and naked on a park bench in Westminster?
I would gladly wage war against Rupert Murdoch. He has been a nefarious influence on the political and cultural life of the UK for decades. Alas, nobody cares what I think or do, and so I could threaten to rip off the aul’ fucker’s arms and beat him with the wet end and draw very little attention to myself. Alternatively, when Vince Cable says he wants to block Murdoch’s ambitions, it’s considered such a faux pas that the Business Secretary is reportedly humbled, diminished and embarrassed.
Vince committed the cardinal sin in contemporary politics and offered an opinion that is contrary to the prevailing politics within the Westminster bubble. Some might say he should’ve learnt his lesson after the student fees debacle, when the Lib Dems set before voters a clear political policy and after the election found they rued the day. To be clear, on that occasion the Lib Dems were not sorry that they broke a promise, they were sorry they made any such pre-election promise at all. So in future manifestos we can expect to see some vague reference to ‘values’ and ‘aspirations’, all expressed in the hope that the media and voters will have the good grace not to press too hard for specific policies.
Vince Cable is being punished because he flew in the face of such anodyne politics. It’s just a pity he had to be tricked into making public a perfectly defensible political opinion.
Rupert Murdoch
But why the brouhaha? Why does the Business Secretary have to display impartiality on the issue of media ownership? Will the new man responsible for ruling on News Corp’s bid to take full control of BSkyB, Jeremy Hunt, be impartial? Hunt had a meeting with Rupert Murdoch’s son, James, shortly after News Corp made its offer to BSkyB. He was careful not to take any civil servants with him, so we’ll never know for sure what was said. That will remain private, unlike Vince Cable’s ‘controversial’ opposition to Murdoch.
Cable’s embarrassment at having been caught voicing a political opinion, like his party’s regret at having made election commitments, is indicative of the UK’s increasingly sclerotic politics. What’s going on in the Westminster bubble when voicing a political opinion is a bad thing but a secretive meeting is fine?
Is it open season on higher education?
Those of you fretting about whether the rising cost of higher education might prevent you going to university will find some consolation in Petronella Wyatt’s Saturday column in the Daily Mail, in which she casts aspersions upon the quality and usefulness of a university education.
What's the point of Petronella Wyatt?
Petronella graduated from University College London, after transferring from Worcester College, Oxford, where she spent only three weeks, withdrawing from her History course, she says, because the dons taught her ‘nothing of any use’.
Petronella has a generally low opinion of higher education, referring to it as ‘an indulgence’. And she goes on: ‘In most cases, it imparts only useless knowledge instead of anything applicable to the economic life of the community: analysing what caused the French Revolution, for instance, but not the causes of global recession.’
‘In my albeit brief experience, university life is about drink, drugs and sex, which can be found in abundance outside any college.’ All of which sheds some light upon why the young Petronella learnt nothing at Oxford.
Apparently no employer has ever asked Petronella whether she has a degree or not, which is a pity. Because if someone had bother to look at her performance at university we might all have been spared her pointless, inane opinions.
The university-bashing carries on today in the Daily Express under a headline that asks: ‘WHY ARE 36% OF OUR UNIVERSITIES TRAINING MUSLIM TERRORISTS?’
The answer, of course, is they’re not. But I suspect we may be entering open season on higher education. Just as public opinion needed to be softened up for the coalition’s assault on state benefits, with endless stories about dole cheats and scroungers, we are now being sent the message that we shouldn’t care too much about the fate of higher education, since it is simultaneously worthless and breeding ground for extremism.
With thanks to Martin at The University Blog who tweeted links to these two stories earlier.
The police do a job which brings them into contact with some of society’s most unsavoury, criminal figures; where they see scenes and incidents that most of us would prefer to never look upon; and they are sometimes sent into situations that leave them confronted with impossible choices. But what is Richard Littlejohn’s excuse for being a complete fucking wanker.
This is from his Daily Mail column (14 December), which you can find here. I’ve reproduced the pertinent bit below to save you from wading through all the other aul’ shite he writes.
I want to go to the demo…
Wheelchair-bound Jody Mcintyre has complained that he was beaten and manhandled by police during last week’s student fees protests.
But if he’s looking for sympathy, he’s come to the wrong place.
A man in a wheelchair is as entitled to demonstrate as anyone else. But he should have kept a safe distance.
Don’t like it: Wheelchair-bound Jody McIntyre was wrong to complain about being mistreated at the student protests
Mcintyre put himself on offer and his brother pushed him into the front line. It’s not as if he didn’t know there was going to be trouble.
He was also at the last student demo in London and persuaded friends to hoist him on to the roof of the Millbank Tower. If his brakes had failed and he’d gone over the edge, who would he have blamed then?
Jody Mcintyre is like Andy from Little Britain.
‘Where do you want to go today, Jody?’
‘Riot.’
‘Are you sure? Wouldn’t you rather go to hear Bob Crow speak at the Methodist Central Hall. You like Bob Crow.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘So, we’ll go there, eh?’
‘Riot!’
‘Ken Livingstone will be there, too. He’s your favourite.’
‘Riot!’
‘All right, then.’
Five minutes later at the riot . . .
‘Don’t like it.’
