It’s About the Education, Stupid.

by The Faceless Bureaucrat on 22 August 2011 · 10 comments

 It must be remembered that, above all, this is an academic blog about strategy and war.  Whether we would all like to admit it or not, in addition to whatever else we may be, all contributors to KOW are educators, part of what Althusser and Bourdieu would separately consider the apparatus of ideological or cultural reproduction.  Therefore, in addition to discussing strategy and war (as well as other worthy topics such as running shoes, URLs, and other assorted gimcrack and bric-a-brac) we all are interested in the politics of education, as are some (if not all) of our Dear Readers and/or Followers.  Or at least we should be. 

It is from this perspective that I read Stefan Collini’s recent essay in the London Review of Books (Bit.ly be darned–I was told size doesn’t matter, so take it all: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n16/stefan-collini/from-robbins-to-mckinsey).

Reacting to the recent changes in UK Higher Education policy, Collini discusses several important issues that go beyond the ‘rise in tuition fees’ aspect of the current debate.  Allow me to share some of his points—admixed with a few of my own observations.

Are you experienced?

Collini takes issue with the idea of what I would call the economic reductionist trope that has come to grip Higher Education in the UK, and most elsewhere in the world.  Education as an industry should be seen to contribute to the economic growth of the nation, either as a generator of innovation or skilled labourers, etc.

Part of the thinking that goes along with that perspective is a consumer focus: the ‘bottom line’ for Higher Education should be measured by the quality of the “student experience”.  The trouble is, as Collini points out:

“The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you ‘want’ – and you certainly can’t buy it. The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from ‘the student experience’) are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process…And it helps if you trust your guides rather than assuming they will skimp on the job unless they’re kept up to the mark by constant monitoring of their performance indicators.”

But then again, I can hear some of you say, that is exactly what some fuzzy don would say, isn’t it?  But Collini admits that there are flaws in the current system:

 “Critics of the current policy need to acknowledge that it is designed to tap into the anger of middle-class parents about the conditions their children encounter at many universities, principally very high student-staff ratios and a consequently low level of contact hours. But in so far as there is a problem here, it is due to two factors: first, the deliberate underfunding of the huge expansion in student numbers that has taken place in recent decades, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and, second, the distorting emphasis on ‘research productivity’ caused by the Research Assessment Exercise.”

Quite right.  Student-staff ratios and contact hours have changed—for the worse—in recent times.  The proliferation of Teaching Fellows and the like is testament to the habit of outsourcing teaching and reducing the amount of contact the Professoriate has to involve themselves in.  Given that, as Collini points out later in the essay, “over the past 30 or 40 years… the proportion of the age-cohort entering higher education [has increased] from 6 per cent to 44 per cent” it would have been impossible, without a concomitant increase in resources (which was not the case) to provide the same ‘student experience’ to The Many of 2011 as was enjoyed by The Few in the 1970s.  (When I think about ways I might have improved my student experience as an undergraduate, the words ‘reform’ and ‘educational policy’ do not factor in much , but I digress…)

As for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), I—like Collini—shall say no more…save this: in my opinion it was, is, an shall likely remain a ridiculous, vapid and inane boondoggle, one which would make Kafka blush and Orwell weep.  

A Not-so-great Transformation

What has gone wrong?  It seems to me that contemporary Higher Education is plagued by what Karl Polyani has labeled as the fictious commodification of things.  Education is not commodity to be bought and sold.  It is not a turbo-charged carburetor to be acquired and bolted on to a national economy, in the hopes of ‘pimping’ one’s ride.  Certainly education has costs associated with it, and in some way or other, these costs need to be covered, if not recouped.  Education is not a commodity because, as Polyani points out, it is not produced for sale.  It is a social good, whose benefits accrue to society and the nation in ways that cannot be simply counted, as if they were beads on an abacus.  Aspects of quality belie easy quantification and throughput, rather than achievement—much less ‘customer satisfaction’—should not be the Holy Grail for educational policies or universities.  To again draw on Polyani and his magnificent work The Great Transformation, we must guard against education becoming ‘disembedded’ from society and subsequently ‘embedded’ in the economy. 

This will mean that tough decisions need to be made.  If we want 44% (and rising) to go on Higher Education and have the same kind of experience as their predecessors had, we need to come up with a way of providing adequate resources to Universities.  The current system, as Collini points out, will actually be far more expensive,not to mention much more complicated, than the previous one, with little in terms of appreciable gains in quality.  Alternatively, we might decide that education as education (not to be confused with training, ‘providing qualifications to’, ‘up-skilling’, certifying, and a whole host of other, worthy dimensions of human development) is not for ‘everyone’ and alter the resource structures in place to reinforce that change in focus.  

To a not insignificant extent, this debate about Educational Policy mirrors that of Defence and Security Policy.  We need to move both these debates (and many, many more public policy debates besides) away from a simplistic economic cost-benefit calculation and really do some deep thinking about what it is we value and what we want to achieve.  Not everything that people (and their collectivities, such as Society and the State) do has to be ruled by the same logic.  If we continue along this path, we shall never escape from the ‘how much is just enough’ thinking that plagues the current Defence and Security discourse, as well as those of Education, Health, Art and Culture, and many more.  (See how, although I started this post somewhat ‘off topic’, I nonetheless segued into the more traditional subject matter of this blog by the final paragraph?)

[Note: In a rare ‘off-site’ appearance, I recently commented on this somewhat related post from Abu Muqawama (http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2011/08/phds-dummies.html).   The post and the comments are worth reading, especially in light of Collini’s contribution.]

 

{ 10 comments }

Quoting URLs in Academic Papers

by Thomas Rid on 19 August 2011 · 19 comments

Why's that so short?

If you’ve written or published a paper in the past few years, you probably know the problem. How should web addresses be quoted in academic papers? If you don’t write academic papers with footnotes or endnotes, you will likely think this is a non-question. So here’s my answer up-front: use bit.ly.

There are three problems with using URLs in publications. They have to do with function, standard, and aesthetics. At closer view, these problems are linked.

Function first. Say you quoted from a text a year ago and you used this messed-up and ugly link at the time: http://www.usnwc.edu/Research—Gaming/International-Law/RightsideLinks/Studies-Series/documents/Naval-War-College-vol-76.aspx. Well, it doesn’t work any more and the printed link is dead. This is because websites are not made for eternity, not even for half a decade; they change all the time (that is even true for blogs and other platforms with well-structured links, such as this one: http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2011/08/quoting-urls). Calling the thing “permalink,” by the way, doesn’t mean it’s going to be permanent. 

Then there’s standardization. How should links be quoted? With http://? with “accessed on 3 May 2008″? There’s no generally accepted standard, although some journals have their own — evolving — standards. Even the “accessed on …” only lends credibility to a quote but does not necessarily help to find the lost source, say with the Way Back Machine or another internet archive; it may just be gone.

Finally it’s about looks. It is just plain ugly to quote messy links over multiple lines — like: http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-asia/nepal/211—-%20Nepal%20-%20From%20Two%20Armies%20to%20One.pdf – knowing that they’re probably be dead in a few months anyway.  

So what to do? Here’s my answer. The best solution is, of course, to quote no URL at all, and instead use author, title, publication, date, etc, even for online-only sources, so that everybody who’s heard of Google can find the publication any time. – But sometimes using a web address is helpful or required. In that case my suggestion is to use bit.ly, the most popular link shortener.

Why? Five reasons:

First bit.ly is well-established: many big corporations and governments use it, from the BBC, the New York Times as nyti.ms, to the entire U.S. government, even the Library of Congress, for instance: http://1.usa.gov/a6Hedi.

Second, it’s designed to be permanent: “We believe, says bit.ly, ”that being a legitimate shortening service means offering permanent URLs. Our users can feel confident that the bitly links they create don’t unexpectedly disappear or expire.”

Third, every link comes with its own little record, including information about the original link through the 301 redirect and its individual history, even if the long link has gone dead in the meantime.

Fourth, you get stats with that record: if you want to check how any shortened link is doing, just add a + sign, http://bit.ly/ilRqjD+, and you see the stats (that of course only counts those using the shortened link, not the long version).

And finally it just looks much better.

Bizarre, isn’t it, what academics find the time to think about?

{ 19 comments }

The Leviathan’s New Clothes: Information and power relationships by Jack McDonald

by Rob Dover on 10 August 2011 · 29 comments

This is a piece penned by KCL PhD candidate Jack McDonald:

“What was perhaps so surprising about the recent riots in London was that the participants were pretty much reviled by the entire political spectrum. While the Guardian mounted a spirited defence of London’s excluded masses, one couldn’t help but think that Alan Rusbringer and co. would have been first to the phone requesting tear gas and water cannons had the hooded masses decided to tear up King’s Cross instead of Bethnal Green.

 

The argument has, predictably, boiled down into roughly two camps: First there are those who wouldn’t be averse to seeing the rioters and looters shot with plastic bullets (and in extremis, real ones), then there are those that say “I don’t condone their actions but…” and reel off a lengthy list of (good) reasons why the people lifting HD televisions (do they even make plasma screens any more?) are doing so. Add to the mix a healthy misunderstanding of “social media”, and there are the beginnings of an epic political storm of mud-slinging to be played out over the comment pages of various political websites.

 

The problem is, none of that really matters.

 

The most surreal aspect of watching Sunday and Monday night’s violence unfold live on web-stream was that the people involved, speaking to the camera and the BBC’s reporters, actually believed that what they were saying would make a jot of difference. Because of course, the type of person that is going to be rooting through Debenhams in Clapham, or setting a furniture shop on fire are also the type of person to be following BBC News 24 and paying attention when the broadcaster says that everyone should go home.

 

What I’ve been researching are information relationships and power relationships in state building and state formation, and I’ll be applying these to the London Riots. The overarching concept that I’ve been researching for the last couple of years is “ungoverned space” and similar variations upon that phrase. Obviously, there are problems taking international relations theory and applying it to a specific context, but I’ll try and avoid some of the traps and pitfalls of doing so. There was a COIN article posted on Small Wars Journal about the riots that reminded me of just how scary the world would be if counter-insurgency theorists were put in charge of democracies.

 

My basic argument is that information relationships between states, populations and non-state actors (and, importantly, within them) define the architecture for the power relationships that exist between them.

 

In the process of state building, one of the key advantages of the state was that it had a form of information dominance. Nascent bureaucracies allowed states to process information better than their competitors, and they had better access to a wider range of information than the populations whom they sought to control. It is notable that the types of actor or political grouping that tended to resist state control the longest were those with similar capabilities such as aristocrats and other networks. The point here is not to figure out who was better at what, but that the various political forces involved in state building all tended to have better access to, and better ability to process and utilise, information than the “mobs” that they ruled.

 

And mob is a pretty good term. Because while those upstairs were busy figuring out who would be in charge of which fiefdom, populations themselves retained quite a lot of power. While states could send in military forces to crush rebellions, violence was in a sense democratic: the population retained the means and ability to use violence.

 

What happens as states become established is that populations are, to a greater and lesser extent, neutered. The legitimacy for the use of force moves to police services. Police are expected to protect the community. Lynch mobs, vigilantes and other public uses of violence are frowned upon and de-legitimised. There are obvious political differences here, in America the right to bear arms is the simplest example. In Britain no such right exists, though people are allowed shotguns and other firearms if they get a permit.

 

The above is a broad historical sketch. I’d say it takes us to about the 1990s. People that can remember Broadwater Farm, the Brixton Riots or the Poll Tax Riots would be right in pointing out that given enough anger, the population’s ability to commit violent acts and express itself through violence remained. And it is here that I think that there are considerable differences between the recent riots and those acts.

 

What the London riots represent is not only the re-democratisation of violence (the ability of members of the general public to use violence to achieve their ends), but also the rise of a kind of nuclear violence (very small, very high impact). I offer neither of those terms as any kind of justification, either.

 

If you had said to a person in the early 1990s that a few thousand people that didn’t know each other, that had no common goal and came from vastly differing physical locations, could get together almost spontaneously and put a city of ten million or so into a state of terror, you would probably have elicited laughter. The idea of a very small minority turning the established order on its head is also quite similar to the effects of terrorism. In understanding London, I’d suggest Phillip Bobbit’s “Terror and Consent”.

 

What has changed is the information relationship between members of the public, and this has altered the relationship between the citizen and the state. Our current model of citizen state relations is that the state can protect the citizenry, as long as they agree to give the state total authority in certain areas, such as law and order and the use of force. This model is founded upon the ability of the state to quell dis-order. It worked, for the most part. That’s not to say that the Met wasn’t institutionally racist, that’s not to say that they didn’t treat Brixton and Tottenham in an abhorrent way in the past, but on a general law and order level, if a gang wanted to cause the havoc witnessed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, they would have to organise in such a way that they could be tracked and stopped.

 

Instead of requiring physical communication, or personal links, rioters could broadcast a message “Will be fighting at this location at 9”. Those around them can instantly take advantage of this. The word-of-mouth effect is near-instantaneous. So you get violent fash-mobs. People figure out that a particular location is unguarded, they are then able to transmit this to the wider world and the place is looted until the police can muster enough bodies to clear the area.

 

What has happened is not simply technology, but its social use. I doubt that RIM, in developing Blackberries for corporate executives travelling the world in business class, ever envisioned its messaging services being used to signal ad-hoc looting campaigns. But BBM (as the service is called), is nearly free to use, and achieving near ubiquity. Those who say that they will track down the organisers are probably chasing a near dead-end. Blackberries are now available on pay-as-you-go, making them as disposable (though decidedly more expensive) than the burner phones that featured so prominently on Season 1 of The Wire.

 

The London Riots are therefore an example of the “dark side” of globalisation. There’s a growing body of literature on this subject, which makes for interesting reading, since it is almost always shoved under the carpet by G8 countries who are rather fond of free trade and containerised transnational shipping, but refuse to admit that such things also enable an unstoppable free trade in human beings and narcotics. London is an example of what happens when the losers from current socio-political arrangements decide to even the odds with precisely the same tools as are necessary for the continuation of current socio-political arrangements.

 

The problem here is that our model for domestic policing is still pre-globalisation. Police talk of “intelligence” in the same manner as collecting data on an organised criminal network, when the outbreaks of violence resembled to sparking of forest fires. Our policing model is designed to cope with organised violence, and can do a good job of containing it (sometimes too good, if the protests over police heavy-handedness are anything to go by), but it is ill-equipped to cope with spontaneous violence. In fact, it’s never been equipped for that, the vulnerability has always been there, and it has been there since text messaging was invented, but it is only recently that members of the general public with a propensity for causing havoc have realised this.

 

In my mind, this vulnerability is akin to the Emperor’s new clothes. The sub-text to that story was that it did not in fact matter that the Emperor was naked, as long as his courtiers agreed that he was clothed. However the presence of a single dissenter made the problem un-ignorable.

 

The London Riots appear to have been quelled in the grand British tradition of flooding the streets with an insane amount of policemen and threatening to use plastic bullets and whatnot (though the latter is a novelty). This would, on the surface, appear to be normality asserting itself. Monopoly on the use of force etc. But the problem is that this level of force is entirely unsustainable (and a drain on the surrounding forces). That is all well and good, some might say, the panic is over, everyone is behaving themselves now. But that doesn’t solve the problem. What I think the “underclasses” have learned is that there is nothing to stop them from repeating the same action. If a gang decided to loot Tottenham Hale, they could repeat the action and get away with the loot prior to sufficient police with public order training showing up. To return to the metaphorical story, the Emperor might have proved that he is able to don clothing when it suits, but he still struts around naked.

 

So it is here that we return to the idea of the re-democratisation of violence. Since centralised police structures offer little immediate protection, and I doubt that British political culture will change to give the police “a little extra oomph” in the form of firearms or the ability to use them, we’re left with a defenceless community. Except that we’re not, and this is perhaps more worrying for British political culture than the rioters. On Saturday, the joke relayed by social media was that the rioters wouldn’t dare do that in Green Lanes because the (primarily Turkish and Kurdish) shopkeepers there would beat the living daylights out of them. When looters returned to Dalston on Sunday, they found a (primarily Turkish and Kurdish) community waiting for them with blunt instruments and kebab knives. Similar things occurred in areas such as Whitechapel, where the primarily Bangladeshi community chased off rioters. Last night the “Enfield Defence League” (with worrying acronym, but apparently multi-racial) was organised via the same social networking methods to provide a handy mob to beat up any looters that came past (they didn’t). The experience, as badly as the Metropolitan Police and the establishment hate to admit it, is that apparently “flashmob violence” can only be deterred by forming a similar mob, with an equal or greater propensity for violence.

 

The above is what I’d term the re-democratisation of violence. And it is worrying, because mob justice is rarely balanced and fair, and the whole point of having a police service and a judicial system is to make the population safe and punish criminals in a fair manner. It appears to have occurred in response to the nucleation of violence itself, the ability of small groups to use force against the wishes of popular opinion and without fear of the defences that the state provides.

 

The London riots are therefore an example of how the changing information relationships between the population and the state, and within the two, have altered the architecture for the power relationships between the two. I say “architecture” because the actual power relationship between the state and its population is not determined by these information relationships, but they act as boundaries that demarcate possible working relationships and fantasy land. Just as the security services have had to wake up to the threats of transnational terrorism, and self-starting terrorism, over the past decade, I think the Met and similar police forces are maybe realising that models of policing disorder rooted in finding the nearest bunch of hippies or anarchists and sending in an undercover agent, are perhaps out of date and at worst, entirely useless.

 

Hanging over the power relationship between the citizen and state is the political arrangement between the two. In Britain, we’ve relied upon the state to provide our security. Now that ability is not so assured. We’ve protected many different things while demanding security from the state. We are (relatively) free of observation. The state doesn’t represent some Panopticon-like entity peering into every nook of our existence (as much as some of its detractors would argue that it does). Also, as I pointed out to one colleague in an argument over the shooting that led to the riot that led to the riots and looting, we live in a state that gives a f**k if we die arbitrarily by the hands of one of its agents, or by another person.

 

At the moment, we want security, we don’t want police using force or coercion, and we don’t want the state intruding into our lives. In effect, we want a state that has its eyes blindfolded and its hands tied to protect us from each other. From where I’m sitting there are three options: Either we ban the internet and communications technology and return to some halcyon days prior to all this globalisation nonsense, or we admit that the state cannot protect us and legitimise mob rule to provide security in times of emergency (potentially any time a gang decides to loot a shopping centre), or we allow the state to do extra things in order to protect the population. I am personally fence-sitting on all three options.

 

Throughout this essay/reaction, I’ve studiously avoided the normal terms of the debate (“Hang them high” versus “It’s not their fault”). I’ve done so precisely because both opinions are largely irrelevant to the manner in which these riots occurred. Police beating the piss out of every protester that they encountered would quell the riots, but at the same time would store up resentment in a faction of society that would explode with increasing frequency. While I understand the “liberal” option, that excluding these people causes all of this, it strikes me as particularly rose-tinted. In any society which is not perfectly equal (nb: all of them) there will always be winners, there will always be the excluded. Trying to reach out to these communities will reduce their exclusion, but it would never fully solve the problem. I doubt that instantaneous full employment could solve the problems of inter-generational worklessness, alcoholic/drug abusing parents and school drop-outs. Those problems get solved in decades, not years, and while they are being solved (if politicians on either side of the divide care about solving them, since winning middle-class votes on a tough-on-crime ticket is easier than invest-taxpayers-money-in-low-income-communities ticket) all the problems listed above remain.

So endeth the PhD write-up procrastination!

Jack maintains his own blog at www.jackmcdonald.org

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The UK riots – further thoughts

by Rob Dover 10 August 2011

Following on from yesterday’s post, this is a shorter and punchier set of views. A wash-up from yesterday and the spread into the provinces last night. The first court cases: The BBC reported last night that the first court cases resulting from Saturday night had taken place. Nearly all had pleaded guilty to charges of [...]

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The London Riots: A time for ‘big society’?

by Rob Dover 9 August 2011

The spasm of violence notionally begun with a peaceful protest about a young man who was shot by the police under circumstances still  under investigation have shocked the ordinary, law abiding British public. They have also laid bare some awkward questions at a time in our contemporary history where there are already too many awkward [...]

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The epitome of awkward

by Captain Hyphen 3 August 2011

Elizabeth Samet, West Point’s Professor of English, had a thoughtful op-ed (read the whole thing) on Bloomberg yesterday that convinced me it is time to return to the blog after an inexcusably long hiatus (thanks to everyone else on KoW for keeping it real). Samet captures the ritualistic dynamic of the American civilian-soldier interaction perfectly: [...]

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The Army, Democracy and the Sacrifice of a Soldier: the view from France.

by The Faceless Bureaucrat 26 July 2011

  I thought it might be interesting, in light Patrick Bury’s post and in keeping with my tortured thought process about this subject, to look at how soldierly sacrifice is regarded outside Britain.  Last Wednesday Admiral Christophe Prazuck wrote this opinion piece in Le Monde.  Its title is simple: L’armée, la démocratie et le sacrifice d’un [...]

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A Soldier Responds to a Commons Report on Afghanistan

by Patrick Bury 21 July 2011

Editor’s Note: A former Royal Irish Captain and King’s alumnus reacts to an important Commons Report on Afghanistan that was largely downed out by the media hype surrounding the hacking scandal. Patrick Bury is also author of Callsign Hades, a memoir from Helmand, just out in paperback with Simon & Schuster. TR  The Defence Select Committee Report on Operations [...]

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Google’s Insurgency Against Facebook

by Thomas Rid 20 July 2011

The don’t-be-evil-company has unleashed what it hopes is a Facebook-killing app, called “Google Plus”. But keep in mind that the leash isn’t fully loose yet: Google+ is still in a beta-version, by-invitation-only. So should Mark Zuckerberg be afraid of a hard punch in the teeth?

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How do you say ‘bollocks’ in Aztec? War is political and it should be, too. So deal with it.

by The Faceless Bureaucrat 19 July 2011

 I just finished reading the latest offering from the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, entitled The New Aztecs: Ritual and Restraint in Contemporary Western Military Operations.   I must say that I profoundly disagree with its author.  He misunderstands several of his key premises, including Clausewitz’s fundamental dictum.  What is more, I think that the piece [...]

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