book review: What are Universities For?

Stefan Collini.
What are Universities For?
Penguin. 2012

---

This book may be over a decade old, and some of the essays included even older, but it is more relevant today than ever. The first half is a thoughtful discussion of the history and purpose of universities in general. This is followed by a series of reprinted essays, dissecting various governmental initiatives in higher education.

The historical overview of the role, size and funding of universities from their inception is fascinating. My personal experience is confined to being a student in the late 70s and early 80s, and an academic during the 2000s. Collini points out most people tend to think that universities had always been the way they experienced them as a student, and only changed since then. But of course, they have always been changing. I am myself guilty of this view! My seven year tenure as a student was during the time of no fees and full grant (and fewer students and universities overall): so no student debt, and only vacation-time jobs. I would almost certainly not have gone to university under the current scheme, as getting into any debt, let alone that much, would have been too terrifying. I feel very lucky, but not guilty: I have certainly since paid enough in taxes from good jobs to cover the costs! I do think that current students should be similarly lucky, particularly as the number of good jobs has not kept pace with the increase in student numbers. (Even jobs that in the past would have required A-levels now seem to require not just a Bachelors, but even a Masters degree: surely they are not that much more complex? I often wonder if this degree-inflation is deliberately used to force people to go to university and get into debt, so making them more willing to take rubbish jobs, or if it is merely an unanticipated side-effect benefical to corporations and governments.)

Collini has a wide ranging and thoughtful discussion of what universities should be for. What should students be taught? How should they be educated? And why? He comes from the Humanities, which some argue are not “useful” subjects, because they do not contribute directly to the economic health of the country. I’m a scientist, and he thinks the arguments for these subjects are easier there. They may be easier, but I think that makes them more damaging, as it tends to encourage a focus on the economic, rather than educational or intellectual, benefits: graduate employability, rather than better, more thoughtful, well-rounded citizens. (If it’s just about job-specific skills, why not raise the status of apprenticeships instead?) Caving to that economic focus can unintentionally strengthen the argument against the humanities.

In particular, Collini’s point is that at university, the student should “study”, rather than be taught, or learn, a subject. This perspective puts the onus on the student to do the work, in depth, and not be a mere passive recipient of whatever the lecturer deems important, merely regurgitating it for assessment. The current insistence on increased “contact hours” (rather than private study) and ever-increasingly detailed assessment encourages this attitude of regurgitation, which helps parrots, but not growth. We are now encouraged to treat students as “customers”, where they pay a fee for the product of a degree certificate. Many students will focus on the certificate outcome, not the process they need to go through to get it. Rather than certificate seller, I prefer the metaphor of “personal trainer”: the lecturers are providing opportunities, resources, and direction, but the student has to do the (sometimes painful) work to achieve the desired goal. No-one goes to a gym to get a certificate (maybe some do? I’ve never been to a gym!), but rather to achieve fitness, understanding that this will require effort on their part.

After this excellent review of the state of universities, and their goals, Collini fills the rest of the book with reprints of earlier articles, which eviscerate various government schemes to measure the “quality” of universities’ performance. These essays are also excellent, and pull no punches. Collini argues that we should not measure (rigid metrics designed by unqualified beancounters), but rather judge (thoughtful analysis by qualified peers), performance.

There is a lot more excellent, thoughtful (and very well-written) material here. I have just pulled out a few points that resonate most strongly with me. Read this, and have good arguments to support universities beyond mere economic gain.

insight into the OU

An ex Open University friend of mine comments on recent changes there.

Closure at the Open University?

How could any national treasure go quite as wrong as The Open University has done in recent years?

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

then four come along at once

One of the tasks of an academic is examining research students.  This involves reading a thesis, then discussing it with the student in a viva.  In the UK the viva is held behind closed doors, and usually involves only two examiners, one internal (same university as the student) and one external.  The scheme is different on the continent: the defence is public, following a lecture, and there may be multiple “opponents”, or even an entire panel, of examiners.

If every research student needs (a minimum of) two examiners, that implies for every student I supervise, I should examine at least two others (one as internal, one as external, to keep the numbers balanced).  In fact, since many universities like to have “senior” external examiners, I should probably do a few more than that.

Each year, I usually take on one or two new students.  So, each year, I should probably examine about three to five students.  So far this year I have examined only two: both external continental defences, one in Trondheim in April, one in Lyon in July.

That implies I should have two or three more to do this year (if it is an average year).  And sure enough, in November a pile of theses started raining down in a seemingly never-ending stream on my desk.

So the total number is about right, but all at once is a bit of a nightmare.  Two internal students, two external students, all to be examined before the end of January.  I know what I’m going to be reading over Christmas.

book review: The Slow Professor

Maggie Berg, Barbara K. Seeber.
The Slow Professor: challenging the culture of speed in the academy.
University of Toronto Press. 2016

---

There is an external view of academics as ivory tower effete dilettantes who spend all their time swanning around, thinking big thoughts, or just kicking back during the long vacations. There’s no real work involved, is there?

Then there is the reality: ever increasing bureaucracy, more scrabbling for more students, more worrying about “student feedback”, more scrabbling for ever reducing (per capita) research funding, more pressure to publish. I spent nearly two decades in industry, and have spent over a decade in academia: I can say with conviction that academia is much harder work and longer hours.

Bosses will say, but that’s because academia is vocational: you work so hard because you enjoy it. Well, we enjoy some of it, maybe even most of it, which is more than many people can say. But also if we don’t work so hard, we fall behind harder working peers, we don’t get promoted, we don’t get the research funding, we get in a death spiral. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons. And when we claim we are stressed because we have too much work to do, we are sent on time management courses (which we have no time for), rather than having workload reduced.

This thought-provoking little book (a mere 90 pages of text, to be digestible by the hurried academic, yet sufficiently dense with references to be academically rigorous), analyses the problem, and advocates slowing down, and savouring, the academic life. This is by explicit analogy with Slow Food and as a part of the Slow Movement in general. There are chapters on teaching, and research, and, crucial for academic learning, on collegiality. The call is for individual researchers to regain a sense of agency in the face of overpowering bureaucracy.

The authors write from the perspective of social scientists, but the findings and comments are equally applicable to other disciplines. The book documents much evidence of the problems, and suggests some approaches to mitigate these:

[p59] What does “time for the self” mean in the context of scholarship? For me, it means a shift from the dominant view of time as linear and quantifiable to time as a process of becoming. That is, rather than thinking of time as an accumulation of “lines on the CV” …, I am trying to think of time as an unfolding of who I am as a thinking being. Broadly speaking, I am trying to shift the focus from the product (the book, the article, the presentation) to the process of developing my understanding. This is not to say that books and articles and presentations don’t get written (although there may be fewer of them), but my experience of writing them changes in the sense that shifting my focus in this way eases some of the time pressure. I can keep at the back of my mind Readings’s question, which applies to our students as much as it does to us: “How long does it take to become educated?” … We tend to think of time as spent and gone. However, thinking of time as “constitutive, a becoming of what has not been before” … connects us to the scholarship that we do and goes against the corporate model.

How well this will go down with that “overpowering bureaucracy” remains to be seen. The issue with bureaucrats is they focus on those outputs, on those products, (presumably) because those are easy to measure, to count, to quantify. Students are to be assessed against learning outcomes: have they learned X, Y, Z? Yet students should grow and learn and change, through a process of becoming educated to think, and gaining meta-skills that can be adapted in a changing world. Research is to be assessed by publication and impact: how many journal papers and books? Yet researchers should grow and learn and change, through a process of reflection, and thinking, and experimenting. With much of academia, both teaching and research, most of the value lies in this process of becoming, hard to measure, even invisible in some cases. How much work are you really doing when reading a book, or staring at a screen, or just staring into space, thinking? Where’s the output, the result, the evidence of your work?

Learning and discovering and critiquing and thinking, like the rest of life, is a verb, not a noun.

I must read more about this Slow Movement. If I can find the time.

---

For all my book reviews, see my main website.

reducing class mobility

RIP maintenance grants. It’s one more move to keep the poor from education

But such analysis ignores the cultural attitudes towards debt in many working-class communities. The ingrained attitude that you never borrow money acts as a barrier to many who would otherwise like to study.

Indeed.  I am incredibly privileged.  When I went to university, waaay back in the day, there were no fees, and (my parents were so poor that) I got a full maintenance grant.  (£660/yr, which was enough to live on without needing more than a summer job.)  And my parents, despite being rather bemused at whatever it was I was doing (I was the first in the extended family to go to University), were fully supportive (morally, if not financially).  But if I'd had to borrow money, no way would I have done it.

I despair at what similar kids are going through today.

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

academic stress

Here’s an interesting article about stress in academia, from last year:

Mental health problems are on the rise among UK academics amid the pressures of greater job insecurity, constant demand for results and an increasingly marketised higher education system.

University counselling staff and workplace health experts have seen a steady increase in numbers seeking help for mental health problems over the past decade, with research indicating nearly half of academics show symptoms of psychological distress.

In the past, I’ve wondered aloud: the academic contract is for a 38 hour week [hahahahahaha]; the academic culture is one of long hours [60 is typical; 80-90 not unknown]; promotion criteria seem to be based on expectations that are possible within that culture, but not within that contract; when are we going to have the first claim for constructive dismissal? 

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page