Simon Jenkins is one of he most annoying columnists in the newspaper world. On occasion he offers deep common sense. On others he writes pure drivel that suggests a profound lack of understanding of the world he observes and comments upon. His comment in today's Guardian falls into the second group.
He has written about universities and is scathing about university based research, which he patronisingly describes as being the basis for universities' claim that they are investing in the future and concludes:
If I were an academic I would stop pretending I was "investing in the nation's future". I would stop using such language. I would try to give students what they want for their money, usually a well-rounded education and a mild sense of obligation to society, and tuck my research into my spare time. That would be my "rate of return". As long as universities play the investment game, they will find students and taxpayers alike asking to scrutinise their accounts.
This is commentary as close to crass in analytical terms as I expect to ever find in a newspaper. First, let's ponder for a moment what a university actually teaches? Is it knowledge, or is it a way of thinking? If it is the former then this education is a waste of time: knowledge is transient at best, is often wrong at the time it is proffered and is almost always so on recall. So 'knowledge transfer' is a poor justification for such an education in very many cases.
What universities should instead do is prepare the student to ask questions, challenge assumptions and formulate answers based upon observation and experimentation, whatever the subject matter. This is what makes them useful employees, capable of dealing with the challenges of the real world of employment as Jenkins sees it.
But that only happens if their education is undertaken in an environment where those teaching them have real experience of that process. And that happens through research. So Jenkins wants to remove the vital skill set from university life that imparts the real value they have to offer.
This really is small minded market logic at its worst.
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‘A mild sense of obligation to society’ -is that the best that Jenkins can come up with? More cloud-cuckoo-thinking form this wealthy ,multi-house-owning man.
And even if the purpose of education is ‘knowledge’ instead of critical thinking (which, I agree, is a mindset that could use a lesson in critical thought) then where the hell is this knowledge meant to come from? Is it magicked out of thin air?
Maybe, as a columnist, Jenkins confuses knowledge with opinion. When he wants to write on a subject he’ll spend some time on Google, maybe with some books, and then, armed with that ‘knowledge,’ pontificate away. But that isn’t knowledge. Knowledge isn’t something that can just be picked up from books (and especially not from the Internet!). Knowledge itself presupposes a whole critical process of production, critique and reproduction. It’s that entire infrastructure that is captured in the name ‘Research’ and that is the infrastructure that is under attack.
No more research, no more knowledge (of any quality, anyway).
All in all, Simon Jenkins needs to go back to school.
I have just posted the following.
As an academic I find this piece arrogant and offensive. Research IS about investing in the future, because comes up with a lot of the ideas which lead to innovations. Universities, that’s who. Research needs to challenge and ask questions, because the only research that government thinks is worthwhile is research which serves the immediate need of industry. Anything that asks difficult questions which challenges the status quo becomes useless and irrelevant, but developing a way of thinking which can challenge the status quo is one of the most useful skills which a university can impart, but these challenges are unwelcome to those in charge. It was the failure.to effectively challenge the prevailing orthodoxy which caused the current crisis.
The go-to text on universities is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – still a great book 40 years on:
“The school was what could euphemistically be called a ‘teaching college.’ At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automation saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community. The reason you teach and teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education.”
That takes me back!
Richard, I think Simon Jenkins has done this for honourable reasons – those referred to in my response/question to Ivan Horrocks (in the “We still need the champions for the courageous state” entry) about Larry Eliot’s Guardian article of 1982 in which Eliot referred to how successful Universities were being urged to adopt unsuccessful business practices — a process that Larry felt was exactly back-to-front.
The problem is that Jenkins has drawn the wrong conclusion from his examination of the facts: instead of, on recognizing that, in the period prior to the philistine Thatcherite attack on that system, our Universities (and Polytechnics and the rest of our higher academic system) were both excellent and effective because they combined rigorous academic standards with a mission to teach and truly educate, on the basis of live research, and so drawing the conclusion that we should seek to return to that system in some form, (so eschewing the whole “money’s worth” measure of education) he implicitly accepts that “money’s worth” argument he claims to be attacking, shrinking “education” down to a mere imparting of knowledge.
Alas, one of Thatcher’s greatest acts of philistine vandalism – and it remains one of history’s bitterest ironies that she, of all people, should have been Minister of Education, given her hostility to the concept, of which more in a moment – was the destruction of the Schools’ Council, a democratic, profession-led body that informed (in both senses of that word) the whole business of education. I had the privilege of teaching Schools’ Council history to ‘0’ Level, and very good it was, encouraging even Year 10 level pupils to explore the concepts of primary and secondary evidence through, inter alia, the question “Who killed the Princes in the Tower?”
Thatcher, however, as I have said before, was a Right-Wing Maoist, with all of Mao’s contempt for, and hatred of “experts” and “professionals” – whether in education, or health, or anywhere else, for the market was presumed to know, and perform, best.
So, out went the Schools’ Council, and any permission for professional input to the education system, all to be replaced by financial “values” (deliberately in quotes, since those “values” are in fact only operating constraints not deserving of the description “values”).
As a result, the enlightened thinking of 60’s and 70’s pedagogy, summed up in a slogan from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, which I cannot now fully remember, but which ran something like “Knowledge rather than facts; Understanding rather than information etc.” was supplanted by Thatcher’s “Gradgrind” system of education, from which we are still trying to escape, like someone trapped in quicksand, sinking ever deeper, as we struggle to escape.
Picking up on that “Understanding rather than information” idea, Jenkins completely misses the point that education – not training, not formation, not instruction – implies the gift of freedom to the taught, and the making redundant of the teacher, not literally, but in the sense that the pupil/student learns how to be free of the need to be taught – just as the child learns to be “free” of his or her parents. The bond is not severed, only changed.
However, any attempt to turn education and understanding into a system of instruction in facts is in fact a process of enslavement for the learner, who never learns how to think, and act, independently. And it is this latter situation, it seems to me, that Jenkins is asking for – enslavement to facts, rather than liberation through understanding.
I agree with you on the relationship between teaching and research, Richard. Indeed, having just been subject to one of the periodic reviews that academic teaching programmes are subject to, I can tell you that the review panel spent some time asking – and seeking evidence of – how academics’ research and scholarship feeds through into what we teach.
Having said that, Jenkins’ is accurate in other ways. For example, it’s certainly true that successive research assessment exercises have distorted the balance between teaching and research. In fact, Stefan Collini – a person Jenkins singles out for criticism – recently made much the same point:
‘So a procedure was established whereby the research quality of all university departments was periodically assessed by national panels, and research funding distributed according to the results ranking. But what an all-devouring monster was created. As a result of successive Research Assessment Exercises, preoccupation with research rankings has come to dominate academic life, from appointments, promotions, and choice of research topics through to universities’ financial strategies, marketing and publicity.
Speaking as someone who has not been able to be sufficiently “research active” over the past five years or so to be able to produce enough (both quantity and quality) to qualify for the forthcoming REF (because of my teaching and administrative responsibilities) I can tell you that should I seek a new job in UK academia this will have a significant impact on my value and thus my employability.
The sad thing is that the governments approach to rectifying this situation (amongst others) – which is to marketise and privatise HE – will simply turn most of those who work in universities into jobbing academics, and most universities into degree awarding factories. They are, of course, well aware of this.
Yet again one has only to look across the “Pond” to see where this is going.
Ultimately this will end in a thoroughly unsatisfactory two tier system. Ivy League/Russell Group in the top tier able to do research? The rest just teaching factories. Though others more than knowledgeable will be able to put me right if I have got this wrong!
You haven’t. That is indeed the plan. However, anyone who thinks this a good idea should take a glance at the July 2012 report published by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labour and Pensions. Based on a two year investigation into for-profit HEI’s, amongst other things the Committee found that at such “universities” only 17.4% of annual revenue was spent on teaching whilst 20% was distributed as profit (similarly large sums were spent on marketing). I don’t have a link to the report but Google will find it fast enough.
Unnoticed by most people, in the UK the cash paid to private colleges trebled in 2012 and now exceeds 100m. Interestingly 23% of the total public money involved was awarded to a single provider – Greenwich School of Management – owned by the private equity fund Sovereign Capital. Even more interestingly, this organisation’s co-founder advised the government on public sector reform and is now government spokesman on education in the Lords.
I’m tempted to say you couldn’t make it up. But in the world of contemporary UK politics it’s pretty much the norm.
I think another part of the jigsaw is university fees.
With students having to pay for their university education they want to get what they are used to at schools – the ability to recite factual knowledge in their chosen field. When they’re paying for it they want to be taught facts and spoonfed information rather than being taught to question and challenge. After all, many won’t want to go into research after they’ve graduated, they just want that piece of paper that says they have a 1st or 2:1 to produce to prospective employers.
And to some extent I don’t blame them when they’re paying £9,000 a year plus have to pay for accomodation food etc. on top and running up substantial debt.
Further education is being regarded more and more a commodity to benefit those with money rather than something improve the prospects of all for the common good.
Until this is reversed and higher education is again regarded as a right rather than a privilege, education standards will continue to go down the tubes!
“Until this is reversed and higher education is again regarded as a right rather than a privilege, education standards will continue to go down the tubes!”
If you want higher ed. to be a right – then fair enough. However, to keep costs down, why not only fund those subjects that actually deliver something so the students on those courses get it for free…..
…and for those other ‘academic subjects’ – well perhaps the students could either self-fund or get sponsorship from a firm. After all if the ‘history of art’ is so vital, surely an auction house would fund it!
You repeat Jenkins’ lack of understanding
A degree in the history of art is just fine for a career in a great many things – like accountancy
Allan, Isnt that just a touch of “Thatcherite Philistinism”? If only Eric Arthur Blair was alive today to comment on this “ism”!
…..or education could be grant maintained like it was prior to 1997! Why have we accepted that further education be a commodity?
What we have is a two-tier system. Universities are being pressed to go for a ‘factory-farming’ approach and are over-burdened by bureaucracy which seeks to ensure quality, although the way in which many of the criteria by which quality is assessed are implemented makes this exercise highly dubious. Meanwhile, Oxbridge and a few other ‘elite’ universities have the clout to simply pay the minimum of lip service to all this and carry on much as they always have done, relying on traditional notions of excellence. And where do most of our leaders come from? Oxbridge and these elite institutions. They want a handful of institutions to train our future leaders to think and the rest to produce compliant drones.
train our future leaders to think????????????????????????
I think they have signally failed to do that!!!
“A degree in the history of art is just fine for a career in a great many things — like accountancy…”
Then let the accountancy firm fund it and keep public cash for the engineering, the sciences, medicine, dentistry, related health professions, teaching and yes even languages…..
“Allan, Isnt that just a touch of “Thatcherite Philistinism”? If only Eric Arthur Blair was alive today to comment on this “ism”!”
I’d say a man as intelligent as Orwell would have at least understood the point that when funds etc are short – as they are in higher ed. at the moment, then funds from the public purse should be directed to where they will have the strongest effect.
If that means students wishing to study ancient Latin texts or medieval German have to pay for it themselves so that engineering students learning about computers or those learning a medical related trade e.g. medical instrument engineering, don’t have to pay…..well I’m sorry I can’t see any thing wrong in that position.
I’m not sure if that makes me a Vogon or not!
If accountancy firms pay al the tax they should then they would be funding this
That is how the common good should be paid for