Danny Dorling has just accepted a chair at Oxford. I suggest that this is why:
The elite is shrinking. It really is now only 1% of the population who are maintaining their very high standard of living. The majority of graduates, even from a university like Oxford, cannot expect to fit within that 1% even if they all wished to only do the kinds of jobs that pay so much. The majority of all our young people should expect to see their standard of living fall in future, or they need to learn how to better control the richest people in our society. The 1% are disproportionately made up not of people who are most able, but of those who are most greedy and least concerned about the rights, feelings and welfare of other people.
You have to know the meaning of courage to write like that when you're being appointed to Oxford.
That makes Danny part of a rare elite - those willing to tell the truth.
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The link in your blog is well worth following, Richard, as it takes readers to what is a longer article drawn from Prof. Dorling’s inaugural lecture. It contains many more truths about inequality and its relationship to and with education (not that the Secretary of State for Education or his acolytes would accept any of them).
But we should also acknowledge the courage of those who appointed Danny to his Chair. I appreciate (and once briefly experienced) the fact that Oxford and Cambridge, along with the LSE and a few others, are worlds apart from the environments and pressures that apply to most universities in England. Nevertheless, in an age when it pays to tow the neo-liberal line and avoid at all cost speaking truth unto power it’s good to see some in academia willing to stick their necks out.
Which does, of course, disguise the dire direction in which higher eduction in England is heading. We are now a long way down the road to a US system (as the Tories always intended and the Lib Dems were too dim to recognise) – and indeed beyond the point at which it’s now possible to return. That may well have little impact on the elite HE institutions, but, as I see at my own university, is having a profound – largely negative – impact on the majority (both from a staff and student perspective).
We are also several months into a dispute between the UCU (University and College Union) and universities, ostensibly over a shameful 1% pay rise (at a time when the average for university vice chancellors was 8%), but which is, I’m pretty sure, really about the employers beating the UCU and thus being able to implement local systems for pay, terms and conditions and so on.
So, Danny Dorling’s appointment is to be welcomed. But it’s a rare moment of brightness in higher education – as with so much else in the UK – where inequality, greed and conflict are largely replacing collegiality, cooperation and commonsense.
Ivan
I agree
Richard
Excellent commetary, Ivan, to which I would add my voice.
Ivan, you work for the OU I believe? I’m currently in my last year (I think!) of an Ou maths degree, and have found the OU to be excellent. However, thanks to the ‘austerity’ agenda, courses are being merged or cut and worst of all, the fees have tripled or quadrupled. I’m able to pay fees via a transitional system so I’m on the old level of fees, but if I wanted to do a further qualification (say a Masters), I’d be on the new fee system.
So if people want to improve their qualification levels, far fewer of them will be able to afford to do so. So much for the ‘self-improvement’ ethic trumpeted by the idiots on the political right then. The truth is of course, something like the OU is anathema to Gove and his fellow ideologues of the right. I’ve never heard Gove praise the OU, gave you? All we ever hear is how excellent private schools are, and how bad the state sector is.
This government is appalling. The most arrogant, devious and underhand I’ve ever known.
I do work for the OU, sickoftaxdodgers, and I’m glad to hear you’ve found the OU to be excellent. But I thank you more for providing a real example of how this government’s policies have destroyed what was once almost unique about the OU – and indeed one of the reasons it was set up in the first instance.
The OU was, of course, a product of a post-war social democratic system which neo-liberals despise, of course, so I suppose its fate was always sealed.
That is, I should add, my personal opinion, though I know I’m not the only person who takes that view. Anyway, I wish you every success with the remainder of your studies.
sickoftaxdodgers -the Tories idea of ‘striving’ is working within the neo-lib financialised world. The would approve of the ‘striving’ of Victorian seamstresses who had to resort to prostitution (a ratio of 1:20 men!) to supplement their poor wages. The idea of learning for its own sake is anathema to these culturless, vacuus cretins. All the best with your studies!
education is no longer underpinned by co-operative values-there are two classes now -‘wealth syphoners’ and ‘syphonees.’ Most coming from oxbridge will want to be part of the syphoners – given the thuggs emerging from Eton one really has to question what ‘education’ is going on there.
Ivan and Simon, thanks for your support; I’ll need it, as the going is pretty tough. As you say Simon, the idea of learning something for its own sake, and not just as a route to self-advancement is unknown to the philistines in this government.
Everything is money, money, money, debt,debt,debt. The same philosophy that brought us the financial collapse in the first place!
And thanks to, as I call them, the Lickspittle Democrats, the right are in a position to do so. A wrecked public sector, increasing poverty and a state subsidised property boom that will also collapse, sooner or later.