This New College of the Humanities news is something else. People, of course, are right to be upset about it – especially for a reason that I’ll get to below. But I think there’s also some real reason for hope… In short, from the point of view of someone actually deeply involved in the work that goes into running a first class humanities department, this plan looks absurd, impracticable, and more or less bound to crash and burn. A few points:

1. The money doesn’t work out correctly. I reckon – just adding this up in my head, very roughly – that if you figure out my economic value to the university in terms of the students that I’m directly responsible for in terms of advising etc, I bring in about £120,000 per annum. I get paid roughly a third of that – the rest goes to overhead and the like. And of course the humanities are, as of now, still “subsidized” by the university as a whole, at least where I am. If the faculty / student ratio is 10/1 at the NCH, and students pay / are charitably subsidized to $18,000, that means each teacher will bring in on average £180,000.

Now, a quick review of the listed teachers indicates that the numbers don’t really work out that well. I’m… not exactly in the Christopher Ricks-range of salary at this point, and the NCH’s overhead might be marginally lower or higher – it’s hard to say. But that’d give each of these superstars an average salary of approximately £60,000. Pretty good, sure, but not for the likes of them.

And especially not for the likes of them if, as implied on the website, these stars are actually going to be doing all of the teaching on these courses. (Really? Christopher Ricks is going to teach most or all of this?) And if they’re not going to be doing all of the teaching on the courses – if the NCH is going to hire a boatload of hourly-wagers and the like – I’d imagine the institution is going to end up with a whole lot of extremely fucked-off and probably (given the backgrounds they’re likely to draw in) litigious students on their hands. Given the ad pitch involved here, they’re going to have a hell of a time pulling the classic adjunct bait-and-switch. But I simply can’t imagine any other way they’re going to do it.

Obviously this is all back-of-the-envelope stuff that I’m doing here, but I simply don’t see how this is going to work. Let alone, given it’s for-profit status, send any cheques to its shareholders… But it’s all coated in the scent of ivy-coated Enron, really…

2. Horrifying to think that the superstars involved in setting this up might well be so distant from the actual drudgery involved in running an academic programme that they actually think that this “All-Star” Model will work. University departments are complex ecosystems. Some end up stars with big books and media exposure, some become worker-bees who keep the show running, lots end up somewhere in the middle. Some departments are disasters of hierarchy, others incredibly egalitarian in workload distribution. (Luckily mine falls into the latter group). But whatever they are, teachers end up taking on different roles at different times in their careers. And the mix is healthy – one learns very quickly, say, as a PhD student that becoming close with a junior lecturer mired in the drudgery of keeping their job and writing their first book can be valuable in a way that one’s relationship with Academic Star Advisor X isn’t.

Are these types really ready to second-mark boring first year scripts, handle admissions, write the shitload of letters of reference they’ve been paid for, handle “pastoral care,” set reading lists and the like? They’ve hired a few course conveners - it’s pretty horrifying to think what these people’s lives will be like as they take up as much of the slack as they can.

3. Even Boris Johnson, displaying the gravitas we’ve come to expect from him, gets it right: this will be – and more importantly look like - Reject’s College, Oxbridge. No one in their right mind would throw over a place at an elite university to attend this place… Those “namebrands” are namebrands for a reason – and one imagines that the sort of students that this place is targeting are just a bit brand conscious. However bright a student may or may not be, in attending NCH she or he would be opening themselves to a diploma marked with the stink of class privilege and lack of open competition. Whatever we feel about the current state (and as WBM might say “use” or “symbolic efficacy”) of meritocracy in universities, it remains a selling point to be able for potential employers and the like to know that you’ve competed against something even vaguely resembling the “best” or at least the “good” whatever their class background.

At any rate, to my mind this thing is a non-starter and I heartily look forward to watching it fail under its own ill-conceived architecture. The only thing that I’m still worried about is that, in a sort of reverse News Corp argument, publically-funded universities will start to claim that state regulation is distorting the market and that if the NCH is allowed to charge £18,000 / annum, we should be able to too…

UPDATE: Ooops, as has been pointed out to me, it looks like I – like many of the prospective students I imagine – didn’t read the fine print on the NCH website:

Our Professors will advise on curricula and quality, and will all give lectures at New College.

The curricula will be delivered by our team of permanent academic staff, with each subject area headed by a Subject Convener and assisted by one or more Senior Lecturers. They will be supported by a fully qualified academic staff.

Things just keep getting better and better in the UK Higher Ed sector.

The idea, which Times Higher Education understands is likely to be explored in the upcoming White Paper on higher education reforms, would remove students who do not take out state-funded loans from an institution’s cap on numbers.

Currently, about 14 per cent of home students do not take out a fee loan. But if they are undergraduates taking a first degree, they still count towards the limit on numbers for universities, which is imposed to ensure that public spending is controlled.

However, with ministers keen for ways to allow universities to expand without additional costs to the Treasury, it is understood that the White Paper may be used to float the idea of removing self-funding students from the cap.

This at least puts to final rest any sense that the “reforms” currently happening here are part of a process of “Americanizing” British universities. Whatever the other problems with them, all but a tiny handful of US universities run “need blind” admissions systems. The UK seems to be heading toward a very much “need wealth aware” system. And just in case you might be thinking that this will be a minor, top-up sort of change: my university, a very very good one, is currently doing everything it can to increase overseas enrollment, often at the expense of home students even when they will be paying the new £9000 fee.

And to think that when I decided to take a job here I was proud to be joining a more egalitarian system than the one that I’d come from…. Here’s more:

The “off-quota” proposal was raised by David Willetts, the universities and science minister, in a speech to Universities UK’s spring conference earlier this year.

He asked how it could be achieved in a “needs-blind” and “socially progressive” way, although the precise detail of what he was referring to was not mentioned.

Well, the precise detail wasn’t mentioned because it’s actually in fact absolutely impossible. Nonetheless, the BBC this morning (reading apparently from some spin-doctored lie-sheet government press release) headlined the news as a progressive move, designed somehow to “free up publicly subsidised university places for poorer students.” Jesus….

As always, the big question at play with this massive thing that I am forever revising is a question about the argument and its reach. In the last draft, I kept the “wider claims” very quiet, almost inaudible. I notice something – something quite important – about a certain set of texts, label it as important, but don’t quite say why. * I am commended by my reader for noticing this something, but urged to articulate more fully what exactly I think it means. Which is what I am trying to do right now… but without tilting into the perilously tempting stance of massively overstating the case, making my finding mean something politically or even philosophically that it can’t (possibly / quite) mean. And so a seemingly endless practice of revising my revision, trying to get the line of the claims just and square.

Literature is really funny in the way that it means. You can’t quite argue “Well, this really does give us a whiff of something, but it’s hard to say just what…” But that, to my mind, is basically what it does. But it can’t simply be something like that as the argument of an academic monograph.

* I constantly tell my students, when I basically take them back through the principles that I learned as a half-time teaching of composition as I was finishing my PhD, that I am absolutely not being condescending to them when I reexplain concepts like motive, argument, structure, and the like. I always tell them that the selfsame issues are what at stake in my own work, and that I am constantly failing to fulfill these basic rhetorical rules and premises. I’m not sure they always believe me, but it is absolutely positively true. These things are what bring meaning to work, given the fact that meaning is difficult, they are what make writing of this sort (any sort?) difficult.

Hard to know what to make of this, because the university’s not being forthright about it, but very, very disturbing…

From Glen Newey at the LRB blog:

Last week, Keele University announced plans to shut down its philosophy programme, in the name of ‘efficiency’ savings. It’s beside the point here that the methodology underlying the calculations is flawed and its specific application to philosophy very suspect. The 27-page document presented for consideration by the Senate on 23 March is a fully fledged statement of the post-Brownean credo, apart from the latter’s insistence on student demand as a touchstone of academic worth. Philosophy at Keele doesn’t enrol enough students to make money; but then, it is subject to a cap imposed by the government: there are fewer than 60 places this year. You break somebody’s legs then complain that they can’t keep up.

“You break somebody’s legs then complain that they can’t keep up.” Yes… Just about every internal political and bureaucratic wrangle I’m involved in at the moment follows the selfsame logic. Take what is fit, starve or mangle it for a bit, set it back into the wild, watch it struggle, watch it starve… then deliver with a shrug the aperçu about the wonders of natural selection, the sublimity of nature taking its course, that you had prepared well before the start of the entire process.

One seems actually to exist and the other is a rather funny facebook joke, but I encountered the possibility of both with exactly the same degree of disbelief.

Update: no, disbelief isn’t the right word. In fact, it might be nearly the opposite of the right word. Baffled resignation at what either could be or is true? What’s the anglo-saxon for that?

Ah, feel vindicated today. During the UK student occupations, I accepted any invitation I received to address student occupations and did my best to come up with something good to say to them… Even though that increasingly amounted to saying something like “Christ, you guys know better than I do at this point… Look at what you’ve done!”

A few weeks ago, I received an email encouraging me to come up with something for the Really Free School. After thinking about it for awhile, I decided to ignore the request… But not without feeling a bit guilty for not pitching something in, especially since the aspects of this movement that have provided opportunities for me to usefully participate have gone into remission for the moment. But reading this this morning, I realize that the hunch I had – that I’m on a different side of this from them – was right. Here’s the post in full:

!Education’s Napster Moment

As a result of the emergence of a virtual marketplace that encourages the forming of community and the sharing of ideas, we have inadvertently been equipped with the tools needed to undo the current rules of engagement.

Ours is the first generation to be given the toolset by which to produce, collectively organise and display our message/ideology/product to a global audience; an audience that, like you, has an equal opportunity to subvert the current trajectory of our education system.

Universities are collapsing. Not as a result of dramatic cuts but because they represent an outmoded model for their primary function, the exchange of knowledge and research. The education industry is about to experience the same death blow to its infrastructure and profit model that Napster issued to the music industry back in 1999.

Everyone within our generation is aware that the construction of ideas and the execution of research has shifted its locality to a sprawling virtual space that is open to collective input.

Let us not draw out the death rattle of our institutions by allowing concessions to be made and minor battles to be fought and ultimately lost – instead let us accelerate the pace of their demise.

Abandon the institution and declare it’s death, the point at which our apathy for the current state of play is declared, the better. With this change we will be able to destabilise the mediated control of our social trajectory, causing a genuine crisis for those that stand to profit both politically and financially from our existing system. It is the institutions and those that control them that need us.

Create a real crisis, torrent your syllabus, duplicate your id cards and give them to strangers, scan your entire library and post it on AAARG, distribute maps of your university online, relocate your seminars to a space outside of the institution. Invalidate the universities existence, so that together we can begin to build fresh foundations on its grave.

Invite anyone and everyone to participate, saturate your institutions and make them a true open space. The path to knowledge does not end on the day of graduation.

This document was put together on the spur of the moment as a direct response to this situation, its ideas are not fixed. Instead it seeks to act as a provocation or suggestion that we should consider the complete reformation of what we currently have. More money/Less cuts cannot cure the decline of our institutions. We have now a unique opportunity to create something new, independently and autonomously.

Wow – sounds like someone’s been reading Kpunk et al – at least before Kpunk et al’s dextrous sidestep into allegiance with the generally non-accelerationist protest movement late last year. (Short version of my critique: saying “They’re not as apathetic as I wrote” is not the same as saying “Perhaps the embrace of apathy is not the right way forward…” Harder to admit that your argument was wrong than your diagnosis…) But that is some pretty hardcore accelerationism cum depressive despair in the blogpost, per what we’ve seen from the likes of the left-theoretical blogetariat. I am fully in-line with the desire to open university admissions, to grant as much access as possible, deheirarchize institutions etc. (If CUNY wants to go back to open admissions and offer me a job, I’d be there in a second, despite the fact that I do indeed get on very very well with my hand-picked and quite brilliant students where I am now…) The only reason I don’t want anyone to video and release my lectures for free on the internet is that I’d have to rewrite my lectures every single year for fear that some or most had heard it all already. Trust me, I have enough work to do as it is…

More seriously, I am absolutely sure that the way forward is not the abandonment of what vestiges of socialized education remain in the UK or anywhere else. I think it’s safe to say that they’re missing an absolutely enormous, gaping difference between the napster-fucking of the music industry and doing the same thing to what is left of publically funded university education. In short, most of us don’t care in the least about the survival of, say, Sony. We don’t care about cutting into to their profit margins, we don’t care if they go under, and we might even have faith that if they and their competitors no longer existed we would still be able to find good or even better music without them.

On the other hand, I’d like to think that we do care about the continued existence and viability of not-for-profit and (let’s hope) state funded educational centres. At this point in history, there are far better targets for anarchistic rage than the ISAs that administer higher education, at least in the humanities and social sciences. (At the moment, I am being force-interpellated by institutional pressure – from a University Press – to add more Badiou etc into my book. That’s not exactly the stuff of Christian conservatism…)

I used to talk to someone who from time to time would kick around the idea of dropping out (or being evicted from) regular academia and “taking it on the road” – giving talks and passing the hat. She also was a sometimes theorist of the sort of university without walls idea that is behind the RFS communique above. When we talked about it, the thing that I always said was that sure, it’s a nice idea, but if I were her I’d just plan to give, say, the porn talk over and over again and probably forget about giving the Hegel lecture quite so often or even at all.

Some of education isn’t fun – it can’t be fueled by people hitting “like” on some social networking website. I’m lucky. I get to teach the attractive stuff from the modern period, the stuff that just about everyone wants to read. But I am incredibly grateful that my students are forced to read lots of other materials that, given the choice, they likely wouldn’t. Lots would skip Chaucer if they could, and much else besides that they complain about to me but ultimately they need to have in order to understand – and in particular to see the limitations of – the hip fun but ultimately sort of narcissistically angled stuff that they get to do with me.

I have no moral qualms with downloading music or television. I will say however that my ability to do so doesn’t necessarily lead to the best use of my time. This morning for instance, feeling in a bit of a rut, I finished up the newest season of Mad Men rather than reading Peter Hallward’s excellently lucid book on Badiou, which I started yesterday. Perhaps you see the problem? The infinite availability of what I like isn’t necessarily a conduit to my successful continuous self-education.

And of course there’s another side to this. Destroy the university and no one pays me anymore. I spend an awful lot of time and energy on teaching – most months, almost all of my time and energy. The students seem to want me to do it. Maybe it’s their interpellation by their ISA of choice, but they’d be pretty upset to run the seminars on their own or if I just put my syllabi and lectures on-line. But if no one’s paying my fine but meagre salary, I’d obviously have to find something else to keep me in hotdogs and buns. Call it me defending my financial interests, but even given the rough job market I’m pretty sure I could find something amazingly more lucrative to do for a living than this.

I think it’s become clear – it seemed very much so at the occupations last year – that faculty are no longer viewed with suspicion. We’re all on the same side here… Save of course for those who go over to administration, which is another matter altogether and something that I sure as shit will never do. At any rate, I’d bet six cans of Grolsch that within a few months, Cameron et al rolls out some sort of Big Society e-learning initiative. When you’re coming up with ideas that happen to be exactly the same as those of the party in power, it might be time for a bit of an decelerationist moment. If so, maybe the folks at the Really Free University could be hired in to administer it.

Scattered post – sorry about that. Anyway, glad I didn’t go. This is not something that I support. I hope there will be many opportunities in the near-term to give talks at occupations whose interests and aims I share.

Let’s hope my book-finishing turns out this way instead of, you know, the other way. I’m not all that hopeful, honestly.

Ah, here we go. This is exactly what I’ve been talking about. From the Times Higher Education:

Data published by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service reveal that 210,022 people – about a third of applicants – were not accepted on to university courses last autumn.The number of UK students accepted fell by 0.8 per cent, but non-European Union places rose by 12.4 per cent.

EU student numbers, which are subject to the same strict cap on places as UK ones, also went up.

The Ucas figures reveal the final picture of those who applied to start university in 2010.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, said: “Record numbers of students missed out on a university place because the government refused to fund sufficient places and that trend is set to continue this summer. After the government axed the education maintenance allowance, these figures are a reminder of the rationing of opportunity at the higher education level as well.

“The foreign market is a lucrative one for UK universities and these figures suggest that UK students are now disproportionately missing out on places.”

There was a 27.8 per cent increase in the number of students coming from China.

Again, just to reiterate: I have absolutely no problem with the admission of international students and, if the world were perfect, one would teach a randomized mix of students ingathered from everywhere. I’m, after all, a foreigner myself. That’s not the issue. What is the issue is shifting from merit to money as the primary determinate of who gets places – or rather, of what places are available in the first place. Non-EU students pay more, therefore universities who can manage it are shifting their provision toward programmes that attract non-EU students (say, interdisciplinary MAs rather than hardcore single subject BAs). The article continues:

Paul Marshall, executive director of the 1994 Group of smaller research-intensive universities, said: “Higher education is one of the UK’s most successful export industries and today’s figures show that it is going from strength to strength.

Never in my wildest dreams, while I was doing my PhD, did I think I’d be a part of a dying nation’s “most successful export industry.” But, true to form,  I did receive an email the other day soliciting applications to work for a new branch campus in Qatar. Comes with a free apartment and car. No salary increase though – the fact that Qatar charges no income tax is supposed to serve as the enticing “raise.”

From the NYT today.

Resolution: I will stop using the Sainsbury’s self-checkout machines, even if I finally have snooped the code that allows me to buy booze without waiting for “approval” from the employees. Here’s for maintaining the inefficiencies (and employment) involved in Actually Existing Human Presence!

Interesting, encouraging piece in the Times Higher Education about socialist education in Venezuela:

To counter this, one of 21st-century socialism’s central features is the extended role of the educative society, accompanied by mass intellectualism from birth to death (Chávez has described Venezuela as “a giant school”). A central objective of this is to develop the conditions for the production of autonomous and relevant ideas for the development needs of the majority of Venezuelans. It is also a means to overcome the traditional division of labour present within Venezuelan society and politics, in which there were thinkers (the dominant economic and intellectual elite) and doers (those who produced, yet were unable to control or receive the fruits of production).

Such educative processes are clearly apparent in the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), where one of us taught. As part of a major attempt to extend access to higher education, UBV is free to all students and seeks to fundamentally challenge the elitism of many traditional universities. Social justice and equality are at the core of its educational content and delivery, and all courses taken there use Participatory Action Research methodology – a multidisciplinary approach linking theory and practice. PAR methodology bases UBV students in their local communities, working on community projects that form a core part of their formal studies.

Mission Sucre is another example of 21st-century socialism’s democratisation of higher education. The programme provides free, ongoing education to the 2 million adult Venezuelans who had not completed their elementary schooling under the old system. The Mission is an attempt to popularise, reform and expand Venezuelan higher education beyond its traditional elitist role. The programme is geared especially towards the most marginalised segments of society and is based in their communities, embedding education in the concrete needs and desires of Venezuela’s poor majority. Yet many professors among the traditional intellectual elite in Caracas’ main universities have refused to go to the barrios to teach in the Mission.

On the other hand, here’s what’s going on in the UK (and part of what I was talking about here…)

The talk that I never quite gave but should have at the occupations would have been the one that directly discussed the issue that is most directly upsetting me about the current direction of the universities – mine, obviously, in particular, but lots of others in the UK too. It’s an issue that should be upsetting UK students too, though it’s something that perhaps the faculty can see more clearly at this point because we sit through endless departmental and extra-departmental meetings dealing with the issue.

Problem with this topic is that it’s very easy to misconstrue and to misconstrue in the very worst of terms. It is what we might call a Daily Mail bridge-issue. Because of this, let me just say that my ideal of the university would be one that admitted students from anywhere – anywhere in the world – regardless of ability to pay. I suppose according to merit, though sometimes I have complicated thoughts about this issue.

But the fact of the matter is that my university – like many others like it – is clearly and determinately attempting to shift its academic provision away from home students toward international students. While it seems very clear that home students will pay more under the new dispensation, they still, even at £9000 / annum, won’t cover costs. International students pay much more, and, from what I can tell, may soon pay significantly more than even the increasingly indebted home students. I really shouldn’t go into the exact details about how this is happening – in general, a turn from BA programmes attractive to UK undergraduates (and in many cases extremely difficult to get into) toward MA programmes attractive to Americans and other non-EU students is one of the clearest steps. There are other things – establishing interdisciplinary BA programmes that will directly draw down our single honours intake, not so tacit pressure to take PhD students from abroad etc.

Just to be clear: I don’t per se blame my university – or any university – for implementing these changes. We are in a funding crisis, and no one in this country has the sort of endowment to survive these changes by play through according to the old rules. I blame the coalition government – as well as the previous government, to an extent – for the current state of affairs and the necessity of implementing changes  that, incrementally, seem to be bent on turning very good academic institutions into mediocre “heritage industry” semi-corporations, inevitably full of “MA Tourists” taking up the teaching time that used to be spent on brilliant and often enough very deserving undergraduates.

Like the student occupiers’ complaint about fees, this issue is extremely vivid – not at all an amorphous gripe about potential outcomes or vague political positions but an everyday reality of my life and those whom I work with and teach. Again, I wish I had gotten a chance to explain this at length at some point during the occupations. Let’s hope – or anticipate – that the opportunity will come again and soon in 2011.

Wonderful:

In the context of numerous student occupations of their universities
and mass demonstrations, the seminar Marxism in Culture has organised
a special session on 17th December at the Insitute of Historical
Research, Senate House, 5.30. All welcome.

‘Cultures of Occupation and Demonstration: 2010/1968/1917′

With
Warren Carter
Gail Day
Steve Edwards
Esther Leslie
David Mabb
Nina Power
Alberto Toscano.

As far as I understood it, MIC had invited some of the actual students to speak at this event… I guess the invitation has been rescinded. Apparently, instead, the students who’ve led the most successful student occupation / demonstration in decades are supposed to show up and listen to their olders and betters lecture to them about 1968. Can’t wait, I’m sure…

Update: Sorted. See the comments. Was an oversight, apparently, on the part of the organizers. Can’t wait to hear the students speak in a different context. The new roster, as far as I know it:

Sofie Buckland

Warren Carter

Steve Edwards

Esther Leslie

David Mabb

Alberto Toscano

and other Students from the Occupations.

So the occupation that I’ve been involved with has ended after a majestic run and I’ll have to find something else to do with my spare hours. Lots to say about it all once I’ve calmed down a bit. But one final wonderful side-effect: they / we had an “after party” at the Boston, a block or so from my place, last night. The Boston is the ultimate source or at least the venue where so many of the life-crisis horrors that I’ve obliquely chronicled on this blog over the last year or so occurred or at least occurred to me. It would be hard to describe what an intimate relation I have to the place, which has served for me as a sort of outfolding in the world of the infolded shit in my head.

But last night in that place I was surrounded by students that I’ve come not only to respect in a new way (lets say ethically rather than simply intellectually) but also to love a bit. One is continually faced, in this business, with the question why bother. It’s hard work, and hard in ways that other work isn’t. But this has made me remember why it’s all worth it and so Monday, despite the fact that I can’t stop off at the Jeremy Bentham Room after work and despite the fact that Higher Ed is generally heading into the shit, I’ll go in happier and more sure of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

Oh dear. What have we here. From an email I just received:

In other news, Luce Irigaray is in UCL and won’t come to see us because the chalking has upset her so much.

Run, academics, the new kids are behind you…

I admit, I get pretty excited when I see chalk at the university too, given the proliferation of fucking dry-erase whiteboards.