Motorway Musings: Two Cultures and Traditional Halls

"We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour," wrote G.K. Chesterton in his 1905 book Heretics. In a chapter entitled 'On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family', cited approvingly by Stephen Fry's eponymous character in 1992's Peter's Friends, Chesterton points out how city life can have the paradoxical effect of narrowing our minds:

"It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us… 

There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.  

The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.”

I was thinking about this on the bus the other day, pondering differences between Ireland's and England's educational systems, and scientism, and the roads that lie before us. 

A Lesson Learnt Before a Sun-burning Day on a Crowded Black Beach

Many years ago, chatting to two smart and wonderful English girls in a Roman underground station I was struck by how, though they were clearly rather better versed in matters scientific than me, they seemed to lack the most basic knowledge of their own country's history or literature. 

Since moving to England, I’ve noticed this phenomenon time and again, as intelligent people with scientific or technical training all too often seemed to subsist on caricatures of history, geography, literature, and philosophy, while equally smart people educated in the humanities look embarrassed when their absolute ignorance of matters scientific is brought to light; some just shrug, and say they're not good with numbers.

That’s not to say that this phenomenon is alien to Ireland, but I’ve long found it to be far more pronounced in England. If Philip Larkin was right in saying that educated people should know three things – what words mean, where places are and when things happened – it rather looked as though there was something amiss with English education.

It doesn't really take a genius to see what's going wrong. English education tends towards early specialisation, such that first year history students – for example – in English universities generally tend to be slightly better than their Irish counterparts. I've known people to study three humanities A-Levels, and others to do four scientific ones. There's much to be said for this, of course, but specialisation has a price, and that price is all too often a rounded education.

In contrast, Irish students tend to study a range of subjects. People who start science degrees with Leaving Cert maths, physics, chemistry, and biology in the bag will also usually have studied English, Irish, and French or German. Those who start arts degrees with English, history, geography, and a couple of languages in their pocket will also have done maths and quite probably a science subject. And, of course, they'll all have done a whole medley of subjects right up to their Junior Cert.

Sometimes this knowledge can be pretty shallow, of course, but still, there's some sort of balance there, an attempt to educate children in a general way.

The more focused English system seems to lend itself far more than the Irish one to people seeing themselves as 'science people' or 'arts people'. It's as though the arts ones have persuaded themselves that they simply can't do science or handle numbers, and faced with this cowering ignorance, the science ones have become convinced that their type of knowledge is the only type that’s reliable.

People do make up lost ground as they get older, but too many years in the English education system have convinced me that though there are loads of well-rounded English people, intellectually speaking, they're seriously outnumbered by those at the extremes.

I remember being surprised and impressed back in the day to meet undergraduates who'd managed a mixture of science subjects and humanities in their A-Levels. They seemed a gloomily rare breed.

(I'd like to see the figures on this, of course, as my impressions might well be deeply unrepresentative, but still,  that's how it seems to me. And, well, I was on a bus while pondering this, so please forgive my broad-brush approach here. I don't know how many spreadsheets I could have summoned on my phone through a ropey connection.)

Two Cultures

The current fashion for popular science books, and the elevation of reasonably articulate scientists to the status of public gurus are clear symptoms of this; it’s as though the arts people feel inadequate, but lacking the skills and experience to educate themselves about science, they settle for trusting those they see as better informed than themselves. And of course, without suitable training and extensive reading, they're hardly equipped to establish just how credible certain scientists are. They all seem impressive, talking about things largely alien to the innocent arts people...

It's hardly surprising then there are no shortage of science people who'll look down on their arts counterparts, given how much ground has been surrendered.

And contemporary information fetishes – without an appreciation of the skills needed to interpret that information – don't help in the slightest. Insofar as there are celebrity historians to rival the science gurus, people can think of them as mere fact-bearers, not really getting that history's as much about approaching, sifting, handling, and contextualising facts as it is about simply finding them out. The facts don't speak for themselves, after all. History and science aren't just about knowing things: they're about thinking historically and about thinking scientifically.

Things haven’t really improved since C.P. Snow banged on about the Two Cultures in 1959. Establishment Britain’s still ruled by those from humanities backgrounds – not one senior government minister has a third-level science qualification – but in terms of popular culture it’s as though things have swung from one unhealthy extreme to another. 

In 1967, G.R. Elton was able to say with a straight face that “Modern civilization […] rests upon the two intellectual pillars of natural science and analytical history,” but a lazy scientism is in the ascendant now; in a world where Oxford dons can describe philosophy as “a complete waste of time” we run the risk of kicking away the philosophical and theological foundations of both pillars, and smashing the historical one into rubble.

Threads Plucked from the Tapestry of our Common Culture

All of which leaves me depressed at the way that high university fees seem to be increasingly driving English students to try to study close to home rather than – as was often the way – as far from home as they could possibly get. 

The system of university halls of residence – especially traditional ones, modelled on Oxbridge colleges – has long struck me as one of the very best features of English education, its real value being in how it forced all sort of students to live side by side, and to learn from each other. It’s an arrangement that mitigates to some degree the English tendency towards a fragmented intellectual culture.

Hall life isn’t always smooth, but there’s something to be said for a system where people of different backgrounds, different worldviews, different interests are simply forced to get on with each other. It’s normal in halls to see people who might identify themselves as Christians, socialists, Muslims, liberals, Thatcherites, Scots, environmentalists, Jews, scientists, vegetarians, lesbians, Buddhists, northerners, communists, Hindus, atheists, nationalists, Arsenal fans, and all manner of other ways sitting down to dinner with each other, and talking into the night about what they have in common and where they differ.

  

That’s not to say that birds of a feather don’t tend to flock together, but in the confines of halls, people just have to get on. Students rarely have the option of sealing themselves off into like-minded cliques, and so firm friendships form between historians, microbiologists, linguists, psychologists, medical physicists, economists, oncologists, political scientists, embryologists, anthropologists. engineers, lawyers, physical chemists, theologians, botanists, philosophers, mathematicians… and do so across cultural, religious, and political divides.

I was lucky enough to live in halls for years, and think there’s a lot to be said for the kind of place that enables and promotes such interdisciplinary mingling; it’s a shame that it doesn’t happen more often, and it disheartens me that the more students stay at home, the fewer students will gain from the deep and diverse friendships that can be forged in traditional halls. The bridge that joins Britain's two cultures seems increasingly frail, and each brick that falls away weakens it further, impoverishing us all.

Or so I thought while slowly making my way up the M6 on Tuesday.

Not Quite Forgotten...

Years ago, I attended a talk entitled something like 'Tedius Scholasticus: Another Forgotten Classic'. As it ended, and we packed up to head off down the corridor to the obligatory wine reception, the lecturer next to me sighed, and remarked that that was a classical author he would have been quite happy to have left forgotten.

That said, there are real gems in the minor league of the Classical canon. While not everyone can be a Thucydides or a Lucretius, there are delights to be found in the lower rungs. Two of my favourites are Publilius Syrus and whatever wag or wags were responsible for To Philogelos.

To Philogelos or 'The Laughter Lover' is a bumper fun joke book from the fourth century AD, supposedly compiled by a comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius. The jokes, I'm afraid, aren't the funniest, but are worth a read for all that. Here are a few:

'An egghead got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine."'

'An Abderite wanted to hang himself, but the rope broke and he bumped his head. He went to the doctor and got some salve. After rubbing it on the wound he hanged himself again.'

'When a wag who was a shopkeeper found a policeman screwing his wife, he said: "I got something I wasn't bargaining for."'

'A Kymean constructed a huge threshing-floor and stationed his wife on the opposite end. He asked her if she could see him. When she replied that it was hard for her to see him, he snapped: "The time will come when I'll build a threshing-floor so big that I won't be able to see you and you won't be able to see me."'

'A rude astrologer cast a sick boy's horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When she said, "Come tomorrow and I'll pay you," he objected: "But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?"'

'A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: "Everyone is fine, especially your father." When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: "You have no clue who your real father is."'

'While a drunkard was imbibing in a tavern, someone approached and told him: "Your wife is dead." Taking this in, he said to the bartender: "Time, sir, to mix a drink up from your dark stuff."'

'A young actor was loved by two women, one with bad breath and the other with reeking armpits. The first woman said: "Give me a kiss, master." And the second: "Give me a hug, master." But he declaimed: "Alas, what shall I do? I am torn betwixt two evils!"'

'A young man invited into his home frisky old women. He said to his servants: "Mix a drink for one, and have sex with the other, if she wants to." The women spoke up as one: "I'm not thirsty."'

'A misogynist was sick, at death's door. When his wife said to him, "If anything bad happens to you, I'll hang myself," he looked up at her and said: "Do me the favor while I'm still alive."'

Oh yes, there's far more where they came from. 255 more, to be precise, albeit with some duplication. Some aren't terrible.

Anyway, we used to be very fond of this collection back in my misspent youth. Not so much for the ancient jokes, of course, as for the endnotes. The edition of To Philogelos in our library had a prodigious quantity of endnotes, all detailing how various German academics speculated about why jokes were funny.

They tended to take the form of 'Moellendorf Willamowitz says that this is a pun on "salve", whereas Kromayer argues that this is a references to the sacking of the city by Philip II in 350 BC. Delbrueck thinks this is an allusion to Democritus, who was a famous citizen of Abdera.'

A German friend of mine -- who habitually borrowed this book to bring to the pub and show bemused friends -- was particularly besotted with the endnotes.

The great Publilius Syrus, on the other hand, is a very different kettle of fish: if the notes on To Philogelos filled us with joy, Publius Syrus filled us with wisdom.

Publilius was a Syrian who wrote Latin plays in the first century BC. His plays became famous for his maxims, such that the plays have all been lost but the maxims remain, with other similarly wise sayings being attributed to him. You can read all thousand or so statements in the Loeb volume Minor Latin Poets, Volume 1. 

Among the sort of things he says are:

'A suspicious mind always looks on the black side of things.'

'An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.'

'Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world.'

'In a heated argument we are apt to lose sight of the truth.'

'It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door.'

'Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.'

'It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.'

'Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.'

'There are some remedies worse than the disease.'

'Hares can gambol over the body of a dead lion.'

And so forth. Profound stuff, you'll surely agree. The kind of thing that folk should absorb before jumping to conclusions, thinking oneself into a circle, and then charging around casting aspersions on people.

Um. Anyway, we used to keep it on the handy shelf back in our postgrad days, thinking he'd be a handy man whenever there was a crisis.

'What should we do?'

'Let's find out what Publilius Syrus would say,' someone would say, reaching for the little red book, opening it and random and treating our ears with his mellodious Syrian wisdom.

Great days.

I'm tempted to start a Publius Syrus Twitter account. Just to help people, you understand. 

Bunting

Years ago, some weeks before the last jubilee, I was living in halls when one of my fellow students asked me for help with an essay; I can't remember the topic, but people regularly came to me for advice on essays, whether they were on history, French cinema, Spanish literature, developmental economics, physiotherapy and the mechanics of the human elbow, or whatever.

My own work done for the evening, I ambled down to Sophie's room -- let's call her Sophie, for convenience -- to help her with her work. I knocked, and she answered, and I entered. And stared.

She'd been doing laundry, you see, and was drying it in her room. And not just any laundry, mind. Underwear, of which she appeared to have vast quantities.

She'd drawn lines of twine about her room and hung her laundry from these lines, such that her room was decorated with a multitude of thongs, myriad colourful triangles swaying in the slight breeze her window let in.

To this day I have never seen more pants.

We sat down to work, but after about the fifth time I frowned, restraining an obvious joke about whether she was expecting the Queen to visit, Sophie realised what was bothering me, started to laugh, and suggested we go down to the common room.

Even now, I can't look at bunting without thinking of Sophie's room and shaking my head. This jubilee weekend is proving quite a challenge.

Thousands of Words

It's long been a conviction of mine -- and as usual this is based on observation and not upon prejudice -- that academic talks with witty and dramatic titles tend towards tedium, whereas those with more workmanlike names can often surprise. Obviously, this doesn't work across the board, but it's a good rule of thumb, and one that first struck me when I attended a talk entitled 'Oaths, Omens, and Abominations' and found myself learning about Greek grammar.

The tragic aorist, to be particular.

I'm not saying it wasn't a good talk -- it was, and it's one where I really learned stuff -- but it certainly wasn't what I felt I'd signed up for.

In contrast, many's the talk I've attended with a dull title that's turned out to be utterly fascinating. Again, I'm not saying that all talks with uninspiring names prove inspirational; a serious contender for the worst talk I've ever attended had the kind of boring title that trained eyes recognised as promising hidden pleasures, but proved both condescending and deeply flawed, delivered in a ponderous manner and accompanied by an atrocious Powerpoint presentation, the nadir of which was an utterly incomprehensible flowchart.

Afterwards, as my colleagues made sure to take away their handouts lest the speaker notice the scathing comments they'd scrawled upon them, I remarked that I hoped the speaker was to be made pay for her own dinner; a friend who wound up seated opposite her during the meal then spent a tortuous two hours desperately trying to avoid discussing her paper.

Still, the principle holds, I think. Don't trust exciting titles, as they merely raise hopes, while things that seem functional and mundane can have poetic depths.

One of my favourite non-fiction books has perhaps the most soporific name of any book on my shelves, it being Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Dull of title it may be, but the book's a thing of rare beauty, and is one of those things that could change how you look at the world.

Scathing of charts and diagrams that are cluttered with useless or distracting information, and damning of those that mislead, Tufte sings the praises of elegant diagrams that convey large amounts of information in a clear and efficient way, especially those that do so in a narrative fashion. Not every picture's worth a thousand words, but some are worth that and more.

John Snow's cholera map, showing how outbreaks of the disease were distributed in the 1854 London epidemic, is recognised by Tufte as an exemplary instance of quantitative information being displayed visually, but the real highlights of his book are the nineteenth-century creations of the French engineers Ibry and Jean Joseph Minard.

Perhaps Ibry's most ingenious creation is this Paris-Lyons train timetable, as published by Étienne-Jules Marey in 1885. The horizontal axis reflects the time of day, while stations are placed proportionately by distance along the vertical axis. Southward-bound trains descend from left to right, while northward ones ascend from left to right. The table reveals an immense amount of information at a glance, with, for instance, it being immediately obvious that the steepest lines indicate the fastest trains.

There's no denying that this isn't all that clear when reproduced on a small size, but at its original larger scale it would have been admirably clear. Tufte's applied Ibry's methods to other modern timetables with impressive results, which really just leaves one wondering why this system hasn't been commonly adopted by transport authorities around the world.

Minard's historical maps are perhaps even more remarkable than Ibry's timetable. Indeed, Tufte is of the view that this 1869 map, depicting Napoleon's doomed march on Moscow, may well be the greatest statistical graph of all time, defying the pen of the historian, as Marey said, in its brutal eloquence.

The thick upper band depicts the advancing army as it sets out from the Polish-Russian border towards Moscow, the band narrowing along the way as thousands of men deserted and thousands more died through cold, starvation, typhus, and suicide; 422,000-strong at the beginning of the invasion, hardly more than a 100,000 reached Moscow.

The dark lower band -- tied to to temperatures along the route -- represents the broken and shrinking army's desperate retreat through the bleak and deadly Russian winter, harassed along the way by Russian peasants and irregular troops, such that barely 10,000 returned across the Neman.

I was horrified and thrilled when I beheld this map for the first time, as me being me I wondered whether Minard's methods could be applied to a similar map depicting Hannibal's march; surely, I thought, that'd be a boon to any book on his Italian invasion. Well, I discovered as I read on, Minard had beaten me to it and rendered such a map more gracefully than ever I could have done.

Working from Polybius' second-century figures, and following -- it would seem -- the route postulated by Jean-Louis Larauza, Minard showed how Hannibal's army set off from Cartagena with about 90,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, but after leaving men behind at the Ebro river to protect Punic Spain, continued to decline in numbers as it crossed the Pyrenees, Gaul, the Rhone, and especially the Alps, such that it eventually arrived in Italy reduced to a mere 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry.

Granted, this map takes Polybius' figures at face value, which I wouldn't do -- all else aside, I rather suspect that Polybius' figures exclude Hannibal's skirmishing troops who he regularly refers to as euzdonoi as distinct from pezdoi, his standard word for infantry -- but it nonetheless strikes me as an eloquent and valuable visual aid, and the kind of thing which should feature more often in modern books.

Dry it may look, but Tufte's book is an absolute wonder, and a call to arms. We shouldn't rely on lazy cookie-cutter diagrams or clutter our work up with noise and effects, the kind of sound and fury that signifies absolutely nothing. We can do so much better.

Devalued A-Levels -- A (barely) International Perspective

Grade inflation is a boringly predictable topic in the papers and online every August. The big question among those who note the incessant improvement in exam results is whether the exams that mark the end of secondary education have gotten easier over the years, or whether -- as some will maintain -- it's simply that teaching has improved, such that students learn better. I know people in both camps.

It's hardly surprising that people should have concerns. A-Level results, which were generally consistent from one to the next until the 1980s, have improved now for 29 straight years. Back in 1982, 68.2 per cent of students passed their exams and one student in eight got one A in their A-Levels. Nowadays, 97.8 per cent of students pass their A-Levels and one student in eight gets three A's.

This is usually the point at which someone pops up to blame Labour for this, possibly doing so implicitly by treating 1997 as kind of Year One for grade inflation, focusing on how the highest grades rose every year between 1997 and 2010, with this rise suddenly being arrested this year.

This claim isn't so much inaccurate as misleading, as it requires one to ignore the general upward thrust in the top grades for more than a decade prior to 1997, and the fact that the number of students passing the A-Levels has risen every single year since 1982. I'm not saying that matters didn't get worse under Labour, but again, as with so many of Britain's problems, the phenomenon predates the era of Blair and Brown by some way. Radical grade inflation had been a clearly discernible problem for years before Labour came to power. Just look at the chart!

The stability in results that marked the A-Levels prior to the mid-eighties was a direct result of them being marked on a selection basis, rather than a criterion basis; they were marked on a curve such that, say, only the top 10 per cent of students could be awarded an A in any given subject, irrespective of their actual score on the paper. During the eighties the system shifted towards a criterion basis, such that nowadays the awarded grades are based more on individual performance rather than on comparison with peers.

(There's a comparative element in the marking even now, but it's relatively minor.)

In principle this is more objective that norm-based selection marking and should allow for results varying significantly from year to year, based on the ability of any given year's students. In practice, however, one could be forgiven for wondering why the results keep on improving... especially when research at the University of Durham has found that a 1980s 'C' grade is the equivalent of a modern 'A'.

I'm often baffled at the tendency to conduct these debates in bubbles, without reference to other countries. There's a lot to be learned by comparing countries with each other, not least because it involves recognising that there are standards other than our own.

I can really only speak with any authority about the Irish system, so let's just run with that as an example. The fundamental thing to grasp here is that Irish students have always done more subjects than English ones: whereas a typical English student did three A-Level subjects, a typical Irish one did seven or even eight. For example, I studied Maths, English, Irish, German, History, Geography, Accounting, and Applied Maths. We went for breadth over depth, leaving specialisation to third level education. Our marks in no more than six subjects are considered when allocating university places.

When I did my Leaving Cert, back in the day, I gave serious thought to applying to go to university in the UK. There were no fees in British universities, after all, unlike Irish ones.** Anyway, one of the things I learned back then was that the standard way of translating Leaving Cert results into A-Level ones was a straightforward two-for-one equation, such that, for example, British universities would consider six Leaving Cert subjects with a results profile of AAAABB to be the equivalent of three A-Levels with a profile of AAB. The opposite arrangement applied for British students applying to study in Ireland: Irish universities regarded each A-Level  as being the equivalent of two Leaving Cert subjects.

It's not like that now. In fact, it hasn't been like that in some time. I remember my then girlfriend getting annoyed six or seven years back when I explained to her how Trinity College in Dublin had downgraded the value of the A-Levels relative to the Leaving Cert. I dread to think what she'd think if I were to tell her that UCD, my alma mater, now explicitly regards the modern 'A*' result as the equivalent of an 'A' result of even a couple of years back, with the current 'A' being only marginally better than the older 'B'.
 

Broadly speaking, Irish universities now take the view that from the viewpoint of University entry requirements, a British 'A' is no longer twice as valuable as an Irish 'A'; on the contrary, it's roughly one-and-a-half times as valuable. A British 'B', which used to be worth two mid-range Irish 'B' grades, is now worth a mid-level 'B' grade and a bare pass, or two low-level 'C' grades. Take a look at this chart, comparing the points awarded for Leaving Cert, A-Level, and AS-Level grades, and leaving out such complexities as bonus points being offered for higher level Maths.

Confused? Okay, well try putting meat on those bones. What does this mean? Well, let's assume you got three A* results in your A-Levels. That'd give you 450 points. Would you like to know what UCD courses you'd not get onto with 450 points? As things stand this year, just based on the first round of offers, 450 points wouldn't be enough for any of: Architecture; Science; Actuarial and Financial Studies; Human Nutrition; Veterinary Medicine; Radiography; Physiotherapy; Health & Performance Science; Biomedical, Health and Life Scences; Children’s & General Nursing; Midwifery; English; History; Psychology; Law; Business & Law; Law with French, History, Politics, Philosophy, or Economics; International Commerce; or Economics and Finance.

And I'm not even getting into what you'd need to get into Medicine.

To have a decent chance at any of those subjects, you'd need three A* results and an AS result in something other than your main three. And General Studies doesn't count for points. For what it's worth, almost all of those require you to have done English, Maths, and at least one other language to GCSE level as the most basic requirement to be allowed do the course, and there are strict requirements barring certain A-Level subjects from being presented together: for example, you cannot present both English Language and English Literature, or both History and Classical Civilization, or both Environmental Studies and Geography.

Trinity College Dublin uses basically the same system, likewise evaluating candidates on the basis of either four A-Levels done in one year or three A-Levels done one year in combination with an AS level done the previous year in a different subject, albeit with a smaller range of barred subject combinations.

Lest you think this is just a matter of Irish universities being arsey, take a look at how the British Universities compare the two systems.

It's basically the same, isn't it? The agreed line seems to be that an Irish Leaving Cert subject, which used to be regarded as worth half an A-Level, is now regarded as worth about two-thirds of one. And this isn't because the Irish standards have risen...

We have to be fair, and admit that the old way of weighing the two sets of examinations against each other was far from systematic, but I think most people would agree that it was broadly fair. If it was any way accurate, then we're looking at a serious problem. The value of the A-Levels seems to have collapsed by a quarter relative to the Irish Leaving Cert, at a time when it is widely recognised in Ireland that the value of the Leaving Cert has itself been slipping. What this means for the real decline of the value of the A-Levels and British education in general doesn't really bear thinking about, but given how OECD and ONS figures show that literacy, numeracy, and cognitive skills in general have either declined or at best improved in a marginal way, I really think some facts need to be faced.

One thing we need to do is not merely to consider whether the A-Levels are fit for purpose, but to consider what their purpose is. Is it to stand in their own right as a certification of having completed secondary schooling to a high level, or is it to act as an entrance exam for third level education, or is it both? If it's either of the latter options, then it mightn't be a bad idea to introduce a percentile score alongside grades, so that university admissions can be conducted on the basis of data far more precise and meaningful than what is currently available.

If it's the former, or the other hand, then maybe it'd make more sense to concentrate less on examination than on education, so that the real emphasis would be placed on what children are learning. And no, Mister Toad, that doesn't just mean indoctrinating children with stuff we're obsessed with.

** Sic transit gloria mundi and all that.

A Mole in the Great Wen

Unlike many of my friends in academia, I wasn't particularly thrown -- on a personal level -- when the Government here in Britain decided that universities here weren't going to be funded as they had been. Sure, I was disappointed, not least because I think it's a big mistake and that it's nonsense to think that the market sorts everything out. After all, even when it comes to so-called 'priority subjects' like engineering and sciences, if we follow a straightforward neo-liberal economic model, I don't see why they should be supported by the State either; the logical question for a laissez-faire thinker in connection with the universities should surely be 'what are universities for?' Because if the answer is 'research', why not just allow the research to be done where it can be done most effectively, and buy the results? University research is irrelevant to vast majority of those who study in universities, after all; for most people in Britain, if we think purely in terms of the 'market', universities are about teaching, and that's it.

No, obviously I don't believe that's the sole function of universities; I just think that that's the inevitable and logical end of any argument that tries to justify British universities in a free market.

Anyway, the reason the new arrangements here, which will have the effect of deracinating all employment in my field, didn't bother me too much on a purely personal level, was that I'd already long decided on quitting academia. The plan has been that once I'd finished my studies and worn my clown costume and silly hat, I'd shake the dust from my shoes and walk away.

Given a choice I'd like to go to London. Well, Rome and Berlin and Paris and New York and Vancouver would appeal too, as would settling back properly in Dublin, but in real terms I've thought of London. I love London; it has a texture and a breadth like no city I've ever visited.

I don't know when the fascination began. With a childhood love of the Household Cavalry, watching them on the television and wishing I could be one, I suppose. I first set foot in London when I was fifteen, whirling through on the return leg of a school tour to the Continent -- we whizzed passed the Houses of Parliament and Nelson's Column, attended and nearly fainted at an impromptu mass in a small chapel somewhere in the bowels of Westminster Cathedral, wasted a ludicrous amount of time in the Trocadero Centre, spotted some of the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 on Petticoat Lane, and waited for our bus in Hyde Park, gathered by the statue of Achilles and within easy sight of Apsley House, which nobody ever thought to point out to us had been the home of the greatest Dubliner ever to -- allegedly -- be ashamed of the fact.

I started regularly visiting when I was eighteen, staying with a sister or two on its outskirts and scuttling in almost every day, whether to comic conventions -- I wanted to be a comic artist -- or to comic shops, all the while trying to take in more and more sights: the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Cabinet War Rooms, the London Eye, Saint Paul's, or the Public Records Office, say, all the while attending conventions and seeing exhibitions, of Ingres portraits and Monet lilies, say, or of all manner of Star Wars props. And though I travelled all over London during at this point, sometimes even staying with friends who had moved there or who I'd made and who lived there, in a fairly profound way I never knew London. I'd been to Harrow and to Finchley; stood outside Buckingham Palace; drank between Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square; eaten a pork bun in China town; spent endless hours in Foyles and the bookshops of Charing Cross Road; marvelled at the comics in Gosh! Comics on Great Russell Street, the Forbidden Planet on new Oxford Street, and Mega City Comics on Camden's Inverness Street; even listened to Scott McCloud expound his theories way out in Ladbroke Grove. But I didn't know London, which became absurdly apparent when staying in Mayfair at a very weird gathering and me utterly clueless as to where we were.

Because I never walked anywhere.

I used to be able to get cheap tube tickets, you see. 25p to anywhere in Zone 1, and never more than a pound anywhere in London. So for me I had this strange, mole-like view of London. I knew the Tube, and I knew destinations near Tube stations, and I knew that you could never get lost in Central London, because after wandering more than a couple of minutes you were bound to find a Tube station, and then you'd be safe.

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere fascinated me when I first saw it on telly, and moreso when I read the book, and bought the series and watched Neil's commentary on it. There were disused Tube stations? Indeed, there's a whole London below London! I've since read quite a bit about London -- fun introductions to the city's quirks like Tim Moore's Do Not Pass Go, dense introductions to its arcana like Peter Ackroyd's London: the Biography and Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory -- the kind of books that like Alan Moore's From Hell reveal just how fascinating the most apparently banal of places actually are -- and specialist explorations of its peculiarities, like E.J. Burford's London: The Synfulle Citie and Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman's London Under London: A Subterranean Guide.

Trench and Hillman's book is fascinating, delving into the history of tunnels under the Thames, Tube lines and disused stations, military installations, mail tunnels, pneumatic tubes, bunkers, catacombs, and lots more, not the least of which are London's underground rivers. London used obviously to have lots of rivers, you see, the most well-known of which probably being the malodorous Fleet, which rose in Hampstead Heath and flowed southeast to join the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge, just off modern Fleet Street, reeking from the by-products of the local tanners. Its route has been mapped out pretty clearly on this Google Map, and seemingly if you sit outside the Coach and Four pub in Farringdon, and listen carefully, you can hear it through the grating on the ground. Or, if you've a deathwish, and want to risk wandering about in tidal tunnels that can fill in thirty minutes' flat, you can visit it, like these heroically mad people.

Well, I may not know London as well as its sub-urban explorers, but I know it fairly well now. I get the bus nowadays, and I walk. I've walked from Islington to the British Museum and the National Gallery and out to Victoria Station, from Fulham to Saint Paul's and up to Holborn, from Chelsea through Knightsbridge to Victoria and Westminster too many times, from King's Cross Station to Paddington and then made my way to Trafalgar Square and thence along the old shores of the Thames to the best pub in England.  And I've wandered aimlessly too many times in Shoreditch and Bloomsbury, Herne Hill and Dulwich, Wood Green and Manor House, Earl's Court and South Kensington, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, and along the South Bank.

And once, from a train, I saw where all the old red phone boxes go to die.

They fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight

After a seminar the other day, I read the most extraordinary article from the new Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. I think the general thrust of it is generally right, but at times it crosses the line into -- well -- into rather unacademic language, which is particularly odd given that its occasionally deployed against a colleague.

I'm baffled by what's intended a complement to one academic, who is described as having 'took up his shillelagh for the soundness of the tradition.' A shillelagh? In the hands of one of the most English people imaginable? Frankly, it was difficult getting past that, but I'm glad I did because it brought me to this, and I'm changing names for the sake of discretion:

'Jeff and Geoff, as proper classicists, were acutely alert to anachronism: they called for one ancient genre, history, to be colonized by other ancient genres, rhetoric and drama. So the adoption of their theories by this cynical crew must inspire in Jeff and Geoff the same strange mixture of horror and pride that a father might feel upon learning that his fourteen-year old son has got a classmate with child.'

Good, eh? It gets better. Its finale is as follows:

'Finally, when history is cast out of the Latin historians, discarded also are the robust intellectual habits of the modern historian, to be replaced, if the restraint of stern philology fails, with the weak and whimsical instruments of the contemporary literary critic. A sense of argument, of proof, of scale, of proportion -- even of logic and coherent language -- all depart. Scholarship becomes indistinguishable from its parody, and the subject of inquiry shifts from the geysering fascination of antiquity to the dull, trend-obsessed, and self-obsessed mind of the critic. The result is like the diary of a fat teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none.'

That's telling them.

Planet Narnia

Tom Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, has a review in today's Times of Michael Ward's Planet Narnia: the Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, a book which expounds on a theory I first heard of last year, and which the BBC devoted a show to at some point over the Easter.

It seems that at some point Dr Ward became intrigued by Lewis' penchant for games and puzzles and began wondering whether there might be another layer of meaning in the Narnia books, below the Christian allegory level which itself obvious underlies the fantasy adventure stories. After reading Lewis' 1935 poem 'The Planets', which features the influence of Jupiter in 'winter pass'd / and guilt forgiv'n', he started wondering whether the medieval understanding of the planets might have influenced Lewis's most famous works, and, after buckets of researched, has found that each of the Chronicles is thematically built around one of the seven medieval planets after which the days of the week are named.

This might sound a bit crazy, but the idea has some merit: Lewis was one of England's greatest scholars of medieval literature, and this sounds a perfectly medieval way of writing, drawing on astrology in this way. Lewis was indeed very fond of puzzles, and his science fiction trilogy, the Perelandra books, are explicitly built around the three planets of Mars, Venus, and Earth. And then if you think of how Eustace meets and chats with the resting star Ramandu in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it does start to look more likely.

Allowing for this, then, Dawn Treader is clearly about the Sun, Prince Caspian draws on warlike Mars, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which deals with the banishing of winter and the forgiveness of guilt is naturally based upon Jupiter. The Silver Chair is apparently a lunar tale, while The Horse and his Boy seems to be a Mercurian work, with its emphasis on communication and its twins, reminiscent of Gemini who Mercury rules. The Magician's Nephew draws on Venus, it seems, and The Last Battle is built around Saturn, the darkest and most mysterious of planets, which could so easily go bad.

I know, it sounds like there's some crowbarring going on here to fit a theory, but I'd not be inclined to chuck the theory out straight away. Why wouldn't a devoted medievalist have embedded a medieval understanding of the universe in his books? It would just be another way, after all, of saying that the Universe was sacramental, created and redeemed by God, and that everything means something.

Wright, at any rate, is convinced by this, saying that 'This introduction to a masterpiece is something of a masterpiece in its own right,' and he's not alone in this, but I must confess to finding the whole idea very unlikely. Granted, I haven't read Ward's book, so I can't judge fairly, but it seems to me that in referring to the Chronicles as 'the Narniad', Wright identifies a fundamental problem with Ward's thesis.

Central to Ward's approach -- and Wright's review -- is the assumption that the seven books were planned as a seven-book set, and as such must be somehow unified, whether by connections to the seven virtues, the seven deadly sins, the seven sacraments, or - as in this theory - the seven planets. But the thing is, this assumption doesn't appear to hold any water whatsoever. Lewis wrote to a fan in 1957 saying that the Chronicles had never been intended as a seven-book set, but instead grew organically:

'The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.'

Even if he thought up a thematic link later, which is possible, you'd expect that the planetary themes would manifest themselves far more clearly in the books that were written last, with this connecting idea in mind, than in the early ones, where he had no such idea. And if anything, the opposite looks to have been the case. And he certainly didn't rework the early books with the intention of turning his spontaneous series into a single narrative, in the way that T.H. White did with his early Arthur ones when he wrote The Once and Future King around the same time.

Another problem, as far as I can see, is that there doesn't seem to be any clear proof that Lewis was hiding anything in the Narnia books. You'd expect that if he was being so clever-clever that there'd be some record of letters between him and Tolkien, say, where J.R.R. commends him on the underlying astrological stuff, while nonetheless repeating his view that the whole thing still looks like a mish mash, and besides, he hates allegory, Christian or otherwise. You'd at least expect that there'd have been letters to people or records of conversations where Lewis talks of an extra layer of meaning. And as far as I can tell, there's no trace of him ever having made such a claim.

This whole affair looks like a typical academic fantasy, where people want Lewis's books to be more complex than they are. They're Christian allegories, and they're children's stories, and they've a clunky style enlivened by dry authorial asides, and the fifth book begins with one of my favourite sentences ever, but one thing they're not is a unified work of art. We can call them the Narnia books, and we can probably call them the Chronicles of Narnia, but we certainly shouldn't call them the Narniad. That's asking for trouble, and invites questions that simply have no business being asked.

Manchester, and the Indirect Route to Excellent Education

There was an article in Student Direct, Manchester's student newspaper, the other week, that got my proverbial goat. I don't have a real one, alas. Anyway, the guts of the article was that Alan Gilbert, current head honcho at the University of Manchester, has admitted that the undergraduate experience at Manchester isn't what it might be:

'Vice-Chancellor Alan Gilbert has publicly admitted that students at the University of Manchester do not receive a satisfactory student experience.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Beyond Westminster, Gilbert said: “I am not satisfied with the quality of undergraduate education in the University.”

He also branded it as “too impersonal” and not “sufficiently interactive”, adding that “the curriculum has been developed a little incrementally and has not been profoundly thought through.

“The student experience can be considerably improved.”

[...]

However, Gilbert implied that the main reason for the shortcomings was insufficient funding for the University, as the top-up fees introduced two years ago nation-wide to boost institutions’ finances were too low to actually achieve this.'

I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with things developing incrementally, that being the English way, but it's good that Alan G has recognised that things aren't what they might be in Manchester. He said this more than a year and a half ago too, of course, but still, it's nice that he's not forgotten.

In the 2009 National Student Survey, not merely does Manchester fall four percentage points below the national average for student satisfaction, but of the 154 institutions listed here, 120 do rather better than Manchester. For one of Britain's leading universities, this might strike you as shocking, but in a way it's not really surprising. Manchester tends to do extremely well in global research-based league tables, invariably being in the top handful of British universities on such lists, but its ranking in domestic league tables, which focus more on teaching and the actual educational experience at universities, is as a rule far less impressive: perhaps most dramatically, the Guardian's latest table has it at a feeble 32nd place!

What's going on? Is Alan Gilbert right to say that the University is insufficiently well-funded?

I don't think he is. In 2007, Manchester's income was around £637 million, more than that of any other University -- although to be fair, Oxford and Cambridge colleges have extra sources of income independent of the respective universities. In other words, Manchester has more money than almost any other educational institution in Britain. This shouldn't come as a surprise: Manchester is enormous, and probably, in real terms, the biggest university in the country. Even so, though, it sounds as though the system is under some strain.

Look, let's be fair. Manchester has made a strategic decision, which is to try to become one of the world's top 25 research-led institutions. It's throwing its resources into that, with the plan being to invest heavily in research and to do whatever it takes to recruit prominent academics so that other prominent academics will be drawn to Manchester. This seems to be working: Manchester is slowly working its way up the Shanghai Jiao Tong league table, which as far as Professor Gilbert is concerned, is the only ranking that matters.

The problem is that without limitless resources you can't cover everything. Frederick the Great put it well: he who defends everything defends nothing.

Elite universities may well be destinations of preference for many of the best students in the world, as Professor Gilbert said in outlining the University's 2015 strategy; they may well support excellence in teaching and provide students with a superb learning experience. It seems that Professor Gilbert really wants Manchester to become such a place. The thing is, that may not be possible just yet. It may simply be the case that there's not enough money to go round to do everything at once, and so a strategic decision has been taken to make teaching take a back seat. Professor Gilbert effectively admitted this back in February 2008, when he said there was a trend in most of Britain's leading institutions towards emphasising excellence in research at the cost of excellence in teaching. This, he conceded, was far from healthy:

'Whether you like it or not, universities are fundamentally about the education of students, both undergraduate and postgraduate ... it is clear that a university becomes non-viable unless it is a satisfactory destination for good students. There is a flaw in the business of a research university unless it is seen to be dedicated as much to the learning outcomes of students as to its research outcomes.'

Manchester, he said more than a year and a half ago, was taking steps to rectify this. Given dropping rankings in national league tables -- 24th to 32nd in the Guardian table and a drop from 81% to 77% in the National Student Survey -- it looks as though these steps might not be working, but maybe they will in time.

In the meantime, it'd probably be useful if the University honestly and openly defended its strategic decision to invest in research in order to join the ranks of the global academic elite, with a view to using that position and the wealth it hopes to generate through leadership in research to become a world-beater in teaching as well. If this means that the interests of Manchester's actual students of today are to come second to the interests of Manchester's imagined students of tomorrow, well, that's an unfortunate price that just needs to be paid. Sometimes you have to play a long game.

Seriously, this is a defensible position. I'm not sure I'd like to be defending it, given that students, parents, and taxpayers from all over the UK might have doubts about so much indirect long-term investment in the English north-west, but the case could be made, and probably should be.

Honesty's usually the best policy, after all.

Someone should have a word with the Morketing People

I'm in Oxford for the next few days, attending a conference, seeing friends, and visiting my sister's clan for the first time since that marvellous August week in the dark summer of 2006., which began with me in the company of my brother and nephew watching Everton win, was followed by drinks and lots of tea with cousins galore, then a train to Oxford for family stuff and old friends, a hasty lunch with the Fairy Blogmother (ret.) in London, a wonderful evening and a very fond farewell in Brighton, and a convoluted return to the madness of Manchester, stopping for tea in Oxford with another old friend.

The conference has been excellent so far, and I've high hopes for the rest of it: it's rare you go to a conference with so many papers and want to attend them all.

This evening we dined at Pizza Express, a favourite haunt of the academic in whose memory the conference is being held.

I happen to like Pizza Express a lot, and have indeed eaten there twice this week, but I always think it's ill-named and that its Dublin monicker, Milano, is a far superior name, one that the chain could well adopt. Pizza Express is a ridiculous name for the chain for two reasons.

1. It's a tacky name for a place that's far from tacky. As chains go, you'd be hard-pressed to find a nicer one, and yet it's saddled with a name that makes it sound as though it's squabbling for business with Domino's Pizza.

2. It's anything but express. Seriously, has anyone ever experienced service there at a speed that exceeded 'glacial'?

Challenging Universities

I realise that with the world collapsing around us, the outcome of a British quiz show ought hardly to be the most important thing on the news. For all that, though, it does seem there's some hoohah about the legitimacy of Corpus Christi, Oxford's victory over Manchester in University Challenge as televised last Monday.

Apparently Sam Kay, the only member of the Corpus team with a background in anything other than the Classical World, had left the college and was no longer a student by the time Corpus took part in the Quarter Finals. In case you don't remember or didn't know, that was the stage in the competition where Corpus demolished Exeter by 350 points to 15, before going on to conclusively beat St John's, Cambridge 260 to 150, and finally stage a spectacularly comeback against Manchester, ultimately beating them 275 to 190.

The rules are utterly clear on this sort of thing, stating that all contestants must be students for the duration of the competition -- both its filming and its broadcasting -- so it seems perverse of Kay to come out with nonsense of the order of 'I was a student when I applied to be on the show and on the day when we filmed the first two rounds, so I don't think I've done anything wrong.'

Well, if the rules are that all contestants must be students for the competition's duration, then he has. Sorry. There doesn't seem to be any wiggle-room here. You'd think he'd be able to see that, as you need to be pretty bright to compete in University Challenge, even if the show's questions are biased more towards crystallised rather than fluid intelligence.

To be fair, it does look as though this started as a genuine error, in that he initially applied and competed in the early stages of the competition when planning on doing a PhD at Corpus; unfortunately for him his funding fell through, hence his going to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers, to whom he'd evidently applied in case the PhD had proved unfeasible.

For all that, though, surely he ought to have recused himself from the competition once his status changed, or at least raised the issue? The problem here, surely, is that it seems highly unlikely that his team-mates were unaware of this, which rather suggests that the entire team were knowingly breaking the rules.

And the thing is, leaving aside the moral question, why would they bother? This is like Putin fixing elections when he's so absurdly popular that he'd win by a landslide anyway. Good grief -- did you see Gail Trimble trounce all opposition? Sure, she was less prominent in the final against Manchester than in earlier rounds, but even so, look at her record. Coming into the final she'd scored 825 of the 1,235 points that Corpus had clocked up to that point, which rather begs the question of why you'd field somebody alongside her who could actually cause the Corpus victory to look fishy?

I mean, sure, Kay got two vital starter-for-ten questions right at pivotal points in the final, opening the gap that Trimble smashed through, but there's a fair chance that any number of Corpus students could have done just as well. I mean, it's not as if they'd have been fielding just three contestants on the day!

The Observer and the BBC report the Mancunian reaction rather differently, with the former having the Manchester team keen on a rematch, and the latter reporting that they have no such desire. Granted, given that University Challenge is a BBC show, you might think they'd be inclined to play down any such desire, but I'm inclined to believe the BBC on this, especially given defeated captain and Manchester historian Matthew Yeo's fine and magnanimous column in the latest New Statesman.

Whatever way you look at it, last Monday was a good night for historians and classicists, anyway.

The Truth Hurts

So, having mentioned PHD Comics yesterday, it seems only fitting that I should point you to Jorge Cham's latest gem:

Usually Jorge's spot on, but I'm afraid he's exceptionally -- even painfully -- so with this one. Converting an academic CV into a civilian one isn't for the fainthearted.

For what it's worth, I've got four versions of my CV in play at the minute -- academic, conventional, skills-based, and short -- and the short, 1-page, American-style one actually looks the most impressive. Unfortunately nowadays it appears that 'impressive' may not be enough.

So it goes, though. It's not exactly a great time for career changes, after all. Not surprising, you might think, given that it's not a great time for careers, but given that all the boys with degrees in finance, economics, accounting and whatnot have royally screwed things up, this might'nt be such a bad time to try something a bit more daring

Sometimes playing things safe can be the most dangerous thing you can do. Soldiers under fire tend to bunch together, for example, which is about the most natural and foolish thing to do under the circumstances. It's natural because it plays to our herd instinct -- we're literally programmed to feel more at ease in the company of our fellows, but foolish because forming a clump turns the lot of them into one big target.

Collective defence is far better than individual defence, but it needs to be coordinated. The herd instinct just gets you into more trouble.

Advice for life, that.

The Power of Procrastination

Last term I went to a fine talk by Jorge Cham called 'The Power of Procrastination' in which he pointed us to the glories of such arch procrastinators as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. One he left out, though, was Leonardo da Vinci.

It seems that

'Leonardo rarely completed any of the great projects that he sketched in his notebooks. His groundbreaking research in human anatomy resulted in no publications — at least not in his lifetime. Not only did Leonardo fail to realize his potential as an engineer and a scientist, but he also spent his career hounded by creditors to whom he owed paintings and sculptures for which he had accepted payment but — for some reason — could not deliver, even when his deadline was extended by years. His surviving paintings amount to no more than 20, and five or six, including the "Mona Lisa," were still in his possession when he died. Apparently, he was still tinkering with them.

Nowadays, Leonardo might have been hired by a top research university, but it seems likely that he would have been denied tenure. He had lots of notes but relatively little to put in his portfolio.

Leonardo was the kind of person we have come to call a "genius." But he had trouble focusing for long periods on a single project. After he solved its conceptual problems, Leonardo lost interest until someone forced his hand. Even then, Leonardo often became a perfectionist about details that no one else could see, and the job just didn't get done.'

I had no idea of this, though it rather tallies with the notebooks that were on display at the Chester Beatty Library a year or so ago: page after page of densely detailed notes on hydrostatics with the occasional comment that he needed to be more organised, to manage his time better, to sort his life out.

The article's well worth reading, and makes a serious if counterintuitive case, though its definition of 'genius' is - at best - contentious.

Taught half as much! Taught twice as well?

I despair of universities. Today I went to get a staff card, my old one having expired, and was told that I couldn't be given one because my old one had expired. Yes, you read that correctly: because I need a card, I can't be given one.

Try not to sprain your brain wrestling with this. I shall need to discuss this with Personnel, I think.


In fact, I don't just despair of universities; I despair for them. Student Direct is running a fascinating story about how little teaching Manchester students tend to receive, and how unfavourably it compares with the situation in the University twenty years ago. It's worrying stuff, both in terms of what it revals about Manchester and about what it suggests about higher education in Britain as a whole.

It seems that Student Direct complained to the University's president last year, saying that teaching hours in the University had plummeted; Alan Gilbert apparently challenged the paper to prove this, and using that marvellously liberating tool that is the Freedom of Information Act they were able to do so, leaving the president 'stunned' and 'momentarily lost for words'.

Student Direct describes students having just four or five hours of teaching a week, clocking up just 120 or even 86 teaching hours over the course of a year, whereas twenty years ago they'd have had roughly double that amount of teaching, on balance.

I think the article would gain from a hefty chart showing how the emphasis has shifted away from teaching over the past twenty years, with figures for each subject clearly laid out, and maybe with case studies and such, but even as it stands, sans the help of Excel, this is potentially huge.

Granted, the article doesn't say anything of how Manchester compares with other universities in Britain and abroad in this respect, which I think needs consideration. Despite this, though, that teaching at Manchester suffers in contrast to research seems clear if you study the university guides published by The Guardian and The Times; the former ranks Manchester as the sixteenth-best university in Britain, whereas the latter ranks it as only twenty-ninth in Britain! These rankings may seem absurd when contrasted with the University's far more credible showings in the QS World University Rankings -- seventh in Britain and thirtieth in the world -- and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Ranking which places it fifth in Britain and forty-eighth in the world, but the latter league tables emphasise research rather than teaching. It seems clear that in the surveys that rank universities in terms of what they offer students, Manchester doesn't do as well as it should.

That's part of where the 2015 Agenda, laudable though it is in so many ways, falls down. There is only so much money to go round, after all, and the University clearly thinks the best way to spend it is on high-profile figures who will in turn attract other eminent individuals -- the aim being to make Manchester one of the world's top twenty-five research-led universities by 2015. All very well, but if that's where the money's going then it's hardly going on teaching, is it?

And while people might argue that this'll mean better teaching -- and better students -- in the future, should the students of today really be asked to pay for the students of tomorrow? Is it the role of the University to teach the students it's got or to pick the students it wants?


Martin Stevens, who taught poetry in Manchester a few years ago and is now the High Master of St Pauls School in London, gave no quarter a couple of months back when damning the paucity of the University's teaching:

The university is so locked into getting in big name researchers and doing as much research as possible that students come far, far down the food chain. Students are so far down the food chain they are in danger of starving to death. . .

This is the philosophy of unintended consequences. By focusing the funding of universities on research, it has forced universities to take their eye off young people even more.

To make that a little bit more tangible, remember Martin Amis? Martin earns £80,000 a year in the University of Manchester, and teaches for just twenty-eight hours during that year; in short, by the only yardstick we can use, he's paid £2857.14 for every hour he teaches, a rather more impressive sum than the £20 to £50 an hour that most visiting lecturers reportedly earn. Well, applying a similarly crude yardstick, there are second year history students who pay £3,070 a year in fees and yet are taught for just four hours a week, which works out at £28.43 per hour.

Granted, you can prove anything with facts, but it does rather appear that on an hour-by-hour basis it takes a hundred students to pay for Martin Amis, whereas it takes only a couple to pay for, say, Terry Eagleton.


Granted, Manchester prides itself on encouraging independent learning among its students, but I've heard plenty of people grumbling over the years that this tends to work out as simply an attempt to provide education on the cheap; I've heard medics in particular complaining that the much-vaunted 'problem-based learning', so central to the Manchester medic experience, is a joke, and the figures might bear this out.

It's all very well to say that higher level teaching is about quality rather than quantity, but that rather loses its potency as an argument when you crunch through the workload figures for British universities and then place those figures side by side with the university league tables that focus on what students get out of their university education.

Try it. If you torture the data long enough it'll tell you anything.

Between Two Stools You fall to the Ground

Just following up from the Naomi Sugai affair I mentioned the other day, I was interested to see a short but telling piece on the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education in today's Independent.

Student complaints about their treatment by universities rocketed in the year after the introduction of top-up fees, according to a watchdog.

They rose by 25 per cent during 2007 to 734, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA) disclosed yesterday. Figures also show the number of complaints upheld also rose significantly from 19 per cent to 26 per cent. The biggest rise was among mature students.

Most of the complaints for 2007 were made in the first half of the year when students having to pay top-up fees of up to £3,000 a year were in their first full year at university.

However, many of the complaints were about examination results with students realising that a 2.2 degree was not enough to find a good job.

"The rise in complaints is due to many more students challenging their degree and exam results," said Baroness Deech of the OIA. "This is probably because there are so many graduates emerging onto the job market now that graduating with, say, a lower second, is insufficient for success."

Students are increasingly aware of the complaints procedures, she added. Years of rising debt levels among students culminating in the introduction of top-up fees have also made them demand more value for money, according to academics and student leavers. In all, 64 per cent of the complaints were related to degree or exam results – while 11 per cent were over disciplinary proceedings and accusations of plagiarism. The OIA recommended that universities pay £173,000 in compensation as a result.

The OIA is recommending that universities set up their own "campus ombudsmen" so that complaints could be dealt with more swiftly and simply.

It's interesting that so many of those complaining are postgraduates and mature students; I'm sure their willingness to complain isn't simply due to them having more at stake than undergrads. Rather, I suspect, it's simply the fact that their age and experience makes them less susceptible to bullying or being messed around; that's not to say that it makes them invulnerable, just that they're perhaps more likely to try to speak up when things are going wrong.

That's not to say that the issue of value for money isn't an important one. Universities constantly justify their actions nowadays by saying that the modern world demands that they be run like businesses -- think of University vice-chancellors and presidents claiming as a matter of course that they should be paid in line with the salaries that CEOs. That's fine, though it rather demands that the universities be run like well-run businesses, and that the students are treated either as valued customers or as stakeholders in the business. Unfortunately, it seems that these truths elude far too many universities.

The OIA's recommendation about campus ombudsmen seems almost too obvious, really, and indeed it's a point that Baroness Deech sensibly made a week or so back, describing a campus ombudsman as 'someone who sits on campus behind an open door and is ready to sort out students' grievances at an early stage... we believe it's a very good idea'.

Of course, like all these things, the office will only be as good as the person holding it. The real problem with the universities is often not so much that they've not got mechanisms to deal with problems, it's that the mechanisms aren't properly applied, and then their misapplication is condoned and approved of by people higher up the chain, effectively institutionalising what might charitably be deemed bad practice.

Baroness Deech is retiring this month; I'm pleased to see that her successor Rob Behrens will be a full-time appointment. He looks promising.

Of course, I've made the mistake of assuming that about people in the past.

Leaders by Acclamation

And so Brian Cowen is leader-designate of Fianna Fáil, and will be only the seventh leader in the party's 82-year history. And this being the way of things, in about a month's time he'll become our eleventh Taoiseach.

I was talking about this to an old friend last night, and couldn't help but grin at how it seemed only the other week -- in reality it was half a lifetime ago -- that he was bubbling over in school at the thought that Brian Cowen, his old family friend, someone his Mum had babysat in her day, had been appointed to the cabinet.

'Mam was talking to him last night,' he said, 'He's really excited.'
'I bet he is. How's your Mam taking it?'
'Oh, she's thrilled!'

It's far too strange, really. There shouldn't only be just one genuine link between me and the head of our government. I live in a village.

I passed the Dáil today when the Soldiers of Destiny were gathering outside for their family photograph. The last couple of weeks have been peculiar. Bertie's resignation was odd enough -- not that he didn't have reason to resign, just that he's brassed so much out already I'd assumed he'd keep going. But watching the Fianna Fáil leadership so calmly floating over to Cowan's head has been bizarre. It just seems freakish that the position shouldn't be contested. I appreciate how popular he is within the party, and how his loyalty is admired by all his colleagues, but even so, he's hardly the only person among the Fianna Fáil front ranks who'd have the ability and the appetite for the top job.


Speaking of uncontested elections, our society -- the second-oldest in the college -- appointed its new auditor today, joining an illustrious line that includes, um, me. Oddly, browsing through the auditorial list today, I realised just how rare elections have been in the society, and spoke to a couple of others who'd likewise taken the helm about this.

'I think I'm the only person in about fifteen years, maybe more, who was actually elected in a contested election,' I frowned.
'What? Someone ran against you?'
'Heh. No, it was the other way round. I ran against someone. There was already somebody who looked set to slide into the position without any objections. It's a long story.'
'What was the vote like?'
'Horribly close. I won by one vote. 41 for me, 40 against. Imagine if I hadn't voted for myself!'
'Hmmm. And it hasn't happened since. A short-lived experiment with democracy interrupting a long-line of automatic succession...'

University in Using Sledgehammer to Crack Nut Shocker!

There was a very peculiar story in the Times Higher the other day, picked up by the Telegraph yesterday, of how Anglia Ruskin University has reacted to the grievances expressed by one of its students.

It seems that one Naomi Sugai, a master's student doing some sort of business course and the student representative for that course, having grown frustrated with attempts to complain formally about how her course was being handled, decided to air her concerns publicly.

Basically, she filmed a short clip of herself claiming that she was was gathering evidence to complain to Trading Standards about the university; she specifically complained in the clip about timetables being issued late and inaccurately, and alleging that the University had said that its students could choose modules tailored to their needs, but that this hadn't happened on her course where all modules were compulsory.

She posted the clip on YouTube back on 25 February, and eventually it drew the attention of the University authorities, who in turn clearly felt a need to alert everyone else to their shortcomings. Claiming that comments posted on YouTube in response to the video were defamatory, the University suspended Naomi indefinitely, and barred her from the campus, with Steve Bennet, the Secretary and Clerk writing to inform her:

Should you attend the campus during your suspension, security staff have been instructed to remove you and, if necessary, to seek assistance from the police. Given the seriously defamatory nature of your comments, this matter has also been referred to our solicitors.

The supposedly defamatory comments have since been taken down, but the video itself is still online, and if you watch it you'll probably wonder why the University has made such a fuss. It's pretty inoffensive, really, just a girl sitting at a computer in her bedroom, talking to her webcam and grumbling vaguely about her course. If the University had stayed calm it's safe to say that this wouldn't have caught the attention of the national media, and wouldn't have inspired internet comment.

Do they not understand that creating martyrs is a bad idea?

Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of Naomi's case, and the fact that things are only defamatory if they are false, what intrigues me most about this is the notion that she could be prosecuted for comments made in connection with the video. The comments have since been removed, so it's not clear whether she made the comments herself or whether the comments were responses by others to the video. Common sense might suggest the former, but this comment of hers from yesterday suggests otherwise:

Belfast confetti I'm afraid I had to delete your comment as it could have been construed as "defamatory" and I have been told to regulate this site. I do not like to censorship but unfortunately I have no choice.

Isn't that interesting? It seems -- and it's important to say that the whole story may not be in play just yet -- that the University has threatened to prosecute her for something someone else has said! Are they just bluffing? After all, it would seem that she was neither the author nor the publisher of the offending comments -- YouTube is the publisher. How then could she be held responsible for them? Granted, she has to power to delete comments, but I think the University would be on shaky ground if it tried to argue that people ought to police all responses to things they've posted on the internet.

It's kind of funny reading the comments, though, both in response to the video and in connection with blogs commenting on it; quite a few people are remarking that they'd never even heard of Anglia Ruskin before this happened, while others simply ask why Naomi went there!