Archbishop hits out at failing leader

Following in the footsteps of a commendable tradition going back to the likes of Nicetius of Trier and beyond, the out-going Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams lashes out at Cameron's Big Society nonsense in a forthcoming book, as reported here.

I wonder if he got AHRC funding for it...

AHRC and the Big Society: An appeal for a big push

You might have been following my intermittent reports on the campaign to get the AHRC to drop its repeated mention of 'The Big Society' (a vacuous notion dreamt up by David Cameron as a smoke screen for the Tories' final assault on the 1945 settlement).  If not, you can find them via the blogging labels 'AHRC' and 'The Big Society'. The real bottom-line, though, is not party-political, as has been made clear from the start.  The same problems would have attended the AHRC's adoption of 'The Third Way' or any of New Labour's equally vapid slogans. 

To recap: initially, this blew up as a result of a claim in an article in The Observer that the AHRC had been forced by government to accede to prioritising research on the Big Society in return for a certain exemption from The Cuts.  Prominent historians, notably professor Peter Mandler (Cambridge) and Colin Jones, the president of the RHS, weighed in against this.  The AHRC issued a fairly unconvincing and grammatically dubious 'refutation' (sic) of this claim, whereupon the suspicion emerged pretty quickly (largely on the basis of the AHRC's own statements) that what had actually happened was that the AHRC had shifted and renamed its priorities to include The Big Society itself, presumably to make itself less susceptible to the cuts.  Which of these versions of events is the accurate one has not, to my knowledge, ever been definitively established.

Be that as it may, the phrase 'The Big Society' remains in the AHRC's delivery plan, producing a petition with thousands of signatures, and an open letter supported by over 30 learned societies (not, at that point at least, including the Royal Historical Society).  I have not been able to find out whether the RHS' stance has changed.  A current statement by the Society simply says it maintains a 'watching brief', by which phrase I understand 'sitting on the fence until it is clear which way it ought to jump 'for the good of history': a prize example, if true, if the dynamics of HE politics, as I have discussed before.  Never mind.  Whatever the RHS' position, Peter Mandler, to his credit, has continued to snap around Rick Rylance's (the Head of the AHRC) heels, like a little cultural historical terrier, and Rylance and the head of the BA have not managed to issue any sort of convincing response, either to that or to the campaign mentioned above, spearheaded by philosophers James Ladyman and Thom Brooks.

To me, it seemed that by sitting tight, Rylance was going to weather this storm.  However, the tempo has changed, with Labour's shadow education minister, Gareth Thomas, weighing in, and doubts having been expressed by David Willetts himself (here, as a piece in the Higher suggested, the recent vote of no confidence in Willetts, rather than his policies, might turn out to be counter-productive).

Now, on Thom Brooks' blog, which I have recommended before, I read the following extracts from an article in the Guardian:

"[. . .] Rylance agreed with critics that the big society was "a government policy" but said that it included "a range of activities" from health to the arts which left room for many different projects and angles for research.

"People have said this is about promoting the big society. It is categorically not about that. It is indicating an area of research which will fund individuals who may well come up and be critical of it. We don't forecast outcomes of these things," Rylance said.

However Rylance said that removing all six references to the big society from the AHRC's strategy would have to involve a renegotiation with government."

It might be that, like mine, your eyebrows were immediately raised by the last statement.  If, as has been maintained all along, the AHRC weren't brow-beaten into including a priority on The Big Society, why should the term's removal require 'renegotiation' with the government?  Or, at least, why should any such 'renegotiation' be problematic?

Rylance might be on the ropes, which would make it timely to launch a big push to put an end to this once and for all.  With that in mind, I reproduce, with permission, an e-mail by Thom Brooks and urge all British historians to support these efforts according to their position vis-a-vis the AHRC.  It'd also be nice if the RHS would abandon its 'watching brief' and make a formal, public statement against the AHRC's adoption of party political slogans.  Thanks. 

Dear friends and colleagues,

My thanks again for your support in the campaign to persuade the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to remove the "Big Society" from its current delivery plan. Please take a moment to read this important message.

We have widespread support for our campaign. Our petitions have attracted over 4,000 signatures from across disciplines and political divisions. Signatories include Fellows of the British Academy and Royal Society. More than 30 learned societies agreed a joint statement in support of the petition. Hundreds of emails and letters of support have been sent to Rick Rylance, the AHRC CEO. The UCU has supported our campaign and the Rt Hon David Willetts (Minister of State for Universities and Science) has recently remarked on the "hazard" of including political campaign slogans in research council delivery plans. The support has been truly unprecedented and the issue has received much media coverage. This includes new articles published in the Guardian yesterday: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/19/academics-quit-over-big-society  This has encouraged the Shadow Universities minister, Gareth Thomas MP, to write to Willetts to demand action: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/20/labour-steps-into-big-society-row?CMP=twt_fd

The AHRC response has been disappointing. They continue to reject calls for this brief, but important, change to the AHRC Delivery Plan. We argue a point of principle, not politics: political campaign slogans have no place in research council delivery plans for strategic funding priorities. Period. I believe we are now at a critical moment and I request your help:

1. AHRC PEER REVIEW COLLEGE MEMBERS

I am a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. If you are also a member, then please contact me ASAP by THURSDAY MORNING, 24th JUNE to confirm whether you are willing to join me with many others and resign on MONDAY, 27th JUNE if no action is taken on amending the AHRC Delivery Plan. I will offer a press release later this week. Resignation is surely a last resort, but I believe that all avenues have been explored without success. While I hope we need not act on our threat, it is clear that we must now come together and show the strength of our support for our principled position. I hope all AHRC Peer Review College members will accept this call -- and please circulate this message to anyone on the College.

2. NON-MEMBERS

Please write to the AHRC and voice your continued support for our campaign. The AHRC appears to believe our opposition is fading: in fact, it is growing and recent publicity in the Guardian confirms this. Contact information includes the AHRC CEO Professor Rick Rylance (r.rylance@ahrc.ac.uk) and AHRC Chairman Professor Sir Alan Wilson (executive@ahrc.ac.uk).

3. FOR EVERYONE

Please write to David Willetts and voice your support. You might use the following template:

david@davidwilletts.co.uk

Dear Rt Hon Willetts,

I want to share my support for the campaign to remove the "Big Society" from the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Delivery Plan. This is a position of principle, not politics: political campaign slogans should have no place in research council delivery plans. This position is endorsed by over 4,000 academics and 30+ learned societies as well as the UCU. Petitions (see http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/thebigsociety/) have drawn support from across disciplines and political divides. Please communicate to the AHRC the importance of taking action and removing this campaign slogan immediately.

Yours sincerely,

[Name]

I believe that the momentum is on our side and positive action likely, but only if we act together and we act fast. I hope I can look forward to your support one last time. We are very close to achieving our goal and defending an important principle.

Warmest wishes,

Thom

Where is the RHS? Humanities learned societies take a stand against the AHRC and The Big Society (with one rather notable exception...).

I reproduce, below, an e-mail sent around by James Ladyman, one of those spearheading the attack on the AHRC's craven peddling of Cameron's vacuous Big Society idea.  It is very good and I urge you to support it and the petitions referred to.  As Prof. Ladyman says at the end: "If we do not take a stand on this matter we will be betraying academic integrity, freedom and standards."

"The number of learned societies who have signed the statement printed in THE, The Observer and sent directly to Rick Rylance (Chief Executive), Sir Alan Wilson (President AHRC), and Shearer West (Director of Research AHRC) stands at 32. Here is the list:

Architectural Humanities Research Group
Association for Legal and Social Philosophy
Association of University Departments of Theology and Religious Studies
Association of University Professors and Heads of French
Association of Social Anthropology
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy
British Philosophical Association
British Association for American Studies
British Association for Jewish Studies
British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies
British Association for Study of Religions
British International Studies Association
British Society for 18th-century studies
British Society for the History of Science
British Society of Aesthetics
British Sociological Association
Council of University Classics Departments
Economic History Society
English Goethe Society
Marx and Philosophy Society
Modern Humanities Research Association
National Association for Music in Higher Education
National Association of Writers in Education
Political Studies Association Media and Politics Specialist group
Royal Musical Association
The British Society for Ethical Theory
The Council of the British Association for Korean Studies
The Philological Society
The Society for French Studies
The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
The Social History Society
The UK and Ireland Association for Political Thought
The UK Sartre Society

This represents a very wide range of disciplines. I have received no response whatsoever from the AHRC officers. The number of other learned societies whose membership disapprove of the AHRC in respect of this matter but whose leaders were unwilling to take a public stance on the matter is probably even higher. That the AHRC officers have chosen to ignore our collective correspondence is symptomatic, but is nonetheless even more deplorable than the first order matter. The AHRC leadership are arrogantly ignoring their 'stakeholders' despite their endless waffle about consultation and engagement with us.

There is a piece by Rick Rylance in THE here:

It is astonishing in its sophistry. He says that funding research into something is not the same as promoting it. Imagine a science research council saying 'we are not promoting creation science just funding research into it'. Imagine the AHRC saying we are not promoting revisionist history of the holocaust just funding research into it. These are extreme examples but the point stands. Declaring 'the Big Society' one of two top priorities is clearly promoting the idea.

It gets worse when Rylance quotes Nick Clegg as follows: "we've been using different words for a long time and actually mean the same thing: 'Liberalism'; 'Big Society'; 'Empowerment'; 'Responsibility'. It means the same thing."

Have you got that?: these words all mean the same thing. Presumably, ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery too.

Rylance repeatedly claims that the AHRC is not explicitly endorsing particular policies or decisions but we have never claimed it did. The point is that political slogans of any stripe have no place in research plans produced by the research councils. Note also that Rylance refers to working with 'other government departments' thereby forgetting that the AHRC is not a government department but is rather supposed to be one step further removed from government like HEFCE etc.

I think we have no choice but publically to call for Rylance's resignation and to petition the Minister and the relevant parliamentary committee, MPs and Lords to press the government on this matter.

There is another petition here that I urge you all to sign and to spread the word about among your colleagues:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bigsociety/

If we do not take a stand on this matter we will be betraying academic integrity, freedom and standards. The academic world has been watching this story unfold and I have received correspondence from all over the world about it. This is fight for the heart and soul of academia. Words matter, ideas matter and reason matters, and defending clarity of thought and expression and the political independence of research is our true strategic priority. Please consult with your colleagues and let me know what you think our next steps should be.

Take care

James

Professor James Ladyman
Head of Department
Department of Philosophy
University of Bristol"

Now, you may or may not have noticed (as I had not until today) one rather glaring omission from the list of learned societies and that (in spite of the presence of other history societies on the roster) is The Royal Historical Society.  This is particularly disappointing since Professor Colin Jones, president of the society, was one of the first to come out and criticise the idea.  So what is going on?  Has the RHS just been accidentally left off Prof. Ladyman's list?  Is there just some sort of oversight?  Were the RHS just not told about this?  Or has it just been spectacularly slow off the mark given the presence of senior historians in the Observer article that sparked the whole affair?  Does the RHS consider its job done once some headlines and quotes have been garnered?  Is it bottling out again, like it did with Impact?  Does it think that it, or that 'History', can work with, or spin, 'The Big Society' to its own interest, and so damn the rest of the Humanities?  "This could work for us; we could get money out of this." Or "This is not the time for history to suggest that it has no input into the Big Society project"? (The 'cells' at work again.)  I think we deserve to be told and, if there isn't a decent explanation forthcoming for the society's absence from this roll-call of protesting bodies, then maybe (just maybe) Rick Rylance isn't the only one who should be reconsidering his position.

I repeat: "If we do not take a stand on this matter we will be betraying academic integrity, freedom and standards."

AHRC vs the Big Society: Latest petition

This is the latest and, if you are a UK academic and especially if you've been involved in the process of grant review, please do sign.  I'm not normally a big fan of e-petitions but I think this expresses its views in intelligent and measured fashion and that mass registration of opposition just might help.  I think this goes *way* beyond party politics.

The State We're In (Part 2)

I’m acutely conscious that these observations on the state of British Higher Education, ‘as it appears to me’ from my not-very-exalted position, may represent no more than ‘stating the bleedin’ obvious’. Nonetheless I’m persevering partly to put my own thoughts in order and partly because the reflection involved even in stating the bleedin’ obvious is sometimes worthwhile. Part 1 suggested that the principal problem facing us has been the division of the HE sector into competing ‘cells’. With this situation in place, governments of both major political parties (neither has a spotless record in this regard) have, by appealing to local advantage, demonstrably been able to force through whatever cock-eyed policy initiatives they have wanted.

The general dynamic was set out in Part 1. As a practical case study, let’s take the obvious example of how it is, as I called it in Part 1, 'fundamentally antithetical to the furtherance of any real educational ideal' – Impact. There’s no need to waste words on what a profoundly stupid, half-baked idea this is (let’s remember, too, for the sake of balance, that it was a typical New Labour idea). Other people have done it far better than I could (Simon Blackburn, my favourite current British philosopher of the analytic tradition, waxes lyrical here and here). I was (and am) strongly opposed to the nature of this scheme; I’m not opposed to a requirement that publicly-funded research be made publicly available or accessible, but that is a quite different matter. When it was first proposed I circulated some reasons why I was opposed to it around my department. Such feedback I got was generally supportive, my colleagues being sound folk on the whole, but what disappointed me was a response from a colleague for whom I have enormous respect as a historian and as a human being, to the effect that ‘this would be good for us’.

This is absolutely symptomatic of the dynamic I set out in Part 1. It became perceived that we could improve our RAE/REF standing through the Impact Agenda. So, no matter what the general principles of the business might have been, no matter whether a general front for the good of the discipline might have been desirable, if it worked for us we’d support it, and damn any other history departments that didn’t fit the bill as well. And even individuals of profound intelligence, decency and humanity got ensnared in this way of thinking. At a lower level, damn your colleagues who don’t work on British history, for whom Impact projects are that much more difficult to devise (the cells have cells within ‘em). It only takes a certain number of cells to think like this for the measure to get implemented, just as it only takes a certain number of individuals within each cell to persuade the cell to support it. There comes a tipping point. At the institutional level it comes where the institution decides that something ‘won’t go away’ (Classic Gutless Staff-Meeting Pseudo-Arguments no.94) and had better implement some initiatives to make sure that next time, at least, it does OK in this category. On an individual basis it comes in what I call, in my vernacular, the ‘What the f*ck’ moment: the moment where the individual thinks ‘Ah, what the f*ck; I suppose I’d better see what I can do for my CV’ … Because once the policy is implemented it will quickly appear among the criteria for promotion etc. Indeed institutions start appointing whole offices of new administrative staff to oversee and implement Impact projects …

The problem went further, though, than the splintering of any general front presented by History. At the next level up, History perceived, on balance, that it could live with Impact, so damn the rest of the Humanities. Things may have changed. The open letter published in the Higher about the AHRC and The Big Society was signed by 26 learned societies. But there was no sign of this with Impact. The RHS decided that 15% of the REF was OK ‘because this was no time for the Humanities to suggest they had no wider relevance’. No matter that no consultation between the RHS and the other learned bodies of the humanities seems to have taken place. No matter that the disciplines most widely held to be ‘relevant to wider society’, the hard sciences, spelled out very vocally indeed their opposition to Impact. No matter that our sister disciplines in the modern languages, philosophy, literature and so on would all find it extremely difficult to work with the Impact agenda. This, too, was very disappointing. The whole business graphically illustrates how the possibility of any sort of unified front is shattered by the way that the sector is divided along all sorts of axes into all sorts of contingently-existing cells all now perceiving themselves as in competition with each other. If the AHRC refuses to budge of the issue of The Big Society within its funding priorities, it will not be long before we hear that, because ‘it won’t go away’, there are various things ‘that we already do’ that ‘can easily be put under that heading’. Mark my words. You heard it here first. Those 26 learned societies will start thinking about the possibilities for their own cell. Already, as this item reports, various VCs, vice-masters, etc, are queuing up to talk about the positives of The Big Society and how it includes what universities already do. This is how it starts, working to the Führer…

Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I can’t help feeling that, thirty years ago, this situation would have caused academics to look somewhat askance. Indeed, in David Lodge’s novels written at that sort of time, initiatives like this appear as obviously satirical exaggerations. How did we get into this mess? The problem surely came with the introduction of the Thatcherite mantras of choice and competition. The clever move here was that choice and competition came alongside auditing and transparency. Now, there is surely no sustainable argument against the viewpoint that recipients of public money should have to prove that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing with that money, that they are doing their jobs to a level and consistency that justifies their receipt of public money, and that therefore public money is not being wasted. That seems unobjectionable to me. I’ve said it before and it has not made me popular, but I’ll say it again: no one deserves a publicly-funded salary just for being clever (let alone, as sometimes still seems to be the case, for having been thought to have been clever when they were 25). If you want to draw a professorial salary but don’t want to (or can’t) do what the job – as currently set up – requires of you, whether you like it or (like most us) not, then the solution is to find a private benefactor.

The trick, though, was then to put the results of these fundamentally unobjectionable audits, especially of research, into numerical form and thence into league tables. This was where the mantras of choice and competition reared their ugly head. Competition is supposed to be good for quality, and transparency about the results good for the sacred cow of ‘choice’. Neither element of the equation stands up to very close scrutiny. Here is Stephen Fry pouring scorn on the idea that having a greater range of choice necessarily is a good thing in terms of quality. That was about 20 years ago, but this neo-liberal idea has got no less ludicrous or - alas - current in the interim.  Little more needs to be said really. Which is best: a choice of a million kinds of crap or a choice of five quality products…? Whether or not choice, competition and the league tables held essential to the maintenance of the first two actually raise quality seems to me to be very much a moot point. What the process seems to me – empirically – to do is simply to generate the production of the right sorts of thing that yield the right sorts of numerical data to improve one’s score.

Anyone familiar with the history of GCSE/A-levels over the last 25 years will know how this works. In an effort, allegedly, to raise standards by introducing choice and competition, school league tables of GCSE/A-level performance, school-by-school, were produced. To improve their scores, schools demanded transparency (rightly) over the marking of the exams. Eventually this became so algorithmic that teachers could drill their students about how to get the best marks by the simple production of formulae. Numerical data can then be produced, marks obtained, etc, etc., and league tables published. But as anyone who has had to teach the sorry products of this system will attest, all this transparency, competition, choice and league tables has produced anything but raised quality.(1)

The RAE/REF has gone much the same way. For most of the process, departments and institutions spend their whole time trying to get clues about what counts and for how much, and how they can best maximise their scores. Many years ago, David Cannadine (or ‘Sir’ David Cannadine, as he likes to be known) said in his inaugural lecture at London that the process mistook productivity for creativity and it’s – fundamentally – still the case. Sometimes it seems every bit as algorithmic in its procedures as the A-levels (according to what I have heard from actual RAE panel members). If it’s not, it’s the pretty arbitrary (or at best subjective) awarding of a score from 1 to 4 by someone whose own research one might or might not personally have any regard for. The only way to stop it being arbitrary/subjective would be to make it entirely algorithmic, something that may well come if people demand transparency about the scores and procedures, thus far withheld from us. It’s also moved the whole issue away from the actual production of quality scholarship and into not entirely related areas, notably, of course, the sphere of getting money (grants). A million-pound grant to publish a list of everyone called Bert in seventeenth-century Rutland? Brilliant! A ground-breaking monograph on a major issue of European history? Meh - well, it’s not A MILLION POUNDS, now is it?

Whilst we’re on the subject of the RAE/REF, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that this now utterly pointless exercise is still ploughing ahead. I say utterly pointless because there’s no longer any real reward for participation by the Arts and Humanities subjects. Their HEFCE grant – the distribution of which was the avowed aim of the RAE/REF – has been cut by 100% (if I am wrong about this, please let me know: this is the most recent piece I could find, and it doesn’t reassure me; I think I read that it might have been a 'mere' 80%). So why are we still bothering? I’ll tell you why. It’s because our universities actually want us to go through these hoops just for the sake of the precious (meaningless) league tables in which they want to do better vis-à-vis everyone else, and probably because individual panel members think it will help them and their careers – vis-à-vis everyone else. If the Arts and Humanities panels, from their chairs down, had anything about them, they’d resign en masse and screw the whole sorry business. But we can’t expect that.  Here we go again, working to the Führer …(2)  You have to admit that getting the cells to wield the stick themselves even after the carrot has been removed represents an astonishing achievement in the comparative history of the state.  It also shows how The Big State can loom very effectively behind a facade of 'small government' (as in the early Roman Empire, I suppose).

So, all the RAE/REF league tables do is generate specific forms of numbers, with little or no actual relation to quality. But if the RAE/REF is bad, then may I introduce you to the National Student Survey? Here is the absolute ultimate in the generation of meaningless numerical data that can be analysed pseudo-statistically and arranged in league tables. For non-UK readers, the aim of the game is to get the students to rate their student experience over a series of headings. An average is then taken and - hey presto! – you end up Nth out of 196 (or whatever) in the league table. The institutions then go out of their way to try and find ways of generating better figures. But the whole exercise is a sham. It is based upon some serious category errors. Number one: it assumes that our students are our ‘consumers’, which – let’s be crystal clear about this – they are not. A friend of mine is fond of saying that the process is like trying to assess the quality of local bakers by asking for feedback from their cakes. The ‘consumer’ of our ‘products’ is society in general – employers, etc. Second category error: it assumes that the student is in a position to judge the quality of the product. The NSS provides none of the ‘grade descriptors’ we academics have to work with. The students have no criteria according to which they can judge their libraries – have they used every university library, or even a reasonable sample? And (at least in newer universities like mine) the poor old libraries always come in for a kicking in the NSS, presumably because they don’t have every book easily available at any time. After my own department didn't do too well in the first NSS it became clear in consultation with the student body, that we probably scored badly on ‘feedback’ because our students – bless ‘em – didn’t (for example) actually even realise that comments on procedural essays counted as feedback. All this leaves aside the fact that good institutions can get penalised for having good, critical students. Many of ours have friends at Oxford and Cambridge and so, because they see that their libraries are many, many times better than our (by comparison with other 1960s foundations) actually rather good library, they rate it as (say) 3 out of 5.

This is only the pinnacle of the problem of feedback, which we are now forced to spend so much time dealing with. Now, feedback can be useful. Let me make that clear. If my students tell me I talk too much in seminars, or I speak too fast in lectures, or I have too many PowerPoint slides with too much info on them, then that is useful for me and I can try to do something about it. If, on the other hand, little Johnny Frithfroth-Smythe (Year 1) tells me I should have had less social history and more politics in my lectures, or adopted a more thematic approach, my immediate response is – pretty much – f*ck you, you arrogant little turd! What does a first-/second-/third-year undergraduate student know about how to organise a course? Now it might well be that students just don't have the vocabulary to express what they mean to say, and that what little Johnny meant was 'I am, myself, more interested in political history and I was disappointed that there wasn't more'.  Fair enough, but too bad.  It's still for me, not them, to decide, and their lack of a useful vocabulary only underlines the problem with feedback-driven HE.(3)  What we are trying to produce – after three years – is someone who just might have some understanding of history and how it works; who might be ready to go on to be trained about how to do research and design a history course. If they already knew this in year 1 there’d be no point in them doing the degree, now would there?

This dimension of the ‘customer’ image is a third category error. If I go into my local Curry’s and buy a DVD-player, then I have some (admittedly vague) idea of what a DVD player should do/be expected to do, and if it doesn’t do it, or do it to what I think is a sufficient level compared with what I had to pay, I can go back and complain. To pursue the (rather forced) analogy, what we are trying to do is produce someone who, after three years, might have enough of an inkling about the subject that they can go on to be trained in what a DVD does or can be expected to do. Wringing our hands about what students think of a first-year course’s content or structure or methodology is akin to the Curry’s staff wringing their hands and being all apologetic when I bring my DVD-player back and complain volubly that it won’t make toast - rather than showing me the door in short order, which would be the sane 'business world' response to this level of 'customer feedback'.(4)

The fact that institutions expect us to wring our hands in precisely this way is what leads to all the expectations laid upon the eventual NSS league table – a student is in no position to judge his/her degree, given they have nothing to compare it with – and the students’ expectations that they, the customers, are always right. But the league table and its absolutely meaningless data leads to the employment of central admin offices and to people having to waste time ensuring the ‘enhancement of the student experience’. I have a friend who has been saddled with this in his department. I can only assume that he is paying some sort of enormous karmic debt.

So what do we have at the end of the day? Universities so obsessed with league tables, RAE, NSS, and combined tables (of equally meaningless numbers), like the various ‘quality’ newspapers’ ‘University of the Year’ tables, that they set up offices to manage these figures and get the academic staff to spend their time on ensuring higher scores (I can, for example, think of one university in the north of England that has recently decided that its history department comes low in the number of grants applied for, regardless of whether or not this might actually help them produce good history of a sort they are interested in).

What this in turn appears to have led to is the idea that institutions are like businesses in competition with each other and that 'business model' has produced the most regrettable fissure of all within the HE sector, the confrontation between ‘staff’ and ‘managers’, which is what I want to state the bleedin’ obvious about next time.

Notes:

1. The situation, by the way, is far worse in disciplines other than history; I know that modern language departments can habitually fail a dozen or so of a first-year intake that had to achieve an A or B A-level grade to get on the course. I have heard similar stories from science departments about the gulf between A-level and the standard necessary for undergraduate first-year success. We complain that history students have little or no idea about what is required of them when they arrive at university but failing five percent of an intake with As or Bs at A-level is a pretty unlikely outcome.

2.  If you think all this is just sour grapes on my part, here is my RAE 2008 submission (you'll probably have to select me from the drop-down dialogue box), which is probably as good as anyone's in the UK.

3.  Again, to evade accusations of 'sour grapes', I should say that I do very well in feedback responses, with results in the general 'how well did you think your tutor did' area invariably in the 90-100% bracket.  I don't have any on-line resource to point you at but there is a Facebook 'appreciation society' if you can really be bothered to look.

4. Aside – a colleague recently had student feedback suggesting that the same seminar should have been run at two different times each week so that students could go to the one that was most convenient to them that week.  I kid you not.  That, it seems to me, is not an issue of the student not having the right vocabulary to hand but a graphic index of the 'consumer mentality'.

The State we’re in (with apologies to Will Hutton): Part 1

These thoughts (I don't promise anything very startling or profound) about the dynamics of the British higher education world, in which I live and work, are prompted by a number of things. I have been thinking about writing a piece (though it will have to come in several 'pieces') like this for some time but the immediate cause was ‘Anonymous’ asking me whose side I am on in the current discussion about the AHRC and The Big Society (I would say debate but debate would require two things that seem to me to be lacking at present: two sides willing to engage in a discussion, and something clearly established to be discussed). The issue of fees, of the impact agenda, and the current dispute between the UCU Union and the VCs, the employers, also come into the equation. So, too, do various other gripes that concern me, about admissions, about feedback-driven teaching, about the often-demoralising nature of students. Thus in one sense this piece, spread over several instalments rather than one long rant, is about ‘the state we’re in’ but is also a case study of how states work, as I see it, using the way in which governments, at least from Thatcher’s onwards, have got universities to bend to their will. In this the current AHRC saga is – if we have been correctly informed about it - only the latest and perhaps clearest symptom.

Regular readers will not be surprised to see that I trace the roots of the problems to the sorts of ‘values’ which I see as introduced during the Thatcher years; the culture of late free market capitalism, the pernicious myths of competition and choice, the triumph of the vapid, talentless New Labour middle management type and vacuous and insidious talk of ‘transparency’, ‘collegiality’, consensus and the rest’, and so on. Thus this sketchy critique of the situation within British universities will have to move beyond that to more general issues of late capitalist* economy and attitudes within it.

Ultimately, at least as I envisage it, the problems we find ourselves confronted by find a common origin in successive governments’ (Labour and Conservative) successful reduction of British universities to a series of competing cells. This takes a series of forms; it is not simply the conversion of researchers in HE from fellow seekers after knowledge into rival competitors for money and status, crucially important though that is.

Let’s take the issue of the introduction of fees. One of the most disappointing features of this (and I think that disappointment rather than anger is the Leitmotif of these thoughts) has been the absolute absence of any sort of opposition by ‘our leaders’, the vice chancellors of ‘Universities UK’. One must be forgiven for thinking that these people have actually been rubbing their hands with glee. Indeed, I can think of at least one who has described the introduction of fees as ‘an opportunity’. I find this – as I said – disappointing. I find it very disappointing indeed. My own institution recently won the Higher’s University of the Year (prizes and league tables are a huge part of the general problem as I will discuss in the next instalment), something which obviously we’re proud of as we think we do a good job. That said, I’d be uneasy about turning that into any sort of implied claim that we ‘do it better’ than anyone else, even if only on a ‘season by season’ basis (as though it was the FA Cup). It would have been nice for our VC to have taken the opportunity as something more than a photo-opportunity for some (mildly embarrassing) air-punching (as though it was the FA Cup), as an opportunity – perhaps? – to say something about the promotion of social inequality commensurate with the introduction of high fees. But no. Sadly all that has come from the VCs (with – to my knowledge – the exception of the VC of Christ Church Canterbury) is a deafening silence (repeatedly satirised by Laurie Taylor in his comments on the back of the Higher), broken perhaps only by the sound of the ker-ching made by the cash registers in their eyes ringing up new profits and perhaps a new pay-rise (more on VC pay-rises anon).

I don’t actually, as I’ll come on to say, think that our VCs necessarily do a bad job – in fact, as I will come on to discuss more fully, I genuinely think that the management of my own institution does a pretty good job. Part of the problem is simply that there is no body (or nobody), even in Universities UK, who can claim to speak for ‘the sector as a whole’. As well as the binary divide, renamed from the division between Universities and Polytechnics as the division into pre- and post-’92 institutions, there is ‘The Russell Group’, ‘the 1994 group’, Oxbridge will always have its distinct agendas (regardless of the Russell Group), and so on.

This is symptomatic of the general process: the reduction of the sector to individual cells – but notice too how some of this ‘cellularisation’ has come at the initiative of the universities themselves (e.g. the Russell Group), which is why the strategy is so effective and so very worrying. Essentially, if one can divide the ‘governed’ (in this case the HE sector) into small groups or cells and make the distribution of resources (patronage) a matter for competition then there will usually if not always be some group (at least) within each cell, perhaps the whole cell, that will see some advantage, vis-à-vis its competitors/rivals, in doing what the government (the ministry) wants. In other words, within each group it is likely that the argument of a sub-group, to the effect that the latest governmental ‘initiative’ can be made into an opportunity, a way of doing better than other cells or groups, will carry the day. Thus the various cells end up doing the government’s work for it.

This is an absolutely classic dynamic which one can see in all sorts of states through history. It is – fundamentally – the same dynamic as can be witnessed in the early Roman Empire, wherein within a couple of generations each conquered tribal group or civitas ended up governing itself for its imperial rulers. Minimal central bureaucracy was required. This was because a situation existed wherein social, political and cultural benefits, of crucial importance in competition within and between civitates, accrued from participation in such local government. Crisis occurred when these benefits no longer pertained, leading to the state having to intrude its own personnel into local societies to make up for the short-fall.** This crisis eventually led to the late imperial situation where (by ancient standards) a large bureaucracy governed the Empire. But this bureaucracy essentially performed the same sorts of function that municipal government had fulfilled in the early period. Within each local or regional society, people competed for posts and advancement within it because it brought (fundamentally) directly analogous forms of material, social, cultural and political advantage. Thus once again the cells of the empire ended up doing the work of government for the state.

You can see the same dynamic at work within the totalitarian governments of the last century and in any number of other states. In the Third Reich there was a dynamic referred to as ‘working to the Führer’ which has an obvious relevance to the current state of play with regard to the AHRC (without triggering Godwin’s Law!). Again, the management of state patronage meant that within the cells of the Reich people would do the government’s work even before any direct order was issued, because they knew it was what the Führer wanted and would bring his favour. If (and as far as I can still no satisfactory elucidation of the business has yet appeared) the AHRC did indeed decide to shift its existing priorities towards ‘the Big Society’, in order to make sure of funding, then this would look - pretty discreditably - like pretty much the same sort of thing in practice.  In some ways caving into direct pressure would be more honourable.

The fracturing of the sector into competing cells, sometimes at the initiative of cells within the sector, seems to me to be doing the same thing – actively participating in an agenda favoured by the government/s of the time, without a general order or policy initiative even being necessary. Why should it be that this was the case? How is it that Higher Education institutions themselves have produced a situation which is, in my view, fundamentally antithetical to the furtherance of any real educational ideal? An explanation is what I want to suggest in Part 2.

---

* Why do those of us on the Left call it 'Late Capitalism'?  Is it wishful thinking?  'Developed Capitalism' would seem to me to be a better appellation, without the implicit Marxist teleology, contained in the phrase 'Late Capitalism', that Developed Capitalism has within it the seeds of its own inevitable collapse.

** One could see (without, I must stress, claiming any prior right to funding by pointing this out!) one of many key problems for Cameron’s nonsensical Big Society project by considering this imperial Roman experience. You might be able to argue that what the early Roman Empire saw was something like Cameron’s notion of a ‘Big Society’ – insofar as this has ever had any precise delineation. People within local communities carried out the government for the state; the local aristocracy provided public amenities from their own pocket (fat chance of Philip Green, Fred Goodwin and the rest doing that…) looked after infrastructure, and so on without central governmental involvement. The early Empire was, you might say, a model of ‘small government’. And yet, in fact none of this would be possible without the state, its backing and its underpinning. Everything that legitimised such local authority was a formal position within the state. The legitimacy of raising every denarius that funded local infrastructure was based on it being an imperial tax or levy. Every time the local magnates built a bath-house, a forum, a temple, a circus at their own expense it was in order to move higher up the social and political ladders of the state and to get their grubby hands on their share of the proceeds of the state. Which leads to the ultimate point that this hypothetical ‘big society’, whilst simultaneously only being a front for a ‘Big Government’ and only being possible because of the legitimation provided by ‘Big Government’, was a situation of massive oppression, bribery and corruption. (In this, it’s difficult to see Cameron’s Big Society being very different.) Finally, as I have suggested, in practice the ‘small government’ of the early Empire was functionally much the same as the supposed ‘big government’ of the Late Empire.

AHRC Saga

I somehow missed this piece by Peter Mandler in The Higher last week.  It's interesting, although I do sincerely hope that the title was not of Mandler's devising.  It would suggest a grasp of the English language unbecoming a Cambridge professor of modern cultural history.  I don't find much in this piece about why the Haldane principle is there.  It seems more to be asking where the Haldane principle has gone, suggesting the common misunderstanding of Juliet's impassioned cry.  Modern cultural, I suppose...

Be all that as it may, here is a less-than-entirely-convincing response to Mandler's piece, which still seems to dodge the key points made by Mandler and others.

Finally, here is Laurie Taylor's take on the situation (scroll down to 'There's no conspiracy'), which sums it all up...

AHRC 'Big Society' Scandal Open Letter

Here is the latest development.  69 academics sign an open letter calling on AHRC chiefs to reconsider their positions.  Certainly it seems to me that as yet the AHRC statements on the issue haven't carried enormous conviction.

How Clean is your Funding? And does it matter?

This is something I wanted to post on a couple of weeks ago, then left, and then thought that with the whole AHRC business rumbling on it still seemed relevant.  Maybe more so.  It concerns the ethics involved in accepting research funding.  I am going to argue that in the current climate especially academics should accept, pragmatically, any research funding, as long as there are no strings attached, regardless of the ethical or political business history of the donor.

Derrida once said that only the unforgivable could truly be forgiven.(1)  It is a classic move in later Derridian thought.  What he meant was that if you set terms on forgiveness, such as repentance,(2) then the act of forgiveness is tarnished; it ceases to be a genuine act of forgiveness.  He went on to concede that such an attitude might not always be practical in everyday life, but that our thinking about forgiveness should be inflected by this point.  And, in my view, he was, as he so often was, correct.(3)

This seems relevant to me because in a recent (10 March) edition of the Higher there was this piece by none other than Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (in other words they don't come any higher) entitled 'Tainted Money?'.  This article stemmed from the recent decision by Oxford University that it was satisfied by the findings of a commission looking into the alleged links between the Toepfer Foundation and the Nazi past.  Essentially the problem (I hope I have this right) was that it had been argued that Oxford should sever all links with the foundation on the grounds that it eponymous founder was a Nazi supporter who had profited from the Holocaust.

The commission found that this was not the case and was even happy with the foundation keeping Toepfer's name.  Oxford, as I mentioned, declared that this was acceptable to them and that thus the Hanseatic scholarships should remain in place.  Evans' piece defends this, and I agree with him.  Richard Evans and I have not always had the happiest personal relationship(4) but I do have very high regard for him as an archival historian (I would do even if he weren't the Regius Professor; the fact that he is the Regius Professor makes whether or not I have any regard for his work pretty much irrelevant!), and - probably more importantly - higher regard still for his work in putting historical skills to practical social and political use in refuting holocaust deniers and the like, something which won't surprise regular readers of H.o.t.E. (of which gratifyingly there seem to be a few).  But here I think that, although I agree with the conclusion he reaches, he has used the wrong argument.  Well, I say the 'wrong argument'; what I might mean is 'an unconvincing argument that might yet have been the only politically practical one'.  We'll see.

You can read the argument via the link above.  What troubles me about it is not whether it's factually accurate or not (how would I know?); I assume it is.  It is more that if you aren't predisposed to accept the conclusion it is very likely to look like a bit of sophistic hair-splitting.  Toepfer wasn't a Nazi, he was merely a German nationalist with views about the racial links between the 'Anglo-Saxon races', who later employed ex-Nazis.  He didn't profit from the Holocaust; his company just provided materials which the Reich used, and made some money out of this.  And who didn't in wartime Germany?  None of this looks very convincing to me or likely to carry much moral or ethical conviction.  I suspect that people like Michael Pinto-Duschinski, out to find traces of Nazi whitewashing or antisemitism wherever they can, will not be swayed by it.  I also think it might be a mistake to lump things like prizes in with funding and scholarships as I think there might be subtle ethical differences between the two.

So, am I saying then that Oxford shouldn't have accepted this money?  As I said earlier, no I certainly am not.  My argument, which might be unpalatable and politically ineffective (I admit) would be that as long as there are no strings attached to a gift, determining what you use it for or what line you take or what findings you reach, then any gift of money is acceptable.  In other words that a lack of strings attached is more important than the ethical business history of the donor.

I say this because it seems to me that there is very little untainted money out there in the capitalist world.  If you start looking into the business details or investments of just about anyone you'll probably be able to construct a trail that leads to something more than a little unpleasant: war-crimes, arms-dealing, support for repressive regimes, ecological disasters, cover-ups, etc etc.  I shouldn't imagine that any German company doesn't have some link to something that happened under the Nazis; I shouldn't imagine that any of the major Japanese organisations has unstained hands regarding Japan's exploitation of surrounding nations (especially China and Korea) or other nastiness, like the Burma Railway (and unlike Germany, where guilt about the war is practically pathological, Japan has rarely come close to official acknowledgement of what was done in its name, say at Nanking).  A whole string of British businesses will have some link somewhere to an involvement in supporting the apartheid government of South Africa, or in arms deals to dubious regimes, and so on.  How untainted is Russian money, do you think?  And so on.

Of course there will always be something qualitatively specific about the Holocaust that keeps for it a particular place among the obscenities of the past.  That needs to be stated, and remembered.  But it wasn't and isn't, the only such obscenity, even in scale.  Here is something to ponder.  For a long time (I am not sure what the current state of play is) western drugs companies mounted a long and hard-fought challenge to prevent various African countries from manufacturing the medicines that have made AIDS effectively an illness that can be brought under control in the West.  They did this in the name of their profits.  It may be that as many as twenty million Africans will die as a result of this obscene bit of capitalist money-grubbing.  I cannot think of any very convincing reason to say that this is a significantly lesser evil that ought to be treated very differently from the Holocaust in terms of the ethics of accepting money.  Different?  Yes.  Lesser?  I don't know.  And very much more recent, which seems to me to matter in terms of thinking about the origins of money.  But we like our villains to have faces, don't we?(5)  And nicely-tailored uniforms too, if we're honest.  A set of faceless grey-suited corporate directors doesn't fit the bill.  And, I ask in a whisper, do we prefer our victims to be white?

And what was one of the leading lights in this movement?  It was Glaxo-Wellcome.  As we all know, the Wellcome is one of the major funders of historical research these days. Apart from the fact that such research has to be on something related to science, health and medicine it doesn't attach strings to these gifts.  No one suggests we shouldn't accept this money; I am certainly not suggesting it.(6)  Anyway, I don't see a problem in accepting this money.  It doesn't come with the demand that it be used to promote the public understanding of Glaxo-Wellcome, GlaxoSmithKline or whatever, or to support and promote the rightness of their approach to patenting and pricing life-saving medicines.  What it does is to fund a great deal of good research and keep a lot of good historians in the business, who might otherwise not be.  And they don't have to spend their whole career working on the history of science and medicine.  So it is a good thing and that matters a lot.  But, whether you like it or not, it's hardly 'clean money'.  What is?

Are there any exceptions we can make?  What about the money from the Gaddafi regime that led to the resignation of the head of the LSE?  I am not well informed but I know that other Gaddafi foundation money was used elsewhere as a slush fund for research into any subject - no restrictions.  But this is money, in the present, provided by a dictator oppressing and killing his people.  We knew about this.  Perhaps that sort of money should be rejected.  But how bad is bad?  Did people reject US government money when the US was invading Iraq or when it was funding terrorism in central America?  I don't think so.

Ultimately, there is no line you can easily draw on an ethical chart of what can be excused and what cannot, without exposing oneself to charges of hypocrisy, double-standards or whatever.  Whether or not conditions are attached to a gift, about subject matter, the angle of approach, etc., is something far easier to draw a meaningful line across.  Toepfer may have been a deeply unpleasant man with abhorrent views but in the end - because it came with no strings attached - his money allowed Richard Evans to set out on a career that led to him being a formidable foe for neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers.  I once took the Berlusconi lira (it was before the Euro), but I figured that if he wanted to pay a socialist historian to travel to a conference, give a paper about a quite left-wing approach to history, and write it up, then that was up to him; fair enough.  Wellcome money funds the careers of people who work hard for causes that the GlaxoSmithKline board of directors might (for all I know) oppose.  On the other hand, strings attached to gifts can seem innocuous at the time, but these things have an unpleasant habit, over time, of coming back to bite you.  When I walk from campus into town I have to walk past a theatre emblazoned with the name of a notorious, disgraced insider dealer...  Thus it's not - in my view - the origin of the money that matters so much as what you use it for, and what you're allowed to use it for.  That's easier to define.

With this said, you might think that my conclusion ought to be that therefore we ought not accept gifts of any sort, even with no strings attached, unless they are absolutely whiter than white (and that, practically, is going to be pretty difficult).  I don't think this is either practical or necessary.  For one thing, we academics are under so much pressure to bring in money (especially as the government slashes our funding) that it would be self-defeating to adopt such an attitude.  Furthermore, in middle management-dominated British universities, appointments and promotions now seem to be made heavily on the basis of funding brought in - no matter that you might be the best known historian on your subject in the world, no matter if the project is of no scholarly worth or interest outside a small area of the UK; it's the cash that counts.  Money talks.  Ethically, if we use the money to write history that does good in the various ways that it can do good, then I think that that is justification enough.  [I also think that an argument can be made that there is an ethical demand within the historical project which allows us to equate 'good' history with that which is ethically good, but that's for another time.] I repeat my point: it's not the origin of the money that matters so much as what you use it for, and what you're allowed to use it for.  We need to stop unconvincing attempts to decide which money is clean and which isn't because none of it is.  We need to be ruthlessly pragmatic, grit our teeth and accept it all, just as long as (and this is becoming my refrain) there are no strings attached.

There's another point of relevance, now.  Whether the AHRC was pressured into adopting the Big Society as a research priority (something which, I repeat, could be cleared up pretty quickly) or whether it decided to adopt it in an ignoble attempt to deflect funding cuts, even government money looks as though it might start being linked to political or ideological conditions.  So the demand to look for funding that allows us to do our research free from interference becomes even greater.  Demanding that we reject certain money because of its links to certain evils but accept others with links to different evils is not a position that can be adopted with any consistency.  If it allows us to carry out historical research in the directions we want to reach the conclusions we want, we have no choice but to accept the money.  Any money, provided it comes without conditions.

I accept that this argument might be politically difficult to make effective in the teeth of media or pressure-group howling - usually triggered by some contingent event (for instance, no one was very bothered by the LSE's Gaddafi money until a few weeks ago...) - but, to borrow the formula from Derrida, perhaps our thinking about research funding ought at least to be inflected by it?

Notes

(1) J. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2005; 'On forgiveness' originally 2001)

(2) I read an interview with Norman Tebbit recently (can't remember where; it was in a paper lying around in Pret a Manger) in which he said that since repentance was a prerequisite for forgiveness and since the IRA had never repented for the Brighton bomb, and indeed still sought to justify it, he could not forgive them.  I quite understand his position, but I think he is wrong about repentance being necessary for forgiveness.

(3) It is worth remembering, at this stage, as some people seem not to, that Derrida was himself Jewish.

(4) It's Oedipal, in a way, especially in the Lacanian reading.  Richard is in some ways the 'father' of my career, having appointed me to my first permanent post in 1991 - doing so, it should be said, in the face of the gurus of medieval history telling him which Oxbridge golden child was next in line for a job.  I think he got some flak for this; I certainly did.  For the next 3 or 4 years I had to put up with people telling me I shouldn't have my job.  No, really.  So in many regards I owe my career to him.  There aren't many people who will just appoint whoever they think is the best person for the job regardless of their school or university background, patronage, familial ties, the rest.  The profession could do with a few more like that.  I like to think that my subsequent career and those of the various people who 'should' have got my job justifies his choice.  Nevertheless we did knock heads a few times, which I like to flatter myself was partly down to us being a bit too alike, though the chances of me becoming as successful or politically effective as he is are slim indeed.

(5) A similar point is made in the opening pages of Alain Badiou's The Century.

(6) Even if I worry sometimes that its dominance in the funding of research might mean that in a generation or so every university historian is working on the history of science and medicine, that the social history of athlete's foot will have become more of a burning issue than major world historical developments...

The AHRC Saga: It rumbles on

Check this out.  You might not agree with it all, you might find the emboldening of phrases a tad irritating, but it is nevertheless a very interesting, critical reading of the available data, which reaches a sadly plausible conclusion.  What it also does is to move the debate on slightly from the simple question of  whether the AHRC were pressured or not into subtler and frankly more worrying territory (territory that I think many of us had considered).  In this sense the second of the 2 petitions I linked to earlier continues to be the one to support.  Thanks to my mate, James Fraser, for the link.

I guess I am still concerned about where the idea of governmental pressure comes from.  The people quoted in the Observer are no dopes and pretty smart operators, so I'm not quite sure that they can be just skipped over quite as easily as they are here.

Arts, Humanities (and Big Society) Research Council: Latest

This is a nice, thoughtful piece.  Thanks to 'JPG' for the link.

Being me, I particularly liked the following paragraph:

(One detail which should be noted in passing is, yet again, the habitual semi-literacy which seems to be compulsary amongst educational administrators these days. The statement does not, as it says, "refute" the allegations made in the Observer: to refute is to convincingly disprove, and the AHRC offers no evidence to make its case. It merely rejects the allegations, which is a different matter.)

I must admit that I am becoming more and more confused by this whole business.  Indeed I am beginning to wonder if it isn't some sort of elaborate early April Fool's Day jape dreamt up by Cable, Willetts, The Observer and those knock-about, fun-loving pranksters at the AHRC.

To clear all this up, what we need, as Iain Pears implies, is some sort of proof from the AHRC (a time-line of meetings, decisions etc., minutes, and so on) that all this predated the Tory party's invention of the ludicrous notion of the Big Society and some transparency about how it reached the (to me at least) rather dubious conclusion that the issues related to the Big Society were amongst the “highest priorities in the arts and humanities.”

Now, rather tiresomely if I'm honest, someone has (predictably) started a petition.  Here is the link if you can be bothered.  Is it just me or is this race to an e-petition for everything at the drop of a hat weakening the effect of petitions?  I have heard that it has, in that the number of signatures, rather than being taken seriously, is now calibrated against the ease of starting an internet petition.  If I was going to petition anyone about this, I'd want the AHRC to give us some 'facts' (as above) first.  The accusation of political interfering in research funding is very serious, to be sure, but don't we need to be certain that that is what is going on?   The AHRC deny it but I doubt I am the only person who thinks that neither Peter Mandler nor Colin Jones are un-savvy enough to make statements like those in The Observer if there weren't some reason to believe that something untoward was going on.   Indeed I was disappointed in the RHS response to 'Impact' because it was (in my hot-headed view) too savvy and politic.  Prof. Jones isn't likely to use the words 'gross' and 'ignoble' lightly.  So to remove all these suspicions let's see some hard proof.  If this is all a lot of nonsense that shouldn't be too hard to furnish.  And then we can all move on.

As it is, anyone whose application is turned down will at least be able to blame this fact on not being interested enough in The Big Society, rather than facing up to not having put in a good enough application.  I'm not sure that would really be a good thing...

But what we need is a bit of transparency about all this, from some of the people involved, so we know for sure.  Then we can protest properly.  No?

Here is another petition.  I have signed this one as it has something concrete to object to.  Not that it'll make any difference.  500,000 people (1 in 120 of the population) on the streets of London on Saturday has had no effect.  Taking no notice is one of the malign legacies of Blair and New Labour.  Once upon a time, even the Tories had to take notice of the Poll Tax demos. Ho hum.

Words fail me

A man with, allegedly, two brains.  Just put your X
where you think either of them might be and win a super
prize!  Send your answers to Historian on the Edge in a
plain envelope marked 'Arse or Elbow'.

Just when I thought things couldn't get much worse with this government, on my return to the UK, I hear this.  Words (well, apart from these 137) fail me.  Welcome to Stalinist Britain.  Now, call me stupid (and after last week's shenanigans I'll admit it's a fair cop) but I thought that the whole point of the Big Society (OK, I know it's an absurd idea to start off with but bear with me) was for government to stop meddling and interfering with things.  I will have more to say about this but for now I am, as they say, gob-smacked.  I am in particular wondering what sort of medieval history, let alone medieval history outside Britain, is going to get funded, but there are far bigger issues at stake here than that.  Unbelievable.  This is Britain...

But: Note that today (28th) the AHRC has issued a rebuttal of all this.  Here is the link, and check out 'anonymous'' comment below for an interesting commentary.  What is going on here?