The State We're In, Part 3.b: Two Billion Pounds!!!

In my post yesterday I said that the government had slashed funding for research in UK HE to 'more or less zero'.  "But, hold on there, Grumpy", you might say, "I read in the papers that the money awarded to UKHE from the REF is two billion pounds per an. - two Billion POUNDS - two thousand million pounds!  How do you call that more or less zero?"  To which I say, yup, it's a fair cop.  Two billion pounds is an unimaginable amount of cash to you or me, readers.  In fact, it's shitloads.  Why, even the highest paid man in the UK would take nearly 23 years to earn that much.

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Hang on...

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So what we're saying is that one person could earn in twenty three years what the entire nation is willing to spend per an on the higher educational research activity of over fifty thousand academics (see below) across the entire country. (Actually, given that that salary is two years old, he probably earns more now so it'd take less time.) Let's reflect on that for a moment.  Put another way, assuming there are other people earning that sort of amount, or even slightly less, five of them would earn the same, over the next five years, as the entire nation is going to spend (per an) on higher educational research.  Or we can look at it another way. Any one of the twenty-five richest people (or people 'and family' - tax dodge) in the UK (as of May this year) could dip into their fortune and pay for the whole country's annual higher education research bill, and still leave themselves with a fortune of between 1.43 and 9.9 billion pounds. 1.43 billion quid, by the way, is 53.9 times the average wage in the UK.  In other words the average UK wage-earner would take nearly 54 years to accumulate that amount of money, and even that would assume that s/he was able to save up 100% of their salary!  As yet another abstract formulation, A 10% levy on the estates of only the *twenty-five* wealthiest people in the UK (leaving them only with fortunes of between £3bn and nearly £11bn...) would yield £17.1 billion, a sum that would match the government's spending on the research activities of over 54,000 UK academics for the next eight years.   I'm just sayin'.  But let's reflect on that a little.  That tells us quite a lot, doesn't it, about wealth difference and the economic priorities of neo-liberal capitalist economics.  Is that the sort of country we really want to live in?

Anyway, let's leave that to one side for now.  Two billion quid goes to universities to pay for research.  That still can't be bad.  How does that work out?  By my reckoning, there were 54,893 academics entered into the REF.  I don't think that one researcher could be entered into more than one panel but even if they could it would be a minority.  Let's round the number down to 50,000 to be on the safe side.  £2,000,000,000 divided by 50,000 works out at £40,000 each.  That sounds OK.  At first.  But £2,000,000,000 per an won't even cover the wage bill of the academics submitted (even at 2011 rates).  Of course, academics are not only paid to research, but to teach and administer too.  The common formula for research active staff in older universities at least is 40% time on research, 60% on teaching and admin. At that rate, then, the 2 billion will cover the relevant wage bill of the full time researching academics.   But we also have to factor in the wages of fairly numerous essential lab staff in the science departments, as well research librarians and research assistants in arts, humanities and social sciences, administrative support staff and the temporary lecturing staff bought in to cover for full-time staff on research leave.  That means that the budget is unlikely to contribute even one penny to the cost of research equipment, or 'plant costs' (maintenance of buildings, electricity, etc.), which in science departments are understandably astronomical.  Even cheap humanities departments require annual library and computing budgets to maintain any kind of research viability.  All of that now has to be financed from other sources.  That means student fees to a large extent, but even then £9k per an is not far above the cost price of a university education (including teaching resources which admittedly can sometimes double for research) leaving very little for research.  Well, fair enough, you might say, if you buy into the US-style neo-liberal propaganda, why should I pay, through my taxes for someone else's university education?  Why? Because culture, civilisation ('m not even going to be drawn into the economic benefits etc).

All this is one reason that everything has begun to turn on research grant income, at the expense of research quality, the thing that drove ICL's Professor Grimm evidently to take his own life (on that subject I can recommend nothing better than this post by the Plashing Vole).

I am also assuming, in all the above, that the money would be divided equally.  But obviously the point of the REF is that it isn't.  It is moderated to some degree by a department's place in the league. Therefore, for every person or department whose research is only adequately funded, let alone those few whose budget is enlarged, there is another department, or someone else, who is correspondingly underfunded, whose institution is no longer able to pay for them to research.  This may drive those people out of the profession, force them to teach more and research less or even force them onto teaching only contracts with no time to research at all (and while we are on that subject, you can't say, that's OK - academics should spend their time teaching the paying student: if you want to teach someone how to be, say, a historian you have to be a practising historian), force them out of the country to work elsewhere, force departmental closures, and so on.  All this seriously diminishes UK culture.

Let's look at it a third way. As of 12 September 2011, the UK had spent £123.9 bn on the bank bailout (but had planned on spending - and been exposed to the risk of spending - one and a half trillion pounds (£1,500,000,000,000).  By comparison, then, the bankers received what, at current rates (assuming our £2bn is an annual budget), the UK would be willing to pay for all of higher academic research for the next sixty-two years.  As I have said, £2 bn does not cover the cost of research.  Let's assume that the actual cost of UK academic research is three times that.  It still means we have spent on the bank bail-out enough to cover two decades of top-level research in all disciplines right across the UK (and stood ready to shell out the equivalent of full funding all university research in the UK for, at current rates, over two centuries...).  And one might want to ask what would be a better use of the money: bailing out irresponsible unregulated money-launderers who hold the country to ransom (we allegedly can't touch them because they'd all leave and now - post Thatcher - our entire economy is supposed to be dependent upon the financial wild west that the City has become), or people who work hard to improve, in all sorts of ways, the quality of life (leaving aside the economy etc etc) of the nation.  Well, you decide.  Maybe tell your MP...

But either way, two billion quid is really not a lot for what the nation as a whole gets back.  You have to ask whether, as a reward, it is worth the financial and cultural costs (not to mention the stress, the suicide) that come with the REF.

The State We're In, Part 3.a: Listmania

So.  The results of the REF (Research Excellence Framework for non-academics, or non-UK academics or UK academics that have been hiding in a cave for eight years) are in (or out, depending on your preferred idiom).  Consult the lists to your heart’s desire.  They will be spun one way or another, stressing one performance index over another, on every university website across the country for months to come.  This seems as good a time as any to resume my thoughts on ‘The State We’re In’ (Part 1; Part 2; plus search for the 'State we're in' label for other scattered interim thoughts on various issues)

Well, there’s (I suppose) good news, bad news and (actual) good news.

First the (I suppose) good news.  My department came 2^ndout of the 83 history departments in the exercise.  Yay, woo!  And actually this is in some important ways good news.  It is good news because some of my colleagues, notably our chair of the research committee and our head of department put in very long hours of tedious work, not always helped enormously by somewhat thuggish ‘powers that be’ higher up in the university, and it is very good news that that hard work gets some sort of serious recognition.  It is also good news in that it represents in some ways the culmination of a process that has been under way for ten years and in which I think I have played a significant part, of turning the department from one that had for decades had no ambition (other than to be some sort of Oxford feeder college) and had more or less institutionalised mediocrity, into a serious player in historical research in the UK.  This provides some reward to all the people who have contributed to that.  It is also good news because we are a very good history department.  I have some very good and interesting colleagues, especially at the younger end, doing good work in new areas.  It is good to have some sort of public indication of that fact; it is good to get some reward for the hard research work we have all put in.  It is, furthermore, good news to see some departments who are somehow supposed to be ipso facto the best in the country slither down to something approximating their actual intellectual worth, though only because it might (though actually it won’t) make them think twice before assuming that anyone graduating from or working at another university is somehow some kind of lesser intellect, and about instilling that misplaced sense of intellectual superiority in their students.  It might make someone in the general non-academic world realise that there is a disjuncture between privilege and prestige on the one hand and merit on the other.  It might even make prospective students (graduate and undergraduate) realise that going to those gilded places will not necessarily get them the best tuition, or expose them to the best historical minds. 

It is also, and I think this is very important, good news– indeed an excellent outcome – given the generally humane way in which my department (and our university management on the whole) have managed the whole REF business, compared with horror stories from elsewhere.  There have been no threats or other bullying strategies, and I hope that perhaps university management culture might make a note of this.  Sadly that wasn’t the case in the institution which produced the top placed history department, which drove at least one fine historian out of the profession altogether.

[Personally – and I take no pride in this but I have to be honest here – I also take some unedifying satisfaction in seeing departments that drove me out through bullying, or which have serially considered me to be beneath them, or which contain other people who have actively hindered my career, come out many places lower than the department where I work. This, the 'ha, fuck you then' response, is the natural response; it is the response encouraged by the system; it is the wrong response.]

But (the Bad News) this all comes at a cost. 

I am happy for my colleagues that they have got a serious reward for their hard work. I am happy that we have serious recognition as a good history department.  Don’t get me wrong about any of that.  

But I am very wary indeed of the bragging that might ensue, wary of suggesting that this means we really are better than (almost) anyone else, even contingently, temporarily, even taking (as I said in part 1) the exercise to be a sort of FA Cup contest, as though historical scholarship were like a race or FA Cup contest where one side definitively could be better than another.  I am wary of suggesting that my colleagues in other departments might be worse than us on this basis.  The risk of suggesting the above is serious and inherent in the league table culture.  We must work hard to counter it (though we won’t for the reasons I set out in Part 1)

Then, where is the real reward?  When the REF (or RAE as it was then) started, the point of the exercise was to divvy up the money the government gave out to universities to fund research.  Now of course, the government (and indeed the last Labour government – let’s be clear) has basically cut that to more or less zero.  So where do the rewards lie for all the hard work put in by chairs of department, chairs of research committees, and the ordinary rank and file researchers? The reward is located first and foremost in university bragging rights (‘we did better than you, ha ha ha’ [see italicised paragraph above!]), league table positions and so on.  This is good news for Vice Chancellors looking for an excuse to increase their pay packet yet further (while putting a brake on that of all the people who did the hard work) but not so much for the rest.  Why?  Because now there is precious little government funding so universities have to find other means of finding money.  And those means put them all in competition with each other.  To get funding we have to attract students, in a zero-sum game, and the league tables’ only value is in that game.  Or we have to get grants (in a situation that has led to at least one suicide in recent months), in a climate where grant income counts for more than actual research value.  All this ends (well, it ended some Time ago) the situation which ought to exist, where academics see themselves as collaborative, cooperative, fellow seekers after knowledge rather than members of competing cells.  Second the participation, the general gloating and publicity all strengthens the whole dynamic that I discussed in Parts 1 and 2, which produces the situation where any government can get the HE sector to dance to any tune: that, in other words, produces the state we are in.  This is all a high price to pay.  It is bad news.  I feel that someone in a department that (deservedly) did well in the exercise and who has put in good submissions in the last two exercises is best placed to make that criticism.

The other bad news is that proportionately far less goes on recognising actual quality research than it used to.  On the one hand part of the submission in terms of research environment concerns research income (see above).  But research income is not a valid recognition of research quality.  For one thing it is what comes out of a project that should count, not the amount of money that went in (however much the latter delights university accountants).  Secondly, what gets the money very often constitutes intellectually pretty lame projects, listing things and putting them on line.  On the other hand, a large part goes on ‘Impact’ – the many drawbacks with which have been pointed out over and over (not least by science departments, who have done best by the system and thus are best placed to make the critique) and hardly need repeating.  As far as history is concerned though, one additional problem is that the system provides little benefit to those who do not work on British or modern (or preferably modern British) history.

A third piece of bad news concerns the numbers themselves, which are entirely subjective judgements made by small panels, not always of the most respected or research productive academics within fields.  Some would say that the data are not robust.  More to the point, the fact that the numbers can be arranged sequentially is highly misleading.  Look at the history list and you will see that Lancaster University comes in twenty-three places below my department.  “Woo”, you might say, “the Lancaster historians must be loads worse than those at Poppleton.”  But look again at the evidence (and essentially to be a historian is to master the art of looking again).  If you count the GPA of Birmingham (in 1^st place) as 100%, then Lancaster came in with 94%, whereas we got 99.6%.  That is a pretty fine difference for twenty-three places in the league (or visually, on the page or computer screen, a big drop of the eye).  Indeed by the same reckoning, the history department that came in thirtieth was still scoring near enough 91%.  So all these league tables, all this listmania, have a seriously misleadingeffect, in addition to all the other detrimental effects the league table culture has on higher education, scholarship and research.  Yet, those big visual drops of the eye (rather than the actual numbers) are what will put some people's jobs under pressure.

But here I want to shift tack again and spin this a slightly different way to end on what I think is some (actual) good news.  One bit of good news is that the table does at least shake things up a bit and suggest that the many good universities of the UK are all really pretty similar – that it is not a case of Oxbridge and a couple of others versus the rest of the pre-‘92s and then all of them against the post-‘92s.  What I would hope is that this shaking up might make research students apply to the university where the scholar best –placed to supervise them is working, rather than according to established institutional prestige.

More importantly than that, using the criteria mentioned above, even the bottom-placed history department scored 58% compared with the top.  The departments at the bottom of the top 51 were scoring 85%.  What I would like to suggest this means, and what I would like to suggest would be the best, the most humane, conclusion that the British historical profession ought to take away from the REF league table is that historians working in UKHE – across the board, from the top to the bottom of the list are producing significant amounts of good work.  That is actual good news and I want to end on this point, for now.  This is what as a profession we should be proud of, not institutional bragging rights.  Or, as Young Mr Grace used to say, “you’ve all done very well.”

Getting the Point of Pointlessness

[I am off to Kalamazoo in a couple of weeks, or rather less (eek!) where I will be giving a paper in the Exemplaria session on 'New Critical Imperatives'.  Here is the abstract I sent them.  Some may note similarities with 'the Manifesto'.  The finished version may end up as the last chapter of Why History Doesn't Matter.  

Given my previous post, it now seems especially pertinent... (On that issue, btw, there is some talk of specifically local reasons for poor medieval take-up, about which it would be unprofessional for me to say more, and I am not 100% convinced in any case.)]

Academic history seems not to know what to do with itself since the linguistic turn.  The realisation that the Rankean ideal of objective history, telling it ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, was not (and never had been) possible appears to have led to a real – if largely unacknowledged – crisis of identity within the discipline, one result of which (in the UK and perhaps elsewhere) has been the removal of academic practitioners of history being increasingly sidelined from public discussions of the subject, its value, its place in education and so on, increasingly replaced by non-academic ‘media dons’ and ‘writers and historians’.  On one side there have been those who have adopted a position simply deriding the absolute possibility of history, a (usually ill-informed) nihilist position (Jenkins, Munslow, Ankersmit); on the other there have been more or less extreme or at least pragmatist defences of traditional empirical history (Evans) while most historians seem to continue in what Žižek might call an ideological fantasy, the ‘je sais bien mais quand même’: continuing to write empirical history judged by fundamentally Rankean empiricist standards as if it were still possible, even though they know it isn’t.

It seems to me that none of these stand-points is sustainable if the academic discipline is really to survive.  But how to avoid the pitfalls of epistemological nihilism when there is no possible transcendental ideal or goal for history, whether one sees that in empiricist terms of recreating or retelling a past just as it was or in more academic-political terms of creating a dominant paradigm/convincing everyone else?  I would like to draw on some work by Simon Critchley (Very Little … Almost Nothing) and Jean-Luc Nancy (La Communauté Désoeuvrée), possibly trying to marry it with some of the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, to try and deconstruct pointlessness.  In other words I want to argue that the role (political/ethical) of historical study is fundamentally transient, consisting in conversation and dialogue, and that that element of discursive transience should be embraced.  What I am suggesting is a ‘talking about’ or an ‘engagement with’ the traces of the past to help us live in, make sense of, engage with the present.  This does not avoid the traditional epistemological standards or rules of ‘fit’ between data and argument, etc., but it – I propose – permits us to avoid either the perils of trying to argue about who is right and who is wrong, or paradigmatic dominance, on the one hand, or simply seeing academic historical practice as no more than a mask for academic careerism on the other.  Whether this is possible without introducing some other transcendent ideal remains to be seen.

Embedding Entrepreneurial Thinking (no, really)

I would like you all to read this.  Further comment from me is superfluous. Thank you.

Moral cowardice

Even with my own views on UK journalism, I have to admit that this is a valuable comment on University managements' crackdown on protest on campus, just one symptom of the moral indigence that pervades University administration in a neo-liberal world where Universities are being turned into nothing more than for-profit corporations, where you can get a chair simply on the amount of money you can bring in - regardless of whether or not you have a sophisticated analytical thought in your head.  I will have more to say on this.  For now, let me quote Chakrabortty's concluding paragraph, which is very good:

Where universities were historically places of free expression, now they are having to sacrifice that role for the sake of the free market. For students, that comes in the form of a crackdown on dissent. Yet the twentysomethings at university now will end up running our politics, our businesses and our media. You might want these future leaders to be questioning and concerned about society. Or you might wonder whether sending in the police to arrest a woman chalking a wall is proportionate. Either way, you should be troubled.

Widespread astonishment erupts as a principled academic historian is found in a senior position in a UK university

Here.  And especially here.  Thanks to one of my colleagues for pointing me at this.

The state of HE: commentary from both sides of the pond

First of all, from one of my favourite bloggers, read THIS.  This is especially for all of you (us) who work in UK HE and think your institution and its management is/are spectacularly shit and miss/es the whole point of academia/education on a daily basis, mostly since (by the very fact of their having opted to go down the administrative career route) those management types have tacitly admitted that they have nothing intellectually creative left in their heads (if indeed there ever was anything there).  Well, to all of you/us, read that piece and see if you or anyone you know can top it for sheer, well ... read it and see.  I dare you.  It will put things in some perspective.

I am sort of hoping it is some kind of clever prank on Voley's part - to invent and post this tale of woe and sit back and watch how people accept it as true, as all too believable, pitching in with comments such as those above - to show the state to which we have been reduced.  How UK HE has become some kind of massive David Lodge theme park, except that at least David Lodge was funny ... before someone at the dept of Business, Innovation and Skills mistook Nice Work or one of the other campus novels for a radical  neo-liberal Higher Education policy manifesto.

Sadly I think it is simple reportage.  Unless I have wandered into the Vole's cunning trap.

Then, from the other side of the Pond, I was watching (as is my sad wont) CSI Miami (aka the World's Worst Cop Show).  Tonight's episode featured the murder of a cultural anthropology professor (Horatio: He's taken a permanent sabbatical. *puts on sunglasses* Yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhh!!! *run opening credits*).  At one point he is interviewing one of the deceased's students - the murdered prof turning out to have been a bit of sadist, who wanted to teach his students that pain and violence were essential to civilisation. Or something.  [You can fill in your own digression on pop culture's depictions of the university.]  The student says he may have been a sadist but his research papers were brilliant.

Horatio: "Ned, don't you think that a human being should have greater value than a research paper?"

Well.  There, sadly, is a question we can all ask our superiors on a regular basis.  Cutting right to the heart of the problem, Horatio.  Right to the very heart.

Why I don't approve of Rate Your Lecturer

According to some lame-brains who commented upon this piece by Bill Cooke (with which I largely, though not entirely, agree), if you oppose the new Rate Your Lecturer (RYL) site you must be a really terrible lecturer who doesn't care about your teaching and is afraid of bad feedback.

So let's clear that one up first.

Feedback on pretty much all aspects of my teaching has always ranged from very good to excellent.  I care about my teaching.  I don't always get it right (as we'll see) but I do try to do it well and to keep it as fresh and innovative as I can, within the limits of what I feel comfortable with (trying 'cutting edge' teaching techniques if you're just not comfortable with them ends in miserable failure and general mockery, from what I have seen: e.g. I am not comfortable in role play so I don't use it). Student feedback has played an important (if not the only) role in keeping my teaching up to the mark, not least because we have had student feedback on teaching for a long time.  I'll repeatedly come back to that.

I care about my students (well, almost all of them); indeed I actually like them (mostly).  They make me laugh; it's a blessing to have a job that puts you amongst young, lively, intelligent people.  They also drive me up the wall sometimes, because they are smart but they aren't making enough of their abilities and the opportunities they are given.  I sound off about it in depressive moments; I get into trouble for sounding off about it, I get lambasted in the press, but most of those who saw that story (above all my own students) knew that I was ranting at them because I cared about them.  One or two, I admit, I want to punch in the face (and they loom larger in my impression of the student body than they deserve to).  That aside, I am, they tell me, 'a legend'; when it was fashionable to set up lecturer appreciation societies on Facebook (c.2006) I had the largest and most active by far in my dept - maybe across my university.  For what any of all that's worth.

I used to be competitive about being popular with the students and I won at that game in two different institutions with two very different types of students.  On that front, all bets are off.  But enough own-trumpet-blowing on my part.  If I object to RYL it's not because I am a bad/unpopular lecturer.  Hell, bring it on.  10 years ago I'd probably even have got a chilli or two; 5 years ago I'd probably still have cared.  I just want to make sure we've established that if I don't approve it's not because I am frightened of RYL.  OK?

But I do not approve of RYL.  At all.  Why?  Here's why.

The site makes the bold claim that this is 'the only way' that teaching in the UK will improve.  That is nonsense.  But let me make a positive point first.  The categories of RYL are considerably more thoughtful and useful than those on its older US cousin Rate My Professor (RMP), which include 'Easiness'....  Nonetheless the dreaded hotness chillies are apparently coming soon.  One might legitimately ask what the hell the hotness or otherwise of a lecturer has to do with educational quality or review, or furthering any of the avowedly lofty aims of RYL.

But then those lofty aims are only so much smoke and mirrors.

For one thing, anonymous feedback processes already exist and indeed have done for a long time.  It is ludicrous of Michael Bulman, creator and owner of RYL, to suggest that he is creating something new and valuable.  I have had to deal with anonymous student feedback since the mid-1990s, I think.  Those with free text options are the most useful and I have decried before the move to numerical ratings.  The problem with numerical scores is that though they look precise and scientific they are anything but either of those things.  When we give a student a grade on an essay or exam we have a whole series of grade descriptors against which we have to set the mark.  We have second-markers to check, and externals to oversee the process.  Even then it's not an exact science.  There are, however, no grade descriptors for feedback scores and no checks on the appropriateness with which they are awarded.  That's not to say they are useless; far from it.  Free text, as I said, is more valuable because 'Prof. Grumpy speaks too fast/ is always late/ has Powerpoints with the text too small/ has too many Powerpoint slides/ mumbles/ talks too much in seminars/ talks over the students/ is too negative in his comments', or whatever is more useful than '2/5'.  It is a bit as though we gave essays back with nothing other than the mark on them.  Nonetheless, as an internal check on how well teaching is being done numerical feedback is, while crude, valuable.  The problem comes in turning those scores into overall averages and then league tables.  You aren't comparing like with like.  You aren't comparing the responses of the same set of judges.  What an Oxford student, say, rates as 3 out of 5, a Poppleton student might think of as a 4, or vice versa.  There are different expectations to take into account.  An Oxbridge student might, for instance, mark a lecturer down for being too dirigiste, for not allowing her the space to think and be creative; a student in another institution might mark them highly for directing his thinking so clearly.  As ratings within a department, then, numerical scores are very crude; as the basis of comparison between institutions they are meaningless.

These are just not, as they say, robust data.

Those on RYL are even less robust, because there is no way of checking whether the raters are students who have attended the course - even indeed if they are students at all.  There is no index of what proportion of students on a course think the same way about a lecturer, or the extent to which personal motivations (positive or negative) intrude into the assessment.  Previous reactions have focused on the negative, with good reason, but there are equal and opposites.  A friend of mine (who is, by the way, actually a really good teacher) once had a RMP comment, for example, that read something like "♥ My future husband!"  So much for the intellectual value of whatever comment she wrote about his teaching.  Take a hypothetical example.  Suppose a young male lecturer talks a lot about football and is generally 'blokish' in his humour etc.  He might be rated 9 or 10/10 by some of the male students who like his laddishness, but only 1-2/10 by some of the female students who justifiably feel alienated by it (OK - I've made some problematic, stereotypical comments about gender interests of football but stay with me, fill in some other analogy of your own that might work better at yielding the outcome I suggest).  You might reasonably suppose that those two, rather polarised, subsets would be those most likely to post to RYL, and they unsurprisingly yield an average of 5-6 out of 10.  But suppose that, that one unfortunate trait aside, our man's teaching was actually really good and that, had a full sample responded, his grade would average at 8 out of 10 (or conversely that it was pretty poor and would otherwise have got 4 out of 10).  All these issues make the consumer analogy highly problematic.  The problem is not that a lecturer is not a dancing bear (in Bill Cooke's formulation), but that a lecturer is not a standard mass-produced functional commodity, like a kettle reviewed on Amazon.

This yields yet another point, and one that belies RYL's avowed (but entirely disingenuous) aims.  High or low scores have nothing necessarily to do with educational value.  This develops my point about grade descriptors or their lack.  A low score can mean 'this course was too hard for me to coast on', 'I didn't like this course', 'I didn't want to do this course but I had to and I'm still sulking', 'this lecturer made me work harder than I wanted to', 'this lecturer didn't tell me what I needed to write for the exam', 'I thought he was a bit of an arse' or any number of other things which have nothing at all to do with pedagogical quality.  A high score might mean 'this lecturer is cute', 'this lecturer is funny', 'this lecturer gives high marks', 'this course was really easy', 'this lecturer pretty much told us what was on the exam', 'this lecturer brought us chocolate/bought us all a drink at the end of the course' or any number of other things which equally have nothing to do with educational or pedagogical quality.  Again, students need to beware if they are making choices based on RYL, and in my view they shouldn't make their choices on that basis.   In fact I very much doubt that many will (at least in the quality universities), for the simple reason that most are too smart to do so.  That raises the point of what RYL is really for (on which more later).

In any case, as I have argued before, simple numerical data, league tables and competition do not raise standards.  In my view they can (and frequently do) actually lower standards.  Where these things get taken seriously (as all too often, but let me reiterate that RYL won't be taken seriously), they lead to the production of the sorts of things that generate high scores and thus higher league table positions, not necessarily things of higher actual quality.  Hypothetical analogy.  Supposing the research assessment developed its impact agenda and started to award points for readership/books sold (a concrete, objective datum at least, you might say).  That would certainly lead to Universities pressuring lecturers to write best-sellers - not necessarily (or even likely to be) works of higher intellectual quality.  I've talked before about how KIS data lowers pedagogical standards.  If making courses as easy as possible, on undemanding subjects, telling students what to write, setting easy exams, and giving free cake at each class produced high RYL feedback scores (and believe me it almost certainly would), and that led to universities compelling all teachers to make their courses like that would it raise standards?  No of course it wouldn't.  Because what yields high scores is not necessarily what is good.

As I have discussed before I decided to move away from being a 'dancing bear' (in Bill Cooke's terms) to teaching more self-consciously difficult history that I felt would stretch the students intellectually and represent more of what I thought a history degree would do, and to damn my feedback ratings.  As it happens my students responded  well to that, which is an important point.  But my feedback score did drop.  I'm happy to take a 10% cut in approval to do something more rigorous.  How does RYL acknowledge or respond to that in its disingenuously self-proclaimed crusade for better standards?

There is yet a further point.  Another one that I have made before, I admit.  The consumer analogy is fatally flawed.  Take the kettle example I used above.  Someone who buys a kettle, from Amazon or KettlesRUs.com, or wherever, has (usually) a pretty clear idea of what a kettle is and what they want it to do, frequently on the basis of having used kettles in the past.  Someone who buys a CD (if anyone still does), or whatever the young people do these days, by a particular artiste has an idea of what they like about that artiste's work, or that of others in the genre.  Certainly one hopes they at least know what a CD/download is supposed to do.  On that basis they have a good basis upon which to review the product on-line.  This kettle is rubbish; it gives off a funny smell and took an hour to boil a pint of water is perfectly valid, if true.  This CD is not as good as X's last one, or as Y's current album, is equally valid.  On that basis, a review of a course on the basis that a student didn't enjoy it as much as another course she'd taken is also fair enough - but brings us back to the point about comparing like with like.  But there are strict limits to this.  At the end of the day a lecturer knows better than a student what the important elements of a course are, what the students ought to be taking away from a course and what would be the best way of conveying all that - in the way that a kettle-producer doesn't know better than the kettle-consumer, or even in the way that (to some extent, in some ways) an artiste doesn't know better than his fans.  If you think you know what a, say, history degree should involve, how it should be taught, what subjects it should cover and what weighting different areas should be given, then really you ought not to be taking the degree, but teaching it.  If you expect a degree just to give you what you want then why have a degree?  You want a qualification.  But you want it to be worth something too, right?  To that extent you have to trust the professionals to know better than you.  Once you have a degree (or two) then maybe you're in a position to judge a degree course.  Before then, not.  As I have said before, the point of a degree is to produce someone more capable of judging a degree.  If you were knew enough to judge it at the start, or half way through, it would not be worth doing.  Ultimately it is for the lecturers and the many assurance processes they have to go through to get courses approved to determine the intellectual quality of a degree.  Student feedback has an important role in ensuring the quality of its teaching but numerical scores - as I have been at pains to point out, and have doubtless laboured the point as a result - is a blunt and potentially very misleading tool to use to that end.  And, as I have said, it is most unlikely that any university will take any account of RYL anyway.

And then there is RYL's fatuous claim to be trying to 'redress the balance' between teaching and research.  It is, I have to say, a real shame that so many students evidently think that their lecturers derive more credit for their research than for their teaching, or care so much more about their research.  Some do; that's true.  It is a minority these days, and that is one good outcome of the greater degree of quality audit that the profession has been exposed to over the past 20 years (again making the point that RYL has come too late to make any difference).  To be promoted you have to show that you are doing your job to the required standard in all three areas of the lecturer's job: teaching, research and administration.  You then choose two areas in which you think you have done more than could be expected at your level.  Most lecturers go on teaching and research, a few on teaching and admin (largely because most lecturers enjoy teaching and research more than they enjoy admin) but even those who go on research and admin have to show that they've been doing their job properly as a teacher.  In those cases, if they want to be promoted again, even if they still want to emphasise their roles in research and admin they still have to show that they are teaching effectively.  That, at least, is the case in my university and I don't think that that is atypical.  Ten years ago, once you had your senior lecturership you could indeed ignore everything but research to get promoted but that's really not the case any more.  Teaching feedback is an essential part of the promotion process.  Thus RYL's claim to be rewarding good teaching, and for the first time giving students a voice in that, is, in addition to being flawed and factually erroneous for all the reasons already set out, missing the boat by about ten years.

RYL refers to moving away from valuing lecturers simply for 'churning out research'.  Do you really think that that is all that is involved in university level research?  Churning it out?  Try actually doing some, all ye who can't get a 2,000-word undergraduate procedural essay in on time.  Leaving that aside, though, research is what universities are there to do and it is as important a role as teaching.  Do you really want UK HE to stop producing world-leading research?  Maybe more important than that, though, is the fact that active, high-quality research and good teaching are fundamentally linked.  (As an aside this is especially disheartening when set aside the claims of the purveyors of on-line degrees that students should be lectured to by 'star' media dons rather than ordinary lecturers.)  How can I teach you how to be a good historian if I am not a good historian myself?  How can I teach you about how to research if I don't research?  How can I give you cutting edge insights into historical topics if I am not myself actively involved at that cutting edge?  You can't have this both ways.  You can't demand to be taught by the best and then claim that the best spend too much time 'churning out' research (as if that would be what 'the best' did).  Lecturers only have 24 hours in a day like anyone else, and (believe it or not) have lives outside work (well, most do).  The pressures on that time are increasing all the time, frequently in ways that have little or nothing to do with either good teaching or high-quality research.

As a last point on this issue, the very same government policies that have slashed back funding, forcing Universities to charge fees (and at which you should be directing your ire, not at University teaching staff) have also forced Universities to rely ever more heavily on research funding.  And believe me, that is FAR more lucrative and significant in a departmental budget than fees.  RYL won't make any difference to that.  Most lecturers I know would far rather be teaching than filling in grant applications but in the current financial situation that is what they have to do, for very real reasons relating to the very sustainability of UK universities.  Argument about students being the sole consumers and financiers of universities are simply wrong.  Want to change this?  Pressurise the Labour Party to commit to reversing the government university funding policy and vote for them if they do, and insist they make good on that.  And realise that a top-quality education system with has fair access requires state funding, and that in turn requires taxation, especially of the rich.

Thus far I have set out why the claims made by RYL are misleading, why it won't (and indeed can't) do what it claims.  My objection to the site is so far based mostly on its essential fraudulence.  But you might say it's still pretty harmless even so, especially if no one in any position will take any notice of it (and they won't, any more than US universities take any serious notice of RMP).  It is not useful but it is not harmless.

What, then, is the point of RYL?

Michael Bulman, the owner of RYL, clearly, from his statements on the site, knows nothing about British higher education, as all the above makes clear.  But that does not matter to him.  The purpose of his creation of the site is simply to make money.  By creating a site that will get thousands, indeed millions, of hits he can charge for advertising space on it and make a tidy profit.  Let's be absolutely clear about this.

The purpose of RYL is not to improve HE; it is cynically to cash in on the obscene situation where you, the students, have to pay for your higher education.

For that reason alone, if you actually care about UKHE, you, the students, should shun it.

There are however, lastly, very serious moral or ethical issues about sites like this.  They further the pernicious and spreading culture of bullying, cowardly, anonymous abuse.  Bill Cooke (author of the 'Dancing Bears' piece linked to at the top) argues that it will stop lecturers from giving negative feedback on students.  Actually I think that most lecturers have more guts than that.  I have recently finished teaching the worst 'Barbarian Migrations' class that I have taught in 17 years. They weren't stupid (far from it), they weren't unpleasant (even further from it), they weren't even lazy, overall.  But they seemed just to have no commitment to the course and its requirements, showed no initiative, couldn't be bothered to discuss things or talk in class.  I tried with them; I put a lot of thought into the course organisation and seminar set-up; I held a discussion half way through about how I could improve the class.  To no avail.  So I have said as much on their reports.  Most are mature and self-aware enough to take it on the chin.  At least one, though, is puerile enough to write something nasty on RYL as a result.  So be it.  If I get another class like that I'll do the same.  RYL is not going to stop me calling it how it is.  But I should not, nevertheless, have to take public abuse on the internet for doing so, just for doing what I see as my job: abuse that anyone (such as colleagues in other universities) can read without knowing the context behind it.

But I am an old hand who generally (as I said) gets good feedback (even from that 'Barbarians' class).  Let me give you an example that raises more serious issues.

A few years ago we had a young lecturer who was given the task of giving a survey lecture course to the first-years.  This is a serious and daunting task, with a large audience.  Maybe we shouldn't have saddled her with it, though everyone has to start somewhere, and it's the sort of thing I had to do, back in the mists of time, in my first job.  I guess one or two lecturers are brilliant from the off but most aren't.  Even the best are a bit rubbish at first, as they'll admit - even if they tend to be rubbish in an entertaining or endearing way (as I hope may have been the case with me) rather than a boring or incompetent way.  But one thing you often do when you start is to have a script and read it.  It is a prop for confidence and it makes sure you stay to time and on the point.  But it also (usually) means you have far too much to get across.  And so it was.  Unfortunately this lecturer was also up against (in the other survey courses) experienced and popular lecturing old hands.  I had to review the feedback on this course and it was vicious.  Unfair, rude, unhelpful, destructive, sexist.  Indeed I really think that a male lecturer who did the same would not have faced the same abuse.  It was, in short, bullying; bullying a bright young woman starting out on her career.  This was bad enough in internal feedback.  Imagine what it would be like if those students had published all that on the internet for all to see.  Apart from potentially harming employment or career prospects, how would it feel to read all that about yourself?  To adapt the famous quote of (I think) George Bernard Shaw, 90% of lecturers will admit to liking reading gushing praise about themselves from students, and 10% will lie.  Similarly no one apart from the super-thick-skinned likes reading bad feedback or rude comments about themselves, even if 1% of the total return, even if manifestly unfair, even if patently written by someone who never turned up and did no work.  So this sort of thing could easily drive someone with great promise out of the entire educational sector.  Indeed some of the students started a Facebook group that had that abuse about that lecturer on it - which I shut down pronto.  The problem with the attitude that the anonymous, 'drive by' abuse culture fosters is that is is one wherein one does not think about how comments affect the recipient.  It fosters the idea that you have no responsibility.  These are all very bad things.  The fact that it goes on all over the place, from comments strands and Facebook through to Amazon does not make it right or justify the production of yet more.

The Union should provide legal assistance to back action to have lecturers removed from the site, thus making it even more meaningless.  It should also sue Bulman's ass for any even remotely bullying or offensive material.  I doubt it will do either.

But otherwise, by way of response, how about 'Rate Your Students'?  Lecturers could (anonymously of course) name the students on their courses and grade them on their punctuality, attendance, ability to write, manners, reliability, performance in class.  Maybe they could add free text comments on their personalities and defects, and maybe a chilli or two on their general 'hotness'?  There would be every bit as much justification for this.  We educate people who then go out into the wide world and are employed.  Thus the employers of our students are 'stakeholders' (in awful New Labour Speak) in UK Higher Education and deserve candid information to be made freely available about their potential employees that goes beyond anodyne results break-downs and reference-ese. The people who - though they may not pay the fees - pay much else towards students' education need also to be sure that the students are working hard enough.  Those who make the loans deserve to know whether they are backing a sound investment.  And education is a two-way street.  Students deserve to know whether their fellow students in a class are going to be collaborative and supportive or whether they are going to be the sort that sit in seminars never saying a thing, who make no contribution to class discussions or group work - in other words, who piggy-back on everyone else's hard work.  It would be the only way of raising standards among UK students.  Why not?  Additionally, it'd get loads of hits as a site - maybe more than RYL - and generate a decent advertising revenue.  [Get in touch Mr Bulman.]  But can you imagine what the students' response to that would be?!  But why the outrage?  If you're opposed to being publicly, anonymously rated it must be because you're a shit, lazy student who's only at university to drink and get laid, right?

Contact Hours: An Explanation

[Because of the Daily Heil article published today which specifically mentions my department and complains about 'scandalous' low amounts of teaching, I thought I'd move this (originally from 25/06/12) back to the top of the page.

The management of Poppleton University managed to score a spectacular own goal in any case.  All universities have guidelines about not over-running, about finishing before the hour is up to allow students to leave before the next class is due to arrive, and about not starting bang on the hour to allow students with classes some way away to arrive.  Poppleton made the mistake of being honest about this and owning up to the fact that its lecture hour starts at 20 past and ends at 10 past.  Thus, immediately all our hours are reduced by 10 minutes compared with less honest institutions.  Students on my 2nd-year course on 'The end of the Roman World' course receive 17 lectures and 8 1-hour discussion groups, 25 hours in all.  They do 2 such courses a term.  However, thanks to the management's foul-up, these 50 timetabled hours are slashed down to 41 hours and 40 minutes.  Students with the same tuition at, say, UCL, will be classed as receiving 8 hours & 20 minutes (20%) more, although in fact they'll be getting the same.  This, alas, is how the system works...

See also here.]

For students, who like to parrot their parents, who like to parrot journalists, who don't know what they're talking about but who do know how to arrange numbers into a sequence from low to high.  And let's face it it makes good copy; you can always get some rent-a-mouth to make some comment damning humanities 'dons' as lazy - and any defence of the situation can be derided as elitist.

The reason why science students get several times as many contact hours as humanities students is because their degree requires them to be taught different things in different ways.  Let me explain...

If I were to model my teaching on science teaching, it would go like this.  I would give one or two hours of lectures about why a particular book was written, what question it had set out to confront, what conclusions it had come up with and why that mattered, and then telling the students in detail how to read the book.  The student would then get five more hours sitting in a room reading the same book, being supervised by a post-graduate or post-doctoral tutor whilst s/he did so, to see if s/he came up with the same answer as I did.  

This, as you can see, is not really what anyone (outside the intellectual drill-régimes of the public schools) would expect of a humanities education.  The science student requires to be taught particular (different) things in ways that require (for intellectual as well as basic health and safety* reasons) different teaching methods and a certain level of supervision, and the aim of the 'experiment' is rather different (at least at this sort of level).  The point of a humanities course is that the student does his/her 'experiments' on his/her own from a range of texts (not necessarily all the same ones) in the library or in his/her room, both before getting the lecturer's thoughts on the overall field and again (and principally) before the seminar where the topics are discussed.  And the point is not necessarily to get the same sort of result as the lecturer.  It is about how to think, not what you need to learn.  Such unsupervised 'experiment' ought - if the student is conscientious - amount to about the same time as the science student spends in labs and doing his/her background reading.

Clarification: Just to avoid any tedious exchanges of e-mails or comments let me make it clear that I am not in any way saying that science is somehow easier, or that it's all just about learning stuff and getting right answers.  What I am saying - and I'm not a scientist so I may be a bit off the mark - is that as I understand it a certain control and supervision of the experimental process and the correctness of procedure is rather more important (or at least important in a different way) in sciences than it is in the Humanities.  I hope you see my general point, whatever its minor infelicities. I have nothing but respect for scientists ... except when they start dabbling in History and standing on their doctoral credentials when they do so, that is.  That, I admit, annoys me.

A related point.  Each contact hour is not the same.  One hour in a lecture with 100 students is not the same as one hour in a group of sixteen students in a seminar, which is not the same as four 15-minute one-to-one sessions.  So totals of hours in league-table format are entirely misleading.  Furthermore, institutions can manipulate these figures.  Our two most prestigious institutions offer huge numbers of lectures a week, each of which they add into the figure for 'contact hours'.  But they are voluntary and only a fraction of students attend.  Their only compulsory hours are the two or three hours (if that) of tutorials.

The whole contact hours issue is a graphic example of how the mantra of 'choice' leads, through the production of league tables, to a lowering of standards.  As I have argued before, the obsession with league tables leads not to a raising of quality but to the generation of more of the sorts of output that, numerically, affect league-table positions.  For instance, 10 hours per week of lectures with 100-200 other students in the lecture theatre is not 'better' than six hours of small group teaching, or three hours of one-to-one teaching (leaving aside the facts that no one gets that any more and my own reservations about the 'inherent quality of tutorials).  But - oh dear - only 6 (or 3) hours a week!  That's not going to look good in the tables.  It won't do, say the university suits when they see that the University of Just Down the Road offers 10 hours (8 hours of lectures and 2 of seminars) a week.  Down comes the directive to increase hours - but how to do so in a way that teaches effectively (students - as above - have to work to prepare for seminars and they only have so many hours in the week) without overloading students or teaching staff?  'We don't want more work, we want more hours', a Poppleton University English student is reported to have said...  The solution: more lectures!  Now - I like lectures (they're what I'm best at) and I don't think they are as useless as many people think, but I'm not going to say they are better for teaching than seminars.

Oh yes.  While we're on the subject of comparison, the reason that science students get more resources than arts/humanities students for their fees is because their tuition costs more.  Before the current government's crazed schemes, the government paid universities three times the subsidy it paid for an arts/humanities student for each science student.  Because they cost more to teach.  That funding difference no longer applies but it is, as it was, wrong to charge students different fees for different subjects (or you'd kill off the sciences for one thing - although for me it matters more that you would simply be penalising students for being interested in one subject rather than another).  And £9k is not very much more than cost price, by the way, once everything is factored in.

Thank you for reading.

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* For instance, if I set a student to go and read (presumably in her student room) a chapter or two of, say, Chris Wickham's Framing of the Early Middle Ages as part of her preparation for a seminar I can do so safe in the knowledge that the odds of her blowing up the Saint Frithfroth's Street Halls of Residence as a result of misunderstanding one of Wickham's foot-notes range from slim to zero.  This might not be the case with many a chemistry or physics assignment.  I suppose the student might drop Wickham's 990-page tome on her (or someone else's) foot, or head, and suffer consequent injury, but my point is - well you see my point.

Gove's School History Reforms "Debated" Again

First as farce...

OK - so the original title of this post was too flippant a way of drawing your attention my thoughts on the interchange you can find here and here between the historian to whom we at HotE like, for legal reasons, to refer as ‘Fire-His-Ass’ (hereafter FHA) and the historian to whom we at HotE like, for legal reasons, to refer as Regius Prof, or Sir Regius Prof as he now likes to be known, on the subject of Michael 'Pob' Gove's reforms of the schools history curriculum. So I've changed it to something more 'vanilla'.  It is, after all, a pretty serious subject.

But anyway, now that I’ve drawn a bit of traffic and attention, let me meditate on the implications of all this for History.  As it stands this all looks (especially, I imagine, to outsiders) more than a little bit pathetic: like a pissing contest between two overgrown schoolboys.  You have to think that if this is the best that modern history can do the discipline really is in a parlous state.  You could say that the fact that this became an exchange at all was a victory for FHA (see here for an analogy).  Regular readers of this blog will know that I have quite a lot of time for Sir Regius even if, as in this episode, he sometimes makes you want to give him a good shake.  The British Medical Association, I believe, tells us it’s dangerous to shake small children who become vexatious but I’m not sure what its stance is on Regius Professors of History, even where, as here, the boundary between the two categories becomes a little blurred.  Really, though, you do wish that sometimes he’d just forego his desire to have the last word and rise above the provocation offered by FHA who, as a cleverly commercially-manufactured, million-selling crowd-pleaser is surely little more than History’s answer to Justin Bieber or, perhaps better, given his age, origins and likely lack of consequence, The Bay City Rollers.  [Actually that doesn't really work as I suspect it'd be the parents rather than the teeny-boppers that would mostly be into him; we'll come back to glib analogies.] After all, if you read his initial piece in the London Review of Books and compare it with FHA’s response, Sir Regius wins hands down.  His response to FHA’s goading only undermines that.

So this was never going to be a clash of intellectual heavyweights but it descends to such a level that I suggest the referee steps in and disqualifies the pair of them for bringing the game into disrepute.  You might say I’m in no position to criticise anyone on this count, and you’d be right, but then I’m not a Regius Professor or a knight of the realm and I never will be.  Nor am I a Harvard professor with a senior research post at Jesus College Oxford, and nor will I ever be.  How does it make any sense at all to judge competence to think about these things by the number of popular books sold or TV appearances, let alone the number of school-aged children?  If we go by the first two then we’d have to proclaim Andrew Roberts and Dan Snow as the greatest living historians, and then God help us all.  As to the third, when did fecundity become a historical qualification?  I suspect that all this – like those academics who feature pictures of their children on the web-pages – comes down to a statement that, believe it or not, I’ve had sex and here’s the proof.  By those lights – I doubt I’ve sold even 10,000 books, only have a personal chair in a provincial university, never went to Oxbridge, have never had a TV series and am a mere divorcee whose loins have, to date at least, proved fruitless – I’m a nobody (perhaps there is something in it after all…) and I doubt either of them gives a damn what I think, probably rightly too.  That said, I suspect that my first (and worst) book may have had more influence upon my own little corner of the discipline, and the way people think about the practice of history and archaeology within it, than their oeuvre has thus far had on their (admittedly rather larger and more populous) patches.  On the other hand, my father was a history teacher so I do have some (though maybe not much) experience of what professionals in that field might think.  I also like to think that I am rather prettier than either of them but let’s let that pass.  [That last bit was irony by the way; I know that some people who read my words aren’t good at spotting that.]

This debate, if we can even call it that, barely reaches the dizzy intellectual heights of a playground ‘I may be rubbish at football but at least I don’t smell’ exchange, but it brings out a crucial issue.  It takes us to the heart of the crisis facing history.  When thinking about raising what I have called ‘the siege’ this gives us a choice (but in detail I’ll have to come back to that another time).  It may not be a proper choice, as both Sir Regius and FHA are conservative in their views of history (the difference being whether the c in conservative is upper or lower case).  The way they do history does not differ, fundamentally; it's just that Sir Regius is (in my view) rather considerably better at it.  But there's an important choice to be made all the same.  There is a vital difference between them and it behoves everyone with any sort of claim to being interested in history to choose on which side of that difference they stand.  As will become clear, my view is that (although, clearly, they don’t) serious, committed historians ought to take their stance on the side of Sir Regius, for all its eventual limitations.  My view will come as no surprise, given that I have made – on this very blog – many points similar points to his.  This is not to say that I don’t think there are two or three points that Sir Regius makes in his LRB article that are fundamentally mistaken (one or two examples of incoherence are pointed up in the letters), but there’s no space to delve into those.

On the one hand, FHA’s view (backed by Gove) is that history is sequential fact-learning (they call it ‘narrative’ but let’s be clear) focused upon Britain.  Sir Regius on the other hand supports the status quo and the relative stress laid upon source criticism, imagination, empathetic exercise and so on, in which the wider world features at least as strongly.  The latter, says FHA, has been a disaster, although no evidence is given as to why.  All we are offered is sneering assertion, anecdote and hearsay from people (unsurprisingly) who share his viewpoint (e.g. an elitist diatribe by an inexperienced teacher in reactionary, Gove-founded rag Standpoint), rounded off with the conclusion that anyone who disagrees doesn’t have a view worth listening to.  This, I should say, is pretty typical of males of FHA’s socio-educational background and intellectual formation: they argue by swaggering assertion, shiny, glib (but paperweight) analogy and a supreme self-confidence born of the notion (drummed into them from the age of eight or so) that their views are inherently superior to everyone else’s because they themselves are, by virtue of their socio-educational background, superior to everyone else.  Ironically, this eventually makes them far worse historians than everyone else because a little self-doubt is essential to good history.  FHA is a fine example of all that (as is the historian to whom, for legal reasons, we at HotE frequently refer as Gussie Finknottle); Sir Regius rather less so (however bullish he may seem, his irresistible urge to answer back to every criticism speaks, to my mind, of a nagging and persistent insecurity in spite of all his considerable and well-deserved success, which is kind of sweet really).  Be all that as it may, the only evidence proffered in support of the Gove/FHA contention comes in the comments to Sir Regius’ LRB piece where one of the devisers of the Schools History Project (SHP) proclaims it a failure because of a flight away from the subject among students given a choice.  I am unconvinced either that this is, in itself, a disaster or that the solution is to pander to what excites teenagers.  Is the solution to the flight of teenagers away from the lab sciences the introduction of more experiments featuring bad egg gas and explosions?  I’m not a scientist but I expect the answer is no.

Let us consider FHA’s position.  Note, first, that everyone who does not share his position, or who defends the current situation is ‘politicised’ or 'partisan', as though his own position isn’t.  This has long been a standard tactic of demagogues of the Right, to berate educators or other holders of office as ‘politicised’ or 'partisan', essentially for not being politicised or partisan in the way they’d like.  The conservative or Conservative view, you see, is not political; it’s not Right, it’s just right: the way things should be.  This would be undercut by FHA’s desire to disrupt the status quo with a radical move back to the alleged good old days, pre-SHP, but here he makes a currently not untypical move by the Right (and pseudo-Left), which is to denigrate and thus, in a way, politically decentre, the status quo as ‘the establishment’.  The move attempts to recoup a sort of fundamental conservatism even while proposing radical, reactionary change.  Note how FHA scorns Oxbridge ivory towers, in spite of being an independent-school-and-Oxford-educated beneficiary of all the advantages (including, let it be said, access to popular media) that that background brings; in spite of having taught at Oxbridge for most of his career and retaining a grace-and-favour post at Jesus College (ironically, Sir Regius’ alma mater).

What Gove and FHA offer is narrative and fact.  I have argued before on this blog that factual historical narrative does not teach you ‘how we got where we are’ or help one to understand one’s place in the world, and that it is not ‘relevant’, as relevance is usually understood; there’s no need for me to repeat that argument.  The points to stress are that any narrative depends upon selection and choice (and is thus politically implicated) and that no facts, historical or otherwise, exist independently of language.  This means both that the language we choose to describe facts (‘victory’ or ‘defeat’, for example) is not neutral and that the function that facts fulfil within narrative depends, as in linguistic syntax, upon their juxtapositions to other facts, the choice of the mode of the narrative, and so on.  I’ve made these points before (they’re hardly novel anyway).  Simple narrative is not – it cannot be – politically neutral.  The national narrative – and this is clear from Gove’s own speech – is predicated upon being, in itself, explanation, and upon the notion that modern Britain is somehow the best of all possible worlds.  Similar points undermine the highly incoherent notion of ‘cultural literacy’, supported by Gove and other right-wingers, and ‘national memory’ but there’s no space to go into that.  It is impossible to claim that a return to a focus on British historical narrative is anything other than shot through with politically-laden ideas or that those ideas are not precisely the ones that Gove’s opponents accuse them of being.  The implications of any attempt to claim either of these things will emerge below.

Why does it matter to study British history?  “Surely”, says FHA, “they [Sir Regius and his ilk] can't sincerely think it's acceptable for children to leave school (as mine have all done) knowing nothing whatever about the Norman conquest, the English civil war or the Glorious Revolution, but plenty (well, a bit) about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement?”  Surely.  Note the rhetorical strategy.  It’s there too in a response by another Cambridge professor (let’s, for legal reasons, call him ‘Grave Robin’) to Sir Regius’ LRB article: “I doubt that anyone [anyone] interested in history, professionally or otherwise, thinks that the purpose of studying the past is to acquire skills, let alone that what Evans describes as ‘the transmission and regurgitation of “facts”’ is unimportant.”  Let me say, first, that I don’t see any reason at all why it is ipso factobad to know ‘nothing about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution but plenty … about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement’; at least I don’t see that leaving school knowing nothing about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution but plenty about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement is any worse than leaving school knowing nothing about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement but plenty about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution.  The only argument in Gove’s or FHA’s favour is the ‘cultural literacy’ one, that not knowing about the facts they list puts a student at a disadvantage in a culture where political and other participation requires the ability to talk knowledgably about the Norman Conquest, etc.  But what if we want to create a culture where it’s important to be able to talk knowledgably about the civil rights movement or the New Deal (no prizes for guessing why the latter wouldn’t be on FHA’s list!).  Even speaking as a specialist in pre-modern history I have to say I’d rather the latter culture than the former, but I’d prefer, to either, a culture where people had the skills to be able to think critically about a historical event and look up and assess the facts of the matter, rather than just thinking that fact-knowing was all there was to civil or political engagement.  So, even as someone interested in history, at a professional level, actually I most certainly do see the fundamental purpose of a historical education as the acquisition of skills (maybe Robin and I differ over what is a skill) and I do see the regurgitation of facts as unimportant.  So, FHA, we surely do, and, Robin, you doubt wrongly.  And?

Then the defence becomes, via the historian to whom, for legal reasons, we will refer as Long John, author of that mighty historiographical work British History for Dummies (a tome curiously absent from his Anglia Ruskin web-site but of which I was the reader – you can fill in your own ‘target audience focus group’ gag here) - just, you might say, the man to advise the Tory Party - that ‘the kids’ want to know what happened.  They like stories; they want to be entertained or excited.  Sure, but I return to my science analogy.  Can you imagine a lab science curriculum based upon considerations like these?  It would involve the listing of things that happen, a descent to the experiments with the most dramatic results.  Add X to Y and … Bang!  Woo!  Cool!  So what?  You could make an analogous, and equally coherent, argument (to FHA’s about history-teaching) that all ‘hard science’ teaching should focus on the learning of results: knowing what happens when you mix X and Y, add A to B, or do Z in fashion C.  It’d be useful, practically.  It’d certainly give students some orientation in the world they inhabit.  But science (I’m not a scientist as I keep saying but I don’t think I’m way off-beam here) is about knowing principles, knowing why these things happen and how you’d test the notion that they do, or that they necessarily do, not just that they do.  The question one then has to ask of Gove, FHA and the rest, quite apart from querying their assumption that history teaching of the current kind is necessarily not exciting or interesting (and Sir Regius in a letter replying to the replies to his article – yes, again – provides decent evidence to the contrary), is why they think that historical education should be less than scientific? 

In my view, one produces politically-engaged citizens through teaching general principles and the skills of finding out if or why, of testing the extent to which, those principles are valid, not by drumming into them a series of events whose importance is held to be self-evident in a story which is explanation and whose justification is the idea that the present is the best of all possible worlds.  Unlike the author of the Standpoint piece, I just cannot see the notion that teachers challenge supposedly eternal canonical ‘truths’ in ‘progressive’ education as a bad thing (it’s telling that ‘progressive’ is employed a dirty word).   Grave Robin feels he’s scored a real point by pointing out that this Tory view is in fact … wait for it … a ‘Whig’ view of history (a point that Sir Regius had made in any case) but it’s a point that goes nowhere except to the curious counter-factual that if we had a view of history, now, that was based around Tory views of the eighteenth century it would be – get this – different.  Blinding.  The drumming of a standard factual narrative into schoolchildren will not produce critically-engaged citizens, it will produce uncritical acceptance of the status quo as the inevitable and best outcome of ‘our island story’ – that’s why the Right like the idea.  Would the ludicrous parody of a science curriculum I set out earlier produce better scientists or citizens better equipped to deal with the world around them?  I’m not a scientist but I expect the answer is no.

So let’s return to the Glorious Revolution.  How would knowing about it make you a better citizen than knowing about Rosa Parks and MLK?  What on earth is there in learning about the English Civil War, let alone the Norman Conquest, that would make you a more engaged citizen?  OK, next time the issue of the Divine Right of Kings or the legality of levying Ship Money without parliamentary consent become political hot potatoes, the next time that the King of Norway and the Duke of Normandy team up for a cunningly simultaneous invasion of England, we’ll be looking to you for political and strategic advice.  For Gove/FHA and co., there are two responses available to this admittedly facetious point.  One (the better) is that the significance of an event transcends its factual specifics; that it’s not the what but the how and why that matter.  The other is that the importance of the events of 1066, 1642 or 1688 consists simply in the fact that they, in and of, themselves led to the situation we find ourselves in – in Britain – today, whereas the civil rights movement (rather arguably) didn’t.

Consider the first response.  It produces, in return, two questions.  First: how does one evaluate issues of how and why without source criticism?  Second: if the significance of knowing about 1066, 1642 or 1688 does not consist in the specifics of those events, if its value is more than simply learning a triumphal ‘island story’ narrative, if its role in forming a politically-engaged and responsible citizenry transcends the event itself, then why learn about that particular event rather than the end of the Roman Empire or the coronation of Charlemagne or the revolutions of 1848?  If there is a transcendent value to the study of events, is it not in explaining and evaluating them and their significance?  If one is to explain an event, rather than just learn it, then one has to question the idea that it simply followed on naturally from the preceding event in the sequence – that other things were possible.  Thus one questions narrative as explanation (and thus, at least implicitly, the importance of narrative context).  If one wants to evaluate an event, rather than just learn it, one has to weigh up its positive and negative effects - unless of course one simply wants to teach children that all things are for the best that lead to the best of all possible worlds.  Weighing up positives and negatives, critically, implies looking at the problems of the sources (or ‘identifying bias’ in the awful language of school history that we have to spend so long trying to exorcise at university): source criticism.  If one wants to get away from a simple depersonalised history of institutions or Great Men and Battles (and note that the triumphal island story does rather minimise any sort of attention to gender), evaluating the consequences of an event involves an exercise in trying to think how people at the time, of different sorts, experienced them – unless, as I keep saying, it’s all for the best in our celebratory island story.  Doing that means an appeal to a shared humanity, in other words an exercise in imagination and empathy.

What I am arguing, then, is that the FHA/Gove/Long John approach cannot logically remain within the terms of its own rhetoric - unless it aims actively to suppress critical evaluation, and/or unless it aims no higher than the promulgation of historical facts, whether as an empty-headed Lang-esque series of lame puns or a Deary-esque sequence of gory factoids, training history students to be no more than prurient raconteurs, or as a triumphal, teleological nationalist narrative, unless – in other words – it does exactly what its critics accuse it of doing; unless – in fine – it ceases not merely to be a historical education but an education of any kind.

Let me put that another way.  Unless it adopts the second response listed above to the question of how the value of knowing about an event transcends its factual detail (that the importance of the events of 1066, 1642 or 1688 consists in the simple fact that, in and of themselves, they led to the situation we find ourselves in – in Britain – today whereas, say, the civil rights movement didn’t) and thus admits to the charges its opponents lay before it, the Gove/FHA idea of school history cannot logically remain within its own rhetorical parameters.  The moment it tries to transcend the accusation of narrow, teleological, triumphalist, nationalist fact-learning, it transgresses – it cannot but transgress – onto the territory, aims, ideals and principles of the ‘progressive’ SHP history-teaching that it claims to despise.  The moment it claims to be other than what its opponents accuse it of being, it empties its own rhetoric of any and all content and reveals itself as what it is: a narrow-minded reactionary attempt to play politics by pandering to the lowest common-denominator amongst Daily Mail columnists (like FHA himself) and the more gullible elements of their readership.

The reason why schools history prepares pupils so badly for university history has nothing to do with the current curriculum or the ways the subject is taught, or by whom.  The problem lies in political interference in schools and in the examination processes that that has engendered.  There are great history teachers, there are mediocre ones, and there are terrible ones, as in any other subject.  I had a mix at my school, from wonderful to dreadful.  The problem came (and here things do get ironic for the FHA view) with the Thatcherite and sub-Thatcherite (New Labour) mantra of choice.  The desire to ‘enable’ parents as consumers and give them a choice of local schools led to the production of league tables according to exam results (everyone knows how problematic those tables are).  Once that happened then – naturally and indeed rightly – teachers demanded more transparency about the marking of examination papers, how marks were awarded and so on.  That has led in turn to the current situation where teachers have to teach to the test, where they have to drill their students in mark-scoring.  That leaves the legacy that we have to deal with in universities, a deep-seated, ingrained belief that there will be measurable ways to get specific marks.  Recently I was asked (not by a bad or lazy student) ‘how many historians do I need to cite to get the best mark?’  Students write in specific ways because they are drilled into thinking that they will get them marks.  None of any of that has anything at all to do with the ‘progressive’ history curriculum.  It certainly wouldn’t get any better under Gove’s reforms.  What would really improve schools history would be to remove political interference from it.  But, as Sir Regius says, that’s unlikely ever to happen.  History is (or it ought to be) dangerous.  I tell prospective students that a history degree is (or ought to be) three years of thinking dangerously.  FHA benefited from precisely that, you might say.  It’s a shame he now wants to make it so safe for everyone else.

Open Access and its surprising dangers

I'm moved to write this by this blog piece from the States.  I comment 'be careful what you wish for'.  Why?

The UK government announced some time ago that it was going to insist that academic research was made open access.  Open access sounds like a great idea and - in principle - it is.  Using this sort of vocabulary is doubtless a sure-fire way of getting people outside academia to support it.

Many journals charge exorbitant prices for on-line access to their articles; the authors, editors and peer-reviewers of said articles get paid nothing for their work but are compelled to participate by the usual demands of academic life, so it's a pretty good situation for the publishers.  Now, it must also be said that publishers do invest in the printing, presentation and marketing of the journals and thus spend money on the diffusion of learning.  Thus it's reasonable for them to want to make a return on that investment.  Whether the sums they actually make are justifiable is quite another issue.

What the UK government wants to do is to pass the costs of instantly-available on-line publication on to the authors of the articles themselves.  A conservative (ahem) estimate of the costs is £1450 per article.

There are considerable drawbacks to this (of which more anon).  But one might also like to ask the following questions:

• Who, outside academia, really wants to read most scholarly journal articles immediately?
• If Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) get to decide which scholars and what research they underwrite in terms of access costs, what effect will that have on freedom of research?
• How will HEIs and departments decide who gets the funding?
• How will young scholars finishing their PhDs or in temporary teaching-heavy contracts get the funding for the publications they will need to get employed (or, perhaps, promoted)?
• Will HEIs fund publications by temporary staff likely to move elsewhere?  It's very unlikely.
• Will publication only take place if grants have been secured to cover the costs of publication?  (Most scholars who publish in history journals are not in receipt of such grants, and the volume of grants available would hardly cover even the top-quality output within history alone.)
• What if future research assessments only count work published in journals participating journals?
• What if HEIs only count such publication in promotion procedures?
• How do we decide which are the best journals?

Already a raft of dubious journals has appeared, hoping to make money out of the government's proposed reforms.  You can read a list of these here.

Pressure on publishers to reduce significantly the costs of on-line access to journals and articles, especially pressure to reduce such costs - seriously and incrementally - in line with the date of the journal/essay, would be a far more reasonable way of ensuring public access to funded research.

Past experience does not, in any case, suggest that publishers will seriously reduce their charges for on-line access.  Once again, the UK government is acting simply to provide more money to their friends in business, albeit under a smoke-screen of liberal-sounding 'public access'.  As is so often the case, this is a 'useful hard science' model into which everyone else is being shoe-horned.  Or - and I suspect that, as with Impact, this is more likely to be the case - it is what is thought to be a 'useful hard-science' model, which in fact 'useful hard scientists' don't like very much and are as opposed to as much as anyone else, into which everyone is being shoe-horned.

As it is, Willett's proposals run a very high risk of reducing the quality, quantity, range and freedom of academic research in the humanities.

I have been critical in the past of the Royal Historical Society's fence-sitting with regard to past developments and policies, such as Impact or the AHRC's move towards prioritising funding into Cameron's spurious 'Big Society' non-idea.  But Colin Jones, out-going president of the RHS, has written an excellent open letter on the subject which very clearly sets out the dangers to the academy (and thence to the public who might be interested in the results of its research).  This touches on a whole range of other problems I haven't mentioned.  You could (and should) read it here and should circulate it as widely as possible.