‘Okay, everyone. The essay is due at the end of the week. Are there any questions? Is anybody unsure of what they are doing?’
Silence.
‘Any questions at all? Anything you’d like to share or debate with the seminar group?’
More silence
‘Anybody concerned about essay writing style? (Silence) Anything?’
Silence.
Then, a young woman’s voice to my left: belligerent in tone. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Okay’, I say, ‘What are you unsure about?’
‘I don’t understand anything.’
This is quite an admission but I ask, ‘Is there anything specific you want me to explain?’
‘Look, I don’t understand anything that you’re talking about.’
I might be in trouble here. What if I’ve spent the past three months communicating nothing to anybody? I need to recover the situation. So I ask, ‘Have you been reading any of the relevant literature referred to in your module guide?’
‘Aye, I got that book you told us to read. The black one.’
‘I’m sorry, what book is that?’
She’s becoming exasperated now, rolling her eyes. ’The black one. The one with the colours on the front; you know, the orange and yellow and red colours. I don’t know what it’s called.’
Suddenly, the dreadful truth dawns on me and I cry, ‘You haven’t even read the fucking title of the book!’
I went to university to arrest my spiraling, downward mobility and remedy my chronic ignorance. It was the mid-90s, I was in my mid-20s and the student grant hadn’t yet been abolished, so university was a realistic option for a prospective student from a working class background who didn’t have clue what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Today I still don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life but at least I’ve an arse in my trousers (as my Granny would say) and I’m less ignorant than I was before university admissions in 1994. That said, were I ignorant and poor today I can categorically say I would not look to university to improve my circumstances. In fact, I’ve had a thought so heretical that I blush to think of it: should working class students boycott university?
Even though I’m both a beneficiary and (in principle) a supporter of widening access to university, I can see that successive governments have handled the extension of higher education badly and their motives are suspect. Swelling student numbers has not been met with a commensurate increase in staff and resources, and this has, of course, had a detrimental effect on the quality of the education provided in HE. It is also an indication that the arrival of students from non-traditional backgrounds (in the jargon) has announced a fundamental change in the experience and role of universities. Institutions that once produced the ruling class are today full of riff-raff like me and that changes everything.
The previous Conservative administration saw in universities a away of massaging the unemployment figures but New Labour has grander plans and reckons higher education can engineer economic prosperity and facilitate greater social mobility. To achieve this it has made higher education subservient to business and encouraged students to behave like consumers, neither of which has done anything for the intellectual life of universities.
According to Clare Fox, marketisation has ‘turned education on its head’. Writing in the Macdonaldisation of Higher Education, she points out the fundamental change in tutor/student relations.
Students are no longer supplicants who must demonstrate that they deserve to be accepted as apprentices by the most advanced minds and researchers in the field. Rather students are the masters that must be flattered and cajoled by humble lecturers who are warned that students will take their “custom” to other educational institutions if they are not satisfied with the marked they receive or the way they are taught.
Asserting the authority of teachers isn’t very cool these days but it is undeniable that lecturers know better than their students. Consumers are always right but students can’t be. Students by definition should be seeking enlightenment, so to stand the student/lecturer relationship on its head is to disregard expertise, knowledge and learning, and replace it with the unending quest for the Holy Grail of value for money. Government and university Vice-Chancellors seem sanguine about this but it means that universities may carry the name ‘higher education’ but none of the substance .
The key to facilitating this lamentable state of affairs is fees, which have not only turned students into consumers but landed them in extraordinary debt. Students who started university in 2007 are likely to owe more than £17, 500, according to the BBC last year, and pressure is growing for fees to rise further.
I can’t help but suspect that there is more to student loans than paying for an education. According to Ben Funnell debt is ‘capitalism’s dirty little secret’: Writing the wake of the credit crunch in the Financial Times in June 2009 ‘excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.’ So, that’s why young people are saddled with such debt even before they start their working lives, to keep the rich in the style they have become accustomed to.
But the genius of the system doesn’t stop there. If you are a student from a working class background that has got yourself in hock to pay for a higher education of dubious value, don’t expect access to any of the leading professions. A recent government report published on 21 July 2009 suggests that careers in law, medicine, teaching and journalism are often closed to students from working-class backgrounds. And it’s not the only report grappling with how and why working class students are disadvantaged in the graduate labour market.
According to education expert, Prof Alison Wolf, we’ve reached the stage where universities are producing far more graduates than the labour force can provide for. And study after study shows that the number of ‘over-qualified’ workers has been increasing because as the number of graduates increase so does the number of ‘graduate’ jobs – jobs that in truth require no more qualifications and skills than they did when performed by non-graduates.
So, crap, intellectually vacuous courses, massive debt and a job at the end of it all that previously asked only for clean drivers license but now demands a degree. It’s hard not to conclude that there is something rotten about the wedding of education to economic imperatives, which is why I’m wondering should working class students boycott university?
The BBC reports that Lord Peter Mandelson wants to encourage students to behave more like consumers. In reply to a question from a delegate at CBI higher education summit in London, he said:
As students who go into higher education pay more, they will expect more and are entitled to receive more in terms, not just of the range of courses, but in the quality of experience they receive during their time in the higher education system. If there is a degree of passivity then, I hope, that without rejoining our student population to take to the barricades, that they become pickier, choosier and more demanding consumers of the higher education experience.
…’take to the barricades’? No fear of that Mandy. Most consumers are more inclined to dawdle to the check-outs. It’s citizens that ‘take to barricades’. The pacific stupidity of consumerism prevents any such revolutionary impulses among students these days.
This caught my eye recently. Earlier this year students in Manchester set up a hotline to contact if lecturers were more than 10 minutes late.
This is a text service provided by the students’ union at Manchester Metropolitan University that allows disgruntled students to snitch on lecturers. President of the university’s students’ union, Nicola Lee, said, “I don’t think its disrespectful for them to say that their lecturer is late, it will just improve relations.”
How will this improve relations? Students already have a number of ways in which to make representations about the quality of their education. Complaining about individual lecturers by text message is nothing short of Orwellian.
The university’s deputy vice-chancellor Kevin Bonnet let the proverbial cat out of the bag when he said, ”Students have a voice and it is worth remembering they are adults and that they have the right to speak up. I am resistant to the idea that students are consumers but their families are paying a lot of money.” Kevin Bonnet may be ‘resistant’ to it but students increasingly think of themselves as consumers and the consequences for student/tutor relations, I suspect, will be dire.
I don’t doubt that there are lecturers who are habitually late for lessons, or that have a laissez-faire approach to their work generally. But they’re a minority and the consequences of legislating for this small group of shysters is that you further alienate and harass a profession that is already depressed and stressed.
I’m a denim-clad kinda guy. I’ve been in Wrangler since I was sixteen years old. So imagine my outrage when I read that Birmingham Metropolitan College will send lecturers home to change if they come to work in jeans or scruffy trousers. The BBC reports that the dress code for staff requires tidy hair, business suits and skirts, no visible tattoos, no slogans on T-shirts or “ostentatious ear-rings”. Instead lecturers are being told to wear a “business suit; smart jacket and co-ordinating trousers or skirt; smart shirt/blouse/top and trousers or skirt; smart dress”.
A college spokesperson said: “We deliver qualifications to over 8,000 16-19 learners and 30,000 adult learners, along with meeting the training needs of a range of businesses – it is therefore important that our staff present a professional image and a dress code is one of the policies we have always asked them to adhere to.” Style over substance, anyone?
The ‘dandification’ of lecturing must be resisted. The UCU must raise a denim-clad New Model Army and stamp this sort of thing out. Denim is authentic. Denim is timeless. Denim is a state of mind. A good denim jacket and jeans is just as bloody expensive as a suit. I rest my case….
I’m the sort of person who finds the discussion about land collectivisation in Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, gripping and moving. I am aware that this makes me weird in many people’s eyes, in particular those students who I force to endure all 17 minutes of it on my British Cinema module. Fuck ‘em , I say, although they’re not the only ones with a low tolerance threshold when it comes to the explicit expression of politics in film and television drama.
Filmmakers like Loach regularly get accused of didacticism or of peddling old fashioned propaganda but the truth is you’d be hard pushed to find a film that isn’t ideological on some level. For instance the causal agent of classical cinema is conducive to the myth of individual sovereignty that underpins capitalism and the romantic conclusions that are a feature of many films sustain the idiotic assumption that it is possible to somehow transcend the social. The things is, to accuse Sleepless in Seattle of propagating the sort ideas that underpin capitalism is to leave yourself open to the accusation of being a right miserable old bollocks.
This perhaps wasn’t always the case. There was a time when the hegemony of classical cinema, usually associated with Hollywood, had competitors and alternatives. Other national cinemas and film movements sought to distinguish themselves aesthetically and politically from US product. However in recent times foregrounding politics in film has been unpopular, perhaps the triumph of neo-liberalism rendering the cinematic interrogation of capitalism and imperialism seemingly pointless. As a consequence politicised national cinemas and film movements have been consumed by the commercial category ‘world cinema’ that presents the films of Others like an exotic smörgåsbord board for the delectation of North American and European connoisseurs.
Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) is a film you’ll find filed under ‘world cinema’ at your HMV, although the film’s political ambition means that it exceeds that label. Made in the wake of the 2005’s G8 conference at Gleneagles the genius of the film is that imagines putting the IMF and World Bank on trial in the backyard of a Mali house, where these institutions stand accused of impoverishing Africa. Various people give testimony and evidence, while around them the people who live around the yard get on with their lives, or in one instance gets on with the process of dying. Others are getting married; some are working. One couple Mélé, a night club singer, and her unemployed, unhappy husband, Chaka are in the process of breaking up. It’s the juxtaposition of domestic melodrama of these everyday lives and the documentary realism of the trial that makes the film so fascinating. It allows Sissako the opportunity not only to present us with a film about politics, and the exploitation of African specifically, but it also allows the film to ruminate on the problems of doing politics on screen and engaging people with explicitly political discourse.
In an acknowledgement of how ordinary people might often regard public affairs, the inhabitants of the Malian house are frequently distracted or disinterested in the political arguments taking place in their midst, preoccupied with their own private affairs. But even those who are involved with the trial are often at a disadvantage. The proceedings are conducted in French, a language that requires interpretation for some of the witnesses and means that their own testimonies need translating. In any case, how do you articulate the plight of Africa? Or as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks, can the subaltern speak? And by extension can a film give a voice to the oppressed in any meaningful way? This problem of representation is highlighted imaginatively when a school teacher is called before the court to give evidence and despite prompting stands for sometime without uttering a word before returning to his seat, this moment of uncomfortable, awkward silence an apparent protest. Later a farmer berates the court in a rousing chant, the words of which require no subtitles and are given none, so clear is the man’s meaning in the angry, impassioned delivery. The other evidence is provided by figures from African civil society, who play themselves and improvise their testimonies. It gives the film an urgency, authenticity and political power that I have seldom witnessed in other recent films. Watch the trailer here and then lay your hands on a copy of the DVD.
From Laurie Taylor, The Poppletonion (9 July 2009)
“Seriously misleading.” That was the forthright reaction of Gus Middlewhite, course convenor on our BA in Pork Products, to a new paper on marketisation in higher education.
According to the paper – written by three members of Bournemouth University’s Media School – there is a danger that universities offering vocational degrees as a route into industry will be “reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them”.
“This is certainly not the case in my department,” declared Mr Middlewhite. “Obviously, in a course sponsored by Poppleton Pork Products and devoted to an understanding of pork products, there will be a strong emphasis upon the well-established excellence of pies and sausages made by Poppleton Pork Products. But students are made aware that other pie and sausage options are also available, although some of these may contain traces of gristle.”
Mr Middlewhite also denied the report’s suggestion that such vocational courses failed “to question market values”. “Only last week,” he told The Poppletonian, “our second-year theory course students were busy considering how it was possible to charge £1.50 for a small pork pie when a large pork pie (containing the equivalent meat, cereal and slurry content of six small pork pies) would sell for only £6.50. If that isn’t questioning market values, then I don’t know what is.”
(Please note that the course guide Your Future in Pies and Sausages is now available. Write to The Pork Secretary, Pork Inquiries, Poppleton Pork Products Building, University of Poppleton. Mark your envelope “Pork”.)
Last week The Guardian (17 August 2009) carried a story about how A Level subjects most valued by universities are disappearing from many secondary schools. Figures obtained by Nick Gibb, the Conservative’s Shadow Schools Minister, show that ’traditional’ subjects such as Maths, the sciences, Geography and History are being usurped by ‘easier’ subjects like Business Studies, Sociology and (wouldn’t you know it) Media Studies.
Gibb is worried about this because he says the older subjects ‘provide the rigourous academic training that enables children to succeed across a number of fields later in life’. Presumably then the new ones like Media Studies don’t. Gibb is also concerned that the government’s ‘flawed’ league tables incentivise ‘weaker schools’ to steer pupils away from what are apparently more demanding traditional subjects in order to obtain better results and advance themselves up the league tables. ‘In doing so they are cheating those children, many of whom are from more deprived backgrounds’, says Gibb.
Gibb’s concern for ‘deprived’ kids is not misplaced. The official figures show that pupils in poorer areas are less likely to pursue the ‘traditional’ subjects and there is research that suggests it is ‘traditional’ subjects that our most prestigious universities are looking for in prospective students. The upshot of this is that doing ‘easier’ A Levels might disqualify working class kids from getting into the top institutions. That’s why last week BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show was asking whether Media Studies was a ’soft option’. Anna Fazackerley of the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, thinks it is. Last year Fazackerley co-authored a report entitled The hard truth about ‘soft’ subjects: Improving transparency about the implications of A-level subject choice (December 2008). It argued that: ‘Pupils may be unknowingly ruining their chances of getting into a leading research university by choosing so-called ‘soft’ A-level subjects, including Law, Media Studies and Psychology’. And it claimed that the ‘majority of research-intensive universities are admitting fewer ‘soft’ A-levels and more traditional A-levels in comparison with the national uptake of these subjects in schools’.
If disadvantaged school kids tend to take the sort of non-traditional subjects that the top universities dismiss then this has implications for the Labour government’s stated commitment to social mobility and widening participation in higher education. But this may be neither here nor there for the chances are that it will be the Tories in office after the next election and they plan to radically overhaul school league tables to reward schools that opt to teach “harder” qualifications. This proposal, the first to emerge from an inquiry into the examination system led by Sir Richard Sykes, the former rector of Imperial College, London, suggests awarding fewer points for subjects seen as easier, subjects like A level Media Studies.
But will any of this help those kids from poorer backgrounds? Actually it will probably discriminate against them further because isn’t it conceivable that Media Studies is an attractive subject to young working class kids because it is about the popular culture that they participate in? Isn’t it possible that it appears more relevant to them than traditional, canonised academic subjects such as English Literature? And is it perhaps the association of Media Studies with ‘low’ popular culture, non-elitist interests and ultimately working class kids that explains why it is disregarded by the most prestigious universities?
Critics of Media Studies, like Fazackerley, got their answer on The Media Show last week (19 August 2009) from Sally Feldman, Dean of the School of Media, Arts and Design (MAD) at the University of Westminster . She accused them of prejudice and living in the past but highlighting the snobbishness of some higher education establishments doesn’t totally exonerate Media Studies.
This is because Media Studies wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants the academic integrity associated with ‘traditional’ disciplines while at the same time it becomes increasingly vocational in its orientation. But as Richard Sennett argues in his book The Craftsman, modern society suffers from a historical inheritance that has drawn a fault line dividing theory and practice, head and hand.
Sennett refers to two provocative categories to illustrate this. Animal laborans are the beasts of burden condemned to drudgery and routine — the factory worker, the call centre telephone operative , etc. Homo faber is the ‘judge of material labour and practice’, not Animal laborans’ colleague but his superior’. ‘Whereas Animal laborans is fixated on the question “How?” Homo fabor asks “Why?”‘
The class character of these categories is obvious and of course Media Studies will claim that it is trying to overcome such class distinctions with its stated aim of combining practice and theory. Who knows, maybe Media Studies is pioneering a new economic order and workplace that is dispensing with class distinctions, in particular those that manifest themselves in the difference between the well paid thinkers and the low paid doers, between the cerebral and the manual worker, between white and blue collar. On the other hand, perhaps it is churning out Animal laborans for these post-industrial times. In which case it’s simply reproducing the class system that pours scorn on it and its students. Time will tell.
Grazing the internet I came across an article by Alan Finlayson in a back issue of Mediacative (July 2003). In it he argues that the knowledge economy as perceived by New Labour is actually dependent upon an ever expanding realm of ignorance. Things that were once routine chores and tasks — part of a common stock of knowledge — are now done for us by ’service providers’ with the specialist know-how to do with things like cooking, deciding what to wear and entertaining ourselves. And those cunning capitalists keep expanding into new areas in which we consumers can be utterly ignorant, such as the computer you’re sitting reading this on now, which when it breaks down will require you to phone someone in a call centre with the knowledge to get you back on-line. Our homes and work are full of high-tech hardware, the workings of which we know little of, and requiring software and content provided by others. This, as Finlayson acknowledges, is not entirely new. What is different however is the growth and intensification of our ignorance about everyday artefacts and tasks, and their subsequent commodification.
So just about everything is a commodity but perhaps the key commodity is ourselves. In the knowledge economy we are no longer seen as an appendage to the machine. No, we’ve been ‘liberated’ and now we are enterprising and entrepreneurial individuals competing with others for advantage in the market place. The key to success here is flexibility and our willingness to re-brand and re-skill ourselves when the market demands it. This is the secret to employability – turning yourself into a commodity; not just your labour, as in the past, but your self. Pheobe Moore has argued that the government’s drive to encourage ‘employability’ among young people and graduates is nothing short of the colonisation of the everyday life. In effect she says, workers are expected to ‘embrace their own alienation from their work, and are told that the project of self-employability must become a part of their subjectivities and self worth’ (see previous post).
As with the ‘knowledge economy’, there is nothing new about people trying to make themselves employable or governments working to that end either. But what these new terms signal is the aggressive expansion of capitalism into every corner of our lives and being. There is no respite from the economy. If one is not consuming to compensate for one’s ignorance, one should be making one’s self consumable.
Finlayson points to education (and higher education in particular) as being key to the making of subjects suitable for the knowledge economy.
Education was the key site for the production of economically usable individuals in the industrial revolution,ordering them,encouraging them to keep time and instilling in them the skills and knowledge necessary for worker efficiency. Now education focuses on key skills of presentation,task-prioritisation and all the rest of it. Furthermore, in a fee-paying system the very form of higher education becomes part of the training.In exercising ‘consumer’choice over their education,students learn how to be good purchasers and sound investors in their own human capital.Education becomes an investment in the enhancement of this individualised physical and mental capital;the purchase of knowledge an investment in a consumer durable that can be traded in for a cash return.
How should we feel about all this? My own default position is to be instantly suspicious of the commodifaction of anything but especially things that seem as sacrosanct as knowledge and the self. If we come to know ourselves merely as commodities is this at the expense of something else? Does it deny some sort of human authenticity? What if we accept the arguments that the self is discursively constituted, arising in language and ideology? In which case why should we worry about its commification at all?
Answers on a postcard please (or just leave a comment).
