Finishing schools for gilded youth?

Somehow I never thought Britain would be forging ahead of even the US in philistinism. Perhaps that’s naive of me.

What worried me is this quote from the Guardian

However, universities would lose money under the benchmark scenario of a £6,000 fee, the IFS said. The thinktank said: “While their fee income would nearly double in this case, buried in the detail of the review’s recommendations are proposed cuts to the teaching budget that would see some courses become entirely self-funded.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/12/tuition-fees-debts-students-university-browne

So I think we are going to be losing money and having to do more teaching however they implement the review. But nobody seems to be paying attention to that problem.

Chris,
I think your analysis is spot on and well put. I’m particularly reassured that you can still feel a sense of solidarity with those engaged with schools/courses that might not be viable without subsidy.
If decision makers have decided that ‘aspiration’ ought to be limited then where do we go from here? Universities are a soft target in the state’s post credit-crunch efforts to accommodate financial capitalism. But the government seems to think it needs to put more effort into raising the level of hate towards its other targets (witness last week’s propaganda against the reproducing poor).
Each week throws up a fresh justification for the state’s latest retreat from a particular area of life. Everyone I speak to, mostly from different public service backgrounds, talks about the same thing: the spending review due next week.
Are there options for some general form of resistance? Or do we retreat into stoicism?
I’m not asking for an answer. I certainly don’t know.

Paul H

“Still, none of us really believe that the value of the arts and humanities lies most centrally in their economic usefulness”.
The same is true, I think, for most academic disciplines: the great British mathematician Hardy developed exactly this theme in his “A Mathematician’s Apology”.

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

No, Chris,

Let’s be even more blunt. It is precisely through philosophy, and only through philosophy, that Britain has any chance of economic success.

We now know that the economic policy of Britain has been made by applying deeply flawed economic theories over the past three decades. We now realize that all the vocational apparatuses that relied on those theories were, let’s be frank, sophists. They didn’t really understand the theories they were using, and didn’t themselves have the tools to criticize or analyze the theories in any sort of critical way. They were fools arguing from authority.

The same applies for the priority fields above. We have seen that, without the ability to understand themselves critically, these fields too might contain large possibilities that they are sophists as well. They may not have made as many errors as the economists, but if they haven’t, it’s largely through luck.

The only way forward for Britain is to re-think everything you thought you knew. We have seen that the vocational studies, by themselves, are either of no assistance or a hindrance to this. Only those studies which teach thinking on the highest possible level are a priority.

There are two ways of looking at these developments which are, though simplistic, not actually wrong. One is that British higher education is moving (further) towards the American model; the other is that it is moving back towards its old structure of Oxbridge, universities and polytechnics, with a different vocabulary.

The American model, not without its advantages, is tricky, because its success in achieving the stability necessary to sustained quality in higher education depends to a considerable extent on an institutional as opposed to a disciplinary perspective — that is, on the right balance between the two. And this, in turn, is possible in the US (insert qualifiers here) because of the prevalence of liberal arts general education in the undergraduate programs of universities. If Britain is heading further in the direction of the American model, the metrics for institutional (as opposed to research) support must be quite different from what we’ve seen.

The same applies for the priority fields above. We have seen that, without the ability to understand themselves critically, these fields too might contain large possibilities that they are sophists as well. They may not have made as many errors as the economists, but if they haven’t, it’s largely through luck.

This is some kind of meta-comment on sophistry, right?

I’m trying to think what a counter-proposal, rather than just a complaint, would look like.

It surely can’t be that all subjects should be funded at all colleges and universities. Britain surely needs people versed in the history of Mesopotamia, or who can offer a convincing account of what happened during the battle of Roncevaux Pass, but surely not every school needs to host scholars doing that work.

Yet here it is clear — indeed, so axiomatic it is unspoken — that Middlesex made a mistake in canceling its philosophy department. I wonder, though, why that was a mistake? This post assumes it, yet a principle like…

“the study of any subject at a higher level ought to give people both an enhanced sense of their own powers and a glimpse of dimensions of value and achievement”

…doesn’t much help in disambiguating between a course on what Charlemagne was up to and why it matters and what Peter Abelard was up to and why it matters.

And if we’re going to throw Abelard under the bus, and say we’re really just doing Plato and Kant and Hume, well isn’t that doing within philosophy what Lord Browne is up to within the academy as a whole?

And so on.

Even as I’m sympathetic to the idea that higher education shouldn’t be reduced to late-model trade schools for Hydrogen Fusion Engineers and Gene-splicing Pharmaceutical Researchers (with an opt-out for the idle rich who want to study Pound and Eliot), I can’t shake the feeling that this particular brand of complaint is so deeply conservative about preserving the status quo that it reads like special pleading.

Of the eight British PMs since 1970, one had a background in a “priority subject” (Thatcher: chemistry) and two didn’t attend university (Callaghan and Major).

The other five studied liberal arts (Blair: jurisprudence, Brown: history, Wilson: history / PPE, Heath: PPE, Cameron: PPE).

I’m only mentioning it because I bothered to look it up, but at least it shows that we’re not ruled by a society of technocratic philistines. And the liberal arts tend to produce successful politicians, if nothing else – though I’m still unsure whether this counts as a public good.

I’m only mentioning it because I bothered to look it up, but at least it shows that we’re not ruled by a society of technocratic philistines.

Or the fact that all these very bright people decided to abandon the liberal arts subjects they had studied at university and go into politics instead might indicate that they didn’t think much of the liberal arts. If Brown had really valued history, wouldn’t he have stayed as a historian?

Chris, or anyone: Clay asked a good question. What’s the competing proposal?

Bill, the competing proposal may be that no one should ask for competing proposals, so that we can regard the humanities as axiomatically worth funding, and complain about alternative formulations, without having to get down to cases.

Clay, there’s more about the closure of Middlesex University’s Philosophy Dept here.

dsquared, I see three objections to your counterproposal as stated.

1. Your justification — anything else would mean taking money from excellent X departments to fund less-good Y departments — presupposes the correctness of your answer. (Why shouldn’t it sometimes be a good idea to take money from an excellent underwater-basket-weaving department and us it to fund an excellent cancer-curing department?)

2. Using departments’ excellence in their field as the criterion — which is essential for avoiding taking money from excellent X departments to fund less-good Y departments — produces results that are sensitive to exactly how one chooses to delineate fields. For very fine subdivisions, this produces absurd results (“yeah, we’re a rotten philosophy department, but we’re the best in the world at studying the influences of Plato’s Theaetetus on Marx’s theory of value, because no one else is looking at that”) and for very coarse subdivisions it seems like it could justify taking money from (what we generally think of as) one discipline to fund another that’s viewed as more important. Where should the lines be drawn?

3. The proposal seems to mean that the present distribution of money among disciplines is never to be changed; at any rate it gives no indication of how any change in the distribution might be decided on. Is there any reason to assume either that the present distribution is optimal or that the optimal distribution won’t change substantially over time?

why is the letting failures wither only for departments? Why not entire institutions?

Because, as far as I can see, the current geographical arrangement of universities is reasonably well-balanced with respect to the undergraduates they’re going to teach. Obviously, if somewhere couldn’t get even one of its research faculties up to the standard of the worst course being funded elsewhere, then it would either close down or become an undergraduate teaching-only institution.

Also, it’s interesting to see “finishing school” as derogatory term for wealthy people studying aesthetics, and then “trade school” as a derogatory term for people of humanistically-limited orientation studying nuclear fusion.

d^2 @20:

The competing proposal (or at least, mine) would be that departments should get funding on the basis of excellence (as measured by a straw poll of international peers) in their field, and basically no other criterion. In other words, backing successes and letting failures wither.

I can see how this would work to allocate funding among departments within a field, assuming you have already set a budget for a field. It’s more daunting to imagine using this process to allocate funding across a space spanning both departments and fields. You would need a poll that would ask peers to, in effect, compare “Princeton in philosophy” to “Carnegie Mellon in statistics”, etc. That would generate interesting data, but it doesn’t seem feasible.

ajay @17: if Brown had valued history “wouldn’t he have stayed as a historian”? Not necessarily. I would think that even in an educational system like Britain’s where specialization usually comes somewhat earlier than in, e.g., the US, the point of a liberal arts education is not to turn everyone into professors, and what CB says in the post tends to support that view.

I buy the argument that sometimes a proposed austerity is unnecessary, but the original case Chris made wasn’t economic but cultural—that the priorities of the Browne report are simply wrong.

Well, as Phil points out in the original post, there isn’t actually a clear economic rationale for the cuts.

Assuming then that we’re dealing with a cultural argument for it doesn’t seem unreasonable to respond with a cultural argument against.

“It surely can’t be that all subjects should be funded at all colleges and universities.”

I tend to agree with this and it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing that departments, or subjects within departments, might be called upon to justify themselves. The difficulty, of course, is figuring out what a good justification would look like, and although I have seen some research and teaching in philosophy departments that I think nobody would be worse off for losing, what would a successful justification be? Of course being the best at whatever you’re teaching is not enough, and I’m not convinced that it shouldn’t have to be an argument for instrumentality, but then the value of good philosophy (to take what is perhaps the hardest case) might not be so easy to gauge. Isn’t the problem perhaps that we who do and love philosophy have a particular vision of the world and its future in which what we do is indispensable, even fundamental, but visions of the world that do not see the value of philosophy will have a much easier time making their arguments, because their world is much more concrete and commodifiable. We do have to ‘sell’ this vision of the world – funding issue or no funding issue – because if we don’t we will soon be speaking a private language that has no currency.

Clay:

Well, the counter proposal is the status quo, and rather than “we’ve always done it this way” we could more charitably express the objection as “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

In an ideal world, it would fall to the government – any government – to prove that their changes – any changes – are necessary and/or to explain why their changes are a net improvement on the status quo. Obviously the government isn’t obliged to do this at present, and can simply assert both as true. It doesn’t follow that everyone writing about the issues has to accept the same premises.

And I’m afraid that’s true, even if you practice – snork – “thinking on the highest possible level”.

Well, someone’s got to do it; you just [1] took a rather facetious comment from burritoboy to be utterly sincere, and therefore took snork-musement from the literal meaning of a line that was pretty obviously intended to be tongue-in-cheek, and [2] suggested physics majors are contributing more per person to economic productivity than humanities majors, which is, to put it mildly, not in evidence, and subject to dispute.

‘To which victors go which spoils?’
‘Smugness, to the engineers,
and profits to the financiers.’

I think the Burkean conservatism of “the status quo is at least no worse than the status quo” is little more than a way of avoiding spelling out an alternate set of priorities that would describe why the academy should be asked to adapt only through growth, never through shrinking.

But we haven’t yet seen the first set of priorities in any coherent form – or for that matter reached any agreement on what it is HE is supposed to adapt *to*. All I’m seeing is a destructive attack on the status quo in HE, and I think it’s quite reasonable to respond with a defence of the status quo as Not Too Bad, Could Easily Be A Lot Worse. (If that’s Burkean conservatism, so be it.)

I also don’t see anything intrinsically wrong or absurd in the idea of an HE sector that never shrinks. There’s more stuff to know about with every passing decade, after all, and I don’t think university libraries should be in the business of chucking out stock that hasn’t been used recently.

I’m staggered by the stupidity of the Tory party’s deficit terrorism. I don’t think anyone should have to suggest counter proposals to policies like this. The counter-proposal to insanity is sanity, isn’t it?

“producing the most gain’ [in market terms]”

No, I really actually meant the most gain. Of course, my touchstone for gain is Plato’s Hipparchus. As we now know, many of the people who pretended to know things (economists) didn’t in fact know them and caused loss, not gain.

Clay,

How about answering the question? We need to know what the best area of study is, the one that will create the best citizens. How do we approach this problem?

“You can’t tell the taxpayer “You are not entitled to have an opinion”. And I’m afraid that’s true, even if you practice – snork – “thinking on the highest possible level”.”

What if the taxpayer is, as is the case here, relying on an economic model that we know to be false to determine her opinion?

Clay, there’s a context here. I recently read a great description of the challenge of describing life on the receiving end of homophobia and other deeply ingrained prejudice to someone who hasn’t been there and is resisting clues: it’s like trying to describe a bird cage, but being allowed to only describe one wire at a time.

The US and Britain are suffering at the hands of gangs of vandals whose vision of the good society breaks down into three major slots: mansions and endless prosperity for the chosen few, Dickensian-nice modest quarters and humble lives for their designated lackeys, and burned-out streets, squalor, and starvation for the rest of us. They’re out to destroy everything they see as either irrelevant to their continuing enrichment or an impediment to the process.

We could have a sensible (inter-)national discussion of national budgeting priorities, including education. It’d start with the question “How much do we actually have that we can spend?”, and questions about how we get that much, and the desirability of placing extra financial burdens on the sectors of business proven to repeatedly destroy trillions of dollars of value, thrive on war crimes, and the like. But that’s not even in the same time zone as the kind of “debate” that Browne and his American counterparts are talking about. Sensible response begins with “We’ll deal with the rest once we get you to stop burning down houses.”

However, anyone familiar with the social backgrounds of sociology students and art history students might share my guess about the probable shift in interest.

Look, come out and say it: art historians are rich layabouts, unlike those morally upstanding folks studying such ethical subjects like sociology and distributive justice. It’d be a lot more attractive than this nudge and a wink crap.

@burritoboy, to be more explicit, my answer is “That’s the wrong question.” I am a Rortyian (Rortarian?) in believing that there is no universal measure against which one could even begin to define the best area of study, so I think the question is a) content-free and b) an obfuscated version of Burkean regard for the status quo, where the inability to propose a single Platonic metric for the good life is regarded as evidence that change is unneeded and uncalled for.

What I think there can be is a way to define the _worst_ areas of study, which is to say areas of study that don’t help people do the kinds of things people want to do (again with a pragamtist’s bias that knowing is for doing.) These can be local (“The physics department at Little Wotting is bad on every conceivable measure”) or global (“We can safely dismantle the Alchemy Department, despite their having tenured faculty.”)

To make this practical, I think that money should flow out of Russian and French and into Arabic and Chinese, because of the relative chance in importance of those cultures. This change is already happening in many places, driven by students voting with their feet; neither your requested utilitarian metric nor Chris’s original formulation help me understand when, _if ever_, money should be taken from one department and put into another.

Now, reading @Bruce at #57, I think Chris’s answer might be “Of course I have an idea for when a particular subject at a particular school should be shut down, but I’m not going to articulate it while the vultures are circling, as they’ll pervert it to further their philistine ends.”

Now, reading @Bruce at #57, I think Chris’s answer might be “Of course I have an idea for when a particular subject at a particular school should be shut down, but I’m not going to articulate it while the vultures are circling, as they’ll pervert it to further their philistine ends.”

When of course the proper way to handle the philistine argument is to achieve its ends by means that are more satisfactory.

“I am a Rortyian (Rortarian?) in believing that there is no universal measure against which one could even begin to define the best area of study, so I think the question is a) content-free and b) an obfuscated version of Burkean regard for the status quo, where the inability to propose a single Platonic metric for the good life is regarded as evidence that change is unneeded and uncalled for.”

Wow, Rorty, Burke, and Plato in one blog comment . . . “Obfuscated version of Burkean regard”? NO PLATONIC METRIC? OMG!!! MUST CONSULT WIKIPEDIA!!!!

Education is not a business. There ought to be a third path that is not forcing competitive “free” (never free) market “values” but not allowing indolent self-satisfaction.

It is interesting to see affluent societies – much more affluent than, say, they were in the sixties, when the great college and university funding system started – engaging in these kinds of cuts for one reason: to preserve the power and wealth of those at the top. Habsburg Spain and Louis XIV’s France both went bankrupt pursuing wars that made no kind of sense for the vast majority of the population, but that fed into the vanity of the court. Similarly, the Anglosphere seems intent on bankrupting economies and destroying the middle class in order to preserve a financial sector and its well paid upper management crewe – this, in order to provide ever more efficient means of extracting rents from moving money aroud for a very tiny portion of the population, no more than half of one percent.

The counterproposal to cuts in higher education should be cuts in preserving the lifestyles of the rich and the famous – I’m sure, for instance, the 37 billion dollars spent on saving the RBS would have been better spent on French and Russian departments, if spent at all. The counterproposal should be shooting for a regime that strives for equality – viz the recent dustup about New Labour – and that rejects the failed trickle down economics of neo-liberalism. The counterproposal would be that affluent societies should be about affluence for all, with the fruit of that being, for instance, a period in the life of all humans when, from 18 to 22, they have plenty of leisure to read, draw, do engineering or chemistry, paint, write, make films, etc. Which of course they can make use of in lives in which less hours are devoted to work – 30 at the most. Because of course a society like the UK has generated the wealth that would make that easily doable, if the distribution of wealth weren’t so wildly and unhealthily skewed to the wealthiest.

Back in the dark Cold War age, we were told that Stalin destroyed Russian culture and we all admired dissidents writing their novels and poetry to denounce the infamy of the system. Now, in the bright post-Cold War era, we are managing to purge the rotten habit of teaching novels and poetry (substituting courses in management writing that promote The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and other shining gems) without any blood being shed at all – showing the Communists how the destruction of culture can be done right, and in a humane spirit!

At least one American university system is adapting to British models. The California State University system has retained Sir Michael Barber to bring “Deliverology” to America.

http://defendthecsu.blogspot.com/2010/01/deliver-us-from-deliverology.html
http://blog.newsystemsthinking.com/deliverology-rears-its-ugly-head-in-the-united-states/
http://www.calfac.org/resource/deliverology-etc-resources

Anyone who has listened to David Cameron or people like him talking recently knows that many well off people in Britain are _very_ interested in fairness and justice right at the moment.

I do think that if working class people’s perspectives were to be more effectively excluded from ‘high quality’ discussions of political philosophy than they already are it seems very plausible this would have some effect on the character of the field.

(but – what if there are no electronic engineering departments in Britain which are as good as the worst music department? Then let us send our budding electronic engineers to America or the Netherlands!)

It has been raised as a problem in this thread, that certain fields of study, like philosophy, could be closed to working class people. It’s no better if electrical engineering is closed to the working class. Working class people are probably less likely to study abroad than the upper middle class. And this argument works both ways – it’s not like you can’t study philosophy abroad.

A country needs both philosophers and electrical engineers, and a the UK is surely capable of education both. But most people don’t want to travel abroad to study, they want to go somewhere closer to home. Instead, many of those who would have studied electrical engineering will study something else instead. And this something else might less beneficial to both the individual and to society.

If there is a need for more teachers and less business administrators, there should be a policy to educate more teachers and less business administrators. There’s nothing particularly “right-wing” about such a policy – prioritising social needs over individual choice and letting the government steer resources in beneficial directions are left-wing in my book.

I really don’t care if it’s right or left wing – it’s wrong and it doesn’t work. It’s wrong because individual choice should be respected and encouraged instead of steered by bureaucrats. It doesn’t work because there a way too many fluctuating factors determining the situation on the job market for anyone to tell people what the situation will be like in the time it takes to get a degree.

Btw, students of philosophy are generally aware of the fact that they won’t become philosophers but will work in other fields and they do.

To make this practical, I think that money should flow out of Russian and French and into Arabic and Chinese, because of the relative change in importance of those cultures

If you’re one of those dodgy European types, then Russian and French are, respectively, the language of the country that is both your biggest military threat and your biggest energy supplier, and the language of the country that is both one of your biggest military allies and one of the largest economies in your region. They’re still kind of important.

Grand Rapids, MI has an annual contest called Art Prize that awards a popularly selected $250k. It has simultaneously raised the awareness of the local populace of art, and it has also blurred the lines between “art” and “technology” since many of the pieces required some serious engineering to pull off. Arts vs sciences is not a zero-sum game for this reason.

However, turn the perspective to “makers” vs “takers.” Both artists and engineers are “makers” while both lawyers and community activists (e.g. Mr. Obama) are “takers.” Any society that cultivates a lot of “makers” will have more wealth for “takers” to spread around, than a competing society that subsidizes “takers” instead.

Are philosophers makers or takers? That is an interesting question.

This is hilarously reminiscent of “You’ll have a national Philosopher’s strike on your hands!”

There cannot be enough philosophers.

Really? Who’s going to feed the philosophers, if everyone is a philosopher? And then there’s clothing, housing, transport, etc. Well, at least they’ll be able to congratulate each other on not being oligarchs before they die of cold and starvation, and laugh at those warm, well-fed free-market fools.

With just 11.5% of its intake coming from working-class families, Oxford is bottom in this particular table. Cambridge is next, with 12.6%, and Bristol, another member of the Russell Group, comes in third at 14.2%. Just two of the universities in the bottom 10 – Durham and Bath – come from outside the Russell Group (both are members of the 1994 Group).

The figures, based on the occupation of students’ parents, compares with an average working-class intake of 32.3% across all universities in the country. In total, 37% of the UK’s population is estimated to come from routine and manual occupations. The figures – from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) – of students entering full-time education in 2008-09 (the latest data available) may not even show the true extent of the underrepresentation because students from long-term unemployed families are not included.

Dr Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, defends her members’ record, insisting that the “underlying cause” of the problem was occurring long before university. […]

Education Guardian’s analysis finds that the subjects students choose are also heavily weighted by socio-economic background. Medicine, dentistry and veterinary science are the subjects least often chosen, with just 18.2% of the students on these courses coming from working-class families. Figures for historical and philosophical studies are also low, at 24.2%, and languages, at 25.9%.

But experts outside the Russell Group argue that the problem isn’t just at school level, and that universities must share some responsibility. “Elite universities have always valued traditional subjects taught by particular schools,” says Miriam David, professor of education at the Institute of Education, who has carried out research projects on class and inclusion.

[…]

Furthermore, I do have to strongly disagree with the ‘understandable’ self-serving views of Chris’ unnamed professional colleagues. As I have previously pointed out on more than a few occasions here, tuition fees were always a horribly regressive idea which may have been of moderate financial benefit to a small number of already relatively advantaged academics and managers, at a huge cost to social progress in this country. To the extent that they had a ‘moral’ justification, it was the individualist one of ‘pay for what you use’ public services, and they meant extending the rotten ethos of British private schools into HE.

Anyone who thinks that ‘middle class entitlement’ motivated free higher education is sociologically naive at best. What middle class entitlement demands is secure access for the offspring of wealthy parents, more or less regardless of effort or ability, to career paths that enable them to reproduce their privileges. Is there any more effective way of achieving this than restricting access to Britain’s ‘best’ universities to those who can afford £12 000+ / year in fees? Britain may soon have the most expensive system of higher education in the world and wealthy people, at least those who ‘want the best for their children’, will be the winners from this state of affairs, even if some of them are too stupid to realise this. The losers will be the rest of us, but especially bright working class students, who will soon find places like Oxford, UCL or Bristol even more of a no-go area than they already are.

UCU also has a very good statement on this here:

http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=5058