Chris Bertram

An especially delicious offering for the start of the new academic year.

I see (via Tim Dunlop) that Troy Kennedy Martin is dead. There’s a lot to remember him for, but, like Tim, the work that will always stay with me is Edge of Darkness, one of the top six drama serials ever on TV. [fn1] Tim has a good clip and a link to a few more. The mid-1980s in Britain were a scary time, with Thatcher and the Tory party utterly and arrogantly dominant, the miners facing a brutally determined state, mass unemployment, nuclear standoff, vicious cuts in public spending, hmm, a bit like what we’re all in for soon. Bob Peck was terrific, but the real iconic figure was Joe Don Baker as Darius Jedburgh. Superb.

[1] The others being Heimat, Heimat 2, The Singing Detective, The Wire, and Our Friends in the North

Goldstone’s report on Cast Lead is out. Google blog and news searches show that the people who were always going to say “It’s not trooo!” (and worse) have begun to do so in large numbers. So it goes.

I hardly ever buy newspapers these days, I just read their websites. The gains are probably greater than the losses: I used to take the Guardian and hardly ever see the others, now I get to read a range of British and foreign papers. The one exception I make is the weekend edition of the Financial Times. In fact, the FT, in its Saturday version is my nomination for the best English-language paper in the world. I love it, as every copy brings pleasurable reading. Today’s was a special treat as it contains a conversation between one of my favourite journalists (Lucy Kellaway) and Nick Hornby (about whom it is hard to avoid having warm, friendly feelings, even if he is an Arsenal fan). Also, check out Simone Baribeau’s account of working to sell overpriced houses to poor people during the bubble, whilst knowing that you are doing wrong but feeling unable to quit because of the need to fund dental treatment. I think I could post half a dozen more links to today’s edition, but just go and buy it (if in the UK) or browse away (especially the Arts and Leisure section).

Reading the current US debate on health care from the outside is pretty dispiriting. It is an example of what happens to rational debate in circumstances of inequality where vested interests and partisan pundits can distort discussion by throwing loads of noise, fear and disinformation into the conversation. Still, that’s no reason not to try to have a conversation about which principles ought to obtain, and I think for that it is hard to beat Ronald Dworkin’s paper “Justice in the Distribution of Heath Care”, McGill Law Journal, 38 (1993), pp. 883-98 (though I’m looking at the reprint in Clayton and Williams eds The Ideal of Equality ).

Dworkin’s “central idea”:

… we should aim to make collective, social decisions about the quantity and distribution of health care so as to match, as closely as possible, the decisions that people in the community would make for themselves, one by one, in the appropriate circumstances, if they were looking from youth down the course of their lives and trying to decide what risks were worth running in return for not running other kinds of risks. (C&W, 209)

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I think I sort-of knew many of the facts that Elijah Wald recounts in this piece in the Financial Times . Still, knowing and putting-together are two different things. You couldn’t listen to 78s as “background music” because even with an auto-changer, you’d have to get up every 15 minutes – hence the importance of radio if you wanted a soundtrack to other activities. Why did jazz singers such as Billie Holiday record such a wide repertoire of “standards”? They were packaging the hit songs of their day for a particular audience (with other singers styling for other market segments). Wald’s account also makes sense of other matters that seem incomprehensible to modern music fans. Wald doesn’t discuss this, but we are often surprised that great singers of the past died in poverty and obscurity and are buried in unmarked graves (Bessie Smith, for example). But Wald’s emphasis on the contemporary importance of the song rather than the singer helps to explain how this could have happened. We might prize the iconic performances of the time, but back then there were lots of jobbing singers churning out multiple versions. Interesting enough to make me order a copy of Wald’s new book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll.

Well with Australia 133 for 8 and 199 behind at tea on the second day, I’m a bit late starting this. If I’d posted last night it would have been to berate a mediocre England – what a difference a day makes. Is Broad the new Flintoff? Can Australia yet pull it back? Comment away.

Sorry, I forgot to get this started. But in truth, it was pretty much over by lunchtime on day one. Should Harmison ever play for England again? I’m certain that Bopara shouldn’t. Comment away!

Quite a few people have now posted about Jerry Cohen on the web. Notable amongst them are Colin Farrelly , Thom Brooks , Ben Saunders, Chris Brooke , Matthew Kramer and Norman Geras . I was also sent, by Maris Kopcke Tinture, a link to a private recording she made of Jerry’s valedictory lecture from May 2008. The recording is imperfect and there is a chunk missing in the middle, but it is the only such recording to have surfaced.

(I also need to post a short note about use of my photos of the valedictory, since people have been taking them from my Flickr stream and using them without permission: they are not public domain. 1. Seek permission, which I will normally grant to any not-for-profit site unless I find the content objectionable. 2. Please attribute (this can be in as miniscule a text as you like). 3. If you are a commercial organization then we will need to come to an arrangement about a fee, which will be donated to an appropriate charity.)

A few unsystematic thoughts about Jerry Cohen:

A friend called yesterday to tell me the news about Jerry Cohen and then I spent the day feeling disoriented, sad, confused, not really knowing what to feel or think. For me, and I’m sure, for many friends, colleagues and former students, Jerry was a constant presence. If I’m writing something I often hear Jerry’s voice telling me that I’m being evasive, that I’ve failed to explain a distinction, that such and such is “bullshit”, and so on. At the same time, Jerry was quite brilliant at striking the right balance between the discipline of following the argument where it leads and the importance of hanging onto one’s deepest convictions.

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I got a call this morning to tell me that Jerry (G.A.) Cohen has died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive stroke. I want to write an appreciation of him as a friend, mentor and philosopher in due course, but I’m too numb to do it at the moment. I know that his other friends, colleagues and fellow students of his feel the same acute sense of loss.

My friend Jo Wolff has a column over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free section taking issue with Phil Willis MP, who chairs the Parliamentary Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills which just issued its report on “Students and Universities” (downloadable here ). Jo is upset with Willis and his committee for two reasons: first, because they suggest that the marked increase in the proportions of First Class and 2.1 degrees is the result of grade inflation; second, because they were sceptical about whether a degree of the same class from different institutions are necessarily of equal value.

Jo’s response to the first “dumbing down” point is to cite the benign influence of the government quango the Quality Assurance Agency on teaching standards in Universities. I can’t actually work out if Jo’s QAA argument is sincere or an attempt at heavy irony. In any case, I wonder if he’s actually read what the report says about the QAA. It argues—surely correctly—that the QAA has been more focused on processes than on what happens in the classroom and that it has been quite easy for universities to tick the quality-assurance boxes whist actual teaching quality goes unexamined. That’s one part of the report that is surely right. At the time of “subject review” I think only about 1/19th of a department’s score was a result of classroom observation and the rest was attributable to a lengthy paper-trail which we all laboured for months to assemble. But whatever, Jo knows as well as I do that the incentive structure that government has put in place for higher education in the UK has not favoured quality of teaching but rather research. Teaching has been seriously underfunded and there has been little to no payoff in terms of career advancement open to good teachers. In the circumstances it really is hard to believe that the across-the-board improvement in student grades is the result of better teaching. (No doubt any increase in performance in the UCL philosophy department is attributable to better teaching, but Jo needs an argument for the sector as a whole!)

Jo’s response to the second point—cross-institution comparability of standards—is to say “so what?”. He may be right. But what infuriated the Select Committee was that they asked the question of university leaders and failed to get a clear answer. Rather they were faced with obfuscation and evasion. Perhaps if Jo had been interviewed he would have given the committee a clear, reasoned and satisfactory answer as to why it doesn’t really matter: the Vice Chancellors of Oxford and Oxford Brookes universities weren’t willing or able to do so.

Someone wanted me to start this thread before the game started. Well I’m a bit late for that, but most of the first day was obliterated by rain. The Aussies are now 126 for 1 after 30 overs …. so unless England’s attack can get it together fast, Australia will be in control.

Judging by a review I read in the New York Times, there is some danger of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe being taken more seriously by some Americans than earlier examples of the Europe-about-to-become-Muslim genre. Matt Carr, writing for the Institute of Race Relations, provides some detailed rebuttal .