Nice to know that our trade union apparatchiks are in tune with their membership. AUT Vice-President Gargi Bhattacharyya has a piece in the Guardian that seems to be arguing (though the article’s rambling incoherence makes it hard to be sure) that “academic freedom” is a kind of fantasy which probably gets in the way of fighting for better pay and conditions, but that, sadly, it is a fantasy to which academics are rather attached. The lesson of the AUT boycott is, apparently, that union activists upset this world of myth and illusion at their peril, so they’d better be more careful in future. Just as Christmas would be ruined if parents told their children that Santa doesn’t exist, AUT leaders better pay lip service (for purely pragmatic reasons) to the values their members actually hold!
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Chris Bertram
There’s a fun article in the FT today about the practice of extrapolating from current trends. Unless you are a subscriber, you’ll only get the first couple of paragraphs, but you’ll see the general idea:
bq. At the time Elvis Presley died in 1977, he had 150 impersonators in the US. Now, according to calculations I spotted in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement recently, there are 85,000. Intriguingly, that means one in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator. More disturbingly, if Elvis impersonators continue multiplying at the same rate, they will account for a third of the world’s population by 2019.
Today’s Guardian has a piece by Jonathan Wolff, political philosopher at UCL , on the peculiar way in which humanities research is funded in the UK and the distorting effects this may have on the way academics work:
bq. Many of the grants currently awarded require outputs to be specified in advance, and to be submitted for publication soon after the grant ends. There is at least a suspicion that this is having a peculiar effect. Some people, including some leaders in their fields, are simply refusing to jump through these hoops, and are not applying for grants. Others are playing a more subtle game. They are applying for grants for their “second best” projects that they know they will be able to complete and deliver to deadline. At the same time, on the side, they are working on projects they care about much more, but have not included on their funding applications. Why not? Because they do not want to be forced to stand and deliver when the grant is over. The work is too important to them for that. Years more might be needed to sort out the details. Maybe it will never be ready, or at least not in the planned form. Genuinely creative work is risky, and risk means the real possibility of failure. But even when it succeeds it is unpredictable, perhaps even a little chaotic, and often deadlines are deadening. Better not to promise anything.
Others here at CT have been more critical of the whole evolutionary psychology approach than I have, and I imagine their scepticism will be bolstered by a newish book by David J. Buller , a philosopher at Northern Illinois University: Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature . According to the reviews, Buller devotes some attention to the factoids that evolutionary psychologists deploy in support of their view. Many of these “well-known facts” seem to have little more support than the well-known fact that if you step on the cracks in the pavement, the bears will get you. From the Wall Street Journal review (pdf) :
bq. This field claims to explain human behaviors that seem so widespread we must be wired for them: women preferring high-status men, and men falling for nubile babes; stepfathers abusing stepchildren. …. Take the stepfather claim. The evolutionary reasoning is this: A Stone Age man who focused his care and support on his biological children, rather than kids his mate had from an earlier liaison, would do better by evolution’s scorecard (how many descendants he left) than a man who cared for his stepchildren. With this mindset, a stepfather is far more likely to abuse his stepchildren. One textbook asserts that kids living with a parent and a stepparent are some 40 times as likely to be abused as those living with biological parents.
bq. But that’s not what the data say, Prof. Buller finds. First, reports that a child living in a family with a stepfather was abused rarely say who the abuser was. Some children are abused by their biological mother, so blaming all stepchild abuse on the stepfather distorts reality. Also, a child’s bruises or broken bones are more likely to be called abuse when a stepfather is in the home, and more likely to be called accidental when a biological father is, so data showing a higher incidence of abuse in homes with a stepfather are again biased. “There is no substantial difference between the rates of severe violence committed by genetic parents and by stepparents,” Prof. Buller concludes.
I finally got to see Steve Earle play live at the Wychwood Festival outside Cheltenham in England. It was a fairly miserable day weatherwise, but the storms held off for his set and (earlier) for that of his current partner Allison Moorer. Since my enthusiasm for all this may not be widely shared at CT, I’m putting the rest below the fold.
The BBC News website has a piece on the role of bloggers in the French referendum, and especially that of a “non” manifesto by law professor Etienne Chouard .
The exit polls say that the French electorate have rejected the European Constitution , with 55% voting “no”.
As the French prepare to vote “non”, my friend Glyn Morgan has a piece in the Independent about the constitution , the conservative nationalism of its opponents on both left and right, and the importance of enlargement. Unfortunately, he argues, faced with problems of demographic transition, immigration, international competition from India and China, and the unilateralism of the only global superpower, much of the left would prefer not to face facts:
bq. Befuddled by these challenges, many Europeans, particularly in France, have slipped their moorings from reality. Both the Eurosceptic left and the Eurosceptic right have reached for the security blanket – moth-holed and threadbare, though it is – of nationalism. The Eurosceptic left’s embrace of nationalism is particularly insidious, because it hides behind the language of social justice. Time was when the European left was outward-looking, internationalist, and concerned with the least well-off, no matter where they lived. In Europe today, the least well-off are to be found primarily in central and eastern Europe. European enlargement, one of the greatest achievements of post-war Europe, offers these victims of history a life-line into the modern democratic world. That’s the reason for admitting Turkey.
The AUT boycott of Haifa and Bar-Ilan Universities in Israel was overturned at today’s special meeting of AUT council. BBC report here.
One of the best comebacks ever, dead and buried at half-time, Champions of Europe….
My dear former colleague Andrew Harrison died last Saturday after suffering a cruel illness for the last three years. Andrew was a wonderful teacher, a kind and generous man and a distinguished thinker in aesthetics. I’ve posted some words about him written by Michael Welbourne to philos-l which you can read here . I know that a number of former students read CT. If you are among them and would like to know about funeral arrangements please email me privately.
The AUT boycott was put before our local association today (for the motion I co-sponsored see here — and scroll down). The debate was passionate but respectful. Everyone on both sides agreed that the AUT had botched things procedurally. The pro-boycott lobby didn’t address the details of the Haifa or Bar-Ilan cases at all but made a generic anti-Israel case centred around an analogy with apartheid. In the end the vote was decisive, a pro-boycott amendment was defeated by 41 votes to 18 and my anti-boycott motion passed by 40 votes to 16. Somewhat disappointingly, a number of people then left and a vote was taken that effectively commits the Bristol delegation to splitting their vote to reflect the proportions of opinion (rather than swinging all our votes at Council against the boycott). This adds Bristol to the list of associations that opposed the boycott.
The BBC radio news this morning has been dominated by hours of whining about the takeover of Manchester United by a Michael Moore lookalike . Meanwhile the disappearance of hundreds (and possibly thousands) of African children from London schools is relegated to mere mention status. (Some of the children have been killed, many more are probably in some kind of slavery.) The relative importance the BBC assigns to these stories is also reflected on its main news page.
Over at Left2Right, David Velleman has posted in opposition to the AUT boycott. I’m largely in agreement with him, but in comments (and by email) he and Ralph Wedgwood ask a few questions. Since others less familiar to the UK university scene may want answers to the same ones, I’m posting them here. By the way, the current state of play is that AUT activists opposed to the boycott have garnered the 25 signatures of Council members needed to trigger an emergency session of Council to reconsider the boycott, this will take place on the 26th of May. Below the fold I append the text of a resolution I’ve co-authored for my local association, which we’ll debate on the 18th.
What is the AUT? Do all university teachers belong to it? Are there other organizations representing university teachers, or is the AUT the only (or main) one?
The AUT is the main trade union representing university teachers (and librarians and other “academic-related” staff) in the “old” universities (i.e those that weren’t polytechnics pre-1992). It does have some membership also in those universities I believe. I’ve heard varying estimates of the proportion of eligible staff who belong to the AUT, it seems to be just under a third of academic and related staff at my own university. The other union, representing the same sort of people but in post-1992 universities, and in colleges of further education is NATFHE (National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education). This is much bigger than the AUT, there is a merger proposed, and, by the way, NATFHE currently has a more aggressive anti-Israel policy than the AUT. The policy of any merged union on this has yet to be determined.
Does the AUT tend to have a political affiliation or complexion? For example, does it tend to attract membership from left-leaning academics rather than others?
Not as such, though local meetings tend to attract a higher proportion of activists than are present in the general membership and, of course, left-wing people tend to attach more importance to being a member of a union.
How was the vote conducted? What was the turnout? Is this one of those cases in which a relatively small number of activists takes advantage of low turnout to push through a resolution?
The vote was conducted at the annual AUT Council, its sovereign body. Each local association sends one representative per 150 members, and I think there were about 200 representatives in all. The specific issue of the Israel boycott was not discussed or canvassed in most local associations in advance, the representatives mostly voted their own personal opinion without reference to the views of their members. (I have so far, despite efforts, been unable to get a reliable idea of how all our representatives voted.) The vote was narrow, and, allegedly due to time constraints, only one side of the argument was properly put before the motions were put to the vote.
Will British academics be bound by the AUT boycott? Are there sanctions for those who break the boycott?
No, they will not be bound. A key question here is whether local activists who try to implement the boycott will be disciplined by university management and whether the AUT will then try to defend them, and whether the AUT membership would be willing to act in their defence. I’m sceptical, given the AUT’s inability to secure collective action on basic questions of pay and employment over the years. I’m certain that those who don’t observe the boycott will face no negative consequences whatsoever.
I went to bed at 12.30 with things looking increasingly grim for Labour, and I’m surprised that when I got up just before 6 they’d improved considerably. The short version: Labour will win an unprecedented third term, but with a reduced majority of 60-something; the Liberal Democrats have made big gains in votes, but less so in seats (and have hurt Labour); and the Tories’ negative campaign has won them some seats but no increased popularity. Oh, and George Galloway ousted Oona King. But you could get all this just by reading the BBC .