For reasons best known to themselves the Havens Center staff have given the George Galloway tour higher billing on their website than the Chris Bertram tour (scroll down the first link for Bertram, he has lower billing). Don’t bug me about this, or about sponsoring gorgeous george — I had nothing to do with either decision (it would be silly to pretend I had nothing to do with the Bertram visit). I’m going to miss Galloway, for domestic reasons, but I haven’t the slightest doubt that Chris’s talks will be more interesting.
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Harry
Via Norm, a piece by Mike Brearley, who understands why cricket is thrilling and why this test series in particular has been so gripping. But he perpetuates a myth about Headingley 1981, that I want to kill. He says:
The comparison is no doubt indecent, but nevertheless valid: people remember where they were on the last day at Headingley, 1981, just as those of us who are old enough remember where we were when we heard of John F Kennedy’s assassination, or the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Well, I do remember where I was on the last day of Headingley 1981. But that is incidental. What I really remember is where I was in the final session of the Saturday when first Dilley, and then Botham, truned a hopeless situation into one in which you started to fantasize about what eventually happened. I suspect Brearley remembers the last day better because, though he never says it, it was a day when a captain won a match.
Anyway, if you’ve got a TV, watch it tomorrow [or the day after, if you are reading this on Tuesday — thanks Chris] for Benaud. If you have a ticket, or can steal one, go for Warne. And pity the rest of us.
I was lucky enough to attend part of the Kidbrooke School celebrations in July, though mainly in order to have my children see my dad speak while he is in his prime. Now BBC Radio 4 has come up with what promises to be a brilliant history of the Comprehensive School. Highlights from the first, rivetting, show include the story of how London County Council officials were impressed by comprehensive schooling in the States (see, European leftists do learn things from the US), the story of Stewart Mason’s experiment in Tory Leicestershire (he had the sneaky idea of calling all the comprehensive schools Grammar Schools, though his reform had the undesirable side-effect of inventing the middle school) and an exemplary media performance by my esteemed former colleague David Crook. They get the history just about right, but more impressively the show really gives the texture of the debates and the experience of people whose lives were affected by the reforms. Radio at its best. Future episodes promise interviews with Kenneth Baker, Roy Hattersley, John O Farrell and one Tim Brighouse (wonder what he’ll say).
Mike Baker (who declares an interest) explains the incredibly complex new University tuition fee system. I think he gets it exactly right (but am not sure because…it is so complicated). His final paragraph:
So it is somewhat ironic that the greatest concern over the new fees system has been on behalf of students from the poorest homes.
This is a Robin Hood-style, redistributive scheme: taking from the better-off graduate in order to give to the student from a poor home. Government ministers have always been nervous of spelling this out for fear of sounding like socialists. Yet, this obfuscation, like the terminology of “variable fees” rather than “graduate taxes”, could threaten the success of the scheme if it deters the very people it is meant to help.The government has a big explaining job to do.
I’ve been meaning to write a long and irritating piece on divorce for ages. You’ll have to wait. In the mean time, Laura at 11D has a good post on it, followed by fascinating, if sometimes slightly intemperate, comments. Well worth a read. (And not irritating, unlike my unactualised piece).
I had a fleeting moment of deep joy the other day. Dsquared had mentioned the RCP (this being the British RCP, not the butt of Scott McLemee’s jokes) in some comments thread, and, via the Virtual Stoa, I saw that spiked-online are described as British Conservatives at What is Liberalism?
The RCP was, for a while, the coolest group on the left. They were so cool that people like me couldn’t even speak to them. They wore clothes that even I could see were hip as hip could be. They were all tall, and dark, and good-looking. They were also articulate (all, I gather now, having been to the University of Kent — scroll down), and there was a rumour that the SWP had banned its members from attending RCP events, for fear of losing grips on them. The group is now defunct not, as with so many others, because it collapsed, but because it members became converted to the joys of capitalism en masse, and created a journal called Living Marxism (devoted to promoting libertarian capitalism and downplaying the atrocities of the Milosevic regime), the descendent of which is spiked-online.
Anyway, I digress. Why the deep joy?
I’ve been doing some looking around to find out what the evidence is on grade inflation, specifically in higher education in the US. I’m surprised by two things. First, that there doesn’t seem to be firm evidence of it. (It is interesting that Valen Johnson’s excellent book Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, for example, is not about grade inflation at all, but about grade variation and student evaluations of teaching). Second, that so many people think that there is firm evidence of it. Certainly, it appears that if you ask people — faculty and students — whether there is grade inflation, they believe there is. But that is poor evidence, because the students don’t know anything abut what happened in the past, and the faculty have faulty memories. When you look at grades, it certainly seems that mean grades have been increasing within institutions over the past 25-35 years. The most frequently referred to site is Stuart Rojstaczer’s gradeinflation.com, which surveys a small number of institutions and finds increases in the mean grade in all of them over both a ten year and a 30 year period (much bigger in the private than in the public institutions). This is what people take to be firm evidence of grade inflation. But it isn’t, and I’m surprised that anyone thinks it is. Here’s why; within the institutions surveyed the students might have been gaining in achievement. Grade inflation consists in higher grades being given for similar quality work, not just higher grades being given. And no-one seems to have any data on the quality of the work being produced now or in the past.
I only just found this call for papers for a volume on Metallica and Philosophy. It says:
Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: Search for Meaning—“Frantic” and “Through the Never”; Nuclear Fear and Politics—“Fight Fire with Fire” and “Blackened”; Capital Punishment—“Ride the Lightning”; Politics, Economics, and Ethics—“…And Justice for All” and “Some Kind of Monster”; The Problem of Evil—“Creeping Death”; Alcoholica: Free Will and Addiction—“Master of Puppets” and “Fixxer”; Appearance and Reality—“Enter Sandman” and “Escape”; Foucault and Metallica on Madness and Insanity—“Sanitarium” and “The Frayed Ends of Sanity”; Truth—“Eye of the Beholder”; Hypocrisy and Inauthenticity—“Leper Messiah” and “Holier Than Thou”; Hume and Augustine on Moral Motivations and Inordinate Desire—“Sad But True,” “The Unnamed Feeling,” and “Master of Puppets”; Emotion: Love and Anger—“The Struggle Within” and “St. Anger”; Heidegger’s Being-toward-death—“Fade to Black” and “The Four Horsemen”; War—“Disposable Heroes” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls”; Sorrow, Redemption, and Forgiveness—“No Remorse,” “Harvester of Sorrow,” and “The Unforgiven”; Violence—“Seek & Destroy” and “All Within My Hands”; Masculinity and Warrior Virtues—“Metal Militia,” “Don’t Tread on Me,” and “Shoot Me Again”; Existentialism—“Wherever I May Roam,” “Nothing Else Matters,” and “My World”; Selling-Out, Commercialism and Marxism: Why did Metallica start making videos?; Napster and Intellectual Property; Group Identity and Personal Identity: Are the group members the same persons they were 20 years ago? Is it the same group it was 20 years ago, given the changes the members have undergone and given the changes in bass players?
I thoroughly approve of the Pop Culture and Philosophy series, but would have to rule myself out of this one. NWBHM and Philosophy, maybe. Thin Lizzy and Philosophy, almost certainly. Loudon Wainwright III and Philosophy, no question… oh, sorry, that was popular culture and Philosophy. Maybe Rufus, then.
Unfortunately the deadline for abstracts was July 1st, but I would bet you anything that the editors would still consider an abstract from an eminent philosopher like Brian.
This is a quibble with something in John’s long discourse on the war. It’s more of a question, than a quibble, really. John rightly points out that, in assessing the true consequences of some policy or action, we have to take into account the opportunity costs:
A second common feature of pro-war analysis is a failure to take account of the opportunity cost of the resources used in war. The $300 billion used in the Iraq war would have been enough to finance several years of the Millennium Development project aimed at ending extreme poverty in the world, and could have saved millions of lives. But even assuming this is politically unrealistic, the money could surely have been spent on improved health care, road safety and so on in the US itself. At a typical marginal cost of $5 million per live saved, 60 000 American lives could have been saved. This is morally relevant, but is commonly ignored.
Please don’t think about the war, or John’s more general argument about it, for the moment. Assume that all we are doing is trying to figure out the consequences for the purpose of moral evaluation (whatever weight you think the consequences should have — for me, its less than for John, but more than for some). What are the real opportunity costs that we should figure in?
I’m too young to remember the D’Oliveira affair in any detail, but old enough for it to have made a dent on my consciousness, and, of course, to have seen D’Oliveira in his later, post-test-playing years. I remember quite vividly the affection for him in my circles, an affection which, if I’m right, contained not a whiff of pride that England had treated him well, but an bemused pride that he had chosen England. I was aware, of course, that the South African government was composed of evil racists and that the English cricket establishment was suspected of collaboration. But what Peter Oborne’s book Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Controversy
I should make a confession here.
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I’ve been puzzling about Hitchens recently, partly as a result of listening to his session at the Hay On Wye festival with the Greatest Living Englishman on blasphemy (courtesy of Norman Geras). He veers in that debate between inspiring brilliance and unfunny rudeness — I cannot imagine what the GLE made of it. I disagree with him about the war in in Iraq, and find myself wondering how he squares his support for Bush with many of his other apparent beliefs. He often sounds shrill in his attacks on the left, even when he can beat his immediate opponent on reason and evidence alone. I thought, for example, that he got the better of Chomsky by a mile in the polemics over Afghanistan, but was taken aback by the energy he put into alienating himself from the left in general. Maurice Isserman quotes one of the Socialist Party leaders who negotiated the merger with Max Shachtman’s group in the late ’50’s as saying something like the following “as soon as it was over I realised that this guy was going to move as far to the right as fast as he could” and that was certainly how Hitchens seemed at the time. He hasn’t exactly fulfilled that promise (nor, IMHO, did Shachtman), though he certainly tries to give that impression from time to time. But I still find his prose, almost always, compelling; I’d certainly sooner read almost anything by him than anything by any other journalist working today. Norm quotes Ophelia Benson (with permission) as follows:
Nominations are closed, but now you can vote, at the In Our Time site, on who is the greatest philosopher of all time. I’m surprised that there is even a debate about this among educated people, but I suppose that even the CT contributors might disagree amongst themselves. For me, there’s one so far in front of the others that it’s not worth debating. To my complete dismay, my two favourite celebrities on the BBC list (the greatest living Irishman and the greatest living Englishman) chose others, and my least favourite concurred with me.
The arrival of Andrew Adonis in government has so far gone uncommented upon here, so I feel entitled to say something, however belatedly. Adonis’s presence at #10 made the Education portfolio a poisoned chalice for at least the whole of the second term. Because Number 10 was always interfering in policymaking, no Education Secretary (even Charles Clarke) could pursue his or her own agenda with confidence. Not only were they constantly being second-guessed and scrutinized, but even when they put forward their own initiatives no-one affected could be sure whose they were, or whether, if they truly belonged to the Secretary, they would reach fruition. It seemed to me that Estelle Morris (who was Secretary of State most of the time I lived in the UK) was always in an untenable position. The portion of the Queens Speech on Education has Adonis’s name written all over it.
Ruth Kelly should be delighted, therefore, to have Adonis in her team.
Tony Banks is to become a peer. And Chris Smith. It’s a long way from the GLC. Check out the list here.
Estelle Morris too, presumably forgiven for setting the appalling precedent of taking responsibility for errors committed under her watch. And Gillian Shephard, the only Education Secretary in the past ten years I’ve heard nice things about from all sides.