The State We're In, Part 3.b: Two Billion Pounds!!!

In my post yesterday I said that the government had slashed funding for research in UK HE to 'more or less zero'.  "But, hold on there, Grumpy", you might say, "I read in the papers that the money awarded to UKHE from the REF is two billion pounds per an. - two Billion POUNDS - two thousand million pounds!  How do you call that more or less zero?"  To which I say, yup, it's a fair cop.  Two billion pounds is an unimaginable amount of cash to you or me, readers.  In fact, it's shitloads.  Why, even the highest paid man in the UK would take nearly 23 years to earn that much.

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Hang on...

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So what we're saying is that one person could earn in twenty three years what the entire nation is willing to spend per an on the higher educational research activity of over fifty thousand academics (see below) across the entire country. (Actually, given that that salary is two years old, he probably earns more now so it'd take less time.) Let's reflect on that for a moment.  Put another way, assuming there are other people earning that sort of amount, or even slightly less, five of them would earn the same, over the next five years, as the entire nation is going to spend (per an) on higher educational research.  Or we can look at it another way. Any one of the twenty-five richest people (or people 'and family' - tax dodge) in the UK (as of May this year) could dip into their fortune and pay for the whole country's annual higher education research bill, and still leave themselves with a fortune of between 1.43 and 9.9 billion pounds. 1.43 billion quid, by the way, is 53.9 times the average wage in the UK.  In other words the average UK wage-earner would take nearly 54 years to accumulate that amount of money, and even that would assume that s/he was able to save up 100% of their salary!  As yet another abstract formulation, A 10% levy on the estates of only the *twenty-five* wealthiest people in the UK (leaving them only with fortunes of between £3bn and nearly £11bn...) would yield £17.1 billion, a sum that would match the government's spending on the research activities of over 54,000 UK academics for the next eight years.   I'm just sayin'.  But let's reflect on that a little.  That tells us quite a lot, doesn't it, about wealth difference and the economic priorities of neo-liberal capitalist economics.  Is that the sort of country we really want to live in?

Anyway, let's leave that to one side for now.  Two billion quid goes to universities to pay for research.  That still can't be bad.  How does that work out?  By my reckoning, there were 54,893 academics entered into the REF.  I don't think that one researcher could be entered into more than one panel but even if they could it would be a minority.  Let's round the number down to 50,000 to be on the safe side.  £2,000,000,000 divided by 50,000 works out at £40,000 each.  That sounds OK.  At first.  But £2,000,000,000 per an won't even cover the wage bill of the academics submitted (even at 2011 rates).  Of course, academics are not only paid to research, but to teach and administer too.  The common formula for research active staff in older universities at least is 40% time on research, 60% on teaching and admin. At that rate, then, the 2 billion will cover the relevant wage bill of the full time researching academics.   But we also have to factor in the wages of fairly numerous essential lab staff in the science departments, as well research librarians and research assistants in arts, humanities and social sciences, administrative support staff and the temporary lecturing staff bought in to cover for full-time staff on research leave.  That means that the budget is unlikely to contribute even one penny to the cost of research equipment, or 'plant costs' (maintenance of buildings, electricity, etc.), which in science departments are understandably astronomical.  Even cheap humanities departments require annual library and computing budgets to maintain any kind of research viability.  All of that now has to be financed from other sources.  That means student fees to a large extent, but even then £9k per an is not far above the cost price of a university education (including teaching resources which admittedly can sometimes double for research) leaving very little for research.  Well, fair enough, you might say, if you buy into the US-style neo-liberal propaganda, why should I pay, through my taxes for someone else's university education?  Why? Because culture, civilisation ('m not even going to be drawn into the economic benefits etc).

All this is one reason that everything has begun to turn on research grant income, at the expense of research quality, the thing that drove ICL's Professor Grimm evidently to take his own life (on that subject I can recommend nothing better than this post by the Plashing Vole).

I am also assuming, in all the above, that the money would be divided equally.  But obviously the point of the REF is that it isn't.  It is moderated to some degree by a department's place in the league. Therefore, for every person or department whose research is only adequately funded, let alone those few whose budget is enlarged, there is another department, or someone else, who is correspondingly underfunded, whose institution is no longer able to pay for them to research.  This may drive those people out of the profession, force them to teach more and research less or even force them onto teaching only contracts with no time to research at all (and while we are on that subject, you can't say, that's OK - academics should spend their time teaching the paying student: if you want to teach someone how to be, say, a historian you have to be a practising historian), force them out of the country to work elsewhere, force departmental closures, and so on.  All this seriously diminishes UK culture.

Let's look at it a third way. As of 12 September 2011, the UK had spent £123.9 bn on the bank bailout (but had planned on spending - and been exposed to the risk of spending - one and a half trillion pounds (£1,500,000,000,000).  By comparison, then, the bankers received what, at current rates (assuming our £2bn is an annual budget), the UK would be willing to pay for all of higher academic research for the next sixty-two years.  As I have said, £2 bn does not cover the cost of research.  Let's assume that the actual cost of UK academic research is three times that.  It still means we have spent on the bank bail-out enough to cover two decades of top-level research in all disciplines right across the UK (and stood ready to shell out the equivalent of full funding all university research in the UK for, at current rates, over two centuries...).  And one might want to ask what would be a better use of the money: bailing out irresponsible unregulated money-launderers who hold the country to ransom (we allegedly can't touch them because they'd all leave and now - post Thatcher - our entire economy is supposed to be dependent upon the financial wild west that the City has become), or people who work hard to improve, in all sorts of ways, the quality of life (leaving aside the economy etc etc) of the nation.  Well, you decide.  Maybe tell your MP...

But either way, two billion quid is really not a lot for what the nation as a whole gets back.  You have to ask whether, as a reward, it is worth the financial and cultural costs (not to mention the stress, the suicide) that come with the REF.

The State We're In, Part 3.a: Listmania

So.  The results of the REF (Research Excellence Framework for non-academics, or non-UK academics or UK academics that have been hiding in a cave for eight years) are in (or out, depending on your preferred idiom).  Consult the lists to your heart’s desire.  They will be spun one way or another, stressing one performance index over another, on every university website across the country for months to come.  This seems as good a time as any to resume my thoughts on ‘The State We’re In’ (Part 1; Part 2; plus search for the 'State we're in' label for other scattered interim thoughts on various issues)

Well, there’s (I suppose) good news, bad news and (actual) good news.

First the (I suppose) good news.  My department came 2^nd out of the 83 history departments in the exercise.  Yay, woo!  And actually this is in some important ways good news.  It is good news because some of my colleagues, notably our chair of the research committee and our head of department put in very long hours of tedious work, not always helped enormously by somewhat thuggish ‘powers that be’ higher up in the university, and it is very good news that that hard work gets some sort of serious recognition.  It is also good news in that it represents in some ways the culmination of a process that has been under way for ten years and in which I think I have played a significant part, of turning the department from one that had for decades had no ambition (other than to be some sort of Oxford feeder college) and had more or less institutionalised mediocrity, into a serious player in historical research in the UK.  This provides some reward to all the people who have contributed to that.  It is also good news because we are a very good history department.  I have some very good and interesting colleagues, especially at the younger end, doing good work in new areas.  It is good to have some sort of public indication of that fact; it is good to get some reward for the hard research work we have all put in.  It is, furthermore, good news to see some departments who are somehow supposed to be ipso facto the best in the country slither down to something approximating their actual intellectual worth, though only because it might (though actually it won’t) make them think twice before assuming that anyone graduating from or working at another university is somehow some kind of lesser intellect, and about instilling that misplaced sense of intellectual superiority in their students.  It might make someone in the general non-academic world realise that there is a disjuncture between privilege and prestige on the one hand and merit on the other.  It might even make prospective students (graduate and undergraduate) realise that going to those gilded places will not necessarily get them the best tuition, or expose them to the best historical minds. 

It is also, and I think this is very important, good news – indeed an excellent outcome – given the generally humane way in which my department (and our university management on the whole) have managed the whole REF business, compared with horror stories from elsewhere.  There have been no threats or other bullying strategies, and I hope that perhaps university management culture might make a note of this.  Sadly that wasn’t the case in the institution which produced the top placed history department, which drove at least one fine historian out of the profession altogether.

[Personally – and I take no pride in this but I have to be honest here – I also take some unedifying satisfaction in seeing departments that drove me out through bullying, or which have serially considered me to be beneath them, or which contain other people who have actively hindered my career, come out many places lower than the department where I work. This, the 'ha, fuck you then' response, is the natural response; it is the response encouraged by the system; it is the wrong response.]

But (the Bad News) this all comes at a cost. 

I am happy for my colleagues that they have got a serious reward for their hard work. I am happy that we have serious recognition as a good history department.  Don’t get me wrong about any of that.  

But I am very wary indeed of the bragging that might ensue, wary of suggesting that this means we really are better than (almost) anyone else, even contingently, temporarily, even taking (as I said in part 1) the exercise to be a sort of FA Cup contest, as though historical scholarship were like a race or FA Cup contest where one side definitively could be better than another.  I am wary of suggesting that my colleagues in other departments might be worse than us on this basis.  The risk of suggesting the above is serious and inherent in the league table culture.  We must work hard to counter it (though we won’t for the reasons I set out in Part 1)

Then, where is the real reward?  When the REF (or RAE as it was then) started, the point of the exercise was to divvy up the money the government gave out to universities to fund research.  Now of course, the government (and indeed the last Labour government – let’s be clear) has basically cut that to more or less zero.  So where do the rewards lie for all the hard work put in by chairs of department, chairs of research committees, and the ordinary rank and file researchers? The reward is located first and foremost in university bragging rights (‘we did better than you, ha ha ha’ [see italicised paragraph above!]), league table positions and so on.  This is good news for Vice Chancellors looking for an excuse to increase their pay packet yet further (while putting a brake on that of all the people who did the hard work) but not so much for the rest.  Why?  Because now there is precious little government funding so universities have to find other means of finding money.  And those means put them all in competition with each other.  To get funding we have to attract students, in a zero-sum game, and the league tables’ only value is in that game.  Or we have to get grants (in a situation that has led to at least one suicide in recent months), in a climate where grant income counts for more than actual research value.  All this ends (well, it ended some Time ago) the situation which ought to exist, where academics see themselves as collaborative, cooperative, fellow seekers after knowledge rather than members of competing cells.  Second the participation, the general gloating and publicity all strengthens the whole dynamic that I discussed in Parts 1 and 2, which produces the situation where any government can get the HE sector to dance to any tune: that, in other words, produces the state we are in.  This is all a high price to pay.  It is bad news.  I feel that someone in a department that (deservedly) did well in the exercise and who has put in good submissions in the last two exercises is best placed to make that criticism.

The other bad news is that proportionately far less goes on recognising actual quality research than it used to.  On the one hand part of the submission in terms of research environment concerns research income (see above).  But research income is not a valid recognition of research quality.  For one thing it is what comes out of a project that should count, not the amount of money that went in (however much the latter delights university accountants).  Secondly, what gets the money very often constitutes intellectually pretty lame projects, listing things and putting them on line.  On the other hand, a large part goes on ‘Impact’ – the many drawbacks with which have been pointed out over and over (not least by science departments, who have done best by the system and thus are best placed to make the critique) and hardly need repeating.  As far as history is concerned though, one additional problem is that the system provides little benefit to those who do not work on British or modern (or preferably modern British) history.

A third piece of bad news concerns the numbers themselves, which are entirely subjective judgements made by small panels, not always of the most respected or research productive academics within fields.  Some would say that the data are not robust.  More to the point, the fact that the numbers can be arranged sequentially is highly misleading.  Look at the history list and you will see that Lancaster University comes in twenty-three places below my department.  “Woo”, you might say, “the Lancaster historians must be loads worse than those at Poppleton.”  But look again at the evidence (and essentially to be a historian is to master the art of looking again).  If you count the GPA of Birmingham (in 1^st place) as 100%, then Lancaster came in with 94%, whereas we got 99.6%.  That is a pretty fine difference for twenty-three places in the league (or visually, on the page or computer screen, a big drop of the eye).  Indeed by the same reckoning, the history department that came in thirtieth was still scoring near enough 91%.  So all these league tables, all this listmania, have a seriously misleading effect, in addition to all the other detrimental effects the league table culture has on higher education, scholarship and research.  Yet, those big visual drops of the eye (rather than the actual numbers) are what will put some people's jobs under pressure.

But here I want to shift tack again and spin this a slightly different way to end on what I think is some (actual) good news.  One bit of good news is that the table does at least shake things up a bit and suggest that the many good universities of the UK are all really pretty similar – that it is not a case of Oxbridge and a couple of others versus the rest of the pre-‘92s and then all of them against the post-‘92s.  What I would hope is that this shaking up might make research students apply to the university where the scholar best –placed to supervise them is working, rather than according to established institutional prestige.

More importantly than that, using the criteria mentioned above, even the bottom-placed history department scored 58% compared with the top.  The departments at the bottom of the top 51 were scoring 85%.  What I would like to suggest this means, and what I would like to suggest would be the best, the most humane, conclusion that the British historical profession ought to take away from the REF league table is that historians working in UKHE – across the board, from the top to the bottom of the list are producing significant amounts of good work.  That is actual good news and I want to end on this point, for now.  This is what as a profession we should be proud of, not institutional bragging rights.  Or, as Young Mr Grace used to say, “you’ve all done very well.”

Widespread astonishment erupts as a principled academic historian is found in a senior position in a UK university

Here.  And especially here.  Thanks to one of my colleagues for pointing me at this.

The State We're In (Part 2)

I’m acutely conscious that these observations on the state of British Higher Education, ‘as it appears to me’ from my not-very-exalted position, may represent no more than ‘stating the bleedin’ obvious’. Nonetheless I’m persevering partly to put my own thoughts in order and partly because the reflection involved even in stating the bleedin’ obvious is sometimes worthwhile. Part 1 suggested that the principal problem facing us has been the division of the HE sector into competing ‘cells’. With this situation in place, governments of both major political parties (neither has a spotless record in this regard) have, by appealing to local advantage, demonstrably been able to force through whatever cock-eyed policy initiatives they have wanted.

The general dynamic was set out in Part 1. As a practical case study, let’s take the obvious example of how it is, as I called it in Part 1, 'fundamentally antithetical to the furtherance of any real educational ideal' – Impact. There’s no need to waste words on what a profoundly stupid, half-baked idea this is (let’s remember, too, for the sake of balance, that it was a typical New Labour idea). Other people have done it far better than I could (Simon Blackburn, my favourite current British philosopher of the analytic tradition, waxes lyrical here and here). I was (and am) strongly opposed to the nature of this scheme; I’m not opposed to a requirement that publicly-funded research be made publicly available or accessible, but that is a quite different matter. When it was first proposed I circulated some reasons why I was opposed to it around my department. Such feedback I got was generally supportive, my colleagues being sound folk on the whole, but what disappointed me was a response from a colleague for whom I have enormous respect as a historian and as a human being, to the effect that ‘this would be good for us’.

This is absolutely symptomatic of the dynamic I set out in Part 1. It became perceived that we could improve our RAE/REF standing through the Impact Agenda. So, no matter what the general principles of the business might have been, no matter whether a general front for the good of the discipline might have been desirable, if it worked for us we’d support it, and damn any other history departments that didn’t fit the bill as well. And even individuals of profound intelligence, decency and humanity got ensnared in this way of thinking. At a lower level, damn your colleagues who don’t work on British history, for whom Impact projects are that much more difficult to devise (the cells have cells within ‘em). It only takes a certain number of cells to think like this for the measure to get implemented, just as it only takes a certain number of individuals within each cell to persuade the cell to support it. There comes a tipping point. At the institutional level it comes where the institution decides that something ‘won’t go away’ (Classic Gutless Staff-Meeting Pseudo-Arguments no.94) and had better implement some initiatives to make sure that next time, at least, it does OK in this category. On an individual basis it comes in what I call, in my vernacular, the ‘What the f*ck’ moment: the moment where the individual thinks ‘Ah, what the f*ck; I suppose I’d better see what I can do for my CV’ … Because once the policy is implemented it will quickly appear among the criteria for promotion etc. Indeed institutions start appointing whole offices of new administrative staff to oversee and implement Impact projects …

The problem went further, though, than the splintering of any general front presented by History. At the next level up, History perceived, on balance, that it could live with Impact, so damn the rest of the Humanities. Things may have changed. The open letter published in the Higher about the AHRC and The Big Society was signed by 26 learned societies. But there was no sign of this with Impact. The RHS decided that 15% of the REF was OK ‘because this was no time for the Humanities to suggest they had no wider relevance’. No matter that no consultation between the RHS and the other learned bodies of the humanities seems to have taken place. No matter that the disciplines most widely held to be ‘relevant to wider society’, the hard sciences, spelled out very vocally indeed their opposition to Impact. No matter that our sister disciplines in the modern languages, philosophy, literature and so on would all find it extremely difficult to work with the Impact agenda. This, too, was very disappointing. The whole business graphically illustrates how the possibility of any sort of unified front is shattered by the way that the sector is divided along all sorts of axes into all sorts of contingently-existing cells all now perceiving themselves as in competition with each other. If the AHRC refuses to budge of the issue of The Big Society within its funding priorities, it will not be long before we hear that, because ‘it won’t go away’, there are various things ‘that we already do’ that ‘can easily be put under that heading’. Mark my words. You heard it here first. Those 26 learned societies will start thinking about the possibilities for their own cell. Already, as this item reports, various VCs, vice-masters, etc, are queuing up to talk about the positives of The Big Society and how it includes what universities already do. This is how it starts, working to the Führer…

Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I can’t help feeling that, thirty years ago, this situation would have caused academics to look somewhat askance. Indeed, in David Lodge’s novels written at that sort of time, initiatives like this appear as obviously satirical exaggerations. How did we get into this mess? The problem surely came with the introduction of the Thatcherite mantras of choice and competition. The clever move here was that choice and competition came alongside auditing and transparency. Now, there is surely no sustainable argument against the viewpoint that recipients of public money should have to prove that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing with that money, that they are doing their jobs to a level and consistency that justifies their receipt of public money, and that therefore public money is not being wasted. That seems unobjectionable to me. I’ve said it before and it has not made me popular, but I’ll say it again: no one deserves a publicly-funded salary just for being clever (let alone, as sometimes still seems to be the case, for having been thought to have been clever when they were 25). If you want to draw a professorial salary but don’t want to (or can’t) do what the job – as currently set up – requires of you, whether you like it or (like most us) not, then the solution is to find a private benefactor.

The trick, though, was then to put the results of these fundamentally unobjectionable audits, especially of research, into numerical form and thence into league tables. This was where the mantras of choice and competition reared their ugly head. Competition is supposed to be good for quality, and transparency about the results good for the sacred cow of ‘choice’. Neither element of the equation stands up to very close scrutiny. Here is Stephen Fry pouring scorn on the idea that having a greater range of choice necessarily is a good thing in terms of quality. That was about 20 years ago, but this neo-liberal idea has got no less ludicrous or - alas - current in the interim.  Little more needs to be said really. Which is best: a choice of a million kinds of crap or a choice of five quality products…? Whether or not choice, competition and the league tables held essential to the maintenance of the first two actually raise quality seems to me to be very much a moot point. What the process seems to me – empirically – to do is simply to generate the production of the right sorts of thing that yield the right sorts of numerical data to improve one’s score.

Anyone familiar with the history of GCSE/A-levels over the last 25 years will know how this works. In an effort, allegedly, to raise standards by introducing choice and competition, school league tables of GCSE/A-level performance, school-by-school, were produced. To improve their scores, schools demanded transparency (rightly) over the marking of the exams. Eventually this became so algorithmic that teachers could drill their students about how to get the best marks by the simple production of formulae. Numerical data can then be produced, marks obtained, etc, etc., and league tables published. But as anyone who has had to teach the sorry products of this system will attest, all this transparency, competition, choice and league tables has produced anything but raised quality.(1)

The RAE/REF has gone much the same way. For most of the process, departments and institutions spend their whole time trying to get clues about what counts and for how much, and how they can best maximise their scores. Many years ago, David Cannadine (or ‘Sir’ David Cannadine, as he likes to be known) said in his inaugural lecture at London that the process mistook productivity for creativity and it’s – fundamentally – still the case. Sometimes it seems every bit as algorithmic in its procedures as the A-levels (according to what I have heard from actual RAE panel members). If it’s not, it’s the pretty arbitrary (or at best subjective) awarding of a score from 1 to 4 by someone whose own research one might or might not personally have any regard for. The only way to stop it being arbitrary/subjective would be to make it entirely algorithmic, something that may well come if people demand transparency about the scores and procedures, thus far withheld from us. It’s also moved the whole issue away from the actual production of quality scholarship and into not entirely related areas, notably, of course, the sphere of getting money (grants). A million-pound grant to publish a list of everyone called Bert in seventeenth-century Rutland? Brilliant! A ground-breaking monograph on a major issue of European history? Meh - well, it’s not A MILLION POUNDS, now is it?

Whilst we’re on the subject of the RAE/REF, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that this now utterly pointless exercise is still ploughing ahead. I say utterly pointless because there’s no longer any real reward for participation by the Arts and Humanities subjects. Their HEFCE grant – the distribution of which was the avowed aim of the RAE/REF – has been cut by 100% (if I am wrong about this, please let me know: this is the most recent piece I could find, and it doesn’t reassure me; I think I read that it might have been a 'mere' 80%). So why are we still bothering? I’ll tell you why. It’s because our universities actually want us to go through these hoops just for the sake of the precious (meaningless) league tables in which they want to do better vis-à-vis everyone else, and probably because individual panel members think it will help them and their careers – vis-à-vis everyone else. If the Arts and Humanities panels, from their chairs down, had anything about them, they’d resign en masse and screw the whole sorry business. But we can’t expect that.  Here we go again, working to the Führer …(2)  You have to admit that getting the cells to wield the stick themselves even after the carrot has been removed represents an astonishing achievement in the comparative history of the state.  It also shows how The Big State can loom very effectively behind a facade of 'small government' (as in the early Roman Empire, I suppose).

So, all the RAE/REF league tables do is generate specific forms of numbers, with little or no actual relation to quality. But if the RAE/REF is bad, then may I introduce you to the National Student Survey? Here is the absolute ultimate in the generation of meaningless numerical data that can be analysed pseudo-statistically and arranged in league tables. For non-UK readers, the aim of the game is to get the students to rate their student experience over a series of headings. An average is then taken and - hey presto! – you end up Nth out of 196 (or whatever) in the league table. The institutions then go out of their way to try and find ways of generating better figures. But the whole exercise is a sham. It is based upon some serious category errors. Number one: it assumes that our students are our ‘consumers’, which – let’s be crystal clear about this – they are not. A friend of mine is fond of saying that the process is like trying to assess the quality of local bakers by asking for feedback from their cakes. The ‘consumer’ of our ‘products’ is society in general – employers, etc. Second category error: it assumes that the student is in a position to judge the quality of the product. The NSS provides none of the ‘grade descriptors’ we academics have to work with. The students have no criteria according to which they can judge their libraries – have they used every university library, or even a reasonable sample? And (at least in newer universities like mine) the poor old libraries always come in for a kicking in the NSS, presumably because they don’t have every book easily available at any time. After my own department didn't do too well in the first NSS it became clear in consultation with the student body, that we probably scored badly on ‘feedback’ because our students – bless ‘em – didn’t (for example) actually even realise that comments on procedural essays counted as feedback. All this leaves aside the fact that good institutions can get penalised for having good, critical students. Many of ours have friends at Oxford and Cambridge and so, because they see that their libraries are many, many times better than our (by comparison with other 1960s foundations) actually rather good library, they rate it as (say) 3 out of 5.

This is only the pinnacle of the problem of feedback, which we are now forced to spend so much time dealing with. Now, feedback can be useful. Let me make that clear. If my students tell me I talk too much in seminars, or I speak too fast in lectures, or I have too many PowerPoint slides with too much info on them, then that is useful for me and I can try to do something about it. If, on the other hand, little Johnny Frithfroth-Smythe (Year 1) tells me I should have had less social history and more politics in my lectures, or adopted a more thematic approach, my immediate response is – pretty much – f*ck you, you arrogant little turd! What does a first-/second-/third-year undergraduate student know about how to organise a course? Now it might well be that students just don't have the vocabulary to express what they mean to say, and that what little Johnny meant was 'I am, myself, more interested in political history and I was disappointed that there wasn't more'.  Fair enough, but too bad.  It's still for me, not them, to decide, and their lack of a useful vocabulary only underlines the problem with feedback-driven HE.(3)  What we are trying to produce – after three years – is someone who just might have some understanding of history and how it works; who might be ready to go on to be trained about how to do research and design a history course. If they already knew this in year 1 there’d be no point in them doing the degree, now would there?

This dimension of the ‘customer’ image is a third category error. If I go into my local Curry’s and buy a DVD-player, then I have some (admittedly vague) idea of what a DVD player should do/be expected to do, and if it doesn’t do it, or do it to what I think is a sufficient level compared with what I had to pay, I can go back and complain. To pursue the (rather forced) analogy, what we are trying to do is produce someone who, after three years, might have enough of an inkling about the subject that they can go on to be trained in what a DVD does or can be expected to do. Wringing our hands about what students think of a first-year course’s content or structure or methodology is akin to the Curry’s staff wringing their hands and being all apologetic when I bring my DVD-player back and complain volubly that it won’t make toast - rather than showing me the door in short order, which would be the sane 'business world' response to this level of 'customer feedback'.(4)

The fact that institutions expect us to wring our hands in precisely this way is what leads to all the expectations laid upon the eventual NSS league table – a student is in no position to judge his/her degree, given they have nothing to compare it with – and the students’ expectations that they, the customers, are always right. But the league table and its absolutely meaningless data leads to the employment of central admin offices and to people having to waste time ensuring the ‘enhancement of the student experience’. I have a friend who has been saddled with this in his department. I can only assume that he is paying some sort of enormous karmic debt.

So what do we have at the end of the day? Universities so obsessed with league tables, RAE, NSS, and combined tables (of equally meaningless numbers), like the various ‘quality’ newspapers’ ‘University of the Year’ tables, that they set up offices to manage these figures and get the academic staff to spend their time on ensuring higher scores (I can, for example, think of one university in the north of England that has recently decided that its history department comes low in the number of grants applied for, regardless of whether or not this might actually help them produce good history of a sort they are interested in).

What this in turn appears to have led to is the idea that institutions are like businesses in competition with each other and that 'business model' has produced the most regrettable fissure of all within the HE sector, the confrontation between ‘staff’ and ‘managers’, which is what I want to state the bleedin’ obvious about next time.

Notes:

1. The situation, by the way, is far worse in disciplines other than history; I know that modern language departments can habitually fail a dozen or so of a first-year intake that had to achieve an A or B A-level grade to get on the course. I have heard similar stories from science departments about the gulf between A-level and the standard necessary for undergraduate first-year success. We complain that history students have little or no idea about what is required of them when they arrive at university but failing five percent of an intake with As or Bs at A-level is a pretty unlikely outcome.

2.  If you think all this is just sour grapes on my part, here is my RAE 2008 submission (you'll probably have to select me from the drop-down dialogue box), which is probably as good as anyone's in the UK.

3.  Again, to evade accusations of 'sour grapes', I should say that I do very well in feedback responses, with results in the general 'how well did you think your tutor did' area invariably in the 90-100% bracket.  I don't have any on-line resource to point you at but there is a Facebook 'appreciation society' if you can really be bothered to look.

4. Aside – a colleague recently had student feedback suggesting that the same seminar should have been run at two different times each week so that students could go to the one that was most convenient to them that week.  I kid you not.  That, it seems to me, is not an issue of the student not having the right vocabulary to hand but a graphic index of the 'consumer mentality'.