Why understanding can’t be bought or sold by Les Back

“I need to get the most out of this because I am paying for it,” I overheard a first year say to her friend as she dashed to an induction meeting in September. The marketisation of the university has turned campuses into places of commerce and competition. As we all know, the increase of student fees is accelerating that process as well as dividing and ranking the sector. Lecturers fear that students will become increasingly demanding and insistent in exercising their rights as consumers.  The National Student Survey (NSS) will be the mechanism through which the government and HEFC will adduce satisfaction of students.  While I share many of the reservations about the adequacy of the NSS to measure educational value, blaming the consumerism of students for our current situation is tactically wrong.  

One of the damaging effects of the prioritisation of research within the auditing of ‘excellence’ in universities was the devaluing of teaching. I think we have to open up a critical conversation with students about what the changes in higher education is doing to them as well as to the profession.   “The more it costs, the less it’s worth,” students shouted in protest to the introduction of fees and indebtedness. The reduction of education to a thing that can be bought and sold corrodes the value of what we do in the classroom.

A thought can’t be purchased, neither can a leap of imagination be bought or a link between a private trouble and a public issue. The idea that education promises a straightforward return on a financial outlay cheapens what is precious about it. It is entirely logical that students should start to see themselves as paying customers. I think it is incumbent on staff to make their teaching worth the price it has cost. Nevertheless, thinking and intellectual growth cannot be purchased ‘off the peg’.

Inside the student movement there is an awareness that the changes in the new university environment threaten to cost them more than just a large debt. An atmosphere of instrumentalism undermines the university’s ability to foster a place where we can ‘think together’ about difficult problems and practise what Fichte called the “exercise of critical judgement”.  They will be forced to weight the value of their learning as balance between financial cost and speculated benefit. I don’t think students want to be placated like customers, they want engagement and to be challenged and pushed to think harder.

“The art of living in a world oversaturated with information is yet to be learned” writes Zygmunt Bauman. Perhaps, there is another challenge that concerns the art of learning in such a world. Can we simply vilify students for not doing the reading set for this week’s seminar? Or, is it time to think again about the adequacy of the lecture/seminar format for teaching the craft of sociology?  I think perhaps the only positive thing about the current situation is that it is forcing a re-assessment of our role as teachers. We have to insist on other measures of worth and reflect honestly on the values we bring to life when we are teaching.  

Les Back, Goldsmiths University of London

Bootleg Sociology by Les Back

One way to interpret the withdrawal of public investment in Higher Education is that the government wants British universities to have an American future. Over a period of thirty years in the US, state funding of universities has been in a long decline. The fiscal crisis bit hard in 2008 resulting in pay cuts and austerity that had a disproportional negative impact on the social sciences and the humanities. UC Santa Barbara English professor Chris Newfield (read Chris Newfield on “The View from 2020: How Universities Came Back”), perhaps the most informed analyst and observer of these changes, recently pointed out that US university administrators chiefly focused on three mechanisms in their attempts to balance the books: a) investing resources in fund raising; b) building reputations through sponsored projects; and c) increasing tuition fees which almost doubled through the first ten years of the 21st Century. The increases led to widespread public backlash, growing student debt and desperate attempts to maintain recruitment through ‘deep tuition discounting.’ Sound familiar? Well, at least the first two seem very close to our situation in the UK. Perhaps we will also have some kind of educational equivalent – the January sales of the future with students around the country camping outside admissions departments in order to secure bargain deals.

The key point Newfield makes is that tuition fee increases did not fix the financial problems of US universities. Through accessing the University of California faculty reports he calculated that in order to return UC to the level of resources it enjoyed in 2001 it would have to find £25,000 per year – double the current charge. Newfield presented these findings at a seminar earlier this month in Los Angeles as part of the annual literature convention. The Los Angeles Times reported “the tough economy… is causing literature and other humanities departments to defend themselves against cutbacks on campuses around the nation.” One strategy is to insist that non-vocational courses do give students practical skills that assist them in gaining employment. This kind of rhetoric of practicality is also beginning to emerge in the UK as we seek ways to justify why students should choose to study sociology. Isn’t something lost in the reduction of the humanities and social sciences to useful practicality? This is not to say that a degree in sociology doesn’t teach useful skills. The promise of practical relevance is not easy to keep or straightforward to demonstrate.

Britain isn’t America as John Brewer pointed out last week in his blog. As he commented, the current crisis is a combination of privatisation and regulation. After all the mess of toxic debt that produced the fiscal crisis in the first place, HE finances are to be addressed by forcing students to finance their education on a ‘buy now pay later’ principle. As Claire Callender points out, this is a ’quasi market’ because the government needs to control student numbers. The student may carry the debt individually but the government will control how many students will have their degrees on ‘hire purchase.’

In his presentation in Los Angeles Newfield, ever the playful and creative critic, dared to imagine another possible American future. One in which the “tide began to turn against measurement and control as dominant educational strategies, and towards craft mastery and intellectual independence.” In this future, writers and critics started to set up their own bootleg universities in response, in part, to parental discontent and student unrest.

These new universities offered an immersive intellectual environment that stood in stark contrast to mass teaching and “charged half the price for twice the service.” Here, teaching linked private concerns with public issues and educational achievement combined with a commitment to social development. It struck me that maybe we have more opportunities than we might think to imagine a corresponding form of bootleg sociology. More and more graduate students come to sociology from outside of the standard undergraduate routes, they have issues they are trying to figure out. They might be architects or youth workers or photographers. They seek resources to understand the professional mystifications they have lived with in their previous employment. An artist reads Barthes and Bourdieu in order to develop a thesis on her own practice but need not write one. Courses facilitated by teachers who do not lecture but where students live with books rather than process piles of photocopies in an instrumental way. Short courses, or even PhDs, in bootleg sociology? Who knows there might even be a market for them!

Les Back, Goldsmiths University of London

Why Nick Clegg needs a degree in sociology by Les Back

Looking back over the past months one of the enduring images in my mind is the sense of hurt displayed in the body language of Nick Clegg, and even David Cameron, at the level of anger that has been directed at them over tuition fees and the education cuts.  ‘We’re nice guys after all, we don’t really have a choice’ you can almost hear them thinking.  They seemed personally shocked by the suggestion that they are implicated in a grave injustice, almost as if the outcry is incomprehensible.  Perhaps, this is because, speaking sociologically, the public anger is incomprehensible to them. 

In a way, their inability to have anticipated the furore and anger over tuition fees is an argument for sociology itself.   The filters that class privilege places on their ability to make sense of the social world explain this incompre-hension.  For the Liberal Democrat there is something desperate and pathetic in their empty gestures at radicalism.  Simon Hughes, Deputy Leader, stated recently that Oxbridge and elite Russell Group Universities should restrict the proportion of applicants from private schools.  At the same time, these changes and differential fees will undoubtedly reinforce the class divided nature of education.  The private secondary school close to where I live charges £12,000 a year to educate a child.  They pride themselves on their ‘excellent record of gaining places at Oxford and Cambridge’.  So, for those families paying £9,000 a year for University fees this is a 25% reduction in their annual investment on their children’s future. Equally, Norman Lamb’s ‘outrage’ at the racism and ubiquitous whiteness of Oxbridge colleges on Question Time is another example of desperate attempts to strike a radical pose.

The situation in HE now is so profoundly different from anything we have seen before that we just cannot know what is ahead.  Whatever that future might be, a sociological imagination will be an increasingly valuable resource to try and make sense of what is unfolding.  Claire Callender warned a decade ago that the fear of student debt inhibits widening access to university.  As she herself has noted despite this there has been a measure of success in widening student participation and the changes to student fees that were implemented in 2004 did not halt this.  Last year HEFC reported “young people living in the most disadvantaged areas who enter higher education has increased by around +30 per cent over the past five years.”  However, according to Sir Martin Harris, Director of Fair Access, for the top third selective universities, the proportion of disadvantaged students “remained almost flat.” There may be an increased measure of access to higher education but there has been little change with regard to where the most advantaged students go to university.  The choices students make according to Claire Callender and Jonathan Jackson: “reflect their material constraints as well as their cultural and social capital, social perceptions and distinctions, and forms of self-exclusion – all of which are class bound”.  

There is something very Victorian about the way Liberal Democrat politicians refer to the image of the clever but excluded poor students of Bermondsey and elsewhere.  It is precisely the politician’s privilege that makes them unable to face up with sober senses to what they are doing.  Maybe it would be worth the money for Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes to apply for a place on a degree programme in sociology?  There might be some intense staff competition to have those courses added to their teaching loads.

Les Back, Goldsmiths University of London

An education of sorts by Les Back

I was standing in front of the House of Commons with my 17-year-old daughter Stevie just before the commons vote was announced last Thursday.  She turned to me and said: “It’s so strange, there are men just over there in Parliament right now deciding my future.”  For her I think being there that night and sensing the atmosphere sour in the air after the vote was, well… an education!  We watched on an iphone over the shoulder of a young man as the votes were announced. Seeing the riot police fully engaged and state power laid bare was a flash back to the 80s for me and for her a flash-forward. 

The police made pronouncements about ‘outside troublemakers’ but all that was so out of step with the anger and frustration of the crowd.  Recently they have supplanted this ‘trouble makers’ and ‘agitators’ line with crocodile tears about middle class students from ‘respectable families’ who have ruined their futures through being involved in violence and attacks on property. There were lots of groups of young people from Lewisham, south London and Tower hamlets, and East London standing close by. It seemed so clear that the anger crosses the lines of class and colour.  I’m not sure how much that has been noted elsewhere.

We got away from the kettles and the batons and the shields and bumped into a sociology graduate just behind the cenotaph.  He’d had a conversation in the middle of a kettle with one of the riot police.  The officer complained: “Don’t you think we have kids too?”  To which the young sociologist said:  “Why don’t you put down your shield and let us out then?” 

We talked about it. Of course, the officer’s individual opinions are an irrelevance.  He is choreographed and marshalled by power to hold the rest of us in place.  Violently reminding anyone who oversteps with a flick, or a full clout, of the baton.  There were certainly moments of the carnivalesque in the midst of it all but the thing that has come up time and time again from people I spoke to afterward is the sense of fear and being terrified.  The police claim constantly that their actions were reasonable and in the name of defending the streets of London – echoing power’s crier du coeur “society must be defended’. 

Les Back, Goldsmiths University of London

The value of sociology by Les Back

The seeds of the current crisis have had a long gestation period.  It is a mistake to think that our present situation is solely a product of the public spending review and the political opportunity that has been seized by the coalition government to force us to oversee our own privatization.   The current crisis emerges out of a long sequence of transitions that have transformed the nature of the university. As Bill Readings has argued the university’s relationship to the nation state is no longer what Schiller or Humboldt thought of as a cultural function to foster national tradition and history through the canonisation of knowledge. The university of culture – albeit for an elite select few – was replaced by what Readings refers to as a post-historical university no longer preoccupied with the past.  Rather it is concerned only with the pursuit of ‘excellence’ through auditing mechanisms like the Research Assessment Exercise or the Research Excellence Framework.  Today via the Browne report the post-historical university is morphing into the neo-liberal university of commerce where knowledge is valuable only if it has a marketable exchange value or the potential for policy relevance.  The problem we face, as a discipline and individually as practitioners of the craft of sociology, is how, and on what terms, do we make the case for the value of sociology and sociological values?  Do we try and show our usefulness to the economy or our impact on policy and thus accept the parameters and values of what I am calling the university of commerce, or do we insist on expanding the parameters of worth and develop the confidence to articulate a set of counter values?  I think it would be a mistake to confine our argument for sociology only within the terms set by Lord Browne and the advocates of the university of commerce. 

Sociology is valuable because is challenges individualism in the era of the ‘fresh page of the present.’  The individualisation of collective relations, the evaporation of history, the loneliness of personal responsibility all seems to suggest the importance of the relation between the individual and history.    “Personality is a strange composite,” wrote Gramsci from the loneliness of his prison cell. “A product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”  The promise of sociology must be the invitation to develop such an inventory. It should identify how we are produced as subjects as biographies so that we can be more than what we are already, more than those scripts. Perhaps it is also a matter of socialising the failings that neo-liberalism forces us to experience privately.  For academic sociologists we must dismantle the personal complicities and collective entanglements with the way the institutional forms of audit (via the RAE/ REF) have colonised our sociological imaginations. 

I have been thinking about this a lot in relation to students in the middle of their final year.  What is the promise of sociology for them as they start to contemplate graduation in the midst of a financial crisis and with a large and unjustifiable debt?  The rhetoric of the ‘new capitalism’ and flexibility, being qualified for jobs that haven’t been invented yet is nothing more than hokum.  Perhaps, the promise of sociology is to provide ways understanding what is before them and imagining ways to act in a society full of moral complexity, a world of ‘skills extinction,’ contingency and uncertainty or what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid life and liquid love.   “At no turning point in human history did educators face a challenge strictly comparable to the one presented by the current watershed” writes Bauman in his latest book 44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World (Polity, 2010).  The university is a place to prepare students for a life in such a society, to learn how information mediates the way they understand themselves and their place in the world. It is where we must all learn how to judge between fabricated realities and distinguish them from our most intimate and profound personal commitments.

Les Back, Goldsmiths University of London