Mapping Campus: Entrances and Exits by Yvette Taylor

Students are ever-more implicated in the marketing of their universities, often awkwardly displayed in costly ways. They appear on prospectuses and even on welcoming banners, where their eager presence and happy faces stand for institutional happiness, diversity and success. Their presence often represents a resilient endurance, where the successful face of the university shines on, despite the devastation of Higher Education. The personal and professional collide here, where standing for the university can also mean standing for and supporting your own value, now made public for a personal return (‘employability’, ‘International’ diversity and mobility). In the UK context, students are warned that National Student Survey scores attach to them, marking current status and future employability: ‘complete the survey, if you don’t, you lose too’. In a time of cut-backs, there is a heightened urgency to market your university – and yourself – via institutional reputations/credentials, to ensure that the map of campus, even if cut-back and under-funded, is still resilient and responsive. 

As a visiting scholar at US ‘premier public university’, the University of California, Berkeley¹ (2012), I see commonalities in the ‘happy, diverse student’ urgently engaged in disseminating value and distinction – their place is best, their choice correct. At Berkeley, even the ‘old’ history of activism, radicalism and institutional dis-engagement is re-invoked and made safe, or somewhat safer, in the name of variety, where everyone is present, and even the past is recast with future value.  The ‘first’, ‘best’ and ‘biggest’ would be words likely to be found elsewhere – as on my guided campus tour – and I wonder about the room for improvement, gaps, and ‘failure’ in these well defined university maps.

Cynical sentiment was displaced by the undergraduate Biology student leading a tour around Berkeley campus on a sunny March morning; she lead us on a hour and a half walking trip, complete with historical facts, key statistics and noteworthy venues on and off campus. She was adding to her CV, her future employability, just trying to get by and facing life-long future debts. She excelled as a university representative and her enthusiasm earned her resounding applause as she related her weekly timetable, extra-curricular activities, and exam success. In being duly impressed, I was joined by potential students, who were informed about the 25% admissions success, and eager parents keen to find out what their child should put in her or his personal statement – how to make the special child become part of the special institution, to secure that special future. While choice, of e.g. activities, eateries and societies was described, I wondered how this process of alignment already demarcates a ‘good fit’ for future students, institutional stories, and societal success.

The sun was shining and it was hard not to ‘just believe’ as one banner, quoting words from a current smiling student invoked us to do. Our guide was believable, committed, determined. And isn’t that just what we would want from good students? On a sunny day, with an unobstructed view of the Golden Gate Bridge (this line of sight is university owned and protected), this all seems perfectly plausible.  But the tour also hinted at presences and absences beyond these lines of sight. We tried to find the university mascot, a Golden Bear, on the first university building (1873); I put my glasses on for the task, confident that I could master it and also achieve. The bear, so the story goes, is a guardian, a mother bear who is watching over her cubs: many parents smiled and the journey from home to university was made safe and familial. The emergency poles, promising a 1.5min response time from on-campus police, if the button is pushed, also reassured of a 24/7 presence. Campus is made safe, students are located, and futures are confirmed as familiar.

As with many UK campuses, a park-feel is maintained and I strolled over Strawberry Lake via a wooden bridge. Echoing many University Open Days, eager parents pushed to the front and asked their questions – this time about trees, wildlife and plants. Protection and security is naturalised, even as the construction of this pervades the architecture and ecology of campus, also present in evoking scenic sounds, taste and smells (Australian Eucalyptus trees, ‘International House’).  These scenes shifted as an all-in-pink team ran past declaring their search for a ‘Berkeley personality’; we were told of opportunities to join the cheerleading squad (and even imagine ourselves as having a ‘Berkeley Personality’). It’s enticing.

But just as you reach for that university personality, as I reached for the university door, we were told that all outside door handles have been removed after student protestors chained themselves to such handles not that long ago. The student of today has, perhaps, no choice but to align; to be un-obstructive to these directing pathways as ‘good guides’. My Berkeley guide does all this with good humour, intelligence and pride: she tells the story of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, who, sitting above the arched entrance bestows knowledge on those entering the library. Because Athena is greedy, as well as knowledgeable, she takes this away as students make their exits. Universities have this knowing, yet greedy, potential and strategies to resist this – in times of abiding doors (without handles) – are vital.  Suspicious students, we are told, choose a different exit. But what would it mean for universities to choose another entrance?

‘A Smug Education’ (New York Times 9^th March 2012) responded to US Republican Presidential Candidate, Rick Santorum’s attack on American colleges as ‘indoctrination mills’, which we are advised not to enter: in his call, Barack Obama was named as a ‘snob’ for urging Americans to go to college, with universities cleverly placed as unknowing, out-of-touch and pretentious, and ‘reality’ and hard work situated elsewhere. It is vital that the hard work of students and staff is foregrounded on and off campus, where broader conceptualizations of learning may also exceed the numerical count of entrance and (employment) exits, only conferred in following specific, and often expensive, university routes.

Yvette Taylor, Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, LSBU. Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley (2012).

¹ At Berkeley, approx. 64% of undergraduates receive some form of financial aid: in 2008-09, 37% of all Berkeley undergrads were eligible for Pell Grants (family incomes generally less than $45,000 a year). Berkeley educates more economically disadvantaged students than all of the Ivy League universities combined. Some 5,700 undergraduates received a total of $33 million in scholarships, many of them privately funded. In 2009, Berkeley received $649.46 million in research funding.

Failed femininities and troubled mothers: gender and the riots by Kim Allen and Yvette Taylor

While the dust has settled, the after-effects of last year’s summer riots continue to be felt as we begin 2012. In the absence of any public inquiry, academics have played an important role in bringing sociological perspectives to bear on the complex causes and consequences of the summer riots. On this forum and elsewhere, sociologists have unsettled the easy answers and ‘smokescreens’ offered by the government – such as PM David Cameron’s assertion that rioters were driven by pure criminality, greed and opportunism – by asking important questions and calling attention to the role of growing inequalities and injustices in contributing to the recent unrest. However, thus far a gendered analysis has been absent from this critical intervention.  

The LSE and Guardian’s ‘Reading the Riots’ project claims that 10% of those involved in the riots were female. But while the dominant images of rioters have been masked young men, one of the most striking features of the media coverage and policy responses to the riots has been the (hyper)visibility of women. Within this, two figures have emerged: ‘troubled’ mothers and ‘failed’ female rioters.

Indeed the historical positioning of working-class mothers as a locus of national concerns around morality and repository of middle-class fear was bought to the fore again. In the immediate public responses to the riots was a strident blaming of ‘poor parenting’ within poor communities, which spoke almost exclusively against mothers. A Guardian/ ICM poll found that 86% of the public cited poor parenting as the main cause of the riots. These debates were suffused with a long-standing narrative of troubled mothers, with single-mothers blamed for failing to bring up their children properly, fuelling public discourses of welfare dependency and the (un)deserving poor. Newspaper reports of mother and daughter Clarice and Chantelle Ali – photographed together looting shops in Hackney, East London – and readers’ saturated condemnations of the working-classes as lazy, irresponsible and immoral – had a specific gendered edge:

Well done Clarice, you’ve ruined your child’s life! No doubt she will go on to destroy her child’s life and the cycle will continue indefinitely as we continue to fund this via the welfare state, effectively giving the green light to such appalling behaviour. 09/12/2011 12:02

What a pair of oxygen stealers. When they’re out don’t give them any benefits – they’ve had their chance, they were looked after by the state and taxpayers – and look  how they repaid us. Until we start getting tough, vermin like this will continue to stick their hands out and abuse the system whilst also draining the system even further and costing more money through criminal activity. 09/12/2011 11:36

Here, working-class families are positioned as sucking the life-blood out of community – and capacity – rendering the State’s ‘good tax-payers’ exhausted by their diseased criminality: these ‘vermin’ are seen to breed, decay and drain in their ‘appalling’ cycles of life-as-death. Respectable, regenerative lives, coded in the bodies of some youth, are replaced with only deathly potential, where the bad youth of today lacks life affirmation.  These public debates are illustrative of the centrality of class practices of distinction and distancing among the middle-classes – or ‘class making’ (Skeggs 2004) – as the middle-classes claim their position as ‘respectable’ and ‘defiant’ members of the community, wielding brooms as they go about cleaning up and repairing ‘Broken Britain’.

Public discourses of feral youth and failing families elide and mask questions of structural disadvantage, individualising inequality as the outcome of personal ‘ills’ rather than systematic material inequalities. David Cameron recently announced a ‘crackdown’ on ‘chaotic families’ as a response to the riots, dispatching ‘family troubleshooters’ to tackle a ‘responsibility deficit’ in problem communities which suggests an even greater hyper-surveillance of the working-classes. Re-configurations of family are re-done around the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality: public discourses of ‘troubled families’ and poor parenting are not only easily and problematically collapsed into one of ‘failed mothering’.  These ‘riotous responses’ also operate to uphold the logics of heterosexuality as (re)productive, thus failing to recognise the complexity of contemporary family formations. 

Alongside the marginalisation of mothers has been an exceptional focus on the young female rioters, most notably 18 year old ex-Olympic ambassador Chelsea Ives who was jailed for two years after being found guilty of burglary and violent disorder. The public interest in Chelsea was undoubtedly informed by her status as a 2012 Olympic ambassador: as the ‘face of the city’. There is much to unpick here about how particular classed, racialised and gendered (young) bodies come to be (re)positioned and (re)inscribed within regenerated city-scapes. Urban ‘disadvantaged’ youth become objects of a particular luminosity, encoded as future-oriented, agentic subjects who stand for the city’s pride, hope, diversity and multiculturalism. But, with London Mayor Boris Johnson calling her ‘unfit’ to represent our country, Chelsea’s story shows us how fragile this positioning is, as her ‘exemplary’ status is used against her: she was the girl who threw away her – and the city’s – chances.

Chelsea’s media representation might also be said to speak to the shifts and repositionings of girlhood within this era of austerity and youth disenchantment. Coverage of young women’s participation in recent ‘organised’ protests such as the anti-tuition fees marches, the Occupy movement and ‘slut walks’ predominantly featured white and middle-class women – perhaps most strikingly embodied in the photo of female students peacefully linking hands around a police van in the midst of the student marches through London. These ‘riot girls’ – positioned as legitimate and respectable protesters and signs of renewed ‘feminist’ protest – sit in stark contrast to the construction of Chelsea’s ‘illegitimate’, and so-called ‘greed-driven’ rioting.

The play ‘The Riots’, performed most recently in Tottenham – where the riots began – includes first-hand testimonies from individuals involved in last summer’s events. Excerpts from Chelsea’s letter to the play’s writer, Gillian Slovo, are included, standing out amidst a sea of male voices. In her letter, penned from Holloway Prison, she apologised for her actions and challenged the media’s image of her as ‘council estate scum’:

The public seem to automatically place me in an unnamed category for thick, low-lifed [sic] individuals which is not me at all. I haven’t even had the chance to speak for myself … The public just need to know I’m only accountable for my actions and not everyone else’s and I’m sorry.

Chelsea’s need to repent, to dis-identify from the pathologised working-class and prove her ‘respectability’, can draw parallels with Jade Goody – another working-class girl who had to show her desire to improve and who was publicly persecuted for her ‘failings’ in the most extreme way. Working-class femininities are always-already failing and must be repudiated, corrected and left behind in order to become intelligible neoliberal subjects. 

Writing on femininities under the New Labour govermment, Angela McRobbie argued that those on the periphery of idealised models of autonomous, individualised and ambitious young womanhood were ‘more emphatically condemned for their lack of status and other failings than would have been the case in the past’ (2008: 7). The troubled mothers and failing riot girls of last summer’s events embody this condemnation of young working-class women but in a new context. The gendering of the riots tells us many things, but perhaps most importantly that classed and racialised distinctions and boundaries of failed and ideal femininities are becoming more accentuated under the coalition government and its austerity policies. 

In a recent post, McRobbie suggests that there has been a further narrowing of the models of ‘success’ available to young women, with a celebration of a ‘normatively middle-class idea of achievement, ambition and professionalism’ presented by white, upper-middle class MPs such as Louise Mensch or the Prime Minister’s wife, Samantha Cameron.  While New Labour’s meritocracy project was deeply flawed, there was a narrative of aspiration available to young working-class women. This seems to have been lost under the coalition – after all it was David Willets MP who blamed aspirational women – and feminism – for the lack of jobs available to working-class men. Recent cuts to youth services, a dramatic hike in university fees, the withdrawl of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA), cuts to Sure Start and rising unemployment, seem to send a simple message to working-class young women: ‘don’t even bother’.

So what is there left to dream of and aspire to for girls like Chelsea who are (increasingly) excluded from the material and cultural resources which are valued? We shouldn’t be surprised at women’s participation in the riots, nor their participation in (likely) future forms of unrest: it is these very cultures and contexts of education, family, community and employment, foregrounded in the below seminars, that may well produce rather than prevent ‘riots’.

Kimberly Allen, Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University, London
Yvette Taylor, Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London Southbank University, London

London Metropolitan University and Plymouth University are holding a seminar on ‘Family Cultures’ on the 15^th February 2012 at the Women’s Library, London. This is the fourth seminar in the ESRC seminar series ‘New Perspectives in Education and Culture’. For more details on the seminar and to book a place, please visit the website: http://educationandculture.wordpress.com/

The Weeks Centre is hosting a British Sociological Association one-day seminar, titled ‘Intersecting Family Lives, Labours, Locales’ on the 3^rd February 2012. For more details and to book a place, please visit the website: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/ahs/news/191211.shtml

Occupying, thinking and learning by Chris Yuill

Tent City University

The Occupy London camp outside St Pauls fired up the political agenda throughout 2011. It brought attention to a range of problems associated with global capital, and the wealth and power inequalities that flow from what has been characterised as the elite 1% .    There are two observations I’ll make here after a day visit to the camp late last year.  Firstly, the actual space in which the camp sits outside St Pauls in The City of London.  The troubling idiosyncrasies of which have been charted by George Monbiot, but sociologically The City provides a case study par excellence of Lefebvre’s ideas of how capital represents and produces urban space to meet its own ends.  This is not the London that most people know, presented in Eastenders or countless popular songs, but a space apart from the rest of London, plugged into the global financial flows as a generator of capital, as Sassens has discussed at length, and which operates on a different set  of rules from  other parts of the UK.  It is, however, the second point about Occupy London that I want to bring to the fore. 

Richard Wilkinson and his trademark graphs.

Tucked-in amid the various tents and shelters there is the Tent City University (TCU).  As a venue it has hosted a variety of talks, lectures and workshops given by a variety of people, academics and activists.  When I visited the camp at the tale end of last year, Richard Wilkinson was in full flow illustrating his ideas on inequality with his trademark graphs.  The actual talk was not much different from the one he gave at the BSA Equality lecture, where he outlined his thesis on the relationships between income inequality and various social problems, but both the context and reception were very different.  It was all much more immediate and alive. The various institutions, for instance, that lie behind the growth in income inequality that Wilkinson has charted were situated literally metres away.  But it was also how the talk was received that was interesting, despite squatting on the hard stone cobbles and loose remnants of carpet.  There was a buzz of interest and keen debate that often can be lacking in the more formal settings of academia; perhaps a situation close to how Fromm describes learning and education in the ‘being’ mode of his ‘being/ having’ schema, where for students ‘listening is an alive process’ and where ‘new questions, new ideas, new perspectives arise in their minds’.

As with much of what LSX is trying to achieve by raising questions and pointing to new possibilities, the existence of the TCU can help us reflect on the state of contemporary education and university life.  Critiques of the neo-liberal incursion into the academy are multiple and I won’t repeat them here, but what the TCU gave me on that day was a very brief but fleeting glimpse of  how the experience of education could be; where the textures of learning were not wrapped up in second-hand business models, where active students are not reduced into passive consumers and where the learning was about ideas and thinking. 

Chris Yuill, Robert Gordon University

Sinking or Swimming? Academic Strokes, Anxious Provokes by Yvette Taylor and Kimberly Allen

Much has been said – and felt – about educational inequalities as intensified in the new funding regime: we hear of ‘at risk’ institutions; of redundancies, short(er) term contracts; increased teaching and administration; and fewer research opportunities. We also hear of varied successes and ‘failures’ in and through these new moments, with certain universities coming forward to claim a resilience, enduring presence and even a new diversity.  Some institutions and even staff are poised as able to capitalise on the re-branding and ‘upgrading’ of Higher Education: those who can be responsive, who are capacitated as ‘elite’ and also now diverse. Vulnerability is presented as a new opportunity, to work on and through. Non-traditional students, subjects, and even staff, are to prove their new viability to endure.

Where there is a generalised uncertainly about the future of universities, it seems that these vulnerabilities re-cast certain viabilities, as the ‘top universities’ are seen to be able to come forward as resilient, able to deal with the blows.  In doing so, certain claims may be cemented, where the ‘shake-up’ – the ‘rise to the top’ and the ‘fall to the bottom’ – implies a natural order of the good and the bad university: the talented student, like the talented university, is often seen to be able to chose a path through precariousness, to carve out a new, even more deserving position. They can cope, the resilient and enterprising worker, the able university – a simple ‘scientific fact’ of league tables. 

In much recent press, different post-1992 institutions have again been called upon as deficit,  placed and evidenced as the ‘worst institutions’ in the UK, where the snapshot headlines conveys an inevitable and even welcome ‘death’. Institutions which have always been diverse and leading the way for enabling widening participation are now seen as deadly. In the National Scholarship Programme, bursaries are seen to stimulate participation from ‘disadvantaged’ groups. Universities are required to provide outreach work as part of their institutional widening participation strategies but post-1992 universities are more vulnerable in this respect, lacking funding, despite their success in securing diverse university cohorts: in contrast ‘elite’ universities may well be marketing themselves as ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ via NSP on the back of rather tokenistic measures which do not alter their still middle-class, white compositions. We witness this on the now happy ‘included’ ‘diverse’ student on certain university webpages, which, like a Benetton advert, seemingly represents institutional success at ‘doing’ diversity (Ahmed, 2008): this is impossible for many post-1992 universities to do precisely because there is no singular measure or embodiment of diversity. Instead ‘diversity’ is a lived-in reality, a sound and sense in and around campus rather than something which can be captured and displayed for use.  The border between ‘diversity’ and ‘death’ is a dangerous one, where different academic spaces highlight rather than heal these wounds.

While there has been much sociological critique of educational inequalities and the positioning of some places and populations as ‘sink’, ‘bog standard’ and wasted-wasteful (Reay and Lucey, 2002) less is said about how this feels and how this shapes everyday encounters with colleagues in-between different institutions. Is it a shared anxiety, when the colleague from a ‘safe’ ‘good’ university turns and asks you how insecure, how unsafe, how risky and impermanent you are? How your presence may soon become an absence and how you may be ‘shaken up’ and fall out in a moment of reinventing academic hierarchies? And how then should you respond to the institutional and personalised implication in the mis-position between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ universities, between capable and culpable staff and students? In ‘swimming’ rather than ‘sinking’ the anxious academic has to become rational, unemotional and enterprising, to work on developing her own thick skin as her institution – and perhaps herself – is positioned as timelessly ‘new’; the ‘post-1992’ as always unable to move past that date.

In responding, elite degrees from elsewhere may be shored up, to credentialise the academic as properly so, to highlight their own travelling in and through the post-92 institution as merely temporary (‘I’m on the look out to move on’) or even a potential mistake, as not indicative of their true place but rather as evidence of the poor state of play. Again, the value and ‘goodness’ of these places – lived in everyday encounters with colleagues and students within your institution – can suddenly be lost in these outside encounters, evacuated in the defence to prove our own value or ‘potential’ and to try to rise, individually, to the top and away from the waste.  Displaying you credentials, your institution and the place of staff and students on demand, can foster a defensive and immediate ‘I’m as good as you’ reaction. Elite institutions are also being measured, made to prove their worth and products – but are they being made to prove themselves, to feel the panic of under-funding as personalised failure, or to reject the ‘worst university in the UK’ as a headline seemingly embodied – and to be displaced – in academic encounters? Again, the shame of being ‘elite’ seems not to attach but to travel, while the embarrassment of ‘failure’ fixes, exposes and becomes you.

So, who will you ‘become’ in these academic inhabitations, will you turn to your colleague and feel relieved that you are not in her place? Will the story of meritocracy carry you to a safe place? If none of us are safe, not all of us are seen as ‘sinking’: sociologists seem well placed to research and challenge the encounters, emotions and esteeming of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as a process beyond ourselves.

Yvette Taylor, Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research and Kimberly Allen, Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University London

‘Higher education white paper is provoking a winter of discontent’ – the Campaign for the Public University

Together with other groups, the Campaign for the Public University launches a Defence of Public Higher Education in the Guardian newspaper today.

In the face of the Coalition Government’s proposals to increase student fees to a level unprecedented in OECD countries, and to open up the sector to for-profit providers, the document sets out nine propositions about the benefits of public higher education:

1. Higher education serves public benefits as well as private ones. These require financial support if these benefits are to continue to be provided.
2. Public universities are necessary to build and maintain confidence in public debate.
3. Public universities have a social mission, contributing to the amelioration of social inequality, which is the corollary of the promotion of social mobility.
4. Public higher education is part of a generational contract in which an older generation invests in the wellbeing of future generations that will support them in turn.
5. Public institutions providing similar programmes of study should be funded at a similar level.
6. Education cannot be treated as a simple consumer good; consumer sovereignty is an inappropriate means of placing students at the heart of the system.
7. Training in skills is not the same as a university education. While the first is valuable in its own terms, a university education provides more than technical training. This should be clearly recognised in the title of a university.
8. The university is a community made up of diverse disciplines as well as different activities of teaching, research and external collaboration. These activities are maintained by academics, managers, administrators and a range of support staff, all of whom contribute to what is distinctive about the university as a community.
9. Universities are not only global institutions. They also serve their local and regional communities and their different traditions and contexts are important.

To add your name to the list of signatories, email altwhitepaper[AT]live.co.uk.

Where did all the sociologists go? Querying ‘the lecturer experience’ by Daniel Nehring

The new government’s announcements of forthcoming changes to the workings of British higher education have inspired much debate. The major newspapers have largely focused on ‘the student experience’, while neglecting the role of universities as centres of research in the humanities and social sciences. Academic bodies have voiced concerns about the changing nature of universities and the respective implications for their disciplines. Among all the clamour, the situation of early-career academics has unfortunately not received much interest at all.

The privatisation and full-on commercialisation of higher education currently underway seem likely to exacerbate trends towards a stratification of ‘the lecturer experience’ that have been unfolding for a number of years already. A select few PhD graduates, who have received their academic socialisation in elite universities, will be able to develop academic careers in those same institutions. For them, the integration of research and teaching will continue to be a meaningful concept. Another few will be able to move into permanent lectureships at the new second and third-tier teaching universities. They will spend their careers as teaching drones, reproducing second-hand sociological knowledge from textbooks for a mass audience of student-consumers. The ‘rest’ will either form an academic proletariat of part-time, short-term teachers and research assistants or drop out of academia altogether.

Such developments seem likely because many sociologists, in their roles as university functionaries, have long since subscribed to the ethos of the neoliberal marketplace that is so evident in the government’s policy proposals. This is most evident in one particularly emblematic development: the rise of the research grant as the key indicator of academic prowess and entry ticket for a meaningful academic career. Virtually all advertisements of lectureships at UK universities over the past years required candidates to show that they have made thousands or tens of thousands in grant funds. Those advertisements were written by sociologists and endorsed by the hiring sociology departments, and they may thus be read as a significant indicator of their professional ethos. The logic underlying the primacy of the grant is unclear, given that many sociological research projects work just fine without such funding and that many senior professors have built their careers and often considerable contributions to sociology without such requirements. Perhaps the rise of the grant as the alpha and omega of institutionalised sociology is simply due to a tendency towards passive acquiescence to the demands for financial profits imposed by the relatively new and now well established class of non-academic university managers.

In any case, most junior academics and recent PhD graduates are destined to fail in their quest for the grant: There just are not enough to go round, and most accessible funding schemes (e.g. ESRC postdocs, the British Academy small grants, etc.) have recently been cut. With no grant to show, the doors to a stable academic career are likely to remain shut. What is left is a patchwork of part-time and short-term teaching commitments, jumping from one position to the next, while hoping that the next grant application will finally be successful or that the first monograph will be a huge success.

The campaign which UCU has been running for a number of years against the casualisation of academic labour is a testament to this trend. Institutionalised sociology has had little to say about it in the past, and it remains to be seen whether it will have anything to say about its exacerbation in the impending era of ‘cuts’. In any case, recent PhD graduates intent on an academic career will face a terrible job market, but few trends that are genuinely new. The commodification of academic labour has been in the making for a long time, with the acknowledgement and acquiescence of many sociology departments and academic managers around the country. The new government’s policy proposals only represent an intellectually honest and more comprehensive articulation of this trend.

So where did all the sociologists go? I concluded my PhD in 2007/2008 in a large department that prides itself on being among the very best in the country and had, at the time, about a hundred doctoral students. Of all the PhD graduates in my commencement year and the adjacent years, only a bare handful managed to find lectureships and establish themselves through research and publications. This applies to both my department and acquaintances from other sociology departments around the country. The overwhelming majority have since drifted out of academia or barely subsist on the patchwork of unstable jobs outlined above. This lack of achievement cannot easily be explained by a shortage of scholarly talent – I have in mind prize winners, recipients of a variety of very competitive scholarships, and graduates who passed their vivas at leading universities with no corrections. The explanation rather is to be found among universities and sociology departments who recruit too many talented individuals to pursue doctorates without subsequently offering them opportunities to make meaningful contributions to the discipline.

The ‘cuts’ are going to make this pattern worse, but they are unlikely to change it. What remains are questions: How much scholarly potential has, speculatively, been lost by driving talented graduates to the margins of academia, or beyond? How can this loss of potential be compensated for? What will happen to institutionalised sociology if it lets itself be driven more and more by the survival-of-the-fittest logic of the neoliberal marketplace? Finally, why has this development not sparked more concern, and why is it hardly talked about? Does anybody out there really care? While the cuts will only make a bad situation worse for early-career sociologists, surely they could also motivate established, institutionalised sociologists to concerted action.

Dr Daniel Nehring, Middlesex University

Alternative to the White Paper – Putting the Vision Back into Higher Education by John Holmwood

Academic staff and students from across the sector and in a variety of campaigning groups – Campaign for the Public University, Oxford University Campaign for Higher Education, Sussex University Defends Higher Education, Warwick University Campaign for Higher Education, Humanities Matter, No Confidence Campaign, Cambridge Academic Campaign for Higher Education – have written a trenchant response to the Government’s White Paper. 

This document – Putting the Vision Back into Higher Education is a call  to colleagues and their subject associations and other groups to contribute to an Alternative White Paper to be published at the end of the Government’s consultation period in September. This will be presented to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, together with the weight of opinion in its support.

The response to the White Paper argues that:

• It threatens the excellence of higher education in England. It does not put the student at the ‘heart of the system’, but the market.
• It cuts direct public support for undergraduate degrees by 80%, and by transferring costs to students via higher fees it succeeds in providing fewer resources for most degrees while requiring students to pay more.
• It is a reckless gamble, a dangerous experiment in university funding with no precedent in British experience. Its different elements are incoherent.
• While the Browne Review advocated a new funding model because of uncertainty over public funding, the present proposals will not produce stability. The uncertainty is switched to the ballooning student support arrangements necessary to maintain a fee-based system of loans and the Government’s overriding interest is now to reduce their cost.
• It has parallels to the privatisation wrecking the financial solvency of high-quality public universities in the US (such as the University of California, where net private revenues have not covered the public funding lost through cuts despite upwardly spiralling tuition costs).
• It had no vision for higher education, only a narrow emphasis on employment and education as an individual investment in human capital.
• It is necessary for higher education to “sustain a culture which demands disciplined thinking, encourages curiosity, challenges existing ideas and generates new ones; [and to] be part of the conscience of a democratic society, founded on respect for the rights of the individual and the responsibilities of the individual to society as a whole” (Dearing Report, 1997).

There is no government mandate for the privatisation of higher education and for the despoiling of the social and cultural value of universities.

Contributions for the Alternative White Paper to: altwhitepaper [AT] live.co.uk

Closing date: 2nd September 2011 .

John Holmwood University of Nottingham, Chair of Heads and Professors of Sociology Group/Campaign for the Public University

British Sociological Association: Response to White Paper

The following statement was issued to the press earlier this week: 

British Sociological Association: Response to White Paper

The British Sociological Association recognizes the place of higher education as a collective public good and thus decries the general line of travel towards a full marketisation with its emphasis on the buying power of individuals and households. We have concerns over the long term economic consequences of the shifts in higher and further education funding which increase the risk of a significant burden of debt on communities and regions at a time of economic instability and decline in some industries.

We draw a link between quality and inequality and note that the White Paper sets in train drivers to force down fees charged for many University courses to such an extent that this will increase the likelihood that resources devoted to teaching and learning will be reduced. This implies an attendant decline in investment across higher education provision which is tantamount to taking the decision to disinvest in future generations and to producing a less well educated society. As sociologists we note that this is one of the direct drivers of increased inequality and a source of damage and limitation to life changes and intergenerational social mobility as well as undermining the health and well being of future communities.

There is a real risk that the White Paper takes a step towards sending the UK back to the future, to the relatively closed world of the class and elite systems more characteristic of nation states in the Fifties. Such a future is ill suited in its ability to meet the needs of ordinary people which range from a well developed capability to construct workable solutions to major global issues such as the very sustainability of our planet through to the simpler yet equally essential act of being able to read, learn from, and be changed by, a good book.

John Brewer, President
Judith Burnett, Chair
Howard Wollman, Vice Chair
Judith Mudd, Chief Executive

The BSA is supporting a two-pronged response approach to the White Paper. It is preparing a response to the White Paper consultation from a sociological point of view AND supports proposals for coordinated, cross-disciplinary approaches which set out alternatives. The support of all sociologists is requested in making sure the BSA’s direct response and sociology’s contribution to any coordinated, cross-disciplinary response is credible.

URGENT: Please send us links to reference material/examples of sociological research findings which you feel best demonstrate the societal impacts of different approaches to education to: Judith.Mudd@britsoc.org.uk by no later than 6th September 2011.

Campaign for the Public University, acting together with other groups, has produced a response to the White Paper – An Alternative Vision for Higher Education.  This calls for a parallel consultation within the sector to produce an Alternative White Paper, to coincide with the end of the Government consultation on it’s White Paper.  Further details will be posted shortly.

How will the BSA respond to the HE White Paper? Your contributions invited

Higher Education White Paper – Students at the Heart of the System.  The description on the Department for Business, Innovations and Skills website says this White Paper “sets out the Government’s proposed reforms of the higher education sector to support funding reforms. Also seeks feedback on the overall strategy set out in this white paper to tackle three challenges. It aims to put higher education on a sustainable footing and for institutions to deliver a better student experience, and take more responsibility for increasing social mobility”.  Download the consultation.

Members of the BSA External Affairs Group are now preparing a response to the HE White Paper. They want to include the views of the wider BSA membership. Please send your comments and suggestions towards the BSA response by 6 September to: judith.mudd@britsoc.org.uk.

Judith Mudd, BSA Chief Executive

Threats to Universities and independent research … a perfect storm? by John Holmwood

A panel discussion at the British Academy – ‘Independence at What Price? The Haldane Principle – Past, Present and Future? – was devoted to the threats to the independence of University-based research.  http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2011/independence_at_what_price.cfm

The Panel was made up of Professor Sir Adam Roberts (President of the British Academy), Professor David Edgington (Imperial College), and the Rt Hon David Miller MP (Chair of the Science and Technology Select Committee).

David Edgerton declared the Haldane Principle in its present understanding to be largely a myth and not helpful to understanding current dilemmas of science policy, government funding and the need to secure the best quality independent research. Adam Roberts proposed that the best defence of the independence of research was a plurality of funding sources and a system of countervailing powers to the government drive to direct the research agenda.

Among the points made in discussion were concerns that research funding was becoming increasingly concentrated and directed. Far from there being a plural system of research, there was a dominance of ‘one size fits all policies’ (such as RCUK’s ‘Pathways to Impact’). Moreover, Universities were failing to act as a counterweight to this tendency.  Increasingly they are mirroring Research Council strategic directions with their own strategic priorities. Concerns were also expressed at the Government’s reduction of research undertaken by its own departments and the perception that it wished Research Councils to direct research toward short-term policy concerns.

During the discussion Professor Roberts warned the audience that the UK had a fine and highly successful system of higher education, but with policies across the board – from fees,  research policies, to changes to the visa system for international students – we are now facing a ‘perfect storm’.

John Holmwood University of Nottingham, Chair of Heads and Professors of Sociology Group/Campaign for the Public University