Intern nation

A story involving shoe-less Tory “big society” guru Steve Hilton that was reported in the paper this weekend both infuriated me and got me thinking. According to the story, Hilton believed the civil service got in the way of his most radical ideas becoming a reality (whether that included his idea to abolish maternity pay isn’t reported). This apparently led Hilton to argue that the vast majority of civil service work didn’t need to be done by properly paid people in the civil service; it could be outsourced to charities and other organisations, like think tanks. This is pretty much the Tory answer to everything at the moment: can’t we get someone to do that for free? And it’s definitely that because the reason charities play such a big role in the “big society” is because they are built on volunteers, which obviously means they’re a lot cheaper than organisations that pay people.

 

This annoys me for a number of reasons. The first is that, as someone with fairly old-fashioned socialistic beliefs about getting paid for doing a job (one of the reasons I have a problem with downloading culture and Spotify but that’s a story for another day), I get wound up by the suggestion that you don’t need to pay people to do a job that they’re currently doing. As someone who used to work in a library, I get pretty annoyed when I hear that local libraries will close unless volunteers step in and do the job because the basic message is that it isn’t worth paying someone to do it because, you know, organising and running a library is pretty easy — the kind of thing you can do in your spare time. The civil service perform an important function. Generally speaking, the people in the civil service do good, frequently difficult, jobs and, with the exception of a few high profile cases, for fairly low pay considering the skills they have. The idea you can run the state for free is stupid.

 

The second reason it annoys me is because it’s typical that this government, populated as it is by public school educated posh boys, would entertain the kind of ideas that underpin the big society. Why? Because they’ve all no doubt done and utilised the unpaid internships that I see so many of students doing each summer. There are lots of reasons to hate unpaid internships beyond the pay issue, most notably the fact they concentrate access, power, and privilege into the hands of people who can afford to work for free and, most frequently, those who enjoy the geographic advantage of living in or around the London area. However, the attitude that goes with internships — that you should work for free with no promise of employment at the end — is really objectionable too. For one thing, there are plenty of business that not only circumvent employment law and the minimum wage by using the “intern” label but also have business models that basically depend on free labour. The other thing is that the attitude is basically trickling down to other aspects of life, like the welfare state. What else was the recent controversy over companies like Tesco using job seekers as free labour than the transference of an upper and middle class intern ideal to the working classes? Except, obviously, those with power and privilege get to work in the UN or a lawyers or something, the working classes get to stack shelves in supermarket.

 

So, basically, if the Tories get their way, that’s the future: everybody working for free in ways that benefit them. The Tories always do well. The very least everyone else should expect is to get a reasonable wage out of it.

Service stations

My Saturday was a day that has been widely recognised as one of the worst days in human history. Fact. I was driving a car to London with the intention of dropping it off and getting a lift back to York. However the car broke down half way and I spent three hours in a motorway lay by waiting for the recovery firm to pick me up (apparently I was in the Bermuda Triangle. Thanks Green Flag call centre), followed by almost five hours in a service station, where I promptly lost the cash I had on me and couldn’t get any more because there wasn’t a cash machine, before my lift arrived.

 

Anyway, that’s enough about my day. The thing was that being sat in a service station for five hours (and it was a really bad service station, by the way) led me to think about how interesting service stations are. They’re fascinating in two interrelated ways. The first as places: they are total products of the motor age. Service stations weren’t there before, like the vast majority of villages, towns and cities that motorways connect, and they contain things that someone decided the motorist wants. The second way is the people: people from all walks of life are there, brought together by one thing — the car.

 

The point is that what you get is an interesting environment governed by interesting sets of rules that bring about a fascinatingly constant and well-regulated social world, which is interesting because the turnover of people is incredibly rapid. People seem to stay for around 30 minutes, with the exception of those who seem to be staying at the hotel, who are probably staying over night at most, but even then seem to spend no longer than an hour actually awake in the place.

 

It just strikes me that service stations would be a really great subject for historical and sociological analysis. A quick search this morning reveals nothing particularly obvious to read on them (yes, I’ve found the Service Station Facts website and that’s not quite what I’m looking for). I sense an unsuccessful funding application coming on…

Student expectations and the new fees regime

Here’s a non-controversial topic for discussion: student expectations and the new fees regime. The spur for me thinking about this was reading an article in one of the student newspapers at the university I teach at (there are many reasons I like reading the student newspapers: making sure I’m still down with kids; ensuring that something I’ve said in a seminar hasn’t been turned into a “history lecturer in eugenics shame” story; seeing what my students think about things; etc). The article was reporting on a recent survey of students that asked them whether they thought their degrees were value for money.

Before setting out some thoughts on what students said in response to that question (or at least what the newspaper chose to say about what they said), it’s worth stressing two things. The first is that I’d prefer it if higher education was free in the UK. It’s a great shame that students are now being lumbered with debts of the kind that they will be from November onwards. The second is that I don’t many of the arguments about free higher education are very good. Social mobility certainly has little to do with it (and many of those arguing for free higher education love the social mobility argument) because universities do little in that department (look at the demographics relating to university entry) and if you wanted to promote social mobility you’d put all your money into nursery education anyway. In essence, I’m pro-free higher education because I think it’s a symbol of the aspirations of the post war settlement (a bit like universal child benefit) where you don’t reduce every argument to a slanging match in which everyone asks “why should I pay for that?” Hence the reason I find the NUS’s simultaneous objection to fees and embrace of consumer culture in universities pretty frustrating.

However, to paraphrase Erving Goffman,  I don’t mind being treated like a commodity, as long as it’s an expensive one…

There were a few things that stood out in the article about whether students thought their degrees were value for money. The first was the stuff they seemed to be right about and they deserve to be listened to about: library provision seems to me to be a good example here. It’s clearly not good if you’ve not got access to the basic materials you need to complete your degree. What counts as basic materials is something to be debated another time but the point still stands. I can certainly say that’s something I and my department have made big efforts at addressing.

The second, however, is the pretty narrow view many students seemed to have of what they’re paying for. One of the headline quotes was “each lecture costs me £25. I’m essentially paying for a library card.” I’m not keen on that. Here’s why. On the one hand, £25 a lecture doesn’t strike me as bad value for money compared to what you might pay for other things, especially given I don’t mind students audio taping my lectures. It took me the best part of ten years to learn about some of things I lecture on and, in some cases, I’m the person who knows the most in the entire world about it (you can multiple all that out for colleagues of mine who have been in the game for considerably longer). Academics aren’t like secondary school history teachers, I’m afraid. We frame and produce the material we teach and have to put all together. I will now avoid ranting about how long it takes to put together a VLE site.

On the other hand, a library is kind of what you are paying for as a humanities student. Independent learning is what it’s all about and libraries cost serious amounts of money to run. That’s why local councils choose to close them down when there are budget cuts: because they cost a fortune and they aren’t legally obliged to keep them open. People work in the libraries and they have to be paid, then you’ve got to heat them, then you’ve got to actually have books in them (and to relate that back to the previous point, you’ve got to have someone who knows what books to buy) and those books cost a fortune, then you’ve got to have access to the journals that aren’t bought in paper form any more and, if you think academic books are expensive, you want to try getting a subscription to an academic journal.

What’s probably important to keep in perspective here is that even when students are paying £9k a year, universities won’t be better funded. Students will merely be making up the shortfall left by the government (and not just this one — there’s a general but unspoken agreement here that all parties want higher education off the books). There’s no actual reason for students to expect that things should be significantly better than they were when I was an undergraduate. However, there are fairly inexpensive ways in which things can be better and I do those things.

The third point I noticed is that none of the students thought about the money they are paying for their degree as being in any way related to benefits they might accrue further down the line. The cost should be literally what it costs to provide things right now and that’s all they should pay. The most obvious thing to think about here is the “value added” aspect of the extra cash you’ll earn from having a degree when you get a job and then when your career progresses. One of the interesting things about the debate about higher education is the assumption some people have about only paying what it costs, not what it’s worth, which isn’t an attitude people have about other goods. You might say it’s a moot point given projections suggest less than 50% of students will ever pay the money back. Then again, if you’re not paying the money back, you might say you’re getting great value for money.

The final point was what I’m going to call the Howard Hotson point. Hotson wrote a really quite excellent article in the London Review of Books some months ago now in which he asked why we all think the American system of higher education is so great, given that’s the road we’re clearly being taken down. The point he made was that if you look at what’s happened to the American system, people pay big money, often in the region of £20,000 a year, often more than that. What do they get for it and want for it, though? Well, the evidence, judging by American campuses, appears to be swanky sports facilities and palatial accommodation. In other words, the money doesn’t all go into educational facilities; most of it ends up going into football stadiums and ensuite bathrooms. The point here is that goes into a “student experience”. I was reminded of this by the student who was complaining about the expense of university sports facilities, then another complaining about the accommodation application process. This, my friends, is a sign of the future.

Anyway, the point of these thoughts? I think there needs to be a sensible discussion about what students should expect in the new system. Stefan Collini is right when he argues that one major problem with the new consumer model is that it assumes there’s a linear relationship between students and those educating them. There isn’t because in a number of important cases the people doing the educating know more than those they are educating, especially when it comes to the question of what those being educated need to do to get educated. This is most problematic in the humanities when it comes to things like contact hours but that’s a question for another day.

In this respect, universities and academics more generally need to be more open in the discussions they have with students about these subjects and not assume a default position of thinking that because students demand something it must be a reasonable demand, though this is problematic because the new fee regime kind of assumes that that’s the case. There needs to be an honest dialogue about this and I invite any student who wants to have that dialogue with me to open it up.

Video content

It’s probably worth noting that should you want to see me “in action” there are two videos available online. The first is a recent conversation with Steve Fuller about the biological challenge to the social sciences. The conversation was part of an ESRC funded doctoral training session. It was a lot of fun. The second is a lecture about counterfactual history and the history of British sociology, which was part of an AHRC funded doctoral event.

 

Buy my book…

It’s available here, here, and from all good book shops selling academic monographs on an incredibly important but largely unappreciated moment in the history of British sociology. Thanks to my friend James Griffin, the book features a cover that would look good on coffee tables everywhere.

Disaster Capitalism, UK Style

As my colleague Alex Goodall said to me the other day, I hate it when governments do things that make me agree with Naomi Klein. I’ve always found Klein thought provoking but often lacking when it comes to a positive agenda for change that I can sign up to. Nevertheless, the point that Alex was making, and one that I agree with, is that the kinds of the things that the British government is doing at the moment pretty much fits the disaster capitalism template that Klein describes in her book The Shock Doctrine. 

For those of you who haven’t read the book or seen the film, the gist is that governments and large corporations use disasters, often in the developing world, as an excuse to unleash the forces of unrestrained capitalism, even though it’s the last thing these countries actually need to deal with the problems they face. Though it’s stretching it a bit to compare the UK with the developing world, it’s still the case that the Conservative led coalition’s budget cuts are of the same spirit as disaster capitalism. 

The reason is that the cuts are profoundly ideological in the sense that they aren’t being made out of strict and immediate necessity. Instead, the cuts are part of a strategy to refashion the state quickly. If reports are to be believed, the pace of these cuts is being driven by the Tories’ desire to learn the lesson of Blair’s first term in office when, as he has constantly remarked since, he failed to make the most of his massive commons majority.

To see how successful the Tories have been at their own version of disaster capitalism, rewind a couple of years to the beginning of the current financial and economic crisis. Remember the situation that we were in: the biggest market failure since the 1930s, which forced the state to bail out banks because we were seriously on the verge of not being able to draw money out of cash points. If someone had told me that we’d be in situation we are now (no serious reform of the institutions that caused the mess, slashing budgets, etc) I wouldn’t have believed them. It’s not that I expected the emergence of international communism but I find it amazing that Cameron can stand in front of cameras and say, with a straight face, that it was reckless state spending that caused the problems we are experiencing. Moreover, it’s astonishing that important parts of the media are running with that message and a lot of people seem to buy it. 

The question of why this is happening is an interesting one. On the one hand, understanding the situation from Cameron’s point of view is easy: he’s from the upper classes, he’s had no attachment to the state at any point during his life, even if he likes to talk up the care his son received from the NHS. From the point of the view of the Lib Dems, I think this is just a revelation for most people. As they’ve proven whenever they’ve been given power in local government, the Lib Dems are free marketeers and they privatise everything they can get their hands on. What makes them different from the Tories is their liberal social values. This much is clear from David Laws’ admission that he could have joined the Tories if it wasn’t for their attitude towards homosexuality. 

From the perspective of the public, I don’t quite understand what’s going on. You could argue that there’s broad public support because it’s just the poorest who are being hit at the moment and the poorest don’t have anyone to speak for them, especially when the Labour party has been anonymous under its new leader. However, I think that is only partly the case. I think there are a couple of important points to make here. The first is that there is a great deal of concern about what’s going on and that can be measured via the debate about tuition fees and the axing of the education maintenance allowance. This is going to get worse when, for example, streets are cleaned less often and potholes aren’t repaired at the end of the winter.The second point is the most important one: there actually isn’t a democratic mandate for anything that is happening at the moment. The Tories ran largely policy free campaign, which means they now just argue that they had to wait to see the public finances before acting, even though that’s basically a lie. As we all know, the Lib Dem’s manifesto has turned out to be a work of fiction.

All of which brings me back to Naomi Klein. It would be one thing if the decision to scale back the state were one that had a democratic mandate but what’s happened is entirely different. A government is forcing through quite serious structural changes to British society having campaigned on a platform of efficiency savings. And they are doing so by telling people that they’re doing it because they’ve seen the government books and it’s the only thing they can do, notwithstanding the fact there’s plenty of authoritative opinion to the contrary (Paul Krugman’s  blog and Ed Ball’s Bloomberg speech spring to mind here). 

What will be the outcome of this? Well, some of what’s going on will be challenged when public services go back to the 80s. As I recall from my childhood, any kind of public institution was basically a bit dirty and run down during the 80s because nothing got fixed and it was constantly starved of money. This was Blair’s great trick: capitalising on the dissatisfaction people felt towards such poorly run public services. However, this will only be the case with some of what’s going on. The rest of it is truly serious stuff that won’t or can’t be reversed. Speaking from my own experience, higher education is one such area as the humanities, for example, will no longer receive any state help. However, another change that concerns me is the change to child benefit whereby higher earners will no longer claim it. The upshot of this will be a generation of people, many of whom will go on to serve in parliament, who will have no kind attachment to the welfare state. The consequence of that could be the final destruction of the welfare state that we have at the moment – one that everyone shares in – and it’s replacement with a minimal welfare state that only the very poorest have any contact with. When that happens, the welfare state will be something that everyone but the very poor resent and it will constantly be chipped away at until it’s gone. And that will be the legacy of Britain’s version of disaster capitalism  

New vinyl, new danger

The cold weather has given me the opportunity to get stuck into some of the vinyl I’ve purchased recently, which obviously can’t be listened to at work. Worthy of a mention are two records.

The first is a reissue: Black Renaissance’s Body, Mind, and Spirit. It’s two tracks — each around the 20 minutes mark — of mid-70s deep jazz. I highly recommend it.

The second is Tokimonsta’s Midnight Menu. I’m digging the Brainfeeder vibe at the moment and, like everyone else, that’s got a lot to do with producer de jour Flying Lotus. But Tokimonsta’s album has got some smart beats on it and the vinyl really does the art work justice.

Her podcast on the Brainfeeder website is well worth a listen as well.

Mumford’s megatechnical critique of behaviourism

An interesting new blog post from Adam Curtis. However, by far the most interesting part of the post is the final video, which features Lewis Mumford critiquing Skinner and behaviourism as features of the megatechnical society Mumford wrote so much about during the 1960s in his Myth of the Machine series.

The benefits of a liberal education

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is the concept of a liberal arts degree or education. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of reasons. The first is that the notion of a liberal education — whereby someone studies a range of different subjects, which results in a wide range of general learning rather than a narrow set of studies that are tailored towards a specific, usually vocational, end — has come up in my research. William Beveridge, for example, promoted a liberal education as the template for economics, arguing that it was essential for students to engage with the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. The second reason is that a liberal arts degree has come up frequently of late in conversations with my colleagues in different disciplines.

It seems to me that what the liberal arts degree stands for is something that is worth investigating for a number of different reasons. One is the uncertainty that now faces higher education in the UK as a result of the planned changes to university funding. What’s clear is that those in charge of decision making in this area only think about higher education as a gateway to higher earning. According to this view, universities are nothing more than institutions that grant credentials to individuals so that they can then take up particular jobs/positions within the economy. Putting my objections to this view aside for a moment, it seems to me that if this idea is to play a significant role in formulating UK higher education policy then the UK is going to need something similar to the liberal arts colleges that are found in the USA. If universities are supposed to play a role in providing skills that are useful in the wider world, why not develop institutions that don’t force students to specialise but instead educate them to a high level across a broad range of subjects that might be used towards all manner of different ends?

 

Another reason is that an education across a broad range of subjects, regardless of what type of institution that education takes place in, seems like a good thing in its own right. Though I only have circumstantial evidence to back this point up with, it seems that one consequence of the effort to push universities towards tailoring their courses with the needs of business and the economy in mind is ever greater specialisation. It’s not uncommon these days for a student to go through their entire degree without studying outside of their parent department. In the case of a field like economics, which I’ve been looking at a lot recently, that means a student isn’t just learning about a narrow range of subjects but also an increasingly narrow range of approaches to those subjects. In many ways, this seems a natural and logical consequence of a set of policies in which education is supposed to serve a pretty restricted set of ends. After all, what’s the point of learning about 10 different things if you only need to know about 2 to get on that graduate scheme?

 

For these reasons, it seems that a renewed sense of a liberal education might be what’s required to solve some of the problems facing higher education. If we want a better educated population possessing better skills of different types — and all sides will agree that this is a desirable end — then why continue to pursue the road to increasing specialisation, which apparently doesn’t seem to be doing that? Moreover, making a broad range of studies a compulsory part of higher education would actually be an important statement about the value to be attached to different subjects. This would certainly be an improvement on the current situation where, if things pan out as Browne and the Tories want, the arts and humanities will receive no government funding because, they argue, these fields contribute nothing (by which they mean nothing purely financial/economic) to society.

The Eton Rifles…

In these times of austerity, it’s always worth reminding ourselves of this, I think. I can’t imagine why PR man David Cameron doesn’t like people seeing the photo.