Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Wednesday, 24 January 2024
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
Why is no one defending teaching at our universities?
Your undergraduate experience depends upon the quality of teaching staff - yet universities continue to put research first, argues Gervas Huxley.
University teaching: it’s time for both Parliament and the public to address the quality of teaching at our universities. Photo: OJO Images Ltd / Alamy
Much as we wish it weren’t so, Christmas shopping really boils down to one
simple rule – the more you spend, the more you end up with under your tree.
The same does not seem to apply to our university system. Students are
typically taught in tutorials of 15 or more students these days, whilst
their parents (if they went to university) studied in classes less than half
this size and of course paid no fee.
How can this be fair? For all the talk about market forces and value for money supposedly reshaping our university system, it doesn’t take an Economics lecturer to see there’s something amiss.
And yet when do we ever hear concerns about the quality of teaching? Rarely, if at all.
As it happens I am an Economics lecturer. More specifically, I am a Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol. This means I am paid to teach, and only to teach.
And it's not just the universities – almost any academic you’ll find speaking about our university system in the Houses of Parliament or in a national newspaper will be there because of their research.
I’ve been asked to give evidence at the House of Lords this week on the state of higher education teaching – and invited to write this blog – because of a lecture voted for by my students which appeared online last year. But this is highly unusual.
This lack of emphasis on teaching is one of the major problems facing our higher education system. The quality of education received by undergraduates relies increasingly on what teaching staff like myself have to offer, but far too little is known about our role.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the near-total absence of discussion about class size. If increasing class size was the inevitable consequence of falling funding per student for almost two decades from 1979 until 1998 – when students began to pay fees of £1,000 – shouldn’t students be seeing a benefit from the successive increases in the fee since 1998?
So far there’s been no sign of this happening. It’s time for both Parliament and the public to address the quality of teaching at our universities.
And it’s time that those of us in academia whose main concern is teaching began contributing to this debate.
Gervas Huxley is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol and consults on Higher Education policy.
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen
Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."
So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?
In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.
The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.
In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.
This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.
The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.
What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.
In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.
In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots' labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.
Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.
This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.
It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.
Sunday, 8 June 2008
No one wins in modern-day academia
No one wins in modern-day academiaNick Cohen The Observer, Sunday June 8 2008 Article historySt Matthew's warning that 'unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away' is the biblical quote least likely to stir the Labour soul.
That the rich get richer and the poor will get poorer is not a policy prescription that appeals to the left. With the best of intentions, however, Labour is imposing the Gospel according to St Matthew on England's universities and is providing a parable on the state of the nation in the process.
Few dispute that academia needs reforming. Britain has a university system in which the last measure the government uses to judge the quality of academics is their ability to teach. Instead, tortuous bureaucracies assess the merits of the research produced by every department in all the 200 universities. On their ruling rests the disposal of £5bn of public money.
The 2008 fight for loot is under way. Luckless workers at a Bristol warehouse are sending 200,000 scholarly books and papers to the 1,000 or so professors who adjudicate on 70 panels like the judges of beauty contests.
In the inaugural issue of the new magazine Standpoint, Jonathan Bate of Warwick University despairs of the absurdity of the enterprise. He explains that panels filled with professors of foreign languages have been more generous in rating the work of their peers than professors of English. Officially, our universities are now world leaders in the study of French literature but awful at studying English literature. What's really happened, says Bate, is that while other professors of literature covered each other's backs and looked after each other's departments 'the Eng lit lot couldn't resist biting each other's backs' even if it meant their subject lost money.
Neither he nor the government says this, but a second failing of the system is that it creates conformism in supposedly independent minds. There are many honourable exceptions, but as a herd, academics are the most predictable of beasts. If I sit down with builders, dentists or accountants, I have no way of knowing what their opinions will be. Within seconds of talking to an academic, I guess their views on every major political issue.
Why should I be surprised? To get the academic papers published the judging panels demand, lecturers must engage in the soul-destroying task of sucking up to the editors of learned journals. The funding for their departments and their very livelihoods depend on their ability to please. The government does not ask researchers to produce work of intellectual distinction, however long it takes. They must loyally churn out enough papers to allow their department to claim a slice of the booty.
The government admits this can't go on. It plans to replace the judging panels with a computer, which will record the number of times an academic's name is mentioned by his colleagues. The theory is that the best academics receive the greatest number of acknowledgements in footnotes. Let a database identify who these oft-cited professors are and - bingo! - you have found the finest minds of your generation.
Ministers possibly realised that under the present funding arrangements, Cambridge University would have to sack Ludwig Wittgenstein. He might have been a genius, but it took him decades to produce a book. Under their new system, the thousands of academics who quoted his work would provide a true assessment of Wittgenstein's worth and spare him the dole.
It sounds fair until you remember St Matthew. In 1968, Robert K Merton of Columbia University coined the phrase 'the Matthew effect' when he looked at how scientists valued each other. He found that the already eminent got disproportionate credit for their work while unknowns, whose research was often as valuable, struggled for recognition.
The great English geneticist JBS Haldane illustrated Merton's argument with the story of an Indian student, SK Roy, who had found a way to improve strains of rice. 'I thought it was a rather ill-planned experiment,' Haldane admitted, 'but I let him go ahead on the general principle that I am not omniscient.' The experiment was a triumph. Haldane said that Roy deserved 95 per cent of the credit, but would never get it. 'Every effort will be made here to crab his work. He has not got a PhD or even a first-class MSc. So either the research is no good or I did it.'
Beyond the prestige of quoting established names lies the incentive to cheat - academics are already promising that 'if you cite my research I'll cite yours' - and beyond that lies sheer luck. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who glories in the title of professor in the sciences of uncertainty, points out that what leads to one academic being cited rather than another can be a simple fluke. But as soon as he or she is cited in one paper, the odds increase that he or she will be cited in another.
The Matthew effect does not only work in academia. Of the thousands of first novels each year, the few that are reviewed make the literary pages because the author is already well known in another field (prestige), the author is a friend of the literary editor (cheating) or the author's book was picked at random from a pile on a slow week (luck).
City firms give lavish bonuses because they don't want to lose staff to rivals (prestige), because they dealt on insider information (cheating) or because they pulled out of the sub-prime market just in time (luck).
You only have to read the financial press to know that the beneficiaries of the property crash won't be first-time buyers - they are struggling to get mortgages because of the credit crunch. The winners will be the already rich sitting on piles of cash who will snap up assets when their prices hit the floor.
Labour should not be happy with helping those that hath. If it wants to reform education, it should begin by noticing that working-class students are dropping out and middle-class students are paying fees for substandard courses, because the first concern of the universities isn't teaching. Ministers would do better to redirect public money to make sure that it is.
That the rich get richer and the poor will get poorer is not a policy prescription that appeals to the left. With the best of intentions, however, Labour is imposing the Gospel according to St Matthew on England's universities and is providing a parable on the state of the nation in the process.
Few dispute that academia needs reforming. Britain has a university system in which the last measure the government uses to judge the quality of academics is their ability to teach. Instead, tortuous bureaucracies assess the merits of the research produced by every department in all the 200 universities. On their ruling rests the disposal of £5bn of public money.
The 2008 fight for loot is under way. Luckless workers at a Bristol warehouse are sending 200,000 scholarly books and papers to the 1,000 or so professors who adjudicate on 70 panels like the judges of beauty contests.
In the inaugural issue of the new magazine Standpoint, Jonathan Bate of Warwick University despairs of the absurdity of the enterprise. He explains that panels filled with professors of foreign languages have been more generous in rating the work of their peers than professors of English. Officially, our universities are now world leaders in the study of French literature but awful at studying English literature. What's really happened, says Bate, is that while other professors of literature covered each other's backs and looked after each other's departments 'the Eng lit lot couldn't resist biting each other's backs' even if it meant their subject lost money.
Neither he nor the government says this, but a second failing of the system is that it creates conformism in supposedly independent minds. There are many honourable exceptions, but as a herd, academics are the most predictable of beasts. If I sit down with builders, dentists or accountants, I have no way of knowing what their opinions will be. Within seconds of talking to an academic, I guess their views on every major political issue.
Why should I be surprised? To get the academic papers published the judging panels demand, lecturers must engage in the soul-destroying task of sucking up to the editors of learned journals. The funding for their departments and their very livelihoods depend on their ability to please. The government does not ask researchers to produce work of intellectual distinction, however long it takes. They must loyally churn out enough papers to allow their department to claim a slice of the booty.
The government admits this can't go on. It plans to replace the judging panels with a computer, which will record the number of times an academic's name is mentioned by his colleagues. The theory is that the best academics receive the greatest number of acknowledgements in footnotes. Let a database identify who these oft-cited professors are and - bingo! - you have found the finest minds of your generation.
Ministers possibly realised that under the present funding arrangements, Cambridge University would have to sack Ludwig Wittgenstein. He might have been a genius, but it took him decades to produce a book. Under their new system, the thousands of academics who quoted his work would provide a true assessment of Wittgenstein's worth and spare him the dole.
It sounds fair until you remember St Matthew. In 1968, Robert K Merton of Columbia University coined the phrase 'the Matthew effect' when he looked at how scientists valued each other. He found that the already eminent got disproportionate credit for their work while unknowns, whose research was often as valuable, struggled for recognition.
The great English geneticist JBS Haldane illustrated Merton's argument with the story of an Indian student, SK Roy, who had found a way to improve strains of rice. 'I thought it was a rather ill-planned experiment,' Haldane admitted, 'but I let him go ahead on the general principle that I am not omniscient.' The experiment was a triumph. Haldane said that Roy deserved 95 per cent of the credit, but would never get it. 'Every effort will be made here to crab his work. He has not got a PhD or even a first-class MSc. So either the research is no good or I did it.'
Beyond the prestige of quoting established names lies the incentive to cheat - academics are already promising that 'if you cite my research I'll cite yours' - and beyond that lies sheer luck. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who glories in the title of professor in the sciences of uncertainty, points out that what leads to one academic being cited rather than another can be a simple fluke. But as soon as he or she is cited in one paper, the odds increase that he or she will be cited in another.
The Matthew effect does not only work in academia. Of the thousands of first novels each year, the few that are reviewed make the literary pages because the author is already well known in another field (prestige), the author is a friend of the literary editor (cheating) or the author's book was picked at random from a pile on a slow week (luck).
City firms give lavish bonuses because they don't want to lose staff to rivals (prestige), because they dealt on insider information (cheating) or because they pulled out of the sub-prime market just in time (luck).
You only have to read the financial press to know that the beneficiaries of the property crash won't be first-time buyers - they are struggling to get mortgages because of the credit crunch. The winners will be the already rich sitting on piles of cash who will snap up assets when their prices hit the floor.
Labour should not be happy with helping those that hath. If it wants to reform education, it should begin by noticing that working-class students are dropping out and middle-class students are paying fees for substandard courses, because the first concern of the universities isn't teaching. Ministers would do better to redirect public money to make sure that it is.
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