In the autumn of 2011, as the world’s financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames. The students’ first term would last longer than the Greek government. Banks across the west were still on life support. And David Cameron was imposing on Britons year on year of swingeing spending cuts.
Yet the bushfires those teenagers saw raging each night on the news got barely a mention in the seminars they sat through, they say: the biggest economic catastrophe of our times “wasn’t mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn’t seem to have any relevance to understanding it”, they write in The Econocracy. “We were memorising and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple-choice exams.”
Part of this book describes what happened next: how the economic crisis turned into a crisis of economics. It deserves a good account, since the activities of these Manchester students rank among the most startling protest movements of the decade.
After a year of being force-fed irrelevancies, say the students, they formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, with a sympathetic lecturer giving them evening classes on the events and perspectives they weren’t being taught. They lobbied teachers for new modules, and when that didn’t work, they mobilised hundreds of undergraduates to express their disappointment in the influential National Student Survey. The economics department ended up with the lowest score of any at the university: the professors had been told by their pupils that they could do better.
The protests spread to other economics faculties – in Glasgow, Istanbul, Kolkata. Working at speed, students around the world published a joint letter to their professors calling for nothing less than a reformation of their discipline.
Economics has been challenged by would-be reformers before, but never on this scale. What made the difference was the crash of 2008. Students could now argue that their lecturers hadn’t called the biggest economic event of their lifetimes – so their commandments weren’t worth the stone they were carved on. They could also point to the way in which the economic model in the real world was broken and ask why the models they were using had barely changed.
The protests found an attentive audience among fellow undergraduates – the sort who in previous years would have kept their heads down and waited for the “milk round” to deliver an accountancy traineeship, but were now facing the prospect of hiring freezes, moving back home and paying off their giant student debt with poor wages.
I covered this uprising from the outset, and later served as an unpaid trustee for the network now called Rethinking Economics. To me, it has two key features in common with other social movements that sprang up in the aftermath of the banking crash. Like the Occupy protests, it was ultimately about democracy: who gets to have a say, and who gets silenced. It also shared with the student fees protests of 2010 deep discomfort at the state of modern British universities. What are supposed to be forums for speculative thought more often resemble costly finishing schools for the sons of Chinese communist party cadres and the daughters of wealthy Russians.
Much of the post-crash dissent has disintegrated into trace elements. A line can be drawn from Occupy to Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter; some of those undergraduates who were kettled by the police in 2010 are now signed-up Corbynistas. But the economics movement remains remarkably intact. Rethinking Economics has grown to 43 student campaigns across 15 countries, from America to China. Some of its alumni went into the civil service, where they have established an Exploring Economics network to push for alternative approaches to economics in policy making. There are evening classes, and then there is this book, which formalises and expands the case first made five years ago.
Joe Earle, centre, with the Post-Crash Economics Society at Manchester University. Photograph: Jon Super
The Econocracy makes three big arguments. First, economics has shoved its way into all aspects of our public life. Flick through any newspaper and you’ll find it is not enough for mental illness to cause suffering, or for people to enjoy paintings: both must have a specific cost or benefit to GDP. It is as if Gradgrind had set up a boutique consultancy, offering mandatory but spurious quantification for any passing cause.
Second, the economics being pushed is narrow and of recent invention. It sees the economy “as a distinct system that follows a particular, often mechanical logic” and believes this “can be managed using a scientific criteria”. It would not be recognised by Keynes or Marx or Adam Smith.
In the 1930s, economists began describing the economy as a unitary entity. For decades, Treasury officials produced forecasts in English. That changed only in 1961, when they moved to formal equations and reams of numbers. By the end of the 1970s, 99 organisations were generating projections for the UK economy. Forecasting had become a numerical alchemy: turning base human assumptions and frailty into the marketable gold of rigorous-seeming science. By making their discipline all-pervasive, and pretending it is the physics of social science, economists have turned much of our democracy into a no-go zone for the public. This is the authors’ ultimate charge: “We live in a nation divided between a minority who feel they own the language of economics and a majority who don’t.”
This status quo works well for the powerful and wealthy and it will be fiercely defended. As Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn have found, suggest policies that challenge the narrow orthodoxy and you will be branded an economic illiterate – even if they add up. Academics who follow different schools of economic thought are often exiled from the big faculties and journals. The most devastating evidence in this book concerns what goes into making an economist. The authors analysed 174 economics modules for seven Russell Group universities, making this the most comprehensive curriculum review I know of. Focusing on the exams that undergraduates were asked to prepare for, they found a heavy reliance on multiple choice. The vast bulk of the questions asked students either to describe a model or theory, or to show how economic events could be explained by them. Rarely were they asked to assess the models themselves. In essence, they were being tested on whether they had memorised the catechism and could recite it under invigilation.
Critical thinking is not necessary to win a top economics degree. Of the core economics papers, only 8% of marks awarded asked for any critical evaluation or independent judgment. At one university, the authors write, 97% of all compulsory modules “entailed no form of critical or independent thinking whatsoever”.
The high priests of economics still hold power, but they no longer have legitimacy
Remember that these students shell out £9,000 a year for what is an elevated form of rote learning. Remember, too, that some of these graduates will go on to work in the City, handle multimillion pound budgets at FTSE businesses, head Whitehall departments, and set policy for the rest of us. Yet, as the authors write: “The people who are entrusted to run our economy are in almost no way taught to think about it critically.”
They aren’t the only ones worried. Soon after Earle and co started at university, the Bank of England held a day-long conference titled Are Economics Graduates Fit for Purpose?. Interviewing Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, in 2014, I asked: what was the answer? There was an audible gulp, and a pause that lasted most of a minute. Finally, an answer limped out: “Not yet.”
The Manchester undergraduates were told by an academic that alternative approaches were as much use as a tobacco-smoke enema. Which is to say, he was as likely to take Friedrich Hayek or Joseph Schumpeter seriously as he was to blow smoke up someone’s arse.
The students’ entrepreneurialism is evident in this book. Packed with original research, it comes with pages of endorsements, evidently harvested by the students themselves, from Vince Cable to Noam Chomsky. Yet the text is rarely angry. Its tone is of a strained politeness, as if the authors were talking politics with a putative father-in-law.
More thoughtful academics have accepted the need for change – but strictly on their own terms, within the limits only they decide. That professional defensiveness has done them no favours. When Michael Gove compared economists to the scientists who worked for Nazi Germany and declared the “people of this country have had enough of experts”, he was shamelessly courting a certain type of Brexiter. But that he felt able to say it at all says a lot about how low the standing of economists has sunk.
The high priests of economics still hold power, but they no longer have legitimacy. In proving so resistant to serious reform, they have sent the message to a sceptical public that they are unreformable. Which makes The Econocracy a case study for the question we should all be asking since the crash: how, after all that, have the elites – in Westminster, in the City, in economics – stayed in charge?
The Econocracy is published by Manchester University.
We all know what students are like nowadays, don’t we? Special snowflakes who can’t cope with the real world, who refuse to venture out of their safe spaces to learn anything, who are so achingly PC they won’t even let their institutions serve sushi in the cafeteria. When they’re not wasting their lives on social media or fighting for a fairer world for all, these mewling, overprivileged babies like to spend their time policing their academic superiors on their curriculum choices.
The latest scandal? Step forward SOAS, University of London students’ union, which has outraged basically every outlet in the rightwing press by calling, astonishingly enough, for such great philosophers as Kant, Plato and Descartes to be banned from the curriculum, just because they are white.
As part of a wider campaign to “decolonise” the curriculum, the union has proclaimed, “the majority of philosophers” taught at Soas should be from Africa or Asia, and – when the great names of European philosophy are taught, which is something that should only happen when absolutely necessary – it should be from a critical standpoint, accounting for (for instance) the colonial context in which Enlightenment thought arose.
Read the news articles on this story and you’d be convinced that some great act of intellectual barbarism was about to take place. But in truth, the notion that anything untoward is going on here is mostly nonsense.
Allow me to explain. First, it must be noted that despite the headlines no one, at any point, has actually called for white philosophers to be dropped from the curriculum at SOAS. Even at its most extreme, all the SOAS students’ union demands (and note that their demand has no binding force whatsoever) is that European philosophers only be taught in preference to African and Asian ones when necessary. Adopting this principle, if it turns out that say, Kant, has expressed some insight that is vital for understanding some aspect of reality, then he should be allowed to remain in the curriculum.
This seems fair: there’s only so much thought one can study as an undergraduate, and students should have a right to not waste their time on any second-rate thinkers who happen to have snuck themselves into the western canon. If we’re going to teach philosophy at a university, then it seems more than worthwhile to critically reflect on which philosophers we’re focusing on, and why. Indeed, this is something that Kant himself, whose mature work is pitched against dogmatism in all its forms, would welcome.
Second, philosophers should also welcome the demand that European philosophy be studied in its appropriate social and historical context. This doesn’t just mean PC hand-wringing: it can be used to actively enrich our understanding of these texts. Consider an example such as Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes – one of the founding documents of western political thought. Hobbes argues that we need a state authority invested with absolute power – because otherwise society would collapse into what he calls “the state of nature”, where no one has any security and life is nasty, brutish and short. The state of nature is often called a fiction, but if you read Leviathan closely you’ll notice that Hobbes is actually getting it from early anthropological accounts of Native American civilisation, which he describes as being devoid of any understanding of law. This of course is deeply problematic – and it’s exactly the sort of point that, if we understand it in its proper context, can allow us to get a better, richer understanding of Hobbes (and obtain a better understanding of our social world in general).
Third, even if the SOAS students had demanded that all white philosophers be banned from the curriculum, it’s still unclear to me how much would actually be lost. You wouldn’t know it from reading any of the other news articles on this topic, but SOAS doesn’t actually have a philosophy department – and nor does it offer a BA degree in philosophy. Rather, SOAS offers a BA in world philosophies, which is run by the department of religions and philosophies. Given the nature of this course and the nature of SOAS as an institution, it makes complete sense for the students to want to study more African and Asian thought at the expense of European. Of course if nearby Birkbeck decided to purge its curriculum of European thought, that would be an entirely different issue. But these matters are context-sensitive, and diversity across curricula should be welcomed.
Finally, the stereotype of students as easily “triggered” special snowflakes who use political correctness to police their teachers is one I simply don’t recognise. Most of the students I’ve encountered as a university lecturer are bright, engaged and want to be challenged. And to be honest, that’s something I recognise in the statement issued by the SOAS students as well. This oh-so-scandalising statement reads to me like it must have been produced by students who are deeply invested in their course and care passionately about what they study. As educators we have a duty to respond to and nurture this passion.
This may or may not be a good time for democracy, but one thing is certain about the past year of political upsets; it’s heaped further humiliations on the economics profession.
A substantial majority of economists thought the mere act of voting for Brexit would pole-axe the economy. Not only did voters ignore these warnings, but so far the “experts” have proved almost wholly wrong. Internationally, the story is much the same. The profound shock to global confidence anticipated by the International Monetary Fund, the OECD , Uncle Tom Cobley and all, failed to materialise; Brexit had no discernible impact on the world economy. Having cried wolf over the short term consequences, the profession should not be surprised if rather more credible warnings of pain delayed are widely disbelieved.
Similarly with Donald Trump, where the widely expected economic and market mayhem his election would supposedly unleash has so far been conspicuously absent. This collective misreading has been widely attributed to the perils of “groupthink” – where opinion hugs the consensus for fear of derision - or more conspiratorially, to vested interest and deliberately misleading intent.
But there is in fact a more prosaic explanation; that as a discipline, the dismal science has quite simply lost the plot. All over the shop, economics seems incapable of answering the great questions of our time. Are we heading for deflation or inflation? Are we locked in secular stagnation or have we finally put the financial crisis behind us? The conceit of modern economics is that it sees itself as an evidence-based science, yet if it could ever be such a thing, it is today no nearer its goal than when Adam Smith penned the Wealth of Nations, and in some respects, a good deal less so.
When he wrote his treatise, Adam Smith was not an economist at all, but a professor of moral philosophy, yet many economists have come to believe that they should be as divorced from moral judgement as scientists – that economics should be a technical discipline free of ethical concerns. In the battle between moralism and mechanism, mechanism won. Unlike science, however, it doesn’t appear to have delivered anything remotely useful.
Few of the profession’s more recent failings should have come as any great surprise, for they merely follow the monumental breakdown in economic analysis exposed by the financial crisis. The Queen’s faux naïve question of economists at the time – “how come nobody saw this coming” – has yet to be answered.
As Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, pointed out in a recent lecture, economic models provided an exceptionally poor guide to economic dynamics at the time of the financial crisis. Even after the crisis erupted, the profession seemed oblivious to its likely consequences. Virtually all the economic forecasts produced in the final quarter of 2007 – that’s after the collapse of Northern Rock - were not just mildly wrong about the coming year, but spectacularly so. Few saw any possibility even of a downturn, let alone the worst recession since the 1930s.
Mainstream economic modelling failed spectacularly during the financial crisis and has largely failed since
This failing has been explained by the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Lucas thus: “The simulations were not presented as assurances that no crisis would occur, but as a forecast of what could be expected to occur conditional on a crisis not occurring”. Thanks for nothing.
A somewhat similar excuse is proffered by HM Treasury for its ill judged analysis of the short term consequences of a vote for Brexit. This was not a prediction, but a “scenario”, it is claimed, based on two assumptions that turned out to be wrong – that Article 50 would be immediately triggered, and that there would be no countervailing monetary action by the Bank of England. Yet in truth, it was always obvious both that Article 50 would not be immediately triggered, and that the Bank of England would indeed take action to support the economy.
A stone when dropped will always fall to the ground. Human behaviour is by contrast far less certain, the result of a complex series of interactions which will always be inherently unpredictable, or what Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, has called “radical uncertainty”. The trouble with much modern economic modelling is that it assumes the laws of physics can indeed be applied to economics, or that behaviour will always respond to given inputs in a particular way. Time and again this has been proved incorrect.
The risks of this serial inability to diagnose what’s happening in the economy lie not just in the social costs of extreme events, or in wrong-headed policy response to them. It has also made mainstream macro-economics the object of political derision, which is in turn undermining public trust in key aspects of institutional and policy orthodoxy, including central bank independence and inflation targeting, which by and large have served us well.
Already we see some of this backlash in Trumponomics, where established norms, evidence and constraints are rejected in favour of policy based on instinct and narrowly perceived American self interest, including protectionism. These cranky alternatives threaten even worse outcomes than the faulty economics of the past.
Mr Haldane sees some reason for hope in reformed modelling, and in particular in so-called “Agency Based Models”, which take account not just of the observable environment, but also the behaviour of other agents which interact with it. Big Data promises to give these models even better predictive qualities.
Long applied to air traffic control, disease prevention, pharmaceutical drug trials and many other practical fields, use of ABMs in macro-economics is still very recent and far from commonplace. We can but hope they represent the great leap forward proponents claim.
One notable sceptic is the economist Paul Krugman, who claims that the old models didn’t fail, or rather that his own relatively simplistic Keynesian modelling predicted almost exactly the failure in post-crisis macro-economic policy. Ah, the path not taken. The beauty of this line of argument is that we’ll never know whether a different approach would have worked better.
Whatever the answer, economists need to be far more circumspect about prediction, as well as the uses their work are put to by the political class, where there is a growing tendency to cite the “experts” who seem to support the party line as true visionaries and dismiss the ones who don’t as useless propagandists. Pick your poison.
But let’s not entirely despair; undeterred by the low regard in which the discipline is held, there are apparently more students applying to do economics at university than ever. Economics may have lost its mojo, but plainly not yet its fascination.
A few seconds later, I remembered that we are in the era of post truth politics. So, I thought let me look behind the spin and see what the proposal actually means.
Many of the UK’s fees collecting private schools are charities according to their tax status. This status has been challenged by successive governments who have found few instances of charitable work and more instances of price rigging. These schools also face the new prospect of Brexit and fewer fee paying EU students on their rolls.
To overcome this threat, The Independent Schools Council (ISC) has proposed to teach 10,000 state school students if the government agrees to pay them £5,550 per student. This will enable the private schools to demonstrate their charitable work to retain their charitable tax status and will assure them with a steady supply of students to replace the EU nationals who may prefer to go elsewhere post Brexit.
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In my view this proposal reminds me of the PPP (private public partnership) and PFI (Private Finance Initiative) proposals which have bled the state’s coffers and unduly benefited private firms. Here are some ways the state will be worse off by accepting the ISC initiative.
No further need to do charity work: Any private school charity has to demonstrate actual charitable work in order to enjoy its tax status as a charity. The ISC hopes this proposal will enable them to overcome criticism of not doing sufficient charitable work.
Raiding state schools of better able students: State schools already feel beleaguered with budget cuts affecting their ability to teach students. This proposal will result in a further exodus of better able students who will be cherry picked by the private schools.
I feel there is no need to accept the ISC proposals. ISC members already enjoy a subsidy in the form of a charitable tax status despite not complying with the requirements of a charity.
Secondly, the above proposal if accepted will resemble the Nissan deal where the state intervenes with a sweetheart deal to once again protect privileged profit making non charitable ‘charities’.
But, I must confess the ISC have adapted well to the era of post truth politics by presenting a self preserving proposal as a charitable act. Is it a case of eating cake and having it too?
Students from non-European Union countries would have to subsequently apply for a work visa while abroad in order to continue living in the UK after finishing a course of study, The Sunday Times reported, instead of being able to apply for one while still on British soil.
A source close to the Home Secretary told the newspaper: “Making sure immigrants leave Britain at the end of their visa is as important a part of running a fair and efficient immigration system as controlling who comes here in the first place.”
Mrs May is also pressing for the power to be able to penalise colleges and universities that would have low success rates in ensuring the departure of foreign graduates and to deprive them of their right to sponsor overseas students, the source added.
Under current rules most students can apply for a work visa while still living in the UK, rather than having to leave the country to apply for one before potentially returning.
Written by Amit Sharma , Mir Ehsan | Meerut | March 5, 2014 7:58 am in The Indian Express
A large private university in Meerut has suspended 67 Kashmiri students for allegedly cheering Pakistan during the India-Pak match at the Asia Cup on Sunday. The students were told to vacate their hostel rooms, and were escorted by police and university officials to nearby Ghaziabad. Some students are now back with their families in the Valley.
Groups of students were watching the match on TV in the community hall of the hostel at the Swami Vivekananda Subharti University (SVSU). A clash broke out soon after India lost, a result which the Kashmiris allegedly celebrated. No action was taken against the other group.
G S Bansal, the warden of the hostel, said the Kashmiri students had been punished for being “anti-national”. “By raising pro-Pakistan slogans, the Kashmiri boys did an anti-national act, and that was why we suspended them and did not take any action against the others,” Bansal told The Indian Express.
SVSU vice-chancellor Manzoor Ahmed said the suspension was a “precautionary measure”.
“There was strong resentment against the students who had shouted anti-national and pro-Pakistan slogans after Pakistan won the match. So as a precautionary measure, we temporarily suspended students of J&K for three days. We arranged for two buses to take the boys to Ghaziabad. We also sent three senior university officials with them,” Ahmed said.
Eyewitnesses said heated exchanges followed all-rounder Shahid Afridi’s last-over sixes off Ravichandran Ashwin, which quickly escalated to brawls, followed by several rounds of stone-throwing. “Security guards did not intervene for nearly an hour after the violence began. The students were ultimately forced to go to their rooms, but the groups clashed again on Monday,” said a student who spoke on condition of anonymity.
University registrar R K Garg said the students were sent home because the university feared more violence. “Meerut is communally sensitive. We were apprehensive that if word of the violence got out, outsiders would storm the campus and target students,” Garg said.
In Srinagar, families of the suspended students said they hoped for normalcy to return to the campus soon. “The university has ordered the students to leave for some time in order to avert confrontations between groups,” Abdul Majeed Khan of Uri said. Khan’s son is a second year student of BBA at the university. He added that the university administration had taken the right steps.
Shahid Bashir, whose son Talib Bashir had to leave Meerut, said, “The university has asked the students to leave for a few days. Most of the students have left for the Valley, while a few are staying in Delhi with friends. Once the situation improves, they will rejoin the university.”
A protester against the proposed closure of the ULU student union last week. Photograph: Paul Davey/Demotix/Corbis
Why are some of the most powerful people in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, consider a few recent news stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are looking for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against spending cuts and other "student-union type stuff". Meanwhile, in London last Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested after a small and routine demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the precise route of the protest – even though it was on campus.
The 24-year-old has since been freed – on the strict condition that he doesn't "engage in protest on any University Campus and not within half a mile boundary of any university". Even with a copy of the bail grant in front of me, I cannot make out whether that applies to any London college, any British university – or just any institute of higher education anywhere in the world. As full-time head of the University of London's student union, Chessum's job is partly to protest: the police are blocking him from doing his work. But I suppose there's no telling just what threat to law and order might be posed by an over-articulate history graduate.
While we're trawling for the ridiculous, let us remember another incident this summer at the University of London, when a 25-year-old woman was arrested for the crime of chalking a slogan on a wall. That's right: dragged off by the police for writing in water-soluble chalk. Presumably, there would have been no bother had she used PowerPoint.
It all sounds farcical – it is farcical – until you delve into the details. Take the London demo that landed Chessum in such bother: university staff were filming their own students from a balcony of Senate House (the building that inspired the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, appropriately enough). Such surveillance is a recent tradition, the nice man in the University press office explains to me – and if the police wanted the footage that would be no problem.
That link with the police is becoming increasingly important across more and more of our universities. London students allege that officers and university security guards co-ordinate their attempts to rein in demonstrations while staff comment on the increased police presence around campus. At Sussex, student protests against outsourcing services were broken up this April, when the university called in the police – who duly turned up with riot vans and dogs. A similar thing happened at Royal Holloway university, Surrey in 2011: a small number of students occupied one measly corridor to demonstrate against course closures and redundancies; the management barely bothered to negotiate, but cited "health and safety" and called in the police to clear away the young people paying their salaries.
For most of my life, student politics has been little more than a joke – the stuff of Neil off the Young Ones, or apprentice Blairites. But in the past few years it has suddenly become both serious and admirable, most notably with the protests of 2010 against £9,000 tuition fees and the university occupations that followed. And at just that point, both the police and university management have become very jumpy.
For the police, this is part of the age-old work of clamping down on possible sources of civil disobedience. But the motivation for the universities is much more complicated. Their historic role has been to foster intellectual inquiry and host debate. Yet in the brave new market of higher education, when universities are competing with each other to be both conveyor belts to the jobs market and vehicles for private investment, such dissent is not only awkward – it's dangerously uncommercial. As Andrew McGettigan, author of The Great University Gamble, puts it: "Anything too disruptive gets in the way of the business plan."
Last month it appeared that Edinburgh University had forced its student union to sign a gagging clause (now withdrawn). No union officer is allowed to make any public criticism of the university without giving at least 48 hours' notice. University managers reportedly made that a deal-breaker if the student union was to get any funds.
The managers of the University of London want to shut down the student union at the end of this academic year. The plan – which is why Chessum and co were marching last week – is to keep the swimming pool and the various sports clubs, but to quash all university-wide student representation. After all, the students are only the people paying the salary of the university vice-chancellor, Adrian Smith – why should they get a say? The plan, it may not surprise you to learn, was drawn up by a panel that didn't number a single student. What with sky-high fees and rocketing rents in the capital, you might think that the need for a pan-London student body had never been higher. But then, you're not a university manager on a six-figure salary.
Where universities were historically places of free expression, now they are having to sacrifice that role for the sake of the free market. For students, that comes in the form of a crackdown on dissent. Yet the twentysomethings at university now will end up running our politics, our businesses and our media. You might want these future leaders to be questioning and concerned about society. Or you might wonder whether sending in the police to arrest a woman chalking a wall is proportionate. Either way, you should be troubled.
Money talks. After two years of tuition fees at £7,000-£9,000 universities are apparently rolling in cash, and their students are demanding value for it. Universities are expected to deliver not just education but jobs. Courses are being tailored to "employability". Research is concentrated in the elite Russell institutions. Now the universities minister, David Willetts, is calling for a "cultural change" to reverse the trend of too much time going on scholarship and not enough on teaching. Is this a new dawn in higher education, or a new darkness?
Willetts has celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Robbins report with a pamphlet questioning one aspect of the expansion it stimulated. Pre-Robbins, British universities devoted 60% of their time to teaching and 40% to research. Now those percentages are reversed, so that universities are "lopsided away from teaching". Only in the former polytechnics does teaching predominate.
Today's students may not realise how far this has gone, but their graduate parents might. Contact time has declined. Essay writing has halved. Fifty years ago two-thirds of students received oral (as well as written) feedback, now two-thirds get none. Willetts wonders how this was ever allowed to happen.
The answer is easy. Willetts and his Whitehall predecessors made it happen. Universities have become creatures of government, paid to do what government says. Ever since Thatcher abolished the arms-length university grants committee and eventually"nationalised" higher education in 1988, universities have followed the money.
Many academics prefer research, writing and conferencing to the hard tutorial grind. I know, as I was briefly one myself. But the price was to allow government to "assess" their work and demand ever more. They sweated over papers, often of staggering obscurity. Civil servants totted up pages and citations, and tested for "impact and translational value". Willetts may complain that students suffered, but whose fault is that?
The surge in student fees has led universities to a new accountability, not to government but to their customers. For the first time they have had to look out to their market place rather than back to their founders and traditions or up to their government. In this change in accountability research is bound to take a knock. The student market cares little about it. Students want an education that stimulates them for three years and gets them a job. Universities such as Bath are popular because they emphasise job-finding. With 40% of new graduates going into "non-graduate" initial careers, the league tables that matter are those indicating successful job placements.
To outsiders, universities remain extraordinarily conservative enclaves. They stick to the medieval three-term, three-year courses. Specialism is almost obligatory: a Briton wanting to study arts and science together had better go abroad. People at the peak of their vigour are thought unable to absorb teaching for more than six months a year, and are still sent home to help with the harvest each summer. Any business run with so little concern for new techniques of operating or delivering a service would collapse.
When research was the activity of an autonomous minority of scholars it could look after itself. Today it costs the taxpayer millions of pounds and is spread over three dozen Russell and 1994 Group institutions. Such spending has to be justified. And here universities sold the pass. In the years following Robbins, the economists Mark Blaug and John Vaizey debated whether higher education was a consumer service or an investment. Blaug advocated the former and won the argument – but he lost the war. Academics loved to think of themselves as "investing in the nation's future". But in claiming so, they conceded the field to the Treasury. If universities were an investment, where was the return?
The argument continued. Even as new undergraduates rushed to arts subjects, government became obsessed with "the nation's manpower needs" and believed this meant driving universities towards science and technology. Still today the science budget remains "ringfenced", as if it were a branch of national security – and despite decades of market evidence that Britain's prosperity was demanding more financiers, lawyers and designers.
The return from teaching that universities most often cite is graduate lifetime earnings. But this is personal rather than collective. Besides, such a validation has consequences. Three years ago 600 Bristol students staged a revolt over receiving too little teaching, fearing it would jeopardise their careers. When Surrey revealed (improbably) that all its drama graduates had jobs, it was inundated with 50 applicants per drama place.
The Institute for Public Policy Research recently advocated areturn of the polytechnics as specialised vocational academies. University College London is introducing a "liberal arts" course that marries arts and science. Where universities appear to be ailing, Willetts is talking of sub-contracting them to private companies, bringing the free-school principle to state higher education. In America this mercantilist approach went to extremes when some graduates sued their old law school for training too many of them, and thus wrecking the jobs market.
There is a backlash to all this. Conservatives such as Cambridge's Stefan Collini inveigh against rate-of-return education, suggesting it means death to the humanities and reduces academics to "door-to-door salesmen for vulgarised versions of their market-oriented product". The vice-chancellor of Reading, Sir David Bell, warns against having to "put a premium on employability … on preparing students for what is to follow", as if that were some sort of betrayal. When a student has £30,000 in prospective debt round his or her neck, employability is bound to apply.
If I were an academic I would stop pretending I was "investing in the nation's future". I would stop using such language. I would try to give students what they want for their money, usually a well-rounded education and a mild sense of obligation to society, and tuck my research into my spare time. That would be my "rate of return". As long as universities play the investment game, they will find students and taxpayers alike asking to scrutinise their accounts.
Teacher Emma Chandler shares her tips on how to make reactionary students question what they read in the media
Using a fabricated news story based on the 2011 London riots sparked debate and action among Emma Chandler's citizenship pupils. Photograph: William Bloomfield/Rex Feature
Branding our young people as "digital natives" is as dangerous a label as any other in the classroom. Not only can it lead to assumptions that they have a natural talent to extract and interpret information simply because it arrives in a format they find engaging, but it can also foster a general acceptance of the idea that we need not plan as rigorously, that the students will teach us. This is just one argument for digital citizenship being the next priority in curriculum development.
Digital citizenship should equip students with the skills to question what they read and hear across the media. They should be taught to make informed choices and take positive actions for themselves. At a time when trending can be conflated with truth, this is a role that citizenship education must fill.
This lesson, from a scheme of work that focuses on campaigns, aims to help students understand the role of the media in forming opinions both personally and across society. When I share this lesson with colleagues it starts with the sentence, "I once let a class start a riot".
The class in question was a year 9 tutor group who had two lessons a week – Thursday and Friday. It's important to point out that this was a very reactionary class: they used Twitter to keep up to date with events in the world but never questioned their sources, frequently believing one celebrity or another had died or that well-known brands that were currently free were soon to start charging. They were constantly in uproar about something. This went locally too; they would often come into class claiming that a teacher was leaving or that they were about to be put in shirts and ties. As their citizenship teacher, I was constantly at pains to make them question before leaping into action.
So this lesson began with a fabricated news story. In this instance, it was a post-riots moral panic article that suggested that Oyster cards were to blame for the London riots as they enabled rioters to mobilise so quickly.
The story can be anything – in the past I have used stories claiming to ban mobile phones or the introduction of a curfew. The main thing is that the idea behind the story stands up to some initial scrutiny – it needs to have some basis in reality otherwise students will see straight through it.
In this particular lesson, students arrived to see the news story on the interactive whiteboard (IWB) and were asked to respond in pairs with a simple agree or disagree statement. During this discussion, I gave some students a reaction quote from David Cameron. Most of these actually went unread for the first five minutes of discussion because the class were so outraged about the blaming of the free travel for the riots.
Views were collected on post-its and placed on the board, arranged in an order going from agree to disagree. The question at this stage was simply how much we agreed with the story. When students showed a deeper questioning, I gave them a different coloured post-it and asked them to write down their question and stick it on another board.
Once it was established that very few students agreed with what they were seeing, I asked them to gather into groups to ask the 5 Ws:
• Who does this effect? • What do we want to do next? • Why is this important? • Where can we find more information? • When did the event occur?
During this phase, I put the reaction quote and a picture of David Cameron on the IWB. The quote outlined that the prime minister would be keen to restrict the use of the free Oyster cards to only during school hours as a way to reduce anti-social behaviour in our capital city.
The 5 Ws were revisited very quickly but this time they didn't get past the 'what'. What did they want to do about it? They were incensed at the idea that they would feel the effects of a policy designed to stop a problem that, for them, had long since ceased to be an issue. They wanted to take action and they wanted to do it now. We had previously used Twitter to share our work and they demanded now that we tell the prime minister they would riot if he tried to take their travel away – they would take him to theEuropean Court of Human Rights.
They very quickly made links to the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child and demanded I enable them. It was my responsibility they said: "You're our wellbeing teacher, how can you let them do this?" So I asked them, "what next?" "We want to riot," they said.
Every citizenship teacher knows the feeling of dread when informed and responsible action disappears from the minds of their students only to be replaced with words taken from the Human Rights Act. For this reason I always have a very large poster of Spider-man reminding us what comes with great power.
So there we were. In the middle of democracy in action. The class had voted on what they wanted to do next and they wanted to riot. They designed banners and logos, wrote chants and stood up for what they believed in. Except no one had asked that question "are we sure?" yet.
I took the different coloured post-its that students had stuck on the separate whiteboard and gently suggested to those who had come up with the idea that they might want to bring these up with their group. The results were mixed: one group listened but quickly realised that they wouldn't be able to take action or get angry if things weren't as they seemed; other groups just shouted down the idea or ignored it.
I was very careful to ensure that these students were aware I was listening and thought their questions valid and interesting. In a rights-respecting classroom it is vital that every child is heard, but this is even more important when you take a risk such as this. It would be very easy for students to learn the lesson of not speaking out again. When the lesson was over those pupils who had questioned the others were rewarded for their bravery as the single voice of reason or opposition with extra positive points for the whole class.
I find a positive to negative points recorder works really well in lessons like these to signpost what I think is working and what I think could be improved on. For this lesson, the mood was very positive – even when students weren't being listened to they were being heard and respected so it was easy to award positive points. I recall only having to record two negatives, both relating to running out of time.
To get to the final stage, I set them a research task. I gave the students one laptop per group to find out more about the story. Using the 5 Ws once again, each group set about exploring what others thought about the proposed ban of free travel for all under 18s in the UK.
It only took a few minutes for the story to unravel. They could only find the first story by using specific search terms and of course no one could find the quote from the David Cameron. A small but determined group kept digging but nothing came up. Eventually I had to reveal that tomorrow a Google search would only show everything that had happened in class today. And that's when the light bulb went off: it was a completely organic moment involving all 25 students who realised they had been duped.
The lesson was tailored for a class that I had teased and reprimanded in equal measure for months over their complete acceptance of everything they read online – and it worked. It makes it into my, albeit small, best lesson catalogue purely for the outcome alone – there are 25 students in south east London that now have a healthy distrust of all primary sources until they can be proven trustworthy. That's 25 young people that question and demand answers from anyone suggesting change that affects the way we live or, better yet, reporting that this is the case. They openly question those sources and share this knowledge with others.
As with all good lessons, they taught me something too. I hadn't planned the section with the different coloured post-its; I remember at the time wanting to tactically ignore the questions lest they bring down my house of cards. But I am glad I didn't. During my lesson reflection, many students expressed regret at not having listened to their group member who had written what we were calling the hang-on-a-minute questions. As far as unexpected outcomes go, increasing empathy and understanding for those with views different to your own is about as good as it gets.
