A couple of years after the University of Cambridge rejected government (in the shape of one of its agencies plus the recently ‘reformed’ charity commission) ‘guidelines’ for the control of universities (i.e. giving great power for the Chief Executive and a board of management with a majority of non-academics upon it) the University of Oxford has now done the same: first by a meeting of the academics and then by postal ballot.
Oddly enough many ‘conservatives’ think this is a bad thing. Lord Butler (a former civil servant who now, for some reason, is master of University College at Oxford), John Redwood MP and the Daily Telegraph newspaper have all campaigned in favour of the “reforms”.
Their arguments are two fold.
Firstly they say that universities should carry out the changes or the government will force them to. This is clearly the argument of cowards “bend over or the bully will just make you do so”.
However, there is a second line of argument. It is claimed that the changes will help the university be run “like a business”.
Either something is a business or it is not. If it is a business its objective should be to make money and it should be under the control of its owners (or those they appoint).
Claiming to “run something like a business” is one of the great fallacies of our time. Bringing in people who have worked in private companies into government departments or charitable activities does not make these things run better – it just inflates the administration bill. Government departments are just as hopeless (if not more hopeless) when run by ex-businessmen than they are when run by life long civil servants (it is not the poor quality of the people who work in a government department that is the problem, it is the fact that it is a government department – regardless of who works there).
Charitable activities do not work better with professional managers – they worked better when the people who gave the money ran things themselves. For example, (to steal an incident from Reclaiming the American Dream 1965) a lawyer should not spend his time selling flags in a car park for a charity – he should (pro-bono) being doing the legal work of the charity. The great class of administrators hired via advertisements in the Guardian newspaper, just like people in national and local government agencies, are the curse of charities – they see their role as seeking after government grants and organising political campaigns, not helping the poor, the old and the sick with their own hands.
A college is not a business, it is a community of scholars who seek after knowledge – for its own sake. Students should only go to a college (and both Oxford and Cambridge should be based on the individual communities of scholars, the colleges – there should be as little ‘university structure’ as possible) if they respect the academics there – both respect the knowledge they have gained and their ability to explain this knowledge (for example Newton would pass the first test, but he was not really interested in explaining things to students).
The fact that undergraduates do not tend to know much about the academics at the colleges they go to before they arrive does not refute this – it shows how far on the wrong path we have gone. Nor is this is a matter just of Oxford and Cambridge, even if one considers United Kingdom alone many universities were run as voluntary institutions. Such great universities as Edinburgh and Glasgow may have had the reputation as being more “practical” that Oxford and Cambridge, but their academics were at least as committed to seeking after knowledge for its own sake (indeed the Scottish academics may have been more committed than the English – as, before the 19th century, Oxford and Cambridge tried to suppress the development of other universities in England and some of their academics may have been more interested in a comfortable life than in the pursuit of truth). Nor did the founding of voluntary institutions stop – indeed the last such institution to be granted formal ‘university’ status before the government funding principle that came with World War II was the University of Nottingham in 1938, and many of the institutions that became universities in the era of government funding had their origins in voluntary (civil) interaction.
“But it is the duty of a university to prepare the next generation of people for the economy” – no it is not. This is nothing to do with a university. If people just want job training (i.e. are not interested in knowledge for its own sake) they should not go to a university.
The much quoted fact that wealthy countries tend to have more university graduates (as a proportion of the population) than poor countries is a relevant as the fact that wealthy countries tend to have a higher proportion of the population owning BMW cars. More people being able to go to university is an effect, not a cause, of wealth – to put it in terms of economics, university education is a consumption good it is not “investment”. Or to put it in more traditional terms, university education is (for the student, not the academic – who is, or rather should be, a seeker after truth for its own sake) part of becoming a more civilized human being – it should have nothing to do with getting a better job.
The tendency for more and more occupations to be graduates only is not a good thing, it is a bad thing. Both because it prevents non-graduates (who may be far more interested and suitable) from progressing in these occupations, and because it totally misunderstands what a university education is for. Indeed as recently as just before World War II such American industries as banking and the railroads were rather hostile to employing ‘college boys’ because (rightly or wrongly) people in these industries believed that a university education gave people too abstract habits of mind for concrete occupations.
Technical training (whether in law, medicine, chemistry or whatever) should be a matter for the relevant cultural institutions (the Inns of Court, the old teaching hospitals, the chemical companies – and charitable trusts devoted to such training). All these subjects are fit things for universities – but only as taught as ends-in-themselves (the understanding of existing knowledge and the seeking after of new knowledge), not in the light of “how to make someone better at the job”.
“But why on Earth should the taxpayer fund academics who are obsessed with the study and teaching of their abstract subjects and students who want to study with them for a few years?”
Quite correct, there should be no taxpayers money involved at all.
Universities should be financed by the fees paid by students (which should go directly to the college – not to the government as is the case in the United Kingdom), charitable gifts given to colleges, and income from property owned by them.
This money should be as decentralized as possible. For example, any money from a business venture of an academic (say a science based business run by an academic) should go solely to the person concerned (as was up to very recently the case at Cambridge) – not to the college, and certainly not to the university. And fees should go to the college (to the community of scholars) not to the university (any university structure should be paid for by strictly voluntary funds from the colleges).
Indeed there is a case (made by Adam Smith and others) that for their activities as teachers (as opposed to their living expenses as fellows of a collage) academics should be paid directly by the students. For example the great Newton would still have been maintained by his college – but students would not have had to pay fees for lectures which he was not interested in giving and was no good at giving (he simply read from his text, explained nothing and refused to reply to questions).
A charitable activity (such as maintaining Newton and other scholars) is an activity that brings no money profit (there may indeed be a lot of “mental profit”) to the person or persons who pay for it. ‘Reforms’ to charity law that seek to bring such charitable activities as the funding of research and education under government control, as part of the ‘target culture’, must be resisted or civilization is lost.
“You are living in the past” – actually both freedom and state control can be found in the past (it is a matter of when and where one looks). Civilization may be valued in the future or it may not – but it will be a matter of the beliefs of human beings and how they act on those beliefs (not what the date is).
“This is all politically impossible” – everything decent is described as “politically impossible”. Whether academics are true to their calling, or choose to live as part of a pretend “business” (actually a government controlled organization) is up to them. But if they wish to live as free people they must reject the poisoned chalice that government funding has proved to be.
There is all the difference in the world between say the gift of land from a King (the income from which going to the community of scholars) and an annual payment of cash. In the early years such money may seem to have come without strings and allowed scholars to set up institutions based on new ideas (such as the University of Keele) which would have taken a lot of hard work to raise voluntarily – but, in the end, becoming dependent on money taken by the threat of violence (tax money) by the government is bound to destroy all academic independence and to undermine all the liberal (in the old sense) principles of education and culture.
A piece of writing containing many good ideas, and others that could start some interesting discussion.
One point, that occurred to me while reading Paul’s comments on Newton, is the perhaps subtle difference between charity and philanthropy.
Best regards
I am not sure that technical training at universities is necessarily bad. Shouldn’t the question be whether doing so conflicts with the pursuit of knowledge and whether students can benefit from scholarly input? This may not be so in all areas, but in traditional subjects like law, medicine or engineering the combination seems to work well enough.
When Blair claimed his priorities were “Education, Education, Education”, I thought that as a lawyer he really meant “Training, Training, Training”. As he was involved in politics soon after completing his pupillage I doubt he ever planned a legal career, so he never learned the truth which is clear to those of us who work:
You can learn law at university, but only become a barrister by pleading cases before a jury.
You can can learn medicine at university, but only become a doctor at a patient’s bedside.
You can learn business administration at university, but only become a manager dealing with customers and staff in a company.
You can learn your subject at university, but only become a teacher by standing in front of thirty 14 year olds in a classroom.
This piece echoes much of my own ideas on the subject. Quite frequently though, I tend to fall into the trap that the university is a place to aquire a tool for a job. It is not, nor should it be considered as such. When I fisrt began reading about these things, I’d find Nock and Mencken’s views quite strange (outdated even), but after giving it much thought I came to the conclusion that they weren’t that far off the mark. People consider a superior “education” to be a tool because of all the pressure from the various professional guilds and associations to limit access to the job market.
I am sorry. I know this is a serious matter, but I just couldn’t get past the idea of a “postal ballet” of academics. The image will stay with me over the holiday season.
Merry Christmas!
In any scientific or technical field, what you learn at University is out of date within 10 years or less. What you should be learning therefore is not just facts, but how to understand and interpret information. In other words university education should be about learning how to learn.
One of the most damaging things about politics is the way in which it stops things – to be a politician you must stop learning anything – except perhaps how to be re-elected.
Really?
Surely one of the things to learn in a scientific education is that most theories are not overturned, just extended, refined or subject to newly found (or better understood) caveats.
Best regards
Great post, I see you’ve been reading your Oakeshott, but I’m afraid the pass has been sold already. Very few of the undergraduates I run into display any interest in their chosen subject beyond the monetary benefits they believe they will in time accrue from it (and perhaps a mild non-committal curiosity). Post-grads tend to be somewhat better, but a surprisingly large amount of them, almost completely erroneously, see their studies as a means to an end. They’re not bad or stupid people, they just have no conception of how a university education differs qualitatively from a school one.
Given this, I doubt that this good news will even arrest Oxford’s precipitate decline (40 years ago every History applicant had to know Latin, 10 years ago they had to know a foreign language, now it is “highly recommended”), but it may well enable Oxford to survive and prosper come 2050 when the (welfare) state becomes fiscally insolvent. I guess that alone makes it cause for cheer.
I agree with a lot of what Paul says, and I was pleased to see the Oxford vote go against the reformers. The proposals seemed like a classic case of mediocracy – i.e. trying to bring everything down to the same muddled, ideologised corporatism which already prevails in the media, arts institutions etc.
But I don’t believe academic research being paid for by student fees can be a complete answer. Pure research, like artistic innovation (the real kind, not the phoney radicalism of contemporary art), needs subsidy. Private subsidy, that is, which the market can in theory provide. But only if you don’t tax private capital out of existence.
I very much sympathise with the merits of study and research for its own sake. However, if you expect students to pay their own fees, to the tune of several thousands a year, then it is unsurprising that they would be concerned about how they will pay off that debt. A course that offers an obvious money-earning career may be a better investment than one that does not (unless money is no object).
It seems to me that if you want higher education to be accessible to those from a broad range of financial backgrounds you either have to keep the cost down (subsidy) or make sure that the finances work out.
The problem (in my opinion) is that employers expect universities to do their training and apprenticeships have become unfashionable. Generic skills are not properly valued – either by employers or universities.
A colleague (I work in an engineering environment) said to me a while back – “We’re all *systems* engineers now” – so logic, reason and lateral thinking are vital. In the past, craft skills and an ability to follow instructions were important, now following the script won’t get you far.
I don’t want universities to be run as businesses, and I agree with many of the problems caused by “fish out of water” business people in an academic environment. But we also have to say that if understanding the world better is a noble goal – someone has to pay for it, somehow.
Really?
Yes.
The successful completion of (for example) a D.Phil. thesis demonstrates that the student is capable of the sort of tasks and reasoning that a scientific career requires, which is really its purpose.
Once it’s finished, one has to keep reading papers to keep up with how the field changes.
“Once it’s finished, one has to keep reading papers to keep up with how the field changes.”
And in the arts as well!
The major thing I’ve discovered writing my thesis is, in fact, how little I know. My mother had the best description of this I’ve ever heard – “The greater the light, the greater the circumference of darkness.”
“Or to put it in more traditional terms, university education is (for the student, not the academic – who is, or rather should be, a seeker after truth for its own sake) part of becoming a more civilized human being – it should have nothing to do with getting a better job.”
What in the world are you talking about? I’m going to a university exactly for training. That’s what universities are for. Truth seeking is very romantic and noble (sounding) but I’m not going to pay several thousand a semester to become “more civilized.” I can do that on my own. The idea that universities are civlizing is a bit silly in itself.
Why shouldn’t it have to do with getting a better job? Is getting a better job not noble enough a pursuit? If it wouldn’t improve my chances of a good career what reason is there to attend? What purpose would they serve?
“In any scientific or technical field, what you learn at University is out of date within 10 years or less.”
Only 10 years? Gosh, why bother?
Can I agree with everybody except Clayton? Yes, I can.
Clayton, forget it! Don’t bother. Please don’t bother.
Spend your money on something else. Anything else. Drink and prostitutes. Drugs and cheap thrills. Anything! I don’t want you anywhere near my university. If you can’t understand the 10 year rule , you aren’t clever enough to get the benefit of going to university. And I would rather my university shrank (and 50% of the UK’s universities folded) than that we continued to take people who are in it to get the `certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world’.
What a clever defense. “Ur 2 dum 2 understand” is always my favorite excuse. I don’t recall not understanding the so-called ’10 year rule,’ either.
To clarify myself a little bit, I take issue with this : “A college is not a business, it is a community of scholars who seek after knowledge – for its own sake.”
I’m not sure which planet you live on, or maybe things are just different in Britain, but I’ve never seen anything to suggest this is true. I’ve met (and know personally) many college professors, including my mother, but I wouldn’t call any of them scholars seeking truth. I would call them teachers. Universities are places of education. If you think they should be something else, well, that’s nice and unfortunate.
This, on the other hand: “And I would rather my university shrank (and 50% of the UK’s universities folded) than that we continued to take people who are in it to get the `certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world’.”
is inexcusable snobbery.
Some people here seem to be arguing a class difference between education and “vocational training”. Really? [reprise]
Try “education = training for the vocation of living”.
Those arguing have a point of sorts, though (as I have argued with Midwestener on his first post as Samizdatista at least approximately), a useful heuristic should not be viewed as an underlying principle.
Perhaps I could be somewhat unkind and argue that those who think a useful heuristic is an underlying principle are, themselves, somewhat lacking in education (in the terms that they define it).
For Clayton and others, keep learning all your life (certainly including full-time at university if you rate yourself in around the top 25% of the population in terms of intellectual calibre). What you learn there will be useful all your life, though you will need to learn other things to, to live and to earn. And is that not so obvious that you don’t need a university degree to know it: so why are people arguing in a way that states the facts that you would learn there will be worthless in 10 years.
Are they arguing that, because you will be expected to think (at a higher level than is “taught” at school), all the facts you are taught are secondary or worse, and of no use after ten years for any purpose. [Facts matter; for example, they are a useful heuristic in checking quickly the validity of someone’s argument. The more you remember, the more educated you are. But if you cannot remember them all, remember how to work them out from first principles, using the facts you have remembered.]
If nothing else (assuming you are badly taught), you will learn what is good and bad teaching, and how to recognise it more quickly.
For those who have needs that make 3 years in full-time education difficult (such as the need for income), try getting your employer to sponsor you. Lacking that, Open University degree courses are well taught; but note, though they do not require you to give up full-time earning, they do need a lot of time and effort. If you have a first degree there are many masters degrees that can be done by part-time study (alone or with a little help from your employer). It’s even possible to do a PhD while working; though I personally doubt a clear emp[loyment-related benefit, if done beyond the age of 30.
Oh, and throw in a bit of philosophy (not too much), such as this list of fallacious arguments.
And for the purists, what is the academic life, but a vocation? For which a university training is essential.
Best regards
If most of what is taught these days at university was of any use to anyone (either intrinsic intellectual value, or applicability to subsequent employment) then perhaps it wouldn’t get out of date so quickly.
Once academia has become more about learning the latest trendy techniques and pseudo-theories, the chances of it having lasting value are sharply reduced.
The fact that people are willing to pay to get a degree doesn’t necessarily prove much about the value of what they learn. There’s a well-known economic model which suggests that the function of a degree is principally to sort the wheat from the chaff, by getting people to jump through hoops. I have blogged about this issue here, in a sort of mini debate with Gabriel Rozenberg (who thinks full privatisation of unis is the way to go).
Fabian Tassano wrote:
As one with a sprog currently at a UK university, plus one who sits on an industry liaison committee at another university, plus one who interacts frequently with universities through work, I must either dispute the “most” in this, or bow to someone else’s greater familiarity with the gutter end and gutter subjects.
If the “complaint” is that too many educational establishments are called “universities” than merit such accolade, that is one thing. I’d prefer it stated more plainly.
However, most if not all of the “universities” of the Major renaming were once called polytechnics and technical colleges. With those names, they provided useful instruction at a level suitable for 1-year or 2-year full-time courses, evening courses, part-time courses etc. I expect they still do.
If the concern is with the proportion of young people who stay in full-time education (or training) until the age of 21, rather than some mix of employment and continuing education, I do see something of a case that it has gone too far. Also that the market should decide (and not the Government). Perhaps it would be good though, for our young people to be guaranteed at least minimal access to education out of the welfare state (as was I) without it being dependent on the purse of our parents (be they enlightened, “educated” themselves or not). I would thus suggest that every young person should be entitled to the same level of state funding for their education/training, up to the age of say 23, irrespective of whether it is delivered by full-time or part-time study, including apprenticeships etc.
As to Mr Tassano’s mediocraty, there is but one person in the world who has no one more intelligent than him/herself; likewise there is only one without a more-stupid. Though one aspect of education is to educate, another is to facilitate a ranking of suitability for the work available.
It’s a meritocracy (imperfect, it is true), helping to determine (more fairly) the “pecking order”.
Best regards
If the role of the university is to provide an environment where people will learn how to learn and learn how to think, then why is it that relatively few require coursework in logic, or any meaningful work in the sciences?
Not all have this problem, obviously. However, I went to one of the Big Eight (later Big Twelve) universities in the midwestern US, and probably academically one of the best of them, and logic was not required for any undergraduate program other than philosophy. IMHO, it (and the ability to actually USE logic!) should have been required in the very first term. (Or better yet, in high school or its UK equivalent.)
Of course, were I supreme dicator of the world Sunfish, I’d also ban the application of the word “science” to any academic program that isn’t actually concerned with learning a method for experimentally learning about the physical world. While we do have something of a degree requirement at my employer, it seems to be more of a test of the ability to jump through hoops, as Mr. Tassano mentions above. Every time we hire at my job, we get stacks of applications from people with degrees in “Police Science,” which has nothing to do with science and remarkably little to do with policing. If one cannot explain how to formulate a hypothesis. conduct a controlled experiment, and explain the results, then whatever he did in school was not ‘science.’
(RANT MODE=OFF)
I wish people would not snear at Clayton.
He is an example of what very powerful people have been trying to create for a long time. We can not (decently) say “is it not terrible that universities, and so much else, have been corrupted” and then snear at one of the products of the corrupted culture.
Clayton has adapted to his environment. He will get his degree and then get his good job and (hopefully) have a happy life.
True I suspect that none of us would actually want to meet him (indeed we might wish that he did indeed live on a “different planet”), but that is hardly his fault – he is person of his times (I rather suspect that he would not like to meet any of us either).
If we were better people, Clayton is exactly the sort of person we WOULD want to meet. Clearly an intelligent and hard working man, surely we should be keen to help him understand the meaning of “education”, rather than thinking “oh another young barbarian, yet another sign of a declining culture”. Snobishness is not an attractive characteristic. I would not have thought it likely that someone like me, who is from the gutter (and who has never really left the gutter) could be a snob – but it seems I am.
On the other points:
Sadly at my age it is more remembering Oakeshott (and Arnold and the others) rather than reading them (although I do try and make point of rereading things).
I am not a cultured man, but I do admire people of culture.
Learning how to learn – or (as used to be said) “how to reason”.
Yes I agree. Whilst many basic facts are NOT overturned in ten years (or in a thousand years), learning how to think is part of what one is seeking (or should seek).
This is true in both the humanities and the natural sciences.
Whilst there may be different ways of thinking (different modes if one wishes to use Oakeshott’s terminology), there are still basic rules of thought that are common to all (if one “really wishes to be right” or wishes to think “straight” not “crooked”).
Yes I smiled at the “postal ballot” of academics.
Oakeshott half thought (sometimes) that the move in the 13th century from indepedent scholars to colleges was a bad thing (or at least had a bad side), but I do not know what he would have said about a “postal ballot” and all the rest of it.
Of course the “Financial Times” (that old journal of the unholy alliance between what the Marxists call “finance capital” and the collectivists themselves) would have no trouble with the concept. To them a college is either a workers cooperative (or trade union), or it is to be run “like a business”.
The idea of group of scholars engaged in the pursuit of truth, for its own sake, is a concept that is not covered by either conception. But then, as Clayton has reminded us, it is not a concept that is well regarded.
I wonder how the “modern” (of course one can find the attitude in any age, sometimes more sometimes less) attitude would react to being told that the purpose of education (both of knowledge and of how to reason) is “sweetness and light” – with laughter most likely.
My “favourate” bit of language related to the “reforms” was the explination from the government agency that the universities had to be run in the way they wanted – in order to be line with “sector norms”.
As a libertarian all my adult life I am a firm supporter of freedom of speech. However, I must confess that if I had heard that the person who used the term “sector norms” in this context was to have his tongue cut out for so using the term, I suspect I would smile – before (of course) moving to prevent this wicked violation of nonaggression principle.
Totally agree. There are some words that we need to prise out of the English language, like the core from a festering abscess, and ‘sector norms’ is certainly right up there at the top, along with my personal favourite ‘pre-owned’.
Again, correct. What was always impressed into me at university was that you do not go there to learn a subject per se but to learn the discipline to acquire not only the brief training for your subject while at college but also the tools you will need to continue to accumulate that knowledge throughout your life. A university can give you an educational foundation, but its up to you to build the Sears Tower on that base.
Julian Taylor writes, concerning:
He gives evidence supporting the truth of the second of these. He says nothing on the first, except by including it in his claimed correct statement. And, presumably, he agrees that the second is true for the stated reason there-in: that the first is true.
I’m happy with the second (minus the “therefore”). That’s what I was taught too, in my technical field. [And I don’t find it out of date after 30+ years.]
The first, I continue to refute, on the basis of my personal experience (I use much of what I learned at university on a regular basis). and, more recently, through that which I see in current university teaching in scientific and technical fields (and others too).
And, as I judge it very important not to discount facts taught at university more than ten years ago, my dispute is over more than linguistic pedantry.
Best regards