Universities are centres of dissent. Dissent is their way of thinking - followed by consolidation of the new. It is in the universities that authoritarian regimes look for, and fear organised resistance to their hierarchies, first intellectual resistance and then the physical centres of opposition to distasteful and illicit bullies. The mindset of intellectual inquiry spills over into everyday life and forms our culture.
So, as history teaches us, the assault upon the universities by New Labour is no surprise. New Labour has assaulted and mauled our constitution, our civil rights, our means of communication with government, our economic well-being, our family life, - even our rubbish bins are monitored. Now freedom of thought and inquiry must be curtailed; controls and limits, obsessions of the authoritarian statists, fitted.
As with all authoritarian, imposed and anti-democratic systems there are individuals who occupy notable positions of ideological importance. And their ideologies are usually equally notably low-grade, cod versions of valid intellectual stances, coupled with a generous admixture of their personal and psychic idiosyncracies.
In Peter Mandelson we have a fine exemplar. Ideologist of the perversion of the social market to progressive post-democratic governance, he is also without any stake in family and the next generation. So we look at the poisonous amalgam of denigration of scholarship in the name of useful knowledge, and envy accompanied by its child, spite. New Labour and personal aggression - towards our children whose enjoyment of a university education is to be curtailed by lack of means unrelieved by any egalitarian provision, and wilful denial of the validity of any pursuit of intellectual happiness, before they take up their places in the dole queues constructed by his diversely but equally dysfunctional Prime Minister and colleague.
Prince of Darkness is not an epithet to be gloried in as a compliment, except by those who either have no cultural understanding of what such a title stands for, or no interest in maintaining the culture that stands against it.
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The validity of your note has been diminishing from the 60s onward such that today, Universities are considered to be places where people learn how to be controlled.
The activist teacher writes a lot about the subject.
One thing that worries me is the rise of 'degree apartheid' that has sprung up in the UK over the last ten years or so. Degrees are demanded from potential job applicants when one is simply not necessary to do the job.
It's not obligatory to go to university, g, nor should it be impossible or almost out of reach.
What we make of our years there is up to each of us. Morgan Forster never disliked his berth in King's (just to pick out one of the 'bleeding chunks' of view posted on the link you give).
To deny a university education to any who qualify for, and seek, a university education is an act of authoritarian vandalism against our culture and against decent modern values. No loving parent would not want those years of freedom to study for their child.
And if unrealistic qualification is sought for (mostly) public sector jobs, then my response would be to provide unrealistic assurance of possession.
the climategate thing is a bit of a shocker, though, HG ?
I don't feel I hold any particularly optimistic views on human weakness, but still ...
we are trapped between manic and non-too scrupulous Enthusiasts, and some particularly odious sophists (C.Monckton this means you)
Climategate is another aspect of the university - research and its funding and uses - rather than he importance of offering the opportunity for undergraduate study to all who qualify, and the means to take it up. Most people don't want to work within the university, the criteria for doing that are very different and the purposes are different too. Undergraduate study turns schooled students into open-minded self-starting grown-ups; those 30 months are when we acquire both intellectual grace and intellectual bolshieness.
What kind of government stunts the least well off, the young, and closes down understanding and discovery? A New Labour government. And that makes it worse because they claim to represent families whose members have been denied university study. People for whom university is the norm do not experience the 'entering wonderland' effect for first generation undergraduates; and their children, the next generation, are guided by their parents towards the same goal throughout their schooling. People are very bitter that they were denied the chance in their own youth, those who were caught in second-rate schools, however those schools were labelled. Mandelson doesn't have any feelings, couldn't care less about any of this. I bet your children went to university ND.
Working in the universities, particularly research for government and obtaining funding, and interference in research work and appointments would need another post.
I understand the distinction you are drawing and my residual question would be whether / how much the corruption of research has malign trickle-down effect on the acquisition by undergraduates of grace / bolsh, as you so aptly describe it
for various reasons I have maintained an ongoing interaction with undergraduates, specifically in the realm of student newspapers
over the last decade, undergraduates (who have ready access to old editions of said rags) have often mused: it seems your generation had more fun than we do - and in some ways I think they are right
they are more focused on the job market, less anarchic / bolshy, suffer under tighter regulations (elf-n-safety, both physical - no climbing in over gates at night - and 'moral' - harassment codes etc)
the dons agree
"once, if you saw an undergraduate in a suit it would mean he was a Schoolsman heading for a job interview: now it could as easily be a freshman, heading for an internship interview"
of course these things are matters of degree [no pun intended], most things are recognisably still the same, more or less
[yes, the young Drews went to university, one replicating the parental pattern rather closely, the other taking a quite different path - both as a very clear matter of choice, though of course there was plenty of momentum in the general university direction. But meself and Mrs D were 1st generation]
On Climategate, the IT guys at UAE seem to have worked as the company I started in my IT career did, early in the 80s. We were a small outpost of a Canadian company, opened in the UK.
We had no QA, no source control, you coded willy-nilly to get the product out and did all sorts of things you should not do, and vice versa.
By the time I left, we had a fully-fledged QA system, with ISO9001 standards to meet (you have to if you tender to any public sector unit {Libraries, for us}); this also entailed regular, and the odd unscheduled, visits from an external QA validation bureau.
Looking through the UAE code, and seeing their Modus Operandi took me straight back to the above. However, we got away with it, as we flew by the seat of our pants, and each library system, of course, is a defined "unit"; you install it, fix it, then maintain it.
The UAE project however is of course open-ended; the result of their total lack of control over any aspect of it means that we can't believe a thing that their programs predicate. The error checking foe example is horrifying; some of it is detected, but then the "good" code juct carries on executing. There errors are not counted - so simple things such as - shit, we have 100 errors in this run, better halt it and alert the operators.
Nothing. Zilch. Not even the most basic approach to error handling.
And comments along the lines of "I'm not up to this" don't exactly instil confidence.
Sigh...
None of you have picked up on the fact that they are planning to scrap arts and humanities.
"Anglia Ruskin's vice-chancellor, Prof Mike Thorne, said: "Arts and humanities are under threat from this government. It is going to persuade students to move into sciences.""
(from yesterday's guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/08/university-funding-cuts-crisis).
"Many [univerities] have already dropped more vulnerable subjects such as music and history"
(also from yestreday's guardian)
This is what you should be worrying about.
Anon.13.19. I gather KCL has abolished the Chair in Palaeography, and sacked Professor Ganz. Not just tough on history but tough on the sources of history - New Labour, New Dawn.
As for music, other readers may have something to say.
Elby it's not just the promulgation, indeed creation, of falsity. It is, too, the New Labour excising of truthsayers. cf Professor Allyson Pollock once of UCL but now in Scotland:
'Allyson Pollock and her colleagues have long argued that using the private finance initiative to build NHS hospitals is an expensive way of building new capacity that constrains services and limits future options. Here they provide evidence that the justification for using private finance that it offers value for money through lowering costs over the life of the project and by removing risk from NHS trusts is a sleight of hand'...
the Brown regime put enormous pressure to get her sacked from UCL.
"No loving parent would not want those years of freedom to study for their child."
couldnt agree more.
as for PFI, my old place had a building built "thanks" to it. needless to say they are running a deficit.
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