Stay Away from Politics(lrb.co.uk)
lrb.co.uk
Stay Away from Politics
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/william-davies/stay-away-from-politics
18 comments
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My partner is an academic in a humanities department at a top UK uni, and I work in STEM in the private sector.
Universities in the UK are a mess, everything is rated on the salary within a couple of years of those leaving uni. But few people are asking if people are happy once they leave Uni, if they want to chase money, if the abundance of Uni places and associated debt make sense to everyone, and even whether society is better for so many people going to Uni. In the UK we've obliterated all vocational and manufacturing polytechnics, replacing them with STEM and business focused universities.
From my perspective, the pendulum has swung too far in this direction (towards everything being quantified with money and money and employment being the sole value of a uni and the courses it offers) and it needs to start swinging back the other direction.
A very simple phrase I recently heard and am paraphrasing: Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?
Most of STEM can be quantified, it's a lot harder to quantify the value of the Humanities and Social Sciences... maybe we should stop trying to make that the primary way to measure it.
Universities (in the UK at least) seem to be suffering from the metric becoming the measure.
Universities in the UK are a mess, everything is rated on the salary within a couple of years of those leaving uni. But few people are asking if people are happy once they leave Uni, if they want to chase money, if the abundance of Uni places and associated debt make sense to everyone, and even whether society is better for so many people going to Uni. In the UK we've obliterated all vocational and manufacturing polytechnics, replacing them with STEM and business focused universities.
From my perspective, the pendulum has swung too far in this direction (towards everything being quantified with money and money and employment being the sole value of a uni and the courses it offers) and it needs to start swinging back the other direction.
A very simple phrase I recently heard and am paraphrasing: Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?
Most of STEM can be quantified, it's a lot harder to quantify the value of the Humanities and Social Sciences... maybe we should stop trying to make that the primary way to measure it.
Universities (in the UK at least) seem to be suffering from the metric becoming the measure.
if they want to chase money
People don’t want to chase money, they have to chase money. Rent is skyrocketing. Food prices are skyrocketing. Trust in society and its institutions is failing.
Money is the only escape catch from the Hobbesian state of nature we increasingly find ourselves in.
People don’t want to chase money, they have to chase money. Rent is skyrocketing. Food prices are skyrocketing. Trust in society and its institutions is failing.
Money is the only escape catch from the Hobbesian state of nature we increasingly find ourselves in.
On the other hand the private budget for research skyrocketed and research became a viable way to directly stimulate the economy.
The problem with the neoliberal narrative is that academics were the best paid, most well-trusted, and highest job-security professionals in existence. They had incredible bargaining power, and indeed traditionally universities were virtually run by faculty. So how did all these (provably very left-wing, many avowedly Marxist) academics let universities be transformed by a few mid-wit administrators copying ideas from the private sector? And how come the results are worse than anything in the private sector?
IMO universities must have been pretty sick to begin with to capitulate so easily. The right-wing counter-narrative at least is internally consistent.
If you want to reconcile the two, the academics I know all suggest the wokest, youngest academics with the least regard for intellectual rigor usually allied with management. Like if you want to teach in the humanities, it's a big help to kick out all incumbents by saying that their courses are eurocentric etc. The more recent generations of academics have nothing to complain about re: universities because they were active agents in its demise.
IMO universities must have been pretty sick to begin with to capitulate so easily. The right-wing counter-narrative at least is internally consistent.
If you want to reconcile the two, the academics I know all suggest the wokest, youngest academics with the least regard for intellectual rigor usually allied with management. Like if you want to teach in the humanities, it's a big help to kick out all incumbents by saying that their courses are eurocentric etc. The more recent generations of academics have nothing to complain about re: universities because they were active agents in its demise.
Great title, tedious article
Best thing to do at a University is leave (except in very rare cases, like a small subset of professors)
Best thing to do at a University is leave (except in very rare cases, like a small subset of professors)
[deleted]
Is there a bottom line to this article? Except "everything is hopeless".
It's a book review, presumably with some intent to advertise the book and its contents. I'd say it's done a good job of that because I've just ordered a copy of the book.
My takeaway so far, not yet having read the book, is that it's indirectly arguing that a new paradigm is needed.
My takeaway so far, not yet having read the book, is that it's indirectly arguing that a new paradigm is needed.
"Nice people team" is sawing the branch it's been sitting on since the sixties, the floor is approaching ever faster.
The overall message seem to be that we should let taxpayer funded universities run themselves with little government intervention. The article blames government interventionism on neoliberalism/capitalism because neoliberalism/capitalism doesn't like unemployable university graduates.
Here in Denmark we had a university like that a few decades ago. It briefly turned into a communist commune. However to continue to attract students they had to slowly moderate and open up. Today they are a normal university. A few of their ideas like group project oriented education was ahead of its time.
Here in Denmark we had a university like that a few decades ago. It briefly turned into a communist commune. However to continue to attract students they had to slowly moderate and open up. Today they are a normal university. A few of their ideas like group project oriented education was ahead of its time.
[deleted]
You know what also didn't work out? F/OSS where eventually every choice/"market" ends in the hands of very few entities, or a single one (eg RedHat/IBM, gh/MS, Goog).
[deleted]
kennethh(1)
Nemrod67(2)
Welcome to the real world?
Everybody has to raise funds, either by being long term valuable to investors or by being valuable now.
The fundamental issues in most of public unis (not the UK) is that you can afford to do non profitable endeavours (both on the research and in generating earning potential for the students) while being funded with my taxes.
Of course the incentives are not aligned and the system is doomed to failure.
I really can't wait for useful universities alternatives made by productive people (some of which are in academia, most of them are in the private sector) and not the old academia dinosaurs.
Everybody has to raise funds, either by being long term valuable to investors or by being valuable now.
The fundamental issues in most of public unis (not the UK) is that you can afford to do non profitable endeavours (both on the research and in generating earning potential for the students) while being funded with my taxes.
Of course the incentives are not aligned and the system is doomed to failure.
I really can't wait for useful universities alternatives made by productive people (some of which are in academia, most of them are in the private sector) and not the old academia dinosaurs.
[deleted]
> Brown recognised, following Foucault, that many of the neoliberal intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, horrified by fascism, advocated markets as a defence against politics. Yet they continued to look to the state to implement their projects as forcefully as possible, and eventually got what they wanted, starting in Chile in the 1970s, then the UK and the US in the 1980s. Expanding the reach of economics and markets into otherwise ‘non-economic’ domains of life is the signal ambition of neoliberalism, and distinguishes it from the Enlightenment liberalism in which ‘market’, ‘state’ and ‘society’ are imagined, as Weber would have appreciated, as three separate spheres of existence.
Which is exactly what is happening today in the entire world, and magnified hundredfold by the megaphone of social media. Due to the faults of the state in 2007, that once again applied its forceful hand on the delicate, chaotic balance of the market, we've seen an acceleration towards inequality and lowered standard of living, apart from the ultra-rich and mega-corporations that are able to benefit and gain from zero interest rates. And what do academics and laymen alike ask to get out of the tar pit? More state. More politics. A move towards left and right authoritarianism.
What caused the 2007 crisis and all other crises is not the market. The market is a convenient scapegoat upon which politicians, even the most neo-liberal ones, can place all the blame. The market is an autonomous process which is controlled and manipulated by the people in the palace with their laws to favour their lobbyist friends. You don't accumulate trillions of dollars without help from the people writing the laws.
These days it's almost become blasphemous and paints a target on your back to ask for actually free markets. These days everybody wants even more state, stuck in this media-powered Stockholm Syndrome for the political circus. Every election a new fever dream that the next party will solve all the ills in our world. Even young people are becoming politicised, participating and promoting the same old game for rich, old people.
We are further and further away from that Enlightened liberal dream, from the true separation of state and market.
Which is exactly what is happening today in the entire world, and magnified hundredfold by the megaphone of social media. Due to the faults of the state in 2007, that once again applied its forceful hand on the delicate, chaotic balance of the market, we've seen an acceleration towards inequality and lowered standard of living, apart from the ultra-rich and mega-corporations that are able to benefit and gain from zero interest rates. And what do academics and laymen alike ask to get out of the tar pit? More state. More politics. A move towards left and right authoritarianism.
What caused the 2007 crisis and all other crises is not the market. The market is a convenient scapegoat upon which politicians, even the most neo-liberal ones, can place all the blame. The market is an autonomous process which is controlled and manipulated by the people in the palace with their laws to favour their lobbyist friends. You don't accumulate trillions of dollars without help from the people writing the laws.
These days it's almost become blasphemous and paints a target on your back to ask for actually free markets. These days everybody wants even more state, stuck in this media-powered Stockholm Syndrome for the political circus. Every election a new fever dream that the next party will solve all the ills in our world. Even young people are becoming politicised, participating and promoting the same old game for rich, old people.
We are further and further away from that Enlightened liberal dream, from the true separation of state and market.
A free market can't exist for long naturally. Once somebody manages to achieve lock-in, there goes your free market.
It's an ideal which sort of works for commodities like potatoes, and only on the assumption that nobody manages to take over that market. That might have been the case earlier in history, but with industrialization scale confers a huge advantage. Which means the family farm can't possibly compete with a huge commercial farm, and will get gobbled up by it eventually.
It's an ideal which sort of works for commodities like potatoes, and only on the assumption that nobody manages to take over that market. That might have been the case earlier in history, but with industrialization scale confers a huge advantage. Which means the family farm can't possibly compete with a huge commercial farm, and will get gobbled up by it eventually.
Maybe not the way the article states.
Politics is involved in maintaining healthy markets in a variety of ways. Hands off mostly, but keeping market power from being too centralized, and making investments of national interest too large or too long term for smaller actors.
But the reverse, where markets run politics is a disaster. And promotes nihilism.
Also agree strong political viewpoints are out of place at the top administration level of educational institutions.
There must be some umbrella of relative neutrality protecting vigorous discourse within universities.