As always, I want to stress that the opinions expressed here are half-baked and polemical, like everything on my blog. Please don’t take them as my gospel opinions, and push back on me if something pisses you off. I'd like to think I'm actually quite a mellow and open person but I only blog when I'm exhausted so things here tend to be a bit toxic. I figure it's better I write stuff down angry than say nothing at all.
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Universities are in (financial) ‘crisis’ across much of the
OECD; certainly in the English speaking nations. International student numbers have
at best recovered but not grown (in large part because Chinese universities are
rapidly getting better) and governments obstinately refuse to lift funding or
allow universities to charge higher fees. I’m not sure what to do about it but I
think there is a colossal amount of bullshit coming out of the sector right now
and I don’t want to be a part of it.
In the UK, domestic students pay upwards of £9000 p.a. for their education. That’s more than enough to cover the costs of that education, at least in the social sciences. That's why departments like mine (political science), can send so much surplus to central finance. What it’s not sufficient to cover is teaching and research. Research is very expensive but has little relation to the quality of an undergraduate education, so why should undergraduates be footing the bill?
There is a myth perpetuated by self-interested academics
that undergraduate teaching needs to be research-led or at least
research-informed. That’s bullshit. If your research is genuinely cutting-edge
then there is no way that an undergraduate could grasp it. At best you can put
a little flourish into your course based on your research, but 95% of what you’re
teaching is going to be way less advanced. Undergraduate courses are at least
10 years behind the frontier because you need to walk before you can run.
What’s happening at the frontier could be absorbed by attending seminars or
keeping up with journals, certainly by 3 months of research over the summer.
Research-informed teaching does not require students to pay 40% of a staff
member’s time (i.e. the typical research allocation of a traditional research
& teaching professor in the UK like myself).
The situation is especially egregious for students when you appreciate that many academics are borderline contemptuous of teaching. They think of themselves as researchers who are burdened with teaching. Half-arsed teaching is common, with crap lecture slides, barely updated courses, no innovation in delivery, and an expectation that students do oodles of work that they aren’t interested in and that isn’t assessed. Lecturers set assessments on a single week of their course and are then puzzled when students only turn up to that week. Well, duh, they have other things they want to do than listen to your half-baked lecture. Then lecturers don’t record lectures because they say attendance will be too low otherwise. Oh, your poor ego. Maybe try smarter design and more engaging delivery? Don't punish on top of offering a terrible experience to start with.
I'm amazed at how much academics push back on me about these themes. I have high attendance over the year, student satisfaction at 90% despite hard assessments and high standards, and seminars that buzz with activity. People ask me how I do it. I say things like: don't expect students to do the readings, instead, design seminar activities like games, roleplays, or assessment practice that can be done by someone whose been off sick for a month. "Oh no no no, students have to do the reading". But they don't. You can keep pulling teeth and making everyone miserable, especially yourself. Or you can embrace a different pedagogical approach. I design the assessments in a way that requires oodles of reading, but on a topic the student chooses themselves so that they have intrinsic motivation for it. They read, and I don't have to mark the exact same essay 100 times. Anyway, I digress...
There is an implicit attitude among many academics that
we’re all at Cambridge, or that Cambridge is the Platonic form of a university,
and we should always be striving for that. By the Cambridge model I mean small
classes (often 1 to 1), low teacher-to-student ratios (say 1:12), students
doing loads of work between classes, barely any summative assessments (i.e.
ones that will appear on your transcript, i.e. ones that need to be marked
carefully), teaching delivered basically with the academic turning up and
saying “so do you have any questions?”.
This doesn’t seem like an optimal pedagogical style to me, and
their love of it is, I suspect, a case of motivated reasoning by academics.
It’s all very delightful for the teacher: no prep, no marking, not a lot of
students, and the ones you do have are very prepared (and riddled with mental
health problems stemming from loneliness and anxiety).
I’ve taught at Cambridge and I don’t think it’s a good
system for any but a few students. And it is precisely for those students that
the university selects. When you do admissions, the main thing you are asked to
consider is whether the student will thrive in the supervisions system. They
need to be very curious, highly motivated, capable of working almost entirely independently,
and drawn to intellectual activities. Most students aren’t like that.
The Cambridge model selects students in a way that means
academics don’t need to do what I’d regard as at least half the work of good
teaching: capturing the attention of students and maintaining their motivation
for their studies. Academics are fascinated by their subject matter and
pedantic about its minutiae. They expect students to have the same values and
are not only surprised when this is not the case but indignant. Ridiculous!
Cambridge and its students should not be our reference
point. Our reference point should be that we live in a neoliberal society that
requires people to get a tertiary education for their economic security and
this is the reason why most of them attend university. We are educators.
That is where our bread is buttered. And we are educating people who don’t
especially want to be there. We can cultivate their interest, but it’s hard. If we want
students to care, to study, to show up, we need to entice, entertain, support, and
inspire them. And when the students turn up, we secure our own funding. Where
high school teachers get a lot of holidays (though not as many as a lot of
people believe – class prep is time consuming), academics get paid time to do
research in exchange for teaching.
A lot of people resent that neoliberalism has made
universities education providers while forgetting that without this the
sector would be 1/6 the size and they wouldn’t have a job.
The motivated reasoning of the Cambridge model extends to
research. Academics were traditionally mendicant monks. They lived off alms,
which provided only a very frugal life but time for scholarship. There were two
cases where the monks were not impoverished. First, Oxford and Cambridge etc., where
aristocratic patronage secured libations and other niceties. And second,
corruption, where the extractive tithing of the church funded the high life.
Both depend on academics being unduly transferred peasant surplus. We seek to
perpetuate that today when we call for more student fees to fund research.
It might be alright if our salaries weren’t high. Of course,
they aren’t so high given our education and work hours, but they’re
thoroughly upper middle class. Our reference point should instead be the PhD.
In Australia, iirc, I got $28 000 (~£15000) for 3.5 years to do whatever I
wanted. Amazing. I supplemented that income with a lot of teaching and admin
work, so transitioning to regular academia wasn’t much of a shock. How many
academics would accept a perpetual salary of £15000 to facilitate a 100% research time allocation? That’s the mendicant monk lifestyle. I doubt most academics would
accept it, but then you need to respect teaching a lot more because it is the
money maker (and it is so because teaching is productive in a way that
the majority of academic research is not – it is valuable to somebody other
than you).
I am equally fine with research haughtiness if it’s funded
by private donations, as is common at say the top 30 ranked research universities. If you
can convince someone to part with their money to become a patron, then do
whatever you want. But this is quite distinct from students funding something
that barely benefits them, and very different from taxpayer-funded
research.
Take an honest look at the research you’re doing, especially
in the humanities and social sciences, and tell me it’s of benefit to the average
taxpayer. And I don’t mean a little benefit either. An associate professor in
the UK is on around £62000 a year. 40% of their time is teaching, so £24800.
They produce 2 articles a year, so £12400 each, assuming they weren’t grant
funded. Do you think the average taxpayer thinks £12400 is a good price for an
investigation of a dozen disabled Maori peoples’ stories about climate change? Or
an analysis of the high-theoretical political economic paradigms lying behind
bike infrastructure provision in a regional city? Or yet another data mining
exercise looking for correlations between various psychological variables? Hell
no. That doesn't mean such research is worthless, just that it's a bit rich to expect the government or students to fund it.
I see similar out of proportion attitudes around tenure and
job security. Tenure is ridiculous. What other industry has something like
that? It’s supposed to protect the ability of tenured faculty to stop
publishing for a while and pursue some ambitious blue-skies research. How often
does that happen? Almost never. Most tenured academics either keep publishing
at the rate they did before tenure because they are steadily productive, or they
gradually stop publishing at all. Everyone would like to think that they’re
Isiah Berlin or Heidegger and they’d produce an opus if they were just given
more space, but the truth is most academics are mid and they’ll never publish
something better than A*. And maybe Berlin and Heidegger could have published a
bit more under a bit more pressure without too great a loss of profundity! Maybe
they could have functioned with just a continuing contract and not the total
job security of tenure. How many tenured academics are doing very little,
reducing the number of positions available for junior scholars with fresh
ideas, so that we can every now and then get something profound? I dare say the
ratio is 10 : 1 or worse. It is especially the case when you consider that many
academics who did go on to make blue-sky breakthroughs, like Ed Diener on
happiness, then became extremely productive within their new areas and didn’t
need tenure protections – a continuing contract where it takes 5 years to fire
someone would have sufficed.
There is this attitude among academics that we are entitled
to things that most people could only dream of, and that these things should be
funded by the taxpayer or the student.
There is also a reference point blindness around the explosive
growth of the sector in recent decades. People complain that there aren’t
enough academics jobs, but there have never been more academic jobs. It’s the
nature of the industry that there will always be more PhD graduates than
academic jobs. The only way to change that would be to make it harder to get a
PhD, and then people would be complaining about that instead.
Most of that growth has been driven by student demand for
tertiary education, not demand for academic research. So we need a lot
more teaching, and the focus of unions and the like should be on making
teaching fellowships better. I think my own university of Warwick, or at least
my department, has been good on that. Teaching loads for fellows aren’t bad,
especially if it weren’t for the marking side. You have 10 contact hours a
week, teach core courses where you should be able to walk in and deliver the
material by heart, get rostered onto the same courses year after year so you
only need to prep once, and there’s lots of coteaching so you don’t have to do
all the lectures. You have a continuing full-time contract, and at least a
third of the year to work on research after accounting for course prep time.
And if that research publishes well then you can convert your teaching
fellowship into a traditional research-teaching contract. We also have a
clearly articulated long term pathway to full professorship for
teaching-focused faculty. This seems the future to me, not pretending that most
academics deserve a 40% research allocation with sabbatical every 5 years, and that the job is not attractive
if it’s only 20%.
I am sympathetic to complaints that governments say they
want more STEM graduates but they’re not willing to differentially fund STEM
over social science despite the former being way more expensive to deliver. So
departments like mine (political science) are often asked to cross subsidise
engineering etc. while adjacent departments in social sciences and especially
humanities are starved of funding for staff. I am also sympathetic to fatigue and frustration stemming from the brainless politicisation of student visa numbers as part of the broader turn against skilled migration. There is heaps of bullshit coming
from government. But we shouldn't contribute to that by being dishonest about our
‘costs’ and 'benefits'. Teaching is only expensive if you think it’s a package deal with 40% (or
more) research time.
I am also very sympathetic to the view that ‘corporate’ – i.e.
the middle management (associate deans) and executive of many contemporary
universities – is an extractive, toxic, and dishonest cabal that cares little for
the ethos of the university. I am particularly affronted by the recent tendency of corporate to shut profitable departments like Kent's philosophy faculty, ostensibly to free up resources for other departments that often aren't even profitable (like schools of cybernetics) We should absolutely be pushing back on their
bullshit while guarding against our own.
Finally, I am sympathetic to the fact that providing an education is getting more expensive because students keep asking for stuff without realising that they're ultimately the ones to pay for it. Examples include DEI and wellbeing services, beautiful campuses, and divestment drives. I think we need all those things but we also need to be clear-eyed about what they do to fees and what is good value for money.
We need to talk more about the difference between research and teaching, and work to educate the public on the value of a university degree at a high ranking research university vs one where there is a stronger emphasis on teaching (e.g. most small liberal-arts colleges in the US, which costs a fortune but almost all of it goes on teaching and campus life). It is a very mixed bag out there in this regard. I'm quite proud of Warwick taking teaching much more seriously than what I see at a lot of comparably ranked research-intensive universities. We also need to make a compelling case for government research funding (see the graphic at the top of this page), and push for less wasteful bureaucracy around that funding. What we don't need to do is try to swindle the students out of more money to cover research they don't benefit from and that neither the government nor private donors will fund.
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