Why I am Not a
Professor
OR
The Decline and Fall of the British University
©
Dr Mark Tarver, 2007
Lambda Associates
This year,
2007, marks the marks the eighth year at which I
ceased to be a tenured lecturer in the UK, what
is called I think, a tenured professor in the
USA. I've never worked out whether I was, in
American terms, an assistant professor or an
associate professor. But it really doesn't
matter, because today I am neither. You see
I simply walked out and quit the job. And this is
my story. If there is a greater significance to
it than the personal fortunes of one man, it
is because my story is also the story of the
decline and fall of the British university and
the corruption of the academic ideal . That is
why this essay carries two titles - a personal
one and a social one. This is because I was
privileged to be part of an historical
drama. As the Chinese say, I have lived in
interesting times.
Universities
are extraordinary institutions. They are in
fact, the last bastions of mediaevalism left in
modern society outside, perhaps, the
church. Like churches they attracted a
certain type of person who did not share the
values of the commercial world. The
oldest universities date from the eleventh and
twelfth centuries - hundreds of years before the
invention of the printing press. In an age
where books were scarce, communication was
difficult and people who could read and write
were almost as rare as the books, it made sense
to centralise the acquisition and dissemination
of knowledge. If you wanted to learn,
you headed towards where the books were and the
people who could read them and that meant the
great universities like Paris and
Oxford. Poor communication, expensive
reading materials and illiteracy were the
foundation blocks for the universities. If
today we have excellent communications, free
online information and general literacy, we also
have an environment in which the universities are
struggling to maintain their position.
That, of course, is not an accident.
My personal
story is mixed in with the expansion of the
university system that occurred in post-war
Britain. Born 12 years after WWII, I was
about six years old when the British government
undertook one the greatest and most far-reaching
experiments in expanding higher-education, making
it free for thousands and thousands of fairly
ordinary people to go to
university. This generated in turn,
thousands of teaching posts. The next
decade encompassed the golden years of the
university; a fact I was too young to appreciate
as a lecturer and oblivious to as a
student. But it did.
My unique luck
was to be old enough to know the system as it
existed while I was a student and to experience
its decline and fall while I was a
lecturer. Of course the Internet might have
posed a challenge to the monopoly of the
universities, but really the whole thing began
before the Internet got started. It began
at the top from the government in a drive
towards egalitarianism reminiscent of the
Cultural Revolution. Like the Cultural
Revolution it ended by inflicting misery and
degrading everybody involved.
Just as the
Cultural Revolution, the ostensible aims started
out by sounding noble. Let us widen access
to university and increase student choice, argued
education ministers, and increase the
accountability of the lecturers by introducing
some form of assessment of teaching and research.
The last went down very well with the general
population because lecturers had never been too
well regarded by the masses. All those long
vacations and idling with books at taxpayers
expense sat ill with many people who felt that
lecturers should be 'exposed to the real
world'. I was often told that as a student,
and, as far as I could work out, the 'real world'
was whatever they could see from the eighth floor
of the office they worked in. The real
reason, I suspected, was that they didn't enjoy
their jobs too well and rather than campaign for
change or seek alternative employment, they
rejoiced inwardly at the thought of another bunch
of people being forced to work under the same
miserable conditions under which they
laboured. The flip side of egalitarianism
is envy and there's plenty of that to go round.
But the goal of
widening access to education is a noble one and
very much in line with the motivations of the
post-war British governments. One way of
implementing it would have been to investigate
why so few students went to university, and,
having constructed a careful social analysis, to
have increased the percentage of entrants by
improving the educational qualities of the
average school leaver. Of course that's the
hard and genuine route and it takes a generation.
An easier way is to water down the educational
system to a lower standard and then peg the
university income to the number of students
accepted while reducing the funding per
head. In that way universities are given
the happy choice of losing money and enforcing
redundancies or watering down their
requirements. No prizes for guessing which
route the government took and how the
universities responded.
It was in 1993
that I experienced these changes as a
newly-tenured lecturer. We were
summoned to be told that the School of Computer
Studies at Leeds was henceforth to adopt a
buffet-style form of degree whereby students
picked and mixed their degree studies rather than
the table d'hote system we had used till
then. This new system was called
'modularisation' and it represented the drive
towards student choice desired by
government.
An immediate
casualty were some hard-core traditional CS
modules like complexity and compiler design. Why,
argued students, elect to study some damned hard
subject like compiler design, when you could
study something cool like web design and get
better marks? So these old hard core
subjects began to drop off. Even worse, the
School (following the logic of the market),
having seen that these hard core subjects were
not attracting a following, simply dropped them
from the curriculum. So future students who
were bright enough to study these areas would
never get the chance to do so.
After a few
years of this system, the results percolated
through to my office. I could see the
results in the lecture hall, but the procession
of students who walked into my office and said
"Dr Tarver, I need to do a final year
project but I can't do any programming"...
well, they are more than I can remember or even
want to remember. And the thing was that the
School was not in a position to fail these
students because, crudely, we needed the money
and if we didn't take it there were others who
would. Hence failing students was frowned
upon. By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the
students should have been failed.
However there
are lots of ways round this little
problem. One of them is doctoring the
marks. Except its not called 'doctoring'
its called 'scaling' and its done by
computer. You scale the marks until you get
the nice binomial distribution of fails and
firsts. You can turn a fail into a II(ii)
with scaling. Probably you want to be generous
because otherwise students might not elect to
study your course next year and then your course
will be shut down and you'll be teaching Word for
Windows. Scaling was universal and nobody except
the external auditors (who were lecturers who did
the same thing themselves) got to see anything
but the scaled marks.
Graduating
computer-illiterate students who had to do a
project in computer science was more of a
headache. The solution was to give them
some anodyne title that they could woffle or crib
off other sources. It was best not to look
too closely at these Frankensteinian efforts
because otherwise you would see stitches where
they lifted it off some text which you were never
likely to find short of wiring them to the mains
to get the truth. It was of course, a lie,
but the cost of exposing that lie was likely to
have ramifications beyond the individual case.
Very few lecturers would want to stir such a
hornets' nest or have the necessary adamantine
quality to inflict shame upon a student whose
principal failure was to be allowed to study for
a degree for which he had little ability.
After seven
years of the new regime, I had the opportunity to
compare the class of 1999 with the class of
1992. In 1992 I set an course in Artificial
Intelligence requiring students to solve six
exercises, including building a Prolog
interpreter. In 1999, six exercises had shrunk to
one; which was a 12 line Prolog program for which
eight weeks were allotted for students to write
it. A special class was laid on for
students to learn this and many attended,
including students who had attended a course
incorporating logic programming the previous
term. It was a battle to get the
students to do this, not least because two senior
lecturers criticised the exercise as presenting
too much of a challenge to the students. My
Brazilian Ph.D. student who superintended some of
these students, told me that the level of
attainment of some of our British final year
students was lower than that of the first year
Brazilian students.
Now parallel
with all this was an enormous paper trail of
teaching audits called Teaching Quality
Assessment. These audits were designed to
fulfil the accountability of the lecturers by
providing a visible proof that they were doing
their job in the areas of teaching and (in
another review) research. In view of
the scenario described, you might well wonder how
it is possible for such a calamitous decline in
standards to go unremarked. The short
answer is that, the external auditors, being
lecturers, knew full well the pressures that we
were facing because they were facing the same
pressures. They rarely looked beyond the
paperwork and the trick was to give them plenty
of it. The important thing was that the
paperwork had to be filled out properly and the
ostensible measures had to be met. Students
of the old Stalinist Russian system will know the
techniques. Figures record yet a another
triumphant over-fulfilment of the five-year plan
while the peasants drop dead of starvation in the
fields.
Teaching was
not the only criterion of assessment.
Research was another and, from the point of view
of getting promotion, more
important. Teaching being increasingly
dreadful, research was both an escape ladder away
from the coal face and a means of securing a
raise. The mandarins in charge of education
decreed that research was to be assessed, and
that meant counting things. Quite what things and
how wasn't too clear, but the general answer was
that the more you wrote, the better you
were. So lecturers began scribbling with the
frenetic intensity of battery hens on overtime,
producing paper after paper, challenging
increasingly harassed librarians to find the
space for them. New journals and
conferences blossomed and conference hopping
became a means to self-promotion. Little matter
if your effort was read only by you and your
mates. It was there and it counted.
Today this
ideology is totally dominant all over the world,
including North America. You can routinely
find lecturers with more than a hundred published
papers and you marvel at these paradigms of human
creativity. These are people, you think,
who are fit to challenge Mozart who wrote a
hundred pieces or more of music. And then
you get puzzled that, in this modern world, there
should be so many Mozarts - almost one for every
department.
The more
prosaic truth emerges when you scan the titles of
these epics. First, the author rarely appears
alone, sharing space with two or three
others. Often the collaborators are Ph.D.
students who are routinely doing most of the
spade work on some low grant in the hope of
climbing the greasy pole. Dividing the
number of titles by the author's actual
contribution probably reduces those hundred
papers to twenty-five. Then looking at the
titles themselves, you'll see that many of the
titles bear a striking resemblance to each
other. "Adaptive Mesh
Analysis" reads one and "An Adaptive
Algorithm for Mesh Analysis" reads another.
Dividing the total remaining by the average
number of repetitions halves the list
again. Mozart disappears before your very
eyes.
But the last
criterion is often the hardest. Is the
paper important? Is it something people
will look back on and say 'That was a
landmark'. Applying this last test requires
historical hindsight - not an easy thing.
But when it is applied, very often the list of
one hundred papers disappears altogether. Placed
under the heat of forensic investigation the list
finally evaporates and what you are left with is
the empty set.
And this,
really, is not a great surprise, because landmark
papers in any discipline are few and far
between. Mozarts are rare and to be valued,
but the counterfeit academic Mozarts are common
and a contributory cause to global warming and
deforestation. The whole enterprise of
counting publications as a means to evaluating
research excellence is pernicious and completely
absurd. If a 12 year-old were to write 'I
fink that Enid Blyton iz bettern than that Emily
Bronte bint cos she has written loads more books'
then one could reasonably excuse the spelling as
reflective of the stupidity of the mind that
produced the content. What we now have in
academia is a situation where intelligent men and
women prostitute themselves to an ideal which no
intelligent person could believe. In short they
are living a lie.
It was living a
lie that finally put an end to my being a
professor. One day in 1999 I got
up and faced the mirror and acknowledged I could
not do the job any more. I quit; and from
the day I quit, though things were often tough, I
never experienced the sense of waste and futility
that accompanied working in a British
university. By stroke of fate, I am
living only a few hundred yards from the
institution at which I worked. Sometimes
when walking past I see the people I worked with
and they look old. Living a lie does that
to you.
What does the
future hold? More of the same I'm afraid,
because there is little sign that government has
recognised the damage that it has done to
universities. Both students and lecturers have
suffered under this new egalitarianism. The lecturers are confronted
with a profession that is pressured,
bureaucratic, and, at the junior end, highly
insecure with low pay that
improves only slowly with the years. Added
to that there is the mountain of debt accumulated
on the road to becoming a lecturer and the hard
work needed to get there. So putting this
all together the whole profession looks
deeply unattractive to anybody with a grain of
sense. Since English people are, on the
whole, well endowed with sense, the consequence
is that the youngest and
smartest of our young people are moving away
from being lecturers. The fact that a staff
crisis has not already in full swing is due to
the fact that universities have taken on a stream
of foreign immigrant academics to fill in the
gaps. Though some of these people are quite able,
the language skills of an immigrant are on the
whole worse than those of a native speaker. So the effects
on the quality of teaching can only be bad.
Which brings us
to the students - the supposed beneficiaries of
this new egalitarianism. For them, the new system
has brought debt and
degree inflation, since the new degrees are
undoubtedly not equivalent to the pre-1990
degrees as measures of ability and learning. They pay more for less
quality than their mothers and fathers received
and they have little contact with the lecturers
because the lecturers are too busy filling out
forms and chasing money. This is the Cultural
Revolution of the new century and it has left the
same desolation behind it.
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