#3 There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza....or It was a dark and stormy night
There’s a
hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza...or It was a dark and stormy night.
Back in
2025, when the Labour government began to encourage such amalgamation, Felicity
had seen the writing on the wall and recognised that her literary talents on
Chaucer’s middle period were no longer the commodity in the sector that they
once were, so she took an admin role in Recruitment and Media relations just
before the “friendly” take over of her university by a local larger sister
institution. The subsequent mergers and acquisitions in what was to become the
U_NO produced redundancies and rebadging’s that made the machinations of Machiavelli
look like taking tea in an old folks home. Now Pro Vice Chancellor Brown, she had
reskilled herself at a furious rate, and surrounded herself with like-minded
souls who took to politics, government liaison, media relations, marketing and
even activities we might have considered as espionage, like ducks to water.
The
University’s Dept of Information handled monitoring and manipulating the
government’s quality enhancement efforts and the electronic media’s ranking
systems for Britain’s two remaining super universities. In the 2020s pre
amalgamation, trivial differences in ranks that meant nothing whatsoever about
the institutions were seized on by the manageriat justify all sorts of interventions
in a mad race to the bottom. First versus second place? What a difference in
bragging rights! But now, with only two Universities left, a second place
finish for a particular subject was now of course a last place finish. Justifications
for actions and expenditures (which made no sense to academics on the ground)
could now be boiled down to “[insert other University name here]are doing it,
so we must follow suit!
For
example, business people who ran the rankings systems and lawmakers were (for
the most part) human beings of course, and could be caught out by the same time
and tested tricks used in the past to compromise high ranking officials,
scientists and military officers of other nations states. For example “honey
traps” had stood the test of time particularly well, and attractive undergraduate
applicants (3D photos as well as other biometric measures became used in UCAS
applications in late 2026) for rare places on high quality courses could be incentivised
to play these important roles for their beloved University.
Of
course, these attractive students could play a relatively cost-efficient role
in the U_No, but even the economies of scale of a super university did little to
offset the massive increase of expenditure required to try and keep pace with
the corporate shenanigans of the enemy, Oxbridge. Consequently, AI-derived
scores on attractiveness, parents bank balances and of course A-level grades
were largely irrelevant in admissions procedures, unbeknownst to the
prospective applicants. In fact, everybody was a prospective customer from
birth, effectively. AI-supported algorithms monitored and catalogued a child’s first
forays on hand-held devices at a very tender age. The U_No’s biotechnology department
had planted untraceable tracking bots on mobile phones which they provided at a
discount to anxious parents, who were
mainly focussed on tracking their own children and not the University’s efforts
to understand their client base all the better. Social media bots homed in on
vulnerable targets like sharks in bloody waters.
Once
those students had been recruited many years later, other bots yoked to their
various University personal development plans were no less active in helping
students “achieve their life goals” by cataloguing not just course attendance,
but their habits (sexual and alcohol and drug related), sleep patterns,
political tendencies and relationships. In fact, the Department of Health and
Happiness identified applicants who scored high on empathy and employed them as
undercover agents to ensure that troubled students stayed on the course no
matter what. These “empathy elves” as they were known as to high level
officials in Health and Happiness, also proved to be particular effective non-bot
recruiters of additional students. They were super cute in their form fitting U_No
t-shirts.
Sadly,
Oxbridge monitored all of these efforts with their own agents, biological and bot.
Advances in any domain by one side were soon matched by the other, just like
how the visible marketing efforts of any University in the roaring 2020s that
showed any promise were immediately copied by competing institutions. This
marketing version of the arms race, unfortunately, did little to improve the
quality of education or research, but those sorts of goals of higher education
were considered at best quaint and at worst nostalgic and dated by today’s
standards.
I could
go on about these two monstrous institutions in my imagined academic “Biffworld”[1]
(I picture the formerly formal Felicity as transformed into anti-Uhura from the
parallel evil alternate time line in the original series of Star Trek) with their
huge budgets that increasingly have nothing to do with research, scholarship or
teaching (now referred to as learning and teaching, to emphasise a
student-centred approach in the temporally-challenged mind of some manager,
somewhere some years ago. There will, no doubt, be a glossy HEA QA document on
It somewhere). Instead, I could tell a parallel tail, about a utopian world of
the near future in which civil societies have come to their senses and have
started sharing resources rather than stockpiling them and where Universities
have become free for qualified students….
But then I am stopped
in my tracks. Because I know this academic paradise account quickly leads to a
conundrum in the back of my mind about access to higher education…how many, and
who? As an academic (as you may recall
from blog number 1---in my day they worked 8 days a week, 26 hours a day….[2])
it is easy to bemoan the skill set of the current class. And it takes only a
few frustrated steps to get to “[insert student name here] does not belong
here at a University”. This thinking is a potentially nasty shorthand for some
assumptions that we make about student ability in times where “bums on seats” are
required so that staff members, not just the richer ones, can still afford to
pay their mortgages and feed their hungry children. We might be Guardian-reading lefties who have some sympathies for [insert student name here]. If we
really thought through her/his/their likely circumstances the sensible conclusion is that
their dose of Spearman’s “g” wasn’t really anything they had much say in. It is
easy peasy to believe, with all the problems that lead tables have produced in
the schools here in the UK, that those modest or even low A level scores of
[insert student name here] really imply that the dye was cast long before their
first year at Uni and that really a lot of resource thrown in their direction
might not make a hill of beans difference. There are occasional success stories
of course where changes in circumstances, maturity, who knows what means a
student with substandard grades pre University goes on to shine in their
undergraduate career. Its’ hard to know, but such cases seem pretty rare. Even the Guardian reader wonders if we have
the conditions right for such a student to shine in the current circumstances
anyway.
Those conditions should
be fantastic. They happen to be pretty heavily policed in theory by quality
control depts and national agencies, who aren’t just ensuring that we are giving the
best possible “product” to the “customer”; they also supply the customer with
data so that they can make informed choices. For example, University ranking
metrics provide lead tables for students and their families to consult to help
choose which ones to apply to. National and international ranking systems, run by
for profit publishing companies, in a bizarre paradox that was perfectly
predictable, start charging universities to advertise in their electronic
spaces[3].
This neoliberal love of
metrics (why do they love this stuff? Well this might be a subject of another
blog) in the real world of 2024 aren’t just about the quality of teaching
(sorry: learning and teaching). Research quality of institutions gets ranked,
in the rather circular fashion that I mentioned in blog 2. In fact this is so
highly successful (for companies outsourced to do the rankings in particular[4])
that the logic gets extended to individual academics. Heck, lets not limit
ourselves to humble bragging about our number of Nobel laureates! We have lots of great folk who get cited a
lot[5]!
Let’s create a market for that too, like some neoliberal dream of an intellectual
betting shop.
And what could possibly
go wrong with Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited ResearchersTM? (I
mean I would have made a footnote joke here but TRADEMARKED? OMG, real life
stranger than fiction, blah blah blah blah). Well here’s what: An intermediate
company contacts you and offers you cash to be an affiliate/adjunct member of the staff of a University in, say Audi Sarabia (not its real name). You put the name of your Audi University on
your papers, and you visit them maybe once a year all expenses paid. Et Voila!
Audi Sarabia in a few short years outperforms Spain, Germany and France in its
share of these superstars.[6]
. The real reason I have given up on my dystopian two University parody (see
blog 2) is that real life is already there!
It might be worth you
academic narcissists out there to keep up with not just what these ranking are
composed of, but who is providing the service. I didn’t get very far in my
quick survey of The Complete University Guide:
“We published
university and related league tables in print for over 10 years before moving
exclusively online in 2007. In 2015, the guide was acquired by IDP Connect
(formerly Hotcourses Group), a division of IDP Education, global leaders in
student marketing and recruitment. In its early years, the guide was published
in association with a succession of national newspapers: the Daily Telegraph,
Independent and Daily Mail. Since 2013, it has had no links with any one
newspaper.”
Fig 1. “Get advice for each part of your journey” sounds surprisingly like a sales pitch, don’t you think?
This site is very
shiny! (And it only takes a few clicks to discover that IDS Connect was a
company set up by Jeremy Hunt, the recent Chancellor of the Exchequer in the
UK. [7]).
You tell it what your potential A
level grades are, how much you’d like to spend on rent, if you want a city or a
town etc and voila!
Fig 2. “Make your search
faster and less stressful” sounds surprisingly like a sales pitch, doesn’t it? What
is it that this web page is selling me?? Oh here is another ad!
Fig 3. “Let the unis
come to you” sounds surprisingly like a …well you know. And given that you are
the customer, they should, should they not??
Fig 4. Look at the adds that pop up,
paid for by different Universities! Partner sounds much more collegiate[8]
than paying customer! This figure shows a small subset of my results, because
my pretty mediocre projected grades don’t’ seem to bother many institutions
that much. Really kind of them to take on students who aren’t yet the finished
product[9],
isn’t it?
Looking at these stock
photos (occasionally of attractive old buildings, Bournemouth clearly doesn’t
have any) but more often of attractive (but not too attractive) models posing
as students, or young people in lab coats holding pipettes or doing “sciency”
looking things, reminds me of the stock photos and videos that you see on most
University websites. Their content, supposedly telling you about the particular
place, is pretty much the same as everybody else’s. From an information point
of view, they are useless. No, come to think of it they are worse than useless
as they take up space that could be used to actually tell people something
about the different institutions. Meanwhile, our professional bodies try to
make sure that our courses are all the same anyway! There’s a hole in my
bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in my bucker, dear Liza a hole.
This big Australian company
which runs the Complete University Guide has a long history in the academic marketing
game. In a bizarre twist of fate:
Fig 5. UK govt
outsources its sexy website designed to attract foreign students to the UK!
Contrast with this a recent story in the Guardian:
Fig 6. Those market-loving
Tories have been working hard to undermine the market, by making it harder and
harder to attract non-British students. Why did we pay that Australian company for
that website back in 2002 again?
Other tautologies are
in UK universities, and although some may not be yoked directly to neoliberal
marketisation per se, they fall out of the same sort of external quality
control mindset. For example, we have an “external examiner” system in the UK.
One odd thing it does is ask experts from other Universities to adjudicate on
the difficulty and appropriateness of the assessments for each module in your
subject, year by year. Are these questions fair for a third year neuroscience
course? Are they the right level? Where it gets bizarre is that after having
signed off on said assessments as perfectly acceptable, we later judge the mean
and distribution of the grades for that module and comment if not actually
tinker with the grades if they seem to low or too high. So after I tell Bournemouth
that their first year psych exams are perfectly appropriate for first year
Psych anywhere in the UK (although their campus buildings don’t wow me, I also
comment), if the resulting grades that fall from it are too high or too low,
well clearly there is something wrong with their internal quality control for
grading. Of course, this standarisation effort fits in with the strange idea that we (academic departments
and schools) are really all the same from University to University, even though
of course we are all really different from University to University---see out
webpages to check out our attractive but not too attractive models, who often
are all doing sciency looking things in pristine white labcoats. In Bournemouth
you can do it in a shiny new building too!
What does all of this
insanity (what else to call it?) have to do with those neoliberals you were on
about in blog #2, David (read: “David where is this all going, I really want to
catch up on Taylor Swift’s completely spontaneous unscripted generosity to food
banks in a town near me”?)?
Why do the neoliberals
like league tables and benchmarks and the like? Well its all about freedom! Milton
Freedman, an influential American economist who will appear in our story again
was all for privatising education in America. From O’Brien (2017):
“Accordingly, to argue
against the ‘market’ was to argue against human freedom itself. Why can’t
parents have the freedom to ‘choose’ their schools? Why can’t students
invest in their own ‘upskilling’? Why can’t they take up voucher or loan
‘facilities’? Why can’t they evaluate their institution’s ‘success’ against
others? Why can’t they measure their teachers’/lecturers’ ‘performances’
and reward them accordingly? In a bid for such ‘freedom’, Friedman sought
to ‘revolutionize’ education via “the drive, imagination and energy of
competitive free enterprise” (Friedman, 1997, 341). The message was compelling.
In a country that nourishes on restless energy and creative ideas, who would
argue with this ‘innovation’?
Of course, for those of
us working in universities in most nations at the moment, this freedom doesn’t
feel very free at all.
Further reading:
Kehm, B. M. (2020). Global university
rankings: Impacts and applications. Gaming the Metrics, 93. https://escholarship.org/content/qt6096m1sp/qt6096m1sp.pdf#page=103
O’Brien, S. (2017) ‘Resisting
neoliberal education: For freedom’s sake’. In T. Rudd and I.Goodson (Eds, 2017,
149-166). Negotiating Neoliberalism: Developing alternative educational
visions. Rotterdam. Sense Publishers. – see https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/studies-inprofessional-life-and-work/negotiating-neoliberalism/]
For an interesting take on “there’s a
hole in my bucket” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ecEMxrdULQ
[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/back_to_the_future_2/videos/wOwVi6hV3oHg
[2] I
thought that I had stolen this from a Monty Python sketch but its not quite in
there in that form: https://smedjeback.wordpress.com/monty-python-four-yorkshiremen-the-good-old-days/
[3]
There is a joke to be had here about arsonists getting paid by neoliberal fire
departments. (It needs work still).
[4] I
am quite surprised that someone hasn’t monetised the REF yet. Currently we just
make 100s of our best and brightest work tirelessly on census after census and
on then fluffing up documents on how good the research environment is. Many of
these folks could be doing clever science instead! There’s a hole in my bucket,
dear Liza, dear Liza… Of course, most of them are doing average science, most
of the time, by definition. (This is another shot at the REF which I will
develop in what is sure to be a 4*** blog someday in the future).
[5] A citation
is where a book or an article “cites” another book or article. More on this in
a future blog, because it isn’t just the Audi Sarabians who are gaming citations.
Sorry this gag will make sense shortly. Have you read “Slaughterhouse Five”?
[6] https://www.sirisacademic.com/blog/the-affiliation-game-of-saudi-arabian-higher-education-research-institutions
[7]
See here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38638577.
Also look at other services this Australian company provides: https://www.idp-connect.com/our-story/our-journey.
Gosh they must really like this
marketisation business.
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