#03 Bacchus reading group summary
This month’s reading: Lambert, H. (2019, August 21). The great university con: How the British degree lost its value. New Statesman, 2019-08-21.
Notes of the comments made during the discussion:
There is a grade inflation within the UK university degrees across the sector, and this is an issue that is very unpopular with university management as it would imply bad practice
Likewise, it is something that occurs within the UK as a whole and is something that is difficult to resist as an individual scholar or institution.
The shift from university students to degree customers, inherently changes the relationship to learning and acquisition of skills. Where the goal of participation within a university is not so much for the inculcation of a hunger for learning and rigour in thinking, but rather a social signalling function that allows students to participate within the wider mechanisation of society (i.e. accreditation).
The development of the university sector, and the drive of neoliberal forces, comes with more subdued negative consequences that are difficult to quantify. For
For the student, because the majority is being rubberstamped through the system, they never learn their own weaknesses and what is in need of self-improvement.
Likewise, it breads a mind-set that what is important is the measurement (i.e. the test) and not what is supposedly being measured (i.e. skill and learning). Which in turn promotes practices that are specifically geared towards gaming the system.
For the teacher, by not being able to provide quality support on an individual level (as the classes are just too big) there is a loss of testing different narrative alterations of what works and what does not in communicating new ideas.
Likewise, by not having to justify their own authority on an individual basis via dialogue, but rather being assumed, it stultifies the teacher in justifying themselves.
The neoliberal system makes everyone complicit, in that even dissent from the system has to justify itself in terms of measurability of why it is creating a benefit.
An audit culture does condition, and become self- confirming in what gets taught to the next generation. A research grant application is not unlike an exam in function.
The precarity that is caused by constant assessment, breeds fear to dissent and in fact becomes another mechanism of social control for conformity.
The universities like to brand themselves as “elite”, but in their mass education approach it becomes a contradiction in terms.
Some of the benefits of a traditional liberal education are:
The ability to understand that size is a an important factor in social control. Where something that is derided as “neoliberalism” on a collective level, are just ‘pragmatic’ actions on an individual level.
Furthermore, this form of material pragmatism, which leads to a fetish of measurement, finds epistemological reinforcement in scientific empiricism.
Disinterestedness, as a value, has the practical advantage of allowing the individual to acknowledge that they were mistaken at any point in the future.
The ability to define a problem, and be taken seriously, is non-trivial when the formulation is new and relates to normalised issues, such formulations can be dismissed as personal delusions.
Communication of new knowledge is difficult, because what is new is unknown
