America’s growing anti-intellectualism

Opinion

Paul Rosenberg concludes his analysis of critical deficits leading to the “Occupy” movement sweeping the nation. Paul Rosenberg Last Modified: 12 Oct 2011 14:26

Occupy Wall Street protester holds a sign while participating in a park near Wall Street in New York [EPA] The first high-profile article to offer a sensible explanation of Occupy Wall Street came from anthropologist David Graeber, author of the recently-published book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In his op-ed, “Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination”, he wrote:

Elite’s self-preservation

This is a letter printed in Times Higher Education on 14 July 2011. It poses some interesting questions about how management make decisions about redundancies and wage rises are made:

On Defending Higher Education

This was written in 1989 at the time of Thatcher’s first attempt to marketise and commodify higher education. It remains an amazingly succinct assessment of our current situation, which is hardly surprising as the agenda of today’s Conservative Party is the same as Thatcher’s.

The cries and wails that have filled senior common rooms in all our universities have sounded too much like the cries of vested interest. The complaints have been too much the complaints of those longing for a return to the status quo. They have rarely been principled complaints for articulating a concern for a genuinely open system of university education in which access is guaranteed to all who are able to benefit. The complaint has too often been: ‘we’ve lost x posts number of posts’, or ‘we are having to keep up research profiles with an increasing teaching load’. Seldom has the complaint been that the actions of government are destroying the centres of culture and learning which are the birthright of all.

Academics have complained that the government does not value education for it’s own sake. But it is not clear that the government with its market-orientated obsession with crass and foolish criteria of efficiency and concentration upon vocational training is merely adopting a philistine approach. For the sons and daughters of cabinet ministers do not, by and large, read for degrees in engineering and accountancy. They read the classics, or history, or even philosophy, but these are not to be generally viable. The responses of the universities have generally missed the point that the government is merely reaffirming longstanding class hostilities. The government does not dislike education per se, but it does not like too much of it. This is where the universities have gone wrong. On those occasions when they have championed the intrinsic value of education for its own sake, they have done so without encompassing this within a charter for democracy in education. They have not come out clearly and stated their enthusiasm for the intrinsic value of education as the birthright of all. Until we get a clear charter of educational exellence, we stand to get only the whinings of a class with vested interests and not the interests of society at large. It is an unfortunate side-effect of our heritage that those centres of excellence in the university sector happen also to have been bastions of privilege and playgrounds for the idle rich……

The vast majority of students able to afford loans for study will be those for whom Oxford serves merely as a rite of passage from public school to the higher echelons of the civil service. It will still serve nicely as a backdrop for films about Hooray Henry’s and dons in quirky hats and fancy dress, but it will no longer be one of the jewels in the crown of an internationally renowned university system.

……An Appeal should be made to the electorate at large: an appeal to politicians and the media to tell people of our implicit charter for educational excellence that still guides the work of academics. It should be an appeal for education against the rabages of the market: an appeal that marked out the non-market criteria of excellence in higher education – an appeal that makes plain to everyone what is at stake is collective cultural and intellectual heritage, and not just and institution for teaching upwardly-mobile youngsters the right way to talk and how to tell a claret from a burgundy.

If we want our universities to be more than expensive finishing schools for the privileged and well-off, we must be clear not only that university education is a good in itself, but that it is not just a good for a certain class.

Michael Luntley.

The Meaning Of Socialism.

Duckworth. 1989.

ISBN 0715623060

On The Humanties Versus The Sciences

Human beings crave meaning; they crave an orderly universe that they can make sense of. Science is a fantastic tool for making sense of and predicting the behaviour of the “physical” world. In turn this predictive ability leads to the development of technology that human beings use for a myriad of purposes. So far so good, but once this is said questions immediately start to arise; what do we want the technology for? Is all technology of benefit to human beings? Does that matter? Do I even care? Are the resources required to develop the technology proportionate to the benefits provided by the technology?

The Browne Report? The Comprehensive Spending Review? What On Earth Does It All Mean? (opinion piece)

The ConDems have been very, very clever and Browne’s solution to fees is very neat. They are also very cleverly drip feeding info so there is, even after the CRS, very little to grasp in terms of mounting a campaign and stimulating public outrage.