Colonised

Frantz Fanon wrote Wretched of the Earth in 1961. This deservedly famous book deals with the psychology of individuals and groups in a colonised nation and in the process of decolonisation; and with the destructive tension in the mind of the individual between traditional views of reality and those appropriate to the colonising power. Fanon was born in Martinique, trained in psychiatry and worked in Algeria where he became caught up in its struggle for independence from France.

This passage in Chapter 2 caught my attention:

The country people are suspicious of the townsman. The latter dresses like a European; he speaks the European's language, works with him, sometimes even lives in the same district; so he is considered by the peasants as a turncoat who has betrayed everything that goes to make up the national heritage. The townspeople are 'traitors and knaves' who seem to get on well with the occupying powers, and do their best to get on within the framework of the colonial system. This is why you often hear the country people say of town-dwellers that they have no morals. Here, we are not dealing with the old antagonism between town and country; it is the antagonism which exists between the native who is excluded from the advantages of colonialism and his counterpart who manages to turn colonial exploitation to his account.

This is from Chapter 2, Spontaneity: its Strength and Weakness and he is addressing the tensions that exist among the colonised people, between those who cling to their rural identity and a traditional world view, and people who have been able to reconcile themselves to the colonising power.

I amused myself by changing some of the words, replacing "country people" with "teaching and researching academics", "townspeople" with "managing academics", "Europeans" with "Administration". You know exactly the sort of conversations you'd overhear in the staff club: "We never see him any more. He's always in his other office, in the main building. He does almost no teaching nowadays. He spoke up in Senate in favour of that departmental closure and the redundancies. You can't talk to him about ideas any more, you can see him glaze over and this thoughts already on the next committee meeting, how they're going to meet their KPI's or move us one more place up the Times Higher league table."

I had similar thoughts reading many other sentences, passages. As has been noted, Fanon's discussion has a significance well beyond the specific context it emerged from. Divisions, psychological tensions found in higher education mirror those found in a country that has been colonised. But universities are not countries. They have not been "invaded" by colleges, or high schools, or hospitals. Maybe this is no more than an amusing parallel but if it is, what has done the colonising? When universities conduct themselves increasingly like corporations, is the phrase "slow AI" relevant?

Carnival of Monsters

Carnival of Monsters is a story from Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who. The Doctor and Jo encounter an alien called Vorg, kind of a travelling galactic showman. He charges passers-by for a look in his miniscope, a cabinet device that contains a zoo of miniaturised monsters from across the Universe: one cyberman, one ice warrior, a couple of giant worm things that want to eat Jo and the Doctor, some humans, a funny dinosaur, etc.

It struck me that the old Department of Adult and Continuing Education (the DACE of this blog's title) was a similar collection, though not miniaturised and of university academics rather than exotic beasties: one astronomer, one zoologist, one historian, one literature specialist, one philosopher... It didn't travel around in the same way, although we did run courses across a very wide swathe of the West of Scotland. Like the miniscope we were not cherished by bureaucratic mentalities.

I really liked our DACE Carnival of Monsters and I believe it was very valuable, in a hundred different ways, to lots of people - possibly too diffuse and diverse a range of outcomes to survive now that Statistics has usurped Philosophy. For some decades it was the sort of cabinet that universities thought they should be constructing but that time has passed, for now anyway. I certainly became a rather rare sort of academic world monstrosity while working there; that time also has passed.

This blog was born in a time of change. The original intention was to keep the multi-disciplinary character of DACE alive virtually when it seemed it might otherwise be swallowed up in institutional restructuring. That didn't quite work out but I kept "sounding off about things that amuse me" anyway, Physics and Astronomy among them. However it's become dominated by my attempts to understand what happened to us and why, something I've given increasing amounts of thought to (possibly as the attempts at optimism and the notes of threat became more and more pronounced). Perhaps that will be the main focus from now: my developing thoughts on the value of adult education - no doubt a rediscovery of what clever people already understood some decades ago - and the particular perspective on universities and their purpose that results from that. For other stories, music, science, there's always Twitter. Maybe this will be a different but equally appropriate Memorial to the DACE Carnival of Monsters.

An unforgiveable sin

Luke 12:10 says, "And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven." Humans are imperfect. All will sin at some point. Most sins can be forgiven but for a very special category there is no remedy: those that deny the nature of what is being sinned against.

In the modern, neoliberal university, it's easy to commit an unforgiveable sin, a sin against the true, essential nature of the organisation. The university no longer thinks of itself in terms of research, scholarship, value to society, etc; just as the fish has no regard for the primordial soup. The University is now a ding an sich. Its reality is composed of metrics: REF, TEF, NSS, league tables, income. Once you represent some activity that has not been codified in this way, does not contribute to any of the existing metrics, then you deny the university's true nature. This is an unforgiveable sin. No penance will suffice. Move on to some other field of endeavour and you may be allowed to survive; but you are fallen.

How do we rescue continuing education, say, in modern higher education, which serves a great range of aims for many people, but doesn't fall neatly into the ambit of any one of those metrics? Only by action where the metrics get defined, at the political level. In heaven.

Books

I've been reading books. Always dangerous.

In The Corporation by Joel Bakan I found ideas like this:

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. Nothing in its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.

Joel Bakan is a Professor of Law at University of British Columbia, no ranting hippy. This view is substantiated in detail via a historical review of the emergence of the corporation, an analysis of the legislative framework defining the corporation, and detailed accounts of particular legal cases. Reviews said things like, "...a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution."

Before picking up The Corporation (and alongside books on quite different topics, and again quite different topics) I had been looking at Neoliberalism: A very brief introduction by Manfred B Steger and Ravi K Roy. For the last few decades much of the world has been run in a certain way associated with the names Thatcher and Reagan, Blair and Clinton. The word, "Neoliberalism" denotes an attempt to define the key features of this project. Again, a quotation:

Neoliberal modes of governance encourage the transformation of bureaucratic mentalities into entrepreneurial identities where government workers see themselves no longer as public servants and guardians of a qualitatively defined 'public good' but as self-interested actors responsible to the market and contributing to the monetary success of slimmed-down state enterprises.

So, we convert the instruments of state - health, social services, education, regulatory bodies - into the same sorts of "psychopathic creatures" that dominate the marketplace. They will operate in a landscape defined partly by income and expenditure, exactly like companies; but also partly by "targets" and "Key Performance Indicators", instruments of management put in place with the intention of ensuring they continue to meet their societal purposes (here's a pretty grim account, not at all reassuring of this process in UK higher education). We are apparently confident we can do this in a way that will offset any psychopathic tendencies they might start to display. Good idea?

MD40

What a lovely girl Gwen was, bright, pretty, outgoing, popular with teachers and class mates alike. School work came easily to her. She was particularly good at languages. Everybody assumed she would go to university and follow some professional career, like most of the other bright kids in her well-off part of town. But she and a boy called Daniel had caught each others' eyes and this secure, sunny future evaporated when she got pregnant at 16. Only when little Jessica reached the age of 10 did Gwen's thoughts turn again to education. Daniel - still with her - was supportive, but was there any way for her to recover what had slipped away?

Kyle was always a laid-back kind of guy, easy going, never had to work at enjoying life. He was bright but nothing in school outside football held his interest. He had little thought of further or higher education and drifted into a job as a salesman. Despite himself he was a success, earning good money, smiled at by managers but he was watching his mates from school progress through university to become the sort of people who told him what to do. He began to feel both that he'd missed out on something, and maybe also that he had more to offer the world than an easy manner and the gift of the gab. But how to step sideways from a well-defined, if limited career path?

Later in life Tommy told people, "my school was like a battleground. Nobody should have been allowed to go to that school." He escaped as soon as he could and started as an apprentice in an engineering works. Promotion to Supervisor took only a few years and he moved to a nicer part of town with the wife and kids he'd acquired in the meantime. He enjoyed learning from the graduate engineers he worked beside but he also began to realise they weren't any brighter than him. One even seemed pretty dim, despite the letters after his name. Sadly the goodwill of your immediate bosses is no protection from the winds of globalisation and Tommy found himself out of a steady job before his 30th birthday. Although his skills and his contacts kept him in short-term contract work he began to wonder if this was the moment to go back to education. But how to get there?

These aren't real people but their stories are like those I meet on our part-time, mature student Access programme. I could have invented lots more: people whose schooling was disrupted by family break-up, women chased by teachers into Arts degrees even although they loved science, people who suffered from depression in late teens... I imagine most of us would agree there should be ways back into education for such folk, both so that they can grow and develop as people and so that the economy can benefit from the full employment of their abilities. Adult routes to university do exist: university Access programmes like ours; the Scottish Wider Access Programme Access courses and many other possibilities in the Further Education Colleges; the Open University. But current "widening participation" policy in Scotland focuses almost entirely on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), and specifically on measures to encourage participation from the bottom 40% of postcodes as classified in the SIMD; so-called MD40. Are our institutions rewarded for helping Gwen? Only if she now lives in a MD40 postcode area. If she does, the fact that she went to a good school would be irrelevant. Tommy? He shouldn't have moved to a better part of town. Kyle? Depends where he lives.

Obviously our Access course still operates and we could be useful to all of these people. Some of the other possibilities might also work for them. The Part-Time Fee Grant is a great help to Scottish adults coming back to study and eligibility depends on income, not where they happen to live. But the lack of recognition in policy of the complexities of adult lives, and in particular the simple fact that adults don't have to stay where they were born, casts a shadow over this kind of work. If times get really tough, institutions will focus exclusively on the activities they're rewarded for. Of course we should start with identifiable, disadvantaged communities, but we need to think more broadly than MD40 if our answer to Gwen is not to become, "you went to a good school. You had your chance. Should have kept your knickers on."

I embrace my "strange kind of streak"

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl.

Skip this post if you're still planning to read H P Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth. Otherwise, stand by for another horror story.

I joined DACE in 1991. It was an exciting move for me: a new role, of a sort that seemed intrinsically valuable, but one that would make real use of the sort of expertise I represented. I would still be a research-active astronomer, but with a job that looked out from the university, that aimed to provide something useful to people in the wider community. The Access course in particular seemed like - and is! - something that could make an enormous difference to its students' lives.

It was more of a change than I'd realised. Not the teaching, but the conversations that take place in the academic discussion of Education. The nature of those discussions, the sort of questions that are asked and the sorts of answers offered, are very different from physical science. It took me ten years to begin to appreciate some of those conversations. I still remember the precise meeting in which I found myself thinking, "Good grief, I understand what (person X) is talking about."

It seemed to me that many of those conversations would make little use of my talents, and that I lacked other talents needed to contribute to them. For almost all of that time I thought of myself as an astronomer working in adult education. I thought it was important that I kept my research life alive, that I kept working at being a proper university expert in my subject. I went only rarely to meetings on the subject of adult education. Nonetheless the years rolled on and I became something different from a Physics department academic.

The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth has laid eyes on creatures that nobody should see and live. An atmosphere of decay and unease grows to a climactic parade of horrors. But it's the twist at the end that makes that story something special: the narrator himself is one of the creatures, and he begins to perceive the inevitability of a future rather different from the one he imagined. Initially only madness and degeneration lie ahead but at last he is reconciled to the only possible course of action: embrace his true nature, evil to men possibly but authentic to him. Flee the sanatorium! Plunge into the ocean! Live with your fellows among the Cyclopean wonders of the sunken city! "Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me — yet perhaps a greater horror — or a greater marvel — is reaching out."

Three redundancy situations in six years have taught me: I cannot escape my true nature. Perhaps once I could have been like other university academics but the streak of adult education runs too deep now. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror.

Why are we so miserable?

Academic staff in universities are getting more and more miserable. Earlier this year the Times Higher Education Supplement published their Best University Workplace Survey. Especially when compared with the last such exercise, it tells a worrying tale. In brief, unfairly crude summary: academic staff are getting more miserable and administrators are getting happier. Academics still mostly enjoy teaching and/or research but are less and less happy with the running of their institutions and the managerial demands placed on them. The Times Higher suggests this might be a temporary side-effect of the REF but the fact is that many academics have deep-seated anxieties over the long-term direction of higher education. Some of them have put these views in the public domain. Here's a small sample:

• Stefan Collini's is one of the leading voices. Here's an example in a book review; see also What Are Universities For?
• The Strange Death of the Liberal University, Michael Bailey
• The Slow Death of the University, Terry Eagleton
• How should universities be run to get the best out of people?, David Colquhoun - "...describes an effect of corporatisation in the medical school of Imperial College London, but the same trends are visible in universities throughout the world"
• Council for the Defence of British Universities
• The war against humanities at Britain's universities This Guardian article makes many forceful points about marketisation in British universities. It's a big shame it opposes sciences and humanities. As the comments show, that's not helpful; a distraction. In a response to a different article, here are some very good further comments on this "opposition".

People sign up to academia with definite ideas of the higher education project but they find a world evolving rapidly away from those basic principles. Of course they're miserable.

Natural Philosophy

My Bachelors degree is in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. My sense is that the name, "Natural Philosophy" lingered on in Scotland particularly, well after the rest of the world had decided to call it "Physics". For instance, everybody who took high school Physics in Scotland in the 1970s used a textbook called, "Nat Phil 5". Must have been much-loved - you can still buy second-hand copies. "Natural Philosophy" was dropped in Glasgow University in the 1980s, maybe as a by-product of the mergers of the Astronomy and Natural Philosophy departments. I remember a slightly frivolous discussion about what a mouthful "Natural Philosophy and Astronomy" would have been for people answering the telephone, but also rather less frivolous discussions about pals at job interviews: "Natural Philosophy, that's nice. Have you studied any Physics?" Aberdeen nonetheless still retains the name for its Physics degree.

I also remember one distinguished, semi-retired member of staff, not in Physics but a closely associated department, lamenting the demise of true "Natural Philosophy", at the expense of what he called "unclear physics" (which probably included elementary particle physics at that time). In retrospect I'm really not sure why he said this; perhaps he felt that particle physicists, hypnotised by the dizzying array of "fundamental" particles they'd uncovered, had stopped thinking about what they were doing and got suckered into a sort of sub-atomic butterfly collecting. Anyway I guess he felt it was important to think about what you were doing and why you were doing it, as well as how to do it. Put like that, why would anybody argue?

I thought about all this again when I read this article in the Guardian. At first sight it's about a "war on the humanities" but really it's about the huge changes sweeping British universities.

The whole climate of higher education is changing. Like climate change in the natural world, some sections of the landscape are more vulnerable to these changes than others (look at the case of high-altitude glaciers, for example). Most of that article is about the changes in ideology in the universities, in thinking about which subjects should be taught and why, in who makes these decisions and how, in universities' relationship with the state and politicians. These changes have happened in a way that means their effects are more immediate and severe in the humanities but they are changes to the whole of the university system, not just the humanities.

I made the mistake of looking at the comments. An article about the changes sweeping higher education spawned a pathetic squabble between scientists and humanities types: "scientists are children," "humanities are a waste of time," etc. Oh dear. Scientists really don't profit, for more than a week or two at most, if free enquiry ("academic freedom") is stifled. And a surrender to short-term, utilitarian aims will come back to bite them. Worst of all, all those broad-thinking, articulate people from the humanities, who might have been able to come to their defence, will have been chased out of the universities completely - well, apart from the one or two institutions that can continue to purvey a sort of classical education to a tiny, privileged elite.

So ultimately I have no doubt that Natural Philosophers really need to have the other kind around.Just as people who live near sea level should be worried about those disappearing glaciers.

Mercury

One Sunday in the winter of, I guess, 1990, I set out for a day in the hills with my pal Douglas. We set out to climb Ben Ledi, that bold, conspicuous mountain near Callander. It was one of those warm, windy winters we were seeing then and the hills were not enticing but I was going stir crazy in the city.

The day was very windy. I think there were 80 mph gusts. At least one stride was thwarted completely because the wind blew me backwards as far as I would have stepped forwards. Douglas thought this was hilarious: "that's the first time I've seen somebody actually blown backwards through the air!"

Bizarrely for that time of year there was almost no snow. The ascent was hard work but we reached the top and made it back to the car without any undue occurrence. Then things got slightly weird.

There is a fairly big parking space at the bottom of Ben Ledi, at the Callander end of Loch Lubnaig. I had borrowed my wife's car, a white Vauxhall Astra with a great big, blue and black letter "M" on the side, logo of her employer at the time, Mercury Communications. We walked across the park towards it, past a minibus into which several men were climbing. They paused and glared at us as we walked past. There was some muttering and nudging. They didn't speak but their faces told a definite story: they hated us. Two of them were getting into another car nearer us. One of them said, "you're lucky your car's still here, mate." I peered at them, reading their tee-shirts: "British Telecom hill-walking club". "It's the wife's," I said - truthfully, although I doubt they believed me. Everybody laughed and the moment passed but for a few minutes those BT employees wanted to kill us. At Margaret Thatcher's bidding, Mercury was going to rob them of their jobs. Anybody in a Mercury car was their class enemy.

Mercury symbols on manhole covers still decorate the streets. This one is on Eldon Street, just along the road from my office. Each time it catches my eye I remember that grey, dreich winter day when the BT hillwalking club wanted to beat me up. Then I was newly married; now my children are in university. That brief moment of tension captured a larger moment in British social history but nonetheless still resonates, particularly as I cross the campus of Britain's fourth oldest university.

The processes set in motion then are still in play. The current government seems to place a religious faith in markets, that kind of faith which evidence leaves unshaken. That the state should be almost the only provider of higher education is intolerable to them, so they are determined to "bring greater diversity to the higher education sector". Companies, the entities that make up markets, do not exist to nurture fully informed citizens capable of thinking critically and playing a full role in society; nor to curate and transmit existing knowledge and create new. Companies exist to maximise profits. We only have to look at for-profit higher education in the USA to see how badly things can go wrong, how completely the profit motive can undermine any value that higher education could have had for students and the rest of society. It's extremely disappointing that our government seems to be encouraging companies linked to bad practice in the USA. It's almost as if big companies are automatically a Good Thing, no matter how they actually behave. I'm glad to see our union opposing this trend. Unfortunately all the media now relegate such discussions to the Politics or Education sections, well away from the eyes of anybody who's not already interested. See "NHS privatisation".

You thought this was going to be about Mercury, didn't you, planet closest to the Sun, smallest of the terrestrial planets, whose orbit evolves in a way that needs General Relativity for its complete explanation? Possibly the very exciting MESSENGER mission? Sorry. But as I criss-cross the campus between my various roles, those little souvenirs of Margaret Thatcher's Britain keep reminding me of a windy day on Ben Ledi.

Brazil (1)

I've been thinking of renaming this blog. It hasn't worked out as I originally planned (and as other people assured me it would - I was always awake to the danger of creating one more of those little unvisited internet graveyards of good intentions). Instead of a multi-disciplinary conversation it's just me sounding off about whatever comes into my head; and not terribly regularly at that. All on my own I can be as multi-disciplinary as the next guy or gal, but with wildly varying degrees of expertise and effectiveness. Laying personal claim to the spirit of DACE would be hubris on an impressive scale, and unjustifiable in dozens of ways. I think maybe the name should change but I have no idea to what. Anyway it seems likely I'm going to touch on all sorts of topics over the next couple of months so maybe I'll give in to hubris for a wee while longer. Any new name suggestions will be more than welcome - even although I'll probably ignore them (already I like "The unvisited graveyard of good intentions" but I suspect Bob Drake already has a song with that title).

I'm spending most of the rest of this year in Brazil, on study leave, working with colleagues here. I have a visiting position at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo. The name of this university has caused some amusement among friends from the Western Isles but: (1) Mackenzie himself was an American (2) it is a very serious institution of 40,000 students, with possibly the best Law School, for instance, in Brazil.

Mackenzie's compact Sao Paulo campus is guarded and policed in a way that would be alien at home. There's a big high wall around it. Each of the entrances is controlled via the sort of barriers we know from railway stations and you need a magnetic card to come and go. Uniformed guards keep a close eye on the barriers and are stationed round the campus. This might sound intimidating but it's not. They just keep an eye on things. I don't think I've actually seen them speak to anybody. Their uniforms are not remotely military, more like janitors, and they're unarmed. It's worth noting that there are parts of the city not that far away that you wouldn't walk around after dark. On Sunday the entrances to the campus are all shut up, as in the picture (I'll post another showing it busy, if I can do that unobtrusively).

Mackenzie is a private university. I was curious about this. I was told that 75% of Brazilian Higher Education is private. The state universities are the most competitive to get into. The kids who go to expensive schools have a head start and are more likely to meet the entrance requirements. So poorer people are more likely to have to spend more money, maybe work at the same time as study, if they aspire to higher education. If this is correct Brazil has some way to go down the Widening Participation road. Of course there is also the possibility that this is a glimpse of our future.

I was also fascinated to learn that Mackenzie incorporates secondary and primary school provision. If you can afford it, you can send your kids to schools that are part of a University. I have no idea how integrated primary and secondary provision is with the rest of the university, if some people teach both degree level students and younger people. I don't think anybody I know has anything to do with the school level provision, however (seems like a missed opportunity - how exciting for school age kids to meet people who are leading edge researchers in subjects like astronomy, that grab the imagination). But it's quite likely I don't know lots of what goes on here yet.

This ingredient of Mackenzie really caught my attention. It's quite unlike anything that happens in the UK. But this might not always have been the case. It reminded me of the young William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, attending Glasgow University at the age of 11. This wasn't, apparently, a consequence of unequalled brilliance but just something that wasn't unusual for bright children of affluent families, in a time of much less formally organised education. I don't know if Glasgow University offered classes specifically for such young people or if they just sat in lectures and took in whatever they could. There probably isn't much similarity between Kelvin's 1834 experience and that of young Mackenzistas, even allowing for the radically different worlds around them. Nonetheless I was intrigued by something Brazilian universities do that ours stopped contemplating a long time ago. Probably somebody reading this knows more - please comment!

That was the first Brazilian bulletin. Everything here is different so I'm bound to touch on all sorts of topics before I go home; a tiny wee, inexpert DACE.

Astronomy Continuing Education

I went to NAM; not as a US conscript in the 1960s, but as a UK Astronomer attending the National Astronomy Meeting in March 2012. So there was no Agent Orange, nor Ride of the Valkyries dawn raid. Instead I took a poster on Christina's work, and I gave a talk on Continuing Education in the session on "Outreach". NAM is always a big meeting with sessions on most areas of Astronomy.

I think Christina's work is really interesting; a bit technical for the blog, maybe. I might have a go at describing it another time. But I'd like to share some of what went in the talk.

"University Continuing Education" (let's call it UCE) kicked off officially in 1873. That year Cambridge University offered its first formal classes for people who were not students working towards a degree. They were offered by the Scot James Stuart, first Professor of Engineering at Cambridge and, later on, a rather interesting if not hugely successful politician. This was a formalisation of lectures Stuart had been giving already, first to Women's Groups and then also Working Men's Clubs, in the North of England. The first group to contact him suggested education as a topic. Instead he suggested "history of astronomy" as a topic he could deal with more easily. So there's Astronomy, right at the very beginning of UCE. Scientists from other fields have always known where to turn for stories that will hold anybody's attention.

A couple of decades earlier there were already educational opportunities for "working men". James Clerk Maxwell, no less, relished this sort of teaching, preferring the "working men who are getting up classes" to the "pups who are in the main a vexation" - i.e. normal students! This is still one of the rewards of UCE for the academic.

(Not heard of James Clerk Maxwell? Shame on you - one of the three biggest names in Physics, with Einstein and Newton, and a Scot too. Radio communication, TV, mobile phones... all follow from the laws of electromagnetism he discovered. This modern, popular book discusses his life and work. The words I quoted are from the old biography by Campbell and Garnett, available online in its entirety.)

Maxwell seems to have been involved in early projects by F D Maurice, founder of the Working Men's College. Did Maxwell teach there? Or in some poorly documented scheme closer to Cambridge? I'm not sure. Anyway, in the history of the Working Men's College we find great words that still sum up "liberal" (note the small "L"!) education: "something you can enjoy for its own sake, something which is a personal possession and an inward enrichment, and something which teaches a sense of values"; as well as a typically modern disagreement over values.

So I stood up at NAM to mention a little of this history, some of our own, local slant on it, and how Astronomy sits among it. In front of this audience I was also conscious of just how much has changed since the early days of UCE: loads of popular science books, internet discussion groups, Cloudy Nights, blogs (like this one), news stories that turn into entire communities of interest, Science Centres, Brian Cox et al.; and indeed research council support and encouragement for outreach activities. Many professional researchers regularly meet school kids a hundred at a time.

I have no doubt that what we do remains valuable for loads of reasons, many of them now documented in detail by the submissions to the DACE consulation last year. As an astronomer, against this outreach backdrop, I can add: creating informed, articulate advocates for our subject in the wider community (so that the numbers may be small but the effects are disproportionate). But I also know that we need to make more connections between what we do in UCE and the broader outreach story. How? I've various ideas, of course, but I know yours would be interesting. Comment away....

Access

Nothing since January and now it's April. Such long absences are what kill a blog, aren't they? Potentially interested customers who haven't mastered RSS forget it exists and never come back. During a heavy teaching semester blogging wasn't a priority. Still, I'm glad you're still here. At the end of the semester there are a couple of items worth a word or two.

What's been happening? Well, for one thing, DACE is absolutely no more. We're now the Centre for Open Studies. More of that elsewhere; follow us on Facebook.

A more personal story: some of that non-blog effort must have worked for somebody or I wouldn't have made this shortlist The nomination came from my Access Mathematics class. Let me explain what that's about.

Our Access programme helps people who've been away from education for some time to make their way towards a university degree. People come twice a week and study two subjects in some depth. In the process they learn how university type teaching and learning work, what will be expected of them in University and how to handle it, etc. If they do well enough on Access the University Admissions Officers will accept it instead of Highers or A levels for entry to degree courses. Access is aimed at "mature" students (although a lower age limit is now illegal!) and particularly at people who have not previously had the chance to benefit from higher education. Demand rocketed in 2008, as the Western world began to fall apart, and the Access programmes are always full now. They were a core function of DACE, as they will be of the Centre for Open Studies.

I teach Mathematics on Science Access. Don't worry! My first degree is in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy (as Physics was still called then) and some of my Astrophysics research is pretty mathsy (e.g. this paper or this one). I'm the sort of person you'd expect to meet teaching this sort of subject in a university.

I did not win the GUSRC "Best teacher - Science and Engineering" award but it was a real honour to he nominated and to make the shortlist. Here's what I would have said if I'd won:

Every week during the academic year the students on our Access programe take two evenings out of their lives to come to their classes with us, after they've spent their days working, looking after kids, involved in all the activities of busy, grown-up lives. Their commitment to study is enormous. It's not hard to teach such people. At the orientation weekend they're starting out hesitant, unsure if they belong here. By the end of the year some of them will have left, for one reason or another, but those that remain are transformed: confident, purposeful, no longer doubting their right to university study. It's a privilege to be involved with these people and a particular honour to have been nominated from Access.

Happy New Year!

A new year, 2012, wahaay!

Maybe we should ignore the man-made transition of the New Year. Instead we could arrange our lives around the solstices. What better point in the year to pause and take stock than on the shortest day, with the poor, enfeebled Sun struggling briefly above the horison? (yes, I'm writing from fairly high latitude) On the other hand, maybe a week or two later, with the days beginning to lengthen, isn't such a bad idea: we wouldn't want our stock-taking dominated by the dark thoughts that feed on short days.

What does 2012 hold? Early 2010 brought a redundancy pool and early 2011 the proposal to close DACE. But let's go with the lengthening days and try to look past these bruising experiences. Our new location makes continuing education a matter of importance across Glasgow University, as it should be in every university. We'll have encouragement and support to look at new sorts of activity, which may make us useful to people we haven't met before. We may be encouraged to work more with external organisations (see for instance our upcoming series of Saturday morning Astronomy talks, offered with our friends at the Glasgow Science Centre in their marvellous planetarium).

UK higher education is in a state of rapid change, in a way that many find deeply worrying. Our experiences in DACE must be seen as a tiny, local aspect of much bigger trends that will not suddenly reverse. New sorts of rocky time don't seem so unlikely.

But for now we'll look to the north-heading Sun. Busy, exciting, challenging - and lengthening - days ahead.

One of the best Universities in the world

I wanted to black out the room for the sake of my powerpoint slides but the blind was broken. "And this is one of the top hundred universities in the world!" I joked. The students laughed. None of them corrected me although the latest Times World University Rankings had in fact just placed us at 102 in the world.

Are these league tables useful? I don't know. I'm sure there are people who consider them to be useful if they seem to support decisions already made. Maybe extremely affluent parents will look closely at them before deciding where in the globe to dispatch their glittering young things.

Every university manager in the country will be staring at their own position, asking themselves, "What can we do to move further up next year?" They'll be looking at the Universities they regard as close competitors. Cal Tech people must be really worried: the best they can do is stand still. Although we moved up 26 places I'm sure our leaders will be cross we didn't break the top 100 (we were a top 100 university two years ago, I think - or was that somebody else's list?).

The Times are very proud of their table. I'm sure they have thought in advance of possible criticisms, probably had to meet them in previous years. They make use of 13 separate prefomrance indctors (sorry, I can't type those words spasm-free) under five headline categories. Because they "recognise that different users have different priorities" the tables can be manipulated and customised (to some degree - haven't tried to play with them myself yet).

We can't do better than quote Einstein: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Numerical tables based on PI's inevitably focus on phenomena that can be counted. Inevitably these only capture part of the activity they're intended to describe. But they take on weight through the league tables so there will be good consequences for those who push them up and bad stuff is more likely to happen to those who don't - even if they contribute to their universities in ways that don't get caught in the PI's.

The choice of PI's and weightings represents a statement of values. Worst of all is the possibility that these values are formed by accident, rather than constituting the starting point for this exercise.

How should Principals and Vice-Chancellors respond? Well, they have presumably thought long and hard about what a University is, its function in society, and the means by which that function can be carried out. This should be their starting point and the extent to which the league tables support those values should be the starting point of their response. Anything less would devolve to the newspapers the job of leading the universities.

cro-mo

DACE may survive. People who are following the Save DACE Facebook or website know this. DACE no longer exists, of course, but it has been singled out in the past few months as though it does so I at least have begun to speak about it again as though it did. I think in many ways it still does. And some of the recommendations of the consultation panel amount to a revival of DACE.

It would be increasingly strange, at the moment, not to comment here on what's been happening. There's a lot to be said, but some of it shouldn't be said in this setting. Some of it is much bigger than DACE.

Anyway I've been enjoying bike runs at the weekends. I believe I'm not a very fast cyclist but I enjoy cycling on a fast bike. I love those weekend sensations: of setting off from the house on my road bike and thinking, "wow, this is fast even just rolling downhill"; of shooting uphill in high gears; of having been out for a long time and feeling you can just keep going and going. I've begun to pore over descriptions of more expensive bikes, wondering if they would actually feel faster, if I might travel less pathetically slow on one. I've learned that so-called cro-mo steel alloys have excellent strength to weight ratio and are preferred for bike parts for this reason. "Cro-mo" is steel alloyed with chromium and molybdenum.

Molybdenum, what a strange name. Element number 42 - nice number, six times nine. Where does it come from? Actually we know the answer to that question. It is produced in the interiors of red giant stars in the so-called s-process, and behind the blast wave that travels outward through a star in the explosive events of a supernova, in the r-process. "s" stands for "slow" and "r" for "rapid". Both involve the absorption of neutrons by nuclei, and radioactive decay of resulting, unstable nuclei. Immediately after the supernova explosion there are lots more neutrons flying around than normal, even for the interior of a star; hence the "r".

There is enough molybdenum now, in the Earth's crust, for us to be able to use it in cro-mo alloys and work towards those sensations of speed, because the universe is 13.7 billion years old and there has been enough time for lots of generations of massive stars, becoming red giants, spawning supernovae, and enriching the abundances of such heavier elements in the Milky Way as a whole.

If I ever get one of those nice bikes with the cro-mo parts and enjoy sensationally fast feeling bike rides in the myriad tiny, sunlit roads south of Glasgow, my thoughts will doubtless turn occasionally to the Sun's far future, to a time when it has swollen and engulfed the Earth and molybdenum is getting manufactured with many other rare substances in its deep interior, when DACE and universities and human beings are part of history, possibly lost from all conscious thought. I'll relish that sense of speed and think about the age and far future of the Universe.

(Supernova 1987a image: NASA, ESA, K France, P Challis, R Kirshner)

Aberdeen

"External examiner" is one of those roles, unseen probably in the wider world, that nonetheless keep the academic world rolling on. How can we all be satisfied that the courses at a particular university are any good? One of the methods is to invite somebody from another university to come along and have a wee look once or twice a year: an "external examiner". We all do this for each other. So courses may still be rubbish but they'll be sort of uniformly rubbish across the whole sector, there shouldn't be any particular islands of unique outstanding rubbish.

I've just taken on the role of external examiner for Aberdeen's Science Access course. I have to say I really enjoy this particular sort of service, meeting colleagues in other universities and learning how they go about things and how they think about their work. Earlier this week I went up to Aberdeen for the day and met the staff and tutors. I liked what I saw up there, a course like ours where academic standards are maintained and students introduced to rigorous thought and study; and where we do our best to help them cope with the rest of their lives at the same time as they feel their way into new ways of thinking and amazing new possibilities: all the stuff that doesn't show up in Quality Assurance forms. It was so nice to be reminded that there are others who haven't given up on the potential of people and the worth of ideas, or surrendered to the prevailing, managerial culture that values nothing that can't be summed up in crude, summary statistics. How do you measure "personal growth"? Doesn't matter, we know it when we see it!

Birkbeck College London

What is Birkbeck College London? Here's the answer in their own words:

Birkbeck is a world-class research and teaching institution, a vibrant centre of academic excellence and London's only specialist provider of evening higher education.

Their About Us page goes on to say

We encourage applications from students without traditional qualifications and we have a wide range of programmes to suit every entry level. Our academic reputation also attracts many traditional full-time postgraduate students.

I thought about Birkbeck today because I received a circular email announcing a seminar there. The exact title was new but the words stirred an echo of current preoccupations from somewhere just below the conscious surface: "Lifelong Learning in a time of austerity". Sounds like a topic that will inevitably turn up in future blogs.

It's only some months since I had a look at Birkbeck's website, when events were forcing me to think about DACE and its relationship to the rest of the University. I loved those words when I read them. As I'd suspected, this seemed to be an entire institution founded on the DACE principles. Here is the reconciliation of "research-led" and "inclusive"; the philosophy of university adult education within which I made sense. The alternative is unspeakable, immoral: you declare that people from particular postcode areas are suited only to certain sorts of education. No Philosophy or Astronomy for them.

London's population is equal to that of Scotland and can support an entire institution operating on this philosophy. We were the Birkbeck wing of Glasgow University; outward-looking, accessible teaching conceived and delivered by active researchers, leading for those who want it into the mainstream. Every such University should have a Birkbeck wing.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this view ignores sociological or political realities, subscribes to an incomplete notion of what's valuable, misunderstands the nature of a university, overrates what we achieved towards these ends.... I'd love to see the arguments. The DACE project is still alive, not yet unhealthy but not strengthened by the events of the last year. And we were not granted the respect implicit in debate.