Business leaders

We have a duty to teach the next generation of business leaders about inclusivity, sustainability and corporate responsibility, say Erika H. James and Ilian Mihov.

Who could argue with these words, byline on an article in yesterday's Times Higher? The authors, Deans of two University business schools, make a case that business can play a leading role in fighting climate change, inequality - the biggest challenges facing humanity - and that business school academics in turn should be carrying out the research that will inform and educate them as they do this. They note that, according to at least one recent survey, 'the public continued to place greater trust in businesses than any other institutions – just ahead of NGOs, and some distance ahead in the trust stakes than governments or the media' and highlight 'the increasing reach of many multinational organisations, whose recognition of their growing responsibilities has led them to be identified as a force for good'.

My goodness. What a hopeless exercise. Could we educate lions to be vegetarian?

Future business leaders may indeed leave business school educated in ethics, sustainability, inclusivity and I'm sure they do already. Many will be capable of A-grade essays on these topics, as needed for the good degrees that will enable the first steps of their careers. But a corporation exists to maximise profit, not to behave ethically or sustainably or to make a better world for humans. If our aspiring business leader lets any such considerations get in the way of profit he will suffer by comparison with his peers and his career will falter (please let me say 'him' for brevity, by the way, I don't mean to exclude women). If he's in a leadership role his company will be disadvantaged in the marketplace by actions other companies don't bother with. Corporations are blind to such considerations until they become visceral - impact profits in other words. He succeeds by aligning himself with the reality perceived by the corporation. He resembles a person in a colonised country who has accommodated himself to the invaders' world view. In this case corporations have colonised humanity.

There are so many, well-documented examples of, literally inhuman behaviour by corporations. The oil companies' decades-long campaign against environmental activism, pursued in spite of their own clear understanding of climate change, gives an example on a spectacular scale but there are stories of destruction, pathology any day we care to look for them. Today we might look sideways at the English water companies or the multinationals engaged in salmon farming in Scotland.

Joel Bakan's book, The Corporation draws together many more examples as well as spelling out the legal and regulatory background to corporate pathological behaviour. He quotes businessman Robert Monks: 'The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine... There isn't any question of malevolence or of will; the enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.' A corporation 'tends to be more profitable to the extent it can make other people pay the bills for its impact on society' - for the economist the word 'externalities' sums this idea up. We've rendered the planet uninhabitable but you'll pay.

The evidence for corporations as inhumane, destructive, externalizing machines seems overwhelming, unarguable. I think it's rather sweet, touchingly naive even, to find successful academics ready to set it aside and place their faith in business as a force for good. I'm sure they can indeed 'teach the next generation of business leaders about inclusivity, sustainability and corporate responsibility' and equally sure that these lessons will be set aside as soon as the logic of the corporate landscape starts to set in. Perhaps many of these new business leaders, afraid of freedom, will even welcome a situation in which they can surrender themselves to something bigger. They'll still be kind neighbours after all. Only if education has gone far beyond 'teaching' to consider the nurturing of the complete person, to produce people of personal integrity, clear in who they are and unafraid to spurn the accommodation with something nonhuman, could we have any hope of success.

Kerrera

In an outside pocket of my rucksack, crumpled and slightly weatherbeaten, I found a copy of the London Review of Books. I'd completely forgotten I'd stuck it in there when we headed off to the island of Kerrera. Kerrera is very quick and easy to reach from Oban but feels remote and undeveloped - no mobile phone reception, at least where we were. It seemed the perfect place for a couple of nights' getaway and the ultimate contrast with the megacity of São Paulo where I'd been working for a couple of weeks.

The weather was rather dreich after the first evening but that didn't stop us enjoying the island. Gylen Castle (above) is famously scenic and the wee tearoom is a treat for daytrippers but the whole island is really rewarding to explore. Just a couple of dozen people live there now but the population was substantially greater in the past, closer to 200 at the start of the 19th century.

I didn't get round to opening that copy of the LRB because I found I was enjoying Kerrera: Mirror of History by Hope MacDougall of MacDougall. Miss MacDougall was one of the family who have been the owners of Kerrera since the 13th century, younger sister of Coline MacDougall who was Chief of the Clan. Her book deals with many aspects of Kerrera life over the last few centuries: community, church, schools, mills, sheep, ferries, etc. It's quite scholarly, sometimes leaving the story to the original sources, but she also writes with some warmth about events and people she clearly knew personally or from first-hand accounts; a very nice combination of learning, personal involvement and indeed humane concern. The island, its inhabitants and its owners become a lens - or as she says, a mirror - offering a particular view of key events and big trends in Scottish history. We didn't sit about reading that much on Kerrera but I've finished reading it since coming back.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on "schools", perhaps because it reminded me a bit of my own experiences in a rural, one-teacher primary school. (I say, "a bit" because I don't think my teacher was as nice to her pupils as the Kerrera teachers). A school was first established on Kerrera about 1757, partly through the agency of the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge. There are accounts of the teaching in the 19th and early 20th century, of drilling in mental arithmetic, spelling, scripture, but also sewing (presumably only for the girls?), singing and natural history. In 1904,

A new feature this year was the Botany class, and great eagerness was shown by all in the work … one little girl alone exhibiting and knowing as many as 302 of the Island's wild flowers

. In 1917 the Educational Inspectors found

a very happy little school, characterised by an excellent tone … the children are frank and alert, and seem eager to do well. Their oral response is good and they are willing to think. The ordinary subjects are supplemented by a fine variety of practical and recreational activities, all admirably fitted to compensate for the isolation of the place.

There are accounts of nature rambles, identifying plants, seashore creatures, excitement at visiting waxwings and a lovely story of the whole school going to see an octopus that had been stranded on a nearby shore:

They put it in the sea, and watched it swim away.

One is left with an impression of a schooling that developed intellect as well as the person more broadly, together with understanding of and sympathy for surroundings.

Back in Glasgow I rediscovered that copy of the LRB and turned eagerly to Jenny Turner's review of K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism was a big influence on me as I tried to understand what was being done to us in DACE, and why. I don't know where my copy is. Did I thrust it into your hand, possibly invigorated by a beer or two, going, "you need to read this!!!"? Maybe losing the book is a good sign - it didn't languish on the shelf.

LRB articles are usually more than just brief reviews of the book at hand and this one provides an overview of key Mark Fisher themes: "there is no alternative", the bleaching of cultural identity by capital, the meaningless bureaucratisation of work, mental illness (he himself suffered and his death in 2017 was by his own hand). He worked for some time in a Further Education College and also - I'm sure I read somewhere - taught in a university continuing education department. He, too, has things to say about education, but in a totally different time and setting from early 20th century Kerrera:

His [FE College] students … knew perfectly well that their prospects were poor, and that there was nothing they could do about it: they studied or didn't bother studying, attended or didn't bother attending, in a state that he calls 'reflexive impotence', a bored, depressed, withdrawn suspension.

This bumps up against another Fisher theme: the rising incidence of mental health problems, particularly among young people. These statistics for England show even primary school age children slowly becoming more likely to suffer from mental health problems. The problem becomes even more pronounced when we reach late teens. In universities particularly, 'over the past 10 years there has been a fivefold increase in the proportion of students who disclose a mental health condition to their institution' (IPPR report, 2017). Everyone who works in a university knows about the rocketing demand for counselling services, something most institutions can now barely cope with.

Mark Fisher sees this as an inevitable result of capitalism, particularly the version that has operated in the last few decades: the 'privatisation of stress'. 'Instead of being the only social system that works,' he wrote, 'capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and the cost of it appearing to work is very high.'

Part of his perspective on his own mental health difficulties is particularly worrying for anybody aiming to promote social mobility. 'Someone who moves out of the social sphere they are "supposed" to occupy is always in danger of being overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror,' he wrote, perhaps a more heightened description of what gets laughed about as 'impostor syndrome'. These ideas came initially from the writings of David Smail, described in the LRB article as a 'radical anti-psychotherapist' (I'm not sure what this means!), who believed that '...the injuries of class are "indelible" and always ready to take over.'

I do not know if children on Kerrera would have been educated until 14 (the school leaving age after 1901) in the same school, or if they would have crossed to the mainland for a couple of years, to a secondary school in Oban. At any rate they were younger than the people Mark Fisher met in FE. In their small community, with a small range of well-defined roles in front of them, their world posed different challenges from those facing young people nowadays, physically harder, closer to poverty but perhaps more manageable. They knew each other, and each others' families, and the teacher no doubt knew every one of them very well. Humane concern grows naturally between the members of such a small community - as indeed do petty jealousies, spites, personal conflicts, etc., but everything operates on a manageable scale between people. Compare that situation with a typical urban primary school now of say 1,000 pupils, an organisation concerned with its place in the league tables, with the management of dwindling resources in a time when government wants continually to drive down costs, with showing that it can manage its available human resources effectively; and in a time when fruitful niches in the world post-school look like they will be harder and harder to find. The world of the Kerrera young people was so different in most respects from the modern one that there may be no useful comparison to be made; they may touch only in the contents of my weekend rucksack. Or perhaps the useful comparison is less the circumstances they met in their education, but the political systems around them that shape how that experience is going to work; time then to put the nature and potential of every human, a concern for their growth and wellbeing, back at the centre of thinking.

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(pictures are copyright me, by the way!)

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.

Consume Red

As a young fellow I formed a rather definite view of university. One went there to learn from people who had worked over many years at understanding their chosen subjects, at developing their own sophisticated understanding and, in most cases, going beyond the books to contribute new ideas and knowledge. Often these people were strong, distinctive characters with broad interests. They WERE the university - not the buildings or the history - and one learnt so much from them, not just about their subjects but about being a person.

The original conception of this blog involved several authors, colleagues in the old DACE. Our several disciplines would bump up against each other and all sorts of conversations would take place, a virtual mirror of those that happened spontaneously in the corridors, or especially in some of the day schools when we took pleasure in mixing up different academic disciplines. That hasn't worked out so instead you get just me. If you're looking for a blog purely on astronomy, adult education, politics or whatever, you'll be disappointed. What's here is my own, personal jumble of interests. "How to build your blog" websites will tell you this is not how to build an audience. Sorry. Me is what's here.

There's been Astronomy, adult education and universities but the promised "clattery atonal music" has been gravely lacking. I've let the reader down badly - no Henry Cow, Derek Bailey, John Zorn. So here in seriously belated recompense is a link to Ground Zero's Consume Red. It starts with the shrill, piercing sound of the Korean hojok, played by Kim Suk Chul, 82nd valuable intangible cultural asset of the Republic of Korea; "brilliant music sacred enough to blow away any puny ideas about copyright." Over the next minutes the musicians of Ground Zero start to join in, scratchy, electric improvisation over the keening cry of the hojok, getting more coherent and louder until a huge, monolithic noise develops over a brutal, thumping rhythm section. It's intense, claustrophobic but fantastically invigorating; I know of few other recordings quite so crushing. I love it!

I don't think it should be freely available on YouTube like this but you wouldn't get to hear it if it wasn't. I bought a legit copy from ReR Megacorp - it's only £5.00 at the moment.

If you meet me in Glasgow University it may be in the hope of learning something about Maths, Physics or Astronomy. Perhaps there will be some illustration or remark based on a book, a film, music I've enjoyed; maybe less overwhelming than Consume Red but I hope they add to the experience anyway.

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."

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.