Surbiton’s premier seat of learning and place of my day-job, Kingston University doesn’t normally hit the headlines. However the recent furore when two psychology staff were covertly taped urging students to rate the institution highly an on-line survey has put us on the map. Crucially, the whole sorry tale is much more than a case of lazy lecturers caught red-handed fiddling the figures. It speaks volumes about the marketisation of education, staff-student relations and a sector that many argue is at an all-time low in terms of morale, pay and conditions.
You can’t imagine the characters from Lucky Jim or Porterhouse Blue sullying themselves with the National Student Survey but this unscientifically collected online nasty dictates ranking tables that deem how ‘good’ courses are nationwide. As any first-year knows, by reducing everything to zeroes and ones, any questionnaire is a blunt instrument for measuring attitudes. This one makes all university departments in the land competitors in a nonsensical race where we’re not all coming from the same starting line, no matter how well-intentioned the ‘classless’ John Major’s move to remove the binary divide between polys and the universities might have been. It’s to the credit of Oxford and Cambridge that they boycott the NSS.
The spread of an audit and performance culture in higher education is present at every level of 21st century academic life, with penalties for poor performers. As well as internal course assessments by students (bringing to mind the Morrissey track The Teachers are Afraid of the Pupils) there’s the Ofsted-style QAA teaching quality assessment [http://www.qaa.ac.uk/reviews/reports/subjIndex.asp] where assessors snoop around for a week to grade our departments while the four-yearly research assessment exercise (RAE) tots up departmental ‘research outputs’. This inhibits longitudinal studies as people rush to get their outpourings published before the cut-off point. The TQA and RAE dictate governmental funding levels. When Manchester University’s Philosophy Department scored 3 (out of a maximum possible 5) it was closed down.
Unmet pay demands – which have seen us slip behind other comparable professions in real terms – are now the norm. The wider role of the academic in society is devalued while our remit has grown. Under the weight of the increased admin and pressure to recruit rising undergraduate numbers, it’s the students that suffer.
New Labour’s target of 50 per cent of 18 year-olds in higher education by 2010 was meant to open up universities to previously under-represented groups. Kingston undoubtedly benefits from a richly diverse student body including mature students and ethnic minorities who make invaluable contributions to classes. But the system needs to recognise that 21st century students are no longer exclusively comprised of straight-outta-school school A-level swots. Mature students may have childcare requirements or elderly parents to nurse, for example. Fresher’s week can no longer just be about pub-crawls.
Higher education has not been immune from the so-called public service reforms of Blair and Brown. Top-up fees mean that students are paying customers who expect more than those of us who had a free ride. They are also compelled to take on paid work – fitting in lectures around burger flipping shifts. If increased professionalism of staff means less sloppiness this can only be good but jumping through the hoops for sinister, ultimately meaningless, national mechanisms is not what most of us came into this game for.
Perhaps all this spells out the benefits then of not letting university interfere with your education and instead signing up for the University of Life – that’s the institution formerly known as Life Polytechnic.