The Marketisation of Higher Education: A lesson from the seminar room

Update: The Times Higher Education asked me to do a shorter version of this post for their comments section.  It is here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/employability-agenda-isnt-working/2002639.article#.UUrF79iMf6g.twitter

The original post....

The other day, Howard Hotson, an Oxford history professor and steering committee chair of the Council for the Defence of British Universities, wrote in the Guardian about the dangers of marketisation in Higher Education. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/11/universities-great-risk-we-must-defend-them?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038

Professor Hotson's particular point here was about business management models being applied in academe, but as he and others, including the Council for the Defence of British Universities, have said, marketisation represents a more general threat to“fundamental academic principles and the purpose of higher education itself.”  Indeed I had an experience this very morning of how that threat works where it matters even more than in management—in the classroom.  My department does a first-year course called Making History that aims first and foremost to teach students about the complexities of researching and writing history. We also use it to teach transferable skills such as how to write and structure essays, how to present written work, how to reference properly, and so on, at this handily early stage in their student careers.  And as of this year we are also using it as a means to integrate “employability” into our curriculum. My colleagues and I co-teach much of this course in seminars, and today’s seminar was devoted to CVs. 

On the face of it, there may seem nothing wrong with any of this. Teaching the problems of historical analysis is so obviously a part of our remit as history teachers as to require no further comment. Teaching how to write, how to communicate historical and indeed any kind of knowledge, is similarly unquestionably good. So is turning out people with degrees who are equipped for the job market. Indeed, through my 20 years as an academic I’ve always taken my responsibilities in this regard very seriously and worked hard to prepare students to be able to make their livings, as well as teaching them the critical thinking skills that are an essential part of undergraduate education. There is not, needn’t be, and shouldn’t be a zero-sum game or a polarised debate about whether my role and that of academic teachers is about training students in critical thinking and/or (should be and) about training students in the knowledge and skills they need to find a place in and be useful in the world of work after they graduate. We can and should do both. So what am I worried about?      

I’m worried because even though there need be no zero-sum game between the aforementioned ends of a university education, and indeed one might argue that the best employees as well as the best citizens are ones with free and critical minds, problems nevertheless arise when the proponents of one agenda attempt to diminish the other. And this morning’s class was for me in microcosmic form an example of how the “employability” agenda is diminishing the imperative of teaching critical thinking. Here’s how. 

“Employability” is now indeed explicitly an agenda, and it is an agenda driven in very particular ways by very specific interest groups. Peter Mandelson, the high priest of New Labour neo-liberalism, moved responsibility for Universities from the Department of Education to the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills, where it remains under the charge of Vince Cable, a man who once preached against economic neo-liberalism but whose words turned out to be about as reliable as a Liberal Democrat manifesto pledge. Our masters at the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills have since made it no secret that they want HE to focus more on employability, on preparing students for the world of work. This kind of thing used to be the task of the Careers Office in combination with academics in their capacities as Personal Tutors. There it remains, though that aspect of Personal Tutoring is now called Personal Development; a clear linguistic signal about who is setting the agenda and what kind of agenda they’re setting. But the newest development in this clearly creeping process is that in parts of the students’ timetables where we used to teach them history (and you an insert of any other discipline here to the very same effect), we are now expected teach things like CVs.  Employability at my university has now therefore crossed the boundary from extra-curricular to curricular activity. It may have done so already at other institutions; it will no doubt do so later at yet more. To ensure that we do this, by the way, “employability,” measured in terms of what proportion of a university’s students are in full-time employment six months after graduation, features highly in university league tables—another weapon taken from the bag of sticks used to beat universities into submission to the ethics and practices of the market. University managers feel they have no choice but to do the bidding of business and government or else go “out of business.”        

Is this really that bad? you may be asking. It’s just one seminar out of ten; surely not too much time to take from the academic syllabus for the sake of employability. My first answer is that, okay, it’s one of ten seminars—for now. Far more revealing, however, is what I was required to do in this one class. As noted above, the employability agenda in general is being driven by business interests operating though the government which pressures university managers. The origins and intentions of the agenda, though, very much show though in the way “employability” is required to be presented in the classroom. For each seminar each tutor on the Making History (now Making History History?) course is presented with a “task” for him or her and the students to do that week. Here, in full, is the one I was given for this morning’s seminar (my co-teaching colleagues got the same one).

“Seminar 7

For this task you need to prepare three things:

• a CV
• a paragraph identifying its weaknesses
• an action plan for how you are going to address these weaknesses

Guidance on all this can be found in the employability section of the Information for History and Students site on Blackboard.”

As this inidcates, the task is not really just about the perfectly laudable aim of helping students prepare to find jobs.  It’s about much, much more than that.  It's about turning them into cogs in the corporate machine. Let’s go through each of the things the students had to prepare, one-by-one, to see more fully what they’re about.

First, the students were required to present their CVs in front of each other, inviting them to think of each other as competitors. Of course one day they will be competitors for individual jobs in the market place. But it is not necessary to make students think of themselves as employment rivals in the first semester of their first year in university, except perhaps if the aim is to inure them to the notion that they are competitors and to normalise that perception of themselves and of the world, to make the rat race seem the right and only way for the human race. 

Next, as above, the students were asked to identify their weaknesses as potential employees. Again, they’re first years in a history class. Why do that this early? Here's why.  Another piece of modern corporate cant is that workers need to be flexible and adaptable to the needs of business--as opposed to businesses being flexible towards the needs of individuals, communities, countries (paying their taxes?), the environment, etc.  Once again, then, it’s about inuring students early to the first imperative, making them think that they have weaknesses, they are the problem, they need to adapt, the underlying assumption of all of which is that they serve the world of the business more than the world of business serves them and the rest of us.  

The third thing they had to prepare would have the effect of practical implementation of that notion: that they need to serve business and business does not need to adapt or serve them. Not just ideological co-option then, but the beginnings of nbehavioural co-option, not just indoctrination, but actual preparation for collaboration.  It had the added intent perhaps of innoculating them to the language of the modern boardroom, of “action plans” in this instance. How's that for "thinking outside the box"? 

The effect of the whole, especially if given sanction by us as a History and Classics Department when we include it in our syllabi and on our information sites, which, as above, it emphatically is, is to promote the notion that all this is alright, a natural order of things, or at least that it's inevitable and something that students must accept. Not something they should question with critical, thinking minds. Certainly not something they should complain or protest about.  

 

As it was, I chose as far as I was able not to let the above happen to its full potential effect. Instead, first, I felt it was unconscionable to require students to present their CVs in front of other students. True, CVs are essentially public documents that are handed over eventually to individuals or committees hiring workers. But I felt it was wrong to make them hand these documents over for perusal in a classroom.  And not just because it would encourage students to think of each other as economic competitors at a time in their lives when they should be thinking of each other as members of an academic learning community.  But also because some might feel uncomfortable or even perhaps humiliated by the process of comparing their records with that of others in this way, and wholly unnecessarily so at this early stage of what we still sometimes call their academic careers—especially when they’re asked to identify and establish “action plans” to deal with their “weaknesses.” They should not feel or be made to feel either uncomfortable or humiliated, and they wouldn’t be if we gave them the message that right now they’re students and shouldn’t feel obligated to be job-market-ready just yet, and that it’s okay at this stage in this stage on their lives if they have other interests and priorities. But we’re not giving them that message. By allowing the “employability” agenda directly into the classroom in the form of presenting CVs, making them dwell on and fix their "weaknesses," their unfitness for purpose, we are telling them instead that their worthiness as students depends on their job-readiness and on their acceptance of what they are told that requires. So, rather than force that on them, I gave my students today a choice of showing their CVs, identifying their weaknesses, and making their action plans--or not doing so. I felt I had to let some do it if they wanted to in order to maintain equal opportunity with those students in other classes who were doing it.  But I gave them the choice not to do it.

I also decided I wouldn’t let the classroom time go by without asking them to discuss the above issues, allowing them the opportunity to do some critical thinking, to reflect on their learning and take a measure of ownership of it—concepts that are not as in vogue as they were before business interests began determining educational priorities more directly.  In that spirit I assured them, as I always do, that they must make their own minds up and argue for themselves—not follow my lead.  I should no more try to indoctrinate them than business interests and governments should. The subsequent discussion revealed a wide range of opinion (though no reductive polarisation)—a very healthy thing among intelligent, independent-minded young people, who, I was thereby given encouragement to believe, will not be easily brainwashed by anyone.

A final point. Another aspect of market-based thinking that’s always thrown at us in support of the marketisation of Higher Education is the cant of consumerism.  And the supposition is that, as "consumers of the higher education experience" (Peter Mandelson), students' top priority is job training.  This is a false proposition, first because it presupposes that students are first and foremost consumers, although that's a compelling proposition when you’ve laid the groundwork for it by charging students up to £9,000 a year for a university education.  It’s also a weird one, though, when we’re so often presented with the notion that there’s no alternative to the marketisation of Higher Education and indeed of just about everything else—that is, there is no choice but "choice". And it's demonstrably false for another reason. It was interesting that this morning five out ten students opted not to engage in the CV task, and ten out of ten thought that employability education and advice should be left to trained experts in dedicated careers offices and should have no place in a history course. Another five who are registered in the group chose not to turn up for the CV task at all. I’m required to report them for their absences. But I’m choosing not to.