Cascading emails; Or, bizguistics and power in modern academia

The other day, everyone in arts and humanities and adult continuing education at my university received from our head of sector a remarkably unremarkable email. I presume everyone across the university got the same one forwarded to them too, or, rather, cascaded to them too.  It was unremarkable in the sense that we receive emails like this one all the time these days, and remarkable for exactly the same reason. I’m not going to mention the name or job title of the original sender. I have no wish to criticise any individual I work with, and in fact no reason to do so. That person was doing a perfectly fine job, given the job s/he is given to do. And indeed that’s the point—this is about institutions speaking, not individuals. 

The email originated from my university’s Marketing Department following instructions from something called the Service Excellence Forum. It provided an “email template signature and generic external email response ... in line with the University’s branding and Welsh Language Scheme.” The template gave us “eg John Smith,” “eg Development and Marketing Manager / Rheolwr Marchnata a Datblygu Busnes” of “Commercial and Campus Services / Gwasanaethau Masnachol a Champws” in “Estates and Facilities Management / Rheoli Ystadau a Chyfleusterau”. Finally, the email’s sender (not the person of the job title above) requested that heads of sector “cascade” the template to all their staff.

I have no problem with the idea of a generic email signature. Our work-email accounts belong to our universities and so our employers have a right to see that they’re being represented in them in pretty much whatever way they wish. And for a Welsh University to require us to use Welsh seems to me to be entirely right in all possible ways. And in fact, as a non-Welsh speaker, I’m grateful that someone’s gone to the trouble of providing some Welsh for me for this purpose. That said, it would be nice to know whether “the University’s branding” came first as a matter of literary elegance or because someone felt it matters more than Welsh, or because Welsh is part of our branding (as opposed to being quite properly a cultural/political representation of the native language of Wales, where the University is). I expect it has nothing to do with literacy elegance. Indeed, my problem with the email is with how all this was communicated, specifically the bizguistics*, and what that represents about who runs universities today.     

I did a small amount of research (in the Oxford English Dictionary) on the word that caught my attention most: “cascade.”  It comes from the Italian cascata, from cascare “to fall,” and entered English via French in the mid-seventeenth century, at about the same time as religious fanaticism. It is of course usually used as a noun, meaning “a small waterfall, typically one of several that fall in stages down a steep rocky slope.” But also meaning “a process whereby something, typically information or knowledge, is successively passed on,” as in accord with the usage above. Although it can also mean “a stunt performed for cinematic imitation or entertainment,” which may also accord with what was going on above. And it’s a verb too, most commonly meaning “(of water) pour downwards rapidly and in large quantities,” but also “pass (something) on to a succession of others.”  It has other meanings too, or had them, including being an archaic slang term for vomiting.   

So, its usage in the email above is not wrong. Nevertheless, it was chosen from a number of more familiar alternatives, including “communicate,” “pass on,” or, by far the most obvious one, obvious because it’s embedded in the language of the act of emailing itself, “forward.”  But, rather, the one chosen was from the lexicon of bizguistics, not surprisingly perhaps, coming as it does from the Marketing Department via the Service Excellence Forum. And as every department must have mission statements, business plans, etc.  And because, as 2008 and its consequences are proving, as is proven at least once every generation, profit motives and big-business methods are the foundations of all things that are excellent. Anyway, also, those alternative words or terms carry no suggestion of hierarchy, whereas “cascade” carries the implication of a downwards direction of communication. Some dictionary definitions, as above, use “pass on,” but the term originates from “fall.” Water and other things may move in various directions, but when they cascade we understand that they go down. Who knows how consciously, deliberately, or precisely people use words when they use them, but certainly to me as a recipient of this email I heard the instructions being cascaded down. That is, from the Marketing Department and the Service Excellence Forum *down* to ordinary academic staff.  And the example used in the template itself?  It’s not e.g. Dr Whatsit or Professor Thingummybobs of the Department of Something Studies.  No, it’s the Development and Marketing Manager of Commercial and Campus Services in Estates and Facilities Management. Those are the people who run the place, after all.

*The word bizguistics is a new one, as far as I can tell. I checked on Google and it’s not there, so I claim it as my own invention. I like it because as a badly spelt and hideously inelegant neologism it imitates with perfect irony what business people, at least in their corporate incarnations, do with language. Indeed it seems to me almost to embody what they do. A bizguis might be a monster that consumes words as greedily as it does everything else, mangling them in its gurgling intestines, and then noisily cascading them as a toxic stream of stinking diarrhoea.  Rather as large corporations consume people, digesting whatever of them they can use, and then shitting out what remains of their souls.

How to create the Big Society in 2013; or, why not open your own workhouse, hospital, or private school?

Pity poor David Cameron. During the General Election he was famously unable to explain the meaning of his Big Society idea, even to fellow Tories who are as happy as he is to eviscerate the public sector and the welfare state.* In the two years and more since then, and at the half-way point of the Parliament, a point at which he and Quisling Clegg are reporting on today, he has still had difficulties communicating his big idea, at least in words, even if its meaning is clear enough in government actions that are eviscerating the public sector and the welfare state. But of course you don’t want to look like you actually enjoy the human suffering that results from these actions, as that might undermine your image as a “compassionate conservative”** and might make voters think that you are just the same old Nasty Party, and you wouldn’t want people to think those things. So you need some kind of cover—nothing that will stop you from destroying the NHS, people’s livelihoods, and civil society as we know it, just a fig leaf to hide your tumescence while you’re doing these things. [*It’s actually apparently the big idea of his policy advisor Steve Hilton, whose other big ideas include the abolition of maternity leave, the decommissioning of Job Centres, and “cloudbusting” as a means to improve the British weather. ** This idea came from George W. Bush. Remember that, the modern Tories get ideas from George W. Bush. George W. Bush.]  

But what fig leaf? What distraction? That’s the difficult bit. You’ve tried to show that you’re an environmentalist by tooling about on the tundra on a jet-ski, but the communist media just said you were a mentalist for belching greenhouse gasses directly into the Arctic sky. You tried hugging hoodies, but they do uncouth gestures behind your back and should be killed. So, “I believe in a Big Society” it is. But what is it? I mean, what exactly the fuck is it?

You can see what a struggle it is for the Prime Minister to think of what it is when he approaches the press, as he often does, looking thinky. As you may have seen on TV, in newspapers, etc., he has a special expression and set of mannerisms for these picture-me-thinky occasions. He looks downwards, squints his eyes, furrows his brow, and, the thinky-look coup de grace, he strokes his chin. Yes, he actually strokes his chin. As if people actually do that when they think, he strokes his chin. With these absurd hamtastic gestures, he actually looks like a picture of Rodin’s Thinker as rendered by a particularly dim six-year-old, except that even the dimmest six-year old could see through this ludicrous show-thinking and has actually drawn the Camerodin as a scathing cartoon of contemptible affectation. You’d think. And yet perhaps, in Cameron’s case, it really isn’t affectation. Perhaps Cameron’s think-act is actually not some sort of pathetic and patronising public performance, a theatrical simulation of thoughtfulness for the delectation of an electorate he believes to be as profoundly stupid as he seems to be. Perhaps he’s really thinking. Genuinely using these physical gestures as means to muster something up between his ears, such as, for example, the meaning of the words Magna Carta, although why the leading lawmaker in the land would need to know anything about boring old constitutional law is anybody’s guess, so let’s get back to the important stuff. Maybe, for real, David Cameron actually does look downwards, squinting his eyes, furrowing his brow, and stroking his chin, when he thinks. Perhaps the cognitive process really is genuinely that much of an effort for him. Pity poor David Cameron.

If that’s the case, if he really does have to scratch his chin and so on when he thinks, then it makes you wonder what he does when he reads. Does his forefinger roam across the page, tracing out the shapes of his favourite booky-wooky characters, Mister Greedy, Mister Hacker, and (Never) Mister Bonus? And when he encounters actual words that he needs to communicate from the page to his brain, do his lips move? My guess is they don’t, but only because he barely has any lips. Instead, his mouth just consists of a little round opening, an under-sized aperture which, situated as it is between his strangely smooth, hairless, pink, and therefore distinctly buttocky-looking cheeks, bears an unfortunate but striking resemblance to an anus. Not unfortunate because of how he looks; one shouldn’t judge Cameron on appearances alone, even if he does have buttocky cheeks and even if his mouth does look like a bumhole. But unfortunate because of the coincidence of how he looks and what he says when he speaks. That is, when speaking, he not only sounds but he actually looks like a man who’s talking out of his arse.

Anyway, that’s enough of these cheap digs. It’s time to get back to the seriarse point here. Given that it’s the New Year and that Mister Carsemoron is in the third year of his Premiarseship, I thought I’d suggest some ways to give his Big Society idea a boost, to show how the Prime Ministarse might communicate what the Big Society is really all about even to the dimmest member of the Tory Backbench 1322 Committee. Here, then, are my top three ideas for getting government off the people’s backs and for mending Broken Britain.

Big Society Idea No. 1
Turn your second home into a Workshop for Winter Fuel Allowance Scroungers. As a member of Alarm Clock Britain, I’m sure you’re tired of walking every morning to work past the closed curtains of the over-heated houses of Britain’s brittle-boned pension cheats, especially as you often find three generations of these superannuated semi-skeletal scavengers in one family. We can’t go on like this. If government cuts the red tape, however, you can put them in your Workshop, perhaps producing on-switches for iPhones or eye-holes for Nike trainers, which will reduce the welfare bill that caused the current economic crisis, help the environment by eliminating the greedy heating so-called entitlements of these so-called old people, with their dependency culture.  At the same time you can turn these work-shy coffin-dodgers into useful members of society by producing goods that raise GDP and produce profits for working families like yours and mine. Also, with thousands of them now working for more proportionate living needs while competing in the labour market, other wealth-creators will be able to reduce the national wage bill that caused the current economic crisis. And don’t be disincentivised by the prospect of higher taxes on the profits you make from your new labour force. Just don’t pay any taxes. After all, the Prime Minister’s own father placed his money in an overseas tax haven, freeing his wealth to buy his son an Eton education so the little Master could become Prime Mister, so why shouldn’t you do the same?

Big Society Idea No. 2
Turn your third home into a hospital for Health Care Scroungers. As a member of Alarm Clock Britain, I’m sure you’re tired of walking to work every morning past the closed curtains of the over-funded hospitals of Britain’s broken-boned and pasty-faced malingerers, especially as you often find three generations of them dying, giving birth, and being born in one family, with their dependency culture. We can’t go on like this. If the government cuts the red tape, however, then there’s no need to overburden tax payers with so-called health-care so-called experts such as surgeons, doctors, nurses, caterers, and cleaners, who are opposed to reform because of their vested interests. And don’t be disincentivised by the costs of the saws, mops and buckets, and coffins you will need. Thinks outside the box. For many years the voluntary sector has been there to fix the NHS inefficiency gap in the form of charity-loving volunteer celebrities who will raise money in return for nothing more than a little quality time with your younger and more deceased patients.    

Big Society Idea No. 3
Turn your fourth home into a private school. As the government reforms the economy, there will be no shortage of bankers who wish to give their children the opportunity to go to fee-paying institutions, rather than to the increasingly impoverished state ones with their inefficient, smelly, left-wing teachers and starving urchins. Furthermore, opening your own private school will ensure that even the more intellectually-challenged children of the wealthy can still go to Oxford, become members of the government, and perhaps even become a Prime Minister who doesn’t know what Magna Carta means. See, it’s a piece of piss—they pay you a fortune and you don’t even have to give them a fucking education! And then, double bonus, with their non-education, they can go on to nourish the Big Society even further. And don’t be disincentivising from profiteering from your “educational” enterprise because, like other private schools, you can claim charitable status, and therefore, like so many of your customers’ parents, you won’t pay taxes.

And that, people, is what the Big Society is all about.

My new day with the Daily Telegraph: or, how to tell lies and influence people

One day on my summer hols eighteen months ago here in France I found myself unable to obtain my usual Guardian, and the only British newspaper available was the Daily Telegraph. Given this lemon, I made a lemsip, and revealed to the world the dark Tory propaganda hidden in the pages of what otherwise looks like a happy-go-lucky celebrity gossip publication. Here is a link to my groundbreaking blog post. http://stevesarson.blogspot.fr/2011/07/being-on-holiday-is-of-course-on-whole.html and a little follow-up to it http://stevesarson.blogspot.fr/2011/07/anarchic-tiny-and-elf-like-ps-to.html    

This year on my winter hols in the same place I found myself in the same situation, so I once again discarded my Guardianista sandals, shaved off my beard, put on my red blazer and weird white horse-riding stocking-type trouser-wear, and, with riding crop in hand, decided to see if, tally-ho, my revelatory post had shamed the editors into changing their devious ways. Amazingly, it didn’t. So, here’s another deconstruction of some articles from a random edition of the Hatey Torygraph, specifically that of Saturday 29 December 2012.

One Page 1, the lead story, unless you count the picture of Bradley Wiggins and story of him accepting the title Sir so he can modestly decline to be called Sir: “State school quotas face axe”.  The subtitle has the spin in the tail, though: “Minister prepare to back down on plans to force top universities to discriminate against private schools”.  There you go: “discriminate against private schools”.  The first line takes up the theme: “CONTROVERSIAL admissions rules intended to force leading universities to take more students from state schools are to be reviewed after protests.” As before, the dissonance between Poshograph headlines and stories soon becomes clear, or clearer at any rate, because, of course, encouraging universities to take more students from state schools is not the same as discriminating against private ones. At no point at all does the article explain in what way any private school or private school boy or girl would be hurt by more access for those from state schools, or indeed be discriminated against in any way. Instead, the Lie-ograph merely asserts the impression of injustice by using words such as “CONTROVERSIAL” and “after protests”. 

Other words that pop up: “Critics”.  But they remain unnamed, presumably because speaking out against inequality and injustice is so dangerous. The only person named here is the author, Tim Ross, the paper’s own “Political Correspondent”, who presumably sees himself as brave enough to speak out, like some sort of Martin Luther King of the British Upper Crust who has a dream that one day his children will not be judged by the quality of their minds but by the size of daddy’s bank account and his willingness to buy his children a centre-forward position on the downwards slope of an unlevel playing field. Yet such is the awfulness of today’s anti-elitism that Tross raises the spectre of Stalinism-style tyranny, stating that (unidentified) “Head teachers accused the Government of pursuing a ‘Communist-style’ agenda of social engineering....” You are of course given to understand that being able to purchase a place at Oxbridge via private secondary education, a place that might have gone to a state-school student with a lesser education and even (but by no means necessarily) lower A Level grades, but who nevertheless has higher intelligence and greater potential, is not social engineering. It is, presumably, the natural order of things. The argument for ensuring more equal accessibility for state-school students (what the policy is really about) is dealt with by a couple of sources cited saying that school background is an ineffective way to predict the HE potential of students. Yes, and presumably that’s why rich parents are willing to pay enormous sums to send their children to private schools: because they’re not better resourced and because top universities don’t presently discriminate in favour of private schools. But that’s another story; not one you’ll find in the Etonograph.

That’s class done, now gender. Turn to page 7 and you won’t find actually find any of the more choice quotations from the Book of Jeremiah, but you will find a story headlined “Women don’t ask, so they don’t get the same wages as men.” So, to give the paper some credit, it acknowledges at least on this occasion, the existence of the pay gap. But, it turns out, it’s women’s own fault, so they’re you go. Below that, “Make love? We’d rather lose a few pounds.” Separate sphere, same story. Then below that, “Mothers can’t see if their child is too fat.” Obesity crisis? Blame women. The only other major story on this page, besides one slyly implying that a Welshman is being ridiculous and over-sensitive for insisting on being spoken to in his native language in a shop in his home town by an assistant who was herself Welsh-speaking, is “Danger UXB. Boy digs up bomb with his Christmas gift metal detector.” It is complete with a picture of Danger Boy holding his metal detector in a horizontal position. As this is not the correct position for proper usage of a metal detector, it’s almost as if the picture is posed to make it look like Danger Boy is holding a machine gun, or some other deeply subtle symbol of masculinity. Fortunately, he was a slim boy who had not been subjected to obesity by an overbearing mother force-feeding him pies, or else his natural daredevil boyishness might have resulted in his corpulent figure being blasted over half of Norfolk. Because of his mum. Women, eh?  

On page 8, we have “Mandrake”, or Tim Walker as he is also called, presumably so that if you combine the two names you can come up with anagrams with the word “Wanker” in them. He has a delightful little piece called “Miliband’s journey” in which in a mere 132 words manages to point out or claim that Ed Miliband is Jewish and anti-Israeli, and that the Labour is anti-Semitic. Which ought to keep both the paper’s Nazi and its Zionist readers happy. Top chap, that Lit Dreamkam Wanker.    

So, we’ve had class, gender, and race. Just one more about class. Page 12: “Before you go, here’s £100 to clean your council house.” In which “Nearly 400 council tenants were paid £100 each to tidy their own homes before they moved out, costing the taxpayer £38,000” by “Labour-run Norwich council.” Presumably, none of the council house tenants were themselves taxpayers? The Hellinahandbasketgraph quotes a council member saying “This schemes saves us money on having to clear out hose homes.” And that “Fast re-letting reduces the potential for costly vandalism and squatting.” But I think we all know what the red-faced reader is going to bark out from his saloon bar stool in the golf club, don’t we?

There is more, plenty more. But you’ll have to do it for yourself from now on. I can’t do any more. It is simply too much to bear.                      

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.

Remember, remember the fifth of November; or, understanding some aspects of the historical origins of the US Presidency; or, why Americans are roundheads

Newly reposted and slightly revised for 5 November 2014, as many US voters once again proved once again how very different they are.

This blog post was originally intended as a serious-ish discussion of aspects of British and American constitutionalism that help explain some aspects of the current US Presidential election, aspects deriving from the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The tenuous-ish link to November 5 has to do with William of Orange landing at Torbay on that day, 324 years ago. As is my way, though, I got diverted for several hundred words into a catastrophically meandering preamble replete with the usual desperate, attention-seeking lengthy humorous asides, or non-humorous asides, depending on suxh things as your point of view, and age. So, if you want to skip all that and get to the serious bit, scroll down until you see the words, in bold, This is the serious bit.  

As children, my fellow undergrown gumps and I were often told by our teachers and our televisions to “remember, remember the fifth of November.”  Sometimes these authorities invoked this phrase as parts of health and safety lectures about not holding lit fireworks and thereby ending up with a blackened lump of burning bone and smouldering skin where your hand used to be, although even back then I thought that wouldn’t be such a bad thing in some cases, for the greater good, you know, the Darwinian betterment of the human race and all that.  This may be harsh, but it is an important consideration.  Imagine if lizards made an evolutionary comeback. The two-legged stand-up ones (who were always the dangerous ones, compared to those fat, four-legged, leaf-eating dumbosaurs) would have major evolutionary advantages over us, accustomed as they would already be to performing daily tasks with naturally short arms and stumpy paws. That’s where namby-pamby health and safety will get us once global warming returns us to the most elemental struggle for survival—defeated and eaten by dinosaurs. 

Anyway, I digress.  We were also taught that the fifth of November is about Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. “Remember, remember the fifth of November” comes from the following, or some variant of it:      

Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England's overthrow.
But, by God's providence, him they catch....

Fair enough, an important historical moment to be sure, and it should be remembered.  But it shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be and often isn’t remembered to the exclusion of other fifths of November.  We’ve already seen that our future Giant Lizard Kings will remember the fifth of November as a crucial factor in their eventual ascendancy over us.  But there are other fifths of November to remember too. One that used to be universally remembered in the Anglo-dominated world is the fifth of November 1688, the day that William of Orange landed with his forces at Torbay, in Devon, on his way to overthrow James II and claim the throne for himself as King William III and his wife as Queen Mary II.

Now this event, the Glorious Revolution as it came to be called, can, of course, be remembered in different ways for different things. The English might remember it for its restoration of Parliamentary and other liberties from the prerogative-grabbing claws of William’s father-in-law James, the father of Mary, a legacy perhaps best encapsulated in the Declaration and then the Bill of Rights of 1689.  It often isn’t remembered this way, however, or indeed at all, as I pointed out somewhat shirtily in a previous post about a radio programme positing that Britain should perhaps adopt a Bill of Rights, perhaps based on the US one (we already have one, from 1689, and the US one is partly based on it):  http://stevesarson.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/britain-already-has-bill-of-rights-yes.html

Alternatively, and equally validly, Catholics might remember the fifth of November 1688 and what followed it as the beginning of a century and a half of political and economic disfranchisement and social segregation. The Scottish might and perhaps more often do remember it as a moment in the aggrandisement of Parliamentary authority that led to the kind of imperialism that saw their parliament abolished in 1707, not to be restored until almost three centuries later. The Irish might and certainly far more often do remember it for James's final defeat by William at the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, and what followed—another moment in the on-going oppression of the Irish and of Catholics. Patriotic English people used to remember it this way too, only in a rather more celebratory way, and indeed the fifth of November often used to be called Pope’s Day, and people would burn effigies of the pontiff rather than of Guy Fawkes. The Protestant Irish still see it in something like these terms, and to this day they march about in traditional seventeenth-century costumes, such as bowler hats of the exact same kind that King William and Queen Mary used to wear.

Whatever the case, for all the Glorious Revolution's ambiguities as an event, I think it’s a shame that it isn’t as well remembered as a moment in the history of liberty as well as other things as it might be. It certainly used to be. When the American lawyer and legislator John Dickinson wrote his famous (and deviously misnamed) Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, objecting to British taxes in the form of the 1767 Townshend Duties, and to Parliamentary presumption of an entitlement to rule over the American colonies, as expressed in those taxes and in the Declaratory Act of the previous year that proclaimed Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” he published the first of the letters on the fifth of November. And everyone knew what that meant—Dickinson was performing a symbolic insurgency in favour of liberty analogous to the invasion of England by William of Orange, the cheeky monkey. 

This is the serious bit.

[Fellow historians and, for that matter, political scientists: please see * below for a quite possibly unnecessary and vainglorious note on intellectual property.]

So, anyway, why, given all the different ways to remember the fifth of November, am I writing about it here today? It’s because, as it happens, this year, the fifth of November falls on the day before the day of the US Presidential election. What possible bearing can the fifth of November 1688 have on the 2012 contest for the occupancy of the most powerful address on earth, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House? Well, quite a lot, actually, and here’s why.

As many historians of colonial America have said, in some ways the Glorious Revolution in the colonies was similar to the one in England. Yet in some crucial respects, its settlement worked out very differently on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the run-up to 1688, colonists felt that their rights as “freeborn Englishmen” were being violated by James II or his minions much as Englishmen back home felt theirs were. The need for actual revolutions in most colonies, though, was obviated when colonial governors declared allegiance to Parliament and to William and Mary once news reached America of James’s overthrow. Two of the three exceptions prove the rule. In the colonies of Massachusetts and New York, local revolutions overthrew Governor Edmund Andros in Boston and Lieutenant-Governor Francis Nicholson in New York city, who were agents of James II’s direct rule of the Dominion of New England. When that that regime collapsed in those places, it also collapsed in the other Dominion colonies of Connecticut, New Hampshire, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Things were slightly more complicated in Maryland, a proprietary colony owned by the Lords Baltimore, the Calverts, who were Catholics, bringing a religious dimension to their overthrow in early 1689 by a Protestant Association, making that local revolution even more resonant of events back in England. (The Calverts got their proprietary back when Benedict Leonard Calvert, the fourth Baron Baltimore, converted to Anglicanism in 1715.)  

As the above indicates, there were local contingencies that made the Glorious Revolution, or revolutions, in America sometimes somewhat different from what transpired in England, but it’s how the Glorious Revolution’s settlement panned out over the long term that really explains some of the differences in British and American politics since, including the nature of the executive arms of government and the relationships of executives to legislatures on this side of the Atlantic and that.  

In England, desperate as politicians were to be rid of the Papist tyrant James, as they saw him, and to restore what they saw as England’s ancient constitution, they were also desperate to avoid falling back into the darks days of the 1640s, back into civil war in which one-in-ten of the population died, and into God-only-knew what kind of cosmic retribution another regicide might invite.  Men as diverse as radical Whig believers in popular sovereignty, moderate Whig and Tory believers in Parliamentary sovereignty, and High Tory believers in the Divine Right of Kings therefore worked together on a compromise that all could peaceably live with. They thus agreed that James had “abdicated” rather than been forcibly overthrown. That allowed them to believe that the Declaration and Bill of Rights represented the work of the people, or of Parliament, or of God, as ideological preference directed. Eventually, they could all believe in the “principle of co-ordination” whereby sovereignty, whether it originated in the people, Parliament, or the crown, in practical terms worked through the operations of the crown-in-parliament. By the 1720s, the time of the premiership of Robert Walpole, the British parliamentary system worked much as it does today. The leader of the majority party in the House of Commons becomes the King’s or Queen’s First or Prime Minister, the head of an executive that in the nature of the system controls the majority in the legislature. (Or, in the event of a hung Parliament, the leader of the party with the largest minority can form a coalition with the leader and members of a third party to form a working majority in the House of Commons, especially if members of the third party are a sufficiently unprincipled bunch of shit-weasels who, for the sake of experiencing chimerical power, are willing to betray every principle they promised during the foregoing election to uphold.)

In America, however, or, rather, in the various Americas, it didn’t turn out this way at all. Royal governors were just that: royal governors who derived their authority from the imperial centre, whether formally from the Privy Council and thus the crown, or in practice from government ministries, or indeed from the complicated but co-ordinated operations of the crown-in-parliament. Governors could not co-ordinate with provincial legislatures in the way the crown could and did with Parliament in London, as that would have put them at odds with their metropolitan masters. Even when they did what local legislative assemblies told them to do, as indeed many had little choice but to do, they could not institutionalise that kind of executive-legislative co-ordination, and ended up politically ineffective from an imperial-interest point of view. When they were active, the implementation of imperial-executive will necessitated such actions as proroguing and even dissolving colonial legislative assemblies, vetoing their legislation, and exercising other traditional executive actions such as creating courts and dismissing politically disagreeable judges—the kinds of prerogative powers that were either explicitly outlawed by the Bill of Rights or else obviated by the operations of co-ordination within England (or, after the 1707 Act of Union, Britain). It was this kind of executive prerogative that Parliament adopted towards the colonies from the passing of the Sugar Act in 1764, ultimately leading to American independence in 1776, which the British were forced to recognise in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. 

The Americans thus never developed the tradition of co-ordination that defines the British system of parliamentary democracy. They thus to this day retain a degree of separated rather than mixed powers in their constitution. Thus it is that the American President is elected every four years singly and separately from members of Congress who are elected every two years in the case of Congressmen and Congresswomen (members of the House of Representatives) and every six years in the case of Senators. Thus it is that there can be and often is a President of one political party and either a House of Representative or a Senate or indeed a whole Congress dominated by another. Far from controlling the legislature, as is inherently the case in the British system, the American executive often finds himself the opposition to it.  

It’s often said that the US constitution is new, or at least much newer than the ancient constitution of Great Britain. I’d contend that at least in some respects the opposite is the case. The modern British constitution is very much the product of 1688-89, a 1688-89 that never happened in America. The US Constitution reflects (and so do all the state constitutions with their independent governors) an older oppositionism between executive and legislature that pre-dates the principle of co-ordination that emerged from the Glorious Revolution in England, and that indeed was such a divisive feature of the English civil war era and in fact much further back into the English past. And what’s true of American political constitutionalism may also consequently be true of American political culture. If the moderation of modern British politics is a product of the co-ordinated nature of the British parliamentary system (as opposed to being somehow inherent in British character, as some ridiculous people would have you believe), then perhaps the sometimes “paranoid style” of American politics (as it has been termed by American political historians) is a product of an inherited roundhead tradition of legislative opposition to the ever-present danger of tyranny that they believe executive power inherently represents. 

So, what I’m saying is, if you think American politics is a bit weird and wacky, remember, remember the fifth of November (1688).     

[* Academic friends: I'm intending to develop and publish these ideas one day, so if for any reason you are enough of a poppet to consider them worthy of mention, then I'd appreciate a citation. Ta.]

                                              

Disney & the Future of Star Wars; or, how about a Sci-Fi Mash-Up with Star Trek, Dr. Who, & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

Update: 4 May 2020. None of the stories below was commissioned by Disney and will not be appearing at a cinema near you any time soon. Nevertheless, May the Fourth be with you.
   

The recently announced [October 2012] Disney takeover of George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise is causing a great deal of grief and gnashing of teeth.  Aficionados of the Sci-Fi classic seem concerned that the promised new films will somehow be Disnified, perhaps with a regiment of Stormtroopers unrealistically defeated by Seven Dwarves, or the Millennium Falcon risibly outmanoeuvred by a flying elephant, or some other harbinger of the End of Days. But Star Wars lovers needn’t worry. There is surely enough cultural capital in the Vaderverse to sustain at least the promised Star Wars 7, 8, and 9 without having to adulterate these artworks with childish foolishness. And if the new makers are running out of ideas when they decide to story-board Star Wars 10 plus, there’s still no need for them to stoop to having a Wookie in a light-sabre-death-fight with Donald Duck, or, worse, Princess Leia being enslaved by a mouse. Instead, and much more appropriately, they can find interesting inter-textual synergies with other Sci-Fi franchises, such as Star Trek, Dr. Who, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Indeed, below are some possible plots for Star Wars 10, 11, and 12 based on exactly these potential scenarios.  And some guesses about how, in artistic and entrepreneurial terms, it might all pan out.     

Star Wars 10: “Space Seed”

The Kardashians and their evil leader, Kim, are planning to conquer the entire Galactic entertainment industry and, consequently, the political structures of the whole Milky Way. Luke and the gang are determined to stop them, but don’t have the military or, more importantly, the media resources to do it alone. They therefore team up with internationally well-connected Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the second iteration of the Starship Enterprise in order to defeat the dastardly scheme. In a dramatic twist, Captain Picard, immediately after ordering the final attack on the Kardashians’ Hollywood lair by bellowing “MAKE IT SHOOOOW” in an unnecessarily loud voice suited more to the requirements of live theatre than to film-making and television, is mauled to death by a Wookie who has become deranged with anger at the injustice of such an appalling ham taking a lead role while he, a superior actor, is invisible to the audience, hidden as he is in what he later describes to police psychologists as “a fucking wanking Bigfoot suit.”      

In a subplot, Princess Leia, inevitably sidelined when the real space-ship and laser-gun action narrative begins, goes on a week-long Pan-Galactic-Gargle-Blaster bender on Betelgeuse 5, until rescued by a semi-retired Captain James T. Kirk, who restores her to mental and physical health with his “Space Seed,” after seducing her with a cornographically humorous invitation back to his Space Hotel room to see his “Force.”

                    The Kardashians’ evil leader, Kim (right) and sibling henchperson Kourtney.

Star Wars 11: The League of Cybermen Strikes Back

The League of Cybermen, having failed to take over the Earth and the Milky Way, are planning to conquer a galaxy far, far away. Luke and the gang are determined to stop them, but don’t have the military or, more importantly, the time-travel facilities to do it alone. They therefore team up with Doctor Who in order to defeat the dastardly scheme. In a comedic twist, Han Solo cannot get the hang of flying the Tardis, and there are hilarious scenes of him stalling it, going round in circles, and landing it on its roof, until, in exasperation, he hands over the controls to a gigantic space bear. Solo blames the machinery, calling it a “goddamned un-aerodynamic bean tin.” The Doctor explains that because space is a vacuum there is in fact no need for aerodynamic shaping of space ships, and nor indeed for time-travel vehicles. This information offends Solo’s belief in a universe dominated by symbolically masculine geometries, so he punches The Doctor in the face.

In a subplot, C3PO becomes surprisingly aroused by the rearward attentions of K9, but the tinny cyber-romance scenes are panned by critics because of the young director’s ambitious but lamentably ill-judged attempts at an arty allegorical referencing of Blade Runner, including a confusing, unfeasible, and frankly tragic dual role-play by Harrison Ford.

Star Wars 12: So Long, and Thanks for All the Pish

The Chinese government and the warrior people of Krikkit are planning to conquer the galactic headquarters of the Brockian Ultra-Cricket Association in order to sell the broadcast rights to Sky TV, depriving terrestrial television viewers of free-to-air sports coverage. Luke and the gang are determined to stop them, but don’t have the military or, more importantly, the political connections to do it alone. They therefore team up with Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian, and Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox in order to defeat the dastardly scheme. In a casting twist, after lobbying about negative cinematic representations of Asian Americans, the role of the insanely sadistic chief of the Chinese Secret Service is offered to Alan Rickman. In the film, Rickman holds the Dalai Lama and Yoda hostage, hoping to use their wisdom in dealing with the cunning and double-crossing Rupert Murdoch, who is also played by Alan Rickman. The day is ultimately saved by Darth Vader (who, following the death of Sir Alec Guinness, is played by Alan Rickman), when he turns away from The Dark Side after being told by his brutal bodyguard and sidekick, played by Sean Bean, that one simply does not associate with a man as evil as Rupert Murdoch. 

In a subplot, after many, many lifetimes of sexual abstinence, the Dalai Lama and Yoda find themselves strangely attracted to each other, and an ultimately unresolved homoerotic will-they-won’t-they scenario ensues. 

Sadly, Star Wars 12 bypasses cinemas and DVD release, going straight to Channel 5 and Fox TV, where its only viewers mistake it for a documentary. Disney decides to discontinue the franchise for the good of all humankind, and the producers and directors spend the rest of their lives in the Hollywood Hills giving poolside interviews to large young men with over-sized beards and small young men with over-sized spectacles for broadcast on their niche-audience You Tube channels.

          

The Rhetoric of David Cameron’s Speech to the Conservative Party today at the Birmingham Party Conference; or, the Conservative PC Lies in Scameron’s Ansprache to the Lizard People today at the Nuremberg Rally.

The Tories, with their US Republican ideological soulmates, long-ago came up with the term “Political Correctness” to describe liberal-left attempts to find respectful language to refer to non-white people, LGBT people, disabled people, and so on.  Of course, the term itself is a kind of political correctness that allows them to demean these efforts to respect others, dismiss others' rights to self-representation, and which constructs such respect for and rights of others as oppression of their own freedom of speech. Or, put another way, their freedom to continue routinely (and without comic effect or political inversion) using words like darkies, benders, mongoes, spazzers, and so on.  There is indeed a whole lexicon of Conservative Political Correctness at work today.  I’ve written before (as have others) about how you can’t say “cuts” anymore; nowadays you have to say “efficiencies,” or at least I wrote about it when I saw Tory Not-Even-Slightly-Secret-Agent Nick Robinson using that whitewashing and factually misleading word: http://stevesarson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/a-long-tweet-to-nick-robinson.html.  Similarly, in ConPC-speak, the term “something for nothing culture” now applies to people who actually have nothing, rather than people who inherited large fortunes that their parents acquired by maximising them in tax-havens (or low-tax havens and no-tax havens as they might much more accurately be called).  And, of course, the word “not,” in the ConPC dicktionary* means “and break up, privatise, and thereby abolish”: as in the election pledge that “We’ll cut the deficit, not and break up, privatise, and thereby abolish the NHS.” (*Not a typo.) 

I’m writing this as David Cameron (David Scameron) is delivering his keynote speech (Ansprache) to the party faithful (fellow Lizard-People) at today's Conservative Party Conference (Nuremberg Rally).  There will be lots of ConPC (lies) in the Asprache, and in light (the obfuscatory darkness) of the litany of enormously damaging dishonesty I have decided to publish this brand new blogpost about ConPC rhetoric as it might be applied in a Tory version of a history textbook (reheated version of this:

http://stevesarson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/a-glossary-of-terms-for-tory-history.html with a new context and introduction and one extra joke: at the end below, if you've read this lazy rehash already and want to skip to the only new bit).  

Medieval Society. Early Big Society.

Feudalism. Social responsibility.

Serfdom. Internship.

The Peasants’ Revolt. Class hatred (orig. David Starkey).

Enclosure. Land management efficiencies (necessary and unavoidable, there is no alternative, and it's not at all driven by class-interest or ideology).

The English/British/Civil War/s/Wars of the Three Kingdoms (etc.) / The Interregnum / The Glorious Revolution. The Unfortunate Disruptions.

The Renaissance/Enlightenment/Scientific Revolution. The Birth of Capitalism (orig. Niall Ferguson).

The Birth of Capitalism. The Enlightenment / The Great Going Forward (orig. Niall Ferguson).  

Imperialism/colonialism. Global democratisation (orig. Niall Ferguson).

Empire. Free-trade zone (orig. Niall Ferguson).

The Atlantic Slave Trade. African Labour Recruitment System THAT WAS ABOLISHED BY THE BRITISH (orig. Simon Schama).   

Slavery. Free Labour.

France. South Dorsetshire.

Germany. Unser Vaterland.

World War I. The Unfortunate Incident.

World War II. The Even More Unfortunate Incident.

Europe. Northern Africa.

The United States. Daddy.

Margaret Thatcher. Mummy.

Chartism. (See Peasants’ Revolt.)

Suffragettes. Lesbians.

The Working Classes. The Help (orig. Lucy Worsley).

The Welfare State. The Failed Soviet Union (orig. Dominic Sandbrook).

The National Health Service. The Sixty-Year Mistake. The Medical Business Opportunity.

The Tabloid Press. Our Friends in the North.

Bankers. Masters of the Universe.

Boris. Person born and raised in single-parent household.