Guest Blogging on Tory Bear
I’ve written a post on the NUS over at Tory Bear.
Sphere: Related ContentI’m basing this argument on the premise that the new constitution for the NUS gets ratified. If it doesn’t then disaffiliation may well become necessary, and I will be proposing it in my union. It is also comforting to know that I am a masochist; political involvement is not about personal comfort.
We should first dispense with the notion that the NUS is some EU clone. It is not. The NUS has virtually no ability to dictate the policy of individual unions, and acts instead as an umbrella organisation to represent their interests. It bears closer resemblance to the LGA than Brussels. The idea that it is “bloated” is also a myth; in the past few years the organisation has undergone drastic efficiency drives and downsizing to balance its budget, to the point where they sold off their headquarters building. It has a budget far smaller than some of the unions it represents.
Far from being a mere collection of unwashed, unshaven, oppositionalist placard-wavers keen on demonstrating about whatever it is trendy to be against this month, the NUS performs roles that are vital to many student unions. It provides training and a forum for sabbatical officers to share ideas that many individual unions simply could not afford. Through NUSSL and NUS Extra it helps provide services to and discounts to unions and their members.
When those on the Right are organised, we have successes. It may surprise some to learn that the NUS has had two CF members on their executive in recent memory. We don’t know if we could get more on because we haven’t tried. When the Right are on top of their brief and in command of the facts, we are able to make valuable contributions to the debate. The fact that our ideas are neither the empty rhetoric of the left, nor the stereotype expected of the right, gives us a distinct advantage in discussions.
Though the idea that a CF defeat in the NUS would affect our party’s standing in a general election is absurd, there is the genuine possibility of the NUS becoming the focus of future opposition to a Conservative government on education policy. The only way to reduce such knee-jerk automatic hostility is to have people inside the Union making the case for such policy. Even if the NUS retains a left-wing slant, which it will for the forseeable future, better that their ideas encounter stiff opposition than the unanimous approval of an audience unaware of any alternative.
It has always been something of a bogeyman to demonise the NUS as the front group of a band of revolutionary Trotskyites. Though disproportionately represented, they still remain in a minority. That minority is shrinking year on year, as witnessed at the last annual conference, where they suffered a major rout from the NEC. A vast swathe of delegates belong to no faction whatsoever, and are willing to vote on the merits of the argument. We owe it to them, as well as the students we represent, to make that argument.
The idea that we should spend more time and effort organising and campaigning on campuses is indeed a laudable one, but it does not come at the exclusion of conservatives organising for and within the NUS. Part of the reason the hard left are disproportionately represented is because on many campuses they run the strongest campaigns. Were CF members to offer organised, sustained, issue-focused opposition we could reap similar rewards. The divisive politics of the hard-left are off-putting for many students. We are in an excellent position to offer a viable alternative.
Fundamentally, the idea of organised national representation for students is a good one. We cannot simply keep out of the organisation that does that because we disagree with its current policies. Conservatism, if it means anything, is about working within flawed systems to reform them, rather than seeking to overthrow them in a utopian fantasy or fit of pique. A new rival to the NUS isn’t going to come along. Education policy is currently severely flawed; we have to remain in the NUS to explain why, and how we would improve it. We have to remain in to make sure that left-wing dogma does not go unchallenged. Above all, we must remain in because to leave would be to silence ourselves.
Another Concrete Ceiling
The latest study from Warwick University makes for interesting reading.
Researchers have uncovered evidence that teachers are routinely under-estimating the abilities of some black pupils, suggesting that assumptions about behavioural problems are overshadowing their academic talents.
The thrust of the research is that the abilities of black pupils are widely underestimated, resulting in their being entered for lower tier examinations.
Rather than a solution that might ameliorate elements of this issue, I have a bolder idea:
Get rid of the two-tier exam system.
Some people may think now that I have suddenly made a radical shift to the left of Labour with that statement, or am engaging in some bizarre piece of triangulation. After all, the present belief of Labour ministers is that we do not have a two-tier education system. This however ignores the simple reality that exams are literally divided into two tiers, imposing collars and caps on the grades a pupil may achieve before they have even put their pen to paper.
At GCSE, in Foundation Tier, a pupil is limited to the grade range of C-G, while a Higher Tier pupil may receive marks from A*-D (with the occasional E).
What surer way to kill the ambition of somebody than to put them on the lower tier, effectively imposing a ceiling on their achievement and telling them that they can rise no higher than a certain grade? What harm is there in offering a standardised form of the test that challenges everybody’s ability equally?
I am not naive enough to believe that this would necessarily result in a seismic shift in exam results. Nor am I suggesting that differentiation between levels of ability is per se, a bad thing. But splitting the exams into two tiers effectively preordains a result unnecessarily. Rather than the subjective judgement of the teacher, why not let the relative objectivity of the exam be the judge of the pupil’s ability?
Teaching to a grade may be an effective and realistic form of education, but why impose an arbitrary limit? If a pupil is particularly bright in his set, why not allow him to scrape a B, rather than limiting him to a C?
We are supposed to promote equality of opportunity. Two-tier exams promote the opposite. It’s time we got rid of them.
Sphere: Related ContentDelich Further Discredited
Harry’s Place have had the last laugh in the Jenna Delich saga. After reporting that the Sheffield academic had linked to David Duke’s website on the UCU activist list, they were threatened with a vexatious lawsuit and had their site taken down for a couple of days. The threat of a libel case evidently failed when she admitted to actually posting to the website. That numerous blogs from across the spectrum jumped all over the the case and disseminated the information far further than it would otherwise have gone may have helped as well (and it’s quite nice to read something saying “Even the Tory, Benjamin Gray, gets it”). The Samizdat is alive and well.
After its restoration other activists jumped to her defence claiming that while the article itself was indeed hosted on the website of a former KKK leader, the article itself was not racist. Having been rather discredited on that front, pointing out that the article claimed that Jews control the media and was penned by someone who thought 9/11 was perpetrated by Mossad, the UCU activists retreated to the next barricade. Jenna Delich, we were told, was not someone who happened to dabble in anti-semitic conspiracy theories, but a rather credulous individual who had no idea what she was linking to and did not have a racist bone in her body.
This, I argued at the time, does not really stand up to criticism. A lecturer on education management ought to have some basic understanding of checking sources for reliability. The idea however that this was a failure to perform some academic due diligence on a source further diminishes upon Harry’s latest story. Delich did not simply post to a single conspiracy theorist’s article absent-mindedly, she in fact has prior form on this issue. In May this year she posted a link to another article, on another website, by another author, which claims “the initiating 9/11 atrocity was actually committed by the US CIA and Israeli Mossad in the interests of US and Zionist hegemony”.
Can we please stop pretending that she made an innocent mistake? To, on two separate occasions, link to articles with broadly similar anti-semitic conspiracy theorist views is not negligence or absent-mindedness.
Sphere: Related ContentVictory of Sorts
Harry’s Place is back up and Jenna Delich has been removed from the UCU activist list.
This is obviously a step in the right direction, but to read some of the responses you start to realise just how ingrained the anti-semitic attitude of some of the boycott campaigners is. Here are some prize picks:
Diarmuid Fogarty
the fact that the link was actually to a webpage whereupon was published an article that was not at all racist
Sue Blackwell
Jenna did not post a racist article nor even a link to one. She posted a link to a perfectly reasonable article
This being an article that insists that Jews control the media and are psychopathic oligarchs who have no qualms killing unarmed women and children. The author himself believe that the Madrid Bombings were a Mossad Plot.
“Yet the Israeli government does a very good job of convincing the whole world that it is the victim in the conflict. How can this be? Israeli control of the press? Could that ubiquitous “conspiracy theory” actually be closer to a conspiracy fact?”
If that statement is “perfectly reasonable” then either you haven’t read it, or you are an anti-Semite. The person on Engage who defended its author started ranting about Jews poisoning wells.
The Right knows perfectly well that we have had to contend with the racists in our ranks, as the likes of UCU and the NUS will never fail to remind us. It is however absolutely galling for the Left to do this while burying its head in the sand about the racism on their side. Racism is not an issue of where you lie on the political spectrum, but your attitudes towards other people. It’s one thing to criticise the policies of the Israeli government, quite another to extrapolate such attitudes to an entire country and the demographic upon which it is based despite having no allegiance.
At least this episode has forced UCU to acknowledge that some of their activists are racists. This is not the last we will hear of this business, and hopefully it will gather enough momentum for UCU to take the issue seriously. I fear however that that may just be wishful thinking.
Sphere: Related ContentUpdate on Harry’s Place
It seems that Jenna Delich has actually admitted to posting the link to David Duke’s website, but denies having any knowledge of what the site was about. Any libel suit she cares to fight will be utterly nuts and counterproductive. If Harry’s Place’s lawyers use disclosure properly, some very nasty things about the UCU could come out. The theory now is that her supporters may have caught Harry’s Place out by pointing out their reporting of the post linked to a far-right site, which is often against a host’s Terms of Service.
For Delich to claim that she had no knowledge of the far-right links in this article, or to have not a shred of anti-semitic tendencies, is beyond belief.
First, she is of an academic background. According to her LinkedIn profile she went to a good university and teaches education management. It ought to follow that she understands the concept of checking a source for authenticity and reliability. A quick perusal of David Duke’s website is more than enough to see that the guy is a racist nutjob. There’s a prominent link to a book called “Jewish Supremacism” in the article, if that was not enough. If you google search him his Wikipedia page appears before his website, where it clearly states in its first sentence that he is a former KKK member. One would think that Delich’s chosen career of teaching how to teach would involve a basic understanding of checking a source. If she claims she did not then she is either incompetent or a liar.
More importantly however is her failure to even question the contents of the article. That she claims “No comment necessary. The facts are speaking for themselves”, means that she would have accepted the contents of the article without demur. That the article repeatedly refers to a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate the media ought to set off alarm bells. That it did not suggests that Delich’s supposed “anti-Zionism” is in fact rather closer to anti-Semitism than she has led herself to believe.
In her admittance of linking to the site, she goes on to write that “none are saying that Joe Quinn (the author of the article) is a racist or anti-semitist [sic], and the article is quite interesting”. The only way you can draw that conclusion is if you close your eyes, cover your ears and shout very loudly. In various articles, Joe Quinn claims that Mossad perpetrated 9/11 and that Jews are “psychopaths” with a predisposition to bloodlust. If she does not consider this racist or anti-semitic, then you have that wonderful phrase “I’m not a racist, but….“.
I suppose she’ll claim that some of her best friends are Jews next.
Sphere: Related ContentEducational Complacency
A. C. Grayling reminds us in the Guardian today of the importance of SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) at university. The diatribe stems from the comments of a university lecturer who said that the spelling of the average undergraduate is so bad that markers should give up correcting mistakes and instead accept them as “variants”.
I understand that the proposal was made both with tongue somewhat in cheek and a hint of exasperation. The problem is so severe that the desire to give up can be incredibly strong. Nonetheless the proposal regarding “variants” has already been seen in the SATS fiasco, and there are some who would genuinely believe that this represents a pragmatic Panglossian scenario heralding a new stage in the evolution of the English language. An attitude exists among some of the educational establishment that this sort of complacency is acceptable.
Notwithstanding Grayling’s excellent article, there is an even simpler reason why the proposal is asinine. Universities are institutions of learning: if you don’t correct basic spelling errors, where do you draw the line? Why not stop marking down poorly articulated arguments as many students doubtless make? The logical conclusion of such is that you give up marking altogether as to do so must be a horribly tedious and unpleasant experience given the probability of receiving a poor essay.
The job of a teacher, university or otherwise, is to take a group of pupils or students, and finish with them in a better educational state than they were in previously. This involves not just the didactic imparting of knowledge and wisdom, but the assessment and criticism of the recipient’s engagement with that information. You tell them when they go wrong, why they have done so, and how they can improve. It does not matter if the mistake is factual, grammatical or logical; all require criticism so that improvement is possible.
This culture of indulgence that has sprung up around certain aspects of the educational system has been utterly debilitating. Rather than challenging our students to do better, and telling them how to, we instead leave them to wallow in mediocrity. As a result, they are left poorly equipped to deal with the outside world. It may seem kind to refuse to punish a student with good ideas but poor spelling, but the long-term damage this inflicts is counter-productive. As The Devil’s Kitchen points out:
if I see “variants” on a curriculum vitae, that CV will go straight into the round file
The complacency of not correcting “variants” ultimately reeks of snobbery. The underlying logic is that “these people do not know any better and cannot improve, so we won’t bother trying to correct them; it’s a waste of time”. Or somesuch other nonsense.
To paraphrase Joanna Lumley: “You don’t have to be posh to spell properly.”
Sphere: Related ContentIn the Name of Academic Freedom
Reading The Week today I came across a surreal article that reported a Professor Priya Venkatesan is suing students of Dartmouth College for what amounts to robustly questioning her opinions. The natural response to such an article was a healthy dose of skepticism combined with disbelief. I ventured on to find out a bit more about the case to see whether or not this was misrepresentative scandal-mongering, or a situation so daft you couldn’t make it up. An interview with the professor herself bears out the accusations. Her complaint stems back to an incident in which a student challenged a theory of eco-feminism that she was presenting, and was applauded by classmates (predominantly female) for the effort. After this ‘disturbing’ exercise of independent thought and research, the Professor felt the need to take a week off to ‘recover’, and is now taking legal action as a means of restitution. The history of frivolous litigation has hit a new low when a professor sues her students for disagreeing with her. Professor Venkatesen not only deserves to lose the case, but ought to be banned from holding any form of teaching position whatsoever for her shocking attitude towards academic freedom, debate and inquisitiveness.
I say “teaching” rather than “academia” as I am not fully qualified to question the intellectual capabilities of Professor Venkatesen. I have no desire to dismiss her PhD or other academic pursuits, and I have little specialist knowledge of the areas and disciplines she covers to be able to mount a full of criticism of her theories. Academic skill and teaching ability are not linked: I have been taught by Professors who are fantastic teachers as well as gifted academics, but I have also sat in lectures by distinguished professors whose utter inability to teach resulted in lectures on fascinating subject matter becoming as interesting as watching paint dry, as engaging as a concrete wall, and as rewarding as going to the dentist. The question at stake is not her intellectual capacity: she is probably an intelligent and successful academic (even if she cannot construct a sentence properly). The issue is whether or not she is fit to teach undergraduates, and, based on her own words and the experience of others, one can only conclude that she is not.
The first, and most obvious, reason is that she is a poor lecturer. She has been reported to have gone completely off-syllabus on several occasions. She is alleged to have used an introductory first-year (US) course to lecture students about her own academic interests and theories rather than teaching students the course they were supposed to receive. Furthermore, she has a significant number of complaints made against her by students that she responded to by means of intimidation. In the words of her former students:
Aside from the fact that I learnt nothing of value in this class besides the repeated use of the word “postmodernism” in all contexts (whether appropriate or not) and the fact that Professor Venkatesan is the most confusing/nonsensical lecturer ever, the main problem with this class is the personal attacks launched in class. Almost every member of the class was personally attacked in some form in the class by either intimidation or ignoring your questions/comments/concerns. If you decide to take this class, prepare to NOT be allowed to express your own opinions in class because you have “yet to obtain your Ph.D/masters/bachelors degree”. We were forced to write an in-class essay on “respect” (and how we lacked it) because we expressed our views on controversial topics and some did not agree with the views of “established scholars” who have their degrees.
Additionally, your essays will (at most) receive 2 lines worth of feedback, along with a miserable letter grade.
All in all, there are much better ways to understand science, technology, and society than to suffer through ten weeks of emotional battering.
What this further indicates is an attitude utterly unacceptable for a teacher in a learning environment. She possesses a narrow-minded and condescending view of her students and detractors that innoculates her against all criticism and stifles debate. She dismisses her students as narrow-minded bigots with some ineffable “agenda”. She claims that she didn’t like their ‘arguing with me about every point that I was making’, dismissing them on the grounds that ‘frankly, they don’t even have a BA’. Any student of logic will know that this is an ad hominem fallacy that has no place in sensible debate. She claims that such questioning ‘totally undermined the whole academic system… because it never became about the students meeting my expectations’. Such is her hubris that she banned questions in class and dismissed numerous complaints about her incompetence as just ‘oil and water’ tension. Her paranoia is such that she makes allegations of racism despite stating ‘no-one made a comment about my ethnicity’. She claims that a student asking how “Gattaca” was spelt was a swipe at her non-tenured status, hatched in connivance with her boss, and accuses her detractors of immaturity and mental illness. She makes numerous accusations that are little more than assertions backed up with flimsy, questionable or no evidence. At no point does she demonstrate any form of engagement with criticisms raised.
To claim that the role of a student is ‘to meet his or her [Professor's] expectations’ is to encourage such sickening sycophancy as to discourage the curiosity and disagreement that is the spirit of academia. Rather than accusing students who counter her claims with researched opinions of ‘fascism [and] demagoguery’, she should be applauding their initiative to research, their intellectual curiosity to challenge assumptions, and their courage to stand up and criticise the ideas of others. Critical reflection and engagement with ideas presented is considered one of the key goals of any student at the college I go to, and one of our professors congratulated students for “challenging received wisdom”, encouraging them to continue to do so. The unpolished first engagements with complex ideas by a freshman student should be encouraged, not dismissed because the proponent doesn’t have their degree yet. To be so condescending about one’s students suggests that Professor Venkatesan does not really understand that teaching is about nurturing those initial sparks of criticism and initiative, not snuffing them out because you don’t happen to agree with them or they aren’t expressed in the most advanced manner.
All this would be bad enough on its own, but what worsens matters, and leads to the conclusion that she should be banned from teaching, is her attempt to pursue a lawsuit against her former students. To resort to such crass intimidation of first-year students, extending to writing a polemical book in which she threatens to ‘name names’, demonstrates further contempt for her students and an unwillingness to use the very reason that underlies the academic tradition to persuade her critics to accept her point of view. This cynical use of the very laws supposed to protect one’s freedoms represents an attack on free expression, inquisitiveness and discussion. It is made all the more galling in that it is being pursued by an academic claiming that she wants to uphold such freedoms. The case is an insult to the law; a legally illiterate example of crying wolf and wild exaggeration in such a way that demeans the genuine cases of discrimination that occur in academic institutions. Though she claims she is ‘not the kind of person who likes to make a fuss about petty or trivial things’, this gross overreaction and display of sore losership is a disgraceful form of arrogant bullying. That it is being done by a professor against first-year students only worsens matters.
Such litigious bullying and condescencion in place of rational academic debate and the free exchange of ideas is behaviour entirely unfit for any academic, let alone a teaching one. One can only hope that Professor Venkatesan’s case is rapidly thrown out of court and she either sees the error of her ways and changes, or never teaches again.
Sphere: Related Content
