There’s a debate raging at the moment, and its one sparked by the pre-eminence of the American Ivy league in the international university stakes. MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for those who don’t know) in Cambridge, Boston, is a renowned world leader in science and technology research and teaching. So much so that over here in Europe we are apparently feeling the pinch.

In an attempt to keep up with such lofty institutions there is a proposal by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission to create a ‘European MIT’ in an effort to “act as a pole of attraction for the very best minds, ideas and companies from around the world”.

All this sounds very nice, although the Vice-Chancellors aren’t too impressed by the idea (no surprise there then) citing duplication of existing partnerships in an effort to stave off this latest challenge to their own best interests.

However, the real subtext here is the spending gap between Europe and the US, and Japan (and increasingly China and India) on research and development, namely, you guessed it, were falling behind and the European MIT is one proposed attempt to close the gap.

You see we really do now live in a globalsied world and the competition between nations for those prized foriegn students is ever more keen. Furthermore, if we continue on the present course of reducing the student spend per head here in blightie, we can only ever fall further behind the likes of the Ivy League.

Like it or not but they set the bar regards academic excellence and research endeavour, and we in Europe are trying to keep up!

I was watching the telly the other night and on came this ad for Edge Hill University, very professional, very slick (I even fancied going there myself it looked so good). But I also think its a bit surprising to suddenly be confronted by an advert for a university .. aren’t universities, well, kind of above that sort of thing?

Its also a bit paradoxical, because if you are a successful institution then surely you would not need to advertise in the first place. After all, there are only so many places to be filled, and this is dependent upon numbers of applicants wanting to go to your institution. If your popular you don’t need expensive TV adverts (you may well have more applicants than places).

As with all advertising, marketing is about turning a whole truth into a half truth and a half truth into a whole one; its what they don’t tell you at Edge Hill that you really should want to know about! And that is about resources available to the new intake, the staff-student ratio for instance is not mentioned .. now that would make an interesting ad!

Simon Jenkins recent article in Timesonline http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3223-2320577.html argues that there is no good reason for universities not to be charging the full fees to all students. Jenkins highlights the numerous virtues of this, namely weeding out the time wasters, increasing the funding to halt university decline, and ending what is in effect a middle class subsidy.

Whilst all this has its merits and indeed imposing full fees may alert the less studious to value their education more than hitherto, there are other down-sides, namely, accelerating the commodification of university education. Anyone faced with repaying between £27,000 - £45,000 on graduation will perhaps be forgiven for single mindedly pursuing those subject areas which provide the greatest advantage and renumeration in the labour market at the expense (and perhaps decline) of other worthy subjects.
Anyone who has spent any time in Aisa for instance can not help but notice that there are few philosophy graduates, or literature, history or arts graduates, rather there are inordinate numbers of buisness and management schools along with the expected focus on hard sciences. Do not the arts, literature and philosophical thinking also benefit society, no more when we leave the office and working routine behind, and allow ourselves to contemplate, think and imagine beyond the constraints of narrow instrumental reason and economic rationality?

I think that universities charging full fees would discourage the malingerers and party people surviving on the bare minimum educational effort, but there would also be some hefty downsides and ultimately one which risked impoverishing not only the HE sector but wider society.

Its that time of year again, and my teaching duties have begun for the new academic term. I must confess this always makes me a bit nervous, although I can’t complain too much, I only have some occassional teaching, its not like I’m doing 20 hours a week or more.

Nevertheless, delivering the first lecture of the year is tense, even though I tell myself there is no reason to be. I guess its becasue its a ‘performance’ that you do - I don’t mean that I sing and dance type of thing - but you do walk in and there is an expectant audience, and as with any performance, it can go wrong and you can look really, really stupid! This is what we teachers all really fear, if were honest.

You may not know this if you have never taught, but the great fear is that whilst standing there doing your stuff, you suddenly dry up .. eeekk! Mind goes blank .. what do i say next???

But its an irrational fear - I find the answer is to simply go onto something else and come back to that point at a later stage (and tell the class your doing this without explaining its becasue you can’t remember a bloody thing!) this is what I think of as one of my ‘teaching skills’. Still .. the fear still haunts you in the back of your mind .. what if ..

Touch wood, no disasters this time .. everything went reasonably smoothly, I even got a decent classroom discussion going, and people were volunteering to say things, hands aloft… always a sign that your doing something right.

And what about the all important class size, well there were about 21, a few more than I had expected, but about an average ratio per staff member for a UK university.

What would be interesting to know is the cut off point at which students feel reluctant to stick their hand up and say something - I know this will vary depending upon the inidividual concerned, but reason dictates that there is an optimal size for an engaged discussion to take place. Even though the class went quite well (I have had sessions where resolutely they just sit there, petrified - nobody says anything despite endless promptings from me).

I reckon the number is about 6-10, that way everyone will have the opportunity to not just say something, but develop an argument, be heard, take questions and objections, and this process be passed around, to and fro. I think anymore than double figures this tends to go into free fall and you move from something which resembles a seminar group to a full blown class. There just seems to be a group dynamic that only holds up to a certian number, then it dissolves.

Of course, the contary is also true. I once rememeber teaching a seminar where only 1 lone student turned up! He was petrified, but having said who he was on entering the room he couldn’t just turn heels and flee, as much as he wanted to I’m sure. None of this was helped by the topic that week - a discussion of ‘post-modernism’!

Freshers week has arrived and both campus and town is alive and abuzz .. uni has come out of its a long summer slumber - at last. No more quiet corridors and resturants, now replaced by hordes of young excited faces milling around everywhere, its like a lifeforce and its infectious.

God, campus is so depressing in the summer. Its like the night after the party, everyone interesting has gone home long ago but your to wake to the mess and the odd billy-no-mates who has nowhere else to go .. and yet, the sun shines, but only to console you that there are better places to be, and your not there ..

At least now there is a sense of normalacy, i now feel that when I get in my car in the morning i am at least going to the right place. If you have to work like me, summer on campus just makes you feel so out of wack, its like a resturant without food!

Mind you - can’t get in the bloody lift now, full of students! (lazy bastards ;0)

There is a familiar ring when people start going on about the ‘good old days’, this was better, that was better .. and most of us start nodding off. The question as to whether a degree was harder to obtain, or exams harder to pass .. and of course, whether a university education was superior to what it is now, persist and are rehearsed routinely in the media.

Every year the A level results are announced, or university expansion ‘celebrated’, brings with it a chorus of dissenting voices, usually lamenting the past and decrying the present. Trouble is, apart from anecdotal evidence, how do you decide if their right or not?

Well, the AUT (the Higher Education Union) has recently flagged the much neglected issue of staff-student ratios as a useful metric - one which sheds some intriging light on the matter. For instance, when Tony Blair went to university there were just a mere 9 students to every member of staff! Of course everyone knows that there is now more people going to university, but this has led to a massive 21 students to every staff member!

You might think that common sense would dictate that this must mean a significantly increased work load and proportinoatley less time devoted per individual student .. and that something would suffer? Well not according to the government; their 2003 White Paper on Higher Education not only refuses to admit that this is emblamatic of a serious decline in the quality of a degree education, but rather that further increases in the staff-student ratio can increase further without detriment! This admission is not only counter-intutitive, its strangely like Orwellian ‘doublethink’ !

Strikes me the matter is quickly settled with a simple thought experiment, if Tony was sending one of his sons off to Uni this year, which would he choose between our two hypothetical institutions, one offering his previously enjoyed 1:9 staff-student ratio, or the contemporary other, offering a 1:21 ratio (assuming all things being equal) - its a no brainer as the Americans say. Our Tony got a good degree education (and not just becasue he went to Oxford). One of the principal reasons was there were plenty of talented staff on hand to devote personnal attention to his needs and flowering academic interests, to encourage and nurture, inform and inspire .. after all reading a book only gets your thinking so far, you have to actually engage with other human beings to really start thinking for yourself - books don’t answer back!

Not that this seems to worry Blair too much, political expediency has won out as is evidenced in their doublethink. I think in this respect University education has become poorer and the dissenters are right to be a tad cynical. At least this is one useful metric that can be compared to what should be the embarrasment of many.

Interestingly, the AUT are now calling for a staff-student ratio off no more than 15:1, still not quite what Tony experienced but an improvement none the less ..