by David Craig
Whilst some elite research universities are located in poor inner–city areas, there is a greater preponderance of new universities in such areas, which explains why these universities are more likely to be found near the top of crime charts. This returns us to the two–tier student experience – because students from poorer backgrounds are more likely to attend such universities, they are also more likely on average to be affected by crime targeting students.
The ‘Stepford Students’
There is one other pressure on student life – a growing pressure towards social and political conformity on campus. Whilst university has traditionally been about individualism, exploration and discovery, today there appears to be a growing requirement for students to look, sound and even think alike. The journalist Brendan O’Neill, discussing his experience of students attempting to shut down debates or silence opinions that they deemed offensive, described what he was faced with as “the Stepford Students”:
“…they look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform… anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.”
Mr O’Neill’s offence had been to accept an invitation from a student society at Oxford University to discuss abortion with another male journalist. After protests by feminist groups, the event was eventually cancelled. As males, it was apparently unacceptable to protestors that either should contribute to a discussion on this subject.
This experience is not an isolated exception. Instead it is a reflection of a growing norm of intolerance amongst students. This new norm only permits an increasingly narrow and politically–correct set of social attitudes and views and seeks to exile or silence anybody who would dare dissent. It is for this reason that the “Stepford Students” label has drawn such attention – it neatly defines a growing sense of totalitarianism on campus, coupled with a detachment from reality that is beyond satire. Anything which is deemed offensive – Red Indian head dresses, heterosexual men cross–dressing, a pop song with the ‘wrong’ lyrics, clapping, statues, the formation of a men’s society – is banned in the name of creating ‘safe spaces’ for students. Moreover, student groups now regularly campaign for ‘trigger warnings’ on books which contain material that they might find or believe other people might find ‘upsetting’.
Anybody who wants to speak at a university, but may say something that challenges this orthodoxy, is banned or ‘no–platformed’ with monotonous regularity. Student activists should be proud that the list of ‘no–platformees’ is becoming increasingly diverse. After all, where else might one hope to find Nigel Farage, Peter Tatchell, Germaine Greer and Nick Griffin (the former leader of the British National Party) keeping company?
There are many possible causes for this shift towards conformity and censorship – a lower average intellectual level of the student cohort, the pervasiveness of social media, a sense of debt–induced ennui or the troublesome notion that any institution adopting factory processes and scale is likely over time to become populated by and to produce drones. Whatever the explanation for this phenomenon, there is no justification for it in Higher Education. Students might not have much control over their high tuition fees, the accommodation on offer, the loans system or the size of the student body. But individually and collectively they either shape or are complicit in the shaping of their intellectual environment. If freedom of thought and expression is the lifeblood of the university, then conformity and censorship are pathogens.
Ultimately, it is students who promote these agendas and it is other students who let them, either by supporting them, ignoring them or failing to challenge them. That there isn’t a greater backlash, a louder protest about such fundamental issues as the loss of free speech is perhaps the most significant and worrying illustration of today’s campus conformity.
Being a student today doesn’t sound like much fun. Shoddy or expensive accommodation, de facto segregation by income, dress codes, the prospect of getting mugged or, worse still, the censorious attention of the campus thought police. And then there’s the problem of overcrowding of most university facilities and decreasing face–to–face time with lecturers and tutors. To the casual observer, much of student life now appears to foster a sense of dependence, grievance, limitation and restriction rather than optimism, independence, personal growth and freedom. While many students will still thrive at university, there is little doubt that the Great Expansion has made student life worse for the majority.
CHAPTER FOUR:LEARNING: YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN
“A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.”
W. H. Auden82
“The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of their masters.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations83
Academics receiving criticism for their teaching is not a new phenomenon. During the 18th and 19th centuries the standards of teaching at Oxford and Cambridge universities were roundly condemned by many of their most illustrious alumni. Amongst the complainants were Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Edward Gibbon, Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth. Byron’s 1806 poem Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination captures the spirit of these complaints, caricaturing his teachers as:
“Dull as the pictures, which adorn their halls,
They think all learning fix’d within their walls”84
Similar reactions, encompassing the comic to the frustrated to the sad can be found dotted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in the writing of Tennyson, Auden, Larkin and Amis, amongst others. During expansion, this tradition continued in the satirical campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge.
What these criticisms have in common is that they sprang from the same source – regular, prolonged, or even too prolonged, exposure to multiple academics and their assorted pedagogic and behavioural foibles. For most undergraduates studying today, however, it is unlikely that their university affords them the exposure required to develop either contempt or admiration for their academics. This is because many of the variables that determine teaching quality, such as contact hours, assessment quantity and quality, teacher experience and the size of seminars have worsened significantly during the Great Expansion. Undergraduates pay more but receive less on each measure than they did thirty years ago. In 2012, the Times Higher Education Supplement reported how students at Manchester University: “... used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain figures showing that social science students had half as much contact time as Manchester students 20 years earlier.”85
This is now a serious issue for many students. In 2014, a report from Which University? noted that 32% of students felt that their courses were not providing value for money, a significant increase from 16% in a similar survey in 2006. The report also noted that students receiving relatively low levels of academic contact time were three times more likely to feel aggrieved about this issue.86 Post expansion, it could seem that the higher course fees rise, the fewer hours of contact students have with those paid by those rising fees to teach them.
University apologists insist that contact hours are a misleading guide to quality; they mention the importance of informal learning and refer to the quality of teaching hours rather than the quantity. These caveats are, frankly, meaningless in a system where the size and quality of the student cohort has altered so dramatically. Effective informal and peer–to–peer learning is less likely to occur when many students have been pressured into going to Uni because they felt everyone else was going and when there is a very wide range of abilities amongst students. Moreover, huge courses with large cohorts of international students tend towards fragmentation along nationality and language lines preventing, rather than encouraging, inte
gration. Equally, it is hard to see how academics teaching seminars the size of school classes can possibly provide a better quality of teaching than they would have done in seminars with half a dozen students prior to expansion.
The reality of expansion is that bigger means worse. In 1976, the average student–to–teacher ratio was 8.6:1 By 2013/14 this had almost doubled to 17.1:1. In newer universities, with fewer staff and more students, it can be higher still.87 UK universities are also falling behind their international competitors on this important measure. The average student–to–teacher ratio at universities in the thirty member states of the Organisation for Economic Co–operation and Development was 15:1 in 2011.88
This ratio affects every interaction between students and academics. It increases the size of lectures and seminars and reduces the frequency and length of personal tutorials. Many students are now lucky to get two 15–minute slots with their personal tutor during an academic year. In 2011, the National Union of Students launched a campaign calling for universities to implement a minimum standard of every student seeing their personal tutor once a term:
“All students are entitled to a personal tutor and should meet them at least once a term; the National Union of Students said this week. The union also calls for students to have the right to change their tutor, for all staff to be given full training on the role, and for published ‘minimum requirements’ in the area.”89
The NUS charter asks that each student gets to meet their personal tutor at least six times during the course of their three–year degree. That the NUS offered the charter as ‘an aspiration’ underlines the fact that many universities currently fall below even this basic threshold. In 2006, the Guardian spoke to a final–year psychology student at the University of Manchester who stated that: “We never had one–on–one sessions with a lecturer. We didn’t have seminars until this year – it was just lectures and occasionally a lab class, with 90 students there. We are paying all this money in tuition fees and we have had no one–on–one contact.”90
A Which University? report from 2014 also showed major variations in academic contact time across universities. For example, despite paying the same fees for their psychology degrees, students at the University of Exeter received four hours of academic contact a week, whilst students at Durham University received ten. It is hard to square such variable contact hours with the identical fees charged by both universities – unless, of course, the psychology lecturers at Exeter are more than twice as good at teaching as those at Durham or their students are more than twice as intelligent as those at Durham.
Part of the problem, especially within research–intensive universities, is that increasing numbers of academic staff do little actual teaching. Instead, they are employed to generate more research funding for universities. Despite having minimal or no interaction with students, these academics are usually counted as teaching staff to improve apparent student/staff ratios. Clearly, reduced contact time leaves limited opportunity for students to build a relationship with academics in general and their personal tutor specifically. This is a key concern considering that personal tutors are usually the first port of call for a graduate job reference. By 2007, UK academics were complaining anonymously to the Times Higher Education Supplement about having to teach seminar groups of 35 students or more.91 In 2008, 71% of academics surveyed by the University and Colleges Union said that they had seen seminar sizes increase in their institutions over the previous decade.92
Sadly, the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) does not collect data on average seminar/class sizes. In 2008, Professor Bruce Charlton, then of Newcastle University, suggested why this might be the case: “I doubt that universities will publish class size data unless they are made to do so. University bosses probably feel too embarrassed to admit the real situation: nobody wants to be first above the parapet with shocking statistics.”93
Problems of scale aside, there is widespread evidence that many students are very unhappy with the quality of teaching they receive. The experience of this graduate was common to many of those interviewed for this book:
“The teaching was horrendous in both schools of the university. The academics were not really teachers. They didn’t have communication skills; they weren’t there to teach us, they weren’t good at teaching. Whatever I did to learn at university was done by myself; the teachers didn’t help in any way.” Finance and management graduate
In the UK there is no requirement for academics to undertake any teaching training – a much greater priority is placed on the link between research activity and teaching on the bemusing assumption that teaching is always improved by research. This somewhat dubious proposition often dies a cold and lonely death in overcrowded lecture halls and seminar rooms crammed full of bored, fretful students. A student submission to the House of Commons Select Committee in 2009 noted:
“In a lot of lectures, the entire year group are made to feel like an inconvenience. Complaints go unheard, student reps seem to be ignored even when the same complaints arise, and the bog–standard answer to most requests for help seems to be ‘You should know it already, so I won’t tell you.’ ….. if 10/20 students on a course of 80 (down from 130 in year 1) are all asking the same things, shouldn’t this set off alarm bells?”94
This apparent disinterest in how the student receives and understands material and in how well the teacher transmits knowledge reflects the core belief within UK universities that an undergraduate has to make sense of a subject for themselves through independent study. But as a result of the Great Expansion, we are now sending many students to universities who have neither the capacity nor the motivation for this type of independent study. To successfully widen the pool of students attending university, either teaching methods or the new students needed to adapt. This did not happen and a system designed for a smaller cohort of bright students, who were genuinely capable of independent study, was scaled up without adaptation or proportionate resources to accommodate a much larger but less able, more dependent cohort of students.
The problems this causes were picked up by several students in the House of Commons Select Committee report in 2009. This comment is typical: “...university lecturers seriously need to take lessons from school teachers on how to teach. They are clever […] but they are not skilled at conveying the message. They talk to us like we are fellow professionals who understand everything.”95
Whilst seminars traditionally allowed students to ask academics questions about the lecture material they either didn’t understand or slept through, they now rarely get this opportunity. Most seminar classes are taken by postgraduate students or researchers, rather than academics. These postgraduates are generally only a few years older than the students and unlikely to have either teaching or research qualifications:
“The seminar classes were predominantly held by research students who were not very old. They were not qualified to teach. ….” Economics graduate
The postgraduates are also increasingly likely to be part–time and/or from overseas, often lacking subject knowledge, time and sometimes even a basic command of English:
“We had foreign language research students doing English, who were taking on first–year seminars about the structure of the English language and they couldn’t speak it properly themselves.” English and cultural studies graduate
This is grim and tedious for the silent majority. It is desperately depressing for the motivated minority and, of course, the postgraduates themselves. This is the Great University Expansion in action – huge class sizes, inexperienced teachers and the majority of students exhibiting total disinterest:
“Often we would do presentations during seminars and you got the impression that was just the lecturer’s or PhD student’s way of avoiding having to do any preparation for the class themselves – it meant that many classes just felt unstructured.” English and philosophy graduate
A significant
number of individual submissions to the House of Commons Select Committee in 2009 painted a similar picture:
“...the worst offenders are the PhD students … employed to run lab sessions (in which they refuse to help), mark coursework (which is always carried out suspiciously quickly and inconsistently) and give lacklustre tutorial sessions (these involve a couple of half–baked PowerPoint slides and quickly deteriorate into having a chat).”96
Underworked and overpaying?
The reduction in hours spent teaching doesn’t tell the full story, however. We must also look at how today’s students are supposed to spend around half of their time – on self–directed learning. Research in 2007 by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) looked at the total workloads of UK students, including formal and informal learning. What they found was a growing variability for students studying the same courses at different universities:
“Students on medicine and dentistry courses might be working for anything between 29 and 45 hours a week, those studying biological sciences between 19 and 43 hours, while in history the difference ranged from between 17 and 18 to more than 32 hours depending on the university.”97
Follow–up research in 2009, 2012 and 2013 found similar variations in workloads between different universities in the same subject areas: “In historical and philosophical studies, the loads ranged from 39.5 hours in the most demanding institutions to just 14 hours in the least.”98
Graham Gibbs, former director of the Institute for the Advancement of University Learning at Oxford University, provided a commentary on the initial 2006 research, noting: “...a significant minority of UK students are enrolled full–time but studying part–time with their university receiving funding for full–time students”.99