More will mean worse....managers
Some campus novels. And why are the managerial tools the same when the system grows as when it contracts?
I have had reason, this week, to re-read some campus novels that I vaguely recall enjoying around 15 years ago, when I was writing my PhD dissertation on universities. To be fair, I am reading them through what is certainly the worst illness in my memory and maybe that is clouding the experience (in my few lucid moments between fevers and worse I can’t stop myself coming to type this newsletter, that’s how cranky they’re making me).
But. Well. While these acclaimed novels are necessary to the task that has been rapidly inserted into my *spare* time {HAHAHAHAHA], they really kinda suck.
I’m talking about Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954) and David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy (1970s-80s) - though the latter falls past the subscriber line.
Image: Lucky Jim cover.
Lucky Jim is set on a not-Oxbridge campus. Jim is this sorta Basil Fawlty type character but nowhere near as funny. He teaches history, but thinks the whole apparatus is…well kinda phony in a Holden Caulfield kind of way. This seems to have been a thing in the 1950s. Jim doesn’t use the word phoney, he just pulls a lot of faces to make his disdain for phoniness clear.
Image: Basil Fawlty
Jim is publishing an article about the ‘Economic Influence of the Development of Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450-1485’ and we are supposed to find this as stupid a topic as Jim does. He’s having trouble getting a journal to publish it, but needs to, in order to secure his position. Eventually it is accepted, but by a fraudulent professor and his dodgy journal - until, in the end, he sees it plagiarised under another name, in another journal. What’s unrealistic about that though, is that it is printed and available in the college lounge so quickly. Or else maybe publication schedules were faster in the 1950s?
Jim’s key phony task, however, is a public lecture on Merrie England, which he drafts to say what he knows his professor wants: Merrie England was great, we should strive to return to it. In the end, however, Jim gets drunk, pulls faces, mimics everyone and tells them Merrie England ‘was about the most un-Merrie period in our history’.
Jim doesn’t keep his job, which is his salvation, in fact. Jim represents the ‘new’ types being recruited to the rapidly growing university system after 1945. In his 1992 introduction to Lucky Jim, David Lodge points out that other jobs that would have suited people like Jim, say, in the civil service, were still controlled by British public school fellas, and so university teaching was one of the few things open to Jim-like characters - though, this implies, the continued influence of Oxbridge meant it did not suit him. And he did not suit it.
‘More will mean worse’
‘More will mean worse’, Kingsley Amis famously said nearly two decades later when universities were about to expand again. Lucky Jim already said it, in a couple of different ways. One was an explicit articulation of the logic of expansion. One of Jim’s colleagues says:
If we institute an entrance exam to keep out the ones who can’t read or write, the entry goes down by half, and half of us lose our jobs. And then the other demand: “We want two hundred teachers this year and we mean to have them.” All right, we’ll lower the pass mark to twenty per cent and give you the quantity you want, but for God’s sake don’t start complaining in two years’ time that your schools are full of teachers who could pass the General Certificate themselves, let alone teach anyone else to pass it.
The other ‘worse’, of course, is Jim himself. Sure, the Oxbridge vibe is phony, but even so, Jim doesn’t belong and so is ‘saved’ by leaving.
There is nothing here in what we might hope, and have sometimes even seen, in the ways new students enter university and knowledge expands, innovative approaches and methods emerge and new ideas become possible. Not to mention the expansion of opportunity for a wider body of students. Nor the possibility for campus cultures to change, become and include.
Image: Kingsley Amis. Source, wikipedia.
More did mean worse - worse managers
The sort of growth that Kingsley Amis was worried about was minuscule compared to what we have seen in recent decades: between 2000 and 2020, the number of university students worldwide doubled. It is tempting to concede that Amis may have been right, isn’t it? For students go to university and fail to make friends, they sit in classes so large that if one was a little intimidated it is easy to stay quiet. This is no environment in which to really engage, let alone belong, especially if the whole thing is new to you and your family. And it is certainly no way to enable all those new people to bring their life experiences and perspectives to expand knowledge, or build something bigger, transform the world by new forms of inclusion in the making of knowledge.
But Amis was wrong. It was not more students that made things worse. They hardly ever entered an environment where they really had a chance for the experience to be what, frankly, in other hands, it could have been. Throughout the whole period, staff, academic and professional, were told to tighten costs, be more productive, make classes bigger, streamline assessment, reduce student subject choices, lots and lots of ‘tolerable sub-optimisation’. Austerity, over and over, in this period of the fastest, biggest growth in university enrolment the world had ever seen.
Many are now in a state of contraction. Austerity kinda makes sense then, right? Fewer students, less income, sack some staff. All that stuff.
But hang on…what the hell happened to the massive windfall of *doubling* student enrolment in twenty years?
If I could be bothered, I’d run through all the university annual reports to make a decent list, but we know, don’t we? Buildings. Executive salaries. Crazy IT schemes that were supposed to produce productivity but just made some IT innovator rich. A whole lot of - often ridiculous - marketing gimmicks. In the midst of massive, massive growth.
F*cking (managerial) capitalism.
While staff and students carried the cost of all that austerity, they now also carry the cost of contraction. Not the buildings, not the executive salaries, managerial perks, or frivolous IT projects that benefited from the windfall (I think…if someone else wants to have a proper look, I’d love to see some figures). Certainly not the gimmicky sales folk, who are surely needed more than ever.
About a year ago Ryan Weber at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency published a How to Reverse our Declining History Major that circulated again this week and is eerily familiar. Courses with titles that managers think will appeal to ‘the kids’. Gimmicky sales ideas that do absolutely nothing to fulfil the core mission of teaching. Shift staff time from actual engagement with students to engagement with…oh, I dunno, maybe that new IT system we paid squillions for?
Two Tools: Austerity and Sales Gimmicks
Oh look, the same tools they used in the time of expansion are also the right ones to use in a slowdown.
How can they expect anyone to take them seriously?
Is there nobody - no grown ups - running these universities who are actually committed to what they are for, what makes them good, what produces excellent, innovative knowledge, expands the world we live in, makes it better?
I’ll say it again. F*cking (managerial) capitalism.
Histories of Capitalism - how is it changing Australian history?
On 3 April, Sophie Loy Wilson and I will speak at the State Library of New South Wales about Histories of Capitalism - lots has happened since we gave a paper in 2015.
With a thousand thanks to Mike Beggs (Sydney political economy) for chairing the session and Jesse Adams Stein (UTS) for organising the History Now! seminar and the State Library of NSW for hosting - and for being just always fabulous.
Register here if you want to come!
Oh, and also those books are F*cking Sexist
One of the supposedly important things about Lucky Jim is that there is a woman, Margaret, who is Senior Lecturer, higher up than Jim. There are women! At university! OMG. I mean this really would be exciting, except Amis only has three kinds of women:
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