A few weekends ago I gave vent to displeasure over the state of our universities, echoed by several commenters. In passing I made reference to the lack of concern for free speech among today's students, and linked to a chilling Speccie piece on this. It's part of that I want to pick up on now.
The new enthusiasm for censorship goes way beyond "no platform for ..." (fill in you favourite bogeymen here: in my day it was the South Africans, anyone associated with Barclays Bank or the Shah of Iran, etc etc) - which is bad enough, but in days of yore was at least robustly conducted, with skulls cracked and plentiful beers consumed afterwards. The pitched battle fought in St Aldates between the National Front and various leftist groupings remains fresh in the memory, in particular for the brave tactic of berseker lefty women deliberately hurling themselves under the boots of the NF phalanx in the manner of a loose forward trying to bring down a maul, to provide vivid photographic material for the next day's papers.
They don't make 'em like that any more. These days, it's everyone's right to feel 'safe'; and anyone who takes against anything they encounter is entitled to claim to be 'traumatised'. Naturally, no-one can be allowed to go round causing trauma. Take this example, admittedly from the USA (Brown University), where a 'safe space' was established in case anyone was being 'damaged' by what they heard during a formal debate about campus sexual assault that was taking place at the university. The 'space' was:
... intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. ... a rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs”
Or this, (hosted by the redoubtable prof Brian Leiter on his well-known Philosophy blog):
I'm sending this email anonymously since, nowadays, being linked to even the mild views that I wish to get your opinion on is grounds for being tossed in the dustbin of "bigotry" ... I recently read of a stranger's experience with a transsexual friend. Having no malicious intent whatsoever, this former individual casually addressed a group of friends, of which the latter person was a part, with the word "guys." His transsexual friend informed him that hearing the word "guys" "triggered" her, induced serious psychological distress, by way of a gender identity conflict that this word brought about ... the individual recounting this story was incessantly berated by victim-mongering identity politickers on Twitter, who suggested that he's an "evil bigot" with virtual unanimity
And finally, for a real belly-laugh
A student group at Mount Holyoke College has decided to cancel its annual performance of The Vagina Monologues, saying the play excludes the experiences of transgender women who don’t have a vagina
(Let's also note that it is by no means a US-only phenomenon: the bow-wave of this nonsense has already reached these shores. It seems to me that once this line of thinking takes hold, there's an element of competitive effort at work to find ever more bizarre applications.)
The right to live one's life in intellectual cotton wool - as Leiter puts it, the hypersensitivity of coddled narcissists.
Well. We don't need to be advocates for the Rugby Club being allowed to de-bag studious types in the front quad, to find this stuff depressing, and indeed sinister. To be "bombarded by viewpoints" is 90% of the point of going to university. Giving a cast-iron, knock-down, drop-dead refutation of the 'reasoning' behind labelling use of the word 'guys' as bigotry shouldn't tax a Year 12 schoolkid in a General Studies exam - though I suppose these days we may have to worry about that, too.
The potential for the 'must-feel-safe, therefore must-silence-my-oppressors' formulation to be coupled with (for example) the greenies' enthusiasm for stifling debate on climate change, makes this a political issue going beyond the more laughable manifestations within the self-indulgent studentry.
Conscription. And compulsory Rugger on Wednesday afternoons, with cold communal baths and singing after. That's the answer.
ND
Reports that British universities now award Firsts to 19% of undergraduates, and 2:1s to 70% (sic), do not inspire confidence in their quality control, still less represent a cause for rejoicing at standards of tertiary education. 70%!
What
Is
Going
On ??
Apparently, anyone graduating these days with a Desmond is no longer employable, so we are reduced to awarding a piece of paper that means no more than "(s)he didn't make so much of a nuisance of her/himself that we feel inclined to blight his/her life".
In my day ...
In my day, less than 10% went to university anyway. Now it's approaching 50% (bloody John Major, that was), what do we expect ?
The answer, of course, is that an undergraduate degree course is just the backdrop for a low-risk growing-up experience (of sorts) in much the same way as it is in America, where first degrees have long counted for almost nothing. Post-grad work is what matters: and indeed all the best UK establishments are mostly concerned these days with attracting the best researchers and post-grad students, ideally from overseas and paying top-dollar. (Or indeed some very dubious overseas post-grads, see the LSE Gadaffi scandal.)
Not only are undergraduates being allowed to twiddle their thumbs, they aren't even revolting, in the good old sense of getting noisy on behalf of free speech etc. This chilling piece from the Speccie would be enough to indicate the whole game should be wound up, were it not for the strong suspicion it is somewhat overstated.
Prima facie, there would be scope for a major clear-out here, except that one would need first to figure out the economics. Hundreds of thousands of kids are being suckered into borrowing tens of thousands of pounds, to support - what ? A major employer of middle-class pseudo-academics and adminstrators, that's what. NHS mk2, in other words. Tamper with that at your peril.
Oh, and of course loads of these kids (a) will never repay the loan anyway - so it's just a taxpayer funded, public-sector merry-go-round: (b) will, however, have learned at least one thing - a very dangerous blasé attitude to debt, the macro-outworkings of which won't be felt for a few years, but could be very bad indeed.
Gah !
ND
I am a non-exec at a small software co which licences specialist apps (as we must now call them - it used to be 'solutions'), almost exclusively to large UK industrials. The stories the sales people bring back from the front-line are generally of the "you can't believe how disorganised they are" type, but regrettably I can, having seen the inside of many a massive software installation cock-up. (Anyone who imagines these are the preserve of government departments is quite wrong, as we've discussed before.)
Anyhow, this week I learned of one that really adds to my general gloom on this wet holday weekend.
Company (household name firm, identities concealed to protect the *ahem* innocent) approaches us 4 months ago: "we are operating very inefficiently in one of our biggest cost centres & are worked off our feet using utterly hopeless old spreadsheets that no-one really knows how to maintain. We think your app could save us a lot of time and errors". "Correct. And our app will work on all your existing PCs and most smart-phones; it will replace your grotesque, clunking spreadsheets with something you can audit; we will set you up in half a day; no systems integrators are required; the training is 2 hours for a basic user, one day for in-depth knowledge for sysad; we maintain it remotely." (it is SaaS) "Great: can we buy a 3-month full trial licence?"
Last week, two months in, we call to find out how they are getting on & invite them to roll over into a permanent licence. "Oh, we've been too busy to use it. We haven't really looked at it since your guys left our office. Can we just pay for the final month and uninstall, please?"
What's the betting they have however mysteriously found time in that period for at least one departmental away-day in a nice hotel somewhere? If they get wiped out by some far-eastern competitor that actually knows what it is doing, I shan't be remotely surprised. Tough shit guys, but you have it coming.
ND
I credit the Grauniad with being the home of some very good writing. But their editorials and op-eds are frequently penned by people with a truly deficient grasp of the English language.
The following is a case in point: a piece of outright ignorance which is pretty shameful for a broadsheet newspaper with liberal and literary pretensions.
"The last paragraphs of the Mail's editorial manage to elide Karl Marx and the 'hammer and sickle' with Ed Miliband's stance"
'Elide' is a perfectly good English word, and it does not mean what this idiot thinks. For fun, I searched their website for other uses of 'elide', and at least 95% are equally wrong (and more than one writer is involved in this stupidity). I say 'at least': it could be more, but there are just a couple of instances where you can't be certain what they intend and they might just actually mean what the sentence says. Here are some more, all from the same bunch, all in the last few months.
"The narrative voice can elide with the young narrator..."
"The conversation tend (sic) not to simply be about governmental matters but frequently elide into discussions about ..."
"Grayling manages not only to elide criminality with stupidity, but also ..."
"Different periods elide to consistently potent and surprising effect"
"The rhetoric of public interest tends to become elided with the self-interest of ..."
(Hats off to Nicholas Lezard for a rare instance of correct usage.)
The malady is not difficult to diagnose. They are looking for a clever word for 'slide', or 'slide together', and 'elide' is just so tempting ... Pathetic, really. The best they could plead in defence is that they are using it as a kind of shorthand for 'elide the distinction between' - and that's pretty thin.
It's a nice example of its kind but by no means alone; and there's no defence in calling me an inflexible pedant who is unable to accept the evolution of language. Of course language evolves, and words subtly change their nuances over time, there are no end of examples. I might fairly have employed the word 'grotesque' in several of the sentences above, but its use today is quite different to that of 150 years ago.
A current case in point might be 'kudos'. Americans throw kudos around all over the place, clearly under the impression that it is a plural noun, where 'a kudo' is presumably thought to be what we might call a plaudit, or a brownie-point. Of course they are wrong (with a small 'w') about this but it's clear enough what is intended, it's pretty harmless, and a few decades from now it will be the new de facto meaning of the word.
But when clearly based on ignorance, Outright Wrong is Outright Wrong; and it can even be serious. Take 'failsafe'. This is a very important concept in engineering design, with handy metaphorical or analogical uses in other contexts. But it is clear that many idiot writers and broadcasters think it means 'foolproof' or 'impossible to fail'. Young engineers nowadays must presumably be carefully told of the real, rigorous meaning in their training, to ensure they aren't blithely misunderstanding it based on the careless usage they were brought up on.
Well-educated folk that C@W readers are, you will definitely have some favourites of your own, in all these categories: annoying, harmless and dangerous. Care to share them ..?
ND
Ok. Enough is enough. I've listened to your thoughts for quite a while now. I've watched you on Newsnight. I've heard you on the Today program and read about your views in the Independent.Now I want you to stop. Partly because you're sounding ridiculous. But mostly because I'm right and you're wrong.I'm talking about this mass media burble of a mix of the political /student/activist/opportunist/columnist/ twitter-chatter and disconnected opinion.Its all pervading. Whatever the subject there is this incoherent babble of argument that could be punctured in a moment if the whole thing was a proper discussion instead of a fight, purporting to be a serious discussion show.Whether its on Workfare. On 'The Cuts'. On Human rights. Salaries. Tax rates. Spending. Foreign aid. Interventions in other lands. Unions. Health Provision or 'capitalism'. Please...Be quiet. Shhh...Just STFU for a minute. Because I keep hearing the most ill informed, ill thought through, politically motivated, hysterical garbage pouring from the radio and TV speakers. So ..just zip it, Ok?Because there's no point to it all unless someone finally says A is right and B is wrong. Since the BBC can't by charter and Sky seem unwilling and no one trusts newspaper columnists anymore, it will have to be me.So..firstly. Mr Occupy. Lets do capitalism.
Seems only fair as its the title of the blog. Capitalists and work. Not something very much in evidence down at Finsbury Park. Mr Occupy.
Capitalism and all that. Its a terrible thing and is doing its evil to society Some people have more than other people and some people didn't do much to get a lot more than others. Some were given money and some got a bailout and yada, yada, yada. But if I can just point out this.That awful,uncaring, heartless society. What does it actually ask from you as an individual? Not very much. And what does it do for you? Quite a lot.The callous capitalist west is happy to house you if you want to be housed. It will educate for free from 3 -18 years. It will attend to your medical needs, cradle to grave, regardless of what you do to your own body. It agrees to protect you from hostile countries with a military and from hostile fellow citizens with a police force, whether or not you yourself are a criminal. If you catch on fire it will send someone round to put you out. It will have a justice system to ensure you are fairly treated and will provide a lawyer for you if you need one. The state doesn't care what religion you are. What you call yourself. What you wear or where you travel. The state will provide infrastructure every citizen may use regardless of how much taxation that individual has contributed to its development. Anyone may use terminal 5 or New Street station or the M25. . It will give you money every week and ask only that you sign for it once every month. More money if you're ill. Or if its cold. When you're sixty five or sixty eight it will give you more money if you have never saved or earned any any of your own. It won't even ask you what you're doing with the cash. It will let you spend it on cigarettes, booze, Cheesy Whatsits, gambling or an E Harmony subscription. The state doesn't care. It won't demand you serve in the military or a national service labour scheme. It doesn't even ask you to give blood or take part in medical experiments. Or sweep up the streets or even just sign an agreement that you promise only to say nice things about the government. And that's just a democratic government. Capitalism adds choice. Technology. Medical advances. Communications. Longevity. Energy. Transportation. Travel. Comfort.The whole of civilisation has been a struggle to secure enough food to eat and enough shelter to survive. Once mankind has those then life expectancy and general health and happiness increase. China, even after all their recent advances and wealth, is currently only at our 1948 standard of living levels in a direct comparison with the UK. Africa is not even in the 20th century.
That puts YOU, my camping friends, way ahead of 925 million Africans. Ahead of many of the 1 billion Indians. 143 million Russians and 81 million Egyptians might think that's a sweet deal.1.5 billion Chinese might ask if you have to have a child, as they do, to give you an income in old age. They might be amazed to learn that the state will pay you a sum for eighteen years if you have a child. It will provide birth facilities and free healthcare at any cost and pay for nursery care from 3 years of age. And the evil money grabbing employers will pay the mother a salary for 39 weeks and will keep their job open for her all that time in case she wants to have it back. The mum isn't even required to say whether she plans to return to work. The 112 million Mexicans might wonder if you HAVE to promise to vote for the president of the party to get all those benefits. They might be surprised to learn that you don't even have to vote at all. 46 million Colombians might wonder how long a person could stay on unemployment benefit, in a state paid for house. With their children educated and their council tax and national insurance paid for. They might be surprised to learn that there is no time limit.
76 million Iranians might wonder how restrictive all the state and religious laws are? Be a shock to find out that any sex, race, religion or dress code goes. And everyone, regardless of gender, is treated equally.So, Occupy and fellow travelers. Give it a rest. It isn't that bad. Even when the cuts really do take hold your cheque will still come. Your home or alternative bedsit accommodation will be available. Your milk vouchers will still be accepted.You won't be asked to do anything or even to justify your lifestyle.And of all the thousands of laws in the land probably only 'no smoking inside public places' and 'no camping in the street' really effect you at all. Oh, and maybe the one about our borders.Because if you really can't take this western, capitalist, neoclassical, oppressive Hell hole anymore its going to cost you £77.50, plus £4 for photos and 58p for a stamp for a passport to escape.Those fascist bastards!
