Skorupski's Law

Some costs

Academics have always had wildly unrealistic evaluations of the impact of their work. Having deluded themselves that their intellectual contribution to humanity is indispensable, it is but a short step to renouncing all normal moral conventions in the desperate quest to ensure that the product of their cogitation prevails above the mass of common knowledge. Until recently this tendency was held in check by a kind of self-regulation among academics. One important facet of this self-regulation was a common agreement that all members of academic staff in university departments should contribute equally to teaching, administration and research unless there were very exceptional circumstances. However, a new breed of "managers" has removed this check — with extraordinarily damaging consequences.

My own immediate experiences at the University of St Andrews are as nothing when compared to the radical effect that the unrealistic ambitions of university managers are having on higher education as a whole. These are grubby days for universities, and a dark age for intellectual pursuit. There are two main strands involved, and both can be dated precisely to the proliferation of universities in recent years. The first strand is the managerial solution to the problem of funding — what might diplomatically be called the commoditisation of higher education or, more rudely, the making of "degrees for sale". The second strand is that the dominant ideology in universities today is to give by far the greatest priority to research ratings, with disastrous implications for teaching — and thus for the welfare of the majority of students.

The effects of making university degrees into "products" which are sold to "customers" are already being widely talked about and hardly need to be spelled out here. (I have provided a link to a small sample of recent reports which touch on the issues involved and invite readers to suggest further links.) There has been a near-universal lowering of standards in degrees at all levels to the point where some degree courses, or units within courses, have little or no intellectual merit at all. It is particularly worrying that external examiners, who are there to defend standards, are instead frequently complicit in the lowering of standards.

With regard to degrees where independent research is a main or sole component, very poor quality theses and dissertations are increasingly being hurried through and/or massaged in order to meet targets that managers have set. I have known cases where a supervisor has so extensively rewritten the thesis of an incompetent research student that the final product could not be said to be the student's own work in any meaningful sense. And yet these students have been awarded research degrees, including the highest degree of PhD — a passport to further research funding and teaching in universities.

In taught degrees, both undergraduate and postgraduate, there is great pressure on academics to ensure that as few students as possible now fail. Higher failure rates might persuade fee-paying students (particularly foreign and postgraduate students whose fees are considerably higher) to apply to another university. What increasingly counts is the number of students on the books, not the ability of those students. During the last twelve years I have often come across students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, who simply did not have the capacity to do the courses they were registered for. These students should never have been admitted but clearly were there for the sole reason of boosting income.

The effect of prioritising research ratings is not, as managers would generally like to have us believe, an improvement in research output. On the contrary, it encourages poor research because academics are pushed to publish virtually anything to meet targets. Regrettably, more and more academics are capitulating to this pressure in an extraordinarily supine manner. In my own subject of social/cultural anthropology this has led to such a corruption of the discipline that in certain quarters it lacks any rigour worth speaking of. One variant of this is a phenomenon that I have labelled "Rapportage".

University managers often have no understanding of, or sympathy for, the concept of academic integrity. They care only for "results" and normally can only understand results in a quantitative sense. A potential Kant or Shakespeare or Einstein is, from a managerial perspective, a fool if he does not put out the number of publications the managers demand in any given period. What is more worrying is that so many academics are complicit in this chimeric pursuit. It may only be a minority who consciously toady to those who control their promotion prospects, or who cavalierly forfeit the integrity of their subject. It may be that the remainder simply go along with the flow because they fear for their position within their own university — and ultimately for their livelihood — if they do not. The result, however, is that an increasingly large number of academics are waging a kind of silent, conspiratorial war on the intellectual legacy they inherited from previous generations.

It is not only research that is suffering. In search of ever "better" — which frequently means "ever more unrealistic" — ratings, an alarming number of university managers and complicitous academics believe that everything else can be compromised or sacrificed. Apart from the deleterious effects on research, there are other very harmful consequences brought about by the ideology of "ratings über alles". They include:

• contempt on the part of many managers and complicit academics for the welfare of those academics who take teaching seriously and who look out for the general well-being of students. This contempt easily slides into abusive behaviour towards those who do not play the research ratings game, leading to the breakdown of physical and mental health and the abandonment of careers.

• neglect of teaching and administrative responsibilities by many university academics to the point where normal functioning of departments is threatened on a daily basis — and students (on taught degree courses particularly, though often research students too) are regarded as an irritation, however great their fees, or however great the personal investment they have made in their studies.

• a system of financial rewards such that senior managers and complicit academics who pander to the ideology of managerial "solutions" are typically promoted faster and paid higher salaries than academics who are taking on significantly greater responsibility to make their university function as a whole.

All of these various trends derive from wildly unrealistic ambitions on the part of competitive managers whose only concern is to be "better" than other institutions, whatever the cost. The result is a corruption of university life and a destruction of human potential to a degree that was unimaginable as recently as twenty years ago.

The author

**********

Skorupski's Law: "The more vain one's ambition, the more redundant one's grasp of morality"