degrees ‘r’ us

Stefan Collini on the Browne report in the LRB:

he wants to see a system in which the universities are providers of services, students are the (rational) consumers of those services, and the state plays the role of the regulator. His premise is that ‘students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education.’

Browne appears to believe that the only relevant measure of teaching quality is ‘student satisfaction’. [...] I would hope the students I teach come away with certain kinds of dissatisfaction (including with themselves: a ‘satisfied’ student is nigh-on ineducable), and it matters more that they carry on wondering about the source of that dissatisfaction than whether they ‘liked’ the course or not.

It may be that the most appropriate way to decide whether the atmosphere in the student bar is right is by what students say when asked in a questionnaire whether they ‘like’ it or not. But this is obviously not the best way to decide whether a philosophy degree should have a compulsory course on Kant. The philosophy department might hope that, some time after graduation, most of its former students would come to see the wisdom of this requirement, but ‘student satisfaction’ is not what is at issue here. That this recognition is retrospective tells us something important about education: individuals often need to be told by someone who knows that a particular line of study is worth pursuing whether at the time they want to or not.

Overwhelmingly, the general statements announce, with startling confidence, the real point of higher education: ‘Higher education matters because it drives innovation and economic transformation. Higher education helps to produce economic growth, which in turn contributes to national prosperity.’ [...]  On graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to move from one job to the next.’ This report displays no real interest in universities as places of education; they are conceived of simply as engines of economic prosperity and as agencies for equipping future employees to earn higher salaries.

The truth is, of course, that universities are not businesses and they do not operate in a market (which is not to say that they do not need to be financially well run and to make good use of their, at present largely public, resources).

I Capture the Castle (1948)

This book was lent to me by a good friend of my father’s – my favourite, of all his friends. I stayed with him and his wife in December 2007 while on a Bodleian raid, in their wonderful house with lots of windows. Terrence died a few weeks ago and I pulled Dodie Smith off the shelf to take with me to Scotland on holiday.

I found it creeping up on me, a quietly engaging read, and it makes writing about power in a human way look deceptively simple. The style appears straightforward but the games played with literary modernism are quite mischievous. I did like the way it was organised into notebooks, and how it made me realise it was structured around the physical act of writing, with its rhythms, physical textures and hiatuses.

I wonder whether Jeannette Winterson was influenced at all by it when she wrote Oranges – the ‘consciously naive’ refrain could apply to her construction of the character Jeanette. Perhaps it was said of DS – or of her own writing – and she had to write the novel to be avenged.

I didn’t think it said anything to me in particular about my own writing (but then I get that more from poetry, non-fiction and theory). But there was one paragraph towards the end. Simon is trying to help Cassandra get on terms with her father’s writings:

‘I think that one of the things your father’s after is to stimulate that potential creativeness – to make those who study his work share in its actual creation. Of course, he sees creation as discovery. I mean, everything is already created, by the first cause – call it God, if you like; everything is already there to be found.’

This definitely strikes a chord – firstly the question of finding over creating, which we try to teach on the poetry side of the writing course – we have to struggle against received notions of creative genius, but sometimes the students really do get it and find some splendid things out of the language and sources around them. But also the idea that writing or anything creative can – if it chooses – offer readers and audiences a share in creation. That’s definitely the key to creative practice as research, for me.

Impractical books

Got to love a publisher who makes a point out of selling ‘impractical books’. Very thoughtfully, one of the many students in support of my proposal for delivering the entire English & Writing curriculum through vampire, zombie and werewolf texts has just alerted me to the Quirk Books rewrite of Pride and Prejudice.

Personal literary history

This week’s set task for the new Creative Writing MA students is to write a one-page, informal personal literary history. I don’t like setting tasks I haven’t done myself, and it’s a nice excuse to reflect on books much loved (and a little hated).

For many years I thought I was going to grow up to become Bertie Wooster. It gradually dawned on me that this was not the case during a year of working as a waitress and home help after finishing my BA. I needed a break from study, to be sure that an MA was the right thing and not an automatic next step. Instead of throwing bridge rolls at game pies down at The Drones, or extricating myself from being engaged to improving young ladies, I was working casual bar shifts until 3am and living in Longsight in a house with no heating and a broken bathroom window. At secondary school I would religiously skive PE and sit in the library reading P.G. Wodehouse, and have been unable to entirely relinquish his effect on forming my expectations of the world.

The earliest stories I remember are Tiger Voyage and The Butterfly Ball. My Dad would read the first of these to me and my brother on a regular basis. There’s a close escape from a volcano explosion at which point the duvet would inevitably erupt to resounding shrieks. It’s a story about the amazing adventures of a Tiger gentleman and his son, beneath whose sedate and ordinary appearance there lie brushes with death and various exotic encounters. Picking the book up again recently I noticed that it was riddled with assumptions about class and race and was torn between wanting to deconstruct the tale and wishing away my years of politically correct education.

The Butterfly Ball is a series of songs or poems that I used to listen to over and over again, on a cassette tape with Michael Horden and Judi Dench doing many of the voices. The Ball itself hardly features – we meet various characters who for one reason or another haven’t been invited or miss the occasion due to distractions or mishaps. The music is exquisitely cheesy in that way that only children’s entertainment from the 1970s can be.

Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room made a huge impression on me. Even though the character Myra was living in quite a different situation – suburban America as compared to an East Anglian village – there was something hugely compelling about her situation against the world. Perhaps it was because she had no original sense of shame. Years later I met Christy Ann Conlin and read her novel Heave, which in terms of a female character’s struggle against society’s expectations is an equivalent of The Women’s Room for a later generation, confronting addiction and mental illness. Heave gave me churning knots in my stomach. It is one of the best and bravest books I have ever read.

I spent a year reading Camus and Sartre on my own instead of French lessons, at the age of 15-16, and nearly went mad. There was something irresistible about the thought processes of Antoine Roquentin in particular, and the sense of the physical world on the verge of erupting into seething chaos and hostility was too infectious.

At sixth form, in the first year of A-level English, we were set Ulysses and I still have my first copy with BOLLOCKS scrawled over the opening page of episode three, tearing though the paper. It was unbearably frustrating being asked to read something that I couldn’t begin to make sense of. But the idea that the ordinary everyday world is waiting for us to recognise it as art, as orchestrated accident, has haunted me ever since. That moment when pieces of paper scuttle around like leaves and the advertising letter men walk past often comes to mind in the middle of a city, with a feeling of excitement in the knowledge that art can be found as much as made.

Perhaps the true inheritors of modernism are today’s graphic novels. The Filth by Grant Morrison and Gary Erskine is marvellous, grotesque, hilarious and disturbing. Don’t read it!

Back to reality

In three months my luxurious sabbatical year will come to an end and I’ll be returning to my post at Anglia Ruskin University, teaching English Literature and Creative Writing.

This blog is a way for me to communicate with students and colleagues in an informal way about my interests in poetry, science and imagination. It’s also a collecting box for ideas, contacts and resources that I’d like to pursue.