BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Shaping for Mediocrity
By Gibson Burrell, Ronald Hartz, David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley ‘and friends’
Published by Zer0 Books, 2024, rrp £7.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Over the last few decades, a growing ‘management culture’, hog-tied to neoliberalism and austerity programmes, has put education at all levels under assault. This is true from infant, junior, and secondary ‘academies’, through colleges of Further Education such as our local college (always at the bottom of the pile, it seems, especially adult provision), to universities. Much of this is money-driven, overseen by parachuted-in senior management whose job is less about education, students, pastoral support etc than about purse-strings.
A side effect of management culture under austerity has been staff cuts and pressure on faculties to appear to be competitive as compared to the so-called ‘top’ universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, or the Russell Group universities. This attempt to create ‘one-size-fits-all’ identikit and modular provision, with as little costly face-to-face student contact as possible, argue the authors of this book, may aim at ‘shaping for excellence’, but in fact shapes for mediocrity. Faculties that offer unique and interesting takes on a subject are deemed problematic when trying to look like a Russell Group top uni, so the very things core to good academic study are militated against.
A BLUEPRINT FOR SAVING OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM
The authors here were from Leicester University, and are victims of redundancy rounds, after a long battle to keep a unique syllabus from being watered down. Interestingly, they are from the School of Business, which had an international reputation for academic excellence. It is apparent from their experience that they were a more objective school than I thought could exist under the umbrella of ‘business management’, which may well have been relevant to their being targeted. They were part of a very militant union and took the fight against redundancies as far as they could, and that sorry tale is well told too. In fact, it is compulsory reading for anyone in a union, or who thinks things are well in worker-manager relations.
Most faculties targeted tend to be those regarded by the anti-liberal-arts Tory attack as ‘useless’ subjects, as well as ‘experts’ in general it seems. The experience of the school of business at Leicester is central to the book, but other faculties, such as Mediaeval Studies were targeted, and in other universities it has usually been ‘the arts’ that were and are targeted. Another example, driven by the science sections at Lancaster University, was the corporate attack on post-graduate studies in environmental philosophy. Lancaster had huge money pumped in by companies such as DuPont, and Monsanto and there was massive pressure, ultimately successful, to shut down sociology and philosophy that questioned their practices, in for example genetically modified crops, or their corporate capitalist ethos in general.
Addressing these issues is a huge task, and needs to be enacted by powerful forces. Most of those in a position to act are in fact and of course the perpetrators. Politically, the henchmen for neoliberal corporatism have been in government since at least 1979. Melissa Benn, daughter of Tony Benn, wrote a book I reviewed here, Life Lessons, which gave a blueprint for saving our education system. It to some degree was taken up in Labour’s manifesto in the two elections during Corbyn’s tenure as leader. The much complained about change to make private schools pay VAT on certain services, as other industries must, by denying, in effect, charitable status to them is a light-touch attack on them, Benn, and I, would simply abolish them. But the narrative is controlled by the posh middle-classes who run the newspapers, TV and radio, and have time to bang on about it all on social media. Polls show there is considerable support for the government’s policy, but the war on social democracy rages on, as seen more successfully in the assault of the policies on inheritance tax.
SPECTATORS OF OUR OWN CULTURAL SUICIDE
In 2016 on Sky News, Michael Gove expressed a very negative view of ‘experts’, claiming to be talking for ‘the British people’, the interviewer, Faisal Islam neatly summing Gove up as an ‘Oxbridge Trump’. The philistinism of his government was remarkable, and drove much of the attack on the academe. One chapter is especially illuminating and topical in relation to the role played by social media during their anti-redundancy campaigns and strike action. It is clear that power can buy time, so a highly professional and unremitting assault on those fighting redundancies and glossy pro-uni PR campaign was difficult to counter by those strapped for time with teaching, inspections, marking etc to do. Misinformation and lies repeated over and over is a huge issue on social media, and the mainstream media today: both owned by a small clique of overweeningly powerful billionaires.
Adam Steiner, in his book Silhouettes and Shadows sums things up tidily, although talking of TV not social media and the tabloids – ‘it doesn’t teach you anything, it simply accumulates images and sound bites to become the junk food of the mind. In watching, we enter into a contract, the more we see the more readily we accept to be nullified and battered in the contemporary backwash of culture. Our refusal to turn away commits us to the routine of the everyday atrocity, spectators of our own cultural suicide’. So long as your ‘breakfast news’ consists of GB News, the Daily Mail, and Trump and Elon Musk’s toxic tweets, we remain doomed to, at best, ‘mediocrity’, if not something far darker. But definitely not ‘success’.
Shaping For Mediocrity is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road TN34 1RE
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