Commenting elsewhere: grading and the purposes of education

Interesting conversation with Andrew Fisher and others at Crooked Timber.

In Defence of Higher Education

Excellent alternative white paper challenging the UK government's attempts to destroy the country's university system.

Principia Ethica & Professional Philosophy

G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, which was first published in 1903, has had an extraordinary influence on twentieth-century moral philosophy. One of its ideas - the naturalistic fallacy - provoked Stephenson, Ayer, and the other expressivists, who provoked the growth of metaethics into a vast and elaborate field of professional philosophical concern.

This review isn't about that field: I want instead to make some ideological or sociological remarks on Moore's project and legacy.

As I read it, Principia Ethica is an attempt to found an autonomous form of moral philosophy, immune to being absorbed by the sciences, especially biology (which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was bullish post-Darwin) and psychology (post-William James). This explains several odd features of the text and its reception: the extraordinary vitriol it directs against Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill - neither of whom could have cared less whether what they were doing counted as philosophy in Moore's idiosyncratic sense. Its firm assertion of distinctive, non-empirical methods for philosophy: intuition, self-evidence, and the method of absolute isolation. In person, as John Maynard Keynes records in his fascinating memoir 'My Early Beliefs', Moore's methods were expressed as pantomimes of extreme disbelief that anyone could possibly disagree with him. Finally, the cultish character of Moore's school at Cambridge, also described by Keynes.

Moore won: in the twentieth century, philosophy became professionalised in university philosophy departments, jealous of their distinctive subject-matter. Philosophers' research was funded on models borrowed from the sciences, along with that word, 'research': I work in philosophy by reading, thinking about, talking about, and writing it, but I'm not sure I do research. Philosophy's superstars were  the magicians of the abstract and technical - like metaethics - and their work appeared in obscure, overpriced professional journals; popularisers and amateurs were looked on with suspicion, however many books they sold. (There's a fair amount of exaggeration in this picture, I admit.)

Was this a good thing? Obviously I owe my living to it, so I'm not disinterested (I'm no superstar, but I've published in several of those overpriced journals). But with that caveat, I'm in two minds: on one hand, I think philosophy should be public and accessible. It's a shame that some of the smartest people in the field never talk outside it, not least because there's obvious public interest in the questions philosophers work on, and if the smart people don't publish for that public, they'll look elsewhere (to weak sauce like Alain de Botton, for example). On the other hand, the realistic alternative to professional philosophy right now is probably not a utopia of high-level public discourse; it's the replacement of philosophy with self-help (The Secret, for example), leavened with the occasional philosopher kept on staff by a wealthy patron: think of Thomas Hobbes's faintly embarrassing dedication of Leviathan to Francis Godolphin.

Mark Edmundson

on what students could and should be getting out of university.

Teaching Cross-Cultural Communication?

Tamsin Haigh, a student on the MA in the Idea of Toleration at York, has an interesting project called 'Teaching Cross-Cultural Communication: How Should Political Theory be taught in the 21st Century?'. She sent me (and I assume plenty of other people!) some questions about it; here they are, with my responses.


TH:
I am exploring the above question as part of a project involved in the construction of an alternative to the traditional undergraduate curriculum for political theory. The aim is to restructure the study of politicaltheory, in line with the current trend of 'internationalisation', in order to retain a place for this sort of exercise in today's academic context. I am writing to you, as a member of the PPR faculty, in the hope that you might be able to spare a few minutes to contribute your perspective on this issue.

- The current restructuring of higher education suggests that, in the future, students will demand more choice regarding the modules they study.

- Higher education is becoming internationalised. A global market has emerged, with an influx of international students and a demand for more internationalised subjects. In response to this, many traditional Politics degrees have moved towards international studies, with IR theory becoming part of the mainstream curriculum.

- There is a worry that the standard text-based approach to political theory, focusing on key thinkers from the Western canon of political thought, no longer addresses the needs of the modern community of political scientists. Like other areas of politics, it needs to broaden its scope.

- By internationalising the current approach, political theory will retain its place in the discipline as a vital mode of advancing cross-cultural communication and understanding.


SC:
1) You’re probably right that there will be more pressure from students to choose what modules to study in the future. This change is part of the wider transformation of universities towards a more commercial, ‘customer-focussed’ style. But I’m not sure that it implies demand for a more international political theory: some of the most successful courses I’ve taught – according to student feedback – have been very traditional close reading courses, in small groups, on canonical texts. My attempts to introduce non-canonical texts have been often resisted and resented by my students, many of whom have an instrumental, performative attitude to their studies. They know what to do with Mill’s On Liberty, they have a context and prior acquaintance, they understand (or think they understand) what’s expected of them. They’re quite unwilling to engage with the unfamiliar, because it’s too open-ended and risky.  I therefore think that increasing student power to influence course content is at least as likely to push in the direction of more conventional, canon-based study as it is to take us in the direction you suggest. 

[Later: I should have made two things clearer here: (1) that this is true only of some of my students; many are pleasingly independent; (2) that I don't blame the more instrumentalist students - they've been poorly served by A-levels, and in any case have good reasons for regarding a degree as a necessary passport to the lives they want, not as anything worth doing for its own sake].


2) Again, you’re right that higher education increasingly operates in a global market. But British Universities’ pursuit of international students is at least partly the product of a particular funding regime which incentivised, especially, efforts to recruit non-EU postgraduate students. That funding regime is being dismantled as we speak, and it’s very unclear what the effects of its replacement will be. It might, for example, shift recruitment efforts much more towards the most well-qualified of UK undergraduates (students with AAB or above at A-level), because there will no longer be a cap imposed on how many of them we can take, and each will be worth £9,000/year.


3) I and many other political theorists/philosophers are humanists deeply committed to the value of reading, interpreting, and arguing with great texts. We’ve invested a great deal in learning the skills involved in that kind of work, and in understanding particular texts through it. I teach John Stuart Mill, for example, because I’ve spent some years and effort becoming an expert on him, and I did so because I love both his work and the particular kind of investigation involved in understanding it. So I’m not sure that the changes you look forward to will be made easily, especially in an environment where we’ll be under student/customer pressure to teach more contact hours on more familiar material. When am I going to have the time to become an expert on Lao Tzu, for example? Would anyone take my course on him even if I did?


4) I’m not to be honest sure that political theory’s ‘place in the discipline’ is ‘advancing cross-cultural communication and understanding’. In the first place, which discipline? In the second, the obvious role of political theory – like any other academic discipline – is to expand our understanding of the world. If that fosters good things like cross-cultural communication, great, but it isn’t really my, or political theory’s, job.

Teaching focussed

This is the first advert I've seen for a lectureship which is explicitly described as 'teaching focussed', i.e. it's a 9-month post in which you shouldn't expect to get any writing done - and therefore shouldn't expect to get a better job next year.

I have no problem with there being academic jobs focussed on teaching out of scholarship, rather than on publishing original research; but there does need to be a career structure attached.

Public vs Private in Universities and Health Systems

Howard Hotson in the LRB argues that the success of world-class private US universities (Harvard etc.) isn't evidence that market tactics would improve UK universities. Although Harvard and the other Ivies do exceptionally well, the US university system as a whole does worse on average than the UK, is far more expensive, and maintains huge inequalities.

A parallel point can be made about markets in healthcare: the US system does exceptionally well at the top end of provision, but does no better than the NHS on average, costs a lot more, and maintains huge inequalities (see references below).

***

Some places to start on markets in healthcare, and especially the NHS:

• Ben Goldacre's summary of NHS reform
• The Commonwealth Fund's comparison of health care systems
• OECD comparative data
• Cost vs outcome analysis of the NHS vs the US health system, based on OECD data: (i) life expectancy; (ii) low infant birth weight
• US healthcare inequalities
• Civitas's summary of recent empirical work on the effects of internal competition in the NHS