What Richard was 'grumping' about on the other thread was his increased workload. Well, amongst other things. And why should he have been given one? Because the economics of his department dictates that it can't afford to have others (PG students, let's say) doing the teaching instead - teaching that they desperately need to do if they want the relevant lines on their CV for a teaching job themselves. It's the same everywhere. Universities that can't demonstrate a high level of research income (which is most of them) will have to teach more to pay their way, which means that those they employ will have to do so individually too. Two-tierism is round the corner (if it hasn't de facto already arrived).

Academics moan endlessly about their teaching committments - but that is on the whole at least part of why they are employed. And the workload and hours required in lots of non-academic private sector jobs are much worse (I know no academic who's had to keep the insane hours as did my fiancee when she was working as a lawyer on call - one reason she moved to a different type of legal job).

O-s, you should see from the posts, if you do other than cherry-picking bits out of context, that the view of certain institutionalised modes of scholarship are far from uncritical. But if you're just spoiling for a fight, I'm not prepared to debate further - do you have any actual thoughts on how else things might be done that would be better?

I do see that. But I suspected that the types of 'theory' Ollie was objecting to might have been other than the musicological type you gave as examples, and I was trying to draw him out on that a bit because it's interesting to me. (I suspect I do have a genuinely different perspective from Ollie on this issue and I'd be interested in discussing it, rather than just sitting back and watching old arguments get re-rehearsed ...)

That would indeed be interesting. Whilst somewhat instinctively at odds with those points of view which dismiss anything that might be termed 'theory' out of hand, the concept and its own enactments certainly have their own limitations. 'Pure' and 'Applied' maths are not absolutist terms, but their use to delineate broad subsections of the discipline are not merely arbitrary. Same with history and historiography. Some methodological self-reflexivity is healthy for any discipline.

It should be made clear that the fact that universities cannot "demonstrate a high level of research income" in no way means that they cannot demonstrate a high level of research productivity and output. For those of us now (thankfully) retired from this "system" it is only possible to look back nostalgically to the late-70s and early-80s. The irony is, of course, that these were the good old days when research and research funding were healthy, but also the very time when (thanks to Thatcherism) the "wheels of doom" were carefully set in motion. Ever since then successive governments have actively and enthusiastically wasted public money to the tune of very many millions of pounds each year merely inventing ever-new and more sophisticated methods of "measuring" educational activity in terms of "value for money".

The inevitable consequence is that we now have a Higher Education system totally bushwhacked by and riddled with the world of "business speak". We are no longer asked to describe the educational experiences of our students in terms of progress and refinement; this is because our paymasters, being interested only in the "value for money" syndrome, require us to explain the progress of "the system" rather than that of the students. Consequently we have to learn a peculiar jargon in which improvement is now to be described  as "added value". That which has been "added" is no longer merely a passive "better understanding" on the part of students and scholars, but rather a "systemic transmogrification" through which league tables can be used to demonstrate exactly HOW the spending of X million pounds on initiative Y has enhanced the "system". Where failure in this regard is "identified" within the system the financial penalties can be severe.

But the substantive point in this posting concerns university research and its pathetic public funding. Quite apart from the 5-yearly farce of the RAE - whereby seemingly endless time, energy and public money is simply wasted instead of being given directly to support research - the reality is that such funding will only ever decrease in any case! So unless an institution actually increases the quality and quantity of its research it will be unable even to maintain its current puny level of funding. The only way in which an institution can survive under these conditions is to optimise its only other source of funding: ever greater numbers of fee-paying students (especially those from overseas). Now it does not take a genius to realise that this means that full-time university academics will be increasingly required, year by year, to devote more and more of their time to the teaching of these increasing numbers of students. Furthermore, under the carrot of increasing numbers of overseas students (providing much higher fees), greater and greater amounts of teaching time will have to be devoted to basic language and other "remedial" teaching pursuits.

Now what effect one asks will this have upon research productivity? The whole thing is simply a con. As this systemic cancer spreads further throughout the system, we can see the same kind of paralysis that has befallen the NHS: greater funding for, and provision of ADMINISTRATION instead of qualified academic/medical practitioners. When I started my teaching career my institution had never heard of things like:

Director of Quality Affairs
Pro-Warden (Academic)
Pro-Warden (Research and Development)
Pro-Warden (Students)
Senior Pro-Warden
Deputy Director of Finance (Estates)
Deputy Director of Finance (Business Sponsorship)
Deputy Director of Finance (Research Funding)

Each of these runs an entire Office of administrators, turning out endless pages of documents all full of the now-familiar business speak, and holding interminable and boring "meetings" that occupy and waste academic time that not only confiscates the opportunity for research but also (ironically) teaching. Nobody can show any educational initiative without "permission" from endless committees and "officials" (often not even appointed as academics). It is all one continuous and horrific social experiment that gains its momentum only by slowing down and gradually strangling every last breath of freshness from what might otherwise have continued to be a vibrant educational environment.

Martle speaks of two-tierism, but I worry that this does not express the critical severity that is already present! Two-tierism implies (correctly) the impending arrival of universities that divide into "research" and "teaching" factions (with consequent implications for respective funding levels). BUT...it comes much closer to home (and is already here!): two-tierism also affects single institutions! Because of external funding and administrative pressures some staff are already finding themselves on "teaching only" contracts, while others who are asked to undertake far less teaching can continue to enjoy researching and publishing their papers and books. This utterly pernicious enforced two-tierism is surely the final nail in the coffin of self-esteem and morale as they impinge upon a collection of colleagues who would normally be expected to work together harmoniously.

Baz

The kneejerk antipathy that I've encountered from you towards all sorts of potential issues - including the relativisation of 'classical' music in higher education, the idea that all sorts of political ideologies might somehow be sedimented within musical language, the idea that music may not be immune from the sort of ideologies that overtook it between 1933-1945 in Germany, and these ideologies might have both roots in earlier periods and their associated aesthetics, and also not have completely disappeared in 1945, the idea that composers' self-presentations in terms of their life, work, place in society, or whatever, might benefit from being taken at other than face value, the idea that the wishes of today's students in terms of higher education, however much they may be anathema to an earlier ethos, need at least to be considered, and much more, all things that have been extensively explored in various quarters - might itself be a major reason why a serious debate on these issues is unlikely here. I can think of another board where it could happen - one where there are a wide plurality of views, sometimes quite strongly opposed to one another, but where there have been no serious personalised flare-ups since one member left - and it may be better to take this debate over there. These debates do exist in academia much of the time, with much stronger opinions offered than seem to be permissible according to the boundaries I think you would like to impose.

University bureaucracy is certainly a major burden that affects most of those who work in academia. And I worry about the 'commercialisation of universities' as much as anyone else. But in the face of an expansion of higher education (which, all things told, I do see as a positive thing) and the concomitant entrance into higher education of many types of students quite different from those who had previously inhabited it, many of whom see the purpose of higher education much more in terms of their own future commercial prospects, as well as the near-impossibility of a larger amount of funding for higher education such as would require higher taxation (which no party would dare advocate because they know the electorate would instantly reject it), I'm a bit at a loss to know concrete alternatives, which is not of course to say that they don't exist. But I reckon it would be a more fruitful debate if some such things could at least be posited. 'Measuring' the achievements of higher education is hardly a very exalted business, but when there are limited funds to go around, and different institutions would all like to have a certain amount of these, can this process be avoided?

Apropos of this question, if not directly answering it, I'd like to go back to the hypothetical raised on a different thread, to wit, why students should be taught about Monteverdi rather than Madonna.

Let's assume that the richness of Monteverdi's music and the paucity of Madonna's is not a sufficient argument. Perhaps what is rich about her music is not of interest to most academics because their biases are set up all wrong.

The human brain is an indispensable storage medium for knowledge. Not the most permanent one, like paper, but indispensable because it evaluates information and can transform know-what knowledge into know-why or postulate-why knowledge. Music history, like any history, is a know-what knowledge, the kind of knowledge that tends to decay, unlike know-how knowledge, which will not decay as long as it is relevant. Know-what knowledge also tends to calcify, if it is simply recorded on paper and set adrift in some data repository such as a book. The best way to apply brain power to the storage of know-what knowledge is to press the brains of students into the service of processing this knowledge. They must perform this duty in order to get their degrees. If they forget almost everything that their brain is exposed to, then that is a calculable loss, as someone else will remember the part that they forget. Of course, the most important or most notable or most memorable parts will be stored by the largest number of brains, and that is fine.

They do not learn history because it furthers their career. They learn it because it is their duty as an educated person in their field to take in that learning long enough to take their exams. If they forget it thereafter, then of course that is unfortunate, but the university as curator of this knowledge cannot do more than it is already doing, i.e., cannot follow those students home and continue to lecture to them. A university is not an education facility like a primary school. It is a knowledge curation facility that uses student brains for storage.

If students really ONLY want to learn what will further their careers directly, then they wouldn't have to go to university. The industry they are seeking to enter would privately finance vocational schools for them, and they'd go to those schools instead of universities. Let them do that if they want to. Their degree means more, though, if they go to university; and employers in most industries have sufficient foresight to hire university students instead of vocational-school students because they understand that students who have the foresight to study things they don't think they'll immediately need, and have the Sitzfleisch to study those things earnestly enough to get good marks, will be better (albeit more expensive) employees.

That's the theory anyway. The market will ultimately decide whether universities are a worthwhile 'business model,' and in my estimation universities should simply continue being curators of knowledge and be allowed to judge internally rather than democratically what knowledge is worth keeping and what is worth discarding. New generations of academics can argue for what they consider worthwhile, and the university needs to be structured in such a way that it is forced to listen to these young upstarts, even if they prefer Madonna to Monteverdi as teaching material. That of course is hard to implement, but that is indeed the problem that needs solving, not the purported market-unresponsiveness or elitism of the university itself.

I also think everyone on this thread might enjoy the remarks on the topic by the late Richard Rorty, to be found here. I'm not sure I agree with every ounce of what he says, nor do I wholeheartedly endorse him as a philosopher (far from it!!), but I do think it's an interesting contribution. Apologies if I've posted it before.