I’m told this is supposed to be terrifying. Frankly, it isn’t all that surprising–although, for anyone who thought they got into acedemia to avoid the cutthroat trials and tribulations of law or business, it’ll be a bit of an eyebrow raiser.

Universities are facing a new funding crisis with looming public spending cuts and intense competition from overseas, according to the man employed by the government to allocate money to higher education in England.

Sir Alan Langlands, head of the university funding council and a former chief executive of the NHS, warned that the UK risks losing its international reputation for higher education as other countries pump cash into universities to try to train people out of the recession.

It comes after research by the lecturer’s union this week suggested that universities are already making widespread job cuts in anticipation of a decrease in public funding. In the last year 1,318 academics have been laid off and a further 5,097 are threatened, it found. Cardiff University has lost 50 jobs, City 65 and Salford 150 through voluntary and compulsory redundancies.

]]> http://www.heyzeitgeist.com/?feed=rss2&p=390 0 http://www.heyzeitgeist.com/?p=386 http://www.heyzeitgeist.com/?p=386#comments Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:15:00 +0000 Zeitgeist http://www.heyzeitgeist.com/?p=386 From a recent item on the website of the British Conservative Party:

Universities have been forced to spend thousands of pounds helping students make ends meet as a direct result of the collapse of the Government’s system of student finance.

…

Willetts said the Government “still refuses to take responsibility” for the situation. “Ministers urgently need to get a grip on the crisis so that students are not forced to drop out and those that start university in January get their money on time”, he added.

Just thought it would be fun to note that, while the ‘moderate’ Republican government of California finds itself dismantling one of the best public university systems in the world, the other best public university system is getting support for student funding, from putatively conservative politicians. In other words, while one set of conservative politicians are willing to eviscerate the entire system, the other is looking to prevent tuition increases in a way that would be hard to get American or even Canadian liberals to approach seriously.

Just nice to be reminded what counts as conservatism south of the border–and everywhere else.

It’s hard to say anything new about this–it’s a generally tragic event, and, along with budget cuts, stands to do permanent damage to the system. Top-tier professors are, I gather, already grumbling about moving on.

I would indicate only that at least this is getting attention. The comparably slower decline of Canadian public universities into massive classes, lower standards, and almost no face time between professors and undergrads (an important thing, some bizarre arguments notwithstanding), is pretty dead as a public issue here. Yes, student walk out once a year (about two weeks ago, I think), and that probably gets some prefunctory press, but that’s about it.

If you set out to kill the system slow enough, in other words, no one sees you coming.

While the chance to put their work online for public viewing was enthusiastically endorsed by students in the sciences, there were more concerns from the humanities students, said Richard Roberts, a history professor who chairs the university’s committee on graduate studies.

“Science students are used to having their papers published quickly as journal articles,” he said. “But the ‘tenure book’ is very important in the humanities, and students were worried that making their work instantly accessible might affect publishers’ decisions later on.”

The problem was solved by allowing the graduate students to embargo their work for up to five years, to give them time to get it published. They also will be allowed to decide whether to release either 20 or 100 percent of their dissertation to Google.

I have nothing especially to add to this–sounds like a good solution to me–but I wonder if this doesn’t say something about the limits of how we do things in the social sciences. I would have thought that an ideal solution would be to simply rely less on one single-author book publication as a measure of academic success. But, like most people, I have nothing especially in the way of a better idea.

What struck me as odder, though, was this:

Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Penn’s Center for Bioethics, said there was a difference in degree, if not in kind, between ghostwriting and plagiarism. Faculty members who sign their names to ghostwritten papers for research credit usually have some agreement with the paper, he said, even if, improperly, they did not write it. Students who plagiarize a paper may know nothing about the subject.

Now, it seems to me that plagiarism at the undergraduate level is taken to include quite a bit more than just handing in a paper someone else wrote. Where I’m from, a few missing quotation marks, forgotten footnotes, and the like, can get an undergrad in just as much hot water.

So I thought I’d look into it. I googled ‘plagiarism policy’, and the first US school to come up was Rutgers. From their policy:

Plagiarism is the representation of the words or ideas of another as one’s own in any academic work. To avoid plagiarism, every direct quotation must be identified by quotation marks, or by appropriate indentation, and must be cited properly according to the accepted format for the particular discipline.  Acknowledgment is also required when material from any source is paraphrased or summarized in whole or in part in one’s own words.  To acknowledge a paraphrase properly, one might state: to paraphrase Plato’s comment… and conclude with a footnote or appropriate citation to identify the exact reference.  A footnote acknowledging only a directly quoted statement does not suffice to notify the reader of any preceding or succeeding paraphrased material.

In short, plagiarism as academically defined is pretty damned easy for an ususpecting, underinformed undergrad to commit. Those of us who deal with them regularly will know this. Certainly, letting someone else write an entire paper for you is above and beyond the minimum requirements for plagiarism as conventionally defined.

What these med school profs stand accused of, of course, is actually worse. It’s a) miscrediting of knowledge and argument (plagiarism) and b) misrepresentation of that material as non-biased. In other words, it’s academically and medically unsound.

Why on Earth would anyone get away with this?

Two puzzles present themselves in all this: first, why was Hobbes so attached to the Hebrew Bible? Second, why has he only be half translated in the past, and why where the part left out left out–i.e., why did the previous Israeli version exclude so much quotation and analysis originally from Hebrew?

There’s no real consensus across the five authors. However, the answer to the first seems roughly to be that the Hobbesian project involved setting aside a great deal of existing Ancient Greek scholarship. Hebrew was an available ancient tradition to turn to. The core metaphor of the work, after all, is the sea monster from Job.

This gives us little purchase on the second, however. The to exclusions were a series of quotations from the Old Testament and the latter two sections of the book–that is, those tied to Christian morality.

In short, the book was fairly radically secularized. The five who assessed this for the times don’t seem to know why in any conclusive or agreed way.  Leviathan is, of course, rather long book, and there is plenty to complain about in Hobbes, if you’re so inclined. Much of its most important argumentation can be reduced to a few sentences. The question this raises, then, is why the rest of the book is there to begin with. At least Hebrew speaking scholars and students will now have a chance to answer this for themselves.

Barrack Obama’s town hall meeting with Chinese students doesn’t seem to have generated any great volume of blogging yet, at least not that I can find as I write. That’s kind of a shame: it would be nice to keep the Chinese internet censors busy.

The President was briefly given the opportunity to address Chinese internet policy, which he politely and circumspectly opposed. Apparently his comments continued to be readable in China for several hours before authorities papered them over. That’s nice, but it’s not all that much.

When I was in China briefly over the summer, I made a few just-for-fun attempts to get a blog post censored from there, writing for another site. No luck. While in Xinjiang, which was and is still in post-riot hyper-security mode, I literally couldn’t get online at all. They’d shut off the internet tap to the entire province (which is probably something like the size of Texas). Later, while in central and southern China, I could get online and check email (hell, I read a NYTimes story on net Chinese censorship ), but couldn’t log into wordpress.com.

So, in the end, I couldn’t get a post blocked because I couldn’t post at all. That’s a pretty thick firewall they’ve got around their political establishment. It’s not clear to me how or why they’d take it down.

The take-home point seems to be that there’s not so much a lack of consensus on this (although there may be) as a lack of consensus as to how to answer the question, or what the precise question even is.

In any case, the mounting crisis–too many students in over-large classes, taught by too many grad student and too few professors, who are educating them more and more in things they need less and less–is, of course, entirely unresolved. Ask in a generation, or even a decade, and the answer may, sadly, be the same. But if they are, the tone will be a good deal more heated.