Another Gray Day

In an earlier post I wrote about the need for educational research to move into a new space. Currently, there is a tendency for research to focus on school performance, school improvement, teacher efficacy - all very worthwhile but missing the point. Schools onlyaccount for part of the difference in pupil achievement between the top and bottom groups. The rest, perhaps as much as 85-90%, comes from pupil background. And what is going to change that? Even within schools we know that disruption and the underachievement of a minority of pupils are a major problem.

The problem is that research is much easier inside schools than outside. Schools keep records, produce statistics and often produce tea and coffee for meetings. They can also use their status as research sites or subjects as evidence of a commitment to excellence (or similar phrase). For everyone else research is a nuisance - intrusive, time consuming, guilt-inducing, etc. Or is it? Surprisingly (or not), most people enjoy being heard, and problems arise in research because they aren’t. Completing an ‘instrument’ designed through the responses of american college students doesn’t count as being heard. Having a conversation with a real listener, who is in a position to make things happen - that counts.

Perhaps the first stage in this process is to ask pupils - politely - what they think. This is beginning to happen, and it is the first stage in getting into a new space. Let’s get on with it.

There are several kinds of purpose. One kind involves knowing the final goal, but another kind of purpose involves ‘just in case’ scenarios. Mostly, these are looked down upon, since their common image is of lock-up garages stuffed with things which might come in handy if…In the big wide world, defence contractors and chiefs of staff are fond of ‘just in case’ scenarios, although the items involved are usually rather more expensive. Unfortunately, all just in case scenarios suffer from the same problem which is that they involve chance. You may or may not need that old bath or that stealth bomber.
So in terms of the meaning of life, we might be here just in case…what?

“Leading something” is esentially a spatial metaphor. We talk about “leading from the front”, “top-down decision making” and so on. The leader is positioned geometrically, at the centre of a circle or the apex of the pyramid. What does this mean in organisations? As a member (or ex-member) of a University, how did I position myself in relation to its “leader”? The first problem in answering this question is that the leader was largely invisible. Although I knew who she was and what she looked like, it was not a visible relationship in the way that say, McCoy Tyner is in relation to his trio (currently playing “Up ‘gainst the wall” from the “remembering John” CD). An organisation such as a University is of course much larger than a Jazz Trio and functions much like a compost heap - things happen messily but predictably so long as certain kinds of inputs continue.

So how can one individual organism function as leader of the heap? Perhaps she only performs a symbolic function, turning up at graduations, weddings and funerals? Or perhaps she fights battles for the continuing supply of potato peelings and orange peel? Well, of course she does, being on endless commitees goes with the job. But just as compost heaps need to be constrained, so that their components can interact successfully, so it is with Universities. There needs to be some linearity about the flow from input to output. So the leader needs to mark out direction in some way, which in turn requires visibility.

In a lesser-known disaster movie called “The Core”, on of the characters, a patronising Air Force/NASA commander, tells an up-and-coming woman astronaut “Leadership isn’t just about ability, it’s about responsibility”. Whilst he had obviously been reading too many instant management books, it’s a useful line for deconstruction. Perhaps it could be written as
“Leadership is about ability, responsibility and visibility, not about potato peelings”.

It occurred to me that the most important consideration for manufacturers of guitar amps is to reproduce something from the past - “that Eric Clapton Bluesbreakers sound”, tradition 1960s valve crunch”. Innovation may be used to get there but is rarely desirable in itself. And so it is within academia, even down to the “valve vs solid state argument”, or “analogue vs digital” which, as the so-called “qualitative vs quantitative debate” is equally spurious. The only judgement which means anything is the eye (or ear) of the beholder. And in many cases the beholder is in thrall to the sort of paper written by American psychology professors, which summarises previous research in a small pond, takes a sample of hard up college students, gives them credit and experiments the shit out of them. Conclusions are then produced using scary devices such as “Malmsteen’s lambda = 0.07″ to produce the illusion of rigour.

Just as Eric Bell produced fabulous guitar sounds from a totally solid-state HH 100W top, so is it possible to produce rigorous or at least useful research with nothing but good data and a word processor. Sometimes it is nice to see all that gear up on stage, with valves glowing and that nasty hum which tells you the gain is up high. But then there’s Richard Thompson…

We forget how much space we take up in daily life. We need new spaces to move into. Jeff Beck pointed out that in the mid 1960s, there was a space for music to move into, an unexplored space of loudness, improvisation and imagination. Previously music had existed in a Butlinised holiday camp world of romance and convention. Between 1964 and 1967, that world suddenly seemed very small. The new world was bigger, more colourful, sexier and, most importantly, it could not have been predicted. On the other hand, it was built up from parts that already existed. The Fender Stratocaster had been around since 1954, but Hendrix picked it it and changed everything.

OK what has this got to do with research? Lots. Academia is now in the same position that pop music was in around 1962-63. Lots of singles, no albums. Or like mp3 players before the iPod. There’s a new space to open up, and the only place you’ll find it is here. Or at least i’d like to think so.

By which I mean, a day bogged down through institutional constipation. Universities have become fixated with aims and objectives and strategies, whilst the same academics publish papers and books in which the complexity, fluidity, and dynamism of (post)modernity sweeps away fixed ideas and so-called static bodies of knowledge. Of course, no institution would admit to being aimless, though there is a book on university mission statements (as this is a blog I won’t spend hours agonising over the reference) in which (during the 1980s) several eminent university secretaries confessed shamelessly that their institutions had no such thing.
Even a casual reading of university policy statements reveals that most of them are exactly the same, especially in the following areas:
1) Attract more overseas students, especially postgrads, since these can be easily ripped off through extortionate fees
2) Publish more articles in top journals - desirable but arithmetically impossible for all of them at once.
3) Extract more value (i.e. work) from staff for less money
4) Be inclusive, accessible etc - fair enough!
5) Pursue excellence or quality, or both
6) Be research-led and student-driven
Personally I’d rather be driven by a researcher than a student. But the last one is a classic, real-world example of a gray whole. A gray whole is an object into which matter (money, people, photocopier paper) and thought can be poured without anything emerging over its event horizon. In the above example, both sides of the statement are equally vacuous and the object therefore has stability.
For a start, research is not a single entity, like a leader, but a multiplicity of disparate projects. We could be led by fish parasites, eighteenth century poets, soil erosion, teacher induction, the documentary films of John Grierson or face recognition. Furthermore, the most obvious characteristic of research is that it doesn’t know where it’s going, even in replication studies, since otherwise there would be no point in calling it research.

Presumably in the above case, being ‘research-led’ is a substitute for being Principal (=vice chancellor) led, even though the individual concerned is paid lots of money to be a leader.

Incidentally both the opposite of research and a synoym for is ‘holiday’. You can either go where you haven’t been before in order to find out what it’s like (a type 1 holiday) or somewhere totally predictable but enjoyable (a type 2 holiday). If I was a psychologist I’d devise a theory and an instrument to study these.

As for student-driven, I’m all for participatory democracy, but since students are there to find out what they don’t know, it is illogical to expect them to tell anyone else what they want to know. Students are under too much financial pressure to pursue excellence, for the most part, whilst staff are under too much pressure to pursue aims and objectives to actually do any teaching. Or research. Or even answer their email.
Cynical, moi?
Yes, but i feel much better for it!

Here’s another pointless speculation: is DIY the meaning of life? Perhaps we’re here just in case someone from central universe needs an M6 x 30 socket screw, preferably in stainless steel, and if you’ve got a set of Allen keys that would be useful too. Which brings me to a point about education, and how narrow the school curriculum is, compared to the range of knowledge that’s out there. Aha, but school is about learning to learn, nowadays (at least in the UK, sometimes). Yes, but that’s OK if you know what you don’t know. Heidegger uses the term ‘dis-stancing’ or ‘deseverance’ (depending on translator) to refer to the way the world shows up for us (Dreyfus’ term). Some things are within our range of concerns and some things aren’t. Increasingly the internet makes it possible to widen our range of concerns, which is another way of saying ‘enriching the information landscape’. But, in relation to schools (and universities) , there’s a danger that too much focus ends up being counterproductive - destroying curiosity in return for standards. Bah, humbug!

In the old days (before printing) university libraries were special, a few hundred books at most, all hand-copied and annotated.So they had to be carefully controlled and guarded against dishonest students. The attitude has not died out - universities and publishers are still concerned to keep knowledge locked up behind Athens passwords and all the rest of it. This is nonsense. The vast majority of University research is paid for out of public funds, and should therefore be in the public domain. Academics do huge amounts of unpaid work writing, editing and reviewing, and the only people who profit are the big publishers. The persistence of prestige - being published in Nature, rather than the Journal of underwater knitting research - means that universities are unwilling to let go of the whole peer-review, two years to get published if you’re lucky, process.
The big publishers do a nice job with production and circulation but who knows what the actual audience is? Citation indices are not a good way of assessing impact, which is not really a measurable quality anyway. I’m interested in doing some research on this, so if you have been influenced by academic articles (as distinct from citing them because you have to), get in touch.

I was just looking at a website for someone successful (a drummer) and thinking how so many sites are just unmitigated lists of didn’t-I-do-well! which produce alarm and despondency in ordinary mortals. So I thought I’d point out to myself that failure and mistakes are better sources of learning than successes, which usually happen for reasons we don’t entirely understand. If we did understand them, we’d be able to replicate them, i.e. I could write the next Da Vinci code or Harry Potter, or be as rich as Bill Gates. Therefore, I will try to make sure that I record as many failures and mistakes as possible - who knows - I might even learn from them myself.

Going back to the meaning of life question, then, we (sorry to use the royal we, but I is too individualistic and one is not comfortable) could speculate as to what might constitute a mistake in the grand scheme of things. Would the dinosaurs count as a mistake or a necessary evolutionary step? Us likewise? In the evolution of technologies, we can often see that something (ms-dos, walkman, the Citroen CX) is not perfect but might be a step to something else which we can’t predict exactly. Unfortunately, life requires that we waste lots of time on these intermediate steps rather than go straight to perfection (OS 10.3.9, iPod, Citroen BX 1.7 turbo diesel). Only partly joking.

The point is that purpose is not always definitive or ultimate. Purpose can be entirely futile, and usually is. unless it results in something getting better for someone (or something, in the case of animal welfare). Raymond Tallis’ book “Enemies of Hope” makes a good case for an ethics grounded on this simple principle. Whilst there are endless intellectual arguments around what ‘better’ might mean in this context, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine what ‘better’ might mean if you had to walk six miles for clean water, or were a six year old in a brickworks in Burma.
Ah well, back to work!

Today was more a sort of whitish-grey as we had some rather wet snow last night. After a rather messy day shunting furniture around to Jane’s office in Meylan, time to think about two points>
What is the point of a) this website and b) what is the point, purpose or meaning of life?
The first one is the most difficult, but briefly, it is part of a trend which, pretentiously, could be called “enriching the information landscape”. Thinking back to the 1960s, getting information about technical things involved writing letters, badgering people at exhibitions (if you could get in), reading out of date reference books in the library or just doing it. Which all worked in a rather lean sort of way. Nowadays I can find out what I was doing in 1979, I can find out what I was doing it with and who built it. More or less, anyway. Across a huge range of topics, people are putting what they know into the public domain. Is this any use for anything, apart from encouraging endless surfing? I think it is, but there is no way of knowing what kind of useful.
Not a very original thought I know, but somehow it has to be worth doing, a sort of car boot sale of all knowledge.

Now for the meaning of life. I’m currently writing a book which is partly about death (link) and in order to do that I was looking at websites about the meaning of life, which of course consisted mainly of Christian contributions about divine purpose and so on. I’m sure I will be put right on this, but there seems to be a gap in philosophical thinking here. The main problem is that we have huge difficulty in imagining how something could not have some sort of ultimate purpose, without falling into “Oh what’s the point of it all, can’t go on etc etc”. In “the Principle of Reason”, Heidegger shows how difficult, or impossible, it is to find an ultimate ground for reason. But ‘ground’ is a metaphor, so there’s a clue to how to start thinking about purpose, not as something ‘built’ on foundations but as something circulating, fluid, dynamic etc. Like the web, whose purpose is to circulate information or knowledge, but to what further purpose?