Bloody awful work creeps in when standards are relaxed
UK universities’ Augean stables
DAVID MCGROGAN
Oh, God of Earth and Altar/Bow down and hear our cry
Our earthly rulers falter/Our people drift and die-Iron Maiden
Perhaps you are familiar with the Richard Scarry story called ‘The Unlucky Day?’ In it, Mr Raccoon wakes up one morning, goes to wash his face, and the tap breaks off in his hand. From there, matters only get worse, as Mr Raccoon variously breaks his front door off its hinges, rips the seat of his trousers, destroys the interior of a restaurant, loses his hat, floods the ground floor of his house, and has to eat cold pickles for dinner.
Well, a person called Jason Arday has been experiencing something along those lines recently, although in his case to attribute the various calamities he has experienced to luck would be stretching things a little. Arday, you see, is a Professor at Cambridge University who has, over the past week or so, been exposed as a likely plagiarist, fantasist, and – worst of all, really – a very bad scholar apparently incapable of producing anything that anybody in their right mind would want to publish or read. The result of this has been something of a pile-on. So much of a pile-on, indeed, that I have even found myself feeling a little sorry for the man; yes, he appears to have milked his previous good fortune for all it was worth; yes, plagiarism is unforgivable; yes, much of his behaviour is suggestive of a worrying tendency towards narcissism. But it isn’t his fault that everybody who has made a decision to employ him has been either credulous or slovenly, and it is right to pity anybody who is being publicly humiliated even while recognising they at least partly deserve it.
More importantly, it is abundantly evident that Arday is being made a scapegoat, and that a lot of the opprobrium being visited on him is deflected guilt. The truth of the matter is that plagiarism, fantasising and bad scholarship are rife in the UK academy among staff and students, particularly since the advent of Large Language Models, and that almost everybody is implicated in those problems to some extent or other. Arday is a great Guy Fawkes figure to hurl onto the metaphorical bonfire, not least because he also serves as an embodiment of many of the sins of EDI (a phenomenon which even many of its public adherents no doubt find privately disturbing). But he isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that for too long standards have been in decline, everybody knows it, and everybody is complicit in it. Arday is just the vector through which collective frustration can be channelled away from a genuine confrontation with the bigger issue.
That issue has, I think, three facets. I am going to label these in accordance with the three features of a modern academic career, namely teaching, research and academic administration, but there is of course rather a lot of overlap between those things. The overarching connection between them, as you will see, is a relaxation of standards, and ultimately the desire to sacrifice them to make life easier. Overarching that is an uglier truth still – the oldest story in the book: pigs with their faces in the trough.
Teaching first, then. There is no doubt whatsoever that the nature of undergraduate students has changed, and that universities have not found a way collectively to cope with that change – roughly, I would say, beginning in 2016 or so. I want to make clear from the outset that I do not blame students themselves for this change, for one moment. It is attributable almost entirely to the effects of technology, most obviously the smartphone but also including the phenomenon of 24/7 screen-based streaming of entertainment, and – more recently – AI. And layered on top of that are the lingering consequences of Covid lockdowns, still being felt but little discussed.
Ask any university lecturer who still works at the coalface of undergraduate teaching and they will tell you the same story. Prior to the mid-2010s, teaching – if the material and tutor were engaging – was like traffic control. Students came to tutorials having done the required reading, sometimes more than the required reading, or were at least able to bluff having done it. They were happy to speak up and offer their views about the material. They may not have understood anything. But they were happy to talk, to look the tutor in the eye, to make notes, and to demonstrate engagement. In lectures, they looked as though they were listening.
Something has changed – the devices, stupid – and with it engagement. Anybody with half a brain expected this, and behold, it has come to pass: it turns out that being raised on an attention-sucking, highly addictive, brain-rotting piece of technology destroys the capacity for concentrated thought. Who could have foreseen it? Yes, I know that there are still people around who insist on bleating things like, ‘Ah, but studies show…’ or ‘Yes, but enhanced digital participation…’, but I for one have rather had enough of such people and am prepared to call a spade a spade – screens are bad for children and bad for teenagers and they are particularly bad in terms of preparedness for higher education.
Universities have collectively shown themselves to be entirely inadequate to the task of coping with this issue. Faced with cohort after cohort of students who lack the proper mindset (again, to be clear – I do not blame the students themselves at all for this) to do concentrated reading or thinking, they have taken the path of least resistance and simply expected less. Not wanting to fail people who cannot do what is required (and thereby miss out on future fees), and not wanting to slip down the league tables by failing to award sufficient numbers of good grades, university managers have placed pressure on staff to relax standards. And so standards have been relaxed. What is required to get a good degree at a good university (let alone a bad university) is just not the same as what it was twenty years ago, and everybody knows it.
But this problem hardly stops with undergraduates, and this is where research comes into the frame. The pressure on academics to publish and garner research income for their universities has become intense. This, in UK universities at least, is largely because of something called the Research Excellence Framework, or REF. This, to cut a long story short, is a periodic audit of the research output of all of the institutions who participate (i.e., essentially all of them), the results of which both decide how a big pot of public money is divided between them, and feed into important league table metrics. The more outputs per head of staff, and the ‘better’ the outputs, the more money the university is allocated (nobody ever asks the opportunity costs in terms of staff time spent on non-research activities) and the higher up the league tables the institution rises.
Prior to the existence of the REF, and its precursor, the RAE, academic research in the humanities and social sciences was performed chiefly only by scholars at the top universities and they did it fairly sporadically – i.e. when they had something useful to say. Writing a good textbook and keeping it up-to-date, certainly in law, the field with which I am most familiar, was at least as important for one’s reputation as producing peer-reviewed articles in journals, or academic monographs. But since every institution more or less engages in the REF these days, and since this includes all of the institutions where previously no academic research would have been done at all, there are now simply many, many more things being published than would have been the case 30 or 40 years ago – all of the thousands upon thousands of academics who previously would not have been producing scholarship, have to.
Add this to the sheer increase in academic staff that has accompanied expanded student numbers in the last two decades, and the result is vast oceans of ink being spilled on work that is – may I speak frankly? – tripe. I once heard a helpful analogy to explain this, used in the US context but equally applicable here. It goes as follows.
In the National Hockey League roughly 1,000 players take part in at least one match each season. The quality of hockey is extremely high – these are, essentially, the best 1,000 hockey players in the world. Imagine, however, that the NHL decides to expand and increase the number of teams by a factor of 50, resulting in there being the need for 50,000 hockey players to participate in the league each year. Now, consider: would that result in better hockey being played on average, or worse? It would be worse, wouldn’t it? There is no way that the average quality among the best 50,000 hockey players in the world is higher than the best 1,000. It stands to reason that average quality would decline.
Well, the same holds true in academic research. The more people there are publishing, the lower the average quality of their publications. And since more people need to be publishing, there need to be more outlets for their publications – generally edited and overseen by precisely the same people who are writing the papers. The consequence of all of this is a huge expanse in the number of academic journals which exist to churn out terrible nonsense that only the truly demented would ever bother to read, let alone write – generally produced merely to satisfy internal departmental requirements. Average standards, as a result, have fallen off a cliff. There is still good material produced, but finding it is like using a garden fork to trawl through sewage – it is embarrassing how bad some stuff is in comparison to what was being done in previous decades. And since this all feeds into the REF, discernment at that level has markedly declined: it turns out when you audit sewage you tend to find yourself discovering that there are gradients of it, and calibrating your measurements accordingly.
I could easily go on listing the problems afflicting academic research in the 2020s all day. The one I have mentioned is only the most obvious; there are hundreds more. But then there wouldn’t be enough space to dedicate to the subject of academic administration, or what is sometimes euphemistically referred to as ‘management’.
University departments can, to all intents and purposes, more or less run themselves, and this is how they indeed used to operate. Vice-Chancellorships and other major institutional posts were held on a rotating basis by senior professors, and departments largely made their own budgetary, staffing and timetabling decisions. University senates wielded decision-making power. Within departments the Chairs ran the show and Head of School positions were, again, usually on three-year rotations. A career in academic management did not really exist. This set-up no doubt had its problems – it was, by all accounts, pretty oligarchic, and gave too much power to professors to bestow patronage. But it was a system which emphasised autonomy and common sense, and crucially had low overheads.
Since the mid-1980s, however, management has ballooned. V-Cs are now akin to chief executives – they swap positions at different universities like football managers – and a vast number of permanent chief-cook-and-bottle-washer type positions have come into existence alongside them. (‘Nice to meet you, my name is Steve Smith and I’m the Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Overseas Engagement Activities, Dog-Petting and Soft Play’.) Alongside this, external regulatory requirements, as well as massive pressure to improve ‘student satisfaction’, have resulted in a huge proliferation of compliance officers, careers advisors, widening participation experts, mental health support workers, and so on.
And at the same time, perversely, the workload of academic staff has become increasingly dominated by desk-based busywork, as it presumably has in any field you would care to name – responding to emails, going to meetings, behaving as though it is terribly important that something-or-other has been ‘approved’ on ‘the system’, and so on. The ‘lived experience’ of being a mid-career academic in the UK is not all that different from being, say, manager of a call centre in an industrial park just outside Darlington; a lot of grappling with bits of software that don’t talk to each other, a lot of deleting irrelevant emails, a lot of meetings scheduled by people who are compensating for nonexistent social lives.
In other words, even as the stakes have grown progressively lower, with everything becoming easier and more lackadaisical at a practical level, at an administrative level there has been obscene bloat. And this has been mirrored by a pivot towards vaunting rhetoric: almost every university in the country now boasts a corporate strategy that promises to ‘Point the way ahead so that together we can make a better world’, ‘enrich lives and change the world through the advancement of learning’, ‘Creat[e] Progressive Futures – flourishing, sustainability and progress for the whole world [sic]’, and so on.
This razzle-dazzle is nakedly a marketing ploy for the most part, of course, but it also reflects the character of the people in charge of these institutions. Gone are the days when universities were run by port-swilling dons in tweed jackets and corduroys. They are now run by people who imagine themselves to be terribly important, earn £350,000 a year, and have ambitions to match. Who among them wants to be seen to be doing anything as humdrum and tawdry as providing students with a good education? What is that when set against ensuring that the whole world achieves ‘flourishing, sustainability and progress’? A curious mixture of hubris and dumbing-down follows: the laxer things become, the more grandiose becomes the ludicrous, overweening bluster.
In summary, then, while we can agree that Arday’s career has been founded on lax standards, the perpetuating of flagrant fantasies, and simply bad work, much of that same thing could be said about a great deal of what has been going on across the sector in recent decades. We expect less and less of undergraduates; we delude ourselves into thinking that universities are of profound importance in the project of global improvement and progress; we waste time producing an awful lot of unreadable, unhelpful ‘research’ that almost nobody reads. No, few of us has done anything as bad as the things Arday has been accused of. But we (I speak to any fellow academics reading this) are all implicated in a collective failing; it has happened under our watch.
At its heart, the reason for the decline is simple enough to understand. Maintaining standards is hard. The path of least resistance is seductive. And it is especially seductive when set against a background of the rent-seeking behaviour of a group of institutions that increasingly resemble a cartel, whose chief priority is maximising the generation of income largely underwritten by the State. The incentives are not to educate, much less to advance knowledge, but to do a) what is necessary to satisfy regulators and b) what is necessary to keep the show on the road and the money rolling in.
These are the incentives that any private sector enterprise faces, of course, but the crucial distinction is that UK universities do not operate in anything like the ‘private sector’ properly understood. When most of your income comes from the State, your interests are brought into alignment with political decision-makers, rather than what is best for the students or the long-term interests of the operation, and suckling at its teat rapidly becomes your be-all and end-all – horizons narrow accordingly. This was not a problem when a VC-ship was a chore which was performed reluctantly by a crusty don for a three-year term, and student numbers were capped – at that time, financial stakes were low. But it is a problem when an entire class of university managers rely for their very high salaries on the cash washing in from almost half of school leavers going on to higher education. In that context, it is easy to simply go along, doing what is necessary to carry on carrying on, and not rocking the boat by insisting on standards being maintained. Why fight against the institutional tide when there is no incentive or reward to do so?
It probably goes without saying that the advent of AI has made everything I have described here worse, and will likely make it worse yet if universities are not willing to grapple with that problem seriously and take practical steps to eliminate its use, at least in assessments but preferably in general. I hold out little hope that this will happen for reasons which I suppose are obvious. The person instrumental in exposing this recent plagiarism scandal, a retired professor at Plymouth Marjon University called Dave Harris, summarised the problem with Arday’s scholarship as follows: ‘Bloody awful work creeps in when standards are relaxed’. This seems set to be the leitmotif of UK universities in the 21st century. And it’s no good just blaming the odd rogue scholar, for all that subjecting him to a two-minutes hate is cathartic in some sense. The crisis is systemic, which means everybody is in some way to blame.
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(UKR)