Sphinx

I for one am overjoyed at the announcement of the government’s cunning plan for getting students home for Christmas, as it solves at a stroke the knotty problem of what to do with my Thucydides class in the final week of term. It’s always been the case that student attention tends to be lagging by then, and attendance dropping (especially for classes later in the week, as most of them disappear off home), which then creates the dilemma of whether to plough on with material regardless for the few who do turn up, having then to repeat it all at the beginning of next term, or just have an informal chat and knock off early, which then seems like short-changing the few who do bother to turn up. My solution in recent years has been a session on ‘Thucydidean Games’, not essential for the core elements of the module but containing potential both for serious analysis and for just playing some games, depending on the general mood.

As it’s become increasingly obvious that messing about with scores of pieces and cards, clustered around a board, is a sure-fire way to break at least half of the university’s COVID-security rules, I’ve been wondering what on earth to do instead. I need worry no more! Week 12 will clearly be a write-off, as effectively it becomes the first week of the Christmas holidays; week 11 will probably be disrupted by everyone packing up and travelling home. So all I need to do is cram all the scheduled material into Week 10, and save the following fortnight for any especially keen student who wants to talk about their assessments or dissertation…

</sarcasm> Because obviously what I want to do at this stage of term is reorganise reorganise all my modules because the government has randomly decided, in its obsessive pursuit of insisting that universities must continue as normal during the November lockdown but must then get students home in a way that government can’t be blamed if it goes wrong, that all teaching should switch online at a date that disrupts the last couple of weeks of term for the majority of universities but just happens to come after teaching has finished in two of them. This, I’m sure, is coincidental. It is not that there won’t also be disruption in Oxford and Cambridge in implementing the latest decrees, but it is nevertheless striking that they are not being told to change their teaching delivery or to cope with the possibility of students disengaging and/or having complaints about the change.

Why couldn’t this year’s higher education re-enactment of the Fall of Saigon be staggered, so different universities organise the departure of their students according to their existing term dates and teaching arrangements? This would surely be preferable to having everyone trying to evacuate at once, after all. To be honest, the only explanation that presently comes to mind is that they just want to get it over with, not with any notion that it’s preferable to manage it like this, but to limit the number of days this story might feature in the newspapers. Get them all home, and with a bit of luck any ensuing plague-spreading will be buried in the general noise.

One of the things that most strikes me in this whole mess is that a government with a dedicated Behavioural Insights unit seems to be remarkably clueless about human behaviour. This is especially the case when it comes to students, who are, apparently randomly, perceived in three different but equally problematic ways: (1) hard-headed consumers focused solely on the economic value of their degree; (2) irresponsible delinquents; (3) malleable children who will do exactly as they’re told.

None of these reflects the reality that students are entirely rational adults but with a much wider and more complex range of motivations; it’s scarcely surprising that policies based on these assumptions tend to run into problems, and still more when they hop from one to another according to which suits their other purposes. Such as responding to a perception of (2) by building a fence, a policy which was always doomed unless students were actually (3), or assuming you can address anxieties about (1) and demands for fee refunds by switching to (3). (Almost the only positive aspect of the pandemic from an HE perspective has been the rapid abandonment of all the student-consumer-choice rhetoric – except that it’s been replaced by even stupider ideas, and has of course only disappeared temporarily for as long as the government finds it threatening).

What this does mean is that the last proper, non-disrupted class this term will, fittingly, be on The Plague…