I came across a very nice, thought-provoking piece last week by Jim Dickinson of the WonkHE blog – actually written back in November, but reposted because of its relevance to debate about whether universities should have a formal ‘duty of care’ to students – considering higher education, and especially student support, through the prism of ‘nostalgia memes’. You know the sort of thing: ‘Whatever happened to Proper Binmen?’ posts on Facebook, liked by the sorts of people who complain a lot about ‘health and safety gone mad’ and having to sort their recycling. As Dickinson notes, it’s a lament about the present state of things that implies everything would be great if we could just return to the way things were, and even if we don’t buy into that world-view, it still raises the question of what elements of past practice might be worth trying to salvage or protect even as other things inexorably change.
Obviously I am the very last person who should start nit-picking someone else’s whimsical, ephemeral blog idea, but… There’s no doubt at all that academia is suffused with nostalgia for an earlier, less stressful/better resourced/less bureaucratised/more collegial/more elitist/more radical/delete as appropriate time. When it comes to the specific nostalgia meme of Proper Binmen, I think this more or less works for Dickinson’s main focus on students, the degree to which university discourse (especially outside universities) still takes for granted the model of the full-time, not-working, living-away-from-home-with-no-caring-responsibilities 18-to-20-year-old as its default, and at the same time bemoans the fact that today’s students are all whiny snowflakes with seventeen flavours of gender identity. (It’s still more complicated than Proper Binmen – is our nostalgic image of the student drawn from Brideshead Revisited or the ‘68 Événements? I’m reminded of a complaint of a character in A Dance to the Music of Time that “one is never really a student in England”…).
But what do we imagine if we think of ‘Proper Academics’? Lots of tweed, I suppose, and very male; a cross between Giles from BtVS and Professor Branestawm – and I now recall that there is some nonsensical cosplay around ‘Dark Academia’ that probably fits this theme. Okay, so it’s a thing. What isn’t obvious is why this thing is supposed to be obviously better in the way that Proper Binmen were obviously better, except insofar as one might favour a professoriate that is as male, white, elite and small-c conservative as possible. Is there an idea of how academics used to be – or better, perhaps, what they did or didn’t do, rather than just who they were and how they dressed – whose absence explains why things just aren’t working any more?
Obviously academics themselves have an idea of what things were like for their predecessors, which tends to involve more status, more money, bigger offices, less teaching, less bureaucracy and a lot more time for research, under less pressure to produce, probably with a dutiful wife to manage all domestic stuff and type up one’s notes. But the point about Proper Binmen is not that they had a better time of it than today’s refuse collectors, but that they did a filthy job with a whistle and a grin and this was better for everyone else. So, is there an Imagined Academic who did specific things more or better or differently, to others’ benefit – especially, given that this is the theme of the week, in supporting and teaching students?
I guess the analogy may be less Proper Binmen and more The Good Old Neighbourhood Bobby, who knew everyone in the village by name and kept the youngsters in line with a firm clip round the ear and applied the law flexibly for the Greater Good (“the Greater Good”) rather than spending his whole time filling out forms and prosecuting innocent Gollywog lovers while the Real Criminals go scot free. Always available, always at the heart of the community, never too busy; was this ever a real thing with academics?
There is the archetype of the kindly old don who offers afternoon tea to all his students [for elite Oxbridge values of ‘students’, and not too many of them], or of the trendy Bradburyesque radical lecturer who keeps open house for his students [for ideologically sympathetic and/or sexually attractive values of ‘students’] – but, leaving aside the issue of whether either of those is remotely desirable as a model, it can hardly be claimed that once upon a time all academics fitted such a template. Yes, knowing everyone’s name would be a good thing – and the difficulty of getting everyone’s name right when you have thirty or forty personal tutees is an obvious symptom of the expansion of HE without commensurate resourcing – but that seems a bit minimalist.
Hypothesis: what is felt to be missing today is not a specific form of personal tutoring or student support, treating all students in a particular way, but a bespoke, student-specific approach. The default Proper Student just needed someone who knew their name, sorted out any essay extensions that needed to be sorted out, invited them to sherry or a garden party a few times a year, and wrote boilerplate references afterwards – and was there in case of the sort of emergency that required a tutor. But some students need a Yoda, or a Michael Caine, someone who would recognise their potential and put in the effort to draw it out, the catalyst to make university a life-changing experience.
De me fabula narratur… I’m not sure I would have taken the path into research and teaching if Peter Garnsey, whom a small group of us was seeing for the City of Rome course, hadn’t spotted some sort of spark of interest and given me a copy of a piece he’d been writing on urban diet to see what I thought of it. The combination of encouragement and flattery was perfectly timed and tailored to pull me in.
Obviously being this sort of guru – offering what the student needs, rather that dispensing pre-packaged esoteric wisdom on a take-it-or-leave-it basis like the professor in The Secret History – is quite time-consuming. The more students for whom the lecturer has to provide the basic tutorial service, the less capacity for giving extra help to the Special Ones; the less the Proper Students model holds true in reality, the more support more and more students need, the less capacity for giving more time to a few. Whereas once, I guess, it was possible to assume that 95% of students were fine so long as they weren’t sitting in your office in tears, now it’s the non-present ones who cause most anxiety.
So, there simply isn’t the time or the energy to seek to identify students who might most benefit from a bit of personal Kenobiing; further, there’s a sense that probably most of them need it these days, not just a few, and hence a reluctance to give special treatment to just a few if you can’t offer it to all. “Help will always be given to Hogwarts to those who deserve it” and “…to those who ask for it” are equally problematic ideas: who decides who deserves help, on what basis, and how do you stop it becoming a case of more being given to those who are self-confident enough to request it, who may not actually need it the most?
On reflection, the dominant image of the Proper Academic may have little to do with universities at all, but is rather the Professors at Hogwarts; substitute parents, always – except when motivated by evil – trying to protect the teenagers under their care from danger even when those teenagers persist in seeking it out, never too busy with other things, always – except when motivated by evil – recognising the Specialness of the Special One and his friends. The demand for universities to be effectively in loco parentis for a bunch of young adults is close cousin to the unspoken idea that they really should be more like boarding schools than the real world, just with a bit more magic.
Where does this leave us? Personally I think all my students are special, even the toerags who are absolutely fine but ignore the first seven increasingly anxious emails. Yes, I have a particular liking for those willing to argue and explore ideas, but my response is not to make extra time for them but to tailor my teaching to try to get everyone arguing and exploring ideas. I’m not sure if this makes me a Proper Academic or not, but I do wear a tweed jacket occasionally…
Update 15/6: it is almost certainly true – to respond to the story in this morning’s Grauniad – that Proper Academics used to read every UCAS personal statement thoroughly, weighing not just every diving certificate, DofE bronze award and two-week work experience on Uncle George’s ranch in Botswana but the very words in which those achievements were articulated, looking for the spark of brilliance that might counterbalance some rather iffy GCSEs. Certainly I have been button-holed by teachers at events, open days and parties, demanding to know the secrets to a really compelling self-presentation.
And it has also, clearly, been one of the biggest anxieties for parents and students who don’t come from the sort of background where university acceptance is taken for granted. There, it’s not about distinguishing yourself from other expensively-educated people, but about justifying even the idea that you might dare to apply, showing that grades and a decent reference are never enough. The myth that a Proper Academic will spot the magic quality that gets Charlie Bucket his golden ticket sustains an entire system of social signalling and filtering…
I’m sorry, Peter Garnsey? P.D.A. Garnsey of Jesus, Cambridge? That’s my second bizarre coincidence of the morning.
Yes, my PhD supervisor. What’s the bizarre coincidence?
ell, it’s odd to get halfway through any post (but particularly one with this title) and read the name of the man who was my Personal Tutor at Jesus…! Peter Garnsey was assigned as Tutor, to be precise (personal or pastoral duties only) to everyone in the English group in the college in my first year; only for that year, though, and without much interaction between Dr G and most of us (self included; I have to admit I didn’t even know he was a classicist). I’m glad he was such a good influence on you.
It’s an odd thing, academic influence. I was greatly inspired by a guy called Ralph White who postponed retirement to teach evening units on the part-time MA course I took in the late 90s; he gave me a lift home a couple of times, told stories about M.R.D. Foot (who had been his supervisor) and tried to discourage me from thinking of academia as a career (“It’s not like it used to be, you know. We have to do performance assessments!“). I wanted to be just like him (and, to be fair, to be quite a lot like two or three of the other people who taught me; the European Studies centre at Salford was a good place to be at that time).
But nothing has ever inspired me – made me feel that there was worthwhile and interesting work to be done and I could do it – like the writings of Raymond Williams. And I stress ‘writings’, because Williams was also at Jesus and I did meet him once, with some other students who had plucked up the courage to accept his weekly open invitation to tea; I’m afraid he made very little impression on me.
More to say on the main topic of the post, but this is long enough already – and I have got my own blog…!
Well, well. Small world. This does highlight how far I’ve passed over the distinction between the Oxbridge personal tutor system, where you are under the pastoral care of someone who has nothing at all to do with your subject, and the academic oversight of a Director of Studies or equivalent who is in your subject area but may or may not ever teach you (neither of mine ever did, as when I was in History my DoS was a modern historian and I focused on medieval stuff, and when I switched to Classics I was doing historical topics while my DoS was a Latinist), and the system elsewhere where one person combines pastoral and academic tutoring and is in your discipline but may or may not teach you. Not sure how much difference it makes, though I guess that a sage/mentor is more likely to be found on the discipline-related side.
Much too old a fart to contribute to this discussion, but you seem to me spot on. When it became impossible for academics to read the p s (which for me was usually the best indicator) as you describe it should simply have been dropped.
Thanks for this. I must admit that I rarely found the personal statement a good indicator – and if so did, I suspect it was largely if not entirely a matter of someone who just happened to conform to my personal preferences, which isn’t the path to an equitable system. I think I can see a case for retaining the opportunity to offer specific kinds of context, rather than abolishing it altogether, but certainly we need to move away from the idea that this is THE thing that makes all the difference, hence anxiety, parental and teacher rewriting, private coaching etc.
Perhaps my ‘usually’ was an exaggeration – and little more than nostalgia for a lost face-to-face world.
[…] A second theme that emerged, and that I’ve been thinking about for some time, is that of integrity, of being your full and whole self in all aspects of your life. Academic writing causes fear, the need to fit in, the need to leave part of yourself behind, (to not be my full bolshy self), to conform to those standards set by the colonial institution. It’s a terribly sad thing, because it means that the kinds of knowledge researchers could produce as their full selves doesn’t get produced. In some ways, there’s some resonance here with the battle of feminist scholarship to have woman-as-subject taken seriously as the object of academic investigation; back in the 1970s and 1980s, work on women or feminist themes in my discipline was seen as extremely niche and radical, where now it has become an absolute staple of the field. Similarly, the whiteness of academic writing also can cross out certain subjects (certain people, places, events, stories) as not being appropriate to study – and yet. And yet. If a researcher comes with their full self, that may be precisely the subject they should study. (I think of the question I ask myself when thinking about classical reception studies, that I could write about this topic, but should I? Is it my topic to write about, or do I need to make the space for someone else to do that?) Interweaving here is the very true fact that once you put on a dog collar and become a public representative of the Church of England, people will make a lot of assumptions about who you are and how you should or might behave – which, again, may have very little to do with who you actually are. There’s work to be done both about showing why those assumptions might not match up, but also about not trying to fit into those assumptions, trying to live up to the image of the perfect priest (or, for that matter, Proper Academics a la Proper Binmen). […]