Hidden in your grade inflation comments you also hint at another danger – namely that we will see a reactionary and regressive attitude to teaching in which teaching hours are increased in order to give the impression that value is being added (i.e., a bigger product is being given in return for bigger fees – neatly forgetting that the bigger fee is not an increase in price for the product, simply a transfer of the burden for paying for that product from state to individual). Worryingly, then, in response to consumer demand and management profit maximisation we could see more lectures added to the timetable – despite the fact that they are shown to be the least effective means for developing the skills I outline above (which requires active engagement of intellect not simple reception of acknowledge). Students see lectures as contact time with little required in return. As such they are a product to consume without having to work in return (like the sauna at the gym – you feel you are getting something healthy in return for your membership fee, but you don’t have to work at it). On the other hand, managers like lectures because they are efficient in terms of addressing the greatest number of consumers in the least amount of time/space. Adding more of this kind of contact time to the timetable would be a backwards step since it would not advance the kind of learning which makes a university education so valuable (and would fly in the face of pedagogic research).

Thanks for providing this insightful (and sobering) analysis. It strikes me that there are two additional risks of removing the current fees cap and ending public funding of the arts, humanities, and social sciences related to what you’ve outlined.

The first is grade inflation. With increases in fees doing little more than covering what was previously provided by the state, institutions are going to struggle to demonstrate ‘value for money’. Most will increase contact time and probably seek to improve the level of pastoral care on offer. However, there is no guarantee that these will increase student satisfaction. Similarly, what students perceive as ‘quality’ teaching and what is perceived as ‘quality’ teaching by professionals are not always the same things. Given these uncertainties, grade inflation is a quick, efficient, and low-cost (at least to universities) way of increasing student satisfaction and satisfying ‘objective’ indicators like ‘value-added’ so beloved of league tables and government ministries.

The second is probably a subsidary of your observation that there will be the establishment of two tiers of academic employment (research and teaching). I would add that teaching employment will likely emulate practices based on fostering flexible pools of casual labour. Why hire teaching staff on permanent contracts–leaving yourself vulnerable to overspending if demand drops–when you can hire them on low cost fixed contracts with no obligation to nuture talent or make pension contributions? North American academia’s dirty secret is that the majority of university lecturers are not permanent staff. They are contracted based on short-term teaching needs. They are poorly paid, overworked, and undervalued. They have neither the time or energy to pursue active research agendas. Teaching quality suffers under these conditions. People are incentivised to teach outside of their core competencies and are often juggling employment across several institutions in order to cobble together a living wage. Any sense of a community within the university dies with lecturers (and students) being part-time. This not only demoralises and alienates staff but it also affects the student experience when one can no longer build-up learning relationships–like you’ve outlined above–with their teachers. It will be a real shame if/when the UK goes down this road…

Thanks for what is the most insightful treatment of the war logs that I have read to date. In particular, I was struck by the following passage which I think gets right to the heart of the matter:

‘The problem for me is that we tend to be obsessed by the details to the detriment of the wider narrative. To put it another way: while it is important to bring individuals to justice for specific episodes, we must not lose sight of the bigger context that gave rise to these episodes in the first place. To fail to understand this would be akin to policing individual crimes without pausing to ask how crime itself might be tackled.’

Even in media outlets that are highly sceptical of the value of the Afghan mission, I have yet to see this kind of critical questioning. Instead, there is a continuing focus on the minutiae of the data and the horrible revelations contained within. This serves to geograph the issues as either being unique to Afghanistan itself or as a function of the way in which the mission has been (dis)organised. Thus, by assuming that these revelations are particular, the dominant narrative avoids asking the very kinds of probing questions that your analysis demonstrates to be absolutely essential at this time.

There is a categorical difference in the way in which one can relate to otherness that I think is dissolved when we transmute struggle into warfare. We can do our best to mitigate it by coming up with new definitions of “war”, but I think ultimately we fail by relying on a term that functions differently than we want it to. There’s an interview with Said in “Power, Politics, and Culture” (I seem to have lost the reference) where he brings up the self-defeating qualities of seeing everything in terms of zero-sum struggles. He’s addressing the dual facts of his political critique of and enjoyment/admiration for the western literary tradition, and he basically says (if I’m remembering correctly), “yes, there is an opposition, but this opposition can only really function by being involved with its object of derision, not by standing outside of it or rejecting it.” And it’s this distinction in the terms on which we conduct the struggle/war which, to me, lies between the notions of society as being fundamentally about struggle or fundamentally about war. And again, this comes out of a sense that I still don’t know precisely what Foucault means when he speaks of “war”. But also a sense that my confusion may be related not to a mis-understanding of his text, but to a certain reservation in adopting his mode of analysis (I just finished Society Must be Defended a few days ago, so all of this is very fresh in my mind).

Now, what does this have to do with your reply? Good question. I think the part I’m having trouble with is where we come to the problem of deligitimizing war if it is constitutive of social relations. My confusion pops up because I’m immediately uncertain: what is the “war” here? What is it we’re fighting against, and what is it that is constitutive of our relations? You say that delegitimizing war will require “something akin to de-militarising modernity”. To be honest, for me that works at a level of abstraction that becomes irrelevant. I have no idea what a de-militarised modernity would look like or even if I want one. I certainly don’t want a society without struggle, but maybe I want a society without war? Again, the confusion gets me.