13 SEPTEMBER 1997, Page 20

WHY I'M OFF

I HAD been a schoolteacher for seven years before I took up my first job in a uni- versity, at Cambridge in 1974. I was direct- ing a project sponsored by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers to pro- duce a new sort of ancient Greek course for older beginners. The project published (JACT, Reading Greek, CUP 1978), I was offered a lectureship at Newcastle. I leapt at it. I knew the classics department there well, and was certain that it was the place for me.

The department did not let me down. Surrounded by like-minded colleagues with the best interests of the subject and our undergraduates at heart, with manage- able numbers of students, in a department that was starting to be recognised nation- ally and attracting good students as a result, I happily threw myself into the frenzy of departmental activity. In term- time we were devoted fully to the students, sometimes for six or seven days a week, what with departmental jollies, sporting activities and walks on Hadrian's Wall and in the Cheviots.

In the vacations, we wrote. Our great professor of Latin, David West, and I would nail up on our doors our week-by- week timetables for the completion of sec- tions of our latest magna opera, and inven- tive indeed were the excuses that emerged blinking into the sunlight if we fell behind (inspections of progress were rigorously monitored at abstemious weekly lunches). Holidays? Forget it. University staff are entitled to six weeks a year, but two weeks lecturing on Swan Hellenic were quite enough for me. There was too much to be done in the university, and the university willingly gave its slightly baffled blessing to these lunatic classicists doing things their way.

Students from those days who return to see us ask what has gone wrong. It was all to do, I think, with a general feeling in gov- ernment in the 1980s that no institution could be successful if it did not have gov- ernment inspectors breathing down its neck enquiring whether it gave 'value for money'. There was, of course, no evidence, nor has there ever been, that universities did not give value for money (we are public institutions — our books and procedures are open for inspection at any time). But that made no odds. Further, government was convinced that the methods of business were the only way to guarantee success. That there is, of course, no fit whatsoever between the practices, values and aims of the educational world and those of the business world is apparent to an idiot child. That made no odds either. The result was that, since we were now to be regarded as businesses, our 'prac- tices' and `output' had to be checked, mon- itored, controlled, evaluated and subjected to 'market forces'. Enter the inquisition. Exit, slowly, loyalty. Further, since it was now the government that was determining our procedures, power in universities began to shift away from the people doing the teaching and researching to the admin- istrators, who were charged with putting more and more government diktats into effect.

Enter, then, the administration supre- mos, bent at every turn on fulfilling gov- ernment requirements at whatever cost and in the teeth of whatever advice from their more intelligent administrative col- leagues, let alone us struggling workers; and the exciting new breed of para- academic, the quality management teams, with nothing to contribute to university life but a new, inane vocabulary of business- speak, their fantasy worlds built on their fantasy language, the object of derision among both academics and the more intel- ligent businessmen. The government had by now developed a taste for destruction, and promptly came up with two more brilliant wrecking schemes: first, to double the number of students in the system while keeping staff numbers the same, and second, so to reconstruct that system that every course in every university should be made compa- rable, in intellectual weight, method of assessment and time taken, with every other course in every other university in Europe and America too. This was an administrator's nirvana (it must have cost hundreds of millions), as boring old 'years' were converted into 'stages' and `semesters', and old-fashioned 'courses' into 'modules' (12 a year, all with num- bers) with different 'weightings' and busi- ness-linked 'aims and objectives'. Such artificially imposed divisions made non- sense of course after course. That made no odds.

The purpose of this twin thrust at the very heart of what universities are for the induction of the intellectually qualified into the rigours of rational discourse was twofold: first, to keep unemployment figures down at minimal expense (an arts undergraduate costs the public purse £750 a year in fees, and from next year, with stu- dents paying fees, not even that) and sec- ond, to ensure that Europeans and Americans, especially the latter, could eas- ily enter the United Kingdom system, bringing their money with them. What was to be achieved by redesigning a system to increase the number of third- rate graduates it delivered remains a mys- tery. Plainly, if quality were a priority, the corollary to boosting numbers would be to increase failure rates. But universities will turn every cheek in their collective bodies to prevent that, since student fees account for 65 per cent of an institution's fast- diminishing public money, and quality managers will tut-tut if students are failed (not providing an appropriate service for intellectually disadvantaged stakeholder- customers). Good, hard-working students (of whom there are still plenty) deeply resent the presence among them of increasing numbers of incompetent layabouts whom the regulations bend over backwards to pass. So do staff, since the layabouts take up far more of our time than the conscientious. But that makes no odds.

Vast classes are therefore the order of the day. We work at a staff-student ratio of about 1:20 (if we were a school, we would be closed). I regularly taught final honours classes of 40. This is not what uni- versities are for. Ah, counters the govern- ment, we are producing an educated workforce. No, simply a workforce that has been through the modern university system. It takes a seriously intelligent stu- dent to squeeze an education out of it. Meanwhile, para-academics tell us how to handle huge classes by using computers. Brilliant.

That the result is acknowledged to be an academic disaster is transparent. Why else should government impose these ludicrous quality managers on us? The government blew the gaff again the other week when it proposed equalising standards and making them comparable across the whole range of universities. One wonders idly, whose standards? You can bet they won't be Oxford's, but there could be no clearer admission that standards are all over the place. Where else could they be, if univer- sities depend for survival not on intellectu- al quality but numbers? It is as if Rolls-Royce were, overnight, to cut capital expenditure, halve their workforce, double their production and expect to produce the same car. If the government is serious, uni- versities will soon be following monitored syllabuses like A-level, constructed and examined by university exam boards. The general result of all this is that anyone who wants a real university education these days had better stick to Oxbridge.

I am too old for this anti-educational, anti-intellectual nonsense. Sir Ron Dear- ing's report on higher education does noth- ing to persuade me that things will not get even worse. Nor will the massive savings made by government on fees find their way back into universities. So my declining years will be spent doing real work.

I have nothing but admiration for my colleagues, those older ones trying to stem the tide, the younger ones trying to build a career, against all the odds. Nor is Newcas- tle University different from any other in the absurdities foisted upon it. But I can hardly wait to get back to those evil days when going to work did not bring another avalanche of illiterate drivel from quality controllers, bossy demands from adminis- trators to describe the business skills inher- ent in teaching The Iliad, or classes the size of a Nuremberg rally — and endless con- tortions to ensure that those palpably unfit- ted for serious university work are kept in the system.

Bugger the system. I'm off.

Peter Jones's first pleasure of many in retire- ment will be to write Learn Ancient Greek, a companion to his world bestseller Learn Latin (Duckworth, £7.95), and a column on the joys of ancient literature for the Daily Telegraph. He will continue to write 'Ancient & modern' in The Spectator.

Admit it Doris, our lad's a failure.'