The Daily Novel

At first sight the changes at education should please the workers at the chalk face. Blair famously used all his rhetoric to proclaim his commitment to them; when asked what his priorities were he replied, ‘Education, education, education’. In practice his education secretaries reinforced the introduction of the new managerialism to the university sector started under the Thatcher government. Blair had his own backroom boy as a junior minister who thought he knew better what was good for education than the teachers.

Brown with his clunking fist has given education real clout at the cabinet table. In his reshuffle he has given education two cards in the pack. And Ed Balls who is to be responsible for the schools sector is the joker in the pack. He is one of the new Prime Minister’s oldest friends who is widely known and respected by the Treasury and in the City, and who is intelligent enough to realise that the new managerialism is mostly claptrap. Like twelve others amongst the twenty-two sitting around the cabinet table he is part of the Oxbridge elite. He went on from there to Harvard as a Kennedy scholar, one of the best places to make contacts with the American elite at the same time as getting a first class education. He began his work life on the Financial Times. As did Shirley Williams, one of old Labour’s best education ministers, nearly forty years earlier.

Brown intriguingly also tried to bring Shirley Williams, now a Liberal Democrat, into the government as part of his botched attempt to co-opt Britain’s third political party to the success of his administration. Apparently, the Baroness is still considering taking on a role as an adviser and giving him the benefit of her fine mind, vast experience, and, co-incidentally, her own Harvard connections.

What all this signals is that the Blair era of faith in faith schools is at an end. Though Brown is a son of the Manse and no less ardent in his private religious beliefs than Blair, he is not a closet catholic and is highly unlikely to fill the junior education posts with colleagues of that ilk.

John Denham is quite as much his own man as Ed Balls, though he comes into the cabinet with the delightful Blairite job title as Innovations, Universities and Skills Secretary. (Yes, just think about. You can as a cabinet minister realistically attempt to influence how universities are run. But what can you do about influencing the development of innovations and skills, apart from write articles for the newspapers and rabbit on about it on the television.) Denham is one of tiny minority of the new cabinet who went to a decent old fashioned metropolitan university and entered Parliament as the MP for his university town (Southampton). He was one of the very few junior ministers who actually resigned his job because of his opposition to the Iraq war. Subsequently he has used his role as chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, to challenge and constructively criticise the government.

That’s the good news.

The worrying aspect is that Brown reveals his Blairite tendencies by messing around with the structure of educational administration, which day to day is done by the Civil Service. He is splitting schools from the universities, despite the steadily growing realisation, that what is needed is closer co-operation between the two sectors. The wisest voices at the chalk face have realised this for many years. It took over ten years for the unions from the older universities and the former polytechnics to merge into the new University and College Union. It will probably take more than ten years for UCU to merge with the school teaching unions. Real change just not happen quickly when it involves institutions.

Just how much havoc is created by breaking up the department of education and skills remains to be seen. Much will depend on the how well the two education ministers co-operate with each other and how much attention they pay to the huge potential disruption involved in creating new administrative units of government.

All I can do is recommend some weekend reading. Co-incidentally Frank Heller, who died last week, wrote many things highly relevant to these issues. He worked for many years at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, who were and are one of the world leaders in promoting a multi-disciplinary approach to achieving institutional change. I first met him when I was at London Business School in the mid 1970s working on a project called The Quality of Working Life. He was the director of the Tavistock centre for decision making studies for thirty years until he retired in 1999. This quote from The Guardian obituary sums up what he was about.

Frank’s abiding interest lay in the exercise of power and the consequences of sharing power, mainly in work settings. Concerned about the use of appropriate and ideally longitudinal research methods, where data is collected over time, and recognising that much could be learnt from exploring the exercise of power in different institutional contexts, he engaged in a series of comparative projects that helped to establish his reputation.

Frank did his Ph D at LSE in occupational psychology. This discipline, unlike most of the psychology taught at Oxbridge, concerns itself with how academic theory can be used to effect changes in the workplace. Inevitably that leads to a multi-disciplinary approach because as soon as you begin to study why human beings behave as they do at work, you realise that as well as internal psychological imperatives you have to look at sociological and economic influences.

The Tavistock ethos, which is also influenced by neo-Freudian thinking, is based on getting people to talk to each other at a deeper level and confronting, rather than avoiding, the conflicts that arise when human beings try and work together with other human beings. Maybe if Frank Heller had been at the Granita restaurant table in Islington, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown allegedly made their pact to resolve the conflict that arose because of their mutual wish to succeed John Smith as leader of the Labour Party, he would have been able to help them resolve their deep-seated antipathies which led to some of the nastiest feuds between Blairites and Brownites when they actually achieved power.

I like to think so. As well as an impressive intellect Frank had a keen sense of humour, which he used to change the course of a conversation. And he retained until well into his eighties a zest for life, continuing with his regular visits to the ski slopes until shortly before he died.

Bournemouth

In the late afternoon the sun broke through the billowing clouds and a strong wind whipped up the waves and buffeted those UCU delegates venturing out for a fag.  Inside the hall the carefully prepared proposals of the leadership for dealing with the vexed and heated issue of a boycott of Israeli universities were blown blown off course by a thumping vote from the delegates.

When the debate began it seemed that everything was going the way the leadership wanted. The compromise entitled Policy on International  Greylisting and Boycotts, was passed by an overwhelming majority of delegates, with only a few hands raised against. This approach meant applying pressure on Israeli universities and asking for changes but not moving to a boycott unless these measures failed.  Even then imposing a boycott would require a further motion by UCU Congress in a year’s time.

This was Resolution 28. The tiger in the tank was Resolution 30, which condemned Israel’s ‘40-year illegal occupation that denies educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shooting and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students’.  It condemned ‘the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation’, which has provoked a call from Palestinian trade unions ‘for a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions’.

Resolution 28 went on to demand immediate action by circulating the Palestinian proposals to all union branches, by organizing a UK-wide campus tour  for Palastinian trade unionists and by urging all union members to consider the moral implications of llinks with Israeli universities.

It was a long and well argued debate with speakers for and against following each other. There were still several available from both sides when the vote was taken to put the motion to the vote. The hall was electrified as a forest of hands shot up to support the rebels. The tellers were called in and they confirmed what we already knew; 158 for the boycott and 99 against. Nearly two-thirds of the delegates had over-ruled their own executive.

They had also, in one sense, cancelled out the near unanimous support they had given for Resolution 28 which in effect had committed the union not to go for an immediate boycott. What happens now is that the members will have to decide on the issue.  So it will be a few months before we know whether the General Secretary is right in thinking that most members don’t want a boycott. Or whether the rebels are right in thinking that their policies are backed by their members.  This is not always easy to know in the union movement, particularly when university teachers have so little time to attend meetings, so that policy can be decided by a committed few, whose views may not reflect the majority.

The rebel victory projects a public image of dis-union on the first day of the new  union. And no doubt some of the tabloid press will see a thousand Arthur Scargills leading university students down the path of left-wing fundamentalism. In fact the difference between the two sides is not as wide as it seems. 

Two speeches to give you the flavor of the debate.

Richard Seaford from Exeter University argued with eloquence and passion that it was a boycott of institutions not individuals. He spoke with conviction about how many Israeli academics he had worked with. And claimed that the boycott would still enable him to invite them to Exeter.  He ended with a plea to delegates to:

Make a small contribution to the growing movement for change in the climate of opinion which will bring a lasting and just settlement in the middle east.

Michael Yudkin of Oxford University argued quietly and firmly that a boycott would conflict with the duty of academics to encourage dialogue.  It would also harm the Palestinian cause by hurting the Israeli academics, who he claimed provided the main opposition to the Isreali government. He reported that 358 Israeli academics had signed an on-line petition opposing the occupation.  He advised members to read a new research study which found that the boycott against South African universities was not important in defeating apartheid. He argued that rather than tell foreign governments what to do we should take on our own:

How many British universities have passed motions opposing British occupation of Iraq?

I was impressed with his arguments. My own worry is that the Israeli boycott issue diverts attention from the damage done to British universities by a series of government measures.  And I hope that delegates are going to tell the education minister just how mistaken their policies are when he comes to Bournemouth on Friday morning. 

Bournemouth

The splendid from views Bournemouth pier are shrouded in mist this morning and the town is drenched in drizzle. But  inside the conference hall the spirit was upbeat at the first Congress of the University and College Union. The merger was the result of ten years work to bring together the Association of University Teachers, which represented the older universities, and NATFHE which dominated the former polytechnics and the further education sector.  In the last twelve months the brotherly spirit was sometimes ruptured by the infighting which took place in election of the first General Secretary.  Victory went to Sally Hunt, who as the AUT candidate had to win NATFHE votes because they had more members than the AUT.In her speech this morning Hunt focused on the future and ‘the need to build a new union fit for the 21^st century. She said:

We meet in a political and industrial environment as challenging in its way as any faced by our predecessors.

She has no doubt as to who the enemy is and she pulled no punches in describing the effects on academic life.

This government increasingly sees us as instruments of economic policy………and ignores the wider benefits to  society that universities and colleges provide.They intervene in the curriculum in the name of quality.They direct funding towards some and away from others in the so called skills revolution.They choose to protect some subject areas while throwing others to the wolves.There has never been greater government interference in our professional lives than today. And yet while government wishes to increase its control it wishes to do so by contributing progressively less from the public purse.That is why students now pay top up fees in our universities.That is why adult learners are paying progressively more for a second chance.And that is why we face the beginnings of privatisation in both sectors.

She then gave some telling examples of the how the government is shooting itself in the foot.

Take health where community care is prioritized, yet our members, who train our nurses are made redundant to fund NHS deficits.Take science where despite warm words from ministers we are still shutting labs here almost as fast as they are building them in China.And take lifelong learning – at the heart of the government’s agenda so they say – yet the latest cuts have seen a 17 per cent reduction in adult learners last year.On the ground, the reality of government policy for too many of our members is job insecurity, increased casualisation and higher workloads.

She then turned her attention to the need for the union to focus on these educational priorities.

I counted forty five different motions and amendments on our agenda this week which call for campaigns of one kind or another.

To be effective, the union needed to prioritise.  She particularly does not wish the union to be sidetracked by another academic boycott of Israel. Hunt believes that the majority of the membership don’t want it.This afternoon, when the Israel issue is debated, she will find out what the delegates think.

After getting back home from St Marylebone Church I checked my email. My bank tells me that someone has been trying to get unauthorised access to my account. If I want to get the details I must get in touch with postmaster@city.ac.uk. But of course he will have gone home by now.

What on earth can have happened. Does it mean someone in the accounts department of City University has got hold of my bank details and is trying to augment their salary by milking my bank account? If so I must urge them to join the trade union, where they can argue their case for more money.

Or is it yet another scam, like the message from PayPal that a purchaser is claiming that I have not paid his bill. Whereas I have never purchased anything from PayPal. Or like the messages I get from the Halifax and NatWest telling me that someone is trying to access my account, although I have never had an account with them?

All this is worrying. Because internet banking saves me time and the banks money. And my belief is that it is no more, or less subject to fraud, than credit cards or non-internet banking.

But I don’t really know.

But I have checked my bank account and my modest credit balance is as yet undisturbed by any un-authorised transactions.

In between all the running around looking at flats and houses I have found time to study the full results of the first election for all the posts in the University and College Union, formed by the merger of the Association of University Teachers and NATFHE. The results augur well for the future of the new union. Although only a minority bothered to vote, those who did vote appear to have made their choices based on intelligent reflection rather than tribalism.

Although ex-NATFHE members have most of the votes, they have not voted tribally. Not only did they elect the highly experienced AUT leader, Sally Hunt, as General Secretary, they elected many AUT candidates to positions on the national executive. It is particularly pleasing to see so many representatives on the National Executive from the old metropolitan universities, including two from my alma mater, the University of Birmingham.

This is not, I hope, a tribal comment. The old metropolitan universities, like London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, etc, stand in between the academic elitism of Oxford and the pragmatic vocational thrust of the former polytechnics. They have a strong commitment to research and to teaching traditional subjects. They have ensured since the end of the nineteenth century that bright working class entrants have the opportunity to have as good an academic education as that provided by Oxbridge.

It is also pleasing that the Open University has a voice on the Executive via Alan Carr, who has been elected as Treasurer. The Open University, which Harold Wilson regarded as one of his most important achievments as Prime Minister, makes it possible for late developers to study either vocational subjects or intellectually challenging ones. The mother of one of my wife’s oldest friends is working on her second Open University degree aged 91. And she is not the oldest student.

Assuming my move goes smoothly I shall be riding over from Charmouth on my scooter to report on the first UCU Council in Bournmouth at the end of May.

Sally Hunt has won the election for the first General Secretary of the new University and College Union. It was a close run battle. Hunt, who has been with the Association of University Teachers since 1995 and General Secretary since 2002, got 7,605. Roger Kline, a long standing NATFHE organiser was close behind with 6,151 votes. Peter Jones, another NATFHE man, who has worked in further as well as higher education, collected 2,494. That suggests a lot of members voted tribally since NATFHE had a bigger total membership.

But this interpretation is really only a guess because only 14 per cent of the 116,000 membership voted. Perhaps they were put off by the 164 pages of election statements. If they were it is shameful. If university teachers cannot take the trouble to read the material to inform their decisions, what hope for democracy.

Woke up early not in a cold sweat but with a troubled conscience. Realised it was 7 March and that I had not done my promised blog on the first ever elections for my new trade union, the University and College Union. So now too late for me to influence any of the electorate who reads this blog. But still time to cast my own vote. Because the deadline is noon and it will only take me 15 minutes on my scooter to deliver my forms to Electoral Reform Services in Hornsey.

So have now read the literature and cast my votes. It took rather more than five minutes. There are 100 candidates for 33 posts, and the manifestos and biographies of the candidates cover 164 pages of A4. Which means I had to read getting on for 80,000 words!

First decision I had to make was for the job of General Secretary. There are three candidates. Took me no time at all to decide where to put my number one. The General Secretary of my old union, the Association of University Teachers, Sally Hunt. I have known her for many years because on her first day of work for the AUT as London organiser she had to come and help me dealing with a very delicate inter-union problem at City University, where I was then President of the AUT branch.

 She showed an unusual capacity to understand the complexities of this situation in the five minutes it took us to get to the meeting room. She showed an even more unusual capacity to understand how my curious mind works. So we have been firm friends ever since.

 I was about to put my number two against Roger Kline, the leading candidate from NATFHE, with whom AUT merged to form UCU last year. I had met Kline at a hustings at University College recently and liked him and what he had to say. But then I remembered that the number two vote can be important in an election based on the single transferable vote. I think Hunt is the best candidate, as do many people in both unions, but if most of the membership votes tribally, Kline will win, because NATFHE has more members. So I decide to vote tactically for the third dark horse candidate. It also amused me because he bears the same name as my brother, Peter Jones, though he is no relation.

 Deciding how to vote for each candidate was, in fact, an interesting exercise. It made me realise just how many criteria I use in coming to such decisions. One or two decisions I made on personal grounds, like my number one vote for Alan Carr from the Open University, a former AUT national president whom I have known for many years. He is a friend of mine, but then that is partly because he shares many of the same values as me, in relation to what is most important in running a good trade union and fighting for academic standards.

 I tried to make sure I was voting for an equal number of candidates from the old universities and the former polytechnics. I used positive discrimination for ethnics and women, who are still thin on the ground in the top echelons. I favoured candidates whose biographies showed they had done casework: this involves fighting on behalf of members who are under threat because they have become ill, have had personal problems or have become the victims of bullying or personality clashes. I took into account not only what people said they stood for, but the tone in which they made their assertions.

 This democracy business takes a long time. But it is time well spent. And though you could write a computer program which would feed all these criteria into the computer and give you a precise print-out telling you where to put your vote, I can’t help thinking that the imperfect human mind working in a more mysterious way gets a better result than one you would get by such quantification.

 Though I can’t prove it.

This article, despite the headline, is more about me, than estate agents. Because I am currently a quivering mess of emotions. That is not the fault of the estate agents. It is because I am selling the house in which I have lived for the past twenty-one years. But, if you read on to the end, you will find that it does connect back to estate agents eventually.

 In early 1976 I bought this house in something of a hurry. In the closing months of 1975 Janet and I had been spending much of our spare time, looking for a bigger house in the Gospel Oak neighbourhood, because our existing house in Oak Village was just not big enough to house our growing children and put up our foreign friends and our extended families. We had found a house twice as big over the road, at substantially less than the value of our house, but which needed a lot doing to it.

 There was a snag. It had a sitting tenant. But because we had been looking for some time, and were well-acquainted with the lady, we knew that she was on the verge of getting a council flat. So we put in our offer, which was about £18,000. And the deal was proceeding.

 Then, on Friday, the thirteenth of September, (I mention the date in case any of my readers are superstitious. I am, of course, a rational human being.) I was knocked off my motor bike in Pall Mall, on the way back to The Economist, for whom I was then working.

 In February, the Abbey National told me that they would not give me a mortgage on our preferred house. In those days, the building societies, were unprepared to lend on a house, which had an elderly tenant with legal rights inhabiting a bedsit on the first floor. Though we were quite happy to live with her, while she waited for the Council to give her, what she had wished for many years, a nice small mod cons council flat. Because, on our visits, we had become quite fond of her.

 But I was starting a new job, and facing a prospect of several months on crutches, during which I would be incapable of doing any of my amateur do-it-yourself. So we opted to buy a similar house in the same street for around £25,500, which was we could easily live in without doing anything immediately, because it had been well-maintained and modernised, but in 1950s, rather than Victorian style.

 Most of the work we did, and the money we spent, on that house was ripping out the plaster board partitions, and installing replicas of two of the original fireplaces. So what we now have is something which combines the elegance of the Victorian structure, with central heating, discreet big French windows facing the garden, etc, etc.

 But even before we had done anything, I remember sitting at my desk, then in the front ground floor ‘dining room’ which was designated my study, the first study I had ever had in my life, and feeling totally happy. This was a house in which I was quite happy to spend the rest of my life

But I have lived longer than I expected to. And I am now looking forward to a change, when I will divide my time between a flat near here and a small house by the seaside.

 And so is all my family. But we are all in a mess of emotions, because so much of our life together has been lived in this heap of bricks and mortar which has suited us. So today while were discussing all the practicalities of this change, little Dulcie upset a glass of wine over the documents I had brought over to show to Holly. And slightly bigger Joe had vanished to the sitting room to play on his parent’s laptop.

 Earlier in the day my wife had erupted, because, due to a misunderstanding, I had arranged for the first visits of the first prospective buyers at the wrong time. So she vanished and I dealt with them, carefully concealing the tears in my eyes.

 We were fearing the newly rich who were going to tear out what we had so carefully constructed. But in fact, it was not so bad. Two of the three lots who came round were obviously appreciative of what we had done. And although, one was a rising grocer and the other a banker, they both were not just buying their houses as ‘investments’.

 They were not behaving like ‘estate agents’. But, neither were most of the estate agents I have been dealing with. They have mostly shown quite a lot of sensitivity to the emotional upheavals that are an intricate part of selling and buying houses. (Though, they are, I think, overpaid in relation to postmen, milkmen and small shopkeepers, who also spend a lot of their time dealing with the emotional needs of the people they encounter while earning their daily bread.)

 My headline was provoked by the comment of Phil on the previous blog I wrote in which I referred to the estate agents who were dominating my life. He wrote that those I had encountered must have been young. Because even estate agents die of shame. Good joke.

 But that rather misses the point I was making. Which will be clear to anyone who has read my last three blogs. Estate agents and small shopkeepers are doing just exactly what they have been doing for generations.

 What is different today is that university teachers are being encouraged to behave like estate agents, and university vice chancellors are going along with it. The students are not our customers. Our job is not to sell them the knowledge and experience we have. It is to challenge and provoke them. It is to make them dissatisfied.

 Our job is not to quench their thirst. It is to whet their appetites, to raise their aspirations, not to train them to fit in with the fashions of the times.

Blair is making some attempt to repair some of the havoc he has wreaked in the university system. Plans are to be unveiled later this week through which the government will donate £1 from the public purse for every £2 given by wealthy philanthropists or grateful ex-students. That should help to get some much needed extra funds into the university system. But it still leaves our university system at the whim of private donors, rather determinde by government policy. Which is the old Conservatism, rather than Labour, new or old.

Harvard is to get a female President. Particularly pleasing after the last chap who was even worse than me at making male chauvinist jokes. So the boys at Harvard have decided to leap in the opposite direction and fight fiercely under the leadership of a warrior Queen. Three cheers for the Ivy League.