Two contrasting stories about the use of virtual technologies for research and teaching have been hitting the headlines in the United Kingdom this week.

At Durham University, Dr. Patricia Easteal, a law lecturer at the University of Canberra in Australia, has accepted a "virtual sabbatical" in what is believed to be the first sort of fellowship of its kind. Dr. Easteal will conduct her five months of research and teaching with staff and students at Durham, using online tools such as Skype, YouTube, blogs and wikis. She plans to teach her students via Second Life. Unfortunately, for all the freedom of cyberspace, there is no overcoming one feature of real-life geography: the 11 hour time difference between Australia and the UK means that some of her lectures and contributions will have to be pre-recorded.

One acerbic commentator on the Times Higher Education is less than impressed, though, complaining that this may just be a "grandiloquent claim" about a "virtual fellow," when academics have long been used to exchanging knowledge internationally. At Durham, Dr. Westmarland, the lecturer in criminal justice who devised the project, has acknowledged that there may be technical hitches, and that this is a test case for how effective virtual tools are for collaboration at this level.

However, Demos, the UK government think-tank, might well have applauded their efforts. In a recent report entitled The Edgeless University: Why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology, the authors find that whilst social networking and the mobile internet are commonplace among students, such tools have not yet made many inroads into the university classroom. The report argues that with their expertise universities ought to be well placed to filter "the noise of information and knowledge" that envelops students, and so should be eager "to capitalise on the connections and relationships made possible by the new information technologies." Whilst acknowledging that individual academics (such as, perhaps, those mentioned earlier) have been trying to break new ground, investment in online learning and research technologies now needs to be more strategic and sustained.

A new task force set up by the British Government, chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library, aims to help with this. Backed by a new Open Learning Innovation Fund of up to £10 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the group aims to enable universities "to develop greater expertise in online teaching and create centres of excellence for the delivery of online learning."

What do readers here think? Have universities been a bit slow off the mark in making use of the internet for networking? Or should we be a bit sceptical about the effectiveness of things like the "virtual sabbatical"?

[Note: This is a cross-post from the Graduate Junction Blog]

Labels: Technology, The Edgeless University, University Life, virtual learning

One of life's pleasures as a schoolchild was to come in dripping and chill from a winter's rugby or football game, and to win the squabble for the hand driers in the changing rooms. I would clamp the collar of my rugby shirt over the blower, and blast hot air down the top, turning the wet mud on my torso to a cracked, brown glaze, which could then be picked off and flicked at my peers. Like the hot showers that would follow, though, that warmth would last only for thirty seconds, and one had to build up a resistance against pushing the button just three times, two times, just once more.

As an adult, though, and an environmentally conscious one at that, I have a bit of a problem with hand driers. Just consider the huge energies and infrastructures required simply to deliver that brief spurt of air from the hand drier. In a huge concrete furnace, coal burns and smoke churns, whilst a dash of power runs down miles of cable, passes through substations, filters through a transformer box, so that a stream of electrons will get jammed in a small coil of resistant wire, which will warm a stream of air - and all simply to dry your hands. The hand drier is a metaphor for the egocentrism of our lives, as we exploit power and fabricate devices to do jobs that are essentially unnecessary. For there is a way of drying hands that has been used for centuries, and that involves nothing more than a shake of the excess water, and a little patience in the air. Of course, in the modern day, we grumble that we simply do not have the time.

If the hand drier has a benefit that maybe, just maybe, outweighs its energy-sucking pointlessness, it is its social one. Mirroring the pleasure of hand driers as a child, the hand drier offers a way of cutting oneself off from the human world. As an adult, stuck in one of those dreaded conversations facing the wall of the urinal - stare straight ahead; don't dare to look sideways at your pissing conversationalist! - there is no better way of signalling an end to chat that hitting the blast of the hand drier, its hot air drowning out that of the unwanted interlocutor.

Labels: Environment, hand drier

Over at the American Spectator, the British philosopher Roger Scruton has been having an eloquent grumble about the state of the humanities, entitled Farewell to Judgement.

Scruton complains that in an attempt to justify their coexistence with the sciences at universities, the humanities have faced a crisis of legitimation. If the sciences offer knowledge that explains the world, what can the humanities present as their raison d'etre? The response has been an ideological turn, with the humanities justifying themselves by their political radicalism. As Scruton notes, this led to a problem for English studies, which is the informed cultivation of something that might otherwise be seen as a leisure interest:

Unlike women's studies, which has impeccable feminist credentials (why else was it invented?), English focuses on the works of dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today. So maybe such a subject should not be studied, or studied only as a lesson in social pathology.

The brave new world faced by English studies is not one recognised by Scruton's generation. For him, literature offers a way of perceiving those human universals that, in a writer like Shakespeare, transcend historical circumstances to sympathise with a deep human nature, even if the superficial politics look very different to ours. When Shakespeare invites judgement, it is not a political one. Instead:

We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty. And that is how you justify the study of English, as a training in this other kind of judgment, which leaves politics behind.

Scruton says that the other aim of English studies was the judgement of "taste," established through careful emotional criticism, taught by the likes of R. P. Blackmur, F. R. Leavis, William Empson and T. S. Eliot, "who had raised the study of literature to a level of seriousness that justified its claim to be an academic subject." Now, however, Scruton laments that:

When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?

Scruton seems to have things both ways. On the one hand, he argues that literature offers access to human universals, whilst on the other he complains that because Jane Austen cannot tell us about contemporary ideology or power struggles, the point of studying Austen - if we are going to focus on political rather than aesthetic values - is lost. Resolving this double standard of universality points us to the factor Scruton overlooks in his lament about the state of the humanities.

Whereas Scruton perceives that judgements of value and politics must be mutually exclusive, so that Jane Austen both is and is not universal in her value depending on which side you come from - the political or the aesthetic - I do not see any such binary. I do not see the binary because I am, in my own critical and teaching approach, a historicist. Historicism allows one to perceive the universality of underlying aesthetic or humanistic values, without this entailing that political values must be similarly universal; or, to look at it another way, just because political values today are historically different does not automatically mean that the work must be aesthetically compromised.

Take the case of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As most famously expressed by Chinua Achebe, this novel that has come in for a great deal of political criticism, because of its alleged racist tendencies, as Conrad refuses to offer black characters a voice, other than those of cannibal grunts. It is an ideal case of Scruton's "dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today."

Except my students - like myself - do still read and enjoy Conrad today. They are very adept at perceiving that even if Conrad's political values may be suspect, this is not to say that his aesthetic values should automatically be condemned. Students generally recognise that his artistic techniques in representing Africa as an inscrutable, dark place of the Earth - what Leavis called Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery" - must be held in aesthetic admiration, even if the political work to which those techniques are directed, the denigration of Africa as a "dark place of the Earth" and the consequent elevation of European culture as one of enlightenment, may be troublesome from a postcolonial point of view. Students appreciate that Conrad's stylistic traits, such as "delayed decoding," his use of a frame narration, and metafiction, are a masterful way of allowing Conrad to represent Africa in his own way, and to convey his personal, sensual impressions to us as readers who have not necessarily travelled up the Congo. We may not like what he says, or allegedly says, about blacks, but we can admire the way he says it as part of the wider impressionistic purpose of the novel. The crucial intervention here, between political and aesthetic values, is historical awareness, the understanding that Conrad was operating in a different political framework to our own time and that, because we could not have expected him to be of a postcolonial mindset in the late nineteenth century, we can accept that he did the best possible aesthetic work he could under his different circumstances. What would be most surprising of all about Heart of Darkness is if a novella first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, read solely by European civilised males, were to be actively anti-colonial. I should add, as a caveat, that I do not agree with Achebe that Conrad was a racist, and my own view - which I will not elaborate on now - is that he very cunningly undermines the status of his anticipated readership. But even if a modern student or Achebe do think Conrad's political values were wrong, and are inscribed as such in the novel, that does not preclude one holding a different view of his aesthetics. To keep the aesthetic and political in mind simultaneously, what is required is a historical consciousness, as well as a critical acumen.

Which leads me on to another problem I have with Scruton's argument. Scruton later laments that:

Departments of musicology are now “into” pop music and Heavy Metal, and refrain from creating the impression among their students that they regard the Western canon as anything more than a piece of musical history. I recently had the experience of teaching a course on the philosophy of music to young people in a British university, and was acutely aware at every moment of the resentment that now greets any criticism of pop.

This is symptomatic of the humanities' opening of that door to modernity labelled "cultural studies," where instead of looking at dead, white artists, literature, music, art departments encourage their students to look at what is going on in the contemporary cultural world. The problem with cultural studies is its tendency to conflate popularity with quality. Further, as Scruton shows, because pop music is popular amongst those studying it critically, any suggestion that it might not be as good as Bach or Beethoven is taken as a personal affront, thus making judgements of value very difficult. The only thing that can be done is the relative comparison of one pop artist against another - which students readily do in pubs and bedrooms - rather than saying with critical acuity that this pop artist is inferior to Bach.

I appreciate Scruton's criticism here, but his view is based on an experience of cultural studies done badly. There is nothing in principle wrong with studying the contemporary. However, it is only by tapping in to the historical moment in which a particular work of art is produced - asking, why this piece of art, why this style, why now? - that we can hope to perform the separation of politics from value that Scruton desires. Politics can be taken more broadly than just ideology, to mean the social, technological, economic factors that inform a person's beliefs and experiences in any given moment. At its best, the aim of cultural studies should be not primarily to look at what is popular per se, but to ask how that popularity acts as an indicator of what is significant in a culture at any given time. This allows cultural studies to model a moment clearly, and to use this as the basis for making value judgements.

Given the things that matter and inform a contemporary society, which works are doing the best job at this time of responding to, elucidating and - if politically radical - seeking to change that moment? Scruton is right in that cultural studies can fall for the trap of thinking that if something is popular, it must be good. But if, as I believe it should do, cultural studies makes its first point of attention the historical circumstances of the time, and only then asks what works are doing the best job within these circumstances, it can achieve the aesthetic value judgements which literature, music or art departments used to do in the days of Leavis, Eliot et al. Whether looking at canonical works, or looking at the present time, then, the important factor that Scruton overlooks in perceiving a tension between politics and aesthetics as the subject of study is the way in which the historical can mediate between the two objectives. It provides a bedrock from which value judgements of older works can be made, even if their politics seem alien, and from which value judgements of the contemporary can be made more objectively, even if they seem too familiar and a part of who we are, and thus beyond any potentially stinging aesthetic criticism.

Labels: aesthetics, cultral studies, Literature, Roger Scruton