A couple of days ago, somebody forwarded me a link to a new career's website for Arts and Humanities PhD graduates, called Beyond the PhD. The site seems quite useful, offering advice and experiences from recent graduates, who have gone on to careers inside and beyond academia. Unlike many other careers websites, this is actually targeted at, and relevant to, this particular audience.

Seeing the website reminded me of my own experiences a couple of years ago, back when I was in the middle of my PhD research. I am a socialist and utilitarian at heart, which means I find it necessary to justify taking public money by explaining what benefit the society which distributes those funds gets out of it. Given that I was lucky enough to be fully funded throughout my studies, I was always conscious of the need to put something back into the public domain, as I explained in a series of posts labelled "The Idea of a University."

It was out of one of these posts that the issue of the "value" of an English PhD arose. Picking up facts and figures from various reports circulating at the time, I worked this post into an essay, which I presented as a seminar paper in my department. However, since I am now at the end of my PhD studies, I thought it appropriate to revisit this piece and put it up on The Pequod. Since some of the employment figures may be slightly out of date (especially given the current recession) it is not an authoritative case study, but will hopefully be of interest to some readers, particularly those currently undertaking PhDs in the Arts and Humanities, and wondering for themselves whether and why their studies are worthwhile.

The essay can be found here: The Value of an English PhD.

Labels: Literature, PhD, the idea of a university

This week's (stylishly revamped) Times Higher has an extended article by Matthew Reisz on what a university is for. Is it for pursuing knowledge for the sake of it? For engaging with business and the demands of the economy? For promoting social mobility? My own impression, and the implication of Reisz's survey of opinions, is that universities are blank slates upon which, although (or because) relatively free from state control, the government can impress its broader ideological and social abstractions. In the current climate, this is the use of private finance for the improvement of public services. In part, then, universities are simultaneously where the state of the culture is writ large, as well as where that culture can be modified by new research and technologies. This is why the question "What is a university?" is also a question about "What is society?" and so far from being a peripheral issue to be discussed behind closed doors at university senates, it should be of concern to all, whether readers of the Times Higher or not.

One aspect of Reisz's article struck me in particular, which is that one of Cardinal Newman's original principles in The Idea of a University was that a university should bring academics and students into proximity, not necessarily in terms of their ideas but physically, as a community living over an extended period under one (or several) roofs. However, with the expansion of higher education, halls of residence have become distributed (where they still exist at all), and the commendable open-access policies that inform institutions like the Open University suggest that geographical centredness is not itself central to the idea of a modern university.

Two anecdotes occur here to suggest that, in this particular aspect of his argument, Newman may have been short sighted (as Reisz shows, it is surprising how many other aspects remain pertinent today). According to these two, universities are really functions of action rather than place.

The first is from Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind. He imagines a prospective student touring a university. He or she sees the library, the labs, the sports arena, but then asks the tour guide, "But where is the university?" According to Ryle, the mistake made by the student is a failure to realize that "university" and "library" are terms that belong to different logical categories. (The analogy signifies Descartes' mistaken assumption that there is a ghost inside us that works a merely mechanical body, without understanding that mind labels a behaviour, which - like the university building - is a different category to things, including the brain that may give rise to mind). In the advertisements section of the same issue of the Times Higher, a university campus in Croatia is listed as being for sale or rent. The buildings may exist, but this particular university is no more; likewise, just because we have the infrastructure of universities in the UK does not mean that - whether in Russell red brick or Million+ concrete - they exist unchanging and for all time. Much of New Labour's secondary education policy seems to have been directed at changing the architecture and nomenclature of schools, building glassy new academies - and they may be right that in this case changing the physical form of education for the better will also improve its chances of success with those who are involved in it. But, though that new physics lab or supercomputer may provide for a glossy photo opportunity, this rule does not hold true of a university in general.

The second anecdote comes from the U.S. When Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia University in the 1950s, he was introduced to senior faculty. He remarked how pleased he was to meet with the employees of the university. He was interrupted by the physicist I.I. Rabi: "Mr. President. We are not the employees of the university. We are the university!" (Thanks to Heinz R. Pagel's The Dreams of Reason for this).

Labels: Politics, the idea of a university

As regular readers will know, in my daily research I undergo something of a continual crisis of confidence, as I try to work out why literary studies is worth pursuing, in comparison to sciences which seem to produce so many technological and social benefits beyond the internal logic of their research. Several of my posts and essays have explored the "value" of literary criticism, and of doing a literature PhD, and one of my regular moans is that literary criticism is often intended to reach a limited spectrum of readers. So it was with a mixture of delight and deflation that I found one of my pieces receiving the following comment from a reader, Vincent, who blogs at A Wayfarer's Notes:

I was interested to see your piece on The Secret Agent, as I wrote one today on my blog, specifically not as literary criticism, for reasons which I summarise therein:

"Literary criticism, if I am not mistaken, analyses texts as objects with intrinsic qualities. I don’t take that view. Texts are nothing without the reader, who alone constructs the meaning. They are dishes served up to a person, preferably hungry, on a particular occasion. By this, my book-reviewing is a subcategory of memoir-writing. Here’s my bit of cooking for you, my reader. I have to guess your taste in spices for I don't know you that well."

I did literature at university but it was before the days of this new criticism, so I wasn't trained in it at all. I therefore have no idea as to what it's for, other than to keep academics busy.

The Secret Agent is subtitled "A Simple Tale" and while it is of course permissible for any individual to extract from it material to support any thesis which appeals to them, it would make more sense in my view if they took complete ownership of it, for example to start with a "claimer" (as opposed to a disclaimer) saying "I read this novel as one generally reads a novel, that is for fun and not work; and these are the thoughts which inspired in me personally. These are the things which I consider are most important to say about it."

I would also consider it perfectly valid to try and guess, from evidence available, why the author wrote what he did and so forth.

I have come across many essays in a similar style to yours on Conrad, when I used to contribute articles in a literary review on John Cowper Powys, but I have never had the chance to ask anyone "Why?"

Naturally, if I was a university student today, and asked to write such essays, I should, especially if young, just do it, as a rite of passage, the necessary if painful price of earning my degree.

But I am not young any more. I am not in thrall to the approval of academics, though I have children and grandchildren who will be embarking on their journey through the universities in due course.

I once was employed to edit some essays of students at the local college in the Crafts department, about ceramics, tapestry and the like. They used this same style, which I take to have emanated from some post-modernist general criticism. OK, it is academically fashionable. Perhaps if you train as a nurse nowadays you have to learn it too, for any essays you may have to write.

But still I don't know why.

If ever you feel inclined to respond I should be most grateful and enlightened. I'm pretty sure it is my ignorance which makes me so sceptical. I'm going to read some more of your work in case it throws any light.

With best wishes & thanks for your generous display of original web pages

Naturally, I could not let these comments pass without response, but happily I think my email - dashed off in the space of an hour - has provided my strongest and simplest articulation yet of the value of literary criticism. For this reason, I reproduce it below.

I am not sure if you read about V.S. Naipaul's comments the other week, but he argued - in his typically subtle way - that all literature departments should be shut down and its professors go and work on buses, whilst universities get on with teaching practical science. If you are questioning "what literary criticism is for, other than to keep academics busy," then you are not the only one. And I have asked similar questions myself in the context of my literature PhD (see links below).

Actually, though, Naipaul is being thoroughly naive of his literary history. Who was it who showed us how English literature was ignoring postcolonial writers like himself? Precisely the literature departments (e.g. Edward Said). Likewise, 1960s feminism was bound up with rediscovering a feminine style of writing (Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Susan Sontag), and again it was through and from literature departments that the politics of 1960s feminism originated. Likewise, if you agree that language is central to all the activities of all aspects of culture - from politics, to computer games, to film, to science - then literature departments have a key role to play in understanding and interpreting how we make ourselves understood by other people, and how groups of people (such as men, or scientists) write in a particular way to the exclusion or inclusion of other groups (such as women, or laypeople). In my own specific field, which involves analysing the way in which scientific ideas are understood by scientists and transmitted to culture, literature departments have been central and these things do matter: it's surely significant in judging, say, the ethics of current stem cell research that we understand through a reading of Frankenstein and the historical conditions in which it was produced that reactions to new life sciences tend to be similar across the ages; thus a knee jerk, tabloid reaction today that demonises stem cell scientists is only to be expected.

If you agree with Naipaul, it appears OK to turn million pound telescopes to the heavens as if we'll see a cure for cancer etched upon the cosmos, but not a valid activity to turn the tools of literary criticism to examine the words in novels, poetry, film etc, as if language has, after all the human effort that goes into its making, no point beyond its immediate meaning. I am not a romantic believing in ars gratia artis or knowledge for the sake of knowledge; as a left winger, I have to be also a pragmatist and admit that literary criticism in the university, paid for by the taxpayer, ought to justify its own existence and hence why it deserves funding rather than that new hospital. But that utilitarian principle - which Naipaul holds in extremis - does not mean I think literary criticism has no value at all.

Rather, the value of literary criticism lies in exploring the contexts around a text, the frameworks in which the novel or poem was originally produced: history, philosophy, politics, science etc. By doing this, such a form of criticism can help us to understand about ourselves, evaluate how "good" or "bad" our current society is - and you pointed out the obvious connection between Conrad's novel and the war on terror. My essay was admittedly more esoteric than this, in that it was about how the changing Victorian notions of time and relativity could affect Conrad's literary style. This may have been a prosaic piece, but if you agree in principle that it is worth being interested in novels because they show us connections across time (e.g. in notions of "terror"), then you ought to allow some room for studies such as my essay. If you agree that it is worth understanding history if nothing else but for the sake of it, because it is (was) there, then understanding literary sty
le can offer a route into this sort of knowledge.

Of course you may not agree. If you are a Naipaul, and think that universities (and the accumulation of human knowledge they represent) should just be producing applied sciences, then OK, lets do away with literature departments...and telescopes. And if we ever do live in that brave new world, I may just have to overdose on soma.

So I hope that this makes the case for my sort of essay, beyond it being (originally) the "painful rite of passage" of having to pass an exam (and, incidentally, English Lit students are among the most employable graduates around, so clearly literature departments are doing something right, given the quality of the students who emerge from the other side of its mill).

And now comes the twist. As I understand your email your problem, and the issue I do have with literary criticism myself, is not whether literary criticism is valid given the innate human desire to produce knowledge, and to understand the linguistic terms in which knowledge is produced and expressed, but the way in which that practice is carried out - its style.

You suggest that your piece on your blog - which I liked very much - was written "specifically not as literary criticism." But if not literary criticism, then what on earth was it? It certainly wasn't a mathematical appraisal of the number of words in The Secret Agent. It was, rather, an attempt to elucidate what to you seemed to be some of the key themes and interesting characters of the novel, comparing its urban themes to the maritime ones of Nostromo, and your placing the novel in an aesthetic rank along with his other works (e.g. his later writing is better than his earlier). It was critical in that you picked out some aspects and excluded others from your focus. It was literary, in that it studied literature, and was in its own way creative (a sort of memoir-writing). But your style of literary criticism (if you will allow me to varnish it as "literary criticism") is very much sympathetic, appreciative of the novel in question, self-reflexive in describing your own reactions to Conrad's work. In a word, your literary criticism embodies...passion.

It is passion which is lacking from contemporary literary criticism, including, I admit, my own. In an attempt to position itself alongside the sciences in the university - given the existence of views such as Naipaul's that the sciences alone have social value - literary criticism has systematically developed a more elevated, jargonistic manner; it has adopted some of the conventions of scientific writing, such as analysing the text from the perspective in the passive, third person. Thus, it writes "the text says this in such a way" rather than the (your) first person "I read this in such a way."

So here we find ourselves in a funny position. We hardcore literary critics admire novels for their historical transmutability, their ability to embody multiple themes simultaneously; the way they revealingly say different or similar things to different people. But we analyse them in a way that - as you observe - does away with the reader and constructs an artificially objective perspective which implies that "the text says this," definitively. Should we then produce a "claimer" which admits that we have complete ownership of the text, in spite of apparently arguing for the texts as objects with intrinsic qualities?

Well, herein lies the second problem to emerge from literary criticism's current style. If you were to read lots of contemporary literary criticism and theory, or if you were based at a university, you would not need a "claimer" to know full well that personal opinion still counts; that we all appreciate the aesthetic qualities of particular works and play authors off against each other; that in literary journals and monographs debates about the meanings of particular works bounce furiously around; that postmodern literary theorists dispute the possibility of there being a final meaning in any text, and propose that meaning is in a sense constructed by the reader, depending on their gender, race, age etc.

But if you haven't read lots of contemporary literary theory or criticism to allow you to realise this - I don't blame you!

Especially in the latter postmodern guises, it's hard, littered with jargon, full of dense and often turgid prose, clever references to other philosophers or theorists no one else has ever heard of. Sadly, then, what emerges is the impression you have got. That "texts are objects with intrinsic qualities"; that these intrinsic qualities rather than the passionate reader "construct the meaning." As a PhD student, I'm still very much trying to find my voice in this scenario. I am totally confident that I have (like all literary critics) something worth saying by placing novels and their language in a broader human context. The question is what tone I can adopt to say this message.

Have I got to succumb to the occlusive, difficult style of much current literary theory in order to get ahead in the university? Or can I find a way to be accessible, without "dumbing down" the intellectual content of what I've got to say?

At this point, I'm not sure it is possible to reconcile these competing needs within the academic context. What it is possible to do is to "do the police in different voices" (to cite T.S. Eliot, a great critic, great poet, who was accused in his own time of being irrelevant). Hence the blog is one of my most powerful outlets, because here I can write in a fluent way that expresses passion, but also points towards some of the more specialised elements of my discipline. Meanwhile, whilst some look down upon publications such as the Guardian Review or London Review of Books, most of our best critics write there (and, incidentally, many of the best critics happen to also be literary authors e.g. A.S. Byatt, John Lanchester, Tom Paulin). I would jump at the opportunity to contribute to any of these pages, alongside writing for academic journals (you don't happen to have their phone number, do you?!). I also engage heavily in interdisciplinary work, particularly explaining the language and history of science to scientists themselves, who have rarely reflected on the issue but who are always interested when described to them sympathetically.

It is sympathy for the reader, and a lack of passion in the writing, that leads to accusations that literary criticism lacks validity in the current culture. But - young and idealistic as I am - I do not see that this means we should give up on an activity which is as old as literature itself (think Aristotle's Poetics).

I hope this diatribe and polemic has not put you off reading more on The Pequod, or of letting me know how you feel about my arguments and about literary criticism now. If you do respond, I'd be grateful; and if you want some more existing material that I have written on this issue, then the following selection may be of interest:

• What Difference Does Difference Make? The Creative Deconstructions of Jean Rhys and Aimé Césaire - On the problems I have with literary criticism that imposes meaning on a text:
• The Political Art of Criticism and Quarks: An essay on the political value of literary criticism (my thinking on the subject has changed somewhat since I wrote this a couple of years ago)
• A Critical Highlight: Literary criticism at its passionate finest
• The Idea of a University: More on the "value" of literary studies

Labels: literary theory, Literature, the idea of a university

(This topic continues the theme of a post earlier this year)

Around this time of year, as the Christmas holidays draw to a close and after they have had a chance to reflect on their first term at university, I receive a trickle of emails from first year students asking advice about changing course. The majority of these involve students who have started doing joint honours (such as English and Philosophy) deciding that they wish to convert to single honours in one of the subjects. Little do they realise it, but my students are touching the fringes of a large and key debate about what a university is, and what sort of education it should provide.

For the fact that students are encouraged to pick and choose courses from the vast range offered by universities is the key complaint of Peter Berkowitz, who writes in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review that "at universities and colleges throughout the [United States], parents and students pay large sums of money for — and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support — liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being." The essay is slightly stilted, in that it attacks the liberal education system in America - in which students can choose from a large range of courses and "major" in one branch in their final year - whilst comparing it unfavourably with the principles Mill set out in the British context in the mid-nineteenth century. Had he looked over here in the United Kingdom, he would have found less evidence of the "compassless curriculum": in this country, rather than "majoring" in one discipline only in their final year, students generally do a single honours degree for the full three years, or a joint honours split 50-50 between two related subjects.

However, whilst I think (and Berkowitz's complaint confirms) that specialisation is preferable to spreading study across an eclectic mix of subjects, one of the limitations of the British system is that it deceptively compartmentalises us into different areas of interest, when in fact there is a great deal of overlap: several of my peers doing an English PhD started off in philosophy, and I'm sure the reciprocal is true over in the philosophy department; conferences tend to be organised by faculties rather than individual departments, and over coffee you encounter scholars from all backgrounds, not just those in your prosaic field.

If cultural theory has done one thing successfully, it has been to spread itself seductively across every discipline, so a student doing history or archaeology or literature may well encounter the same broad scheme of ideas - from postmodernism to postcolonialism - in each discipline. What shifts is the subject matter, whilst the approaches to them run through parallel perspectives. It is this fact which means that in response to my students' emails I almost invariably advise them to go with their hearts, since their heads are probably more than capable of absorbing the switch. However, is it really the case that all disciplines are of equal value in sending students into the world equipped with a philosophical and scientific guidebook? F.R. Leavis certainly didn't think so, when he placed the English department as the spider at the centre of the entire academic web, which could interpret any branch of intellectual life since it critiqued the language which structures thought, whether in particle physics or historical research.

Even if English departments are no longer seen as the most important generators of liberal wisdom, a residue of the Leavisite approach can be seen in the buzzword of modern academia, literary criticism especially: interdisciplinarity. Almost every call for papers that lands in my inbox on a Friday stresses that papers that straddle traditional disciplines are most welcome; I myself am not so much reading English, as philosophy, history, fiction, film, novels and computer games. The critical arts now possess a proud sense of the range and scope they are permitted to cover, and so I would suggest that academia is starting to find a middle way between variety and speciality.

Of course, one risk of this is relativism: if it is not what you say or study which matters, but how you say or write your study which matters, do we not end up with an aimless mess of disciplines shouting ever louder but actually doing very little by way of good and lasting research. This is a danger Berkowitz analyses, when he notes that professors tend to teach the fields which coincides with their interests, rather than teaching those texts, in those ways, which will most permanently benefit the student entering the "real" world.

The second problem with the spreading range of Arts study is that it sets itself up to compete with the sciences (both theoretically and in the battle for funding), rather than seeing both Arts and Science as necessary elements of a student's education. Leavis's elastic approach has become stretched by some brands of postmodern criticism, which, as the Sokal hoax showed, absurdly recruits empirical principles to scrutinise texts or narratives. Obviously, it is not possible for the arts student to use particle physics to analyse Silas Marner; equally particle physics is not simply a narrative in numbers that expresses ideology and meaning in the same way that a George Eliot novel does. (I critique this in my essay "Science as Writing, Writing as Science: Addressing the Boundaries of Literary Criticism and Fiction"). What participation, then, should science make in informing the student of the liberal arts? Here, Mill also strikes a chord with my views, arguing along utilitarian lines: "While it is not to be expected that many will achieve mastery of the laws to which the physical world is subject, students should acquire the basics that will enable them to distinguish those who are competent to provide the public advice on scientific and technological matters." Certainly, with Bush's withdrawal of funds for embryological research (leading to a bizarre jumble of red table and stickers in science labs) and Blair's hysterical reaction to supposed hybrid cow-men, one can see the value of ensuring that leaders educated in business (in Bush's case) or law (in Blair's) are encouraged also to appreciate, if not to deploy, the dispassionate scientific method.

In this coincidental way, the opposition between Arts and Sciences in the university context can be seen to affect the political split between conservatism and progressivism. Berkowitz notes that Mill was open to the positive aspects of both wings of the political spectrum, and argued that the cultivation of a liberal "third way" means accepting that each side, for all that its general outlook may be erroneous, may nevertheless have something of value to contribute to the detail of moral debate. Berkowitz argues that:

universities that purport to provide a liberal education will be failing in their mission unless their graduates, progressives and conservatives alike, prove capable of sympathetically understanding the positions of the political party to which they do not belong and discerning what is true and enduring in the beliefs of their partisan opponents.

But the comparison between Bush and Blair highlights that the liberal education systems of Harvard and Oxford have, in actuality, very much succeeded in providing perspectives on both parties. So much so that this Republican right-winger is now the best of friends with the Labour prime minister, one who marched for CND in the 1960s. Blair's brilliance has been his ability precisely to understand the position of the right, and to simultaneously occupy that ground whilst pulling both progressives and conservatives closer to the centre - the rise of fellow blogger (oh, yes, and Conservative leader) David Cameron indicates his success. Unfortunately, rather than promoting toleration (as Mill hoped) the accommodation of those on both left and right who are close to the centre has further marginalised anyone who breaks from the new majority centre. As Bush said two months after September 11, "you're either with us, or against us": if I am against Bush, detest Guantanamo, and think the war on terror utterly misguided in its approach, I am, by inference, a terrorist.

If the risk of interdisciplinarity in the Arts has been a relativistic "anything goes so long as you can talk the talk," the risk of representing and treating both political outlooks as equals is to imply that it does not matter whether you are left or right wing, so long as you fall into line under whoever happens to rule. This is where study of the classics might come in, since they (as Paul Cartledge reminds us on Radio 4's recent: "The Greeks: For Better or for Worse") form the philosophical foundations for modern culture. As Berkowitz says:

Accordingly, liberal education should concentrate on the languages and literature of the ancients, of the Greeks and Romans, because of both their farness and their nearness. On the one hand, the circumstances and sensibility of classical authors differ the most profoundly from ours (without being, Mill stipulates, like those of Asia, “so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to enable us to understand them”). On the other hand, their writings are rich in the wisdom of the common life of humanity. The classics both challenge our moral and political assumptions and provide models of human excellence. Particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle represent “the perfection of good sense.”

Happily, having plummeted down the ranks of academic esteem, classics seems to be starting to come back into favour. The new, controversial, Cambridge Latin Course is helping us to see that Latin is far from a dead language. Study of the Ancients might help us to accept that human thought and morality is always variable and that, above all, a good democratic system needs to accommodate difference, rather than eliding it as Neo-Conservatism or New Labour have done.

All this has wandered very far from my original impulse for this post, and the idea that the form of liberal education can inform the war on terror is probably quite far from the minds of the students who contact me wishing to change course. Nevertheless, besides being an excuse to have another political dig, the sheer range of Berkowitz's essay, and my criticism, leads me to realise that, specialist though universities may be, they and their courses really do form the foundations for society. My thinking about the "Idea of a University" started with my justifying being funded to study an English PhD; the ends of that concept, however, are tangled and deep. I rather liked Mill's comment that "Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not, is part of his education." However, not only is whatever shapes the human being part of his education, education is clearly the principal means by which modern societies seek to shape the individual. The study of the idea of the university is the study of our modern selves.

Labels: J.S. Mill, Peter Berkowitz, Postgraduate Diary, the idea of a university

Listening to Martha Kearney's excellent mini-series The Idea of a University, I hear the steady tread of modernising and economically-minded feet marching towards my ivory tower. Her series covers the rise of the polytechnic universities following Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" speech in 1963, in which he warned that the new sciences promised to leave behind those industries with outdated practices and methods. With their musty jackets, academics in traditional universities might have provided one example of the latter, and the polytechnics were the antidote to their staid culture, with their emphasis on vocational courses that could deliver cutting-edge teaching and research and disseminate it into industry through students who would go directly into relevant, and often local, workplaces.

"Relevance" is a dread word for me. A year in to my research, and I have come up with the vital 50-word answer when, at parties, I am asked what my thesis is about. The idea of my stock response is that it be simple enough to be understood without patronising, and elevated enough so that the person to whom I am speaking is not tempted to engage in a long dialogue about it. I socialise to escape research, not to discuss it. But the question I dislike most, and one to which I do not have a definitive answer, is: "Why is my research relevant?"

Last year, my university paid me £15,000 to study, and for the coming two years the AHRC are going to donate some £30,000 to me in the form of living allowances and tuition fees. In some ways, the provision of this money answers the question, or at least redirects it: if my research wasn't relevant, then the higher bodies in education would not have sent down their nuggets of gold from the heavens. Nevertheless, higher education can be accused (and it has been in The Idea of a University) of being a self-fulfilling loop, in which traditional university scholarship is felt to be worthwhile because the people at the top in government, themselves products of that system, feel it to have been of value to them. I have to bear in mind, therefore, that ultimately the money that pays for my research (and my beer and petrol and cameras) comes from outside this loop, from the taxpayer, and the question of value asked by the typical taxpayer I meet at my parties is one I have a responsibility to answer.

The word "value" has a double-meaning. In the first sense, which the OED gives as "That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be an equivalent for something else," the value of my PhD is not too difficult to estimate. With just 4% of PhDs in Arts and Humanities unemployed after completing their thesis, I will be more likely to obtain a skilled role as part of the UK workforce than I would have been had I joined the ranks of my peers who left as BAs, many of whom are still either unemployed (around 7%) or doing menial work behind bars and in garden centres. In the findings of the document "What do PhDs Do?" commissioned by the UK Grad programme, "In a modern knowledge-based economy, highly educated and skilled people - knowledge workers - are in great demand. PhD graduates are, arguably, the most highly skilled and educated people in our society." According to some figures, salaries reflect this, with PhDs earning up to a third more than those with only first degrees. So, over the course of the next fifty years in employment, I can expect to repay the investment made in me several times over.

Nevertheless, in the immediate term of the coming few years, it is the second meaning of the word "value" - "The relative status of a thing, or the estimate in which it is held, according to its real or supposed worth, usefulness, or importance" - to which I need to respond. Harold Wilson may have wanted universities to drive the UK economy forward through the white heat of technology, and there is no doubt that in the science sector the universities have been powerhouses of research and development. I heard a talk the other day from a former university lecturer whose spin-off company developing imaging crystals is now worth some £15 million, with contracts from the European Space Agency and potential worldwide markets opening in airport security systems. This, from a relatively small initial investment, as the university already had the infrastructure in place to pursue new lines of interest with ease: an international research community, the freedom to innovate, laboratories and, yes, a pool of eager doctoral students able to contribute their skills much more cheaply than could similar workers in industry.

But the "white heat" quite literally generated in the chemistry labs is hardly something I experience at my desk. In the words of a famous Punch cartoon, "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and then again I just sits" in, on good days, a smoulder of good ideas and words. In Education and the University: A Sketch for an English School, F.R. Leavis may have placed the English department at the centre of university life, but his heyday is long gone. When asked by Kearney about the changes in higher education that have taken place over the last thirty years, Mary Warnock, in her considered tones, lamented the passing of the idea that one could do research simply for the joyful sake of it. She did not, however, say why this ever was a valid argument, and the idea of ars gratia artis (art for the sake of art) no longer satisfies even me; it certainly, therefore, would not be expected to satisfy most taxpayers or Blairite politicians. If Warnock - one of our most respected philosophers - failed to come up with a response, I cannot be expected to do so either, at least not in the brief space of this blog. For the time being, I will have to satisfy my party interrogators with the financial statements of my "value" to UK Plc. Answering the other part of the "value" issue is something I must, however, work on.

Labels: AHRC, PhD, Postgraduate Diary, the idea of a university