Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Universities are businesses. Students are customers. The more customers, the better the business does. And of course, the best way to retain a customer is to keep her happy. I’d suggest that happiness for students might arise from challenge, from hard work fairly rewarded, or from the acquisition of new skills. But there is of course a quicker route: you keep students happy by not failing them. And then – surprise! – when they graduate they are not literate, or numerate, or knowledgeable enough to perform the work they have been studying for." 'The difficulty is the point'

England The fat cats have got their claws into our universities The worst place to grow up poor

The future of universities

How treating students as customers turns the idea of meritocracy into a joke

England " Some 95% of the 1,054 heads, deputies and senior teachers responding to the survey said they had cut back on support services - including equipment and materials, as well as mental health and special needs support. More than eight out of 10 said class sizes had increased - a claim strongly refuted by the Department for Education. And more than two-thirds said they had cut back on activities like clubs and trips." (bbc online) The refugees fault? Too many foreigners breeding like rabbits? They wish they could privatise all schools like what they have been doing to the National Health Service. Where is Richard Branson to "fund" education? Higher education is already elitist, why not making all education elitist, i.e. only for those who can afford it?  These capitalists cannot afford even to be Keynesians. They have the money for wars and bombs. They tell us our aid and charities, and missionaries, are helping poor people in Africa and elsewher

" Mainstream economics is not fatally flawed — but would achieve much more of its potential by questioning itself and listening to other fields." Of course it is not flawed. It just teaches and trains students how to manage capitalism. Yes, there are some malfunctions of the system from time to time, but mainstream economics should justify that and find solutions not to question the functioning itself. Does mainstream economics teach students that there are intrinsic relationships between profit-making as a driving force of capitalism and how 8 people own more than half of the world population, uneven-development, wars, and other crimes? Or, does it teach how to have entrepreurial spirit and business ambition, i.e. individualism, promoting NGOs to massage power relations rather than challenge them, "free-market" as a universal recipe, and "balancing the relationship between labour and capital to serve capital"?

England's corporate education: tuition fees

"As we know, Trump supporters tend to be white, tend to be older, tend to be male, tend to live in households with slightly higher income, and tend to have less education. Interestingly, his base is also significantly more likely to be self-employed overall, among other whites, and among other Republicans. In key respects, Trump represents the revenge of Joe the Plumber — and indeed Joe supports him. Many feel more comfortable casting his bid as some abhorrent anomaly. But Trumpism is no oddity. Instead it’s the expression of the anxieties of the petit bourgeoisie and a result of a break between two wings of the capitalist class in the Republican Party that began with the emergence of the Tea Party." The Revenge of Joe the Plumber

Education in Britain (source:  bbc ) But researchers highlight some other questions muddying the waters. Students do not enter university unshaped by what went before.  How much of higher earnings in later life might be linked to coming from high-income parents, rather than anything to do with higher education? A key finding of the income research was that graduates from wealthy families ended up earning more than than those from poorer families, even if they studied the same course at the same university. But there is no escaping the growing sense of stratification in the university sector and differences in status. Belonging to the Russell Group [i.e. elite universities] has become a kind of self-conferred status symbol for its membership.

Occasionally, I get across a rarity, a non-conformist among the complacents, the career-seekers: " The point that you made about people blaming the ‘ignorant uneducated American’ is also very evident amongst my Facebook friends who are predominantly university-educated people. I feel that most of these people live in their university educated-upper class bubbles, completely oblivious to how neoliberal policies are affecting people that live in the ‘real world’." — Pieter Dockx, an LSE student. Will Trump call Sanders? 

The Twenty-First Century Victorians

Britain’s university system now “serves a renewed patrimonial capitalism and its ever-widening inequalities.”  —  John Holmwood’s 2014 valedictory message as British Sociological Association president.      The Rise of the Corporate University in the UK

"Perhaps the central function that meritocracy plays — complete with SAT exams and other presumptively objective testing mechanisms — is in normalizing the growing class disparities in money, power, and resources. Top universities have been the essential building blocks of our new Gilded Age, facilitating the transfer of wealth and opportunity from one privileged generation to the next — and doing so while cloaking the extent to which today’s meritocratic elite are really the beneficiaries of a modern version of an "old boys’ club." And this applies to elite universities in general, "[H]igher education is a profound instrument of social power, one that can project values independent of state and corporate demands and offer its students and community members a space for their own cultivation. The dilemma is that our universities, in particular our elite ones, are doing less of this work and far more of the invisible work of class reproduction. " Meritocra

" Servicing warfare and neoliberalism is a terrific path to scholarly eminence. Those who condemn warfare and neoliberalism become uncivil goblins, impenitent radicals, sloppy polemicists, immature agitators, scourges on the good name of the profession. Ruling-class sycophants, meanwhile, don’t encounter trouble for their service to power. It’s the same around the world: dissenters are the ones to get fired, arrested, even murdered. It’s almost comically obvious, and yet plenty of academics persist in recycling the mythological virtues of tone and civility as criteria for fitness as an academic, as if those descriptors are detached from norms of power — as if using a civil tone means you can’t articulate ugly ideas." Six ways to unsettle colleagues and irritate administrators Six ways of resistance, but the eradication of corportae universities should be the solution.

Note that the Washington Post here is not questioning corporate education and how the system is organised to reproduce the elite in the US and in other countries. It is only questioning/exposing the excesses, which shouldn't be exploited by Trump in a context of electoral campaigns. Good! The more they stink, the better.

Economic performance in two dimensions: How Europe beats the US

They make this "finding" look like a surprise. They conclude their finding with an already-bankrupt solution.  What do ordinary citizens in the Arab world really think about the Islamic State?

"Astonishingly, the US mainstream media have barely covered what everyone here calls “the massacre.” Make no mistake: If police in Venezuela had shot down 11 unarmed demonstrators, a pack of American reporters would have raced there." Rebellion spreads in Mexico after police massacre

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or http://www.resonancefm.com/ (worldwide) Interview with Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy , Professor of Nuclear Physics, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy has been a faculty member at the Quaid-e-Azam University since 1973. In 1984 he received the Abdus Salam Prize for mathematics and is the author of 65 scientific research papers. He is chairman of Mashal, a non-profit organization which publishes books in Urdu on women’s rights, education, environmental issues, philosophy, and modern thought. Dr. Hoodbhoy has written and spoken extensively on topics ranging from science in Islam to education issues in Pakistan and nuclear disarmament. He produced a 13-part documentary series in Urdu for Pakistan Television on critical issues in education, and two series aimed at popularizing science. He is author of ’Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality’, now in 5 languages. In 2003, Dr. Hoodbh