England’s great divide walk

Several years ago, I read Stephen Pern’s excellent book, The Great Divide. This described his walk along the watershed between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in the USA. He began in the Mexican desert, and followed the crest (or as close to it as he could manage) of the Rocky Mountains to the Canadian border. If he had continued North, passing West of Banff, he would have come to the Columbia Icefield. This glacier is the origin of rivers that flow into three oceans - not just to the West and the East, but also to the North. The main Northbound river is the Athabasca, and you can follow it along a road called The Icefield Parkway, as it descends from a mountain torrent to a wide sweeping river between meadows near the town of Jasper. After Jasper, the river travels hundreds of kilometres North to become part of the River Mackenzie, flowing through tundra into the Arctic Ocean.

The courses of rivers and their watersheds are easy to follow on the maps of a vast empty country like Canada, but much harder in a crowded one like England. So what would be the route of a great divide walk in England? Most people would guess that the Northern section would be close to the Pennine Way. This is generally true, although the watershed actually crosses the Scottish border several miles West of the Pennine Way, near Kielder. From there, it heads South along the boundary between Cumbria and Northumberland, towards Once Brewed near Hadrian’s Wall. The great divide walk would then follow the Pennine Way South to Edale, close to the crest line of the Pennines, across Saddleworth Moor and the High Peak. But what happens after you reach Edale?

Following the map, you can trace a strange circuitous route around the heads of lowland rivers systems. First, you would walk South around the Western edge of the Peak District, near the Roaches, and then across Staffordshire to the West of Stoke and Stafford. From then on, my imaginary long distance path is difficult to trace, as it passes through the Black Country over Frankley Beeches to the Lickey Hills South of Birmingham. From then on, it would swing East and then South in a long arc around the catchment of the Warwickshire Avon, eventually reaching the Cotswold escarpment and the Cotswold Way. You would follow this lovely scenic long distance path for most of its way until a few miles North of Bath. The great divide path would then need to head East around the watershed between the Gloucestershire Avon and the Thames until you reach an area called the North Down near Devizes. This is England’s equivalent to the Columbia Icefield, albeit a low-lying hill without ice. From it, rivers head West to the Atlantic, East to the North Sea, and South to the English Channel.

As human beings moved back into Britain after the end of the last Ice Age, they would have travelled along the dry watersheds to avoid the marshy and tree-clogged valleys. The North Down and the nearby Salisbury Plain would then have been the great junction of this Stone Age transport system. Early inhabitants have marked this busy place with rings of standing stones, white horses carved into chalk hills, barrows and mounds. This is a kind of commercial, political and religious city, but dispersed over several hillsides and occupied seasonally. It would be a superb end to my Great Divide Walk. While I walk it in my imagination, others may do so on foot.

Research without fear

A week ago, my computer connection to the Internet ceased. This was puzzling because my son was still able to log on from his laptop, via the home wireless network based on my computer. Eventually, I traced the problem to the Norton Security software I had installed. With remarkable success, this had prevented any viruses infecting my computer by blocking access to all websites. Computers of course mimic the humans that create them. The Norton approach is found among experts on ‘security’ who argue that the only way to protect our liberties is to lock up without trial people who might possibly be terrorists, give the police free rein to assault and kill peaceful demonstrators, and subject all citizens to permanent CCTV surveillance. A similar destructive enthusiasm is found in the system used in the National Health Service for assessing the ethics of proposals for research.

Just as there are real computer viruses and real terrorists, so there is a true history of unethical research on patients. The most outstanding, described in every book on medical ethics, was the Tuskegee Experiment carried out by the US Department of Public Health, in which 400 poor black people infected with syphilis were monitored from 1932 onwards. Although penicillin was identified as an effective treatment by 1940, none of the subjects of the research were informed or treated, leading to the infection of their spouses and other sexual partners, and their children. The whole ghastly racist experiment only came to an end when a whistleblower informed the New York Times.

This case is a warning that medical scientists are no more ethical than other people, particularly when the subjects of their research are poor and from racial minorities. Bad ethical practice in research still exists, although usually in a less extreme manner than the Tuskegee Experiment. There have been cases of people included in clinical trials without their knowledge, people being denied effective treatments, pointless research inflicted on people, and so on. To prevent these kinds of problems, the National Health Service has set up a complex network of ethical committees to thoroughly assess all applications for research. This is backed by a parallel system of ‘research governance’, which ensures that the recommendations of ethical committees are followed by researchers, that research in insured by its ‘sponsor’, and that the cost implications of the research for the NHS are taken into account.

As governments have attempted to extend the protection of human rights (the 2005 Mental Capacity Act, the 2004 Human Tissue Act, and others), so the work of the ethical committees has become more demanding. Nevertheless, the system has improved greatly in efficiency in the last few years, and the various local ethical committees strenuously seek to protect the public from unethical research. However, there is a problem - the same sort of problem encountered by all who seek to avoid risk and create a world free of fear.

All autonomous or creative human action, whether individual or collective, involves risk and therefore danger. The risk may be very small, but the resulting fear may lead to disproportionate and even harmful precautions. In my village, both the primary and secondary schools are in easy walking distance for most children. But many parents drive their children to school because they perceive the quiet roads of a peaceful village to be dangerous and the pavements crowded with paedophiles. As a result, the roads through the village at the times the schools open and close become crowded with large 4x4 vehicles. This has the effect of making travel more dangerous at these times, even for those children and parents who do walk to school. Disproportionate precautions of this kind are particularly common among those with a professional responsibility to protect the rest of us. After all, it seems common sense to believe that one can not be too safe or too ethical.

In the case of ethical committees, this can result in extreme precautions being evoked for the simplest and least offensive of research projects. One of my masters students (a qualified and very experienced child mental health nurse) proposed to interview a small number of experienced and qualified paediatric nurses about their experiences of managing children who are admitted to accident and emergency following overdoses. The ethical committee expressed concern at the impact of these interviews on the state of mind of the nurses, and eventually insisted that an independent counsellor be made available to alleviate distress. Another student wished to send a questionnaire to fellow therapists about the impact on their career of changes in NHS employment practices. This has required six months of applications, and permission from dozens of separate NHS trusts. I know of many similar cases.

Why do ethical committees need to be involved when members of staff pose a few questions to other members of staff? After all, if we applied the same procedures to any other walk of life, all collective human activity would cease. One reason may be that all these research projects concerned the care of either children or people with an intellectual disability. Both are included in the ever-expanding group deemed ‘vulnerable’, a term that flashes warning lights to some ethical committees.

I raised these problems with a team sent to carry out a routine quality assurance review of our masters programme. I was advised that the solution is to discourage students from carrying out research of the kind that requires ethical committee approval. This is of course the Norton Security solution and ultimate triumph of risk avoidance - the danger of unethical research in healthcare will be completely eliminated by preventing any research from taking place. The cost of doing this is that we continue to treat children and people with an intellectual disability with medications for which have limited evidence of effectiveness, and that we fail to investigate the reality of care they receive behind the bland brochures and policy statements. As a result, their real vulnerability to poor quality health and social care is increased.

The wisdom of economics

Economics rarely gets a good press. This is probably because of the regrettable tendency among economists to pose as modern soothsayers: predicting (usually wrongly) the long-term direction of the stock markets, which countries will go bankrupt, and which economies will prosper. But there is great wisdom in economics, which should be known more widely. Here are three concepts from economics, which, if applied, would make British universities far more effective.

The first concept is marginal cost. This means the additional cost incurred in producing one extra item on a product line. A related concept is marginal income, or the additional income received from selling this one extra item. As a general rule, therefore, firms should expand production as long as the marginal income they receive for doing so exceeds the marginal cost. This seems obvious, but it is not how many organisations (let alone universities) operate. I have had very frustrating discussions in which decisions on whether to expand student numbers on a course have been based on average cost/student rather than the (usually very low) marginal cost of adding one extra student to a course that is already in operation. To make matters worse, the government penalises financially those universities which do expand student numbers beyond the ‘planned’ targets that have been set centrally.

The second concept is comparative advantage. This was originally developed to explain how trade can produce additional wealth if each trading partner specialises in producing those goods which it can produce at the lowest cost compared with the cost of producing the same type of goods elsewhere. Comparative advantage can be adapted to analyse the kind of ‘trading’ of activities within an organisation. Suppose an academic department has two members of staff: Cain is an excellent researcher and a mediocre teacher; Abel is a mediocre researcher and a mediocre teacher. What usually happens is that both are required to do their share of research and teaching. As a result, all the teaching in the department is mediocre, while half the research is excellent. If, however, the university applies the wisdom of economics, then they will specialise their staff. In that case, all the teaching will remain mediocre, but all the research will now be excellent. Of course, it would be even better if Abel had been an excellent teacher. But who knows - the more he specialises, the better he might get.

The third economic concept is satisficing. This involves seeking a solution to a problem that is adequate and costs the least. Satisficing is therefore an alternative to seeking a ‘rational’ solution (which would involve comparing all possible alternatives whatever the cost), and to plumping for the ‘excellent’ solution (which involves selecting the best possible  outcome irrespective of cost). Satisficing is what most people probably do most of the time when they come to make decisions about where to live, who to marry, which university to attend and so on. But universities are temples to rationality and excellence: the greatest contributions to knowledge have often come about because academics have taken infinite pains to collect data and have considered radically new ways in which the world and the cosmos can be explained. Such commitment, essential as it may be in scholarship, can have a damaging effect on how academic committees function. Every committee-member thinks up ways in which the outcome of a decision could be even more excellent, and deliberates whether there might be options no-one has yet thought of. It is hardly surprising that university leadership becomes exasperated and takes decisions without discussion or just hands things over to the administrators.

The strangest ethnic group

The strangest ethnic group in Britain is the upper class. Most of us in this country spend our lives without meeting an aristocrat, let alone attending an expensive private boarding school, the royal enclosure at Ascot, or any of the various other places that the upper class gather. But every so often our paths cross at a distance, and we have a chance to observe them, and note their outlandish forms of behaviour, dress and speech.

One example from my own life shows how this can happen. In the late 1960s, I was a very poor student in London. Without money, my only entertainment at weekends was to walk. I walked hundreds of miles across London, and at the end of the summer term on a Saturday afternoon one year (I forget which one), I arrived in Knightsbridge. In those days, posh shops closed on Saturday afternoon, and the streets were quiet. I entered a narrow street with a church at one end. Suddenly, the doors of the church opened and a wedding party emerged. The groom and most of the male guests were in the military uniform of officers in the Guards, and they walked, almost marched, arm-in-arm with their wives along the street to a hall at the other end where, I assume, the reception was to take place. Far from the noisy family weddings I was used to, this march took place in complete silence. The only discrepant sight among the military and Georgian buildings was a single scruffy student - myself. This experience, with its discipline, conformism and utter lack of spontaneity, reminds me of the scene at Royal Ascot in the film My Fair Lady.

I was raised in a left-wing working-class family, and so I inherited a suspicion of the upper class, and even a hostility to them. But, looking back, I think these ideas were wrong. There was no reason to believe that the people in the wedding party lacked kindness, consideration or charity towards others. Judging by the performance of the British Army, the men I saw did not lack courage. We should instead regard the upper class as one of many different cultures that may be incomprehensible to each other, but can live together in harmony. Rather than judging people by accent or appearance, we should assess their personal virtue as shown by their deeds to others, their skills, and their opportunity to occasionally bewilder the rest of us. 

The status wars in universities

Henry Kissinger (quoting several earlier writers) once remarked that disputes in universities are bitter because the stakes are so small. This is true if, perhaps like Kissinger, you regard money and power as the only stakes worth playing for. But academics are not usually greedy or power-hungry - what they seek is status. More specifically, they seek to have status attributed to them by those who already have status in their area of study. There are three signals of academic status: research publications, research grants,  and membership of esteemed academic societies. Status in all three is graduated in an extended hierarchy of infinitely small steps. In each academic field, there is an array of learned journals, ranked mathematically according to how many times the papers they publish are cited by other papers in similar learned journals. This makes it possible to rank the status of individual academics (and the academic departments they work in) according to which journals they publish in, and the ‘citation score’ for their papers. Research grants are of course ranked by size, but also by source. One million pounds from a prestigious peer-reviewed research fund (such as the Medical Research Council or the Wellcome Trust) counts for more in terms of academic status than the same sum from central government or the Lottery. Academic societies are also deliverers of status, in a hierarchy of esteem all the way up to the Royal Society, each with their own rankings of fellows, prizes and other awards.

At the very bottom of this academic hierarchy is teaching. This confers no status in any of these three measures, and, because it involves committing time and energy to meet the needs of other people, also fails to satisfy the essential egoism of many academics. In the past, when universities operated on a more collegiate basis, teaching was seen as a burden to be shared among academic staff in each department. This may still be the case in universities which have maintained a sense of collegiate self-government. But most universities have adopted a corporate model, in which individual academics are set targets for research grants and publications, thereby driving ambitious academics to avoid teaching at all costs. This is not, however, possible for all staff. Competition for research funds is severe (with some only funding 10% of grant applications) and many academics reach a point in their career when the money no longer arrives. In this case, they sink down the hierarchy of academic status and take on more and more teaching and managerial tasks. Some rationalise their diminished status by saying they have so much teaching that they have no time for research.

The funding system for higher education in the UK exactly matches and thus confirms this hierarchy. Research grants are allocated to designated ‘principal investigators’, who can take their grants with them if they transfer to another university. Since their grants usually fund a team of researchers and research students, these too usually transfer, like medieval peasants following their liege lord. This places the most successful principal investigators in a strong position with their university. If they object to policy changes or resent being asked to accept part of the ‘burden’ of teaching, they can move to another institution and take staff, money and prestige with them.

A major source of research grants are the various research councils, which are publicly-funded. But a second stream of public funding is allocated to universities rather than individuals, in accordance with the type and quality of research they undertake. ‘Quality’ is assessed in an infrequent series of assessments previously called the ‘RAE’ but now renamed the ‘REF’. This process involves a series of panels of senior researchers from each academic discipline, who allocate a score on a five-point rating scale for the research carried out in their discipline by each university over the period since the preceding assessment. The scores are awarded, needless to say, on a combination of citation scores for research papers, research grants awarded, and measures of esteem received by staff from their learned societies. The whole process requires a great many panels (67 in the last RAE), and is a massive diversion of funds and precious staff time from research itself. But it is eagerly supported by most research academics because, in a society obsessed by status, the results of the research assessments play the same role that Burke’s peerage or the Almanach de Gotha occupied in aristocratic societies. 

Funding for teaching, by contrast, is awarded neither to named individuals or even for specific courses. Instead, each university is given a block grant for a designated number of students, with this sum topped up by student fees. The block grant is higher if the student attends a clinical or a laboratory-based course (because these are more expensive to deliver), but the same sum arrives if the course is excellent or poor, or whether it is taught intensively or neglectfully. As a result, no status or corporate power attaches to staff who specialise in teaching, and few academics could name the leading teachers in their field of study.

There is, however, one real problem with this hierarchy. Just as status-obsessed aristocrats could bankrupt their countries, so research can undermine the finances of their universities. This is because much research does not cover its costs. Funding from research councils meets only 80% of the its full cost, while many charitable bodies cover little more than the direct costs of the research projects they support. Income from the RAE covers some of this deficit, but many universities subsidise research from funds allocated for teaching. This size of this subsidy is likely to increase because funding from charities and payments for research from central government is likely to decline in response to the economic recession and the consequent poor state of public finances in the UK. Faced by this problem, universities have proposed that student fees be raised while the cost of teaching be reduced. This latter can be achieved by accelerating the existing trends of reducing the number of staff specialising in education, transferring teaching tasks to research students, and cutting back teaching hours.

If this strategy is successful, it will have catastrophic effects for this country. Virtually all professional training now takes place at universities. A poorer quality of higher education would therefore mean less skilled lawyers, doctors, engineers, economists, librarians and so on. Whether or not students are in professional training, they would be less likely to have their ideas challenged, to learn to assess and analyse evidence, or develop skills in the laboratory. The strategy of subsidising research at the expense of teaching would thus have the paradoxical outcome of depriving us of the researchers of the future.

See also: http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2009/10/great-crackpot-ideas-of-past.html

The New Era of Good Feelings

Britain has now entered a new era of good feelings. Two of our political parties are in coalition, and outwardly agree on the fundamentals of policy. The third party is in opposition and electing a leader from a range of candidates with a shared lack of any policies at all. There may be disagreements for the sake of form, but all party leaders agree that there should be budgetary cuts (a bit more or a bit less), that Britain needs to ameliorate climate change by ‘green’ policies, that schools should have greater autonomy (usually involving the private sector), and that the UK should remain engaged in the endless war in Afghanistan.

The first ‘Era of Good Feelings’ was a period of about eight years in the USA after the end of the War of 1812. One of the two main political parties had collapsed, and the other soon ceased to function. Many of the outstanding issues of the day (particularly the geographical expansion of slavery and the creation of a national bank) which had previously divided politicians were, for a time, resolved. Most leading politicians were either slave owners or tolerated slavery, and shared a commitment to territorial expansion and aggressive dominance of the USA in the Americas. Lack of party competition resulted in falling turnout at elections, and in 1820 President Monroe was re-elected (by the electoral college) with only one dissenting vote.

This lack of organised political conflict did not of course mean that no issues divided Americans, merely that their leading politicians chose not to express them. Once the presidency became vacant in 1824, none of the four main candidates won a majority in the electoral college. The election was then decided in the House of Representatives, and  John Quincy Adams was elected as a result of a backstairs deal. Andrew Jackson, who had won the largest number of votes, bitterly attacked this decision as corrupt, and began organising a political party to promote his candidature for the next presidential election. His rivals formed another party, and politics returned to an era of ill feelings as each party sought areas of discontent to exploit for votes.

The new era of good feelings in Britain does not follow a war or the collapse of one of the political parties, but it does correspond with the intellectual collapse of the traditional political parties. There is simply no intellectual content remaining in socialism, liberalism or conservatism. All parties proclaim they are ‘green’, and portray themselves as the more effective managers of the national consumer society. The party leaders (and the would-be party leaders in the Labour Party) are also remarkably similar. It is true that one of these candidates, Diane Abbott, is distinguished from the others on physiological grounds, but shares with them (and the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties) an education at either Oxford or Cambridge Universities, and a lifetime career in the media, public relations, and the junior ranks of politics. It is hard to think what any of these potential leaders would do differently in office from the two party leaders that currently control the Government.

It is difficult to predict how long this new era of good feelings will last. It is possible that one of the party leaders will spot an opportunity to speak on behalf of rising discontent. However, insurgent politics is probably more likely. This would arise if a politician from outside the three main parties was able to effectively articulate hostility to all of them. This has happened in the USA with the ‘tea party’ movement and Sarah Palin, whose apparent lack of sophistication combined with her startling ignorance of the wider world are taken as signs of authenticity by her followers. We await with terpidation her British equivalent.

Murder in the village.

The worst-informed people in any society are those who watch the most television. It is of course possible to learn a certain amount about the world by watching the news. But most news programmes only skim the outward appearances, usually without any explanation for why there are riots in one place or starvation in another. In any case, people who watch the most television do not sit gazing at 24 hour news channels - they watch daytime television. Their knowledge of the doings of humankind is thereby based on personal confessions of dysfunctional families, celebrity gossip, house redecorating and repeats of murder mysteries.

The murder mysteries, at least those shown on British television, are the most misleading of all. These show that the most dangerous places in this Kingdom are Oxford University, country houses, and villages in beautiful countryside. Fortunately, the victims and perpetrators of all these murders are restricted to a small number of members of the local elite, living in splendour, speaking upper class English, and surrounded by horses, land rovers and mixed herbaceous borders. The ordinary rural population of England do appear in murder mysteries from time to time, distinguished by their comic ways and all-purpose rural accents.

I have lived in a small country village for over a quarter of a century, arriving almost by accident because there were few houses on the market and one my wife and I could afford became available. There have been no murders and hardly any crime at all. But there has been a great deal of friendship, shared community activity, and effective local leadership. There is also the immense beauty of the West Worcestershire countryside, of hills, fields, and footpaths.

One late summer evening just after we moved into our bungalow, I lay on the small front lawn, looking through the woods opposite to the ancient country church, listening as the village bell-ringers rang the oldest complete set of bells in England. Later I watched the pipistrelles circle above me at dusk. I decided to stay. My wife and I raised two children in our small bungalow. They walked each day to the village playschool, then the primary school and finally to the local high school (also, fortunately, located in the village). They could play in fields and the quiet local streets.

Living in a village had its costs for me: each job was further away, and meant a longer commute. Traffic got heavier and the trains more crowded. But now I work from home, and look from my office window on the same trees and the same ancient village church, and see the seasons come and go.