The Soft-Marking Syndrome

SIR: “The Soft-Marking Syndrome” by Malcolm Saunders (June 2008) is an excellent article. It sums up what most of us have been talking about, once we had left the university (often early)!

Hans-Peter Stoffel,
Murray’s Bay, New Zealand.

SIR: While Professor Saunders’ article on soft marking in universities is not wholly inaccurate, it is hardly a sophisticated analysis of the issues. Causa causae causatis est, if my Latin has more or less survived. To see what has gone wrong, and gone right, with universities in recent times, one needs to look rather more carefully into the mechanisms than he does.

If it is true that managerialism is rampant and frequently extremely silly, and that pressures to pass incompetent and idle students are increasing (along with numbers of incompetent and idle students in general, although this is something from which my university is mercifully sheltered to some extent), then it should also be said that there are “managers” with a genuine appreciation of the proper objectives of a good university and enough sense to see the desirability of maintaining or even raising standards. Given the collapse of the fundamentals in the schools, we cannot maintain the same level of knowledge as in earlier years, but we can insist that students engage with reason the smaller amount they can tackle, and we can exploit their familiarity with a different world from the one in which we were raised. Or we can try to teach what we have always taught, and bleat when we discover that the intellectual foundations on which it depends are long gone.

Going to earlier, if not first, causes: once the government takes over control of institutions, those institutions inevitably decline. The government has discovered that it cannot run banks or transport systems or power stations; it knows nothing about how they work and simply regards them as cash cows, running them down and destroying the infrastructure from sheer ignorance. Bureaucrats who couldn’t run the proverbial fish-and-chip shop cannot reasonably be expected to do anything else. It will, in the fullness of time, become apparent, even to them, that they can’t run educational systems either, and for exactly the same reasons.

I have no objection in principle to running a university as a business; it has always been a business. But like any business, it is run better by people who understand what the product is and how it is constructed and delivered. I can’t say I care for this particular jargon, but the product has to do with intellectual excitement, the grasp of ideas which have the power to change the world and in most cases already have. And the delivery of the product is to do with communicating the pleasures and other more mundane profits of insight and reflective thought, which is not a whole lot like marketing shirts or bootlaces. The construction of the product is what we call research, and that also is not much akin to making socks or tins of beans, and measuring productivity by counting units and ignoring quality is the kind of insanity to which the bureaucratic mind is prone. Which is why they are incompetent to run any business and shouldn’t try.

But governments greatly enjoy meddling, and so do bureaucrats, and we live in times when they indulge themselves at an unprecedented level of detail. So it is pointless to rail against university administrators for applying managerialist principles taken from running chain stores and manufacturing socks. They are obliged to placate intrusive government. On the whole, I am grateful to my own administrators for protecting me from the worst excesses and leaving me to get on with my job.

Nor are academics blameless. The intellectual myopia engendered by the doctoral degree is, in many cases, sedulously preserved in later life. It has always puzzled me that parents put the education of their children in the ways of the world into the hands of those who have chosen to retreat from the world and avoid it wherever possible. The monkish traditions still linger, they are commonly identified and despised by the young, and it is hard to blame them. What have academics done to prevent the centralised control of universities by the state, or even educate themselves about the probable consequences? They have generally favoured the encroachments for ideological reasons and given the matter only the shallowest thought, if any. If things are now not to their liking, this is the consequence of their intellectual laziness and moral flabbiness.

For much of the time universities have existed, they have obtained money from the rich and the aspirational to educate their generally not very bright offspring, and have leavened classes with a handful of the intelligent poor by awarding bursaries and scholarships. One might see recent developments in higher education funding as a clandestine attempt by government to privatise universities by salami tactics. Perhaps we are becoming an embarrassment; one may certainly hope so. But however we are funded and whether we have autonomy or centralised control, we shall not soon return to educating a small minority of the population to take their places in a power elite.

Academics will have to get used to pressures to pass students; the trick will be to ensure that the students have in fact gained enough from the course so that passing them can be done in good conscience. It is not a matter of whether they come up to some absolute standard, it’s a matter of whether they go out with a sufficient amount more than they had when they came in. The term value added is contemporary jargon, I think, but the idea is quite old. The effects of such pressures should be to design sane contemporary courses, not to persist in ancient rituals and complain that they are ineffective.

Mike Alder,
Nedlands, WA.