The Zero Room

This evening I attended what I think must be my first book launch since leaving Sydney over a decade ago. I feel almost civilised. Here's a comment I left on The Conversation's review of Richard Hil's new book:

Students don't only have "no choice but to study online because of work or family commitments", or indeed anything to do with their own circumstances. Often we have no choice but to study online because we have no choice but to study online.

Last year, as an undergraduate at Southern Cross University, I first encountered the phrase "converged delivery". This is where nominally "internal" units of study are delivered entirely without face-to-face tuition. You can "attend" lectures on-campus if you like, but you'll just be looking at a slightly larger screen than you have at home, hanging from the wall of a classroom. Students thus have the "flexibility" of choosing distance education at home, or (in the case of Coffs Harbour) distance education in a campus conveniently located in the middle of a swamp, adjoining an airport and one of Australia's most impressive sewage ocean outlet pipes.

Initially I thought that this was a reaction to the Grattan Institute's - sorry, I mean the government's - proposed higher education reforms. But no, the move to converged delivery is an SCU program that was set in motion in 2007. University administrators are not reluctantly responding to a neoliberal agenda imposed on them by government; they are among the agenda-setters, leading the way to cheap, dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator faux-education.

This week, instead of writing my final essays for the session, I have been mostly reading:

• VCs Go Missing In Action As University Whistleblowers Speak Out On Four Corners - Max Chalmers at New Matilda: "The highly anticipated program was partially based on a recent Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) investigation which warned the pressure on academics to pass students in universities was so extreme it could be conducive to corruption." Shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
• Waiting for the fallout: Australia and return of the patrimonial society - John Quiggin on the relevance of Piketty to Australia in the Australian Review of Public Affairs: "The claim that the rich are mostly self-made is already dubious, and will soon be clearly false. Of the top ten people on the Business Review Weekly (BRW) rich list for 2014, four inherited their wealth, including the top three. Two more are in their 80s, part of the talented generation of Jewish refugees who came to Australia and prospered in the years after World War II. When these two pass on, the rich list will be dominated by heirs, not founders."
• A New Deal for Greece – a Project Syndicate Op-Ed by Yanis Varoufakis: "The result of [the troika's] method, in our government’s opinion, is an “austerity trap.” When fiscal consolidation turns on a predetermined debt ratio to be achieved at a predetermined point in the future, the primary surpluses needed to hit those targets are such that the effect on the private sector undermines the assumed growth rates and thus derails the planned fiscal path. Indeed, this is precisely why previous fiscal-consolidation plans for Greece missed their targets so spectacularly."
• Statement on resignation from CPD and alternative - Public Statement by Mark Bahnisch, Eva Cox and John Quiggin: "Current policy making is shaped largely by limited influences and insider advice that fails to read public opinion or evidence. Business-funded lobbyists and think tanks dominate public debate, crowding out the very limited alternatives to current ‘verities’. Many public-minded advocates, active in the past, are silenced by the financial constraints of universities, and too many NGOs are now more dependent on government funding. There is much public disquiet about the state of our society and polity. However, few offer carefully devised and well promoted alternative options."
• Zombies of 2016 - Paul Krugman OpEdding at the NYT: "Pundits will try to pretend that we’re having a serious policy debate, but, as far as issues go, 2016 is already set up to be the election of the living dead."
• The BBC Trust: a work in progress - Jacquie Hughes at openDemocracy: I know nothing about the current structure of the BBC, which leaves me eminently qualified to speculate that BBC Worldwide appears to be the money-spinning tail that has for many years wagged the emaciated public service dog. Any avenue for genuine public accountability (as opposed to philistine euphemistic demands for financial sustainability - i.e. bleeding the patient) seems something to be welcomed.
• Miliband Goes the Full Henry Jackson - Craig Murray: "But Miliband was not admitting that the Guernica style massacre was wrong – he voted for it. No, he was going the full Henry Jackson and arguing that what had been needed was neo-colonial occupation of Libya in order to reform its institutions – precisely as had been done in Iraq. And we all know how that went."
• Rorschach Tests at the Nuremberg Trials - Neurosceptic
• After the recent tragedy in the Med, why can’t we talk about free migration? - Morten Thaysen, openDemocracy: Capital and products are assets to be welcomed, people are a liability to be demonised, spurned, and left to die. Discuss.
• Hello World Intellectual Freedom Organization - Mike Linksvayer: Mike is in the top tier of the world's smart people, and an all-round good egg. This [c|sh]ould be huge.
• The Cops Have Met Their Enemies: They Are Us - Ted Rall at aNewDomain: Bull Connor has won; it just took a while.
• The Killing of Osama bin Laden - Sy Hersh at the London Review of Books:

  Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? […] The rules gave them absolute authority to kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’

• Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web - Chris Bloom and a language warning: My obvious tl;dr is "Don't use a web service for anything you can do on your own computer."
• Greatest Threat to Free Speech Comes Not From Terrorism, But From Those Claiming to Fight It - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: 'Basking in his election victory, Prime Minister David Cameron unleashed this Orwellian decree to explain why new Thought Police powers are needed: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.'” It’s not enough for British subjects merely to “obey the law”; they must refrain from believing in or expressing ideas which Her Majesty’s Government dislikes.'
• 10 Writing Tips from Legendary Writing Teacher William Zinsser, May He Rest in Peace - Ted Milles on Open Culture: "Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard."
• Democratically controlled, co-operative higher education - Joss Winn at openDemocracy: "In short, co-operative higher education is entirely compatible with the idea of the ‘public’ if we reconceive it as an autonomous, open, democratically governed ‘commons’: An academic commons, democratically controlled by academic and support staff, students, cleaners and others."

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Matter Over Mind - Paul Krugman, NYT: "[…] belief that income inequality is all about, and can be fixed by, education is even more wrong than you thought."
• Stop subsidising for-profit education - John Quiggin
• Ed-Tech's Inequalities - Audrey Watters: "Education technology will close the achievement gap; education technology will close the opportunity gap. Education technology will revolutionize; education technology will democratize. Or so we are told."
• 6 Things Warwick University’s New Temp Agency Tells Us About Academic Precarity - John Murray on Novara Wire
• Ezra Klein of Vox.com vs. Tom Standage of The Economist - Brad DeLong, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: Aggregation with attribution vs. authority silo.
• The shadowy world of IPA finances - Clive Hamilton on the Drum: "The IPA is notoriously secretive about its sources of funding. Its senior staff have refused to answer journalists' questions, although over the years enough information has leaked out to suggest that much of its funding has come from the oil and mining industries, including Exxon, Shell, Caltex and BHP-Billiton."
• Malice in Wonderland - Desmond Manderson, Arena: "Abbott’s ‘felicific calculus’ is that more people are made happier by ‘stopping the boats’, even if some people—those stuck on Manus or Nauru, for example—are made very unhappy indeed. Let me repeat: our government is prepared to turn a blind eye to, or to condone, perhaps even intentionally devise, actions that amount to torture, so long as it helps it realize its goals. Has there ever been a case like it in Australian history? The violation of human rights is not an accident; it’s a policy. Net happiness has increased, so we have nothing to apologise for."
• The hottest tax idea in Washington is actually terrible - Marshall I. Steinbaum, the Week: Consumption tax. This time, it won't just be an outrageous gift to the rich. Honest.
• Servitude: the way we work now - Geoffrey Heptonstall at OurKingdom: "People who in law are free are bound by economic necessity to work for less than the living wage (‘apprenticeships’), no pay (‘internships’), or in uncertain conditions (‘zero-hours’ contracts). They are free to leave if they wish. Like Okies in the Dust Bowl they can load up the truck. They at least had Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie. Who speaks for the zero people?"
  

This week, I have been mostly sick as a dog. I might have read the following, though it could all have been a delusion brought on by fever and lack of sleep:

• Using Wikipedia: a scholar redraws academic lines by including it in his syllabus - Ellis Jones at the Conversation: Hooray! And well, d'uh. But mostly hooray!
• First we take Amsterdam, then we take The Hague - Nicholas Vrousalis, Robin Celikates, Johan Hartle, and Enzo Rossi: "On April 1, representatives of staff and students from the occupied Maagdenhuis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) came to an agreement with the University’s Executive Board (CvB) concerning the formation of two independent committees, one to investigate UvA’s finances and another to investigate possibilities for decentralization and democratization."
• Students, Solidarity Strikes and Shutting Down Austerity at the Point of Production: The Social Vision of the 2015 Quebec Student Strike - Jonathan Leavit, Toward Freedom: "Bela recounts how inside his organizing conversations, technical education students were skeptical about organizing around education, because their programs are already commodified, privileging market demands over educational outcomes. 'If you tell them, well, you won’t have any kindergarten. You will have to stay at home or your partner will have to stay at home. What kind of society do you want? Then they’re ready to strike.'"
• Time Is Money Is Work Is Virtue - Colette Shade at the Baffler: "The iPhone has allowed office workers to be available anywhere, at any time. The Apple Watch is both a logical next step and a throwback to time measurement’s industrial origins."
• Warwick Uni to outsource hourly paid academics to subsidiary - Fighting Against Casualisation in Education
• The Automatic Teacher - Audrey Watters at boundary 2: "This does not mean, in any unfortunate sense, the mechanization of education. It does mean freeing the teacher from the drudgeries of her work so that she may do more real teaching, giving the pupil more adequate guidance in his learning. There may well be an ‘industrial revolution’ in education. The ultimate results should be highly beneficial. Perhaps only by such means can universal education be made effective."
• The Australian Sharia Lobby - John Quiggin: "The prospect of any significant legislation being based on Islamic sharia law seems pretty remote. On the other hand, those who claim to be concerned about sharia law (the Arabic term simply means ‘religious law) might want to consider the much more relevant issue of ‘sharīʿat al-Masīḥ’ (the Arabic term for ‘religious law of Christianity’)."
• The Big Chill: How Big Money Is Buying Off Criticism of Big Money - Robert Reich: "It’s bad enough big money is buying off politicians. It’s also buying off nonprofits that used to be sources of investigation, information, and social change, from criticizing big money. Other sources of funding are drying up. Research grants are waning. Funds for social services of churches and community groups are growing scarce. Legislatures are cutting back university funding. Appropriations for public television, the arts, museums, and libraries are being slashed."
• Dear Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is not, and should not be the internet - SavetheInternet.in coalition, Hindustan Times
• Yanis Varoufakis in conversation with Joseph Stiglitz on the Eurozone Crisis – at the INET-OECD conference, 9 April 2015 (video)