One More Epicycle

How I miss the Queen’s graduate society, the SGPS, and that’s not entirely sarcastic. They have a certain entertainment value.

For example, whenever I see that they’ve sent a message out, the question isn’t whether or not it’s going to be inappropriately drenched in lefty politics, it’s to what degree.

Today’s example comes from a while back:

M.C. Third Word (AKA Mohammad Ali Aumeer) is having CD launch party for his debut album, “Such A Long Journey”, a benefit for the War Resisters Support Campaign.

He is a socialist emcee and grassroots activist who works, studies, and makes music in Toronto. Being involved with the War Resisters Support Campaign for over six months, the M.C. decided to release this album not only to raise funds for the campaign but to also spread awareness of the soldiers fighting for refugee status in Canada to the young fans of hip hop music in this country with a focus on university campuses.

All profits from this album and performances in support of the album go directly to supporting the legal and/or material needs of U.S. War Resisters in Canada.

This will be a night of great music and words in support of the US war resisters.

For more information, please check out www.resisters.ca or www.mcmohammadali.com.

Not only does the SGPS take political stands on issues that aren’t within its competence — and mysteriously always lands on the left side of any issue — but now they’re actively encouraging its members to support desertion from a volunteer military.

There’s an old, wry explanation for why the Left has more marches and protests and the like than the Right: “Conservatives have jobs.” And more generally, families, and bowling leagues, and so on.

Part of this is just snark, which I approve of, but there’s a serious difference between the Left and the Right lurking here, a difference of social ontology.

The Left’s is much flatter, and simpler, and easier to explain. It doesn’t have much of a place for subsidiarity or federalism. Hence the spectacle of graduate student union organizations taking stands on international politics, because they recognize no limit on their jurisdiction. It’s an important issue; the members elected an Executive; the Executive has views; why shouldn’t the Executive get involved? Why shouldn’t the SGPS take social stands on behalf of some of its members? By comparison, the Right’s view of the social world is rich and messy and self-contradictory, a complex web of overlapping and incompatible powers and duties, some voluntary, some not, with countless mediating institutions with their own domains and limits; but this confusing kaleidoscope of social structure leaves space for the human, in a way that I don’t think the Left’s does.

I’m reminded of the Derb’s description of the medieval crusading Europeans:

That is what they were like, these men of Western Europe. Brutish, coarse, ignorant, often insanely cruel — yes: but peer into their inner lives, their thoughts, their talk among themselves, so far as it is possible to do so, and what do we find? What were their notions, their obsessions? Faith, of course, and honor, and then: vassalage, homage, fealty, allegiance, duties and obligations, genealogies and inheritances, councils and “parlements,” rights and liberties. The feudal order is easy to underestimate. In part this is because feudal society was so at odds with many modern ideals — the ideal of human equality, for example. In part, also, I believe, because the sheer complexity of it, and of its laws and customs, deters study and sometimes confounds analysis. (Define and differentiate the following: champerty, maintenance, embracery.) A certain dogged application is required to get to grips with feudal society, and few who are not professional historians are up to the task, Karl Marx being one honorable exception. Yet it is in this knotty tangle of heartfelt abstractions spelled out in Old French that can be found, in embryo, so much of what we cherish in our own civilization today.

Having spent so much time following the machinations of the intersection of the academic and political worlds, I’m ever more convinced that WFB had the right of it:

I would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard University.

My earlier story about visiting the National Gallery has an epilogue, but I wasn’t in a mood to rant at the time.

When I finally left the building and crossed Trafalgar Square, there was a large crowd. Larger than normal, I mean.

They’d assembled as part of an enormous protest against the idea that anyone should be charged tuition to pursue postsecondary education. They carried signs saying ‘Grants for All’ and ‘Free Education’ and so on. (The Protest Babe factor didn’t seem to be in their favour, for what it’s worth.)

By “free education” the protestors don’t mean that university staff like me should be willing to teach and research as volunteers, living off the occasional apple that our students bring and the charity of local soup kitchens. They mean “publically funded”, but prefer to let the distinction become blurry, and emphasize only that they shouldn’t be the part of the public that’s funding it. I’m familiar with the same confusion from back home, where people talk about “free health care”.

This particular student whine has always irritated me, even back when I was a poor undergrad getting by on scholarships, tutoring, and the generosity of my parents. Let me set out my official stance as clearly as I can:

Publically-funded postsecondary education is not a right.

A citizen has no right to demand that the public fund him to study, any more than he has a right to get a cheque cut out to him if he’s not interested in going to college.  That decision rests with the public themselves, who may agree with his choice, or may not.

Sure, the government may have an interest in ensuring that students study certain subjects. Biology, chemistry, physics, engineering: these come to mind as useful investments both immediately and long-term. Sociology, the history of medieval weaving, and, yes, astronomy, have less obvious benefit. Nevertheless, you don’t always know where the best students and the best ideas — the ones that are going to produce the most good for society in the future — are going to come from. So one approach is to cast a wide net, and pay for lots of people to study lots of things, including both marginal students and the ’softer’ subjects whose benefits are harder to quantify but no less real.

That’s only one way, though. You could just as easily have a highly-streamed system concentrating on certain core disciplines, with excruciating exams all along the way and scholarships for those who do well, and steer people towards studying particular sciences (nanotech this year, gene therapy the next). I’m not sure that’d work any worse than the “teach-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out” method we’re using now. You can dream up countless schemes, ranging from the clever to the crazy, but none of them are mandated by any alleged right to education on the part of the recipients of public largesse.

It’s not really clear to me how far the social benefits of university education extend. Fewer people in university and more people in college could be a better arrangement, and if a high school diploma actually guaranteed that the graduate could read, write, and handle basic mathematics, then it’s likely not as many people would need to go to college in the first place. The degrees are often used more as tests of what it takes to survive the program, i.e. some basic level of performance that having a diploma no longer shows, than they are as proof of a particular knowledge base.

For my own part, I’m astonished and grateful that the Canadian public (through its elected representatives and the bodies they appoint and superintend) and now the British public are willing to spend their hard-earned dollars funding my research. I’ve done what I can to show my gratitude by producing work of adequate quality. Honestly, I’ve never, not once, thought to myself: “you know, the public owed me this: it was my right to have my studies, in a subject whose only practical benefit is keeping me employed, paid for”. And if they’d ever said, “Well, we’re actually more interested in funding medical research now,” I’d have thanked them and gone on to do something else. Anyone who’s capable of doing university-level research is also capable of earning an honest living. (Paul Erdös and similar savants excepted.)

I wonder how many people who would otherwise be sympathetic to student concerns about loan repayment policies were turned off by the self-important presumption of those at the march. When the speaker started going on about the impact on tuition of the War in Afghanistan, he lost me, and I was barely there to start with.

I can only pray that I never feel such an unjustified sense of entitlement, and that I stay thankful to my countless patrons.