IBL and Research - 'A Live Political Issue'

The fifth 'conference theme' for the 2009 LTEA Conference in Reading (that's the 'Learning Through Enquiry Alliance') is 'Enquiry-based Learning and Policy - where now?'. This is a very good question, and it's one half of the question that's guiding the research of The LRT Project (the other half of the question is 'Research and Policy - where now?'). But the reason that this blog is launching with the fifth conference theme of the LTEA conference is that the following phrase, which comes from the conference literature:

EBL and its linkage to fostering the next generation of researchers is now a live political issue

Now, before I go any further, EBL stands for Enquiry-based Learning - only, at Sheffield we call it IBL (for Inquiry-based Learning). To me, the distinction is much like the difference between UK and European plug sockets: both work perfectly well, both do roughly the same thing, and you don't want to sink into parochialism you need to get comfortable using both. If you're unfamiliar with the phrase 'Enquiry (or Inquiry)-based Learning', click here.

Back to politics. I was gratified to see the LTEA organisers use the phrase 'live political issue' so readily, and it got me thinking about something that I've been wondering about a lot recently: why do the political opinions of academics command so little respect? Here's a good example of this disrespect - it's the final paragraph of John Lanchester's article about the financial crisis, 'Melting into Air', published in the New Yorker.

Are there any unreconstructed Marxists left, anywhere in the wild? (Universities don’t count.) If there are, now would be a good moment for one of them to publish a book saying that the man in the beard would regard himself as having been proved right.

'Universities don't count.' Let's dwell on that for a moment, because Lanchester isn't being dismissive of Karl Marx (the title of the article is itself a tribute to the 'man in the beard'). He's specifically dismissing any academic who follows Marx. This probably doesn't come as a surprise to you - the 'unreconstructed academic marxist' is sort of the left's Colonel Blimp - but leaving aside our prejudices for a moment, isn't it slightly crazy that academics' political ideas would be regarded by as thoughtful a writer as John Lanchester as automatically unworthy of consideration? After all, universities are supposed to be places where consideration of evidence, testing of hypotheses, and interrogation of truth claims are more rigorous than they are elsewhere - that's one of the main reasons we have universities. So why this sense that politically, academia is full of buffoons?

This is a big question, and I'm not going to try to answer it, but I want to make one suggestion, and to do so I'm going to quote from Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father. Obama's writing about being an undergraduate at Occidental College:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling consuaints. We
weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted from [...] my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated (pp. 100-101).

I think Obama's final phrase - 'white and tenured and happily tolerated' - gets close to the nub of the issue: at the end of the day, the university is part of the establishment (in fact, within its particular realm it is 'the establishment'), so anybody working within it who claims to have taken an 'oppositional' stance can expect to be taken exactly as seriously as a high-level civil servant who announced that she regarded herself as a utopian anarchist.

If you are dissatisfied with the current state of politics, and have decided that your vocation is in academia, then you have decided that the best way for you to create change is from within the system. If you don't acknowledge this, then neither John Lanchester nor anyone else should feel compelled to take you seriously.

Less a blog post introducing the project, more an extended digression. But my colleague Rose will soon be pulling this blog back onto its intended course.