Some of my best friends teach at universities; several are professors. But as a class, you sometimes wonder whether academics realise quite how out of touch they seem. I’m not talking about the lovable boffins, people with arcane specialities. They’re all good. I mean the proposal by Universities UK to allow a permanent move away from teaching, lecturing and examining in real life to doing them online. For them, Covid wasn’t a tragic aberration, a departure from human engagement to be reversed asap. Nope. It was the shape of things to come.
It was remarkable, the swiftness with which universities downed tools at the start of the pandemic — students who pay £9,250 a year were holed up in halls for a year and encountered their tutors and lecturers on Zoom. But what was also remarkable was how reluctant these institutions were to return to normal once it became possible. When everyone else was back at the coalface, university lecturers were still on Zoom. One friend surreptitiously let his students know that he was, in fact, available to see them in person and they sneaked in for actual tutorials; others joyfully embraced the opportunity to keep the student body at bay.
Universities UK is the umbrella group for university vice-chancellors, the most overpaid individuals in the country. Some want “to permanently change teaching” and hold assessments which do “not have to happen in an exam hall”.
Trouble is, most students want actual engagement, the buzz of a lecture that other people attend. It’s a bit like live theatre, as opposed to watching Netflix, it’s better. You want the human interaction with a lecturer (who is left in no doubt about whether his audience is with him), the chance to sidle up with a question afterwards, the chat about it later with your friends. You want seminars where you can see other people shift uncomfortably when they’re quizzed, the spark of interest from a tutor.
In short, you want something like a full engagement with other minds, which university should provide. Many overseas students already have to have online tuition; one friend did so with the University of London. It was a dismal experience.
The answer, of course, is for would-be students to give those universities that can’t be bothered with human interaction a wide berth. Where’s student radicalism when it’s actually needed?
