Developing a multimedia educational resource is something I have long wanted to do and increasingly thought was just plain necessary since 1989. Discussions in Cambridge University's Institute of Criminology around that time with then doctoral students and mates Mark Fenwick and Richard Jones, were stimulating and helped form the reasoning for the agenda, apart from justifying playing with Apples. Since then, there have been aborted negotiations with entrepreneurs for educational CDs and for online criminology programmes, but no cigar. As Head/Dean of Law at the University of East London in the late 1990's, I did lead the staff into an extended use of IT, getting much of the administration put online and facilitating the much wider use of online legal knowledge; something which is now standard everywhere I expect.
My rationale for my interest in IT is simply that it enables a higher-quality education and a more rich expression of out forms of knowledge. I would not want to defend computers or the internet per se beyond that. However, when set in the full context of an educational sector where the lunatics have taken over the asylum and politicians have reduced it, and are constantly reducing it as we speak, to an el cheapo utilitarian shambles in service of profit and industry alone, and when put in the cultural environment of computer games, social networks, mobile phones, superficial communications generally, and the sheer volume of information and entertainment available on the internet, it becomes a big positive to swim with the tide, for once.
Given the context, an online venture of this magnitude, depth, and quality, is not just some toy equivalent of a book or an academic journal, it becomes the very site or groundwork of the discipline itself and so is appropriately web-hosted by a company called SiteGround. It does the work not only of the Faculty Common Room but also the Junior Common Room, the library, the disciplinary journal, the encyclopedia, the staff seminar, probably dozens of regular tutorials and seminars, and the drink in the pub afterwards.
Academics don't talk to each other about intellectual stuff much these days: a website such as this can help to bring people together again and to rejuvenate a declining universe of discourse and debate - and in public not in private. In that last crucial dimension, websites like these work against the increasing depoliticization and dumbing-down of the public realm and towards the democratization and proletarianization of knowledge, aiding the recreation of a common language to articulate our deeper thoughts, hopefully preventing both the formation of an arthritic and irrelevant professoriat and of a retarded public discourse on crime and justice subjugated to the knee-jerk responses of The Sun.
In short, I do feel the general decline in the quality of university education makes it barely worth the candle to go there in most instances these days, either as staff or student. In perfect synchrony with that, a growing minority of students arrive at university today either barely able to write let alone think critically, or they do think critically but without adequate channels, political parties or forums to convert that into constructive action and remain stuck in some purple haze of nihilism. All this is apart from the straightforward but brutal closures of politically critical departments, like sociology and philosophy, amidst a din drowned out by the vocational growling and crowing of the philistine hordes.
In an insane society, the UK, that persecutes intellectuals for being intellectual, and which now seems to hate and deride working-class intellectuals in particular, to celebrate the cult of nihilistic comedy and the thoughtless exploitation of opportunity, we need a free and developed internet underworld, but one that is populated with the civilized qualities and forms excluded by or mocked in the superficial over-world of the quick word, the short term, and the easy dismissals of the overfed middle-class. I like comedy, indeed am obsessed with it and will write some of my own one day, but it suffers when it falls into blunt cynicism or pointless critique.
Several strands of my life came together with several powerful social trends to make me realize that as a professional educator in social sciences with specialisms in criminology, sociology, social and political theory and social science methodology, I had to find a new way of being who I am. This means of course that what I was remains a true reflection of my character - no regrets - I did and do have an abiding fascination with good and evil.
- Universities increasingly, as in other fields, are simply not delivering quality scholarship in criminology - in the sense that the resurrection of policy-oriented, quantitative analysis in service of government needs or in search of grants inevitably results in a decline in the quality of interpretation, theorizing and debate, with a consequent loss of connections with other fields and a loss of meaning and of the history of criminological thought. Facts without interpretation mix easily with agendas driven by ideology and careers, numbers without meaning, plain old corner-cutting and time-serving, and of course the sacrifice of teaching for research thereby avoiding the boredom of formulaic teaching, the nuisance of collegiate control and the general reduction in independence.
- Besides, mass education and grade inflation combine to undercut continuously the possibility of quality education. Attend an A-level exam board and discover they don't want professors there criticizing the formulaic conveyor-belt knowledge being set up and treated as truth or thought and you'll soon find out that it's not the truth that counts but meeting the target number of As and Bs which saves a school's funding for another year.
- Publishers, aligned with their academic readership, tend to want ever more formulaic, textbook-style, superficial and self-referential, politically correct, non-knowledge. Large volumes of bland, stock, formulae are what is required - not debate, innovation or investigation. Ideally, in a 'handbook' or 'dictionary', non-thought can be peddled as the one and only truth without reference to opposite arguments, or damning refutations, and completely different perspectives to the one presented. This also has the added advantage of not requiring the author or producer to recognize and discuss the now vast body of publications within criminology; so academics don't talk any more, to each other, or about their subject, or about the world out there. And publishers want it to stay that way.......
- After leaving universities in disgust, I tried to buy a working men's club. That fell through because I refused to pay an aristocrat for his rights under his strategic but probably unlawful and thus rescindable restrictive covenants; I tried to play the stock market, the world economy receded; I could n't get back into a UK university to pay the bills because I'm too old, too radical, too theoretical, too Northern, too expensive and too male. I miss the creative work involved in intellectual life and feel the subject is too important to leave to universities, women, Southerners, youngsters, non-intellectuals and conservatives.
- New philosophies are emerging in praxis which do not see the education of the working class as dependent on universities - those who want can learn from the internet with very little guidance; this is the philosophy of such as Sugata Mitra [see press cutting Teach Yourself] whose project inspired the novel behind Slumdog Millionaire. In my case, I came to the conclusion many years ago that UK universities were irredeemably 'middle class', status-conscious and exclusive. I've seen too many working-class scholars crushed, demoralized, driven to psychiatrists or drink, and put off remaining in universities. Tony Blair kidded himself by thinking that if you increase the size of the intake you make universities less middle-class: it just exposes the class character of universities even more. UK universities, and elsewhere, do not like working-class habits, lifestyles, attitudes, politics and goals. They either try to stamp them out or pretend they are not there. Of course, that is harder still when it is a working-class member of staff, but the authorities do have the political assistance of white, middle-class feminism to ensure that working-class staff are got rid of in large numbers - I've seen or heard this all too often and we guys don't break our silence just suffer in it.
- Criminology had become police science [again] convened by small dens of monkish sects. It needs to relate to the public desperately, because it is generally speaking so remote, abstract and irrelevant. The academia I knew reminded me of its image in Gormenghast - huddles of retards, anti-social nerds and impotent time-servers locked away in their own timeless bubble viciously back-biting their rivals, namely everybody else, and slandering all at every available opportunity. That academia is not what the search for knowledge needs, any more than a sick person needs to die of MRSA in a hospital. The idea was to produce knowledge, to think outside and beyond the past and convention, to be obsessively curious and to be creative in looking for answers to important questions. What I saw was too Machiavellian, too self-serving, often not fit for purpose or even targetted at the purpose, often amnesiac of any purpose beyond self-aggrandisement, sometimes moronic, always bitchy, often profoundly unjust in its treatment of others, especially those defined as deviant, and always self-interested. How can anyone respect the knowledge that emerges from that?
- The public needs to hear a lot more from non-hegemonic or excluded or underground academics and professionals. There are many who find their professions too stultifying, too politically correct and restrictive, and increasingly divorced from reality. Many of them are now permanently excluded from what might have been their chosen occupation. Hierarchies are too steep, there are few friends to talk to, responsibilities and laws restrict free speech, and yet we all need to earn a living. Criminal justice matters, crime and morality cannot just be left to professionalism and the professionals. As in academia, all to often criminal justice becomes a closed shop which looks only after its own and loses all sense of wider goals and values.
- There is too much fragmentation everywhere, resulting in public, professionals and academics rarely speaking to each other honestly in a shared forum. Even if it remained anonymous, honest communication is vital to ensure that our systems retain some integrity in the face of ever-increasing state control of the idea of justice and its means of implementation. Our names don't matter anyway - only academics and lawyers care about that.
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