Authenticity and Higher Education: The Nietzschean University in the Twenty-First Century

Richard Smith
University of Durham England

At the beginning of his 1983 book, Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsches educational philosophy, David Cooper quotes Foucaults celebrated comment that the only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsches is precisely to use it even, perhaps, to deform it, make it groan and protest. David Cooper writes that he has unashamedly used Nietzsche to conduct a critique against fashionable educational ideas. For him those ideas are predominantly those of vocationalism, a debased kind of progressivism, and the idea of education as initiation into the disciplines or forms of knowledge. Twenty years later, the dominant educational ideas, jargon and ideology have changed, and the focus of critique must change too. But my strategy here in this chapter is the same: to use the disturbing power of Nietzsches thought and writings to help unsettle educational orthodoxy and unmask, by the very Nietzschean devices of mockery and celebration in places, some of its flaws and pretensions Values In The Will to Power Nietzsche writes that The highest values have devalued themselves. There is no goal. There is no answer to the question, why?. This, he believed, was how things stood in his own day, and perhaps they stand so in ours too; or perhaps all ages stand on the edge of this kind of nihilism and from time to time embrace it. When this happens values descend to the status of conventions. We do not recognise ourselves in them, nor identify ourselves with them: they are mores maiorum, the ways of our ancestors, to an age not much given to respect for the ancestral unless, of course, it can be dressed up as heritage. When values become merely conventional moral education becomes a matter of deciding what values we want children to take on board, in that most revealing of phrases. Morality comes to seem temporary, to be jettisoned at will, and as much subject to whim and fashion as choice of clothes. All over the English-speaking world, and perhaps most of all in the UK, education from the primary school through to the university shows all the signs of a similar nihilism. We have lost our sense of the value of education: a loss which we

Solicitude and Solitude

conceal with mission statements (Our aim is to be among the top seven universities by 2004, Uttoxeter for excellencei) or frenetic image management. If the prospectus shows enough college scarves and ivy-covered walls, enough brighteyed young people playing rugby or sitting confidently before the computer, then it will appear we know what we are about: these signs clearly signal university. If only children would take to carrying satchels again, or wearing caps displaying concentric circles, we would not need to worry about the point of schooling either. The fact that education can so readily and uncontroversially be thought to be all about raising standards shows how far we have descended in our devaluation of value. For what this means is that the complex question of what education is for has been reduced to the business of league tables. The raising of standards is now widely understood simply in terms of pupils, schools or universities moving up or down educational league tables: more pupils in Bassetshire have achieved Level 5 at Key Stage 2 this year compared with previous years, therefore the standard of education in Bassetshire has clearly risen. It is important to remember that a standard, in one of its meanings at least, is a linear scale, like Fahrenheit or Beaufort, on which all relevant phenomena (in these cases, temperatures or wind speeds) can be ranked. The standard is the same for all, and questions of goals and values come down to simple matters of more or less. A better central heating system for instance makes the water and the radiators hotter faster. All central heating systems then can be commensurable with each other, and from here it is a small step to the conclusion that they must be so commensurable, for unless such a system can be compared with its fellows we cannot know what it is worth. It becomes an eccentric, a one-off, a curio: we would not know what to make of a school or university that defied comparison in the same way. Tabloid newspapers would foster suspicion: something fishy, something deviant is going on here. Recall Jean-Franois Lyotards famous observation (1984, p. xxiv) that under the condition of postmodernity what cannot figure on the common scales of measurement has no real existence: we are required to be commensurable, or disappear. It is in this context that there has been widespread reluctance to devote any real thought to questions of the aims, ends or purposes of education. The phenomenon is of course not new: in Twilight of the Idols (What the Germans lack, 5) Nietzsche complains that the essential thing has gone out of the entire system of higher education in Germany: the end (p. 74). The government documents and reports of many western countries have during roughly the last quarter of a century either dealt with questions of aims briefly and with no serious discussion or have even declared that argument about ends and purposes is now superseded. A remarkable example of the latter comes from the 1995 European White Paper, Teaching and Learning: Towards the Learning Society: Everyone is convinced of the need for change, the proof being the demise of the major ideological disputes on the objectives of education.

Authenticity and Higher Education

A later (p. 24) section is entitled The end of debate on educational principles. Thus the question of what higher education is for has been declared redundant by decree. Another good example is the UKs own Dearing Report into Higher Education of 1997. Despite its length of around 1700 pages there is virtually no real reflection on the aims or point of university education. Proper discussion of such aims is replaced by airy talk of the learning society, which in turn is conceived in primarily instrumental and economic terms (cf. Blake et al., 1998). Dearing, para.1.10 declares: The expansion of higher education in the last ten years has contributed greatly to the creation of a learning society, that is, a society in which people in all walks of life recognise the need to continue in education and training throughout their working lives and who see learning as enhancing the quality of life throughout all its stages. But, looking twenty years ahead, the UK must progress further and faster in the creation of such a society to sustain a competitive economy. Higher education is justified in terms of the creation of a learning society: this, in turn, despite passing mention of enhancement of the quality of life, apparently needs to come about primarily in order to sustain a competitive economy. What kind of world we need that competitive economy for is not indicated. It seems wholly of a piece with this inability or refusal to engage in discussion of educational values that the only real debate that Dearing stimulated concerned the funding of higher education and the question of student fees. The UKs 2003 White Paper (DfES, 2003) on Higher Education and the discussion that surrounded it concerned little else but student fees and the related issues of wider access and participation, and at the time of writing this chapter there is speculation that the governing Labour Party may be out-voted on the matter of top-up fees by its own members of parliament. Now none of this is a trivial issue. Yet a vacuum has opened at the heart of things when questions can only be asked about how, and not about what or why; when the only language that can be spoken is the language of economics; and when the status of this as the only proper, grown-up language in which to talk about education is quite taken for granted. Wider access, participation yes, but to and for quite what? After the publication of the 2003 White Paper the UK Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, made several speeches (including one in which he was, rightly or wrongly, taken to be questioning the value of the study of mediaeval history, and another in which he described the study of Classics as dodgy) whose function he afterwards described as being to open up the question of just what university education is for. There was some surprise among members of the public, but perhaps not as much as there should have been, that he thought this question could reasonable follow, and not precede, the White Paper. It seems a clear indication of the status of discussion of educational values: an optional extra after the serious business has been dealt with, a nostalgic practice perhaps like Mediaeval History, or Classics which the grown-ups have grown out of.

Solicitude and Solitude

Yet where we try to exclude value we create a kind of vacuum, and into this creep bastard values, valuettes and values-lite. Does that claim to excellence mean anything more than that Uttoxeter scores highly in all the league-tables, that it is committed, whatever the league-table is a league-table of, to be at or near the top of it? Uttoxeter may claim proudly to be a top ten university, but all this seems to say is that it does exactly the same kind of thing as the eight universities above it and the rather larger number below. In his analysis of the modern university in The University in Ruins Bill Readings (Readings, 1996) argues that in the context of the university excellence is a content-free notion, merely a sign that the university that claims it seeks to compete with other universities on any measures or leaguetables that are current and models itself on the corporations of global capitalism. But this is not fair. Our senior management team went on a retreat to develop our Mission Statement. As a result we have statements of Purpose, Values and Aims, with linked Objectives and Action points. Do not accuse us of having no values they appear on every page of our Strategic Plan! But in his more honest moments one Vice-Chancellor admits: The strategic plans submitted to HEFCE are not the strategic plans of the institution. They are bidding documents to position ourselves in anticipation of when the inevitable special initiatives come round (THES 25.8.200, p. 4). Of course the Vice-Chancellor is not to be blamed: to act otherwise would be irresponsible. By making financial crisis the permanent condition of universities government ensures that their leaders must jump for every carrot that is dangled before them. It is a further sign of the widespread failure to think about educational values that what is valuable in education is so often defined by contradistinction to its opposite. Perhaps nothing else so satisfactorily explains the recurring controversy about Mickey Mouse degrees.ii They do Womens Studies, Equine Studies, even (shudder) Surfing.iii We may not be certain of our own core values, but what a relief to be able to indicate them by excoriation: we dont do any of that. We, by inference, stand for something vastly more solid and respectable, even if we have lost the capacity or confidence to say quite what that is. It was of course this formulation of value as the opposite of what is other to us that Nietzsche saw as an aspect of ressentiment and one of the defining features of nihilism.iv

Institutions
Our institutions are no longer fit for anything: everyone is unanimous about that. But the fault lies not in them but in us. Having lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we are losing the institutions themselves, because we are no longer fit for themFor institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility Thus Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (What the Germans lack, 39, p. 104). His criticism of course is of modernity, as the title of this section of Twilight

Authenticity and Higher Education

makes clear, and of the loss of the sense of tradition. But perhaps we suffer from a similar disease: the disease of endlessly inspecting, monitoring, auditing institutions rather than looking to what lies elsewhere in the quality of human engagement, in the peculiar nature of academic authority: in what lies, as Nietzsche so economically puts it, in us. For what is more natural, in the vacuum left by the loss of thinking about ends, than to think of the only solid value in education as consisting in the running the system administering the institution or higher education sector as a whole? Bill Readings (op. cit.) argues that in arriving at what he calls the University of Excellence where excellence names precisely nothing we have reached a situation that allows the maximum of internal administration (p. 120, my emphasis). He writes further: The University of Excellence is one in which a general principle of administration replaces the dialectic of teaching and research, so that teaching and research, as aspects of professional life, are subsumed under administrationteaching is [i.e. becomes] the administration of students by professors; research is the administration of professors by their peers; administration is the name given to the stratum of bureaucrats who administer the whole. (pp. 125 6) Neither Readings nor I mean to argue that the university does not need good administrators. I return to this point below. Administration here names the prioritisation of the ideas and principles of business management to the point where they obliterate all other notions of educational value. Readings mounts a powerful criticism of the kind of student evaluation of courses where the ticking of boxes becomes definitive of the quality of teaching, arguing that consumerism here replaces what can only and properly be acts of judgement, which are themselves subject to further acts of judgement in an endless chain. No judgement is finalQuestions of value are systematically incapable of closure (p. 132), and those that make judgements have to take personal responsibility for them rather than taking refuge in the sort of statistical pretension to objectivity (ibid.) that occurs where (in the recent UK context) 22 points out of 24 can be held definitive of a departments teaching quality, or 4 (or 5, or whatever) definitive of its research excellence or lack of it. As an up-to-date instance of what Readings means by the dominance of administration, and of what I mean by the tendency to look to institutional solutions rather than to what lies in us, consider the current obsession with what is called closing the loop. One dimension of this is the concern, in our audit society, as Power (1997) calls it, to show that the books figuratively add up. Suppose for example that external examiners make a justifiable criticism of course organisation. Their comments are minuted; the relevant university department and faculty committees discuss the criticism and propose solutions; these solutions are implemented, and in the following year the external examiners comment favourably on the change. This too is minuted. If any element of this process were omitted there would be a gap, a lacuna in the loop. Closing the loop is also a term of art in a slightly different context, that of student feedback. What is meant here is

Solicitude and Solitude

spelled out with admirable clarity in the Abstract of a recent paper (Watson, 2002): Feedback from students informs improvement in higher education institutions and is part of the students role in university management. To be effective it is important to close the loop: from student views, through identifying issues and delegating responsibility for action, to informing students of the action resulting from their expressed views. The focus of this paper is the Student Satisfaction Approach, an institution-wide survey used internationally. The paper explores the different ways universities feed back information to students following institution-wide surveys, including the different presentation styles and the types of issues that are presented to students, drawing on international examples. Web pages give many examples of the growing obsession with closing the loop. One university worries over whether feedback is best given via noticeboards, in lectures, through newsletters or by way of e-mail or a Web page. Another quotes Leckey and Neill (2001, p.25): closing the loop is an important issue in terms of total quality management. If students do not see any action resulting from their feedback, they may become sceptical and unwilling to participate. It is clear that a new shibboleth is being born, one connected with the ambition to make universities Highly Reliable Organisations, like hospitals or nuclear power stations. Academics may not cause the equivalent of Chernobyl during their daily work, but it is only fair that if they make mistakes cost their departments a point in Subject Review by producing imperfect committee minutes, say there should be hell to pay. That will encourage them to leave nothing to chance (see 3 below). In any case the loop-closers have a very good point. If we seek student feedback and act on it then we need to tell students how we have met their concerns, not least because otherwise why should they go to the trouble of giving us their views in future? The good administrator does well to remind us of this, and thus to keep us clean and decent in the eyes of those who scrutinise us. Yet something seems wrong here when this is a matter of administration and systems (of institutions, as I put it above) rather than of the thinking and talking together that should surely characterise the relationship between teacher and taught. Does not the good university teacher say: You raised these issuesthis is how we have responded to them; did we hear you right, does our response meet your concerns? That is to say: there is an ongoing dialogue here, open and sensitive at its best, not a systemic add-on to the work of the lecture and seminar but an intrinsic part of it. This process, as Readings says, is systematically incapable of closure. When it is conceived as a loop that is, precisely, to be closed there is the suggestion that once the requirements of bureaucracy have been fulfilled we can forget about loops and feedback until the next point in the yearly cycle, and meanwhile devote ourselves to other things. The distinction here is important, and easily misunderstood or caricatured. Administration is vital, especially when it reminds us of aspects of our work that

Authenticity and Higher Education

we may have neglected. It would be entirely wrong to cast faceless bureaucratic administrators on one (the bad) side and on the other the noble academics, concerned only with their students learning and well-being. The reality is only too often quite otherwise. But a significant change occurs when bureaucratic administration becomes central and replaces what Readings above calls the dialectic of teaching and research and what I would prefer to call the endless business of thinking with each other (cp Smith, 2003). How easily the new administrative vocabulary enters the contemporary discourse of higher education and insinuates itself at its heart! We may welcome widening participation, for example, yet find it odd when that seems to have become the universitys main aim: surely the central concern must be just what students are participating in. Who, above all, can be against accountability, when we know that public money must not be wasted? Yet we should be uncomfortable with the way accountability, transparency and the rest of the vocabulary of administration have grown fat at the expense of creativity, of intellectual excitement, of taking students into a journey into the not fully known. The manifest desirability of the new substitutes for value, the eminently reasonable language in which they are expressed, stifles necessary criticism. It is important, then, to make what has become familiar and over-familiar in our educational world look a little more odd. It is here, in my view, that Nietzsche proves so very useful to us. It is not that his explicitly educational writings are among his most interesting. His immense value to the world of education today is rather in his ability to shock us into re-examining and re-evaluating our orthodoxies. Take the notion of accountability again, for instance. Even Readings rather meekly concedes the need for universities to respond to the demand for accountability; his strategy is to refuse to conduct the debate over the nature of the universitys responsibility solely in the language of accounting (p. 18). But does not Nietzsche go to the heart of things? Everywhere accountability is sought, it is the instinct for punishing and judging which seeks it. The doctrine of will (and accountable acts) has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty. Twilight of the Idols, The Four Great Errors, 7 The emotions that sustain the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb are the emotions of vengefulness and resentment. They are part of the slave morality that elevates the interests of the weak over those of the strong, for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey (Genealogy of Morals, 1.13). How long have you been a buzzard/Professor of Theology? What are your aims and objectives, in being such? Where is your evidence we require minutes of meetings and questionnaire returns that your customers are satisfied with your services, that you have listened to their concerns and acted on them? Yes, we must have accountability, and we must close our loops. But these matters of administration could only take centre

Solicitude and Solitude

stage in a nihilistic culture where we lack the confidence to address and affirm the distinctive values of the university.

Contingency
Kingsley Amiss novel, Lucky Jim, now approaching its fiftieth anniversary, casts a Nietzschean light on universities recognisably like our own. The epigraph, Oh, lucky Jim, / How I envy him, with its suggestion of ressentiment, is echoed in the workings of chance throughout the plot. Jim Dixon, new lecturer in History at a rather dim university college, learns to trust his luck. In contrast the academy leaves nothing to chance (recall the risk-free, high reliability organisation): all is measured according to the proper standards, which the university exists to maintain. Something of what those standards amounts to appears in the opening words of the novel: They made a silly mistake, though, the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory... (p.7) The professor, it emerges, has played the recorder in a little piece by Dowland for recorder and keyboard. The newspaper has correctly reported composer and instrumentalists; but what, Professor Welch asks, do you think they said then? Dixon shook his head. I dont know, Professor, he said in sober veracity. No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor. Flute and piano. Oh? Flute and piano; not recorder and piano. Welch laughed briefly. Now a recorder, you know, isnt like a flute, though its the flutes immediate ancestor, of course. To begin with, its played, thats the recorder, what they call bec, thats to say you blow into a shaped mouthpiece like that of an oboe or a clarinet, you see. A present-day flutes played whats known as traverso, in other words you blow across a hole instead of... (ibid.) They made a silly mistake, though. This is surely familiar to us from a hundred common-room conversations, a thousand articles. The proverbial, anthropological Strange Visitor would conclude that the pleasure of academic work lies in the uncovering of error. And of course it is important to get things right. Yet here we seem, in Lucky Jim, to see the limitations of a certain view of what it is to get things right and true. For what Jim Dixon learns in the course of the novel is something less about moving from the erroneous to the accurate, or from making mistakes to avoiding them, than about the importance of properly registering the truth

Authenticity and Higher Education

of what you know is true: of converting what may initially be conventional or halfrecognised truths into personal and fully recognised ones. From time to time, for instance, he finds further evidence for his theory that nice things are nicer than nasty ones; there was no end, he comes to see by the end of the novel, to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones (p. 243). The slave morality is to convert what you must endure anyway into a virtue: your abasement becomes humility and patience, and so on. The university world that Amis depicts exemplifies this in abundance, and Amis it would appear sees the academy as a significant site, in modern times, for this conversion. The pressure to worship the gradations of hierarchy has much to answer for here: recall how much store Professor Welch sets on being called Professor, and the profound unease it causes Dixon that a particular student calls him, apparently alone of the academic staff, sir (his manner appears to be concealing something: remarkably, it turns out to be genuine regard and respect, so unusual at the university that they are not readily recognised). Then there is the relationship of the academic to his subject-matter, a relationship widely infected, in the novel, by pretension, posing, obscurantism, the drive to cultivate a specialism as a retreat from the world rather than as a means of understanding it and engaging with it. (This relationship is by no means confined to the academy: we learn much about Welchs son, the painter Bertrand, when he says that if he lands the plum job of personal secretary to the wealthy Gore-Urquhart, he will paint with one hand and answer his letters with the other.) Dixon, by contrast, has drifted into his specialism of mediaeval history largely because he took it at university thinking it might be a soft option, and then this job here turned up, and so here, by the operations of chance or luck, he is. But Dixon will not succumb to the temptation to love the source of his oppression. He has for example written an article, which may just save his job if it is published: The economic influence of the development in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1483. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the articles niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw on non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. In considering this strangely neglected topic, it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and a fool. (pp. 14 15) All of this comes to a head in the novels first comic denouement, when Dixon has to give a public lecture on Merrie England Welchs specialism and passion. Under the influence of nerves and the whisky Gore-Urquhart has given him to calm them, Dixon unconsciously talks in a parody first of Welchs style and intonation and then the college Principals, as if in instinctive acknowledgement of the inauthenticity of the occasion and his own part in it. Realising momentarily what he is doing, he moves into an exaggerated northern accent as least likely to offend anyone present: he seemed to have forgotten how to speak ordinarily. Finally,

Solicitude and Solitude

he began to infuse his tones with a sarcastic, wounding bitterness. Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded rubbish. Within quite a short time he was contriving to sound like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a book-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts from a pamphlet written by a pacifist, Jewish, literate Communist. (p. 226) Not, of course, the best way to recover ones authenticity. The alternative is something like what Dixon attempts throughout the novel, with more or less success: to hold on to, and clarify to his own best satisfaction, what his instincts and perceptions tell him. What is bad is bad, and not to be loved in order to make it tolerable. The relationship with the neurotic and manipulative Margaret must end because it involves the trek away from honesty (p. 77). The university and Dixons subject, history, are to be seen in an honest and accurate light, rather than through comforting illusion. The horribleness of the truly horrible Welch, his Merrie England and evenings of madrigals is to be relished as what it is: The one indispensable answer to an environment bristling with people and things one thought were bad was to go on finding out new ways in which one could think they were bad. The reason Prometheus couldnt get away from his vulture was because he was keen on it, and not the other way round. (p. 129) Not the other way round: unable to escape what gnaws at our liver, we come to love it, the masochistic, servile trick at the heart of Judaeo-Christianity. If we love our vultures, that is another matter. The novel the novel form in general, that is makes available a richer range of language than most genres of academic writing. That is one reason why it is valuable to us. So too we seem to sense that for Jim Dixon the trek to some version of authenticity involves recovering and using language that says what you want it to say. There are many examples of this in Lucky Jim. In the early part of the novel the language of authenticity is necessarily interior, and reflects Jims powerlessness. Unable to tell Professor Welch what he things of him, Jim expresses his feelings behind closed lips: You ignorant clod, you stupid old sod, you havering, slavering get Here intervened a string of unmentionables, corresponding with an oom-pah sort of effect in the orchestra. (p. 87) John Mullan (2003) comments that this is the interior tune of heartfelt insults, a kind of exorcism of resentment that any reader could identify with. As Jim begins to achieve freedom from his slave status, the tune is not only interior. When Bertrand confronts Jim and accuses him of attempting to seduce his girl, matters come to blows. Jims is the harder, and Bertrand ends on the floor, defeated.

Authenticity and Higher Education

The bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation, Dixon thought. You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation, he said. (p. 209) At this point, immediately before the disastrous and triumphant lecture on Merrie England, we grasp that Jim has reached a kind of harmony. As Mullan (ibid.) puts it, inner and outer voices finally become identical.

Conclusion
Nietzsche too of course teaches us that we must take language seriously: that the range of our language and the quality of our thinking are not two separate matters. Language is not to be treated as a box of disposable tools whose function is simply to help us get to wherever we want to go; or, if we do treat language like that, we should not be surprised to find ourselves enmired in the instrumentalism that results from unconsciously foregrounding means-towards-ends. His famous description of truth as a mobile or flexible army of metaphors points to the ineradicably figurative nature of language. When we suppose language to be offering us direct and unmediated access to reality we have probably failed to notice the particular metaphors we are using (or, more accurately, which are using us). Educationists ready talk of effectiveness and what works, of accountability and of closing the loop, supplies excellent examples. That is how we come to think that the only grown-up way to understand the world is by counting, calculating, weighing, seeing and touching, and nothing more (The Gay Science, 373): not by the endless efforts of thought, the creative imagination, or by the striving to create fresh values in that spirit of dynamic vitality and affirmation which lies at the heart of Nietzsches notion of the will to power.

Literature
1. Amis, Kingsley (1984: first pub. 1954) Lucky Jim (Harmondsworth: Penguin) 2. Blake, Nigel, Standish, Paul and Smith, Richard (1998) The Universities We Need: Higher Education After Dearing (London: Kogan Page) 3. Blake, Nigel, Smeyers, Paul, Standish, Paul and Smith, Richard (2000) Education in an Age of Nihilism (FalmerRoutledge) 4. Cooper, D. (1983) Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsches educational philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) 5. DfES (Department for Education and Skills) (2003) The Future of Higher Education (Cm 5735) (London: HMSO) 6. European Commission (1995) 'Teaching and Learning: Towards the Learning Society' (Brussels: European Commission)
(http://www.cec.lu/en/comm/dg22/dgss/html)

7. Lyotard. J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G.Bennington and B.Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press)

Solicitude and Solitude

8. Leckey, J., and Neill, N., 2001, Quantifying quality: the importance of student feedback, QHE 7 (1), pp. 1932 9. John Mullan (2003) Four little letters, The Guardian, May 10 (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,952399,00) 10. National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (The Dearing Report) (1997) (London:HMSO) 11. Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power (trans. and ed. W.Kaufmann) (Vintage Books, 1968) 12. ----The Gay Science (trans. and ed. W.Kaufmann) (Vintage Books, 1974) 13. ----The Genealogy of Morals (trans. and ed. Douglas Smith) (Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1996) 14. ----Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (trans and ed. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 15. Power, Michael (1997) The Audit Society: rituals of verification (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 16. Readings, Bill (1996) The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press) 17. Smith, Richard (2003) Thinking with each other: the peculiar practice of the university, Journal of Philosophy of Education 2003 37. 2, 309-323 18. Watson, Sarah (2002) Closing the Loop: ensuring effective action from student feedback (www.uce.ac.uk/crq/presentations/praguesarah2002.doc)

Notes
i. There is no university of Uttoxeter, but the example is real; the slogan appears inter alia by the postmark on the universitys letters. ii. See for example Taking the mick, The Guardian 15 Jan, 2003, conveniently at http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/story/0,9860,875003,00.html iii. The University of Plymouth (UK) offers BSc (Hons) Surf Science and Technology, which has offended a number of people who like to think of themselves as academic purists. iv. In places this section draws on and adapts parts of Blake et al. 1998 and 2000.