University of Essex focuses on Business of Education
Creative writing can be a way of reading, and it fires up students who, used to browsing Wikipedia, can be reluctant to read a whole book. It’s a direct, though unforeseen, consequence of those radical 1960s ideas of valuing individuals and encouraging self-expression and confidence.
.. In December 2012 I was asked to chair the Man Booker International Prize for 2015. I was torn. Did I want to swerve away from my own writing to read hundreds of books from all over the world? Was I really ‘interested in canon-formation’, as a friend put to me?
.. Outside grants are becoming the only way to earn time off to write or to take on a piece of research. The model for higher education mimics supermarkets’ competition on the high street; the need for external funding pits one institution against another – and even one colleague against another, and young scholars waste their best energies writing grant proposals.
.. What is happening at Essex reflects on the one hand the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business – one advantageous to administrators and punitive to teachers and scholars – and on the other reveals a particular, local interpretation of the national policy