Hector Drummond

2000-01

Semester 1

Week 4

Wednesday… continued

 

Ren decides that this is a suitable time to talk about the TITE because none of the Department’s Continentalists are here (they are, of course, staying away because today’s talk has been an analytic talk). He’s wondering how best to bring up the topic up, when Compton says, ‘So you were going to tell me what happened yesterday at the titty.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it’s all become very titty-politti,’ Ren says, sounding a bit too pleased with his prepared line. He starts to fill Compton in on what happened in the TITE yesterday. Some of the other philosophers present – Walter Clutterbuck, Tristram York, Martha Gelber, George Bagnall, Bill Porterfield, and Derek – keep half an ear on what he is saying, as much as they can with Hedley and Beresford bashing away at their other ear. They’re mostly sympathetic to what Ren is saying about the TITE. Derek is as hard left as they come, but he has no truck with Continentalism. The rest are analytic soft leftists, and regard Continentalism, in their understated way, as ‘unfortunate’. But it’s hard for Ren to be heard as the visiting speaker and his antagonist are continuing their pointless and loud argument at the other end of the group. Ren can see Douglas, who is stuck next to them, looking over at Ren’s end of the group wondering whether he could politely move away, now that Beresford and Hedley are fully preoccupied with demonstrating how ignorant the other is.

‘Oh dear,’ says Martha to Ren. ‘I was afraid something like that might happen with that course, but I didn’t think it would get as bad as that.’

‘It’s that Balderstone chap,’ says Bill. ‘No wonder it’s like that with him in charge.’

‘It’s not just him, though,’ says Compton. ‘This is what the people behind it wanted. The whole of SADE are like that.’

SADE, which stands for the Staff and Development Unit, is the department that runs the TITE and other staff development courses.

‘This is the beginning of there being no escape from the left,’ continues Compton. ‘You will be forced to be a leftist if you want to be an academic. Eventually it will become law that you have to be a leftist, not just in academia, but in the wider world.’

‘You always exaggerate these things,’ says Derek. ‘And I’d rather you didn’t call them leftists. The real problem with the SADE lot is that they’re foisting mumbo-jumbo on intelligent people who have previously been trained to think well. What we need is to make academic people teach what they know better, not to cloud their minds up with poison gas.’

‘From what I’ve heard none of the SADE people know anything about teaching academics to be better teachers, it’s not just Balderstone,’ says Ren. ‘They’re terrible teachers themselves.’

‘Yes they are,’ says Martha. ‘I went on one of their short courses a few years ago, it was a disgrace.’

‘Not a surprise,’ says Walter. ‘You know they’re all just rejects from other departments?’

‘Are they? What do you mean?’ says Ren.

‘I mean that most of them have not been hired in as teaching specialists. Most of them don’t have a background in education at all. They’re people who their original departments wanted to get rid of, because they were no good at research or teaching, or both, but as it’s hard to sack an academic, they got shunted off instead to SADE.’

‘Great, so we’re being taught by third-raters who couldn’t hack it as proper academics themselves,’ says Ren. ‘So where does Balderstone come from?’

‘He’s one they did bring in from outside. But I don’t know what his background is,’ says Walter. ‘Do you?’

‘He conveniently doesn’t have a staff webpage,’ says Ren, ‘so I don’t know what he has. But he appears to have never seen anything so outlandish as an educational research finding, so I doubt he would come from Education.’

‘Well, you say that,’ says Compton, ‘but a lot of Education departments have been colonised by the left, and their training is now worthless.’

‘You mean colonised by the Continentalists,’ corrects Derek.

‘Education departments were colonised by the left a long time ago,’ says Compton. ‘That opened the opportunity for them to be further colonised by Continentalists, which has now happened. And now they’re got their foot through the door into the rest of the University system.’

‘Well, I’m going to ask Grant, as Head of Department, to write a letter of complaint on behalf of the department,’ says Ren. ‘My other issue with the course is the inordinate amount of time it takes up. The whole thing needs to be completely overhauled, or dumped.’

‘They won’t dump the general idea of having training courses for new lecturers, that’s here to stay,’ said Compton. ‘So the line has to be that it should be taken over by empiricists. It should be shorn of the politics, and it should be reduced in the time it takes up.’

‘You know we’re only doing one afternoon of video work?’ says Ren.

‘One afternoon a week?’ says Walter.

‘No, one afternoon in total,’ says Ren.

‘You mean where they video you giving a mock lecture?’ said Bill.

‘Yes, apparently four of you get to do it in a group, which means you get about half an hour spent on you for filming and analysis. This course goes for two whole years, and we get half an hour of video work. Half. An. Hour. Out of two years. That sort of thing should be the basis for the whole course. Regular filming of yourself and analysis of how you’re doing, are you speaking too fast, too slowly, are you being too boring, how comprehensible are you for the level you’re teaching at, are you getting better at this as you go along, and so on. That’s the sort of thing that’s needed. A proper nuts and bolts servicing of your teaching over a couple of years. Not half an hour of it, and then five hundred hours of postmodernist propaganda, which you must parrot back, or pack your bags. You know, I might just not go any more.’

‘But don’t you have to pass the course, otherwise you don’t pass probation?’ says Walter.

‘Yes, but probation is three years long. My contract doesn’t say that I have to start it in my first year. I could re-enrol next year, when it might have improved.’

‘Or got worse,’ says Compton.

‘Well, I’m going to get Grant to do something. I’m also getting some of the other people on the course to get their Heads to do something too.’

‘Another drink for anyone?’ says Walter.

‘Another pint of Mildewmelter, please,’ says Ren.

‘Mildewmelter?’

‘Or whatever it’s called. Mildewmouse? Something like that.’

‘Would our guest…’ begins Walter, before raising his voice, ‘Would our guest like something as well?’

‘Yes thank you,’ says Beresford, looking up from the argument. ‘Another red please.’

Walter looks embarrassed. ‘I, er, meant our guest speaker, but of course I will get you a red, Beresford. Hedley, would you like a drink?’

‘I’ll have red too, please.’

‘Medium or large?’

‘Oh, large I should think. Thank you.’

‘Large for me too, thanks,’ says Beresford, who isn’t going to let Hedley outdrink him.

2000-01

Semester 1

Week 4

Wednesday… continued

 

Anyway, all this, or rather none of it, is going through Ren’s head as he approaches the staff club bar. What’s in his head is the intent to purchase a beer. Which beer he should get is a complex decision which involves weighing up various factors, such as the beer’s alcoholic strength, its price, the awfulness of the taste – most beers taste bad to Ren, but especially ales, bitters and wheat beers – and the embarrassment quotient of buying a lager, whose blander taste he can more easily tolerate, but which will elicit scorn and mockery from those of his colleagues who hold that the only beers worth drinking are obscure ones which have sticks and ambergris and bits of beak floating in them, and which smell to him like they contain a mould that has evolved to be resistant to alcohol. Also to be factored in are how many of his lager-deriding colleagues are here tonight, and what mood they are in. And also how much of a shit he currently gives about the venting of their opinions on lager drinking.

He eventually decides that tonight his preference is to avoid another tedious round of lager-bashing, because he wants to get the conversation quickly onto TITE before Hedley drags everyone into a conversation about his views, so he orders a pint of something awful called – as far as he can remember three seconds later – Mildewmarch, an ale which the beardies from the Campaign for Right Proper Gravy, Whippets and Brews have given the seal of approval to. And, of course, a packet of pork scratchings.

He notices even before the barlady returns that something isn’t right. The delicious home-made pork scratchings in a clear packet that the staff club used to serve have been replaced by a commercial variety in a brightly-covered tinfoil pack, bearing the name ‘Oinkers’, which he knows from previous empirical research to be an inferior product in every way, unless you prefer your scratchings to taste and feel like popcorn mixed with puffed-up honeycomb. Ren reflects that if the bearded campaigners were really serious about keeping British pubs the way they should be then they should be complaining loudly about the replacement of wholesome, nutritious dead pig skin and fat with this tasteless cavity insulation. Perhaps he would write to them. But he would have to resist the temptation to start the letter, ‘Dear beardies…’, otherwise they wouldn’t take him seriously, and that would take all the fun out of it.

‘I’ve only been at this University for a few months and already it’s going to the dogs,’ Ren says, indicating the Oinkers, as he avoids sitting next to Hedley and Sadler and instead pulls up a chair to sit next to his friend and fellow Philosophy lecturer Compton Hart, a smartly-dressed thirty-something with curly, sandy-coloured hair, and a liking for cigarettes, which are becoming forbidden fruit at Universities. ‘The fatty esculants are not what they were.’

‘I think you’re the only person who comes here who eats pork scratchings,’ says Compton. ‘Those ones you’ve been eating recently had been on the shelves for ten years before you turned up and started eating them. Now you’ve eaten them all the manager finally had to buy some new ones.’

‘Not true,’ says Ren. ‘I’ve seen no less a personage than the Professor and Head of the Art History Department, Harold Furter, eating packeted pork rind.’

‘You mean old Frank?’ says Compton. ‘You’re really going to use him as an example?’

‘What, just because he’s the fattest man in Western academia?’

‘He’s the fattest man in the whole galaxy. He was eating deep-fried bits of Jabba the Hut, not pork scratchings. Why do you think they have a double door here for an entrance? That was put in a couple of years ago just so Frank could fit through. He got a grant for it. They’ll be rolling him around on his sides soon. Harold the Barrel.’

‘I expect he has a glandular imbalance. Or he’s big-boned.’

‘He has big dinosaur bones stuck in his throat if that’s what you mean,’ says Compton. ‘They keep his oesophagus wide so he can pour down beer direct from the barrel.’

‘No, no, no’, interrupts Derek Lucas. ‘Frank considers himself a cultured man. He might drink from the barrel, but it’s always good wine. He only eats pork scratchings when he thinks no-one’s looking.’

‘Why must my brethren be so ashamed of themselves?’ says Ren.

‘Are you not aware’, says Derek, ‘that pork scratchings were developed in the thirteenth century by medieval monks as a way to prevent young men from masturbating? That’s why masturbating really took off in the seventies, when the salt levels were changed.’

‘Never change the salt levels, I say,’ says Ren. ‘That’s like my motto for life. Never change the salt levels.’

‘Someone’s changed the salt levels for this department recently,’ says Compton.

‘A more pertinent fact,’ says Ren, ‘which you gentlemen may be unaware of, is that pork scratchings have more vitamin K in them than the equivalent number of melons in the University’s girls’ volleyball team.’

‘That one’s definitely a lie,’ says Compton.

‘Made-up, yes,’ says Ren, ‘but not a lie, because I don’t know it to be false. And it’s not obviously false. It could possibly be true, if melons have no vitamin K whatsoever, and the scratchings have a trace amount. And my knowledge of the vitamin K levels in melons is, shall we say… scratchy?’

‘Do pork scratchings have any vitamins whatsoever in them?’ says Derek. ‘That seems doubtful.’

‘How do I know, I’m a philosopher,’ says Ren. ‘Ask a biochemist. Bound to be one in here somewhere. Ask the bar to page a biochemist.’

‘A biochemist wouldn’t necessarily know anyway,’ says Derek. ‘The vitamin levels of assorted bar snacks and citrus fruits might not be the sort of information they make sure to always have at their command. It may be information they have, in fact, never possessed, it being of no earthly use to their more specialised alchemical pursuits.’

‘Well, perhaps they know the core bar snacks and popular fruits,’ says Ren. ‘Peanuts and oranges. But I agree. They may rely, for the more obscure comestibles, on nipping over to the science library when the topic comes up in conversation.’

‘As I’m sure it would if the VC walked in and was pelted with so many tomatoes that the issue of tomato poisoning came up,’ says Compton.

Compton was someone that Ren had been immediately drawn to when he arrived at Grayvington, not only because he is, in Ren’s view, if no-one else’s, good company, and not only because he is even more down on Continentalism and postmodernism than Ren, but also because he is the only person Ren has ever met in academia who is a conservative, and isn’t afraid to admit it (although he only admitted it once he had got his permanent appointment). That was something that Ren, who had only started recovering a couple of years ago from a standard dose of leftica idiotica acquired in his teens, admired.