David Mitchell had a terrific piece in the Observer triggered by stories that up to 10 British publicly-funded universities are in talks with Carl Lygo, the CEO of BPP (Britain’s first for-profit ‘university’), about possibility of running the business side of these institutions by going into “partnership” with them.

The idea is that they’d still make all the academic decisions, while BPP would deal with the admin. Mitchell has this to say about the proposition: “There is little doubt that state funding changes an institution’s attitude to money and can increase its propensity for waste.”

But…

I think it’s a big jump from that observation to the current orthodoxy that the public sector’s flabby inefficiency and the private’s dynamic productivity are inevitable and universal – that the private sector possesses some kind of magic which, by dint of being paid by the state, no one in public service has access to; that the private sector is always brilliant and the public always useless.

I suspect Lygo of subscribing to this view when he says: “We have got a lot of universities in the UK and not all are in a strong financial position… the private provider would add expertise in the back-office functions.” What expertise? Expertise in administering, say, Bristol University that the people currently administering Bristol University don’t possess but a new company that’s never done it before is going to be brimming with? Won’t they just employ the same people to do the job but pay them less or sack a few? Is that what he means by expertise?

It’s not expertise, it’s ruthlessness, it’s the prioritisation of profit. What Lygo is offering people running universities is the opportunity to divest themselves of many of the problems inherent in their jobs. If you don’t want to take the tough decisions, he’s saying, if you doubt you’ve got the backbone to make the efficiency savings, then we’ll handle them for you. Pass your troubles on to those of us untroubled by conscience. Not only would this be a dereliction of the universities’ duty, it would also help perpetuate the myth of the private sector’s omnipotence and the public’s doltish money-burning idiocy.

The private sector caused the credit crunch, the financial crisis, the global recession. The public sector bailed out the banks and brought the world back from the brink of ruin. When our railways were in public hands, they were shabby, unreliable and loss-making. In private hands, they still are but public money ends up in the hands of shareholders and the tickets cost vastly more. The NHS is the most efficient health service of its peers despite having, up till now, much less private sector involvement than they do. The armed forces remain in the public sector and people seldom have cause to criticise their efficiency or commitment.

What Mitchell doesn’t mention, but Howard Hotson did in his splendid piece in the LRB, is that BPP is an offshoot of Apollo, the US Corporation which owns the ‘university’ of Phoenix.

In 2004, a scathing report issued by the US Department of Education concluded that Phoenix, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, had a ‘high-pressure sales culture’ that intimidated recruiters who failed to meet targets and encouraged the enrolment of unqualified students – in short that it rewarded ‘the recruiters who put the most “asses in classes”’. Apollo illegally withheld the report, but it was leaked and the group’s value on the stock market crashed. A suit was brought alleging that its management had ‘disseminated materially false and misleading financial statements in an effort to inflate its stock price and attract investors’.

In 2006 the company’s controller and chief accounting officer resigned amid allegations that the books had been cooked; in 2007, the Nasdaq Listing and Hearing Review Council threatened to withdraw Apollo’s listing from the stock exchange; in 2008, a US federal jury in Arizona found Apollo guilty of ‘knowingly and recklessly’ misleading investors, and instructed the group to pay shareholders some $280 million in reparations. Apollo appealed, but the appeal was rejected by the US Supreme Court on 8 March this year.

In the face of strenuous lobbying from the for-profit university industry, the Obama administration is now reversing the regulatory changes of the Bush years that allowed this bonanza. It has just been revealed that attorney-generals in ten states are investigating the University of Phoenix ‘for possible deceptive practices in its student recruiting and financing’ dating back to 2002. It looks like the party may be over, at least for the Apollo Group. Enrolment at Phoenix dropped by 42 per cent in the last three months of 2010. In January the group conceded that it expects applications to drop by another 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2011.

So this is the group that is going to offer its commercial nous to the UK higher education sector? “Is it possible”, asks Hotson, “that [David] Willetts just doesn’t know what the Apollo Group was up to at the University of Phoenix? Or does he imagine that for some reason the same thing couldn’t happen here?”

I’ve seen too much of universities over my professional career to think that their administration and management couldn’t be improved. But the idea that an outfit like BPP has anything to contribute to their management is, well, insane.

Which means, of course, that it is now quite probable.

Astonishing column by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post.

Everyone knows — or should know — that the United States spends much more than any other country on health care. But the Kaiser Family Foundation broke that spending down into two parts: the government’s share and the private sector’s share (both measured as a percentage of total gross domestic product), then compared the results to figures from 12 other countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And here’s the shocker: Our government spends more on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada or Switzerland.

Think about that for a minute. Canada has a single-payer health-care system. The government is the only insurer of any note. The United Kingdom has a socialized system, in which the government is not only the sole insurer of note but also employs most of the doctors and nurses and runs most of the hospitals. And yet, measured as a share of the economy, our government health-care system is the largest of the bunch. 

And it’s worse than that: Atop our giant government health-care sector, we have an even more giant private health-care sector. Altogether, we’re spending about 16 percent of the GDP on health care. No other country even tops 12 percent. Which means we’ve got the worst of both worlds: huge government and high costs.

Nice LRB piece by Howard Hotson about the background to the private ‘university’ to which David Willetts seems so attached.

In 2004, a scathing report issued by the US Department of Education concluded that Phoenix, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, had a ‘high-pressure sales culture’ that intimidated recruiters who failed to meet targets and encouraged the enrolment of unqualified students – in short that it rewarded ‘the recruiters who put the most “asses in classes”’. Apollo illegally withheld the report, but it was leaked and the group’s value on the stock market crashed. A suit was brought alleging that its management had ‘disseminated materially false and misleading financial statements in an effort to inflate its stock price and attract investors’.

In 2006 the company’s controller and chief accounting officer resigned amid allegations that the books had been cooked; in 2007, the Nasdaq Listing and Hearing Review Council threatened to withdraw Apollo’s listing from the stock exchange; in 2008, a US federal jury in Arizona found Apollo guilty of ‘knowingly and recklessly’ misleading investors, and instructed the group to pay shareholders some $280 million in reparations. Apollo appealed, but the appeal was rejected by the US Supreme Court on 8 March this year.

In the face of strenuous lobbying from the for-profit university industry, the Obama administration is now reversing the regulatory changes of the Bush years that allowed this bonanza. It has just been revealed that attorney-generals in ten states are investigating the University of Phoenix ‘for possible deceptive practices in its student recruiting and financing’ dating back to 2002. It looks like the party may be over, at least for the Apollo Group. Enrolment at Phoenix dropped by 42 per cent in the last three months of 2010. In January the group conceded that it expects applications to drop by another 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2011.

Is it possible that Willetts just doesn’t know what the Apollo Group was up to at the University of Phoenix? Or does he imagine that for some reason the same thing couldn’t happen here?

I spotted Dell’s claim on a piece of junk mail that came through our letterbox the other day but thought that life is too short to go checking ads. Fortunately, the eagle-eyed chaps at the Guardian checked out the small print.

Noted in passing: advert for the Dell XPS-15, containing the phrase

“Finally, the power you crave in the thinnest 15″ PC on the planet*.”

Wow, the thinnest? But wait, what’s the asterisk?

Small print time: “Based on Dell internal analysis as at February 2011. Based on a thickness comparison (front and rear measurements) of other 15″ laptop PCs manufactured by HP, Acer, Toshiba, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, MSI. No comparison made with Apple or other manufacturers not listed.”

From Engadget’s review of the XPS-15: “it’s actually a few hairs thicker than a 15-inch MacBook Pro, wider, and at 5.54 pounds, it weighs practically the same.”

So that would make the XPS-15 the world’s thinnest… apart from any thinner 15-inch laptops it wasn’t compared against. This seems an interesting way to proceed with future advertising: the most powerful in the world* (apart from others that are more powerful). And so on.

Well spotted, guys.

From Roy Greenslade.

You have just missed one of the great modern journalistic opportunities. An advert on the journalism.co.uk site (but just removed because its closing date was today) was offering the princely sum of £10 per 1,000 words.

It was placed by Snack Media, which boasts: “We specialise in the creation of high quality new media content”.

In its advert, the company said it had received “some big orders” and required writers to complete the wide-ranging briefs.

This involved “writing answers to user questions for a Q&A website – quite easy and fun” and “travel writing” (without, of course, actually travelling).

It added: “We pay £10 per 1000 words. This is non-negotiable.”

Wow!

Fascinating piece by James Ball.

Yesterday, media lawyer and legal blogger David Allen Green published the full text of the gagging order signed by almost all WikiLeaks employees earlier this year.

It's an extraordinary document. WikiLeaks staffers face a £12m penalty if they reveal any information about WikiLeaks' day-to-day operations, let alone any documents given to the whistleblowing organisation.

In a move reminiscent of the UK's reviled superinjunctions, even revealing the existence of the gagging order is itself a breach.

Within minutes of the publication of the gagging document, WikiLeaks supporter Asher Wolf pointed out to her followers that I, during my time with the organisation, had refused to sign the document. Others quickly pointed out the leaked document was unsigned.

Yes, it was my copy of the agreement that was published.

The leak was hardly premeditated though – it emerged through the refusal of transparency campaigner Heather Brooke to believe I was not joking when discussing the terms of the WikiLeaks contract.

Inadvertently, I sent her a photograph of a portion of the document publicly rather than privately, over Twitter. Needless to say, this provoked a lot of interest, and one thing then led to another.

Answer: impossible to say — as this sharp piece by Max Fisher argues.

On the fifth straight day of foreign, air- and sea-based attacks against Qaddafi’s forces, there is still no one leading the massive Western force. The U.S., as Pentagon officials frequently point out at daily press conferences, is not in charge. NATO, still deadlocked by internal disputes, is not in charge. The United Nations Security Council, which only gave enough authority to enforce a no-fly zone, is not in charge of the now far more aggressive campaign. The Arab League, which withdrew its support within hours of granting it, is certainly not in charge. It would be as if, in June 1944, the allied powers decided to invade Normandy at roughly the same time, but didn't bother to appoint General Eisenhower to command and coordinate the multi-national force.

Journalists trying to answer the question of who is in charge have been reduced, perhaps because no concrete answer yet exists, to speculating as to whether the U.S. might be willing to support France's proposal for a “steering committee” for the war, though it’s not even clear who would lead that committee or how it would delegate authority between the Western powers. Not only is no one in charge, no one wants to be, and no one has any idea who to appoint.

There appear to be two primary reasons for the confusion, both of which may also help explain why there’s no clear objective.

The first reason, Fisher maintains, is that all the states involved have different objectives. The most cynical is the frantic attempt by the French to overwrite the embarrassing fact that Sarkozy’s support for Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was deep, long-held, and consistent right up until the latter’s overthrow by popular protest. Italy needs Libyan oil more than most other states. And Germany, always reluctant, has become positively hostile to the venture — even to the extent of withdrawing four warships from NATO control in the Med.

The second reason is that nobody in Europe (or the US) is willing to take on a leadership role in a civil war in a fractured, tribalistic statelet.

As my mother used to say, never start something that you cannot finish.

Further to my post about universities being addicted to tainted money, Stefan Collini had an interesting take on the underlying malaise:

All academics in British universities will immediately recognise that nothing they do as scholars and teachers wins anywhere near as much commendation and support from their university’s “senior management team” (older readers may still refer to them as “administrators”) as the securing of some kind of external funding. Such funding may range from a project grant from a research council or charity to the sponsorship of a post or studentship by a local business, and then on to the murkier regions of whole courses and centres being paid for by some overseas government or large corporation.

At first sight, it may seem absurd to bracket all these disparate types of funding together. The first and second kinds are not only innocent of any taint of corruption: they are the bread-and-butter of most working scientists and an increasing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well. But that is precisely what is so insidious and why the LSE case raises systemic rather than merely local questions. Let me illustrate in two ways.

First, it is now axiomatic in British universities that a piece of research that was financed by any of these forms of external funding is ipso facto superior to one that is financed indirectly out of the university’s recurrent income. Such external funding is, in principle, supposed to cover the “extra” costs of doing a piece of research, but this means that in practice academics are now under instructions to incur more expense.

If a book or paper could be written either during the research time that universities still, just about, make available or during a period in which the scholar or scientist in question receives external funding for the notionally additional costs, academics are now obliged by their universities to opt for the latter. Indeed, being able to raise such outside money, from whatever source, is now being written into job advertisements as a requirement of the post.

Spot on. There is one aspect of this that Collini doesn’t discuss, which is that in many scientific and technological disciplines there isn’t any realistic prospect of universities being able to finance the research out of their own stable funding. Maybe the big American Ivy League colleges are exceptions, but even then I doubt it. But research and scholarship in the humanities does not require such lavish funding, and yet even there academics are being pressured to seek external funding and to demonstrate the “impact” of their work. Collini’s strictures apply with even greater force there.