tim's experiment

The temporary closure of Hong Kong’s universities has accidentally highlighted the very old-fashioned way in which they operate in normal times. In the Middle Ages, when books were scarce and expensive, it was necessary for students to gather round the feet of an established scholar and gather the pearls which supposedly fell from his lips.

Nowadays this is hardly necessary. Unfortunately the one topic which attracts little attention and less research in universities is their own internal doings. Education departments – where some relevant expertise lurks — are regarded as very much the bottom of the prestige pyramid; comments from them on the way more eminent people operate are neither welcomed nor heeded.

So the tools used to insert knowledge into young heads remain for the most part what they were hundreds of years ago: tutorials, seminars and lectures.

The difference between these is the number of people present. The classical tutorial is one and one: student and tutor. In practice the number of students, at least in the early years of the degree course, may creep up to two or three.

What happens is that the student or students read out their essay on the set topic, and there is then a discussion. The tutor, if she is a good tutor, will try to make this a conversation of equals, while guiding the students in fruitful directions. The friendly atmosphere does not detract from the fact that this is a very demanding exercise for the student.

The seminar is bigger, and used to go up to about 12. This is the number up to which, according to the anthropologists, it is still possible to have a conversation, with some guidance from a leader. People speak spontaneously, interrupt (politely, we hope) and interact with each other. As in the tutorial one person reads out his thoughts on the set subject, and these are then discussed.

This is an ordeal for the individual doing the reading. The other people may be tempted to sit back and say little. A good instructor will try to draw everyone into the conversation.

After this we get to the lecture. Up to about 40 this can operate rather like a well-run school class: the teacher will set the topic, advise on readings and other resources, will set out his own views and invite questions and comments, to which she or he can respond.

Above 40 (another landmark for the anthropologists, for reasons we need not go into here) we are in the territory of the mass lecture. In this the instructor really has no choice but to perform. Meaningful two-way interaction with the audience is desperately difficult. Many of them will be unwilling to speak before such a large gathering, even if invited.

This has been a popular method since the 1700s and the only concession to modernity usually offered is a Powerpoint presentation.

Two points to note here. In various subjects there are other requirements: scientists do lab work, law students argue in moots, journalism people produce newspapers, medics have clinical practice and so on. But the basic diet is still as above.

Secondly there has been some inflation in the language used to describe these events. Many so-called “tutorials” are really seminars, “seminars” are so big they should properly be called lectures, and lectures have in some courses become so large – 300 and up students – that they are more like a very sleepy pop concert.

Clearly there are economic forces at work here, as there were at my secondary school, which switched from football to rugby on the very simple grounds that a teacher running a football game only occupied 22 boys, while a rugby match would engage 30.

Universities are propelled by competitive forces to do more research. The league tables measure little else. And this is congenial to their staff, for whom teaching is a chore, while research is what allows them to cherish the hope of being headhunted by Harvard.

So there is a temptation to reduce teaching hours, and spread them further by packing more students into the room. Against this is the dilution of the effect on students. As the number of people in the room goes up the temptation and opportunity to doze, wool-gather or Wechat to fellow-victims on your mobile phone increases.

People who knew which university I had been to would console me at this point with the reminder that the “Oxbridge method” demanded huge numbers of staff which we did not have. I was told this so often that I believed it.

Then one day I tackled a puzzle which had been bothering me for a while: why, if your staff:student ratio is, say, 1:14 do you not find that the average class has 14 people in it? Take it from me: you don’t.

After some struggling – my algebra had lain unused for 30 years and was never very good – I came up with the formula which determines your average class size, and to my surprise the staff:student ratio barely featured. The two important factors were the number of contact hours required of students and the number of teaching hours required of staff.

So actually you have a choice. I found that at our staffing levels we could provide a real weekly hour-long tutorial for an average of two students, with the staff conducting 12 of them a week, which was rather less time than we were supposed to be spending on teaching already. This would drop the students’ workload to one very strenuous session a week.

This was, of course, of no relevance to life as it was then lived at my university, or any other in Hong Kong. But it has become increasingly relevant. Because what the current crisis has revealed is that many of the current interactions between staff and students are unnecessary.

Threatened with a lethal new virus, everyone can retreat to their computer screens. At which point it becomes transparently unnecessary for a lecturer to read his notes to an audience. He can put them up on the internet and save his time for dealing with queries.

Indeed, trying to read them to an audience is emerging, as everyone plunges into on-line learning, as a big mistake. The days have gone when watchers were mesmerised by A.J.P. Taylor lecturing, straight to camera, one take, without notes, or by Brian Horrocks re-enacting the Battle of Arnhem with no more props than a sand-box and two expressive hands.

Modern audiences are accustomed to all-singing, all-dancing entertainment, with lights, action and moving pictures. Faced with a talking head for 40 minutes they lapse into a somnolent state, or start surreptitious conversations on their cellphones.

Teachers at the university level perhaps need to face the fact that talking to large bodies of students is no longer our thing. They don’t need us to impart the basic information which our course requires. It’s all on the net anyway. Students who were not happy with my version of Clausewitz could find the version taught at West Point.

You may think that they could always do this by making proper use of the library, but generally we have never had much confidence in this theory. University systems are usually constructed on the basis that students will devote all their time to sport, booze and the pursuit of the opposite sex unless their noses are kept to the grindstone by constant tests and examinations.

Libraries have other problems. If 300 people are told to read the same book in the same week there are not going to be 300 copies of it there. They hate buying multiple copies because books go out of date. Your copies of Aristotle’s “Politics” may suffice for the next generation, but publishers of text books take a pride in producing new editions which can be advertised as making their predecessors obsolete.

Electronically this is no longer a problem. Indeed Aristotle has been available for years.  Nor are we limited to the classics.  Click here for an introduction to “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”

I feel the need at this point, first articulated by Bernard Levin, for a printer’s mark like the asterisk signifying that the writer did not make that last one up.

Given, then, that students can browse the globe in search of information and usually will find it, what are the teachers here for? We have an important new function, which is to teach them how to distinguish, as they forage the global information market place, the gold from the garbage.

We still also have the important old one, to transmit through personal example the approach which will help them in the outside world: curious, sceptical, engaged, tolerant, informed and humane. The challenge for universities is to develop a new approach which fits both what is now possible for the first time and what has always been necessary.

We have not seen much progress on this in Hong Kong. Perhaps the present epidemic, by kicking everyone out of their educational ruts, will have done some useful service.

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Did you forget the great 2009 flu pandemic? So did I. We have all been reminded of it recently, however, by a spate of complaints from fans of the People’s Paradise that China is being treated unfairly during the Wuflu outbreak.

The gist of the complaints goes like this. The US had a flu epidemic in 2009, which was declared a Public Health Emergency and caused quite a lot of cases. But nobody was advised not to travel to the US, there were no travel restrictions, no disruption of international travel and no suggestion that people from other countries should go home.

How unlike the way our dear People’s Republic has been treated since the outbreak of Wuflu, with foreigners fleeing, visits discouraged, Chinese students sent home or told not to come back, and so on.

If you do not remember the 2009 outbreak in the US this is not surprising. The people complaining have quietly transplanted it from Mexico, which is actually where it originated. It was commonly known as Swine Flu, leading a number of countries, including China, to restrict pork imports.

Mexican diplomats lobbied vigorously against any suggestion that the ailment should be called Mexican Flu, so the pigs got the blame. The official name is H1N1.

While this certain did cause a stir it was no Black Death. Fairly early in the pandemic the WHO, bless it, urged people to stop counting. But of those places which disregarded this well-intentioned advice and had good functional reporting and treatment systems in place we can derive some notion of a rather low death rate: Italy 3 million cases, 244 fatalities, death rate microscopic; France 2 million cases, 344 fatalities, death rate 0.17 per cent; Hong Kong 33,000 cases, 80 fatal, death rate 0.24 per cent.

That is not to say that this was a trivial matter. Mexico did all the things we are doing: close schools and universities, shut cinemas and theatres, cancel public events, encourage hygiene.

In the US it was declared a Public Health Emergency, but this is an example of that devaluation of words which tends to afflict the Land of the Free, where every academic is a professor, every ex-serviceman is a veteran and every congressman is a statesman, unless he is obviously senile, in which case he is an elder statesman.

Public Health Emergencies are declared on a wide variety of occasions at the rate of about six a year, including the after-effects of typhoons, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, floods, the “opioid addiction epidemic” and – mysteriously – President Obama’s first inauguration.

The total is swollen by repetitions of existing emergencies — the opioid epidemic has been renewed eight times — and the need sometimes to declare a separate emergency for each of a number of states, so that Hurricane Dorian gets the blame for five separate emergencies in North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Puerto Rico.

Well you get the picture. It’s not the end of the world. There have been a total of 60 declarations of a public health emergency since the last one stemming from H5N1, which was itself renewed four times.

Elsewhere in the world the reaction varied. Most countries had some cases. Some banned travel or suspended flights to all or part of Mexico. China was one of these. A good many, including the European Union health spokesman, did in fact advise against unnecessary travel to the US.

So it seems the complaint of unequal treatment is unfounded. Indeed, in disregarding the role of Mexico in the swine flu proceedings it could be considered dishonest. No doubt the western media are not always fair in their treatment of China, or so my mainland students have usually suspected. But this complaint is not a good example.

We have to bear in mind that the death rate from the new virus remains for now a mystery. It is no good dividing the number of confirmed cases by the number of fatal ones because the number of cases is still increasing rapidly. This means that cases which have reached a conclusion, fatal or otherwise, are being swamped by cases whose outcome has not yet been decided.

So people are cautious, and rightly so. It seems rather unlikely that the US is unusual in this respect. China or its defenders are perhaps being too sensitive. Consider the response of a fellow-member of the International Black Hat Club, as reported in the Guardian:

“Russia, which reported two confirmed cases on 31 January, has halted most of its air traffic to China since the start of the outbreak. Trains connecting the country to China and North Korea have also been suspended. Meanwhile, Moscow has temporarily halted issuing work visas to Chinese citizens. Students who returned to their homes on holiday for lunar new year have been asked not to return to Russian universities until the end of March.”

Under these circumstances governments are bound to look with a less welcoming eye at international travel. It may be that bans or restrictions on comings and goings are not very effective. But at least they enable leaders to give the impression that something is being urgently done.

This small trick seems to be beyond the abilities of the Hong Kong government. Our local leaders are a bright bunch. As a result they are rediscovering a truth noticed long ago by the Roman orator Cicero: “The more subtle and astute a man is, the more he is hated and distrusted once he has lost his reputation for honesty.”

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