Over The Counter Culture

In the early hours of Saturday morning on the 21st of August 2010, the Swedish police issued an arrest warrant for Wikileaks’ mystery honcho and guru, Julien Assange, who has in recent weeks become a very mediatised figure. He was wanted, it said, on charges of rape and molestation (against two individual women). A few hours later, the media was baffled as the warrant was cancelled. What might explain it?

1 + 2. Proper functioning of a policing system in response to real allegations

The first two hypotheses are straightforward; maybe it’s true but they don’t have enough evidence for an arrest yet; and all this is unconnected to his threat to release yet more sensitive documents. Maybe it’s untrue, and like some ‘crimes’ reported to the police, that reports turn out to be too shaky.

3. PR test balloon for upcoming smear campaign

Or it really is a smear campaign against Julien Assange. Sex sells. This might at the very least be a ‘test balloon’ by some PR-savvy anti-Assange outfit (the CIA?), wanting to see how the press might respond to a full-on smear campaign. But if this was a wikileaks taskforce’s test balloon, wouldn’t they have done it in a normal newsday?

4. Vaccination by an attenuated pathogen

Assange is pretty damn good at PR himself. What if he’d decided that his best strategy in anticipation of a smear campaign was to vaccinate the media and their readers to smear, and prevent the next allegation from going viral?

Here’s how a smear vaccine might work: find two acolytes to report the alleged rape and molestation on just barely credible terms, and then either have them withdraw them or bring to light certain facts that mean that the charges HAVE to be dropped (factual inconsistencies, for example, or a previous record of crying wolf; etc).

Do this quickly on a Saturday morning when newsrooms are too understaffed to do much reporting and will probably not have much time between the issuing of the charges and the withdrawal to actually spread the uncorrected, damaging rumours; just the retraction.

Result? CNN runs a front page headline next to not-negative press about you (charges withdrawn) suggesting to all its viewers that you might well be the target of a smear campaign. Future journalists AND readers will be immunised and healthily sceptical the next time something like this is comes up.

I have only offered limited comment on the PBS documentary at the heart of this 4-part series of posts. A lot of the discussion it attracted was understandably US-centered, and I’m just not qualified to discuss the detailed structure of American higher ed. My take-away was more philosophical.

I suppose my first point is how ‘the American Dream’ is repeatedly referred to by those involved, throughout the programme. Several of them went from ‘rags to riches’, so arguably it fits them.

But the product they’re now forcefully selling to prospective students is an American dream perversity: the message is firstly, whatever your personal characteristics, American prosperity and success will be denied to you unless you have accreditation from an institution that itself has accreditation (irrespective of its own characteristics). Secondly, you have to pay for this accreditation. You will not break through in society unless you pay up. Society’s “answer” has been to fuel the accreditation system with a subprime loan system that is easy to get into (no credit checks, no certainty that the applicant is going to be able to find gainful employment even with this new degree under their belt), but hard to escape from once you’re in, no matter how bad things get for you.

The issue for me is not really the profiteering. The practice here is no more abusive than other industries based on deceptive marketing over objective contribution to reputation (which traditional universities rely on, pouring money into research programmes, etc) that are undergoing huge, unsustainable growth (a bubble) based on overflowing and poorly thought-through Wall Street capital on one side (as in the mortgages market) to meet demand unlocked by idealistic but cretinous state-provided finance.

The issue for me is that the whole demand for education – which underpins the aforementioned perverse industry – is a nonsense. Education is wrapped up, institutionalised and commoditised, viewed as a universal ideal in the ‘product’ form it is offered, and extremely divisive between the underclass that has not purchased the product and those that have. It’s yet another barrier to entry, to social mobility, to liberty to explore ways to contribute to society in exchange for payment. It’s self-perpetuating, since the pressure to push more people through education means that the more apt/determined of students have to find new ways of distinguishing themselves – hence you see the sinister (but perhaps unintentional) sense in BPP up-selling the LLB after contributing to diluting the value of the GDL.

The best treatment of the topic I have come across is the short but ever so sensible and powerful Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. I warmly recommend it to any that have ever thought about how to go about creating an open, accessible and liberal societies. How please he would have been with efforts like Wikipedia and other open learning, open access, “open society” movements.

Lastly, quite what role universities play in the future, sandwiched between the Internet on one side and privatised, commoditised education on the other, remains to be seen.

So what’s my connection? Well, a couple of years ago BPP was purchased by the Apollo Global group, the main operator of for-profit higher education in the US, including the massive University of Phoenix. BPP is the UK law school I just completed my Graduate Degree in Law at.

The acquisition as 4/5th funded by Apollo, whilst the Carlyle Group (well known to Michael Moore and his unwashed ilk for its huge presence in the US war machine and its ties to both the Bush and Bin Laden families and the UK Conservative party) stumped up $200m for the ongoing joint venture.

Since then, BPP has been aggressively expanding, and I have been part of that effort: as a Brand Manager, I’ve assisted on open days, fairs and even a marketing video. The UK Bar Standards Body, the non-governmental body which regulates education to become a UK barrister (read: attorney) had their guts for garters over a disgraceful ‘administrative error’ that led to massive oversubscription on the course, swelling class sizes and seeing people turned away at short notice before the start date of the course they’d previously been accepted to.

BPP is adding centres around the country, and increasingly shifting to online, long-distance courses. Leverage. It’s also running a very strong upselling campaign to get people in my position to ‘upgrade’ our GDL into LLB (i.e. Bachelor of Law) degrees – getting the accreditation to do so was one of the very first moves it made after Apollo took the reins.

And in very recent news, BPP also announced that it is abandoning its bases as a professional educational college, and taking the title ‘University’ – the first private university in thirty years, and fully in keeping with Apollo’s US track record.

Yet it’s worth pointing out that the tutoring and teaching I got last year was mostly really very good. I was lucky to be in a class of very bright people and mostly quite good tutors. So my concerns aren’t derived from personal experience; they came from an HR person I got talking to that was attending a BPP event I was working at. She was from a very decent City law firm.

BPP, she said, has become less selective in who it allows onto the course. People with 2:2 (i.e. third-rate) degrees from universities are now given places when before a 2:1 or better was required. Her complaint is that this has made her job harder; no longer a badge worth trusting, she has to look deeper into CVs to see if they have to be binned at first sweep through the thousands of applications they receive. Worse, the HR personnel now have to field calls from emotional mothers asking why their child is being turned down for City jobs despite the family having shelled out/indebted itself in order to pay for the most expensive GDL course on the UK market. In truth, a third-rate university degree is going to be a straight-up rejection and the HR personnel view BPP’s new practice as at best immoral, at worst, downright deceptive.

So that’s my connection. I realise that sharing it in this tripartite piece is labelling myself a profiteering hypocrite whilst simultaneously shooting myself in the foot by potentially devaluing the value of a keystone of my CV; and may perhaps come to be seen as a snobbish and irrational act from an Oxford graduate irritated at seeing the value of his further education cheapened as his degree is made more accessible to ‘the high street’. Even if this comes to be seen as a good thing, it’s an enduring truth that good things are not necessarily good ideas.

This piece continues on from Part 1, which looked at the basic dynamics of the for-profit US education industry: brokers scouring the country for underperforming schools that have held on to the very highly valued Regional Accreditation status, which is both prestigious and unlocks federal loans to students to pay for courses they can’t afford. The federal loans are unexpectedly nasty to be holding on to. Once found, the brokers link up the school with Wall Street investors or more bizarre sources of funding, like megachurches looking to add education to their other businesses (music labels etc), or the Carlyle Group, a gigantic global arms/defence contractor.

Prospective students are enticed into the promise of a better future by college recruiters and pushed into courses which their previous educational background makes them unsuited for (they can’t cope, and future recruiters bin their CV – and this is something I have personally heard happens in the UK – again, see Part 3).

The message (forcefully delivered) is: you’re investing in your future, and somebody else is providing the money up front.

It’s a hugely leveraged system that’s state-subsidised because it’s thought to provide a public-private hybrid solution to bring social mobility to poor Americans at little to no up-front cost to them. Sound familiar? It’s the same logic that saw US banking regulators giving the thumbs up for zero downpayment mortgages to subprime borrowers; duping the subprime into taking easy credit to fund a sure-thing investment in real estate, giving Americans the independence of home ownership and the net worth to get them out of poverty. Wonderful ideals based on cretinry. Because the value of houses would obviously keep going up, this cheap capital would drag millions out of poverty. And obviously, the value of education will keep going up, too.

And the courses, sometimes, really are appalling. In the most tragicomic section of the PBS Frontline documentary this blog post is about, 40 minutes in, three women are sat around a table, recounting the practical experience they got on their degree in vocational nursing.

“They took us to the Museum of Scientology for our psychiatry module” “For the pediatrics rotation, we got taken to a daycare”.

When the hospitals inevitably ask them about that experience, they have to admit: these qualified vocational nurses have never set foot in a hospital.