E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

As a creative writing lecturer I was concerned Crossland Employment Solicitors might not get me and my particular concerns.  Instead, I found them not only commercially practical and legally astute, but also imaginative, concerned and compassionate.  I would recommend them without hesitation to anyone in education. - Dr Todd Swift

The UK university system keeps changing as the current government seeks to open it up to competition, that chimera.  My concern is with the idea that university education should always be about "giving students the skills they need for a good job in the marketplace".  Sure, college skills are always going to be important for gainful employ, but some things are goods in themselves, not least, knowledge.

A.C. Grayling 's new academy in London, set to charge twice the government-approved limit, of £18,000 a year tuition to students, has been accused of copying the syllabus of another university , down to very specific elements of modules written by lecturers in no way connected to the new cash cow...

The British news has been filled with the trump of doom - some of the world's leading academics have gotten together and called themselves an institute, as Paul Simon might have said - a private university in London set to charge twice the amount allowed for public universities: £18,000.  What no one seems to have remarked upon is that several of the key figures in this extraordinary move are also the leading British atheist-intellectuals, A.C. Grayling, Richard Dawkins ; also to teach is Ronald Dworkin , not known for his support of religious beliefs, to put it mildly.  Also to be teaching is famous atheist and psychologist Stephen Pinker .  The distinguished astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss , a top American atheist, will teach science.  Historian Niall Ferguson , the famous atheist from Harvard, will also teach.  Steve Jones , the controversial atheist scientist, is also on board.  Indeed, it is striking how little has been made of this intellectually hom...

British Education may be the envy of the world - but also, to large parts of the world, also unreachable - at least at England's most elite universities.  According to the Guardian today, at Cambridge, "of more than 1,500 academic and lab staff none are black ."  Italics mine.  Yes, that's right.  And then you wonder why American has Obama , and we have Clegg and Cameron .  Then turn to the student access statistics, and some Oxford colleges haven't accepted a single black student in: 5 years.  This is why raising tuition fees to £9,000 a year will not benefit the many, but only the few - even now the system benefits the few.  It can only get worse...

As seen at the blog Harriet - a link to news that the great(est) American poet of the last century, Mr TS Eliot , had trouble at Harvard with his studies - in short, he got far fewer As and Bs than we might have expected.  Instead, the no doubt day-dreaming, perhaps anxious, maybe even sleepy, Mr Eliot, missed classes, got a D, and seemed to be on academic probation.  Mr Eliot, unique in being both a charlatan and a genius, often in the same essay, or sentence, was a master of verbal erudition that displayed more than it actually said - the reverse of subtext - he was the lord of the overtext.  He also abandoned his PhD work, and, famously, went on to work in a bank, edit books at Faber, pen essays, plays, and the most famous difficult poem of the last two centuries in English, and, win the Nobel Prize.  I too was a piss-poor undergrad student who got through on a wing and a prayer, as were (I would guess) several other poets.  Poets have a habit of missing dea...

Curious news. Schools in England have been told to no longer teach the catchy mnemonic "i before e except after c" because it is "irrelevant". I may be thick, but I still use the rule several times a day - it's one of the only things I do remember from school, along with "seven eights are fifty-six" (sung to a particular tune). Hope they reconsider.

Poetry always lays claim to a Golden Age just behind the corner. Perhaps poetry was always, more or less, unpopular - mainly of interest to a few. It seems that, in 1947 , according to Time , the problems for poetry were not that far removed from in the schools today. Nor was contemporary poetry more appreciated in the 1950s. According to John Press in The Chequer'd Shade (London: OUP, 1958), Stephen Spender stormed out (in protest) of a poetry reading being held at a Foyle's literary luncheon when Lord Samuel took the occasion to attack "the vice of obscurity" ruining British poetry, and read out, with evident distaste, a poem by Dylan Thomas , starting "A grief ago..." - such distaste still evident today among many English poet-critics. A new acclaimed book by fellow-Montrealer and music critic, Carl Wilson , on the music of Celine Dion , has taken the subject of distaste in a fun and fascinating direction - he loathed her work, and sets out to compreh...

Martin Amis is a famous British novelist - maybe the most famous - and he thinks of himself as something of an Orwell , too - an essayist lucidly battling dogma and cant where he sees it. He is also a university lecturer, and his hourly rate has just been published, as £3000. That's just under 100 times more than most any other lecturer makes (it tends to be around £37). Obviously, the department was buying a brand, as well as a creative writing teacher - and the number of applicants went up by 50% when his position was announced. However, creative writing departments in the UK are dangerously close to making the same cheapening and trivialising mistakes the poetry community has already made of late - that is, in the process of seeking to popularise what they do, they have begun to use the marketing and PR techniques of the advertising and political spheres. It is often said, sotto voce, that British Poetry needs a " Saatchi " - that is, a rich, spin doctor, to "sel...

A recent Ofsted report, Poetry In Schools , stated that schools rely too heavily on a limited number of poems as resources for teaching poetry. A survey of schools revealed a top ten of poems which included "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes ; "On the Ning, Nang, Nong" by Spike Milligan and "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll . Interestingly, all of the poems in the top ten were written by men, most of whom are dead. Ofsted was especially critical of primary school teachers whose lack of subject knowledge leads to an over-reliance on lightweight poems with little attention being given to classic and multi-cultural poetry. The report concluded that teachers are playing safe by using the same poems again and again while steering clear of anything challenging. I have a vested interest here. Along with primary school teacher and literacy specialist, Kate McGann , I provide poetry performances and workshops for primary schools. In our performance piece: We Are Poets!...