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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You have to distinguish between the Peace and Literature prize on the one hand and all the others on the other. And then you have to distinguish between Peace and Literature.
Peace is a purely political exercise. My favourite is Henry Kissinger. Ot it was until Barack Obama. Your criticism of the Maria Machado award is ridiculous and a purely political exercise.
Literature is a too subjective an exercise. It was OK in a middlebrow sort of way when it was dead white European males picking dead white European male authors but now it's like the World Cup. You have to move from continent to continent. My favourite in this category is Winston Churchill. (Well, they couldn't give him the Peace Prize, could they?)
As for the others, that's a larger subject.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I discovered an extraordinary thing yesterday. Some familiar background:
* Trains can be operated by either one person (the driver) or two people (driver and guard).
* Unions are naturally in favour of the latter.
* The railway unions are specially in favour because, since drivers and guards are mostly in two different unions, they can call out the drivers in pursuit of something, there's no trains but the guards carry on getting paid.
* Then, when that's settled, they can call out the guards, there's no trains but the drivers will carry on getting paid.
The privatised companies and their passengers have had to put up with endless strikes because the unions will always settle any dispute in the end except on OPO (one person operation) and that allows them to strike endlessly without penalising their members much.
The reason the train companies always have to give in in the end over OPO is that having two people in charge of a train is inherently safer than having one, so the unions can always say
| "We are not prepared to compromise on safety." |
Nobody, in this day and age, would dare to say
| "We're prepared to compromise on safety because the extra safety of having a guard aboard is piffling but the rewards of OPO in every other respect are huge." |
So what did I discover yesterday? That having one man in charge of a train is actually safer than having two.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| "Universities at the moment are simply recruiting to make money to survive. That's not an academic pursuit, they are betraying the whole nature of higher education." Newsnight talking head. |
Let's consider that for a moment. You can operate higher education on one of two models:
1. It should be a scarce resource that will, via competition between applicants, attract only the higher talents who will benefit from it, and that in turn will benefit the country
2. It should not be a scarce resource but should be provided to serve the needs of anyone who believes they will benefit from a higher education. That will in turn benefit the country.
In the old days this duality was achieved by separating out universities to provide (1) from higher education institutions generally, which provided (2). So what went wrong?
| Every higher education body wanted to be a university and they were granted their wish. | |
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