A dozen staff members, employed by Australia’s leading tertiary institution, were investigated last year following allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment, a new report has revealed.
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Researchers from the University of South Australia have conducted new analysis, that found no relationship between international student numbers and rising rental costs for local residents.
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More tax cuts for every Australian and reiterations of measures that had already been announced marked Tuesday night’s federal budget, which also didn’t include any specific funds for higher education.
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At least six Group of Eight (Go8) universities have had research grants terminated by the United States amid an anti-diversity and gender ideology studies crackdown from US President Donald Trump’s office.
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Almost everyone has views on the school curriculum. It’s too academic; it’s not academic enough; it’s too crowded; it has major omissions; it’s too subject-dominated; it doesn’t spend enough time on subject depth. Debates about the curriculum can be wearying: just as everyone has a view on the school curriculum, so almost everyone has views about what should be added to it, though relatively few people have equally forceful ideas about what should be dropped to make room for Latin, or personal finance education, or more civic education and so on.
One of the achievements of Becky Francis’s interim report on school curriculum and assessment is that it tries to turn most of these essentially philosophical (or at least opinionated) propositions into debates about evidence and effectiveness and to use those conclusions to set out a route to more specific recommendations which will follow later in the year. It’s no small achievement. As the report says, and as Becky has maintained in interviews, ‘all potential reforms come with trade-offs’ (p 8); the key is to be clear about the nature of those trade-offs so that there can be an open, if essentially political debate about how to weight them.
The methodology adopted by Becky and her panel points towards an essentially evolutionary approach for both curriculum and assessment reform. The first half of that quoted sentence on trade-offs is an assertion that ‘our system is not perfect’ (p 8) and of course, no system is. But the report is largely positive about key building blocks of the system, and it proposes that they will remain: the structure of four key stages, which has been in place since the 1980s; the early focus on phonics as the basis of learning to read, which has been a focus of policy since the 2000s; the knowledge-rich, subject-based approach which has been in place for the last decade; and the essentials of the current assessment arrangements with formal testing at the end of Key Stage 2 (age 11), key stage 4 (essentially GCSEs) and post-16 which were established in the 1988 Education Reform Act.
More directly relevant to higher education, the report’s view is that ‘the A level route is seen as strong, well-respected and widely recognised, and facilitates progression to higher education’ (p 30) and that ‘A-levels provide successful preparation for a three-year degree’ (p 7). Whilst the review talks about returning to assess ‘whether there are opportunities to reduce the overall volume of assessment at key stage 4’ (p 41), it does not propose doing so for A-level. The underlying message is one of system stability, because ‘many aspects of the current system are working well’ (p 5).
However: one of the most frequently used words in the interim report is, in fact, ‘however’: the word appears 29 times on 37 pages of body text, and that doesn’t include synonyms including ‘but’ (32 appearances), ‘while’ (19 appearances) and a single ‘on the other hand’. Frequently, ‘however’ is used to undercut an initial judgement. The national curriculum has been a success (p 17),'[h]owever, excellence is not yet provided for all: persistent gaps remain’, The panel “share the widely held ambition to promote high standards. However, in practice, “high standards” currently too often means ‘high standards for some’”(p 5).
These ‘however’ formulations have three effects: first, and not unreasonably in an interim report, they defer difficult questions for the final report. The final report promises deep dives ‘to diagnose each subject’s specific issues and explore and test a range of solutions’, and ‘about the specificity, relevance, volume and diversity of content’ (p.42). It’s this which will prove very tough for the panel, because it is always detail which challenges in curriculum change. If the curriculum as a whole is always a focus for energetic debate, individual subjects and their structure invariably arouse very strong passions. The report sets up a future debate here about teacher autonomy, arguing, perhaps controversially in an implied ‘however’ that ‘lack of specificity can, counter-intuitively, contribute to greater curriculum volume, as teachers try to cover all eventualities’ (p 28).
Secondly, and in almost every case, the ‘however’ undercuts the positive systems judgement: ‘the system is broadly working well, and we intend to retain the mainstay of existing arrangements. However, there are opportunities for improvement’ (p 8). It’s a repeated rhetorical device which plays both to broad stability and the need for extensive change, and it suggests that some of the technical challenges are going to rest on value – and so political – judgements about how to balance the competing needs of different groups. Sometimes the complexity of those interests overwhelms the systems judgements. The review’s intention is to return to 16-19 questions, “with the aim of building on the successes of existing academic and technical pathways, particularly considering [possibly another implied ‘however’] how best to support learners who do not study A levels or T Levels” (p 9) is right to focus on the currently excluded, but the problem is often mapping a route through overly rigid structures.
The qualifications system has been better geared for higher attainers, perhaps exemplified by the EBacc [English Baccalaureate] of conventional academic subjects. Although the Panel cites evidence that a portfolio of academic subjects aids access to higher education, ‘there is little evidence to suggest that the EBacc combination [of subjects] per se has driven better attendance to Russell Group universities’ (p 24) – the latter despite the rapid growth of high tariff universities’ market share over recent years. This issue is linked to one of the most curious aspects of the report from an evidential point of view. It is overwhelmingly positive about T-levels, ‘a new, high-quality technical route for young people who are clear about their intended career destination’ which ‘show great promise’ (p 7). But (“however”) take up (2% of learners) has been very poor, and not just because not all 16-year-olds are ‘clear about their intended career pathway’. The next phase of the Review promises to ‘look at how we can achieve the aim of a simpler, clearer offer which provides strong academic and technical/vocational pathways for all’ (p 31). But that ‘simpler, clearer offer’ has defied either technical design or political will for a very long time. If it is to succeed, the review will need to consider approaches which allow combinations of vocational and academic qualifications at 16-19, partly because much higher education is both vocational and academic and more because at age 16, most learners do not have an ‘intended career pathway’.
And thirdly, related to that, the ‘howevers’ unveil a theme which looms over the report, the big challenge for national reform which seeks to deliver excellence for all. Pulling evidence together from across the report tells us that 80% of pupils met the expected standard in the phonics screening check and at age 11, 61% of pupils achieved the expected standards in reading, writing and maths (p 17). Some 40% of young people did not achieve level 2 (a grade 4 or above at GCSE) in English and maths by age 16 (p 30). To simplify: attainment gaps open early; they are not closed by the curriculum and assessment system, and one of the few graphs in the report (p 18) suggests that they are widening, leaving behind a large minority of learners who struggle to access a qualifications system which is not working for them. As the report says, the requirement to repeat GCSE English and Maths has been especially problematic.
The report is thorough, technical and thoughtful; it is evolutionary not revolutionary, and none the worse for that. Curriculum and assessment policy is full of interconnection and unintended consequences. There are tough challenges in system design to secure excellence and equity, inclusion and attainment, and to address those ‘howevers’. The difficult decisions have been left for the final report.
Elsewhere on the site, Esther Stimpson, Dave Phoenix and Tony Moss explain an obvious injustice.
Universal Credit (UC) reduces by 55p for every £1 earned as income – unless you’re one of the few students entitled to UC, where instead it is reduced by £1 for every £1 you are loaned for maintenance.
To be fair, when Universal Credit was introduced, the income disregards in the old systems that recognised that students spend out on books, equipment and travel were rolled into a single figure of £110 a month.
Taper rates were introduced to prevent “benefit traps” where increasing earnings led to disproportionately high reductions in support – and have gone from 65p initially, then to 67p, and now to 55p.
But for students, there’s never been a taper rate – and that £110 for the costs of books, equipment and travel hasn’t been uprated in over 13 years. Lifelong learning my eye.
The student finance system in England is full of these problems – probably the most vexing of which is the parental earnings threshold over which the system expects parents to top up to the maximum.
It’s been set at £25,000 since 2008 – despite significant growth in nominal earnings across the economy since then. IFS says that if the threshold had been uprated since 2008, it would now be around £36,500 (46 per cent higher) in 2023/24.
That explains how John Denham came to estimate that a third of English domiciled students would get the maximum maintenance package back in 2007. We’re now down to about 1 in 5.
Add in the fact that the maximums available have failed to increase by inflation – especially during the post-pandemic cost of living spikes – and there’s now a huge problem.
It’s a particular issue for what politics used to call a “squeezed middle” – the parents of students whose families would have been earning £25,000 in 2007 now have £4,000 more a year to find in today’s money.
And thanks to the increases in the minimum wage, the problem is set to grow again – when the Student Loans Company comes to assess the income of a single parent family in full time (40 hours) work, given that’s over the £25,000 threshold, it will soon calculate that even that family has to make a parental contribution to the loan too.
It’s not even as if the means test actually works, either.
How much should students get? Over twenty years ago now, the higher education minister charged by Tony Blair with getting “top-up fees” through Parliament established two policy principles on maintenance.
The first was Charles Clarke’s aspiration to move to a position where the maintenance loan was no-longer means tested, and made available in full to all full-time undergraduates – so that students would be treated as financially independent from the age of 18.
That was never achieved – unless you count its revival and subsequent implementation in the Diamond review in Wales some twelve years later.
Having just received results from the Student Income and Expenditure Survey (SIES) the previous December, Clarke’s second big announcement was that from September 2006, maintenance loans would be raised to the median level of students’ basic living costs –
The principle of the decision will ensure that students have enough money to meet their basic living costs while studying.
If we look at the last DfE-commissioned Student Income and Expenditure Survey – run in 2021 for the first time in eight years – median living and participation costs for full-time students were £15,561, so would be £18,888 today if we used CPI as a measure.
The maximum maintenance loan today is £10,227.
The third policy principle that tends to emerge from student finance reviews – in Scotland, Wales and even in the Augar review of Post-18 review of education and funding – is that the value of student financial support should be linked somehow to the minimum wage.
Augar argued that students ought to expect to combine earning with learning – suggesting that full-time students should expect to be unable to work for 37.5 hours a week during term time, and should therefore be loaned the difference (albeit with a parental contribution on a means test and assuming that PT work is possible for all students on all courses, which it plainly isn’t).
As of September, the National Living Wage at 37.5 hours a week x 30 weeks will be £13,376 – some £2,832 more than most students will be able to borrow, and more even than students in London will be able to borrow.
And because the Treasury centrally manages the outlay and subsidies for student loans in the devolved nations for overall “equivalence” on costs, both Scotland and Wales have now had to abandon their minimum wage anchors too.
Augar thought that someone ought to look at London weighting – having not managed to do so in the several years that his project ran for, the review called London a “subject worthy of further enquiry”.
Given that the last government failed to even respond to his chapter on maintenance, it means that no such further work has been carried out – leaving the uprating of the basic for London (+25 per cent) and the downrating for those living at home (-20 per cent) at the same level as they were in the Education (Student Loans) Regulations 1997.
Augar also thought student parents worthy of further work – presumably not the subject of actual work because it was DfE officials, not those from the DWP, who supported his review. Why on earth, wonder policymakers, are people putting off having kids, causing a coming crisis in the working age/pensionable age ratio? It’s a mystery.
Commuters, too. The review supported the principle that the away/home differential should be based on the different cost of living for those living at home but it “suggested a detailed study of the characteristics and in-study experience of commuter students and how to support them better.” It’s never been done. Our series would be a good place to start.
Things are worse for postgraduates, of course. Not only does a loan originally designed to cover both now go nowhere near the cost of tuition and maintenance, the annually updated memo from the DWP (buried somewhere in the secondary legislation) on how PG loans should be treated viz a vis the benefits system still pretends that thirty per cent of the loan should be treated as maintenance “income” for the purposes of calculating benefits, and the rest considered tuition spend.
(Just to put that into context – thirty per cent of the current master’s loan of £12,471 is £3,741. 90 credits is supposed to represent 1800 notional hours that a student is spending on studying rather than participating in the labour market. The maintenance component is worth £2.08 an hour – ie the loan is £16,851 short on maintenance alone for a year which by definition involves less vacation time).
Carer’s Allowance is available if you provide at least 35 hours of care a week – as long as you’re not a full-time student. Free childcare for children under fives? Only if you’re not a full-time student. Pretty much all of the support available from both central government and local authorities during Covid? Full-time students excluded.
When ministers outside of DfE give answers on any of this, they tell MPs that “the principle” is that the benefits system does not normally support full-time students, and that instead, “they are supported by the educational maintenance system.” What DWP minister Stephen Timms really means, of course, is thank god our department doesn’t have to find money for them too – a problem that will only get worse throughout the spending review.
Back in 2004, something else was introduced in the package of concessions designed to get top-up fees through.
As was also the case later in 2012, the government naively thought that £3,000 fees would act as an upper limit rather than a target – so Clarke announced that he would maintain fee remission at around £1,200, raise the new “Higher Education grant” for those from poorer backgrounds to £1,500 a year, and would require universities to offer bursaries to students from the poorest backgrounds to make up the difference.
It was the thin end of a wedge. By the end of the decade, the nudging and cajoling of universities to take some of their additional “tuition” fee income and give it back to students by way of fee waivers, bursaries or scholarships had resulted in almost £200m million being spent on financial support students from lower income and other underrepresented groups – with more than 70 per cent of that figure spent on those with a household income of less than £17,910. By 2020-21 – the last time OfS bothered publishing the spend – that had doubled to £406m.
It may not last. The principle is pretty much gone and the funding is in freefall. When I looked at this last year (via an FOI request), cash help per student had almost halved in five years – and in emerging Access and Participation Plans, providers were cutting financial support in the name of “better targeting”.
You can’t blame them. Budgets are tight, the idea of redistributing “additional” fee income a lost concept, and the “student premium” funding given to universities to underpin that sort of support has been tumbling in value for years – from, for example, £174 per disabled student in 2018/19 to just £129 now.
All while the responsibility for the costs to enable disabled students to access their education glide more and more onto university budgets – first via a big cut in the last decade, and now via slices of salami that see pressure piled on to staff who get the blame, but don’t have the funding to claim any credit.
What about comparisons? By European standards, our core system of maintenance looks fairly generous – in this comparison of monthly student incomes via Eurostudent, for example, we’re not far off top out of 20 countries:
But those figures in Euros are deceptive. Our students – both UG and PG – spend fewer years as full time students than in almost every other country. Students’ costs are distorted by a high proportion studying away from home – something that subject and campus rationalisation will exacerbate rather than relieve.
And anyway, look at what happens to the chart when we adjust for purchasing power:
How are students doing financially three years on? The Student Income and Expenditure Survey (SIES) has not been recommissioned, so even if we wanted to, we’d have no data to supply to the above exercise. The Labour Force Survey fails to capture students in (any) halls, and collects some data through parents. Households Below Average Income – the key dataset on poverty – counts tuition fee loans as income, despite my annual email to officials pointing out the preposterousness of that. How are students doing financially? We don’t really know.
And on costs, the problems persist too. There’s no reliable data on the cost of student accommodation – although what there is always suggests that it is rising faster than headline rates of inflation. The basket of goods in CPI and RPI can’t be the same as for a typical student – but aside from individual institutional studies, the work has never been done.
Even on things like the evaluation of the bus fare cap, published recently by the Department for Transport, students weren’t set up as a flag by the department – so are unlikely to be a focus of what’s left from that pot after the spending review. See also health, housing, work – students are always DfE’s problem.
Student discounts are all but dead – too many people see students as people to profit from, rather than subsidise. No government department is willing to look at housing – passed between MHCLG and DfE like a hot potato while those they’d love to devolve to “other” students as economic units or nuisances, but never citizens.
The business department is barely aware that students work part-time, and the Home Office seems to think that international students will be able to live on the figure that nobody thinks home students can live on. DfE must have done work, you suppose they suppose.
In health, we pretend that student nurses and midwives are “supernumerary” to get them to pay us (!) to prop up our creaking NHS. And that split between departments, where DfE loans money to students for four years max, still means that we expect medical students in their final two years – the most demanding in terms of academic content and travelling full time to placements – to live on £7,500 a year. Thank god, in a way, that so few poor kids get in.
It’s not even like we warn them. UK higher education is a £43.9 billion sector educating almost 3m students a year, professes to be interested in access and participation, and says it offers a “world-class student” experience. And yet it can’t even get its act together to work out and tell applicants how much it costs to participate in it – even in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Why are we like this? It’s partly about statecraft. There was an obvious split between education and other departments when students were all young, middle class and carefree, and devolution gave the split a sharper edge – education funding (devolved) and benefits (reserved).
It’s partly about participation. It’s very tempting for all involved to only judge student financial support on whether it appears to be causing (or at least correlates with) overall enrolment, participation and completion – missing all of the impacts on the quality of that participation in the process.
Do we know what the long-term impacts are on our human capital of “full-time” students being increasingly anxious, lonely, hungry, burdened and, well, part-time? We don’t.
Efficiency in provider budgets is about getting more students to share cheaper things – management, space, operating costs and even academics. Efficiency for students doesn’t work like that – it just means spending less and less time on being a student.
The participation issue is also about the principal – we’ve now spent decades paying for participation expansion ambitions by pushing more and more of the long-run run cost onto graduates – so much so that there’s now little subsidy in the system left.
And now that the cost of borrowing the money to lend to students is through the roof, increases in the outlay look increasingly impossible.
But something will have to give soon. Some five years after Boris Johnson gave a speech at Exeter College announcing his new Lifetime Skills Guarantee, there’s still no news on maintenance – only ever a vague “maintenance loan to cover living costs for courses with in-person attendance” to accompany the detailed tables of credits that get chunked down from the FT £9,535.
The LLE was partly a product of Augar (more on that on Wonk Corner) – who said that maintenance support should be reserved for those studying at a minimum level of intensity – 25 per cent (15 ECTS a year), and then scaled by credit.
But think about that for a moment, setting aside that increasingly arbitrary distance learning differential. Why would a student studying for 45 credits only get 3/4 of an already inadequate loan? Will students studying on one of those accelerated degrees get 1.5 x the loan?
The centrality of credit to the LLE – and its potential use in determining the level of student financial support for their living and participation costs – is fascinating partly because of the way in which a row between the UK and other member states played out back in 2008.
When ECTS was being developed, we (ie the UK) argued that the concept focused too heavily on workload as the primary factor for assigning credits. We said that credits should be awarded based on the actual achievement of learning outcomes, rather than simply the estimated workload.
That was partly because the UK’s estimate at the time of 1,200 notional learning hours (derived from an estimate of 40 hours’ notional learner effort a week, multiplied by 30 weeks) was the lowest in Europe, and much lower than the 1,500-1,800 hours that everyone else in Europe was estimating.
Annex D of 2006’s Proposals for national arrangements for the use of academic credit in higher education in England: The Final report of the Burgess Group put that down to the UK having shorter teaching terms and not clocking what students do in their breaks:
It could be argued that considerably more learner effort takes place during the extended vacations and that this is not taken into account in the total NLH for an academic year.
Those were the days.
In the end an EU fudge was found allowing the UK to retain its 20 notional hours – with a stress that “how this is applied to a range of learning experiences at a modular or course level will differ according to types of delivery, subject content and student cohorts” and the inclusion of “time spent in class, directed learning, independent study and assessment.”
A bit like with fees and efficiency, if in the mid noughties it was more likely that students were loaned enough to live on, were posh, had plenty of spare time and had carefree summers, that inherent flex meant that a student whose credit was more demanding than the notional hours could eat into their free time to achieve the learning outcomes.
But once you’ve got a much more diverse cohort of students who are much more likely to need to be earning while learning, you can’t really afford to be as flexible – partly because if you end up with a student whose characteristics and workload demand, say, 50 hours a week, and a funding system that demands 35 hours’ work a week, once you sleep for 8 hours a night you’re left with less than 4 hours a day to do literally anything else at all.
Think of it this way. If it turns out that in order to access the full maintenance loan, you have to enrol onto 60 ECTS a year (the current “full-time” position), we are saying to students that you must enrol onto credits theoretically totalling at the very very least 1,200 hours of work a year. We then loan them – as a maximum – £8.52 an hour (outside London, away from home). No wonder they’re using AI – they need to eat.
If it then turns out that you end up needing to repeat a module or even a year, the LLE will be saying “we’ve based the whole thing on dodgy averages from two decades ago – and if you need to take longer or need more goes at it, you’ll end up in more debt, and lose some of your 4 years’ entitlement in the process”. Charming.
A credit system whose design estimated notional learning hours around students two decades ago, assumed that students have the luxury of doing lots of stuff over the summer, and fessed up that it’s an unreliable way of measuring workload is not in any world a sensible way to work out how much maintenance and participation cost support to loan to a student.
Pretty much every other European country – if they operate loans, grants or other entitlements for students – regards anyone studying more than 60 (or in some cases, 75) credits as studying “full-time”.
That allows students to experience setbacks, to accumulate credit for longer, to take time out for a bereavement or a project or a volunteering opportunity – all without the hard cliff edges of “dropping out”, switching to “part-time” or “coming back in September”. Will our student finance system ever get there? Don’t bet on it.
If the work (on workload) isn’t done, we’ll be left with definitions of “full-time” and “part-time” student that are decades old – such that a full-time student at the OU can’t get a maintenance loan, while an FT UG at a brick university that barely attends in-person can – that pretty much requires students to study for more credit than they can afford to succeed in.
Oh – and if the loan is chunked down for a 30 credit module, how will the government prevent fraud?
Via an FOI request, the SLC tells me that last year, almost 13,000 students FT students in England and Wales managed to pull down installment 1 of their loan without their provider pulling down installment 1 of the fee loan. Anyone that thinks that’s all employer funding will shortly be getting my brochure on bridges.
Our system for student living and participation costs may, by comparison with other systems, appear to be a generous one – especially if you ignore the low number of years that students are in it, and how much they eventually pay back. But make no mistake – our student finance system is completely broken – set up for a different sector with different students that has no contemporary basis in need, ambition or impact.
Its complexity could not be less helpful for driving opportunity, its paucity is likely to be choking our stock of human (and social) capital (and resultant economic growth), and its immediate impacts have normalised food banks on campus – real poverty that universities neither can nor should be expected to alleviate with other students’ fees and debt.
The signals and signs are of danger ahead – a minister keen to stress that the “fundamentals” of the system we have for funding higher education won’t change reminds us both of a lack of money and a bandwidth issue. It’s one whose solution requires real research, cross-departmental and nations working, and a proper sense of what we want students to be, experience and learn. Sadly, that also sounds like a solution that lends itself to long grass.
Given everything else going on in the world right now, maybe that’s inevitable. But decade after decade, every time we put off a proper review, or over-prioritise university rather than student funding in the debates, we dodge the difficult questions – because they’re too complex, because the data isn’t there, because it’s another department’s problem, because reasons.
If Bridget Phillipson is serious about “fixing the foundations” to “secure the future of higher education” so that “students can benefit from a world-class education for generations to come”, she needs to commission a dedicated student maintenance review. Now.
The two new leaders of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) were announced on Tuesday.
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This week on the podcast universities failing to promote diversity will face funding cuts – so said The Times. We chat through the controversy building around the REF.
Plus we look at what the sector is asking for in the spending review, and consider the government’s push for lower-level, shorter apprenticeships.
With Shitij Kapur, Vice Chancellor and President at King’s College London, Jess Lister, Director (Education) at Public First, Debbie McVitty, Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief at Wonkhe.
Universities UK submits to spending review
The barriers that must be removed for degree apprenticeships to meet NHS workforce targets
Higher education institutions have invested time, effort and money in level 7 apprenticeships
Societies that are humane are thoughtful about promoting equality, diversity and inclusion
Professor Margaret Sheil (right) speaks to the press. Picture: John Gass
The Queensland University of Technology has announced more details about its independent review into last month’s controversial National Symposium on Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action event.
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The name of an ambition more than it is of a body of knowledge, the term “futurology” is attributed by one source on word origins to Aldous Huxley. The author of Brave New World is a plausible candidate, of course; he is credited with coining it in 1946. But a search of JSTOR turns up an article from three years earlier suggesting that Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West made him the pioneer of “what one may hope will sometime develop into a real science of ‘Futurology.’”
The author of that article was a political scientist and émigré from Nazi Germany named Ossip K. Flechtheim, then teaching at the historically Black Atlanta University; the article itself was published in a historically Black scholarly journal, Phylon. He soon decided that his idea’s time had come.
By 1945, writing in The Journal of Higher Education, Flechtheim advocated for futurology both as an emerging line of interdisciplinary scholarship and as a matter of urgent concern to “the present-day student, whose life-span may well stretch into the twenty-first century.” He was optimistic about futurology’s potential to advance knowledge: Maintaining that “a large number of scholars” concurred on “the major problems which humanity would face” in the coming decades, he announced that “predict[ing] the most probable trends is a task which we have the means to accomplish successfully today.”
But as Niels Bohr and/or Yogi Berra famously put it, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Flechtheim went on to publish landmark contributions to the incipient field of study, surely expecting that a proper social science of the future would be established by the turn of the millennium. But on this point, as in most cases, subsequent history only confirms the Bohr-Berra conundrum.
One rough metric of futurology’s public-intellectual salience over time is how often the word appears per year in publications stored in the Google Books database. The resulting graph shows barely any use of the term before about 1960. But with the new decade there is a sudden burst of activity: a period of steep acceleration lasting about two decades, then collapsing dramatically over the final years of the 20th century. The JSTOR search results show much the same pattern.
And so it is that Glenn Adamson’s A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present (Bloomsbury Publishing) approaches the subject with not so much skepticism about futurology’s prospects as a certain irony about its very status as a distinct kind of knowledge. The author, a curator and a historian, attaches Flechtheim’s neologism as a label to a kaleidoscopic array of efforts to anticipate the shape of things to come, whether by analyzing statistical trends, through artistic creativity or in experimentation with new ways of life. The book concentrates on the United States and the 20th century, but inevitably the larger world and earlier history shape the book, which also reflects some 21st-century pressures as well.
Plenty of science fiction novels have done better at imagining life in subsequent decades than think tank projections made in the same era. But comparing prognostications for relative accuracy is not Adamson’s real concern. Whatever means it may employ, the futurological imperative is always to respond to current reality—to its perceived failings or potentials, to the opportunities and terrors looming over the world or lurking just out of sight. Adamson writes that “every story about the future is also a demand to intervene in the present.” The forms of intervention considered include political movements, religious revivals, market research, scenarios for thermonuclear war, hippie communes, the insurance industry and time capsules assembled for future generations to ponder (to give an abbreviated list).
The future’s uncertainty provides a blank screen for projecting contemporary issues in reimagined form and the opportunity to imagine alternatives. (Or to imagine inevitabilities, whether of the encouraging or despairing kind.)
The author takes futurology to have emerged in the 19th century as a response to concerns previously the domain of religious traditions. Utopia and dystopia provide fairly obvious secular analogues to heaven and hell. But there is more to it than that. “For those who no longer saw the future as a matter of revealed truth,” Adamson writes, “new forms of authority stepped in to fill the gap. This is where the futurologists would come in. They would not only make claims about what lies ahead but also somehow persuade others of their ability to see it.”
The grounds for claiming such authority proliferated, as did the visions themselves, in ways resistant to linear narrative. Instead, the author pulls seemingly unconnected developments together into thematic clusters, rather like museum exhibits displayed in partly chronological and partly thematic order.
For example, the futurological cluster he calls the Machine includes the organization Technocracy, Inc., which in the early 1930s won a hearing for its plan to put the entire economy under the control of engineers who would end the waste, bottlenecks and underperformance that had, they purported, caused the Depression.
Enthusiasm for the Technocracy’s social blueprints was short-lived, but it expressed a wider trend. Futurologists of this ilk “set about creating self-correcting, self-regulating systems; conceptually speaking, they became machine builders.” Under this heading Adamson includes enthusiasts for “the Soviet experiment” (as non-Communist admirers liked to call it), but also the market-minded professionals involved in industrial design, especially for automobiles: “The advance planning of annual model changes was a way to humanize technology, while also setting the horizon of consumer expectation.”
Whereas the Machine-oriented visionaries of the early 20th century had specific goals for the future (and confidence about being able to meet them), a different attitude prevailed after World War II among those Adamson calls the Lab futurologists. The future was for them “something to be studied under laboratory conditions, with multiple scenarios measured and compared against one another.” Some of them had access to the enormous computers of the day, and the attention of people making decisions of the highest consequence.
“Prediction was becoming a much subtler art,” the author continues, “with one defining exception: the prediction of nuclear annihilation, a zero multiplier for all human hopes.”
Those who thought life in a Machine world sounded oppressive offered visions of the future as Garden, where a healthier balance between urban and rural life could prevail. A corresponding horror at Lab scenarios spawned what Adamson calls Party futurology. This started in Haight-Ashbury, fought back at the Stonewall and generated the radical feminist movement that still haunts some people’s nightmares.
Missing from my thumbnail sketch here is all the historical texture of the book (including a diverse group of figures, leading and otherwise) as well as its working out of connections among seemingly unrelated developments.
As mentioned, the book is centered on 20th-century America. Even so, “Flood,” the final chapter (not counting the conclusion), takes up forces that have continued to accumulate in the early millennium. Flood-era futurology is not defined either by climate change or digital hypersaturation of attention. The main element I’ll point out here is Adamson’s sense that futurology’s own future has been compromised by an excess of noise and meretricious pseudo-insight.
The floods of dubious information (from too many sources to evaluate) make it harder to establish reality in the present, much less to extrapolate from it. Filling the void is a churn of simulated thought the author calls Big Ideas. “By this,” he writes, “I mean a general prediction about culture at large that initially feels like an important insight, but is actually either so general as to be beyond dispute, or so vague as to be immune to disproof.” Much better, on the whole, is to study the record of futurology itself, with its history as a warning against secular fortune-telling.