He’s a naughty boy, and he took over from a naughty girl.

This week saw a former registrar of the University of Bath, Karl Woodgett, convicted of the offence of “conspiracy to create false instruments” – create fake degrees in return for sexual favours from two Cameroonian women.

The fact that the UK Border agency was prosecuting suggests that these women were illegal in the United Kingdom. Mr Woodgett escaped a jail sentence and proved that there is one law for a British Citizen caught committing this kind of offence, and one law for Foreign Nationals. Those of us who work in refugee and human rights law know full well that had Mr Woodgett been of a non- EU background, he would have been given an automatic sentence of 12 months with automatic deportation at the end of it.

 Well, say the righteously minded readers of the Daily Mail, foreigners who come here and commit crimes deserve harsh prison sentences and automatic deportation. Except of course that it is a fundamental principle of our democracy and the rule of law that everyone is entitled to a fair hearing and equitable treatment by the courts.

 Consider the following conundrum. You are a middle class Iranian student involved in Iran’s Green Movement. The Basij militia have arrested your friends and raped and tortured them in prison. You know it’s only a matter of time before they come for you. So, with the help of your family, you contact the shadowy network of transporters and agents to get you to a safe Northern European country. It is these agents who decided where you are going. You travel to Turkey overland, where you meet with the Agent who gives you your plane tickets to the UK and a fake Portuguese ID. You know to claim asylum as soon as you land to the first Immigration Officer you see. At Immigration in Heathrow you present your card and state it is fake. You state your real name, nationality, and reason for coming to the UK and ask for protection from the British government.

What you didn’t know was that under the UK Borders Act 2007 the Labour Government, hoping to boost the number of foreigners it could deport automatically from these shores (regardless of their reasons for coming) had created the offence of using a false instrument (essentially a fake ID or passport), which carries an automatic 12 month custodial sentence.

 The harshness of this sentence means that our genuine refugee faces the prospect of, having fled a regime which wanted to imprison him, being banged up in a British jail on arrival, and face deportation proceedings at the end of his sentence, all for coming here and seeking our protection under the Refugee Convention. The same refugee coming overland hiding a lorry will, on arrival, be accommodated immediately and dealt with under the Asylum System.

 An immigration officer screens you and takes details of your asylum claim. Then he tells you that “the asylum matter has been dealt with” and the duty criminal defence solicitor – who often knows nothing about refugee law, and you are placed under police caution (which in the UK does not involve the right to remain silent). Your solicitor tells you to make no comment during the following police and criminal evidence interview, which is then used by the Home Office to prosecute you for using a fake id.

 You do not realise that you are having two sets of interviews for two areas of law, and so the refugee defense is never raised in the criminal matter, neither at the PACE interview, nor later at court (your defence solicitor tells you to plead guilty, not realising or caring that this will involve you being held in a prison long after your Release date has passed in Immigration Detention) and before you know it, the doors of Her Majesty’s Prison close behind you. Your asylum matter never comes to light, and having fled unjust imprisonment in Iran, you find that the British State has finished the job for the Iranian authorities.

 Our jails are full of foreign national prisoners who have been imprisoned for false document offences. Using a false document to work in the UK is not viewed as harshly as entering the country on one, conspiracy to make false documents should be the greater offence attracting the higher sentence, but rarely does. No, the outrage of the British state is reserved for those who dare to enter on false documents at airports, where refugees are rarely allowed, or given the opportunity, to rely on the allowed defence of being in need of International Protection.

 We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. But, if we are incapably of feeling shame, compassion or sympathy for refugees treated in this way, we can at least consider that we cannot afford this system. If you wonder why the delinquents who stole your car and chucked bricks through your window have not been arrested and brought to trial, it could be because our criminal justice system is clogged up and unable to cope with the barrage of invented strict liability offences dreamed up by Whitehall mandarins to boost their deportation statistics.

 If you wonder why our prisons are overcrowded and why we need to build more, we might want to consider that a good many detained there do not need to be there. It costs a few grand a year to accommodate an asylum seeker in the community under the National Asylum Support frame work. To place the same person in prison costs upwards of 40,000. These people are no danger to the public, they are unlikely to reoffend, and have not sought to deceive anyone. It is no surprise that in the prisons that I and my colleagues visit, the majority of those on suicide and self harm watch are foreign nationals.

 But the thing that jars most of all this the case I mentioned at the start of this article. Here we have a white, British, professional, in a position of trust, who uses his position to lure and then exploit desperate women into satisfying his sexual proclivities. The judge considers that he has lost everything, his job, marriage, professional reputation etc, but I wonder how much his victims have lost in comparison? Have they lost their liberty? Their families? Their dignity went a long time ago, because the fate of women who are brought in or who enter the UK illegally often involves exploitation of the worst order.

 I wonder, knowing what I do, where those Cameroonian women are now. I wonder if these girls might not be on SASH watch in some prison or detention centre somewhere. It would not surprise me, for I suspect that, for using a false instruments, they will have been prosecuted under the full force of the 2007 Act and may be in prison as I write along with the thousands of others who do not need to be there and whose imprisonment we should feel heartily ashamed about.

 So while our white, male dominated legal system lets Mr Woodget off with a Carry On style wink wink nudge nudge, a snigger here and there, we might want to meditate on the thousands who are languishing at our expense and with our consent, and for which we are responsible – including genuine Refugees and victims of trafficking, forced labour, and sexual exploitation.

We can argue that it is the centralised system which is cruel and inflexible, not those who run it, or who pay for it through their taxes, or consent to its abuse. To my mind the imprisonment of so many who do not justly deserve to be there smacks of obvious and deliberate government policy. It will not be, but it should be, a scandal, but no one cares because who cares about a bunch of illegals? We do not call them Refugees of course. We call them clandestines, or illegals.

 I cast my mind back to Oscar Wilde’s comments on the Criminal Justice System in his letters to the Daily Chronicle. Evil is not usually the perverse form of egoism typified by your Hitlers and Osmas. Ordinary evil is simply stupidity, and wherever you have centralisation, and bureaucracy, we have stupidity. Right now, I think we would be hard pushed to find a government organisation which fitted Wilde’s definition of ordinary evil more than the Home Office.

But of course one get’s laughed at when one uses the word “evil” in legal circles. So let’s just leave it that Labour’s Home Scretary is a naughty boy for tolerating these serious abuses of fundemental liberty in our name, just like his predecessor – that naughty girl who bought porn for her husband with taxpayers money - and what they need is some discipline themselves.  Although  I confess I am sceptical that a Tory Home Scretary would care enough to end the injustice, expense, and abuses of this current administration.

Distance Learning or a Distance Con?

With Baby Boomerang on the way, the Scottish Boomerang was desperately trying to finish her legal Continuing Professional Development before going off on Maternity Leave. CPD is mandatory for all kinds of lawyers, the idea being that one keeps one’s legal knowledge current enough to advise clients. In my line of work – refugee, human rights and immigration law – our companies will sponsor away days for us to make up our 15 hours of core learning a year, or we can do the free online “distance” learning set by our regulator, the Office of the Immigration Service Commissioner, the body whose job it is to oversee quality in immigration advice and representation. They are the people who will take away my licience to practice if I don’t log my CPD hours.

A little short of my CPD hours, and owing to my advanced state of pregnancy which precluded trips to London for courses, I decided to do the online course. Selecting “Gender and Immigration Law” (there was nothing useful on the website, such as an update on the New 2009 Borders Act) I duly watched the presentation slides and then did the test at the end.

Only four of the questions in a 20 question test related to the subject matter studied. The rest were a mismatch of entry level questions with no relation to the learning objectives of the course. This online module had been billed as “advanced” level study, yet here was an example of one of the questions (anyone working in Human Rights law in Britain is familiar with the case of Shah and Islam, whereby the court held that women without the support of male family members could continute a particular social group in need of Refugee Protection:

Q What was the name of the major case regarding woman as a particular social group in English law? Was it:

A. Shah and Islam

B. Islam and Islam

C: Islam and Shah

D: Islam and Islam

The worry is of course that time pressed independent immigration representatives are using the OISC’s site to make up their CPD hours, especially when face to face away days with experts can cost over £400 per day, and are nearly aways held in London, trebling the cost for a legal rep based at the other end of the country. There is simply no real teaching, learning, or assessment going on, so its hardly surprising that quality in the immigration sector remains low. A second worry is that the OISC had actually commissioned the modules from the Open University, which normally has a good reputation for distance courses.

When we contacted the OISC regarding this we were informed that the questions and testing methods were being reviewed.

The problem with distance based legal education is not, however, confined to the OISC. Last year I started a distance Graduate Diploma in Law with Holborn College (and, yes, you will see I am naming and shaming here). What was billed as “distance learning” – perfect for working professionals, overseas students, or parents who could not make the long trip to London for classes, it was clearly marketed as the distance solution for working professionals.

We did have the option of treking to Greenwich every weekend to attend the lectures face to face. And the lectures, poached from other reputable GDL providers such as the College of Law, were very good when you actually got some teaching from them. As ever, the problem was the course delivery, for if you could not actually physically attend the course – the reason why most of us were on the distance GDL in the first place – the “teaching” consisted of:

1. Do the reading.
2. Download the homework worksheet.
3. Do the worksheet based on what you have read
4. The lecture marks the worksheet and emails it back to you.
5. Submit course assignments in the same way.

Unsurprisingly, the pass mark for the GDL for that particular institution is very low, and the drop out rate high, especially for people like me, who in addition to having to earn my fee targets had to also wrestle with a useless course, for which they charged me £5000 for the privilege of being on. I cut my losses, but they will never give me my money back. Fortunately, I had paid them only half the money.

But is the con – for want of a better word, confined to the teaching of law? Sadly no. Several relatives and friends on distance courses from the UK and the USA begging for help, extra tutoring, advice on how to negotiate with their “providers” (Since the concept of university or further education has actually died a death).

These people have paid good money expecting a decent standard of teaching, or in the case of Mr Boomerang, his company has. Mr Boomerang’s engineering diploma – run by Manchester College – is done in the usual inefficient, teacher-deficient worksheet way, with no actual teaching going on apart from a very occasional away day.  Un surprisingly, he isn’t learning anything and is constantly worried abouthe course, and will have to spend additional money for a private tutor t provide the teaching that should be a contractual requirement for the provider.

Another friend, a teacher in Korea who is doing a distance BA in Education complains frequently of a lack of academic support, clear instructions or guidance from his tutors. Again, death by downloadable worksheet is the norm.

So what should we have the right to expect from a distance or online provider?

Here are some tips for the wayward institutions, which they should know, but to be honest haven’t got through their heads yet.

1. Distance Learning CANNOT take place without Distance Teaching. Your students MUST be able to attend lectures, either virtually or in person. This means you must use the ample technology available – even if this is just Flash Presentation, Youtube, and Facebook, Podbean for downloadable podcasts – to deliver your course material. The technology is there, free and easy to use with the minimum of effort, though you may wish to actually spend some money for a proper distance learning management tool such as Flextraining.
2. Distance Learning can reach more students at the same time, but the number of students per tutor is exactly the same as a face to face course. You cannot get around this.
3. A worksheet and a textbook is not a substitute for a teacher.
4. Your learning programme should contain scenarios based in the real world and worked examples in the form of videos. Employ some struggling actors. Make it fun, engaging, and your pass rate will go up. But at the very least, video stream your lectures.
5. Clearly relate ANY worksheet or assessment you DO set to the learning objectives and the course content.

Done well, the distance model can be as good, and even better, than face to face because it allows for student flexibility and the complex needs of learners who have to combine learning with a job and a family. It also can allow, if planned well, for the demonstration of practical examples which may not be possible in a traditional classroom or lecture theater. However, though it may be cheaper to run in the long term, a distance course requires the same budget to set up and develop as a traditional face to face course, and requires IT literacy on the part of the provider and the lecturer. Not much, but some.

If the course does not contain the following as a BARE minimum

- streamed lectures or at least downloadable lectures.

- video or animated casestudies and worked examples showing the principle in action.

- lecture notes and revision notes in downloadabke podcast form

- real time, online tutorial groups with your tutor, or a face to face equivlant.

- clear self study material, either downloadable or published,-

- an online discussion forum which is tutor lead

- clear deadlines for submission of coursework, proper exam timetables.

Then it is most probably not worth it. It IS possible to achieve a high pass rate no matter how busy your students are, so the following are not excuses

- Our students are bad at disciplining their time due to work and family committments. Our high fail rate is due to this.

- We dont have the money or technical know-how to stream lectures. (If a 15 year old can stream from his bedroom, YOU can stream from a lecture hall!).

- etc etc

Sheer laziness and desire to collect as much money with the bare minimum of impute – down with learning plc!

Good examples of an online distance model are few and far between, but are found in some unlikely places. In the legal field I was impressed by the flexibility and level of interaction between distance students and the teaching staff at Abraham Lincoln School of Law in California ( THAT’S what I expected from Holborn, geddit!) where students can attend streamed lectures online, real time, in person if they live in California, or if the cannot make the lecture, download it at a later date.

Another would be Oxford University Press Korea’s online ESL teacher training for ESL teachers working on the peninsula. This involved viewing a lecture based on theory, then a classroom based example to see the teaching methods in action., and then completing a question. I did this alongside my LLM I was studying because I had to teach to support myself and, having originally trained to teach adults, was finding myself in front of young children. Applied immediately in the classroom, my teaching practice noticably improved, and was well worth the $50 USA I spent for it. I would recommend study of this – for anyone teaching languages to children or teenagers, and anyone wanting to set up an online course of any description.

For languages, Rosetta Stone’s online method works very well, especially as a compliment to a formal class.

Until then, if you need to do a distance course, make sure you check out EXACTLY how much structured teaching time there is on it, and whether the provider has invested anything in the course development beyond drawing up worksheets. Delivery is as important as content!

And if they are not doing their job, demand your money back. Otherwise even government accredited courses are little more than a distance con.

This grim joke from 2001 sets the tone for the West's view of burkas, but in reaility our antipathy to face covering is thousands of years old...

As I mediate on the recent comments of the French president on Islamic dress – I recall a grimly amusing cartoon which circulated the Internet shortly after 9/11 entitled “if the Taleban win”, showing the Statue of Liberty shrouded in an Afghan Bukha I recall it, I suppose because this now most American of icons was originally French, and M. Sarkozy’s comments appealed directly to those republican and secular principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which are etched upon the French psyche. It is also an anathema that any British politician, products of the failures of multiculturalism and lilly-livered in the face of vocal (but not necessarily representative) minority interest groups, should utter such opinions. It starts of course with a proper understanding of what is commanded by Islam, not how that command that women should dress modestly and cover her arms and legs, and her head during religious observance, is interpreted by the various cultures which have informed its development.

We should begin any examination of islamic dress in western society with the recognition of how very little we in the west actually know about Islamic dress and why it has evolved in the way it has. We need to have proper understanding of why certain Islamic dress offends so much in our culture. Few westerners, it seems, have bothered to gain anthropological insight to our own customs, and so we lack understanding and the ability to communicate when trying to explain why a particular act offends so much.

We cannot articulate why we feel offended, and so those who have offended continually miss our point. In addition, in our hurry to embrace multiculturalism in all its flawed but faded glory, we miss the point that there are as many facets and hues to global Islam as there are to Christianity. In addition, many Muslims in Britain cannot see the forest for the trees – there is a perception that nothing we wear can cause cultural offense in this permissive and open society.

This is not so. Our cultural memory is a long one – though we may not realise it. The antipathy or, at the very least, ambiguity towards masks is hundreds, if not thousands of years old, and it always associated with evil, sickness, wrongdoing, or, at the very least, “naughtiness” in western culture. In  ancient festivals masks were worn to either confuse the devil or to make hooking up in illicit affairs easier – think of those naughty early modern venetician masquerades.

These masked ladies and their lovers are flirting and being naughty, while men gamble in the background - veiling or masking in western culture indicates wrongdong rather than virtue.

Not long ago respectable married women were expected to wear hats or scarves in public. We still have nuns who wear the veil, and as far as our cultural memory stretches there has never been any problem with women wearing something on her head, especially in Christian religious observance. So religious head-coverings per se cannot be the reason why we go bananas about burkhas. It is neither the hijab, which covers the head, or the chador or abaya which covers the head and the body, which offends western (and specifically British) so much.

It is the naqab – the veiling of the face which pricks at the very spinal chord of our cultural memory. In western civilization, hiding your face is tantamount to deceiving and lying, our earliest fears and folk memory is articulate in the form of the masked marauder, the bandit who robs and cheats and steals. In the past only lepers, and historically only those enaged in clandestine behaviour such as spying or extra martial affairs – indeed the moral opposites of what the burkha is culturally designed to do – covered their faces. There are few positive cultural connotations to masks or face coverings in western civilization. The demons,  sinners  and sickness ride masked, in our folklore.

In the east, a veil hides beauty, in the west, disfigurement and disease.

Having lived and worked in many cultures – including strictly Islamic ones – I know that the expression of my identity and femininity – and my cultural values – must change when I visit or live in other nations. I know I cannot conform long term to the customary expectations of certain countries and so I choose not to live in them, turning down otherwise lucrative and promising offers of employment. And I certainly know that when I visit other countries I am not exactly free to dress how I choose.

Wearing flowers in my hair (yes, I do!) is fine in Colombia, but signifies madness or loose sexual morals in Korea. I cannot wear shorts or sleeveless tops in certain parts of Asia. In addition, I must be mindful of my actions – I must eat with my right hand only in many Muslim and African countries and I absolutely cannot show the soles of my feet, lest I offend in the deepest possible way. Baring this in mind, I have worn the hijab and even the naqab/chador in Northern India, not because I had to but because doing so caused the least offense and enabled a fuller enjoyment of the society. In northern India I can move more freely alone in a Burkha – I attracted less attention and those unpleasant gangs of youths who would otherwise cause problems for me as a solo female traveler barely noticed me. Of course, I would much rather move around in a society where young men show a measure of maturity and do not target lone women, but one has to take the societies of the country one lives and works in as one finds them – embarking on a single-handed feminist crusade in India’s north-west  is unwise in terms of personal safety and in terms of general diplomacy every wise traveler should employ.

Likewise, those who would wear the naqab in this culture should be aware that when they do so they cause offense to our cultural sensibilities on such a deep level that the British can barely articulate it. You cannot hide your face in this culture without causing the deepest offense. It is as offensive – and as unthinkable to the western mind – as wearing a bikini in a mosque, an equivalent to showing the soles of your feet deliberately to everyone you meet in Saudi Arabia or Thailand. I do not believe we have the same revulsion to the hijab or chador – we have long had our historic equivalents and we are by in large a tolerant and accepting lot. Every culture will place limitations on how we dress, and when we move between cultures we must adapt.

Now to the most scurrilous accusations that the naqab oppresses women. This ignores the many reasons why women wear it, including vanity (I am so beautiful I would drive men mad were I to display my beauty) and the desire to display ones wealth and status (see, we are rich, I have servants to do my shopping for me, I am rich enough to enage in full purdha – the poor woman cannot ) in certain parts of the world, as well as the more well known ones of trying to fulfill the commands of ones faith.  I would say that we should beware of blanket world-wide condemnation of the garment – although the connection between the abuse of women in certain cultures and the veiling of women’s faces is hard to ignore. In some circumstances, and in some countries, it may – and I stress the may – while we are waiting for men to become mature and civilized – confer a measure of security, freedom and autonomy which a woman otherwise might not have.

But not in this culture. In this culture , those who hide there faces cut themselves off from society, and plunges them into cycles of loneliness, isolation and dependence. They cause deep, undefinable cultural offense wherever they go. In this culture the naqab is oppressive to the woman who choose to wear it as any mask or face covering would cause, no matter the gender of the one who wears it.  However much it may suit a bedouin tribal life in the sands of Saudi, it does not suit in northern Europe. Which brings me to my last point. What is acceptable Islamic dress varies from country to country and culture to culture. The naqab is an Arab import to many countries, an expression of the strictest forms of Islamism (as opposed to Islam). Which brings me to my final point. Across the Islamic world an internal, sectarian battle similar to the Christian reformation is raging and burning. It has its heretics and martyrs, its inquisitions, its petty princes vying for power, its Tomas De Torquemdas and its St Francis of Assisis, its Bloody Mary’s and its Elizabeth’s. We in the West are almost incidental to this ideological conflict, though often, we are targeted in order to stimulate devision in the Islamic world – 9/11 being the most potent example. What constitutes a “good Muslim” and which variety of Islam prevails is being decided in the battlefield and in a war of attraction, the prize being the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. The outcome of all these internal ideological battles is still unclear. The whole issue of the naqab should be viewed in that context – far a more subtle, more complex, and more far reaching that perhaps Monsieur Sarkozy – or those in Britain who secretly share his view – have yet to realize.

And that is why we go bonkers over burkas.

CS Lewis, in The Four Loves, commented that Friendship irritates Authority because every group of friends is a direct challenge to it.  In the recent days two things have struck me. Firstly how the little groups of friends on Facebook and Twitter challenged and seriously weakened the Iranian regime, and secondly, how very much our own government, while lauding the brave souls who are risking their lives to log on, fear the internet, and more to the point, citizen journalism, to the extent that – with the sort of irony that writers everywhere dream about – the British courts rule that the name of the anonymous police blogger could be revealed.

The Times, that organ of the British establishment, yet part of the free press nonetheless,  while simultaneously voicing support for the hundreds of anonymous blockers writing from a certain country this week, have won a court case tripping a citizen journalist, writing under the nom de plum of Night Jack,  of the essential anonymity he needed to write; and his wordpress blog vanished as though it had never been.  Last week the British Courts struck a blow against freedom of expression in the same week that hundreds of bloggers and netizens have been arrested and detained.

Britain has too many CCTV cameras, but now the cameras are turned on State Actors. Our police were filmed tazing a man while he was on the ground, at the G20 protests, mobile phone footage showed a police officer cut a bystander down. He later died of a heart attack. All over the world, Authority fears those little groups of friends recording an watching their actions. How it hates those little stubborn fragments of freedom, which turns Authority’s spying cameras on those who abuse their power with the words “I can’t wait to get this on YouTube”.

I am disappointed with the Times. Shall we ask them to reveal the name of the Junior Barrister who writes the “fictious” law blog Baby Barrista?  Of course we won’t. The sort of political blogging that is most effective is effective because it comes from the inside – anonymity reveals the truth by protecting the identity of the correspondent, leaving him able to write more freely.

This is why the names of certain journalists from the established press present in countries in turmoil are not being named – to protect those journalists and their sources.

 The Times, in blinkered short-sightedness failed to see the new forms of citizenship blogging as real journalism, providing insight into  worlds which are  shadowy and unexplored.  Their successful suit to reveal the name of this officer hurts freedom of speech and expression. No organ of the free press should have any business being involved in such an action.

Leave that to Authority, which, keen as it is to erode the checks and balances which ensure our freedoms and liberties, would have to make its case before our courts.

Authority serves itself. And because it does so those who wield it must check themselves, and balance it against what we will loose if the current trends in this society are taken to the wire.

Engineers, Technicians and tradesmen in the UK have a word for the endless and expensive credentials they need to ordinarily do their jobs. Things like Health and Safety certificates, and so forth. The government and academia likes to call these compulsory courses “continuing professional development” and “vocational qualifications”.  In industrial Britain, they are given a more honest colloquial title. They care called “tickets”. The name alone suggests both expense, and lack of progression if you don’t have one.

Next week sees the start of my graduate diploma in law (GDL), the law conversion course in English law without which I cannot become a solicitor. The Boomerang does things backwards, I went to Korea and got a legal masters in International Law before I did this, and I am already a legal rep for LovenJustice Ltd.  So the GDL – to use a trade term – is just a one “ticket” in a series of expensive tickets I need to be a solicitor or a barrister in the UK.

The GDL – which leads to the Common Professional Examination – is the ticket I am doing off my own bat.  And I am doing it entirely by online distance learning over one year, which, on top of my job as a legal rep will be a challenge.  Distance because the suffolk town that is now my home,  though an hour from London, is not really “an hour” – it’s more like “£30″- and also because I need the flexibility for my work,  which has all the long hours associated with solicitor’s work, but without the money.

The jury is still out as to whether it was the right decision to turn down the College of Law and go with them: their attitude so far reflects the money-grubbing culture that is pervasive in the South of England, but also the supreme sence of entitlement that goes along the lines of “you-should-be-positively-greatful-we-have-allowed-you-to-give-us-thousands-of-pounds-of your-money” – an attitude I have always found difficulty with.

In the days before the industrialisation of academia – before Thatcher’s policies turned our univerisites and colleges from centres of culture and learning into souless degree factories, this attitute was much less common, and as consequence, students saw themselves as students, not as consumers.  Consumers, though, we have become: not necessarily by choice, but by necessity, and that involves calling ones instution into question when they are not providing their advertised services. This increasing industrialization fueled by the current mania for credentials has turned the pursuit of higher learning from an intellectual pursuit into a purely economic one, the degree has turned into the”ticket”.

This cultural shift has seen the rise of the Student-As-Consumer. There are some students who think because they have paid the money at one end they should come out the other end with a degree, even if they are not very good at their chosen subject and did not work very hard during their course (or, in many cases, were too busy working to get money to survive).

The Universities have encouraged this by lowering the academic standards (and in the case of the foriegn students they fleece, the English standards) to get the students through the door while providing the barest minimum of academic support in return. Students are not getting the support the need, but many struggling students do not fit the “lazy” stereotype. Students are pressured, they are busy, they are working to make ends meet, and they have one shot at their degree, which will inevitably saddle them with thousands of pounds worth of debt. The lecturers and tutors – too few, of course, for the individual guidance and attention many students need at the start of their academic careers, are under pressure, and so get very lazy when setting coursework questions.

Enter the internet, and its not difficult to see how tempting it is for a struggling student to buy a custom written essay – all original work, perfectly referenced and the grief taken out. Its not difficult to see how their parents, watching their offspring struggle as they never had to struggle when they were students, to “help them out” by buying them a custom essay.  Traditional plagiarism was not difficult to spot.  Plagairism in the modern era is a multi-million pound high tech industry, and one step ahead of the over-stretched higher education sector. In spite of Academia’s protestations to the contrary, we know that many students who do this will never get caught.  Why? Because university resources for marking, assessment and feedback are already stretched too thin.

How can “providers”  spot plagerism of coursework when they don’t have the resources to offer student proper tuition and academic support in the first place? When, frankly, the universities are too lazy to set tasks of sufficient complexity and originality in the first place?  Or offer guidance and feedback prior to submission of coursework? Or, as is becoming increasingly apparent, where the tutors themselves are confused about what plagiarism is, and what it is not?

Which brings me to my current situation.  An essay question was set by my GDL “provider” – at this stage I am hesitating to use the word “university” or even “institution”, the due date of which conflicts with some professional exams I have to sit for my job.  The essay question seems simple enough – a discussion of the role of the Judiciary in the Common Law -  but I need to “front-load” it and wrote it before the start of the course so I would have time to prepare for the other ticket (without which I cannot continue in my job).

I wrote the first draft of the essay, and then submitted it to my course tutor, explaining why I have to submit the blessed thing early, asking him to look over it and suggest areas for improvement prior to the final submission.  Back comes an email from my tutor which reads – and here I am quoting directly -

Hello [Boomerang],

The introductory assignment is mean to be all your own work.

Well, I see a lot of stuff in my work which could win the WTF Award of the Week, but that one really took the biscuit. Here is my tutor – whose salary my (borrowed) money is paying, and who is supposed to be overseeing part of the developing of my legal career -  telling me that receiving guidance and feedback on drafts of coursework was a form of plagiarism.  He also treated me  – a seasoned academic and who has taught at tertiary levels – like a GSCE pupil who had asked the teacher to do their homework for them.  Actually, strike that. Teachers of GSCE and A-level law have considerably more respect for their students.

So now, I am, alas, primarily a consumer rather than a student. The GDL is just a ticket without which I cannot get on the train which will take me to my ultimate destination of being a solicitor.  I am not, though, one of those students who expects to pass  without working for it – however, if I apply my expensively educated brain to the task of gaining this qualification, and then fail because my “provider” isn’t actually providing the service, then thats another thing entirely.

The assertion that providing feedback and guidance (which I always understood to be the work of a university tutor) is plagiarism is either a deliberate attempt to fob me off to avoid doing the work of a university teacher, or woeful ignorance about what plagiarism is, and what it is not.  To be honest, I’m pushed to decide which is worse. I sat at the computer staring at my tutor’s email for a full five minutes with my mouth open.  I then made a mental note to blog it at the first opportunity. Complaining to the Provider will not help. Bad press – even if names are changed or omitted in the private interest – is perhaps the only negotiating tool we have.

Today I started polishing the draft which I got no feedback on.  While googling the rules of statutory interpretation I came across a site offering to do the essay for me and guaranteeing a 2:1.  Clearly inviting the desperate student to engage in academic fraud. It also offered another service of offering academic guidance on course work you had written yourself.  There is nothing academicaly dishonest about using that particular service. In fact, it was offering to do what ones tutor SHOULD be doing. This site was offering students exactly in my position a change to start down the Wide ‘n’ Easy road to Academic Hell. I wonder how many academically abandoned students have been pulled in like that?

I am confident my essay will pass as it is. (it had better, given that I actively sought, and was refused guidance pre-submission). But let’s say I wasn’t that confident? The GDL has put me in further debt by £5,000. I have one shot at it. I can’t afford to fail. I have a lot to lose, really.   And once through the door, having purchased a legitimate service, how much easier would it be just to make that extra click for an illegitimate one?

I consider myself to be a scholar and an intellectual, and possibly one of the last people in this country to have had a truly Socratic education.  I love learning, and believe that aside from the material benefits a good education can bring, that learning enriches your life in many intangible ways. The Degree Factory attitude has always depressed me, and struck me as ultimately counter-productive.

The current trends of high-tech plagiarism is a symptom, not the cause,  of the compromise in intellectual and spiritual aims of higher education: and students are not the ones to blame for it.  If we do not consider learning (and teaching, for that matter) to have some intrinsic benefit to our society, if your students are nothing but cash cows to milk, then whether their  minds, tastes or moral character are developed along the way is neither here nor there.  We are becoming one of the most credentialised societies in the world, but also intellectually impoverished, and completely amoral. That is manifesting itself in all sorts of unpleasant ways, not least in the rise in violence and dishonesty that we see. I am not an old lady to see the moral shift in our society in the last two decades (and I am only 30).

We don’t need no education. All we need are the tickets so we, or our employers, can tick boxes on a form. And since it does not matter much to Academia, or to those who set higher education policy, why should it matter to students how those tickets are procured?

When it comes to workplace bullying and its attendant issues – because it never arrives in the workplace alone – there are distinct stances adopted by HR Departments. Like yoga positions, they can be categorized.

1. The Mafioso:

Perhaps the worst stance, the Mafioso HR Department knows there is a problem with workplace bullying and actively participates or supports the abuse by bringing false, fabricated or unnecessary proceedings against the targets of bullying, supporting the culprits, joining in “the fun”. Their typical way is to issue threats to targets and abuse procedure. They are the harbingers of doom to any firm and and they ride in on the pale horse.

Oh, yes, you know who you are. And so do we. We can tell by the attrition rates, the number of lawsuits, and the fact that you can smell the fear and tension the moment you walk through the door.

2. The Ostrich:

Identified by somewhat sandy and muffled responses to questions on respect at work with.“We don’t have a problems with workplace bullying, nor are we ever going to have one” or even “We take respect at work seriously”. The muffled responses get all the fainter when one tried to identify how, exactly, they are taking it seriously. They achieve the same result as the Mafioso except passively, not actively.

3. The Firefighter:

This HR position involves leaping from crisis to crisis, from formal discipline/grievance proceeding to proceeding, from court room to court room. There’s no time to implement good practice – they are too busy putting out fires.

4. The Bureaucrat:

This HR team loves writing policies that look good on paper and then stuffing them in a drawer, and scheduling expensive training which doesn’t tackle the problems. Failure to monitor and audit procedures lead to a failure in implantation. But hey, they look good, even if you don’t achieve much. Often accompanied by Firefighters or Ostriches.

5. The Tinker:

The Tinker is perhaps the least glamorous respondent to the challenge of workplace bullying. They might not look good, patching here and there, but they only step in occasionally when a rare crisis emerges. For the most part, their conflict resolution and workplace harassment policies and procedures work so well they can get on with other stuff – like hiring, succession planning, and increasing the firm’s knowledge base. They do this by practicing preventative medicine in the work place, continually, monitoring and checking for signs of bullying and workplace toxicity. They actively work to reduce the number of grievance and disciplinary proceedings, and attrition due to mental ill health. They keep their stats in order. Quietly.

You know the burning question, don’t you? Which one of the five positions is YOUR firm’s HR adopting in response to Workplace Harrassment?

Of course, its not HR any more. It’s Human Capital Management. While many firms are fond of saying that “our people are our assests” the truth is they don’t really behave like assesets. They behave like investors – of money, perhaps, but also of their time, goodwill, expertise, and yes, their career path.  Any manager with an ounce of common sense is going to want to capitalise on that investment, and with any luck, encourage their people to invest more. In a nutshell, Human Captial Management should be what HR is all about. In the next few blog articles on The Scottish Boomerang, I’ll be exploring how encourage good pactice, and repair bad practice, in order, with the grace of the angels, to stop things becoming ugly in your workplace.

Workplace bullying is a serious, endemic threat in the modern workplace. It is insideous, it creeps up, it poisons working enviroments, decreases productivity and is hideously expensive. The Fields Foundation puts the cost of workplace bullying to the UK economy at roughly £3.8 billion a year – and rising – and obviously, we want to avoid it.   Workplaces which allow individual bullying to go on soon find the problem becomes endemic and instutionalised – even to the extent where, like racism of old, it becomes embedded in policies, practices and procedures.  A toxic, pathological workplace fails its people, its customers or clients, and ultimately society. Few of these survive in competative market (no surprises then to learn that its in the public and voluntary sector where workplace bullying is at its worse). Unions are often ineffectual (or have their own internal bullying problems). In bullying-riddled workplace, HR usually spends its days hopping from grievance to grievance, from meeting to meeting, putting out the fires and crisis manageing, rather than turning its attention to positive, collabourative management strategies.    However, with a little foresight and front-loading of Human Resource policies and procedureIn the best firms, the work of HR is a light-handed work, stepping in only occassionally when the need arrises.

So how to create this positive, mentally healthy, bully-free environment? The work of this falls on our often unappriciated and overstetched HR Officer.   I recommend the following formula:

• Recognise the need for change, and the rights of everyone in your organisation (including you!) to work in a safe and healthy environment.
• Redraft policies which aren’t working,  policies such as Repect and Work/ Dignity at Work/Grievance procedures to see where they need tightening or changing. Obviously, if you don’t have an anti-bullying policy, now is the time to draft one.
• Review and monitor your policies. Indicators of workplace bullying include things like higher-than-average attrition rates, sickness rates, lawsuits, tribunal hearings, disciplinary hearings and grievance procedings.
• Record all your grievance and disciplinary hearings properly, noting down if personal disputes or conflict in the workplace is at the source. Pay special attention to the signs of workplace bulling.
• Retrain managers and staff in mentally unhealthy teams. Remember that HR also needs this training from time to time.
• Remove managers and staff  shown to be involved in bullying. Not shunt them sideways, and for goodness sake don’t promote them: sack them or ask them to resign.  They make your workplace unsafe and are a liability.  Make bullying as serious an issue as theft.  Make attrition rates part of the performace appraisal for team leaders and yes, senior managers too.
• Renew your effors annually. Audit your workplace bullying. Taking it seriously means doing stuff to stop it and keep it out of the workplace.

In addition,  employees who become the targets of bullying are often the most competent and capable in your workplace.  Those that can, do. Those that cannot, bully others to cover up a sense of inadequancy.  In the toxic working environment incompentance and lack of productivity reign supreme.   Acknowledge as best you can, when interviewing bullied employees who have become to ill to continue, that they are not to blame, and that you will take concrete action to ensure their workplace is safe. Above all, do not blame or threaten your employee – a target of this kind of abuse is not to blame. Do this, and you might be taking the abuse from the personal to the corporate level, thus making your organisation legally liable.

It might not be fair, but the buck stops with HR much of the time in these sorts of disputes.  As an HR Officer, you do have a choice about whether to act positively by creating a bully-free, mentally healthy, safe environment for employees or to continue with an expensive and destructive status quo. Decide in favour of the latter, and you should examine your conscience and your balance sheet.

As I’ve written elsewhere, bad business ethics is really, really bad for business.

In the end.

Silence on The Scottish Boomerang recently should be attributed to the horrendously stressful time of sitting lawyers accrediation exams in London ( for US readers, that’s a bit like the Bar, but without the friendly multiple choice format), and trying to relocate to Suffolk from Scotland. Exams having been sat, I am now sleeping on a Korean-skyle bedding arrangement on the floor of my empty appartment in an anglian market town, meditating on the fact that it is cheeper, far cheeper, for me to relocate 10,000 miles accross the world than to move from one end of my tiny island to the other.

So, in an effort to save money, I took the decision that I will not have a TV in my home. You see – aside from the cost of the set and add-ons itself, Brits have to pay a tax on their TV, a licience which costs them about 135 GBP (thats about US $270) for the privilage of having the blessed thing in your house in the first place. Attempt to watch the google-box without it, and you’ll face a $2000 fine. However, many people simply cannot do without the beloved cyclops, and so pay up.

But for me, the decision to go without a TV makes a lot of sense. I don’t watch sports, game shows, soap operas, home improvement/property development shows, cop shows or reality TV you see, and that means that 90% of the programming is totally, utterly irrelevent to my life. There is nothing a TV can do for me that I cannot get from elsewhere, especially the net, and my film buff tenandcies are better spent getting one of those “all the holywood crap you can watch and more” cards from the local cinema. And lets not discount Radio 4, intelligent, informative, but as dull as dishwater as Radio 1 is lightweight and stupid. Radio 4 is the last bastion of the 1950s. I defy you to find another.

So what do do then, with no TV? Well, for one thing it gets you out of the house. It struck me after a while that many people I know use the TV as a substitute for friendships.  The lack of it makes you hunger for human company, for conversation and discussion of ideas.  I’m begining to formulate an idea that revolutions cannot occur in countries where most of the population have access to 50 or more TV channels.  For I have more time to think. And therefore I am more myself, if you follow my Cartesian reasoning.

At any rate, my house is an oasis of calm, punctuated only by the dulcit tones of the theme to “The Archers”, which airs on Radio 4 at least, oh, every hour or so, and is the most soporific soap opera known to man.

I can’t wait for broadband.

 

 This guy looks a bit like one of my professors…

Anyway,

I am the first to admit my legal education has been…er…unorthodox.

In the UK, the accepted way of training a lawyer is to sit through an LLB whereby you are taught law like any any other academic discipline in the humanities. You are expected to become a jurist, an intellectual, a legal philospher.  After that, you do a one year legal practice course in which you learn stuff like oral advocacy and contract drafting. Then you have to take a 2 year training contract (for would be solictors) or a one-year pupilage (for would be baristers in which (as the celebrated legal blogger Baby Barista put it) you make coffee for the rich and powerful, and and a summer job at Starbucks would probably be of more practical value than the LPC or the BVC.  Of course, there is much merit in this way of training. Theoretically at least, it ensures that there is sufficient oversight from experienced legal practicioners over new ones at the start of their career.  The drawbacks I have discussed elsewhere on this blog.

Accustomed to the grecian graces of European academia, I had no reason to suppose that the academic environment of an American style law school would be any different. And I was on a Masters programme. No one was training me to be a lawyer.  I went in a scholar, and came out as a practicioner.  Sitting on many of the modules I took were Juris Doctor students and the classes had a distinctly JD flavour. I learned here about the Socratic Method, US Style,  the preferred way of making sure that students do the reading before class.

Allow me to explain.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher whose teaching style greatly influenced European universities in the way they teach the humanities. A form of philosophical enquiry, it involves two speakers – usually the teacher is the Questioner although in a Socratic dialogue between peers both speakers question and answer each other. In fact I would say that I am involved in a socratic intellectual enquiry everytime Mr Boomerang and I have a discussion on anything.  When I studied philosophy at St Andrews, the lectures or tutors would use this method to explore various moral or ethical topics. The Socratic method, though, is not often employed in US undergraduate education ( and sadly, its getting that way in our schools and universities too).  The chief benefit of  Socratic enquiry is that it develops critical thinking skills.

In US Law Schools, the meaning of the Socratic Method has more restrictive meaning. You can hear some students complaining about it in this video:

At the Love&Justice interviews, talking about the demands of the LPC and holding down a full time job, I mentioned I had held down full-time teaching while attending 16 hours of classes a week, all of which required case-briefing.  My fellow applicant asked me what case briefing was. I explain that before each class in a US law school (at least, this was the case in Handong) we were given five or six controling judicial opinions to read, which we had to summarise,  identify the issues, the holdings and the controlling and emerging rules of law, and if the professor was feeling particularly vicious, also research the subsequent case activity as it was applied through the courts. The lecturer would then pick students at random to brief the case before the class and grill them on the case for up to forty minutes.  If you hadn’t prepared, you were asked to leave. She looked at me in horror.  I asked how she had been taught during her British LLB. “Well, you know, we sat in a lecture.”

It’s clear that the Socratic Method employed in US law schools is far more agressive than anything gentle, ironic ol’ Socrates would have done himself, and a far cry from the Socratic Enquiry used in my many philosophy sessions at university. (Remember too, that red wine would come into the European enquiries a lot more. My tutor liked to hold his tutorials in the pub, like a good British academic. But I digress).  For  me, I enjoyed the challenge. It also clear that there’s nothing like it for training a legal mind or developing specific skills in oral advocacy and legal reasoning, and most students find the process traumatic. If ever I’m in the position of being a professor, I’m going to use it, or a modified version of it (obviously I am not going to traumatise my students. This is Blighty after all, and it just wouldn’t be cricket).

I lamented – and perhaps I still do – the lack of jurisprudence and real intellectual enquiry in the American legal training. This is perhaps why the best scholarship in law comes out of Europe, and not out of America.  But the American method is first rate in training deadly advocates.  I’m supremely glad I get the best of both worlds, studying under the solid academic training provided in Europe and the razor-sharp adovacy and reasoning skills you get with the American system.

The lack of intellectual pursuit (no-one has time to look into the deeper meaning of the law when you have 50 pages of cases to brief) and the pressure results in a shrinking of ones circle and universe. It was particularly acute at Handong, where we were also walled up on a campus in the middle of rice paddies with no where to go.  What this video says about law school is true of Handong apart from the sex and booze – because basically we lived 4 to a room and there was no alchohol allowed on campus – about the high-school like mentality. The gossiping and bullying drove me nuts. I refused to participate in it and was “punished” by being made the target of gossiping and malicious rumour as a result.    Apparently its the same at other US-style law schools too (although I do think the distinctly Korean flavour of mine, coupled with its geographical isolation, would have made these law schools look like a cake-walk in comparison).

I am though, still a scholar at heart, interested in the bigger picture, in the deeper questions. And I suppose that’s why I recognised myself in the video below, as the “Gunner” at law school. Scholars and Practitioners are not always the best of pals.

But something else is also true.  Gunner’s don’t get called on in class.

I’ll suppress the urge to blow a raspberry at all those kids in that video.

I feel rather downcast today as I realise that I am experiencing reverse culture shock a little. To be honest, it was way too easy to leave Scotland, and aside from my family, there is nothing here that I find inspiring other than the odd Celtic music festival (and lets face it, Ireland’s just next door).  I was the child and grandchild of migrants, and therefore, in the pedantic tribalism that makes up Scottish culture in general and Ayrshire culture in particular, I have always been at the natural edge of things. A wiegukyin, outlander, in fact.  I have often been given cause to reflect that the things that drove me bonkers about the Koreans – the tribalism, the inner circles, the extreme distrust of everyone and everything, but especially outsiders, are also sharply present in Scottish society except to a lesser degree.  We invented golf and freemasonary, for crying out loud. Exclusion is our second nature.

Today I went to Glasgow and realised that the move to England will be psychologically very easy. I will be the migrant again, this time within the boarders of the UK, which has meaning only for politicians, journalists, soldiers and diplomats.   Fragments of India, even bits of Korea with its sad beauty, still more of Mexico and Colombia, have wedged themselves in the fiber of my soul, and my soul has grown over them like bone over titanium.

And the words of the blues song, echoing at the back of my mind since the time I heard it:

I’m a stranger here /A stranger there Lord knows that I’m a stranger everywhere

I would go home/But I’m a stranger there.  

But if you ask me where I would give anything to be right, now, at this moment, it would be sitting in the courtyard of a little slum school in the Me Quejo district of Barranquilla, Colombia a place which probably isn’t on the map, watching the boys fly their prisoner kites, all hope on the wing.

Me Quejo means “I cry”, or, more figuratively “The Neighbourhood of Tears”, but it struck me today, watching the people I once identified as my people, their faces twisted with strain, and stress and debt and fear, that I always saw them laughing and smiling: those desplazados who had lost everything to hired thugs with guns.

Would that they would lend me some of their irrepressible hope, their unquenchable spirit right now. Because its us, not them, that inhabit the country of tears.