There’s a problem with the response, public or private, of many colleagues to complaints about the alleged inferior quality of university teaching this term, that we’ve been working flat out all summer to get it ready and are working far harder than usual now. True; irrelevant.

It’s offering a labour theory of value, that the sheer amount of work we’ve put in must guarantee that it’s at least as good as what was offered in previous years, combined with an implicit claim to authority that *we* know what makes a good university education.

I think there’s a lot of truth in both these ideas - but they are the wrong sort of argument for the marketised higher education system in which we find ourselves, and aren’t going to convince anyone not already in sympathy with the academic perspective.

(And not even all of them, I suspect, given the existence of a loud ‘the only good teaching is proper face-to-face, exchanging ideas and germs teaching’ brigade).

The crude counter-argument: the commodity is worth what people are prepared to pay, and the various ways in which the market is rigged aren’t going to save you. And if you’re working three times as hard to produce an inferior product for the same price, you’re doing it wrong.

It doesn’t help that we’re dealing with a bundled commodity, and that however good we make the documentary channel, that’s not going to cut any ice with people who are furious that the sports channel shows only handball and biathlon, so to speak.

And it’s a reminder that our position is closer to that of industrialised workers rather than a guild of independent artisans. The management position could well be: We didn’t *ask* you to work yourselves into the ground producing bespoke new product...

...we wanted you to produce something as close as possible to the old version, ‘cos that’s what people want, just with cheaper raw materials and under different conditions.

Actually the fact that universities have invested in lots of new software, equipment etc could be taken as a sign that they are still genuinely committed to quality of education, not just to the bottom line.