ICT4D Collective and Centre recognised as world’s 10th top science and technology think tank

I am deeply humbled that the ICT4D Collective and Research Centre that we tentatively created at Royal Holloway, University of London, back in 2004 has just been recognised as the world’s 10th top Science and Technology Think Tank in the 2012 Global GoTo Think Tank Report launched at the World Bank and the United Nations in New York last week.  This accolade is all the more special because the ranking is based very largely on peer review, and therefore reflects the opinions of many people in the field who I respect enormously.  More than 1950 experts and peer institutions participated in the ranking process for the report which was produced by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Collective was established above all else to bring together colleagues who are committed to undertaking the highest possible quality of research in the interests primarily of poor people and marginalised communities.  Its work is premised on the assumption that ICTs can indeed be used to support poor people, but that we need to work tirelessly to overcome the obstacles that prevent this happening.

In 2007, we were delighted that the Collective and Centre was given the status of the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D, and although I am now only an Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway, I am very privileged that for the time being I retain this title while also serving as Secretary General of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation.  It is great to be able to draw on my past research and teaching experience in this new role, to help governments across the Commonwealth use ICTs effectively and appropriately for their development agendas.

Then, in 2009 Royal Holloway, University of London, formalised the position of the ICT4D Collective by creating a new multidisciplinary research centre on ICT4D, that brought together expertise primarily from the schools and departments of Geography, Computer Science, Management and Mathematics (Information Security), with contributions also from colleagues in Earth Sciences, Politics and International Relations, and Information Services.  This provides really excellent opportunities to develop new research at the exciting boundaries between disciplines.

Over the eight years of the existence of the ICT4D Collective, we have focused on a wide range of activities, but have particularly sought to serve the wider interests of all researchers and practitioners working in the field of ICT4D.  We were thus delighted to host the 2010 ICTD conference, which brought more than 500 colleagues to our campus, and we were immensely grateful to the generous sponsorship from global institutions that enabled us to provide scholarships for people to attend from across the world (pictured above).  We have also focused much attention on supporting doctoral researchers, and it is excellent to see them now flourishing in their subsequent careers.

Most recently, under new leadership, the Centre is continuing to thrive, and has launched an exciting ICT4D strand within its established Master’s programme on Practising Sustainable Development.  In 2012, a Branch of the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D was also established at Lanzhou University in China, reflecting the growing collaboration between our two institutions, and recognising the huge importance that China is increasingly playing not only in terms of the practical implementation of ICT initiatives, but also into research in this area.

A huge thank you to all who suggested that the ICT4D Collective and Centre should be recognised in this way.  It is a massive spur to us all to keep up the work that we have been doing, and to share it more effectively with all those interested in, and committed to, using ICTs to support poor people and marginalised communities.

The top 20 ranking of Think Tanks in Science and Technology from the 2012 Global GoTo Think Tank Report is given below:

1. MIT Science, Technology, and Society Program (STS) (United States)
2. Max Planck Institute (Germany)
3. RAND Corporation (United States)
4. Center for Development Research (ZEF) (Germany )
5. Information and Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) (United States)
6. Battelle Memorial Institute (United States)
7. Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) (United States)
8. Institute for Future Technology (IFTECH) (Japan)
9. Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) (United States)
10. Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) (United Kingdom)
11. Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU) (United Kingdom)
12. Institute for Basic Research (IBR) (United States)
13. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) (South Africa)
14. African Technology Policy Studies Network (ATPS) (Kenya)
15. Bertelsmann Foundation (Germany)
16. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) (Austria)
17. Energy and Resources Institute (India)
18. The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) (India)
19. Santa Fe Institute (SFI) (United States)
20. African Center for Technology Studies (ACTS) (Kenya)

On critical thinking…

I overheard a strange and depressing conversation about critical thinking at last month’s otherwise excellent Online Educa conference in Berlin. Ever since then it has been nagging away at my mind.  So many of those involved in the conversation seemed to have a conceptualisation of critical thinking that is so totally at odds with my own!  For many of them, critical thinking seemed to be something destructive, a form of negative criticism of the works of others. Critical thinking, in their views, was all too often damaging, destroying the confidence of young academics, and a means through which supervisors impose and re-enforce power relations over their doctoral students.  This is so alarmingly different from my own perspective, that I feel I should share some of my thoughts here, not only to contribute to the debate, but also so that others may perhaps gain some insight into alternative views of critical thinking.  Here, then, are my list of the ten most important aspects of critical thinking.

1. First, critical thinking is something hugely positive. It should be very far from the negative caricature summarised above.
2. It is a way of creating new knowledges, rather than simply encouraging the regurgitation of accepted truths.  All too often, universities across the world today focus on teaching students accepted truths that they then learn and regurgitate in examinations, rather than liberating them to think for themselves.
3. Critical thinking is therefore hugely creative, a way of encouraging people to craft new ideas that will hopefully better explain, or help us to understand, the world in which we live.
4. It is fundamentally concerned with questioning and challenging accepted norms and arguments, weighing them up both through the power of reason and logic, but also through empirical experience to see which, for the moment, can continue to be accepted as approximations to some truth.
5. My notions of critical thinking derive heavily from my engagement with the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and especially the writings of Jürgen Habermas (notably Theorie und Praxis. Sozialphilosophische Studien, Neuwied, 1963, and Erkenntnis und Interesse. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1968).  In particular, for me, Critical Theory provides two important underpinnings for critical thinking: its emphasis on the interests behind all knowledges, and its focus on emancipation.
   • There is no such thing as value free science.  All science or knowledge, is created by individuals, or groups of sentient people, for particular purposes.  We must therefore understand these interests, and indeed our own interests, if we are to reach agreement on the extent to which such ideas can be accepted as accounting for any particular observations of reality.  Critical thinking is in part about understanding the interests underlying any claim to knowledge.
   • The ultimate purpose of critical thinking is about emancipation, both for the individual thinker, but also perhaps more importantly for the wider community of which that thinker is a part.
6. Critical thinking is self-reflective, requiring a conscious consideration of how and why a particular set of thoughts comes into being.  In this sense, it is an ancient tradition, going back at least to Socrates, but being developed by scholars such as Dewey (Moral Principles in Education, SIU Press, 1909), and more recently Glaser (An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking, Columbia University, 1941) and Ennis (Critical Thinking, Prentice Hall, 1996).
7. Critical thinking is committed to action. This, again, derives in part from my own commitment to Critical Theory, but it emphasises that thinkers must also be actors.  Unless knowledge is shared, in a sense liberated from the confines of the thinker’s own body, then its creation is a purely selfish, indeed arrogant process.  If society permits some of its members to be set apart for thinking (most usually in universities), then it is incumbent on those thinkers to ensure that the outputs of their thinking are indeed used for the betterment of society.
8. Critical thinking involves serendipitous rigour (about which I have written elsewhere).  We need both to be rigorous in ensuring that we create places for serendipity, and likewise be rigorous in how we respond to serendipitous occurrences.  Serendipity is essential to the creative aspect of critical thinking.
9. Critical thinking requires clarity of method.  I do not want to be prescriptive in defining any single particular set of methods, not least because many such lists already exist (Glaser, 1941; Fisher, Critical Thinking: An Introduction, CUP, 2001), but most of these focus on the importance of reason, logic, judgement, argument, inference and analysis.
10. Finally, for me critical thinking is fundamentally about those who are privileged enough to be thinkers, using their thinking skills to enhance society and not just selfishly for themselves; it is, in particular, to use such thinking to help and enable the poorest and most marginalised individuals to improve their lives.  This is not just about action (point 7 above), but about action committed to a particular social and political cause.

There are, of course, many other aspects of critical thinking, but reflecting on that conversation in Berlin, these seem to me to be the most pertinent responses. Let me conclude, though, with a quotation from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (Penguin, 1966, p.21), “‘Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is that not witty? Naturally, they won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown”.  I used this years ago as the introduction to one of my chapters in The Place of Geography and it still seems as pertinent now as it did then!

Advice for students on ICT4D programmes…

I’ve just had a great question posed to me by Brooke Kania: “I was just wondering, what are you looking for in students who are coming out of IDEV or ICT4D programs – what do you think the field needs from academic training? What advice would you give to aspiring ICT4D professionals?”.  The question is easy; the answer is not!  Fueled by a couple of very good glasses of Chianti, let me have a go at responding.  Here then are the ten things I would look for, and also some reflections as to why:

• A willingness to cross boundaries.  The great thing about ICT4D is that it is not (yet) a specific discipline, but brings together people from many different backgrounds.  Exciting things happen at the edges!  Get a computer scientist and a philosopher talking together, and great things can happen.  The only trouble is that most academic ‘life’ is now about becoming the global expert in a tiny field of academic enquiry, and despite the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, old disciplinary boundaries remain strong!
• Understanding the real needs of users.  Far too many ICT4D projects are invented by academics who have little clue about what the real needs of users actually are, and they are then surprised that the projects fail!  In part, this reflects the tyranny of the one year Master’s programme or three-year PhD, that limits the potential for a researcher to go into the field, really discover what would then make a difference to the lives of poor people, and then work with them to develop technologies that can really serve their interests.
• Humility.  The Academy is all too often about ‘experts’ and people who claim to ‘have all the answers’.  In my experience, that is the death of enquiry and exploration.  There is much truth in the statement that “the more I know, the more I realise how little I know”.  Interestingly, I think I have met more ‘bright’ people outside universities than I have within them!  Far too often, academics create a language of obfuscation, to prevent others from understanding how ignorant they really are!
• Being technically sound. ICT4D is fundamentally about technology – not necessarily in an instrumentalist way, but it is definitely concerned with technology, both how it is shaped by society, and also how it shapes society.  It is therefore essential that everyone working in the field of ICT4D does indeed have some technical grasp of technology.  That does not mean the impossible, in other words that everyone must understand all the relevant technologies, but it does mean that we should all have some pertinent technical expertise.  Thank goodness that  I learnt to programme in Fortran as a student!
• A focus on really understanding ‘development’.  This is difficult, very difficult.  There are many definitions of what development is about, but anyone working in the field of ICT4D must address this question in their own way.  For me, development is about addressing the appalling inequalities that exist in our societies, and this is something very, very different from the hegemonic view that development is actually mainly about economic growth.  Capitalist economic growth can never eliminate poverty, and the sooner we abandon this misguided nonsense the sooner the world’s poor and marginalised people will be able to live the lives to which they aspire.
• Get some real ‘development’ experience!  This is tricky for a student, but it is really impossible to understand the challenges and intricacies of ‘development’, however we define it, unless we have experienced it practically on the ground.  For some 20 years I did research and taught about development, but I never worked for a development agency, the private sector, or civil society organisation in that time.  In six months working for a bilateral donor agency, I learnt more about the practice of development than I did in most of my previous research on the subject!
• Recognition that ICT4D is a moral, rather than a technical agenda.  This is closely linked to the above point, but I think it is different.  ICT4D should be about the normative – what should be – rather than what actually is.  Academics are generally quite good about describing what exists, but far too few go beyond this to suggest what they think should happen in the light of their analyses .  This is irresponsible!  Academics are hugely privileged, and they abrogate the trust placed in them by society if they do not use their research to make the world a better place.  They can only do this by having a vision for what the world could be like, and then engaging in political action to help shape that world.
• An ability to engage in critical analysis.  This should lie at the heart of all academic enquiry, but all too often it doesn’t!  Far too much academic research repeats the obvious, albeit dressing it up in grandiose terms.  If we want to explain or understand a phenomenon, we have to keep asking the question “why?”.  I read so many papers that fail to do this!  If the interviews, questionnaires, or experiments that are undertaken do not seek to say why something is observed, then they remain purely descriptive and fail to add to our real understanding.  If you are a social scientist, just look at the questions asked in interviews, focus groups or questionnaires.  There will usually be many “what?”, “where?”, “when” or “who?” questions, but far fewer “how?” questions, and even fewer “why?” questions!  If we do not ask “why?”, we fail really to move knowledge forward.
• Freedom to fail!  Far too much academic work is about getting students to regurgitate accepted truths – especially the opinions of those who teach them!  What we do not seem to allow students is the opportunity to experiment and fail.  I tend to think that people generally learn more from their mistakes than they do from their successes.  So, my advice would be to try something new, and not worry about the risk of failing.  That is where true innovation comes from.  In job interviews, I often tend to ask people about one of their failures, and then get them to think about what they learnt from it.  Those who claim never to have failed, don’t come up to the mark – especially in my book!
• Be a good team player. It was difficult to think of a tenth piece of advice – there is so much that could be said.  However, I am convinced that ICT4D is about good team work.  None of us have all the necessary skills, and so if we are going to develop appropriate solutions, we must be able to work effectively together.  Far too much academic work is now about individual success – and we have lost the collective enterprise that so inspired me as a young academic.  Wisdom, scholarship and development are above all collective enterprises, and we need to embark on them together.

So, Brooke, I hope this gives you some ideas of my thinking right now.  Don’t get me wrong, this is not a tirade against the Academy.  Far from it.  Universities are a hugely precious element in our societies, and I value them enormously.  It is just, I fear, that too many institutions and individual academics have lost their way, and have become merely another tool in the hands of those who do not want us to be free.  Ultimately, it is hugely difficult for those committed to implementing real change in our societies to be based within universities; I have tremendous respect for those who remain fighting for their integrity and sanity.  ICT4D is about engagement, not just about writing papers in academic journals that few people will ever read.  Those who determine our research agendas should be the world’s poor and marginalised.

Latest UK Higher Education Statistics

The UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency has just published its latest data on student enrolments and qualifications obtained for the academic year 2010/11.  Key findings include:

• just over 2.5 million people are enroled in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)
• slightly more students are doing postgraduate courses (up 2% since 2009/10), with slightly fewer doing undergraduate ones
• UK domiciled students account for 83% of all enrolments
• there is some considerable volatility in subject areas: for undergraduates enrolments in agriculture and related subjects increased 11% between 2009/10, whereas for architecture, building and planning, they decreased 6%; for postgraduates the greatest increase was in mathematical sciences (8%), whereas computer science numbers declined 6%.
• 64% of students gained an upper second or first class degree; more women than men achieved such degrees (65% of full-time students received such degrees; 51% of part-time students) (see Table 6 of HESA statistics).

One of the most striking of these findings is the continual grade inflation that is taking place in higher education.  In  2006/7 only 60% of all students gained upper second or first class degrees.  Going back in time, in 2000/01 only 54% of full-time students gained such degrees, and in 1994/95 it was 49% (HESA statistics).  Such inflation is hardly surprising, given that institutions are increasingly being judged externally by this measure.  I doubt that it is improvements in the quality of teaching that have led to such results.

Typical measures that universities use to inflate such results operate both at the institutional level through the mechanisms that are used to turn marks into overall grades, but also in the ways through which marks for courses are derived.  Institutionally, the following are typical mechanisms that have been used:

• introducing systems that ignore the worst marks achieved
• weighting the overall portfolio of marks in ways that lead to higher overall grades
• introducing mechanistic processes for candidates just below a threshold that automatically elevate them to the higher grade
• reducing the amount of unseen terminal examinations, and increasing the amount of easier types of assessment at which students perform better

At the more individual level, academics are also judged by the quality of results obtained by students doing their courses, and so it is quite common to find academics who:

• give strong hints at the subject matter that will be coming up in unseen exams
• give substantial amounts of help to students on assignments, such as dissertations, that are meant to be independent
• decide to be that little bit more generous at the margins, choosing to emphasise the stronger points over the weaker ones
• restructure their courses so that they contain elements that students find it easier to do well in

It could be argued that each of these is desirable, and that we should indeed be rewarding our good students for the efforts that they put in.  The fundamental point to be noted, though, is that getting a ‘good’ degree in 2011 means something very different from getting an upper second or first even a decade ago.

ACU Session at WISE 2011: Doctorates, development and the brain drain

I was delighted to be able to help the Association of Commonwealth Universities run a workshop on “Doctorates, development and and brain drain” at the recent World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) held in Doha from 1st-3rd November.  This focused on four key themes:

• the purposes of a PhD and the characteristics of those who have PhDs
• the quality of a PhD; do we need standards?
• alternative modes of delivery for doctorates
• the brain drain

Although the number of participants was small, the discussion was highly interesting, and the mind map below attempts to capture what we discussed (click WISE 2011 for a .pdf version).

Shadow Scholars, plagiarism and academic merceneries

Ages ago a friend, knowing of my interests in the extent of plagiarism in higher education, sent me a link to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled The Shadow Scholar: the man who writes your students’ papers tells his story.  In a nutshell, this tells ‘the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed’. Although it refers primarily to the US context, it provides a salutary tale for all those involved in helping university students to learn.  Above all, it should remind us that such practices are becoming increasingly commonplace.  In the month that followed its original publication, the report attracted 640 comments, and these are also well worth a read.

On re-reading it today, I am even more convinced that it should become required reading for academics and students alike!

On ‘retirement’…

Around 18 months ago, Royal Holloway, University of London offered a severance/early retirement deal for staff, and after much reflection I decided to apply.  My application was accepted, and I will therefore be ‘leaving’ the College in the autumn after 30 years working there – although I am delighted that I have been appointed as an Emeritus Professor, and so I will still be retaining very close links involving both teaching and research!

Many friends have asked why I have chosen to leave, and so I thought I would share my reflections here.  They say much about the state of British higher education in the 21st century. I was appointed to Bedford College back in 1981, and have many great memories of my times both there and in the merged institution of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College.  It has been a wonderful place to teach and do research, and I have had some amazing colleagues.  However, UK universities have changed so much in this period that I no longer feel that I can really achieve what I want to do within the confines of this environment.  Let me try to explain why.  I guess there are five main reasons for my decision:

• a decline in collegiality amongst academics within universities
• changing student attitudes to being at university
• institutional and individual approaches to learning and teaching
• a failure to promote Geography as the important discipline that it is
• institutional leadership

The decline in collegiality

One of the main reasons I am leaving is quite simply because the sense of collegiality that I participated in as a young academic has been eroded to such an extent that I no longer enjoy the spirit of shared intellectual adventure that lay at the heart of university life when I began my career. Many academics are now so absorbed in advancing their own careers that they have almost no time for their colleagues or their students.  Long gone, for example, are the mid-morning and late-afternoon coffee and tea breaks when administrative, technical and academic staff would all come together to share a few minutes of each other’s company.

At the time of the merger of Bedford and Royal Holloway Colleges in the mid-1980s, I explicitly chose to live near the campus so that I could participate fully in its life – and be collegial.  Rather few people now do so. Many ‘colleagues’ live far away and seem to spend more of their working lives off campus than they do on it. Colleagues who absent themselves are not there to support the students, are not there to attend seminars, are not there to answer the inevitable minor queries, are not there to share research ideas, and are not there to support each other. What has really saddened me is the way in which some young colleagues claim to be collegial and yet their actions seem to suggest that they have no idea what the word means.

Perhaps I was foolish not to be more careerist myself, but what I loved was my research and teaching, and all that mattered was that I should earn the respect of my colleagues and students for what I did.  When I returned to Holloway in 2004 after my secondment to DFID, I therefore specifically created a ‘Collective’, to try to rekindle that mutual support for colleagues and students that I had valued so much – and still believe in.  Ultimately this has not really succeeded in the way I had hoped, in part because it runs counter to the selfish arrogance that drives so many academics today.  It also saddens me that some young academics expect me – as a professor – to be hierarchical and cannot understand that I truly believe in the communal values that lie at the heart of sharing knowledge.

As for the causes of this changed mentality, it is clear that the fragmentation of unified pay scales, the introduction of the research assessment exercise, and increased competition between departments and institutions for the ‘best’ academics have all paid their part.  However, we as academics are also to blame, in that we have not stood up to these changes vehemently enough, and have insufficiently emphasised the critical importance of collegiality in our endeavours.  That having been said, I should also say without any hesitation that there are some brilliant young academics in our department, who are indeed collegial.  Their life is tough, very tough, and I wish them well in trying to retain their humanity and love for the discipline.

Student attitudes

Throughout my career, I have vacillated between being angry that many students do not work hard enough, and being sorry for them that our society has shaped them in this way.  More often than not, I have sympathised with them, and done my best to enthuse them with my love for Geography, and the crucial importance of rigorous academic enquiry. Perhaps I am retiring in part because I taught second year human geography techniques for too long!  Excessive alcoholic indulgence by some students after sports fixtures the previous day, often meant that half the class was absent for my techniques lectures on Thursday morning, and many of those that were there  seemed disinterested in participating. Small wonder that they had difficulties doing the practical classes; small wonder that many did poor dissertations.

The average number of hours that students study a week during term time in the UK is somewhere between 25 and 30. My expectation of a minimum 40 hours work a week is thus way beyond this, and I have not found a way of reconciling these figures.  I love teaching, but after 30 year of hitting my head against a brick wall, I now want to spend time teaching students who really seem to care about their learning.  Having taught at Peking University recently, where many students seem to spend more than 60 hours a week studying, I feel re-invigorated.  It is scarcely surprising that the Chinese economy is so much more vibrant than is ours in the UK.  All this having been said, we do indeed have some able, keen and enthusiastic students in our department – and I will miss them.  They are just too few in number!  It was brilliant, though, how some of them responded when I offered to teach an extra-curricula course entitled “Critical Practices: an exploration of ideas in Critical Theory and Revolutionary Practice” more than a year ago now.  This was learning and teaching how I wish I could have done it more often.  The course was completely outside the normal curriculum, counted for nothing towards their degree assessment, and was based around discussions between us all.  I enjoyed it hugely, and think that they too seemed to gain something from it.

Approaches to learning and teaching

I have always believed that universities should be about sharing ideas at the frontiers of knowledge, that such intellectual enquiry is therefore challenging, that standards of assessment should be maintained, and that it is essential to treat students as human beings if we are to encourage the critical enquiry that I value so much.  So many of these values have fallen by the wayside: in order to make courses popular they often take the form of learn and regurgitate; in some courses students are more or less told what questions to expect in the exams; students have to be treated as numbers in the name of fairness; we have to send them to ‘experts’ if they have personal issues, rather than first trying to help them ourselves; and we have devised mechanisms for ensuring that they get higher grades than they would have achieved in the past, so that out institutions climb up the various rankings in terms of results and added value! I am often seen as a harsh marker, but why should I change my expectations in a world that is moving towards mediocrity?

The amount of teaching that academics do has been vastly reduced in large part because hitting the research assessment criteria is seen as being more important.  I am probably the only member of staff in our department who gives non-assessed essays to the final year students doing my course.  Around two-thirds of the marks for most courses remain as being based on unseen exams at the end of the year, and yet we do not give students time to practise and have feedback.  My non-assessed/formative essays are seen by some students purely as being an extra burden of work, rather than as an opportunity for them to learn how to write better essays!  I believe that all undergraduates should have to write an essay a week (or produce a similar assignment in subjects where essay writing is not normal practice), and that we should mark them and provide feedback.  How else are they going to improve?

Likewise, I have always expected that undergraduate dissertations should be based on at least a month’s fieldwork.  Yet, many years ago I recall a younger colleague saying that given the pressures that students have to earn income during the vacations it was unrealistic for me to expect such high standards.  So it has increasingly become acceptable for dissertations to be based on a handful of interviews, rather than the detailed rigorous field research that I once expected.  This does not only apply at undergraduate level, but I have also recently been dismayed at the quality of several PhDs that I have examined.  Not only have I identified clear plagiarism in some, but also the amount of field research on which others have been based is totally paltry compared with what I expect from my own students.

In a different but related vein, I have always sought to entertain students for dinners and BBQs at our home, in part to get to know them better so that I can write honest references about them, but also to show that I am human, and care about them as individuals.  Yet, this behaviour is frowned upon by several of my colleagues.  I was therefore very deeply honoured that our students should nominate me successfully for an Apple for the Teacher award from our Students Union this year – this is the greatest complement that they could possibly have paid me, and is one of my most treasured achievements in my 30 year career.

The Place of Geography

I read this morning in an e-mail from our Head of Department that Geography has now dropped out of the top ten subjects in the UK in terms of the number of students studying  at A level; numbers have fallen from 32,063 to 31,226 from 2010 to 2011, a drop of 2.6% in a single year.  This is incredibly sad, and only reinforces the arguments that I made in a recent publication (The role of Geography and Geographers in policy and government departments, in Agnew, J. and Livingstone, D.N. (eds) (2011) The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, London: Sage, 271-284) about how academic geographers have largely failed to engage externally with the public, with politicians, and with schools.  I have always sought to champion the subject in schools and the wider political arena – as reflected in my early work for the Geographical Association – indeed, that was what my book The Place of Geography was explicitly intended to do!

I am also saddened at the way in which many geographers seem so unwilling to defend what to me lies at the core of our discipline: an engagement with the ways in which humans interact with the physical world, and an understanding of how we thereby construct particular places.  By building their careers increasingly on a few tiny areas of intellectual enquiry, geographers have all too often moved away from what I still see as the essence of our discipline.  I have always been fascinated by new ideas – often at the interface of disciplines – and enjoy being able to engage across many different intellectual areas.  So, having worked for 30 years, I now find myself increasingly at odds with the views being advocated by many, but by no means all, of our disciplinary leaders.  Rather than continuing to swim against the tide, I am ‘retiring’ to enable me to do the research, teaching and practical work that I believe in.  There is so much still to be done.

Institutional leadership

Finally, I decided to retire because I was disappointed in the specific institutional leadership in place at Royal Holloway at the time I took the decision.  University Vice Chancellors are a motley crew.  Some, but all too few, are outstanding.  I do not envy them the task – it is immense and complex – but Vice Chancellors and Principals have to show real leadership qualities, they must champion intellectual excellence above all else, they must be wise, they must be fair and transparent, and they must be collegial.  Quite simply, I was no longer convinced that I could achieve the things I wanted to do – especially for the ICT4D Centre – within the confines of the institution where I was.  I felt so much more valued by those outside the institution than I did within it!  At the time, I did not know that we were about to have a new and dynamic Principal, and I am certain that Holloway is on the way up again, having fallen dramatically in profile and achievement under the previous regime.

It is obviously with regrets that I am retiring from Royal Holloway, University of London. I have a huge number of very fond memories – of some amazing colleagues, and great students.   I am indeed therefore delighted to be continuing as an Emeritus Professor, and in this capacity will do all I can to support the institution that I have loved and sought to support for the past 30 years.

Back copies of journals seeking a new home …

I am seeking to dispose of back copies of the journals I have collected over the last 30 years as an academic – but cannot find anyone who might be interested in having them!  I hate to see them simply going to a shredder, but even organisations that send publications to universities without the resources to purchase them now seem to shred back issues and use the money to support online subscriptions instead.

So, if anyone knows of a good home for the following journals, please let me know:

• Advances in Horticultural Science (since c.1990)
• Annals of the Association of American Geographers (since c.1980)
• Area (since c. 1970)
• Australian Wine Research Institute Technical Review (since c.1990)
• Children’s Geographies (since 2002)
• Environmental Ethics (since c.1995)
• Geographical Journal (c. 1985-2000)
• Journal International des Science de la Vigne et du Vin (since c.1990)
• Journal of Geography in Higher Education (since c. 1985)
• Landscape History (since 1980)
• Philosophy and Geography (since 2001)
• Professional Geographer (since c.1980)
• Third World Quarterly (since c. 1990)
• Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (since c.1970)
• Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia (since c. 2000)
• Vitis (since c. 1990)

It seems a great waste to consign these journals to a skip, but unless I have requests for them by the end of September they will have to be shredded.  Please help find a home for them!

Graduation at Royal Holloway, University of London, 2011

Last Friday was graduation day for Geographers at Royal Holloway, University of London. It was great to see three of my former PhD students getting their degrees.  Many congratulations to:

• David Hollow for his thesis Evaluating ICT for Education in Africa
• Charles Howie for his thesis Cooperation and contestation: farmer-state relations in agricultural transformation, An Giang Province, Vietnam
• Uduak Okon  for her thesis ICTs and sustainable community development in the Niger Delta Region, Nigeria

Likewise, it was also good to see so many of our undergraduates – particularly those doing my course on ICT4D – gaining their well deserved degrees.  Three of them – Olly Parsons, Ben Parfitt and Jamie Gregory – are spending time this summer in Uganda undertaking research in support of the Ugunja Community Resource Centre.  To follow them, check out

• Their blog – http://ugunja.wordpress.com/
• On Twitter – http://twitter.com/#!/UgunjaResearch

Many congratulations to all of our graduates!

Reflections on Geography at Bedford College (and then Royal Holloway) in the 1980s

The Geography Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, is hosting an alumni event focusing on the 1980s to be held on 16th July.  As one of the last ‘surviving’ members of staff to have worked at Bedford College, I was asked by Klaus Dodds to write a few words about my recollections, so that they could be included on a poster in the Department.  Just thought that it might be interesting also to post them here, together with some imagery from 20-30 years ago!

“The Department 30 years ago was so much smaller than today – fewer staff, fewer undergraduates, and fewer postgraduates.  It was a world largely without computers.  No e-mails!  One could think, and write, and teach students who were genuinely interested in learning.  It was brilliant!

I distinctly remember being appointed, and joining in 1981.  There were but a handful of jobs advertised in human geography that year.  I had been interviewed for a job at Exeter, but couldn’t hear properly what the panel chair was mumbling!  Needless to say I did not get that job!  My girlfriend was working in London, while I was still living in Durham and working at the Geography Department there.  Then this job came up at Bedford – amazingly the College where my mother had studied mathematics many years previously!  I remember being asked at the interview what it would mean for my personal life if I got the job, and responding that of course it would mean that Pam and I could get married. Imagine being asked such a thing in interviews today!

I was appointed to teach historical geography – and loved it!  I diligently used to write out my lecture notes in full – and read them to my students!!  Scarcely something that new lecturers would do now, in a world of PowerPoint!  But I did use slides on the old projector. I was very little older than the students were, and they forgave me for my nervousness.  I think my enthusiasm must have made up for a lot – medieval taxation documents, field systems, and prehistoric monuments!

One highlight was when the new electronic typewriter with a memory arrived; the precursor for word processors and personal computers.  One day, I was using it when the Departmental Secretary came in and threw me off, saying that she had something important to write.  Suppressing my fury, I left the dark room where it lived, and hit the wall outside with my fist.  My hand crumpled….  I then spent all afternoon running “The Green Revolution Game” with my students; my hand bent in pain.  Only in the early evening did I go to St Thomas’s – and of course they diagnosed a broken hand!

Then there were the great students doing the Master’s course in Third World development.  The course was led by Alan Mountjoy, and attracted bright people from all over the world – some of my favourite teaching ever; if only I was still in touch with some of them – particularly the Egyptian journalist who gave me a photograph of Jürgen Habermas.

And there was the IRA bombing in 1982.  I heard the first blast in Hyde Park whilst I was working at the RGS, and then got back to Bedford to see the debris remaining from the other blast that had taken place at the bandstand just nearby in Regent’s Park.  A sad day.

But the early 1980s was the time of mergers across London.  I became deeply involved in planning for the merger with King’s, and remember being saddened when it was announced that this had fallen through.  Going to Egham did, though, have one advantage in that we did not have to negotiate with another Geography Department already there; we could instead build our own identity from within.  On a personal level, we also decided to move from our rented flat in Kennington out to a newly built house in Englefield Green, on the Larksfield estate.  I remember this being a huge risk, since I had not been made permanent and we bought before it had definitely been confirmed that the merger would go through.

The move meant that we could reorganise our courses, and I recall working with Chris Green and others on a new teaching structure that would mean that our third year courses would become much more research oriented and also applied.  This provided the opportunity for me to launch my new course on the historical geography of viticulture and the wine trade.  At first, this was rejected by the University Geography board as being far too esoteric – but I resubmitted it again pointing out that if there was a course at SOAS on the geography of oil, surely we could teach about viticulture and wine.  After all, the wine trade has been in existence for millennia.  This course also provided an opportunity to work more closely with those in the wine trade, and highlights definitely included the wine tastings and the field trips to Burgundy and Champagne.  Imagine being allowed today to ‘race’ in minibuses across France from vineyard to vineyard and campsite to campsite.  How generous were the winemakers who shared their time and their wines with us!!

But I recall other field trips too: the day excursions to Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire for my second year students, exploring field systems and deserted medieval villages, more often than not in the snow; and then the second year trip to Portugal, again with generous hospitality from friends in the port wine trade.

There were great characters in the Department: Ron Halfhide, who became Departmental Superintendent, and was always the life and soul of the party, helping to arrange wonderful Geographical Society events; David Hilling, the ‘uncle’ figure, who cared for students (and rugby) in ways that we are no longer permitted to do; John Thornes, who as Head of Department told me that I should really make myself the specialist in one area of the discipline, such as the geography of Portugal.  John certainly taught me some lessons!  On his recommendation, I drafted two chapters of ‘the’ book on Portugal, and sent them to a publisher.  The academic referees liked them, but the publisher said that there was no market for a book on agricultural innovation in Portugal.  Never again have I written anything for a book publisher without a contract!

Above all, I remember those days as ones of amazing freedom – when we could craft new knowledge in the innocent ways we believed were right, when we could treat students as friends and not numbers, when collegiality rather than individual selfish career progression mattered.  They were good times”.