to be shocked by parents of some university students

[giraffesCantZumba]

My friend works in the graduation office, this time of year is really busy for her so been working weekends/long hours etc. She was venting to me about this and says she gets 3/4 parents a day phoning trying to sort out their childs graduation for them! ANd become totally outraged when told that it is confidential and they can only deal with the student. When do the apron strings get cut?!

Often its because student has totally missed the deadline for paying graduation fees and they are outraged as their poor dc had no idea.

Ephiny - "The university department where I work recently made several academics redundant, supposedly for focusing too much of their time and efforts on teaching, and not bringing in enough research funding or keeping up their publication count. These were some of the most popular and respected lecturers/tutors with the students."

Absolutley. That is a perfect example of what I said above. Students are just seen as cashflow that pays for the buildings and admin and lecturer basic salaries. They do not matter other than the cash they bring in.

Research ranking is all that matters because that is what a university bases its reputation on.

Beta I'm sure you have a lot of experience of this sort of thing, but honestly, what you are saying just does not ring true. At my previous RG post, I worked with people who are 'household names' in their field (i.e., in academic terms, more than 10 people have heard of them ) and they were fully committed to teaching.

Both places where I have worked would not allow 'newly minted postdocs' in lecture theatres - quite the reverse - there is a trend for not employing postdocs at all. All the staff in my dept lecture, even the Head of School, and that was true also at the RG uni I used to work at - the Head was a well-known professor of Victorian history who supervised undergrad dissertations and taught on the Victorian module. Staff at both places were hired for their excellence at 'research-led teaching', meaning that we are actively expected to have our research lead the creation of new modules or the writing of new lectures.

And of course we should be doing research (she says guiltily!) - we are not schoolteachers. All this 'pressure on the quality of teaching' crap is no such thing: what people mean is they want to dumb down university teaching by turning us into glorified secondary school teachers. Lecturers ought to be doing research half the time, and spending the other half bringing their knowledge into the classroom. When people talk about 'teaching quality', what they mean is, they want us to stop writing books which change the field, and start making pointless glossy-glossy websites with blogs to encourage student engagement, and handholding tutorials to talk them through the basics they should've learnt at A-level.

It isn't excellence, it's rubbish :(

Anyhow. /rant over/

Some parents would get a real shock if their children ever attended a foreign university.

We British students were scoffed at on my year abroad for being spoonfed kiddies who needed our hands held before we could learn anything. Our foreign peers were expected to get on with it on their own, without tutorials but with demanding, two hour lectures. They organised study groups, did their own research without reading lists and planned their own revision. It was bloody hard but an eye-opener that stood me in very good stead once I started my working life.

Anecdotally, I can back up what Beta says. I attended an event in Paris last year where alumni of my (RG) university were addressed by the Vice-Chancellor. The audience was composed almost entirely of former undergraduate or Masters level students, ie people who had spent time at that particular university in a teaching environment; the VC gave an address entirely focused on balancing the university's books, its role in the local economy and on research issues. Which is a bit of a giveaway as to where his priorities lie!

EldritchCleavage - I wonder where that was? Most continental European universities are in a dire mess and students learn very little indeed in them, for the very reasons you describe!

I am really surprised MoreBeta that the scenario you describe is on the rise in your wife's university now - it sounds much more like the way things were going in (some - not all) universities around 15 years ago, when the RAE frenzy was first being stoked. My current experience is much more like that described by RevoltingPeasant - the emphasis is swinging away from research and towards teaching/the 'student experience' (I am at an RG uni). But we still have to be excellent at research too of course...

It seems to me that your wife's uni has very poor strategic leadership and is drastically out of step with trends in the rest of the sector. She might want to think about looking for a job elsewhere, as somewhere that is so poorly aligned with wider priorities in HE is likely to struggle in the very tough environment that lies ahead of us.

The thing is, it's easy to say in a general way that people ought to be able to stand on their own two feet by such and such age, and that if they're not they're doomed - sink or swim etc. I imagine it's a lot harder if you're not talking about students as a whole but just one person, your child or family member, and you suspect they're sinking.

I would imagine that some of the types of phone calls where people are asking if their child is attending lectures or how they're doing could come from that sort of scenario. The hand being held out by the parent then might not be one that refuses to let go but one that's just offering to help and is struggling to find the right way.

I don't think any parent should be rushing in and doing things for their kids willy nilly, trying to lead the way in decisions, relieve them of all responsibility and so on. Helicopter parenting, I agree. On the other hand, just waving them off and disinterestedly observing three years later whether or not they've got a degree, with no interest taken in between, in the interests of 'letting them sink or swim' - that would be going too far to the opposite extreme. You can help without doing something for someone else. You can give someone guidance to get out of a mess and leave them with the skill to do it for themselves next time. Academic skills and life skills aren't exactly the same thing and some people can be further ahead with one compared to the other.

Not every student who fails is just lazy or disengaged and deserves to be left to sink unhelped. University pastoral care is an emergency safety net but no substitute for friends and family noticing and being interested in what's happening to a person, before things have gone so badly wrong that they can't be helped and end up dropping out. (Can you tell what nearly happened to me?)

I can see the problem with data protection etc. and that parents ringing up to get information just may not work, it might be the wrong way to go about it. But I think it's making a sweeping generalisation (and a bit callous) to imply that any parent interacting directly with a university must be a helicopter parent who is only motivated by a stupid desire not to let go, and that anyone who ever relies on the help of family ought instead to be somehow filtered out of the academic gene pool and just left to sink.

Excellent post mayslips

Bonsoir,
I don't endorse it as a general approach, but it was good for us as it was only one year and a pretty good corrective to the slightly too swaddled atmosphere of my (very good) subject department at my home university.

Yes, mayslips, excellent post. You are quite right.

EldritchCleavage - pupils at Lycée in France are now required to do a piece of group work on a topic decided by the pupils themselves as part of their bacc programme. The bacc programme is, for the most part, highly prescriptive. I think it's a good idea when there is a combination of tightly structured teaching and more autonomous work, with the proviso that pupils (and students) need to be pro-actively taught to manage both sorts of work effectively.

Mayslips, these are not children, though. They are adults. By the age of 18 - certainly by 20 - it really is not parents' responsiblity.

I do not see much wrong with waving them off and leaving them to it.

It was none of my parents' business how my degree went. (And my parents are academics, btw, and both had attended the university I was at.)

capergirls - well DW is evaluating her position for the reasons you say. In fact she just opened up her uni email to find they just added yet another degree programme which she will be expected to teach on but had not been discussed with her. Its just a bunch of courses pulled together that are already taught on other programmes, rebadged and repackaged as a new degree course to try and bring in more students.

Very much as Bonsoir said, the real priorities of Vice Chancellors are not focussed on course quality. In fact where DW works they just got rid of two highly regarded senior lecturers and replaced them with post docs. Its not what they say to students/parents but what they do that gives it away.

I really strongly advise parents to look very closely at the degree courses that their children are applying for. Support them to the hilt if the quality does not match expectations. It is not good enough to put 200 undergrads in a lecture theatre with a zero experience post doc teaching them. That is what is really happening in at least some cases. Frankly, you would be better reading a book on the subject and save the money.

Sorry that was for campergirls.

"Frankly, you would be better reading a book on the subject and save the money."

Now I am all grown up, I read books about things I wish to learn about. Surely university is about a combination of teaching, private reading, discussion and formulation of thoughts in essay form to enable you to learn to read critically? Just reading a book is not always good enough - there is no guarantee that any book is right!

I have not seen the kind of parenting mentioned in the OP. I've met many concerned, interested parents, who care about their children's education and want to help them. I am only too happy at open days, or informally, to advise students and their parents about their choices and options.

On the contrary, I do, sadly, see many students who are struggling precisely because their parents aren't supporting them enough (and support needn't always be financial). It it these students who suffer mental health problems, not their better supported peers.

On the subject of recent funding changes and how it might transform the academic scene, perhaps we, as academics, could use the changes, potentially destructive though they may be, to put teaching back at the centre of university life and reject the tyranny of the REF (RAE) which has resulted in the overproduction of "research" and encouraged a divisive management culture to flourish.

Sorry to hear that MoreBeta, going by your last post it doesn't sound like a good place to work, in addition to the issues I mentioned earlier. I find it really shocking that she can be treated in the way you describe. And it can't lead to good things for students, as well as being awful for staff. It would really not happen where I work though - one of the things that is becoming very clear from this thread is that standards are hugely variable across the university sector.

(apologies btw for the rather bossy tone of my earlier post, who am I to give your wife career advice!).

Mayslips - of course families will want to help and support each other in life. That's a good thing. My aunt and uncle give a lot of support to my cousin, who is in his 40s and has MH issues which often mean that he struggles with his job. And it definitely helps. But they do it by being kind to him when he needs a refuge, or talking through strategies he can use at work - not by ringing up his boss to ask her to give him special treatment. I can't agree with you that that is appropriate where adults are concerned. And parents ringing up a university on behalf of their adult children is the same as ringing their employed offspring's boss, as several posters have pointed out.

IME the parents who do it have never been those whose kids are the first generation in their family to go to university, and who genuinely don't know that this might not be the right strategy. It is those who have been to university themselves, possess a fair amount of cultural capital and a highly developed sense of entitlement, and are confident in their ability to play the system. So to engage with them would - again, as others have pointed out - be to entrench unfairness, in an education system that is already, frankly, riddled with it.

Bonsoir: 'Surely university is about a combination of teaching, private reading, discussion and formulation of thoughts in essay form to enable you to learn to read critically?' Yes! beautifully put, and a great counterbalance to the highly instrumental, teach-to-the-test culture that is seeping into universities from the school system (and for which I do not blame individual teachers in any way).

Nothing I said about students sometimes needing support applies only to children, or depends on the person getting the help being a child rather than an adult.

I'm not a child, but at times I need help and support from my partner, my siblings, my friends (and I give it back). Students who go off at 17 or 18 don't have the networks of mature support we count on as adults (especially not in the first year). A parent who takes an interest isn't blindly continuing with the role they had when their child was a child, they're moving into a new, different, more distant but not disinterested role.

I'm not trying to justify parental interference (or phone calls to universities, which I acknowledged might not be the right way to go about it) - just saying that I think characterising all concerned parents as mollycoddlers is probably unfair. Sometimes they've probably got good reason for concern and their interest could make all the difference in helping someone get properly onto their own two feet and living and studying successfully.

Hang on - where did I say it was appropriate for someone to phone up a person's boss and ask for special treatment? That's your inference - you've made some massive leaps there.

This is the attitude that makes me a bit sad. The meme that there are entitled and mollycoddling parents there is strong, and therefore that is all someone can see.

I'm sure there are entitled and mollycoddling parents out there - all I was saying is that that's not the only thing that can be going on any time a parent is concerned. But to you, that is the only possible interpretation of parental concern - an attempt to get special treatment. I think that's a shame.

"not by ringing up his boss to ask her to give him special treatment. I can't agree with you that that is appropriate where adults are concerned"

Talk about twisting someone's words, or just making them up. I said nothing of the kind, and it wasn't even implied by what I said!

'I would imagine that some of the types of phone calls where people are asking if their child is attending lectures or how they're doing could come from that sort of scenario. The hand being held out by the parent then might not be one that refuses to let go but one that's just offering to help and is struggling to find the right way.' I read that as endorsing parents ringing up universities to monitor their child's participation. We don't routinely give that information to parents (for good reasons that have been extensively explained on this thread), so the very fact of asking for it does indeed constitute a request for special treatment. Apologies if I misinterpreted. Perhaps 'struggling to find the right way' carried more weight for you than it did in my reading of your post - your post at 14:34:44 suggests that it did, so I'm sorry about that.

I did agree with your general point about families helping each other, so I could flip your 'meme' criticism right back at you - you have focused on one highly specific area of disagreement/misreading in my post (but your meme is 'academics are insensitive to parents' concerns'), ignoring the fact that we are generally in agreement.

A possible MH issue is exactly the type of situation where I could imagine trying to contact a university directly myself. I find it really sad that if I did that I could be rebuffed by someone priding themselves on not engaging with me on the basis that by definition those parents who call are only those with a sense of entitlement trying to play the system.

I didn't say 'by definition', I said IME! On the rare occasions when (as I said a long way up the thread) a really serious issue has made it impossible for students to deal with us direct, of course we have worked with parents. But that is not the primary issue that this thread is about - it's about parents handling the day-to-day business of adult life on behalf of their children

Does it not risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, though?

I wasn't really expecting anyone to disagree that families help each other, but you're right, we do agree on that :).

This thread may have been about some parents handling day-to-day life for their kids, but the 'sink or swim' attitude from some people is one that I felt needed a bit of quibbling with. As I said - it's easy to say that when you're talking about lots of people none of whom are you or your child. Not so easy in reality when someone is about to sink before your eyes.