University changed but is it for the better?
James Ressel is a Law professor at Hertfordshire University, thanks to his experience and his interest not only in his field of study but also in teaching itself, he drew a parallel of his past and current experience at the university.
When I asked James Ressel what was his best and worst time at university he naturally answered...that there wasn’t any bad time for him. ‘I still don’t know who I am’, James thirst for knowledge match with what the university had to offer and allowed him to renew himself.
In a humble and genuine manner, James stated that he still was on the ongoing process of learning, as if he kept a childlike curiosity.
He had not considered studying as an effort, he often found himself digressing in his work and reading an article indirectly related to his primary subject...finding much pleasure in it! ‘This was a most likely to happen scenario at the time of physical records, now with online search engine there is less room for serendipity’ he added.
James describes university today as industrialised: ‘It shackles’ students as a function in an economic system, ‘while to me education is and should be about freedom and finding who you are.’
He pointed out the overwhelming amount of assessments that do not allow the favourable time to go further in their research, to create, to think in-depth. ‘Nonetheless the pressure of the final exam is diluted in this amount of assignment’ he admitted.
‘Back in the time there was less support which incited student to develop their imagination, their own idea and the ensuing critical thinking [...] ‘We forgot the importance of making mistakes whereas it has always been part of the process [...] it seems student were more innovative due to their fearless attitude towards risk, furthermore it favours student to acknowledge what they can and can’t do.’
He also affirmed that to cultivate general culture is essential to cultivate the mind, especially with a subject such as Law which is interconnected with all the other fields :
For James, the student now wants a structured and a formatted content, ‘which insidiously led us to drift towards the myth of objectivity,’ I thought. Indeed I too felt like student thinks of getting different views on a subject as an addition of complexity rather welcoming this diversity as part of the building of their critical thinking.
‘They think Law as a set of rules’ but it doesn’t come down to that, it must be seen with a holistic approach, it reflects our culture, it is deeply political and incites us to express how we see the world. By holistic approach, James referred to a method in humanities that consist in trying to consider all the causes of an event and their interactions to explain this event. Hence the production of laws and case law will by cultural factors as well as circumstantial one.
He likes to remind his students that language is really important and that things that are not said enlighten what we value and what we do not.
Those issues were deeply rooted in James’s PhD (Birbeck Law School) subject, in it, he made a critique of the notion of objectivity in justice.
Another crucial concern for him was individualism :
‘The major trend has shifted from social responsibility to individual responsibility,’ students today are in a market logic where ‘they pay hence they have the right’ as if a degree had become ‘a product among others.’
James regrets the frame of mind that cared about collective responsibility but he concedes that the context was different: ‘There was a fewer student back in the day, fewer economic pressure, studying was inevitably reserved to an elite, we were even paid to study!’
Although motivated by public issues, James did not wait to step into university to read newspapers and talk about those subjects with his parents. James wasn’t a really sociable person but he learnt to be there and he had to. ‘In parties, I was the guy who would start talking politics, maybe that’s why I did not receive this much invitations’ which made us both laugh.
