Lance Mannion

Arthur Conan Doyle's Edinburgh: "Ambition and artistry were in the very air..."

Posted Friday morning, August 14, 2020.

Detail from “Edinburgh Castle and the Grassmarket from Candlemaker Row”, a watercolor by Henry Gibson Duguid. 1850. National Galleries of Scotland.

In 1876, seventeen year old Arthur Conan Doyle began his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh or, to put it another way, he began to picture the world in which Sherlock Holmes would begin his career. In Doyle's imagination, Holmes' London must have looked a lot like the Edinburgh he knew as a student...

Dawn mists rose from the valley until they dwindled to a plume above Edinburgh Castle. Perched on a craggy basalt cliff, the castle rose several stories from the summit,which towered four hundred feet above the base. On the inland side rose a turret from whose crown of lancet windows archers had rain arrows upon besieging armies since the twelfth century.

The castle was so high that its time gun could be heard far in every direction. This civil reminder had been fired at one p.m. every day but one since early 1861, before [Doyle turned two], alerting Leith ship captains and New Town shop owners to set their clocks, while every man on Princes Street reached for a waistcoat pocket to check his watch. The sound carried so far from the castle that its instigator...Scotland’s Astronomer Royal...prepared a concentric map showing the number of seconds it took the gun’s boom to reach each distance, for even more accurate time keeping.

...The castle stood so high that shepherds in Fife could turn from shearing to glimpse it like a mirage on the horizon. Mariners sailing in from the northeast could peer up at its battlements long before they reached the shore. It provided an unparalleled view of the region---northward to the jagged peaks of the Grampians, eastward across a thousand diary rooftops toward the storied height of Arthur’s Seat, southward to the Pentlands…

Group of the 79th beside the Mill Mount Battery, Edinburgh Castle, 1852. Robert Ranald McIan (1803–1856). The Highlanders' Museum, via ArtUK.

The castle cast its royal shadow across a bustling market down in the city. The drum and bugle accompanying the changing of the guard could be heard above the clatter of carriage wheels, the rumble of passing trains. Dense with public houses and shops, bristling with turnpike stairs and crow stepped gables, the Grassmarket had been a public site since the fifteenth century. In [Doyle’s] time it was still renowned for its cattle and horse trading. The venerable White Hart Inn was there, and the Black Bull, with its marble relief columns framing the entrance, and above them the words SPIRIT J. WILKINSON MERCHANT. Next door stood the Carriers Warehouse, where one horse wagons clustered out front, piled with goods covered in tightly stretched tarpaulins against the frequent rain. To proclaim that their wares had traveled from exotic climes, the Tobacco & Snuff Manufactury featured above its sign a bust of a turbaned man, perhaps formerly a figurehead on a ship’s prow. Beneath it, wagons uncoupled from their horses projected handy rails on which loungers could lean to smoke and gossip…

Clustered below and east of the castle, the dark streets of Old Town sprawled in medieval disarray---poorly bracketed upper stories bulging above greasy streets so narrow that a man walking could stretch out his arms and touch a grimy wall on either side. Once Edinbugh’s tall buildings had housed aristocracy, until crowding and plague had driven them to the suburbs. By the 1870s, however, soot-flecked washing fluttered on clothes poles jutting from the windows of once proud houses that bore above their door a scutcheon with a tarnished coat of arms. The view from many windows was a dreary prospect of slate roofs topped with red chimneys, spoutin eye-smarting clouds of smoke---with now and then the rooftop scrabble of a blackened urchin sweeping a chimney. Not surprisingly, the city had held on to its Middle Scots nickname, “Auld Reekie” (Old Smokey). Not only the smoke stank. So did the foul breath of the tanners and glue factories, and the effluvia from chamber pots emptied into street carts or into the streets themselve. At least the winds that buffeted the high elevation helped to dispel the stench…

“John Knox’s House, 1861.” Louise Rayner. (1832-1924)  Dudley Mall.

[By the time Doyle started his studies at the university], many hovels and tenements [had been] torn down and replaced with safer and cleaner modern housing. Poverty and crowding still defined the Old Town [but]...

He could stand high on the wind-plagued North Bridge, which joined Old Town to the cleaner streets neo-classical buildings of New Town, and see the monuments to civil progress and mercantile ambition that had helped turn Edinburgh into a world-renowned center of intellectual labor. He was studying medicine in part because the university boasted one of the finest medical departments in the world. In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment had flowered in this center of research and publishing---philosopher and mathematician Dugald Stewart, economist Adam Smith, geologist James Hutton, and many others. Walter Scott, [Doyle’s] favorite novelist in his later youth, had been born in College Wynd, by Cowgate, not far from [Doyle’s] own birthplace; had lived in George Square by the university that [Doyle] attended every day, and had died only a generation before [Doyle’s] birth. Ambition and artistry were in the very air of Edinburgh.

---from “Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes” by Michael Sims.

College as vocational training for a career as an interchangeable and disposable keyboard-tapper

Obviously, a bunch of things bugged me about New York Times op-edifier Frank Bruni's We've got to stop coddling our kids column and it's hard for me to settle on which thing bugged me most. But the one thing that's back on my mind today is Bruni's casual acceptance of the main selling point of education "reform" used by all the would-be reformers including the President, which is crassly economic.

We need to improve our schools so that the nation can "compete globally."

Basically, they're telling us, we need schools to make us money or, more specifically, to turn out the workers who will make us money. The point of schooling is to produce knowledge workers. Not knowledgeable workers but workers with  know-how, workers with a very specific sort of knowledge they can use on the job, mainly how to read and fill out forms and follow instructions.

Few of these knowledge workers are slated to become executives or even upper-level management. The great majority are intended to be mid and low-level keyboard tappers working jobs in which, to the eyes of the executives and upper management, they will be interchangeable and disposable. And at some point in their "careers"---several points, really--they will be interchanged and disposed of.

An education is unnecessary for such a future. What's needed is training. And earning a diploma isn't important as a mark of intellectual achievement. It's certification. And when, inevitably, that future catches up with them and they're interchanged and disposed of, well, then schools will be there to retrain them nd recertify them for another few years of interchangeableness and disposability.

And despite Bruni's apparent belief that children are lazy and stupid, they are quick to pick up on what's expected of them and will apply themselves to meeting those expectations, which, under these circumstances means making themselves marketable as diligent and reliable and hirable, well-trained and certified knowledge workers, and they will pick their colleges and choose their majors accordingly.

More students going to college for vocational training mean fewer humanities majors. Degrees in English do not make you marketable, at least not in a way your average eighteen to twenty two year old can explain to prospective employers, fretful parents, or to themselves.

Philistine state legislators having to justify spending tax dollars to an increasing base of taxpayers who don't believe that living in an ordered, amenable, functioning society should cost them anything; boards of trustees drawn from the executive class who've devoted their whole lives to making money and don't see why everyone else shouldn't be happy doing the same; and administrators hired by those boards to see that their schools attract paying customers by offering those customers the product they've been convinced colleges are in business to provide, marketability, are going to take this into account when deciding how to allocate resources.

Degrees that don't attract enough customers, departments that don't pay out, classes that don't add marketable value to resumes, professors who don't contribute to the bottom line, who cost more than they bring in, are going to become targets for restructuring.

Have become targets.

At Slate, Rebecca Schuman reports on two colleges that appear to be intent on restructuring themselves as vocational training schools:

If you’re planning to attend either Minnesota State University Moorhead or the University of the District of Columbia, best get in your Romeo and Juliet now—and while you’re at it, you should probably learn the formulas for velocity and momentum, and study up on the Spanish-American War. Because soon, these regional public universities may have no departments of English, physics, or history—nor a host of other programs often associated with “college,” including political science (MSUM), philosophy (MSUM), computer science (MSUM), and even economics (UDC).

What is confounding about these universities’ plans to possibly obliterate nearly half of their departments is why both institutions, faced with budget crises, went straight for the academic jugular. And not just by cutting highfalutin artsy disciplines, but with an eye toward fields of study that are actually valued in today’s cruel and fickle market. Nobody seems to notice that the structure of today’s higher-ed “business” model is backward: It’s far easier to cut academics than it is to cut anything else, so that’s what universities are doing. The irony that the very raison d’être of a university—education!—is also its most disposable aspect seems lost on everyone (perhaps because nobody studies English, philosophy, or French anymore, so nobody recognizes irony or knows what a raison d’être is).

And, if what’s happening in Great Britain is a precursor of what’s going to happen here, and at Lawyers, Guns & Money Dave Brockington, a lecturer In Social Science Methods, Plymouth School of Government at Plymouth University, warns that it is, more American colleges and universities, private as well as public, are going to follow MSUM and UDC and adapt themselves to the “corporate model”:

After I wrote most of this post yesterday morning, an email was sent to staff at noon outlining the need to “reshape our academic offer” which will “drive our investment strategy with investment in some areas, and divestment in others, which we think may include some redundancies”. Said email was also couched in the usual fuzzy business speak about sustainability, strategy, and the need to be “fleet of foot”. 

“Redundancies” is Brit suit-speak for layoffs.

Yet, a university is not a business. We do not have shareholders, nor do we sell a product. Universities are a public good, which add value to individuals and society writ large. Assuming that this is the new reality, why in hell would one want to pay the opportunity costs involved in earning a Ph.D. in order to work in an industry where your job security isn’t that far removed from Dominos Pizza, and where your pay is significantly lower than a similar position in the private sector?  Why go into this “sector” when the fickle year-to-year interests of students, or the shifting business models of senior management, can render your contribution redundant?

And why shouldn’t college professors be as interchangeable and disposable as everyone else?

Read all of Schuman’s article, A Ghost Town With a Quad, and Brockington’s post, Universities as Commercial Enterprise, an Ongoing Case Study.

And, in case you missed it, here’s my post reacting to that Frank Bruni column, Both ways, in the snow.