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In Praise of Drag Queens

Posted in Biographical, History, LGBTQ+, Politics with tags , , , on March 29, 2023 by telescoper
The late Paul O’Grady in Lily Savage persona

I was very sad to hear this morning of the death at the age of 67 of Paul O’Grady, who was best known (to me) in the form of Lily Savage, the best of the drag acts to be found in London when I lived there years ago. I remember seeing Lily Savage many times, including one memorable night at the old Drill Hall near Tottenham Court Road, which was a hilarious occasion enjoyed by everyone there (including a smattering of celebrities in the audience). The best bit of the best drag shows is always how the performer deals with hecklers. Paul O’Grady had a ready wit and a very acerbic tongue which made Lily Savage a must-see act. I wasn’t the only one to be surprised when Lily Savage got her own mainstream television show in the 90s, as much of her material was very “blue”, and I wondered how she would fare with the inevitable toning down of the material. The transition to Telly, however, turned out to be a great success.

Paul O’Grady “retired” Lily Savage some years ago, but still appeared on TV as himself to great popular acclaim. I never knew him personally but some old friends of mine from London got to know him very well, including going on holiday with Paul and his partner Andre (whom he married in 2017). They all said Paul was a lovely and friendly person and just as funny in private as he was on stage or on television. I send my condolences to his friends and family.

Drag has of course been around for centuries. Cross-dressing in the theatre, in film, and in opera, where it plays a central role in many plots especially in comedies. Who can forget the wonderful Alastair Sim in the St Trinian’s movies? More recently, Danny La Rue (who, incidentally, was born in Cork) was a regular performer on television in my youth and was for a time Britain’s highest paid entertainer.

But Paul O’Grady was a bit different. He successfully navigated a tricky journey to bring Lily Savage from the underground world of gay bars and clubs into the realm of popular culture at a time overshadowed by Section 28 and the AIDS crisis. Paul O’Grady was a powerful advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. His visibility and humour made the world a better place for many of us. His was a life well lived.

It is especially sad that Paul O’Grady’s death coincides with widespread and growing hostility to drag queens from far right bigots, who are intent on attacking anyone associated in any way with the LGBTQ+ community. The banning of drag shows – which has already happened in some States of the USA- is just part of this agenda; transphobia is another, as is the anti-migrant movement. It’s all about manufacturing hostility to distract attention away from the real problems of society. The list of targets is growing. Before long, any lifestyle perceived to be unconventional in any way will come under attack. The wave of bigotry sweeping across the world is intended to sweep diversity aside and leave in its wake a bleak landscape of dreary uniformity.

The career of Ireland’s own Rory O’Neill (aka Panti Bliss), who was a popular contestant on Dancing with the Stars, mirrors that of Paul O’Grady. I recently went to an event featuring Rory O’Neill. He had left Panti at home for the occasion but it was extremely interesting and enjoyable – and a bit sweary! – to hear him talk about his life and experiences, especially why he became an activist and how he started out as a drag performer. I have the same sort of admiration for Rory as I had for Paul. We need more like them.

I also have personal reasons for being grateful for drag queens. When I was a youngster (still at School) I occasionally visited a gay bar in Newcastle called the Courtyard. I was under age for drinking alcohol let alone anything else – the age of consent was 21 in those days – but I got a kick out of the attention I received and flirted outrageously with the much older clientele. I never took things further but never had to buy my own drinks, let’s put it that way.

Anyway, one evening I left the pub to get the bus home – the bus station was adjacent to the pub – but was immediately confronted by a young bloke who grabbed hold of me and asked if I was a “poof”. Before I could answer, a figure loomed up behind him and shouted “Leave him alone!”. My assailant let go of me and turned round to face my guardian angel, or rather guardian drag queen. No ordinary drag queen either. This one, at least in my memory, was enormous: about six foot six and built like a docker, but looking even taller because of the big hair and high heels. The yob laughed sneeringly, whereupon he received the immediate and very muscular response of a powerful right jab to the point of the chin, like something out of a boxing manual. His head snapped back and hit the glass wall of a bus shelter. Blood spurted from his mouth as he slumped to the ground.

I honestly thought he was dead, and so apparently did my rescuer who told me in no uncertain terms to get the hell away. Apart from everything else, the pub would have got into trouble if they’d known I had even been in there. Instead of waiting around in Marlborough Crescent, I ran to the next stop where I got a bus after a short wait.

When I got home I was frightened there would be something on the news about a violent death in the town centre, but that never happened. It turns out the “gentleman” concerned had bitten his tongue when the back of his head hit the bus shelter. It must have been painful, but not life-threatening. My sympathy remains limited. I stayed away from the pub after that.

I think there’s a moral to this story, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide what it is.

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Academic Publishing as Exploitation

Posted in Open Access, Politics with tags , , , , on March 3, 2023 by telescoper

In yesterday’s post I asked the question whether anyone actually believes that it costs it costs £2310 to publish a scientific article online? I also posted the question on the Open Journal of Astrophysics Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/OJ_Astro/status/1631022314169987077?s=20

Only a few people responded to that question with a “yes”. Coincidentally all of them appear to be employed by the academic publishing industry. These people insist that the big publishers bring value to scientific papers. They don’t. Authors and referees do all the things that add value. What publishers do is take that value and turn it into its own profits. The fact that enormous profits are made out of this process in itself demonstrates that what the scientific community is being charged is nothing whatever to do with cost.

This reminds me of many discussions I had in my commie student days about surplus value, a concept explored in great detail by Karl Marx, in Das Kapital. According to the wikipedia page, the term “refers roughly to the new value created by workers that is in excess of their own labour-cost and which is therefore available to be appropriated by the capitalist, according to Marx; it allows then for profit and in so doing is the basis of capital accumulation.”

Engels is quoted there as follows:

Whence comes this surplus-value? It cannot come either from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, or from the seller selling them above their value. For in both cases the gains and the losses of each individual cancel each other, as each individual is in turn buyer and seller. Nor can it come from cheating, for though cheating can enrich one person at the expense of another, it cannot increase the total sum possessed by both, and therefore cannot augment the sum of the values in circulation. (…) This problem must be solved, and it must be solved in a purely economic way, excluding all cheating and the intervention of any force — the problem being: how is it possible constantly to sell dearer than one has bought, even on the hypothesis that equal values are always exchanged for equal values?

Marx’s solution of this economical conundrum was central to his theory of exploitation:

…living labour at an adequate level of productivity is able to create and conserve more value than it costs the employer to buy; which is exactly the economic reason why the employer buys it, i.e. to preserve and augment the value of the capital at his command. Thus, the surplus-labour is unpaid labour appropriated by employers in the form of work-time and outputs.

In the context of academic publishing, the workers are scientific researchers and the employers are the publishers. The workers not only produce the science in the first place, but also carry out virtually all of the actions that the employers claim add value. The latter are simply appropriating the labour of the former, which is exploitation. It needs to stop.

 

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The Great British Tomato Mystery

Posted in Maynooth, Politics with tags , , , , on February 26, 2023 by telescoper

Q: What’s red and not there?

A: No tomatoes.

This week my social media timelines have been filled with pictures like this of British supermarket shelves bereft of salad vegetables, especially tomatoes. The UK Government has stated, through its mouthpiece the BBC, that this is due to unseasonably bad weather in Spain and Morocco, although I very much doubt this is the whole story.

There have been reports of similar shortages in Ireland but all I can do is report on my own experience. Because I live on my own in a small town with plenty of shops nearby I don’t do a big weekly trip to the supermarket but prefer to buy fresh things as and when I need them, usually on the way home from work. I therefore generally pop into Dunnes and/or Supervalu every day. On no occasion this week have I noticed any shortage of tomatoes or other salad ingredients in Maynooth, despite always going in the evening when you might expect the shelves to be depleted. I found plenty of nice tomatoes from both Spain and Morocco, though the ones I actually bought – of the cherry vine variety – are from Italy. People living elsewhere in Ireland may of course have experienced shortages, but I certainly haven’t.

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Raising PhD Stipends

Posted in Education, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , on February 24, 2023 by telescoper

Although the Irish Government has kicked its planned review of postgraduate support into the long grass, the Board of Trinity College Dublin recently approved a proposal to increase stipends to for all its PhD students to €25,000. I applaud this decision, but would argue that it doesn’t go far enough.

A while ago Government of Ireland announced a new scheme intended to recruit “high-level researchers” to PhD programmes in Ireland. This scheme, which is a public-private partnership of around  €100 million, will fund around 400 PhD studentships with an annual stipend around €28K, which is substantially higher than the current rate for, e.g., ICR-funded students which is €18.5K. The justification for the higher €28K stipends is that they would be “in line with financial supports offered under similar global scholarships”. I take this as a statement that the Irish Government has acknowledged that the proper rate of pay for a PhD student is at this level, which seems to me to be about right. It seems to me to be logical that all PhD stipends should be increased to this level.

High levels of inflation are combining with spiraling rental costs to make it very difficult for a student to live on the current level of stipend (especially in the Greater Dublin area). This forces postgraduate students to undertake large amounts of tutoring or other work in order to get by financially. This situation is a direct result of the chronic underfunding of higher education in Ireland which means that there aren’t enough academic staff to cover the teaching required. Universities will argue that they don’t have any choice but to exploit PhD students to make up the shortfall, but that doesn’t make the situation is acceptable.

It is of course good for a research student to get some teaching experience during their PhD but this should be on a voluntary basis. A PhD student who chooses to teach will probably do a better job than one who is forced to do it in order to pay the rent. My basic point, though, is that a full-time research student should be funded to do research full time, and it is grossly unfair to pay them too little for this to be possible.

There needs to be a serious “levelling up” of PhD stipends across the entire third-level sector in Ireland. I hope in particular that my own institution, Maynooth University, will take the lead and increase its PhD studentships to the fair level of €28K per annum. This would be a good way to spend at least some of the surplus of €13.2M it ran up during the first year of the pandemic alone.

UPDATE: The Government has now opened a consultation on PhD supports to which you can contribute here.

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#IrelandForAll

Posted in Biographical, Politics on February 18, 2023 by telescoper

The day has come and I’ll shortly be getting on a train into Dublin to attend the above event in Parnell Square this afternoon. Somewhat annoyingly I’ve had a flare-up of my arthritis recently, but I think it’s important to stand up and be counted. There are rumours that “far-right agitators” (i.e. fascist thugs) are planning to disrupt the event, but if any of them have a go at me I’ll fend them off with my walking-stick!

Update: the journey to Dublin by train was uneventful except that a little boy sitting in the same carriage as me was very upset that it didn’t actually go “choo choo” like his Mam had told him it would.

Update: I’m back in Maynooth enjoying a nice cup of tea, after a very enjoyable day in Dublin. There were many more people on the march than I expected – upwards of 30,000 – which was great, but meant it was very crowded and difficult to take pictures of anything but backs of people.

We took a long while to get going because of the numbers, so I reached the end too late to hear some of the speakers and musicians at the rally. Some of us were still in O’Connell Street when the front of the march arrived at the Customs House. I’m very sorry I missed Christy Moore and Bernadette McAliskey, but the huge turnout was in itself more than adequate compensation.

I am also happy to report that the rumored far-right counter-protest failed to materialize so the whole event went off peacefully. The important thing now, as many of the speakers at the rally stressed, is to ensure that this is just the start.

You can find a report on the march here.

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Kildare for All

Posted in Maynooth, Politics with tags , , on February 5, 2023 by telescoper

Earlier today in Courthouse Square, Maynooth I attended the gathering described above. It was organized at very short notice in response to a demonstration by about 20 fascists in the same place last week (which I didn’t see). Although the rally was quite small – I counted about 60 or 70 people – many motorists passing by along Straffan Road honked their horns to express support. Well done to the organizers for pulling this together on such a short timescale. I only found out about it yesterday.

The rally was in response to a wave of violence against refugees in Ireland incited, and in many cases carried out, by thugs belonging to fascist organizations. Kildare For All part of a national movement, Ireland For All, that seeks to take a stand in support of those facing violence and abuse from far-right thugs. We can’t let Ireland go down the fascist road. We know where it leads.

The fascists are trying to play on the understandable anger and resentment felt by many people in Ireland at the chronic housing shortage, poor healthcare and inadequate public services. These are not the fault of refugees who come here fleeing war and persecution, but are the fault of 15 years of failures in Government. If the Far Right were really bothered about housing etc they would have been protesting against homelessness all that time, which they did not do. They’re just using the situation as an excuse to exercise their racist and xenophobic views. Refugees are not to blame. All the recent influx of refugees has done has been to expose the indolence and incompetence of those in Government.

The rally included a number of speeches by union leaders and political figures, including Réada Cronin, the Sinn Féin TD for Kildare North of which Maynooth is a part.

Réada Cronin, the Sinn Féin TD for Kildare North at today’s rally

It is important for decent people to counter the campaign of disinformation from fascists on social media and to stand in solidarity against the threats, intimidation and actual violence against refugees in the places where they live. Today’s event was small, but it is only through grass-roots organizations like this that we can hope to stem the rising tide of bigotry and intolerance. There will be a much larger event in Dublin on 18th February.

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Solidarity with the UCU Strikers!

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , , , , on January 31, 2023 by telescoper

Tomorrow, 1st February 2023, members of the University and College Union will walk out for the first of 18 days of strike action in UK universities:

This industrial action arises from a dispute over pensions, pay, and working conditions. The strikes will affect 2.5 million students but are necessary to safeguard not only the livelihoods of academic staff against increased casualisation and salary cuts but the UK university system itself, which is being ruined by incompetent management. Regrettably, the strikes will cause considerable disruption but, frankly, there is no point in a strike that doesn’t do that.

Although I no longer work in the UK I’d like to take this opportunity to send a message of support to my former colleagues there who will be out on the picket lines tomorrow and on subsequent days.

That also goes for workers in other sectors who are also involved in industrial action in the UK at this time!

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Royal Mail Failure

Posted in Politics with tags on January 18, 2023 by telescoper

Quite a few people I know in the UK are unaware that the Royal Mail is currently unable to deliver any mail to locations outside the UK. The above message, from the Royal Mail website, has been there for a week now and has not changed in that time apart from the date at the top. There is no information about what has happened, no estimate when services will resume, and no idea what will happen to mail stuck in the system. This failure to communicate with users just adds insult to injury. It also calls into question the claim that this failure is “temporary”

I am mildly inconvenienced by the Royal Mail’s collapse, as I am waiting for some items of legal correspondence, but it must be catastrophic for small businesses who use its services to export products abroad. I’m sure any that survive this disaster will be taking their custom elsewhere as soon as they can.

Ooh. An update! Hopefully, they’ll start to clear the backlog soon.

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Putting girls off Physics

Posted in Education, mathematics, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , on January 9, 2023 by telescoper

I see that Katharine Birbalsingh has resigned from her job as UK Government commissioner for social mobility. Apparently she feels she was “doing more harm than good”. If only the rest of the Government had that level of self-awareness.

I wrote about Katharine Birbalsingh last year, and her departure gives me the excuse to repeat what I said then. Birbalsingh is Head of a school in which only 16% of the students taking physics A-level are female (the national average is about 23%) and tried to explain this by saying that girls don’t like doing “hard maths”.

..physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy. They don’t want to do it, they don’t like it.

Gender stereotyping begins at school, it seems.

There is an easy rebuttal of this line of “reasoning”. First, there is no “hard maths” in Physics A-level. Most of the mathematical content (especially differential calculus) was removed years ago. Second, the percentage of students taking actual A-level Mathematics in the UK who are female is more like 40% than 20% and girls do better at Mathematics than boys at A-level. The argument that girls are put off Physics because it includes Maths is therefore demonstrably bogus.

An alternative explanation for the figures is that schools (especially the one led by Katharine Birbalsingh, where the take-up is even worse than the national average) provide an environment that actively discourages girls from being interested in Physics by reinforcing gender stereotypes even in schools that offer Physics A-level in the first place. The attitudes of teachers and school principals undoubtedly have a big influence on the life choices of students, which is why it is so depressing to hear lazy stereotypes repeated once again.

There is no evidence whatsoever that women aren’t as good at Maths and Physics as men once they get into the subject, but plenty of evidence that the system dissuades then early on from considering Physics as a discipline they want to pursue. Indeed, at University female students generally out-perform male students in Physics when it comes to final results; it’s just that there are few of them to start with.

Anyway, I thought of a way of addressing gender inequality in physics admissions about 8 years ago. The idea was to bring together two threads. I’ll repeat the arguments here.

The first is that, despite strenuous efforts by many parties, the fraction of female students taking A-level Physics has flat-lined at around 20% for at least two decades. This is the reason why the proportion of female physics students at university is the same, i.e. 20%. In short, the problem lies within the school system.

The second line of argument is that A-level Physics is not a useful preparation for a Physics degree anyway because it does not develop the sort of problem-solving skills or the ability to express physical concepts in mathematical language on which university physics depends. In other words it not only avoids “hard maths” but virtually all mathematics and, worse, is really very boring. As a consequence, most physics admissions tutors that I know care much more about the performance of students at A-level Mathematics than Physics, which is a far better indicator of their ability to study Physics at University than the Physics A-level.

Hitherto, most of the effort that has been expended on the first problem has been directed at persuading more girls to do Physics A-level. Since all UK universities require a Physics A-level for entry into a degree programme, this makes sense but it has not been very successful.

I believe that the only practical way to improve the gender balance on university physics course is to drop the requirement that applicants have A-level Physics entirely and only insist on Mathematics (which has a much more even gender mix). I do not believe that this would require many changes to course content but I do believe it would circumvent the barriers that our current school system places in the way of aspiring female physicists, bypassing the bottleneck at one stroke.

I suggested this idea when I was Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Sussex, but it was firmly rejected by Senior Management because we would be out of line with other Physics departments. I took the view that in this context being out of line was a positive thing but that wasn’t the view of my bosses so the idea sank.

In case you think such a radical step is unworkable, I give you the example of our Physics programmes in Maynooth. We have a variety of these, including Theoretical Physics & Mathematics, Physics with Astrophysics, and Mathematical Physics and/or Experimental Physics through our omnibus science programme. Not one of these courses requires students to have taken Physics in their Leaving Certificate (roughly the equivalent of A-level) though as I explained in yesterday’s post, Mathematics is a compulsory subject at Leaving Certificate. The group of about first-year 130 students I taught this academic year is considerably more diverse than any physics class I ever taught in the UK, and not only in terms of gender…

I contend that the evidence suggests it’s not Mathematics that puts female students off Physics, a large part of it is A-level Physics.

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Mathematics for All?

Posted in Education, mathematics, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , on January 8, 2023 by telescoper
Random maths stuff to scare Simon Jenkins.

One of the things I noticed in the news from the UK last week was PM Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that all school students in England should study mathematics to age 18. I’ve emphasized in England because responsibility for education is devolved to the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so what the Prime Minister on this matter says has no bearing outside England.

Anyway, two of the obvious fundamental problems with Sunak’s proposal are:

  1. How will making mathematics a compulsory subject at age 16-18 fit within the current system of A-levels, in which most students study only three subjects?
  2. Who is going to teach all the extra lessons required when there is already a shortage of STEM teachers?

I’m not sure of the extent to which Sunak has thought through this plan. I suspect it’s nothing more than the usual sort of half-baked idea that his type of politician likes to float in order to distract attention away from serious problems elsewhere (e.g. NHS, the economy, strikes, etc). The suggestion has generated a wide range of responses, including from the Guardian’s resident idiot Simon Jenkins who, as usual, misses the point spectacularly when he writes:

Like many of my generation, I did basic and advanced maths to age 16. This embraced complex algebra, trigonometry, quadratic equations, differential calculus, the use of logarithms and old-fashioned slide rules. I cannot recall ever using one jot of it, all now forgotten. 

I’m tempted to suggest that if Simon Jenkins hadn’t forgotten what he’d learnt at school he might write less garbage, but I won’t. I also studied these things to age 16 and, because I chose a career in science, I have used all of them (except slide rules, which were obsolete, but including logarithms). Of course not everyone will feel the same.

I should however point out that as well as Mathematics and science subjects I also studied Geography, History, French, Latin, and English Literature to O-level (which I took at age 16). I don’t think I have ever “used” any of these since, but I do not for one minute regret having studied them. In my opinion education is not just about the acquisition of things to use, but represents a way of opening the mind up to a range of different ways of thinking. Mathematical reasoning is not the only way of thinking but it is important, as is the process involved in learning another language. As I have written on this blog many times before, education is not just about “skills training”: it’s about expanding the mind.

Putting most of Simon Jenkins’s childish rant to one side, there is a serious point buried in it. What Sunak seems to want to achieve is increased levels of basic numeracy which does not require the fluency in trigonometry or differential calculus. The question then is what has gone wrong with the education of a student who hasn’t acquired that knowledge by the age of sixteen? I’d suggest that indicates as significant failing of the pre-16 education system, which is therefore what needs to be fixed. Remedial action in post-16 education is at best a sticking-plaster solution, when more fundamental reform is required.

I feel obliged to point out, however, that here in Ireland, Mathematics is indeed a compulsory subject up to age 18 at least for those students who take the Leaving Certificate. This plays a role here similar to that of GCE A-levels in the UK, but most students take 7 subjects rather than just three. Mathematics is compulsory (as are English and Irish). All subjects can be taken at Ordinary or Higher level in the Leaving Certificate and Mathematics can also be taken at Foundation level (as can Irish).

Last Semester I was involved in teaching Mathematical Physics to a class of about 130 first-year students at Maynooth University. Most of these students are doing our General Science degree, entry to which requires just Ordinary level mathematics and one science subject at Leaving Cert.

The great strength of the Leaving Certificate, which it shares with the International Baccalaureate, is its breadth. I think having English as a compulsory subject for everyone is just as positive as the Mathematics requirement. The concentration of subjects at A-level can work very well for students who know what they want to do after School – as it did with me – but there are dangers involved in pigeonholing students at age 16. A broader education does not put so much pressure on students to decide so young.

Moving to something more like the Leaving Certificate addresses Item 1. at the start of this piece, but Item 2. remains an issue for England as it does in Ireland. In reality the choice for many students is restricted not by the examination system by the lack of specialist teachers in schools, especially (not not only) in STEM subjects. The problem there is that the pay and working conditions for teachers in state schools are not commensurate with their importance to society. I don’t see Sunak showing any inclination to change that situation.

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