Month: November 2018

AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD GOES BACK TO BLIGHTY

Visiting England after more than a year away is like putting shoes on after a year in flip-flops. In fact it really did mean putting on proper, all encasing shoes after months of fearlessly baring my toes to the world. I guess it’s how a four-year old feels when they are fitted with their first pair of school shoes.

I’d expected to be a somewhat changed person on my return but as the wonderful Rupert Brooke wrote, ‘If I should die, think only this of me That there’s some corner of a foreign field, that is forever England’. However far you stray from your beginnings some things are too deeply embedded to change. And at this time of year his words carry an even greater poignancy.

Travelling near Remembrance Sunday, I found myself buying a poppy a day – they seem to break with startling regularity – and being sorry to miss being in England to commemorate the 100th year of the Armistice. The two World Wars are written large in the heart of every child who grew up with parents in the Forces and I have stood quietly and respectfully on many sombre early November Sunday mornings. With age I have stood with increasing thanks – it remains the greatest gift and good fortune to have grown up in a period of relative peace and economic stability.

I have always been able to survive the first verse and refrain of the Last Post but there is something that happens after that which is too heart-breaking to endure. And Bunyan’s magnificent verse is a memorial to everyone I have known and loved – ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning. We will remember them. Permission to lose control of stiff upper lip, sir.

The trip was six whirlwind days with three cities, five hotels and multiple modes of travel. My arrival at Heathrow was marked by a cool, overcast English day – it was absolutely perfect. Keats’ ‘seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness’ are missing from California but the English late autumn was a reminder that seasons are built into my blood.

Needless to say the trains were terrible. How it is possible to take longer and to have more changes to get from Liverpool Street to Norwich than to go via Cambridge is a warping of the time-space continuum. Hawkwind’s long neglected song ‘Quark, Strangeness and Charm’ gets close to the experience with the line ‘All that, doesn’t not anti-matter now, we’ve found ourselves a black hole out in space.’

My own theory is that the London to Norwich line is part of a black-arts operation by CERN where the stranger particles from the Large Hadron Collider are diverted for investigation. Passengers are used as substitutes for Schrodinger’s Cat and so whether they existence or are comfortable is unknown (and certainly not cared about). Scientists run the railways as a cosmic experiment and while Einstein wanted trains travelling at the speed of light he is losing out to Lord Kelvin’s views that they should terminate like the heat death of the universe.

To make matters worse Planck’s Constant has been replaced by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to build the timetable. Higg’s Bosun is a grumpy ex-naval man who was the lucky mascot of the Irish Rover, the Flying Dutchman and the Titanic before deciding that he preferred to drive a train. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg summed it up when he used quantum mechanics as a metaphor for the railway system in saying, “There is now, in my opinion, no entirely satisfactory interpretation of quantum mechanics.”

Enough about the trains though because it is the people that make the difference. Some very amusing evenings of drinking and snooker and late-night burgers and Indian meals. And most of all conversations that would only make half-sense to an outsider because they are framed in the context of shared experiences, disagreements and understanding of each other’s values and views. It was great fun and I was humbled that so many people made an effort to meet up during their busy lives.

I also caught up with my older sister for the first time in eight years. It’s a good reminder that when your parents are no longer around there is usually nobody but family who remembers your earliest years. In our case it was a peripatetic first ten years full of different schools, a father disappearing to trouble spots at short notice and a reliance on a very small family unit.

It was a delight to be able to talk about our family, about the misunderstandings we have had with each other and reflect upon all the ways in which life might have been different. But as importantly to share the good things that happened in the period when connections were lost. People say that you can never make up for lost time but we had a pretty good go at it.

I’ve noticed that throughout this blog I have talked about England and when asked that is where I say I am from. For me the United Kingdom has always been a ‘community’ where the squabbles of Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and England have been largely suborned to a belief that there is strength in unity. Respecting and believing in each other’s right to a national identity within that house is as important as respecting and regarding a person’s individuality.

In that context the potential for a botched exit from the European Union to drive an irreversible wedge and create four countries is depressing. It would be a strange future if the territorial certainties, secure since the effective partition of the Republic of Ireland with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, were to change. But I guess that previous generations probably felt the same as the Empire disappeared in a flurry of declarations of independence.

It confirms that change is the only constant of the human condition and Remembrance Sunday was a timely reminder that there is much to be grateful for. After a week back in San Diego I particularly realise that I am fortunate to have roots and friends on both sides of the Atlantic. It is certainly something to think about as Thanksgiving approaches.

Open Doors and Outliers – Looking For Rubies in a Mountain of Rocks

Open Doors data, published by the Institute of International Education (IIE) on 13 November, confirms the much-anticipated decline in international student enrollments in the US. But delving into the detail demonstrates that there are also outliers with significant growth in international students year on year. It is always interesting to dig down to see who is bucking the trend – but more importantly how they are doing it.

At the headline level there is unmitigated gloom with the total number of enrolled international students in 2017/18 down by 11,797 (1.3%) on the prior year. There are also signs of a fractured pipeline for Fall 2018 with non-degree student starters down 9.7% year on year (4,868 students) and down 23.8% (14,135 students) from the 2014/15 peak. Since a 2015/16 high-point undergraduate and postgraduate new-enrollments are down by 9% (10,723) and 6.8% (8,556) respectively.

Table 1 – New International Student Enrollment in the US 2007-08 to 2016-17
Source: Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. Retrieved from http://www.iie.org/opendoors

Against that background the state of Kentucky was eye-catching for two reasons. It posted a 26.9% increase in international students – an exceptional performance for a state that was, in 2016/17, 31st in overall popularity in terms of volume of students enrolled. Within the state Campbellsville University was the only one of the top five (by volume enrollments) to grow and became the leading recruiter with a year on year increase of nearly 2800 students.

Table 2 – Year on Year Change in Foreign Students in Kentucky (Source: Open Doors Fact Sheets 2017 and 2018)
IPEDS data shows that across all domestic and international, full and part-time enrollments Campbellsville grew by 96% year on year to Fall 2017. A time series shows that growth at the institution accelerated very significantly in the past year. Graduate part-time has been the primary engine of growth with graduate full-time and undergraduate part-time also contributing.

Table 3 – Campbellsville University Total Graduate and Undergraduate Enrollments 2014-2017
NB: 2017 data is listed as Provisional Release data by IPEDS

International student enrollments (as per non-resident aliens in IPEDS reporting) have been the driving force for the significant growth over the past year. Full-time international graduates grew by more than 600 year on year and part-time international graduates by over 1700.

Table 4 – Campbellsville Full and Part Time Graduate Enrollments
The graduate growth appears to be almost entirely driven by students from India. In 2016 Open Doors reported the proportion of students from China and India in Kentucky as being equal at 18.9% of the total. By 2017 students from India leapt to 43.1% of the total as China fell to 13.1%.

This is supported by the Quartz news website which published, in May 2018, an article reviewing the courses offered by Campbellsville and another Kentucky-based institution, the University of the Cumberlands . The article quotes Shanon Garrison, the vice president for enrollment services at the University of Campbellsville, as saying that “99% of the students in the course are native to India but live in and work for companies based in the US.” Most students are enrolled in the Masters of Science in Information Technology and Management (MSITM).  which, according to Quartz, is ‘designed to allow international students to work full-time jobs while enrolled.’.

The report suggests that students are required to attend the campus for three days of face-to-face classes at the beginning of each term and that the degree costs around $17,000. Flexibility, affordability and the opportunity to work appear to be key factors in the popularity of the course. It is a powerful combination which appears to have turbo-charged growth at Campbellsville.

International recruitment has always been a space where intelligent minds consider ways to develop creative programming that works productively within the legal, visa and competitive environment. Large institutions can often be relatively slow in adapting to new circumstances or may rely on their reputations to see them through the bad times. Innovation and boldness are usually the hallmarks of smaller, more nimble institutions and their successes are often worth considering.

The purpose of looking more closely at the University of Campbellsville is to illustrate possibilities and is not intended to advocate for or against the model. The Quartz article outlines some of the potential challenges and it is not unusual for innovation to appear in specific niches that are inaccessible or out of scope for other institutions. But at a difficult time for US international student recruitment it’s interesting to see opportunities that are still being discovered and exploited.

 

An Englishman Abroad In Cactus Alley

Tending your own patch of land is as much part of the English psyche as talking about the weather, queuing in an orderly fashion and having fifty ways of saying ‘sorry’. Ever since encountering the overgrown wilderness behind my first house I have been a keen gardener. Four distinct seasons provided the setting for a year of planning, tilling, planting and reaping.

The country’s love-affair with its gardens drove the song, English Country Garden, to number five the charts in 1962. It was based on an English-folk song, Country Gardens, which married the whimsy of Morris-dancing to the pagan, earth revering influence of the druids and spawned many parodies. It is from that background that I came to tend the semi-arid, almost season-less, badlands of San Diego.

Americans don’t really even have ‘gardens’ because they have yards. The word comes from the Anglo-Saxon “geard” (pronounced YAY-ard) and is a good reminder why prisons have yards while country houses have gardens. One word is Proto-Germanic with overtones of efficiency and sparseness while the other comes from the Gallo-Romance language of Picardy and Flanders.

In the new environment everything has to be placed and considered in the context of hours of sun or shade, lack of moisture and relative danger to humans and animals. Rocks, dirt and pebbles are home to relatively slow growing plants that have evolved to be as tough as their setting. It’s a harsh, alien, unforgiving and strangers need to beware.

I’d never been allergic to a plant until I tangled with the toxic sap of the Euphorbia tiruccalli, which goes by the common name of Fire Sticks. Waking up with a face that looked like I had gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson was an early sign that I’d always need to wear gloves in the garden. But that was only a precursor to my duel with the Cactaceae.

Euphorbia tiruccalli

It is no mistake that the family group name for the cactus has echoes of a Mediterranean-based crime family. They are tough, aggressive, impassive plants that never tell, never forgive and always take revenge. The biblical warning “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” (Acts 9.5 and Acts 26:14 of the King James Version of the Bible) could have been written to remind us of the challenge they bring.

Engaging with a cactus and not taking appropriate precautions is like inviting Hannibal Lecter to dinner in a private room. One of you enjoys the potential of sharp objects to inflict pain and misery while the other will end up on the receiving end of a miserable evening. Even the slightest brush against one of these beasts can bring several dozen tiny shards of agony.

But through the allergic reactions and hours of picking cactus spines from my arms the year has seen a pleasing sense of order emerge. The reshaping of the garden has allowed for Cactus Alley and Succulent Corner to become landmarks while individual plants have been able to thrive after being moved to better locations. And I have learnt lessons in caution after indiscriminate digging cut through carefully buried irrigation lines which led the arid earth to resemble the Somme for several days.

Cactus Alley – Jeffe, Bobby, The Succulent with No Name and  Sneaky Pete

Because I am unfamiliar with the names of the plants many of them have emerged with personal nicknames. We have the barrel cactuses Billy, Bobby and Betsy as well as the handsome and rapidly growing Jeffe. Sneaky Pete is aptly named as the prickly pear has tiny, needle-sharp bristles that embed themselves with just a touch. Gomez is as sharp, squat and evil-looking as any bandit from a spaghetti western.

In the open ground Fellaini is the bargain bin asparagus fern with a habit to match the Manchester Uniter and Belgium footballer or his alter-ego from The Simpson’s, Sideshow Bob. Alongside him Spike, the yucca, has moved to luxuriant growth in full sun after being a weedy and ailing specimen in the shade. These are plants with individual characters that are forged by their resilience and robustness.

I’ve introduced some flowering plants but have learnt to paint pictures in the garden with the varying pinks, greys and subtle variegations which seem the natural palette of the desert. From similar climes we have Australian visitor ‘kangaroo paws’ (Anigozanthos), Asteriscus maritimus from the Mediterranean, and Didiereaceae from Madagascar. It is a global garden that is united by the challenging combination of glaring sun and water and soil poverty.

As a United Nations of plants it co-exists in a climate that is under increasing stress and facing enormous challenges from progressively worsening climate conditions. Disproportionate application of resources allows traditional Western plants to grow but plants used to living more frugally demand their rights and can thrive without pampering. It’s a little like the economic lessons of the real world.

After living with the land for a year I have begun to understand the raw materials. The variation of temperature, daylight and precipitation are more subtle than the English seasons. The growth patterns of the plants move to a rhythm which is less easy to understand but which can result in moments of extraordinary flowering and unexpected beauty.

While I have dabbled with herbs, tomatoes and peppers this year I am hankering after developing a vegetable patch. There is little more satisfying than pulling a broad bean or a new potato from the earth and eating it a few minutes later. But the planning involves thinking about ways of conserving even more water over the winter season to support this ambition.

It’s been a steep learning curve but whether semi-desert or temperate the garden offers similar lessons and insights. Patience and perseverance, the determination of living things to survive and the belief in planting today however uncertain the future might be. It is captured nicely by American author, journalist, activist Michael Pollan who writes, “The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. ” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)