Jacob Christensen

Did you know that this slick WordPress operated blog had a predecessor?

No?

Actually, back in 2004 Apple’s .mac service threw in a blogging application called iBlog for good measure and for whatever reason I decided to give it a try. The results – in Danish – are here.

Some posts made it to this blog, so the first actual post on what was then blog.jacobchristensen.name was this one and things only really started going with the 2005 local elections.

Re: Okman-gate

Unfortunately, the piece is not on the web, as far as I can see, but today’s (Sunday) “Politiken” has an interview with Jens Oddershede, the president of the University of Southern Denmark regarding the quality of higher education programmes.

As managementspeak goes, it is a piece of art. But excuse me: I have always known that most university candidates will not be looking for a career in research. And I’ve been around for a couple of years.

This story makes the rounds from time to time: Because of the way higher education in Denmark is financed, teachers are tempted – or even forced – to let students who should have received an F grade pass.

The reason? First, universities are financially pressed, so departments and faculties need all the money they can get (okay, this goes for just about all organisations) and, second, universities receive funding based on the number of students who pass exams. The more students who pass, the more money.

This is a nice, typical NPM way of doing things which works beautifully – as long as there is no goal displacement. Which is something pre-NPM organisational theorists knew about. So, for instance, if a NPM scheme puts emphasis on economic incentives as a means to achieve academic goals, the organisational goal may easily shift to attracting economic funding with academic standards becoming less important.

Another case in point: University professors discuss how many papers they have published, not what insights to the field of study they have contributed. This happens because the Orwellian named Ministry of Science wants to base university research funding on the number of publications.

In order to counteract this, NPM systems have to rely on extensive hierarchical and outside controls – which is why academia, like other parts of the public sector, is being flooded with evaluation agencies, layers and layers of managers and rules and regulations as if there was no tomorrow.

Anyway, I hear you ask, I taught at different Danish and Swedish universities between 1992 and 2008 and have I ever experienced a situation where superiors directly or indirectly “expected” me to pass students who did not live up to the standards formally described?

Actually, no. I cannot mention a case where there was a direct or indirect expectation that a certain part of the student group should pass (or fail) an exam – which is not to say that the drop-out rate was not a cause for concern in a number of cases when it came to PolSci (or, during my time in Sweden, PolMag) programmes. As it is, drop-out rates varied wildly – in Copenhagen something like 90 per cent of the students who started on “my” courses also passed the final exams with the rest disappearing along the way, in the first-year courses I gave in Sweden, something like 20-25 per cent received an F at the first exam.

So, never ever? Well, there was one case with a programme that seriously needed being taken care of. I and others discovered this when I had to fail almost half of the class – which was not particularly funny. I had to spend some time telling the powers that be that something was very wrong here and that professional standards had to be applied rigorously.

And the thing is: Students actually respect teachers who take professional standards seriously.

But in all of this, I can see a problem if a) the professional culture is underdeveloped or b) management gets too much power – or both. My point here is that managers who are not in line with the academic or vocational professional culture tend to look at indicators in the bottom line rather than at the hands-on experience of the quality of programmes and teaching.

And my tax declaration. Mustn’t forget that one. Now wait …

HT: Kosmopolito.

Now let me get this straight: The Social Democrats are formally demanding the continued production of satire on national tv channel DR2? Politiken is writing editorials on the subject?

Never mind the effects of the financial crisis, the housing bubble and job losses: Here, politicians and media join in a united front.

Now what did Kurt Tucholsky write? Ah yes:

Der Satiriker ist ein gekränkter Idealist: er will die Welt gut haben, sie ist schlecht, und nun rennt er gegen das Schlechte an.

I do suspect, however, that Tucholsky had another kind of satire in mind.

As the long, cold winter finally seems to be on its way out, I thought I would offer you one final greeting. The trees in Kongens Have in central Odense suddenly covered with frost one morning some weeks ago. The picture is better viewed in the large version.

Picture #2, Picture #3.

Once upon a time, Berlingske Tidende was known as “Auntie Berlingske” (yes, just like the BBC). This was because Auntie was supposed to be a nice little old lady who would only talk about the things nice little old ladies would talk about. Obviously, sex was NOT part of the package.

Times change. Somebody at Berlingske got hold of a Reuters story about the sex lives of young English women and decided that … well, let’s look at the facts:

We are dealing with research commissioned by a British pharmacist and the results are only reported in a very truncated form so for a social scientist it is almost impossible to draw some valid conclusions but according to the Reuters article, for a sample of 3000 24 year-old English women the average number of (male?) sex partners was 5,65. This was an increase from 1,67 in “the 1960s” and 3,72 in “the 1970s”. No references are given for the later figures.¹

Let’s see: We do not have any information about when English women have their sexual debut – in Denmark the median age for the first intercourse has remained stubbornly fixed at around 16,5 years so the median Danish 24 year-old would have had some eight years of sexual activity behind her.²

If we return to our English lasses, I suspect that the share of 24 year-olds with 0 partners is minimal while we will have some extreme values on the other side of the average, so the median³ is probably below 5,65 – let’s say 3 or 4.

Would a 24 year-old with 3-4 sex partners strike you as being unusual? I mean: This looks a bit like the number of steady boyfriends a lot of young women will have had at that age. And it would also strongly suggest that most sexual activity involving a partner takes place in medium-to-long term relationships.

Inquiries into sexual activities always face a fundamental problem: Can the answers be trusted? Even if you are filling out a paper questionnaire, answers may be guided by norms. No, you did not vote for the Danish People’s Party last time and no, you did not have sex with five guys every night the last time you went on holiday in Bulgaria. (What? You did? You pervert! Voting for the Danish People’s Party really…) Okay – the suspicion is that women in particular tend to underreport sexual activities in general and the number of partners in particular.

Anyway, the results made the brains of several (female?) journalists on Berlingske Tidende’s newsdesk explode and they had to take to the streets to … well, if they had only stuck to doing that then they would have some of their reputation left, but no: They had to do a vox pop where the Danish people tells their unfiltered version of what goes on between the sheets.

So what goes on? “No no, the number is far too low … I’ve heard about … I know that my younger sister’s friends … ” etc, etc.

May I suggest that Tine Damg̴rd contacts my cousin Henrik Lassen who has studied how tales wander through the ages (You can listen to him here Рeven if he is not talking about sex) and who would be able to show exactly what is wrong with these answers.

But do we know anything about the number of sex partners young Danish women have? We do, even if the research is four years old, and the results suggest that the median and average number of sex partners may be a bit, but not excessively, higher among Danish women compared with the English. You can get the report here – go to pages 43-45. The numbers are not immediately comparable, but my best guess is that we could be looking at a value in the range between 5-10 partners for 24 year-old Danes – and remember that if a 24 year-old woman has had 10 partners since making her sexual debut at the 16,5 median, that is (only) a little over one new partner per year.⁴

So maybe the truth about the sex lives of young Danes is that despite all talk of one-night stands, hook-ups and whatnot, most have sex with steady partners and that a kind of serial monogamy is the name of the game.

Paradise Hotel⁵ and Sex and the City are fantasies (and people in a relationship have more sex than singles, for some weird reason) and anyway we all know that other people lead more adventurous lives – in and out of bed.

PS: Epidemiology can be fun. For instance it can show that Danes and Swedes are not attracted by each other in real life.

1. Actually, the pharmacy is trying to sell HPV vaccinations to your daughter [↩]
2. What does this mean? It means that if you collect a representative sample of Danish girls aged 16 years and 6 months, half of them will not have had intercourse [↩]
3. Corrected from mean. Ouch! [↩]
4. If she was taking a new guy home every month we would be looking at a figure in the order of 100 partners. How likely is that in real life? [↩]
5. Remember that the cast of PH is … a cast deliberately chosen by the production company. They are not representative of 18-25 year-olds. [↩]

Leave aside the Brønderslev case (executive summary: Local councils shunting problem families between them), the new immigration policy agreement (executive summary: Get out of here) and the xFactor texting scandal, and we have the story about the resumé of the new Minister for Social Affairs.

Usually with politicians and others, the problem has been that something was on the resum̩ which Рall things considered Рthe person in question would have been wiser to leave out.

Two cases in point: The Swedish labour market minister Sven Otto Littorin did not know an accredited university from a non-accredited university – his MA could have been academically sound, but it could also have come from the University of Duckburg or some diploma mill. The MA was quietly dropped.

The Danish employment minister Inger Støjberg is a journalist. No problem there: “journalist” is not a protected title, but you can only get a recognised diploma from DJH, SDU or RUC. The courses Støjberg had taken was from a people’s high school. They were promptly left off.

But how about Benedikte Kiær? Well, she informs us that she worked in the kitchen at “Viften” in Tivoli and wasted five years studying chemistry before opting for political science (hmmm…. and how does this fit with the government’s line that young people should start studying immediately and not waste any time taking the wrong subjects, by the way?) but somebody googled her and discovered that she had been a member of the Centre Council of CEPOS, the very high-profile liberal-conservative think tank. (You won’t find her on the list now) That one did not make it to the resumé.

Oh dear. The Social Democrats are up in arms and so is the Danish People’s Party. I suspect that the people at CEPOS are a bit disappointed as well – after all publicity is the main raison d’être for the think tank.

In any event, if we look through the list, we will find such raving extremists as Bernt Johan Collet (former Conservative MP and defence minister), Ditlev Tamm (professor in law who also wrote a book about the history of the Conservatives between 1970 and 2000), Anne Birgitte Lundholt (former Conservative industry minister) and Grethe Rostbøll (former Conservative minister for cultural affairs). Even if none of these are prominent in today’s Conservative Party, we can still argue that there are affinities between the Conservatives and CEPOS – so the real news is that the Conservative minister is a … Conservative.

If only she had told us, things would have been so much easier.

So, I hear you asking, what are the chances of DF defector Christian H. Hansen’s new party Fokus making it to the Folketing at the next election?

Generally, single defectors have found it hard to win re-election – the last one I can think of is Erhard Jakobsen who, rather surprisingly, managed to win 7,8 % of the vote in the 1973 election. And then there was Aksel Larsen, the ousted leader of DKP who formed SF and made history in 1960. But scores of single defectors have disappeared from the political scene during the ages.

Being more than one helps, though:

• 2007 – Liberal Alliance: Three MPs and two MEPs. (Besides Naser Khader, two Liberal MPs joined the party).
• 1998 – Dansk Folkeparti: Four MPs.
• 1968 – VS: … euh … six MPs, down to four in the election.
• 1966 – Liberalt Centrum: Two MPs.
• 1935 – Bondepartiet: Three MPs.

Sceptical readers would also note that LC soon vanished into thin air, VS was on the verge of a complete break-up but went on to relative glory in the late 1970s and early 1980s before disbanding in the late 1980s and becoming part of the Red-Green Alliance.

Anyway: I would say that a betting-shop should be offering some high odds on F making it to the next Folketing.