Month: September 2018

“Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. The recess of summer is over, when holidays are taken, newspapers shrink, history itself seems momentarily to falter and stop. But the papers are thickening and filling again; things seem to be happening; back from Corfu and Sete, Positano and Leningrad, the people are parking their cars and campers in their drives, and opening their diaries, and calling up other people on the telephone . . . Everywhere there are new developments, new indignities; the intelligent people survey the autumn world, and liberal and radical hackles rise, and fresh faces are about, and the sun shines fitfully, and the telephones ring.”

The History Man – Malcolm Bradbury

New developments, new indignities. Some perform their indignities, some have them thrust upon them. While many labour under increasing pressures and are forced into indignities, there remains a, privileged, few in the loftier perches of the ivory tower that seem to habitually perform indignation from positions of relative comfort. Just as Bradbury observed through the acerbic whit of his “campus” novels.

In some ways this also speaks to a particular kind of sociological imagination of academia – the academic as an empowered, perhaps even powerful, individual. An individual with time and resources. That imagined individual was also, largely, male and white. It is also a satirical reflection upon the ‘radical’ academic – perceived as all bluster and little action perhaps – but also situated in a radical time – Howard Kirk, the protagonist, was a university lecturer of the 1970s. The radical pedagogue has, however, cast a long shadow from the late 20th century into the present. Some might argue this is the impetus for worthy activities like the Volunteer University, others might suggest such apparent ‘radicalism’ is a performance that shields morally questionable actions. The allusion to Corfu and Sete, or even Leningrad (now St Petersburg), perhaps also speaks of a different time – though I am not old enough to know – in which academics could afford (both in terms of time and money) to go away.

The “radical hackles” of the 2018 UK academic are perhaps frayed, with ongoing disputes over pensions and pay and uncertainties over the future of university funding. Many of us are perhaps performing the Beckett-like refrain We must go on. We can’t go on. We’ll go on. (Waiting for Godot). Term begins – even if for some it does not feel like it really, truly, ended – and we are pressed onwards.

“The recess of summer” has, for many, simply disappeared, if it ever really felt like it existed. The ‘summer term’ of exams and then post-exam activities creeps ever onwards into the time that was once jealously guarded for research. The ‘referred’ or ‘deferred’ assessments (resits or extensions) crash through the frail membrane of summer and drag the mind back to marking schemes and intended learning outcomes.

The return to term-time is often fraught. Sometimes it is simply the things we say to each other in the corridor:

How are you doing? How’s your start of term?
I’m surviving!
Only eleven weeks to go, ha ha ha

Sometimes, and especially in recent years, the churn of change – new management directives, shifts in organisational make-up – conspire to make the seemingly simple task of turning up in the right room, with the right group of students, at the right time, rather difficult.

“Fresh faces are about” at the beginning of term and we meet new and not-so-new students with a seemingly increased frequency, yet it can often feel like we only seem to know them less. Bouncing from one one-hour session to another, between year groups and perhaps between programmes, it can feel like we see more of the students but it is only from the front of a lecture theatre – a series of faces peering over a sea of glowing laptop logos.

Nevertheless, the sun shines, as it always seems to in September. Conversations begin and grow. Sometimes we can just stop to witness the changing of the season. In amongst the melee, you can sometimes, just sometimes, find the time to find yourself and try to laugh at the absurdity of those new initiatives, the new indignities. Starting all over again.

(Just Like) Starting Over – John Lennon

[Due to family commitments and the beginning of the school year I haven’t been able to post for a while – so this post has been rattling around my head for a couple of weeks.]

There are various times in the pattern of working life in academia when we are thrown together. Conferences, training sessions, ‘away days’ and even the picket line all push us together in ways that breaks the ordinary pattern and in that mixing together we might either blend or jumble. Mixing also creates friction. Some friction can be productive; it can produce action. In 2018 the energy of the picket line during the USS pensions strike produced a lot of action, not least the creation of alternatives sources of knowledge about the USS pension scheme and it’s sustainability. Some friction wears people down, and that can often be experienced unequally (not least along lines of class, race and seniority).

The recent period in British university life has felt, to me, rather fraught. I acknowledge that this is based on rather limited experience and those with longer careers might see things differently. Nevertheless, I suggest (and of course I am not the first) that there have been a couple of defining moments that have asked searching questions of all of those that work in universities.

The first, perhaps longer-running, moment is the shift towards the university-as-a-business – with a culture of targets (income, student numbers etc), which has led to league tables, such as the Times Higher World University Rankings “Top 100”, becoming the go-to yardstick for many university leaders and arguably contributed to what my colleague Clive Barnett has highlighted as a crisis of legitimation for universities. Targets have been set not only for institutions and departments but also individuals. This has had the effect of colleagues feeling atomised and individualised.

The second, is the rather insidious recent move towards the UK government directing universities to perform border enforcement, for international students and international staff alike. Les Back writes about this through the example of the experiences of one particular international student in his Academic Diary and the distress such suspicion causes for those we ought to be welcoming*.

In both of these moments in British university life, those of us working in universities are pushed towards forms of friction – of competition and suspicion of and with one another and of our students. Both of these moments too also invite a reconsideration of what had perhaps begun to feel for some an old-fashioned or out-moded concept: solidarity.

If the friction of competition and suspicion, of atomisation and mistrust, wears down and isolates us then a perhaps a key emollient is to act in solidarity. Simply put (following Barnett’s reading of Iris Marion Young), I think this means (ethically) to share responsibility – for/to one another, for (in)action and non-domination. Solidarity means thinking about one another and acting together and on behalf of one another. Solidarity is a shared mechanism of protection.

In a session on possible futures for UK Higher Education at the RGS-IBG conference in Cardiff (2018), James Esson made a crucial, simple and powerful point: solidarity means acknowledging the humanity of one another. We get nowhere by denying one another’s humanity. It is distressing that in the everyday banality of ordinary working life, outside of the adrenaline high of the picket and other extraordinary moments, we slip all-too-readily back into habits of individualism and mistrust. As Esson says: we must strive to acknowledge one another’s humanity, I’d like to think we are all capable of this.

* See the Students not Suspects campaign.

Protection – Massive Attack