Ch-ch-ch-changes – 2nd October

I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence

Changes – Bowie

Two days in a row, I am surprising myself.

I have written before, twice in fact, about the advent of a new academic year and the strange sort of cycle it represents. At different points of circumstances, stage of life, of career, of relationships, this can take on different forms of significance. The last time I wrote about this, in 2019, I quoted Bowie’s Changes and I am deliberately returning to that song in part because of how I feel like I have changed since 2019 but also because I really like the song. I worry that these posts can seem a bit pompous, which (of course!) I’m going to say is not my intention. The conceit of using songs as a means of getting at feelings isn’t meant in that earnest sense of cultural critique but because I like popular culture, and music in particular.

So what ‘changes’ I reflect on in 2024 are written from the same ‘stream of warm impermanence’ evoked by Bowie’s lyrics but with different ripples flowing. In my last post I wrote about struggling to understand the ‘vocation’ of academia and used some touchstones of different versions, or even different periods, of how an academic career has been imagined. In both the posts I wrote on the beginning of a new academic year I quoted from Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, and while I still have a definite soft spot for Bradbury’s work, it feels far less relevant and more distant from my own workaday experience.

In between the two moments in which I wrote yesterday I had a coffee break with a lovely colleague, just catching up. I indirectly talked about, or around, my half-formed thoughts about wrestling to understand what it might mean to be an ‘academic’ these days. As is often the case, my thoughtful colleague sympathised but provided a grounded point of view: the churn of initiatives and changes to systems and structures may be unsettling, and it is tempting to focus on that, but the core of the job kind of remains the same. We still (try to) write and do research and we teach – the time available to do those things and the pressures they might involve change but they remain the central bits of the job. We remain in the stream, the ripples around us continue to ebb and flow but, for now, the stream is still going in the same broad direction.

There are all sorts of things that are affecting universities at the moment. Funding has long been on the minds of university leaders. I think that has become more acute of late and has become the driving bass line of the mood music in HE. Whereas once we were, more-or-less, told in relation to teaching ‘do more with less’ and that it would only be temporary, we are now being simply told to do less. Even so, at many institutions because we have lost so many of our professional services colleagues, and the administrative and technical systems within which we are instructed to operate are more demanding, all academic staff are conducting more administrative work than I have ever previously experienced. Last year and this, the ripples seem to be a bit larger and more turbulent.

I keep circling back in my own mind to the expectations that academic staff may variously have for what the job is, what it means, and where, in society (in the class structure), it fits. Some colleagues still seem to feel secure. Some of us are still able to travel, to visit other institutions to attend conferences and to find the time to perform something of the traditional expectations of the more don-ish version of academic life. I wonder how many of us though are making this work by paying our own way, from our own funds, rather than being support with reasonable expenses. Many of us, but not all, are well paid, when considered against the average earnings. But, as UCU (the main trade union for academics) argue, we are not as well paid as we once were. The dissatisfaction with pay and how academics feel they are valued, or not, is visible in the comments sections of the articles that cover pay on the likes of WonkHE and THE. In the comments of a post covering the 2024/25 pay negotiations, some commenters say:

It’s got to the point that the only way of even maintaining the purchasing power of my wage from 5 years ago is getting a promotion to the next band. So same pay for more responsibility and stress.

… staff on points 38 and above have been badly considered over the past few years like they don’t deserve a cost of living rise because they are on a certain grade. Staff work hard and have difficult stressful roles often requiring additional
Hours to be worked free of charge. 

Every time pay is minimised the gravitas of the roles reduce but expectation is still high from senior management. I hope that mid-management leave the sector for better conditions and pay elsewhere. The civil service pay better than universities now. It’s already extremely difficult to recruit into the sector now and has been for around 6 years but it’s getting worse and worse.

The comparisons are telling, perhaps. The civil service and lawyers are the comparisons I remember hearing in the common room when I was a PhD student. Though this is, of course, a self-selecting sample of people commenting here. Even so, as with many other jobs, academics appear to feel the pinch. There is, I argue (and I would, wouldn’t I – I am an academic), some justification for thinking in this way. Historically, academic roles were fairly well-paid. In part this recognises the sheer length of time it takes to get through all of the ‘training’, i.e. a PhD and entry-level roles (e.g. associate lecturer and research assistant), before you are in a full-time and ‘permanent’ position. Likewise, as was argued in 2018, academic pensions matter because many of us don’t even begin to pay into them before we are in our late-20s or early-30s. ‘Well, boohoo – try living like the rest of us’ may be the response from those on a lower wage, which, for some, may seem a fair response. However, on balance I think it remains true that we don’t want a race to the bottom. Pay the highly skilled and those we need in society more, don’t drag the pay of some down because others are not earning a good wage.

Quite apart from any of these ‘us’ and ‘them’ sorts of arguments about pay, I am really interested in the changing sense of what an academic career is, what it means to those of us doing it. There are now a not-insignificant number of colleagues just leaving the profession, more than any other time in my ~15 years working in universities. Even getting funded to do a PhD in the first place is very, very competitive, and not fantastically well supported, financially. So, the hapless but well-remunerated campus novel academic, of Lodge and Bradbury, is, I think, long gone, if they ever did exist outside of Oxford and Cambridge. I shed no tears, that vision of academia is/was deeply exclusionary and alienating for the majority of the population – anyone not White, male and upper-middle class. Who we as academics imagine “we” are feels more uncertain now than any point in my (not-so-long) career. As a geographer I am tempted to ask the question – where does the academic belong in society? And, for now, I don’t really feel like I have much of an answer.

I could try to contextualise this in proper academic terms, I could introduce a ‘clever’ observation drawing on one of the many dead white (mostly French) men we, in geographyland, like to quote to lend some gravitas or authority to our ‘big thoughts’ but I prefer not to, for once. I might just allow myself the suggestion that, with Haraway, we could think about staying with the trouble of understanding the vocation of academia. Regardless, the subtlety, and dare I say beauty, of Bowie’s echoes of Heraclitus are more than sufficient.

The river where you set your foot just now is gone – those waters giving way to this, now this.

Heraclitus c.500 BCE