Football has long since become an all-purpose symbol of the decadence and dysfunction of globalised late capitalist society and culture. Perhaps this is because it retains traces of its more virtuous and popular origins so we feel its transformation more keenly (plus of course there’s the Land of Cockayne where the stadiums have terraces and the lager is cheap, aka the Bundesliga, mocking us from across the Armelkanal), whereas we don’t honestly expect bankers and the like to be anything other than unscrupulous, avaricious tax evaders. So we despair over modern football because it makes us acutely aware of what has been lost in the transformation.
It’s scarcely surprising, therefore, that discussions of higher education regularly evoke modern football as their touchstone for the evils of marketisation. (more…)
Part of the joy of holding any sort of position of academic leadership is the need to respond quickly and imaginatively to unexpected bits of randomness appearing out of a clear blue sky. This week it was our student newspaper publishing a story about whether arts students get value for money for their student fees; they’d acquired some figures from the university under a Freedom of Information request, and divided a total for teaching expenditure in each department by the student numbers, yielding a figure for ‘spend per head’ that could be compared with the standard £9000 fee. Not surprisingly, arts students were revealed by this calculation to be ‘subsidising’ scientists to the tune of many thousands of pounds per year – with one striking exception: Classics students appeared second in the table, just after Clinical Dentistry, apparently subsidised by everyone else by more than £6K pa.
Once we’d got over the hysterical giggling, it was imperative to work out what on earth was going on so as to demand a correction, in hope of preventing the appearance of an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob of disgruntled English and History students from marching on the department. (more…)
As followers of my Twitter feed will know, I’ve spent the last two weekends away from home, giving papers and attending conferences at St Andrews (post-classical libraries) and Regensburg (migration, mobility and innovation in pre-modern cities). The cats are still barely speaking to me for abandoning them, I’m not sure my wife is a lot happier, and I feel thoroughly exhausted, but both were great experiences – if nothing else, it’s wonderful to spend some time thinking about things other than university admin, and to realise that I can actually still have ideas if given a bit of space in which to have them.
Of course, that then leads to the problem of not having any time to do anything with those ideas. (more…)
I’ve been contemplating possible historical analogies for the role of Head of Department (or Head of Subject or Subject Lead, the titles now in use in my own faculty) in a context where all the control of financial matters, and a lot of control of everything else, resides at a higher level of the organisation. The position is temporary, a matter of a couple of years (even fewer, if I can provoke my colleagues into launching a coup), rather than permanent; it is supposedly meritocratic, but more likely depends on a mixture of seniority, status and vulnerability to moral pressure (there may be people who really want this sort of job, but mostly it appears to get assigned to those who accept that they have some sort of duty and/or haven’t come up with a good enough excuse to avoid it). More or less no power that I’ve been able to identify, but not purely ceremonial; on the contrary, a fair amount of responsibility: to represent the department to higher authority, to defend it against wacky schemes and exciting initiatives, and at the same time to try to cajole colleagues into obeying the dictats that can’t simply be ignored, sometimes trying to translate them into a language that’s more acceptable or accessible to academics… (more…)
A couple of weeks ago, at a drinks party, a friend casually asked whether it was the end of term yet – and was clearly surprised that I then spent five minutes explaining how, rather than the traditional binary term/not-term distinction, British universities now operate on the principle of a spectrum of termliness, in which the level of demands on academic time imposed by the university gradually diminishes from the time when we finish marking exams – but never entirely disappears. On the online calendar system, Monday June 16th is when “Students summer vacation starts” – no suggestion that such a thing applies to academics any more. Indeed, the effect of the online calendar system is to imply that we are available throughout the summer, to be scheduled into meetings at any point unless we expressly block out time for research, writing or – heaven forbid – actual holiday. It’s not that we ever had months of vacation, but there used to be an expectation that we would be able to shift our focus from teaching and admin to research for at least a month or so, and it’s not as if they’re stopped expecting us to produce the same level of outputs as when we had some time to write them… At this point my friend offered to find some more drinks, and for some reason never returned.
The main reason for writing this post is just to say that there probably won’t be many, or perhaps any, for a couple of months; I’m going to be off for an actual holiday for ten days, and have to write a couple of lectures for the end of the month. Maybe August, though I’m supposed to be writing a grant application, if I’ve managed to recharge the batteries by then. In the meantime, a bit of music from the utterly wonderful Viv Albertine. Having just finished her magnificent autobiography Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys I feel inspired to make some changes – as soon as I have a bit more energy. This may be no more than getting some singing lessons…
Addendum: If you haven’t yet read Clothes Clothes Clothes… – and you really should, if you have any interest in music, feminism, creativity, British social history or human beings – then that last comment might seem a little cryptic. Quick summary: having been at the heart of the whole punk movement, including playing in the Slits (not only the first female punk band, but one of the best bands of that entire era), Viv Albertine then went off to be a housewife and (after terrible problems) mother in Hastings, survived cancer, and then suddenly decided to take up the guitar again and have singing lessons, leading to whole new life, new album, autobiography etc. Now, my plan emphatically does not involve separating from spouse along the way, but either I’m going to start writing songs again, or something a bit more dramatic; whatever happens, getting to the end of the year feeling quite this exhausted is not so good.
It has been suggested that one possible, partial explanation for aspects of Michael Gove’s educational reform programme is his biography; we all have a tendency to generalise from our own experiences, and so it must feel quite natural to him to assume that what worked for one bright working-class boy – Latin, old-fashioned pedagogy and discipline, school uniforms etc. – ought to work for everyone. This is brought to mind by the publication this week of the results of a survey on how to tackle the problem of PhDs without permanent academic jobs (see http://hortensii.wordpress.com/). There must always be a concern that those with some power to make a significant difference to the insecure lives of would-be early career academics, i.e. established scholars, may not be best placed to grasp or address the problem. After all, we are the ones who have made it, somehow or other; assuming that we don’t simply take the self-serving line of “I made it, so clearly it’s a matter of inherent brilliance and hard work, and if the weak fall by the wayside and get eaten by jackals that’s their problem”, we may make unhelpful extrapolations from out own experiences (which are, if nothing else, likely to be several decades out of date) – and however much we emphasise to our research students that there are relatively few academic positions, the competition is fierce and there’s no guarantee whatsoever, we are sitting there as proof that it is nevertheless possible to get a permanent academic job (especially if our research students are less over-awed by us than we might believe or wish, and so are quietly thinking “well, if he can do it…”).
One of the most impressive aspects of the survey, and particularly the discussion and recommendations, is the sensitivity to this potential problem, above all through the careful distinction between respondents at different career stages and in different positions. For example, one question asked whether the stigmatisation of failure to get a permanent position might be reduced if the role of luck as well as merit in academic success was emphasised (something with which I thoroughly empathise; looking back over my own career, it’s difficult not to see it as the result of a whole series of contingencies that happened to work in my favour at a particular moment); 75% of academics without a permanent position thought that it could help, only 44% of ‘prominent’ academics agreed (how far some of them might have felt that it would devalue their own achievement is not recorded…). There is greater agreement that we could do more to disabuse PhD students of any illusions they might retain about the academic life, even on a permanent contract – so, all the occasions when I’ve let off steam to my supervisees about university bureaucracy or the iniquities of the REF were actually valuable career development support, rather than self-indulgence…
The basic problem is unavoidable: academic is an attractive profession, even now, for certain kinds of people seeking certain kinds of satisfaction (even if these days it can feel like a constant struggle to make space for those aspects of the job), and there will always be more applicants than positions. What we can do is help prepare PhD students for the possibility of failure, and work to alleviate the worst aspects of their situation in the meantime – which means above all not exploiting them. Not always easy, given the financial pressures on departments and the eagerness of some of them to be exploited in the expectation that such experience will be to their advantage… If I can do one decent thing, as I get ever closer to the point when I take over responsibility for the department for a couple of years, it will be to think properly about this report and the issues it raises, and then actually do something about it locally.
If you haven’t already seen it, head over immediately to Rebecca Schuman’s hilarious and perceptive piece on Slate, PowerPointless, subtitled “Digital slideshows are the scourge of higher education”. Then, if you are a teacher, spend five minutes contemplating those things you have done with PowerPoint that you ought not to have done, for there is no health in you. There are people working on a suitable scale of penances; using the ‘spin’ animation is obviously a sackable offence. Students and other non-academics can, for the moment, start smugly compiling a PowerPoint Bingo card for the next lecture they have to attend; if you have to do PowerPoints they’re probably rubbish as well, but that’s our fault for setting such a bad example. “Faculty who abuse Powerpoint create students who abuse Powerpoint”.
On the whole, I don’t think my practice comes off too badly in terms of the various sins that Schuman identifies; I do at least keep the animation to a minimum, don’t try to cram too many words in tiny font onto a single slide, and have never ever simply read out the words on the screen. On the contrary, I treat the slideshow rather like a jazz standard in small group improvisation (more…)
