This is an article about British higher education, and how the personalities attracted to/suitable/selected for don’t do themselves any favours for bettering their conditions!
We all know the problems: “Indebted students. Overworked staff on squeezed pay. Misery all round.” Some missatribute the causes: overly inclusive admissions policies, wokery. We all know what the real cause is: usiversity management and bosses, empowered by recent governments.
But unfortunately, academics are complicit and even instrumental in this change.
Similar self-image/reality conflict as journalists: “truth tellers and independent thinking” vs. the selection for obedience and subordination that goes on from nursery on up to end up in a professional career.
Acamedics, on the whole, did well in school. They may not have liked it, but they were able to tolerate rigid hierachies and authoritarian structures of mainstream schooling. Those who could not, were very probably weeded out before they got to graduate studies. Deferential personalities selected.
Apparently this is most obvious at departmental or union branch meetings: after a long time complaining about whatever management has just asked, and discussing how harmful it is, any suggestion that you simply don’t do that, regardless of what management want, is dismissed, maybe it will upset management, we’re in a weak enough position as it is. “Grumble and roll over, time and time and again.”
The idea operating here, is that if academics are nice to management, then management will be nice back. Unfortunately this expects the existence of some sort of commonality between the two.
The relationship between academics and management is much closer to that of labour and capital than between friends (depsite much management being drawn from the ranks of academics). labour makes demands and systematically withdraws its labour as required. friends can rely on reciprocity.
Management’s goals are slashing “costs” with cuts and casualisation, hiking student rents, increasing capital expenditure, inflating bosses’ salaries, expanding the role of private “providors”. Once ground is gained, they look for another piece. Why would they acquiesce?
strategic non-cooperation (@10 ways to remain grounded now that trump has won) can slow the decline, and make it harder for management to damage your department. not doing anything, and expecting management to be nice, is teacher’s pet syndrome; an ingrained trust in authority; a fear of getting in trouble.
many of the changes that have fucked over HE can be traced back to the 80s. stuff like the first research assessment exercise (RAE) which wanted to rank research and allocate funding accordingly. staff protested that that was very silly, but other staff said “well, we’d do quite well” and went along with it. Tenure was abolished in the 80s, and massive differentials in pay between junior and senior staff were introduced.
Fees were not the first disaster, and at every point academics have been actively complicit; they form the panels that rank the research, assess the outputs. It’s a lot of work for them! They’d love to have that time to do something useful, but they do what they’re told…
Management love to make academics busy: gather evidence to support your claim the new policy is having a detrimental effect, present the case for why you need offices, tell us which teaching rooms you could stand to lose, fill in this consultation, write the list of who to make redundant. and then management go and do the things anyway!
additionally, the sharp difference in salary and career precarity between senior professors and fixed-length lecturers is huge! makes solidarity difficult. academics also tend to competitive individualism, which is silly (@cat hicks). this explains why they’ll jump through so many hoops to be promoted, and low union memberships, and even lower tendency to strike :((
senior staff rely on junior, precarious, staff to teach their classes during their sabbaticals, to do the research in their labs and so on. junior staff are subjected to insecurity and impoverishment as they trundle from one job to another, in the hope of landing a permanent position somewhere.
if the goal is to get ahead of the next fellow, then general decline is acceptable.
My takeaways:
- yeah, i’m not sure about servility but the competitive individualism, and the way it manifests definitely rings true, knowing about how scarce jobs are.
- thinking about the times I’ve sat in meetings and it’s “the university says” “management says” blah blah blah. what would it be like “the university says X, but we’re ignoring them”. i know we do in some areas, where we can pursuade them. but they always come back.
- i wonder who in my department is most complicit in this way. how does it all work. how will it change?
- challenging myself to be noncompetitive seems fun/hard. i bet it will be really tempting to be. i guess i’ve already opted out of international conferences by not flying, maybe that will make it easier for me to opt out of other silly things.
- i was definitely a teachers pet growing up, i guess its good i’ve read so many things like this to thoroughly disabuse me of the notion that is a good thing…
- cultures of competitive individualism reminds me of dr cat hicks’ work about instead cultures of collaborative learning and how much better they are, and how to go about creating them. one can dream!