There have been meetings. And demands from management that I furnish them with statistics that they already have, plus magic solutions for things like why my working-class students in one of the most deprived areas of the country don't have higher incomes when they graduate. Such is the Teaching Excellence Framework: universities and from next year courses are judged on things like post-graduation salaries because as we all know, if I'd been a little bit sharper on the definition of a trochee in year 2, average wages in the area would have gone up. Forget about the state of the local economy, or the decade-long wage freeze hitting the kind of jobs a lot of my students want to do for the good of society, or the prestige that undoubtedly helps graduates of certain institutions not including mine. No, it's just bad teaching. Trochee clarification. That's the answer.
There has been some pleasure this week: my colleagues' research into memory and the senses culminated in a very enjoyable evening of 'Snidge Scrumping', during which we had to identify various fragrances painstakingly collected from the area and consider their personal significance. I failed to identify at least half of them (including burnt tyre and canal water), and not being from round here, didn't have any Proustian epiphany, but maybe that's because I am – as an old friend once told me – 'dead inside'. It was very enjoyable and thought-provoking though, even if I do feel sick from the burning tyre one. You can see some pictures here – mostly of people reacting with disgust!
Other than that, I've been doing a little reading. Slowly, in the case of Declan Kiberd's meaty Inventing Ireland, and more rapidly with the entertaining things. I read the latest Ben Aaronovitch Rivers of London series – police procedurals with a magica, folkloric twist – straight through: they're good page turners, very evocative of mood and slyly witty. Highly recommended. I've also started Jessica Townsend's Nevermoor, on the recommendation of a student's daughter, with a view to perhaps adding it to the Children's Literature module next year. It's very good so far: a reversal of the Chosen One trope in that the central protagonist is a Cursed Child who acts as a social scapegoat for anything that goes wrong (very expensive for the parents) and is scheduled to die on her eleventh birthday, having spent the previous years as a pariah. Other than that, my reading this week consists solely of the M.Res I'm examining in Swansea on Monday, and the two PhD dissertations I'm examining in December and January.
What else? Well, I assume from the silence that I didn't get shortlisted for the job at NUI Galway, but a one line note to say 'thanks but no thanks' would be nice. To demonstrate that I never learn, I applied for another job, this time at UC Cork. I see applications as spiritual reminders of one's true place in the grander scale of things. Feel unappreciated at work? Apply elsewhere and discover that the universe is similarly indifferent. There's also a literary aspect to the quest for the perfect covering letter and CV too: constantly striving for the perfect way to make mediocrity appear desirable. Sisyphus meets the Wizard of Oz.
Oh well. Applications are more of a hobby these days, though if cutbacks and student numbers slump any further they may become a full-time occupation – it's happened to enough friends recently to be a clear and present danger. A couple of weeks ago a newspaper suggested that one northern university and two on the south coast were on the brink of going bust: within days teenagers and their parents were asking me if I knew which ones they might be, as they decide on their final choices. The sad fact is that the government actively wants a couple of ex-polytechnics to go bust. They think it would be good for market discipline, and it wouldn't affect their children, or those of their voters. The same logic applies to the much-promoted 2 year degrees: their children will continue to take three-year less vocational courses (plus medicine) amidst medieval splendour, safe in the knowledge that institutional prestige, nice manners and intellectual fluency will land them a nice job. They don't see why the great unwashed should do anything other than wield spanners and deliver pizzas, and suspect that any subject not taught at a Russell Group university is a doss. They also wonder why highly-skilled technical jobs are being shipped out to India and China. Putting these two thoughts together is apparently beyond them.
Anyway, that's enough from me. Paralysed by the competing demands on my time, I've decide to ignore them all and lie face down on the floor for the weekend. If sufficiently moved – by the news, perhaps – I shall occasionally thrash around in despair, a tactic adopted by a senior official at the Bank of England during the 1976 IMF bailout, I once read, and no doubt experiencing a Brexit-related revival in the corridors of Whitehall.
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