A Play for All Seasons

I watched the BBC adaptation of King Lear the other night. I don't know if you are familiar with the plot, but a man incapable of running his fiefdom and more interested in status and baubles than hard work decides to hold a restructuring exercise based on incoherent whims, demonstrating along the way that he doesn't understand his vassals' duties or personalities, eventually finding out that bad management shares some qualities with the boomerang.

Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.
Give me the map there. Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom: and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age;
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburthen'd crawl toward death.

Since now we will divest us both of rule,
Interest of territory, cares of state,--
Which of you shall we say doth love us most?
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.

Only Cordelia, who points out that instigating a round of currying favour is no way to achieve success or to run a complex organisation, fails to join in the greedy, desperate grovelling and in-fighting that ensues:

You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

Despite the sensible interjections of Kent:

Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least;
Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound
Reverbs no hollowness.

Cordelia's intransigence is felt not to fit with the kingdom's new mission statement or values and she and Kent are made redundant without even a notice period or compensation.

…take thy reward.
Five days we do allot thee, for provision
To shield thee from diseases of the world;
And on the sixth to turn thy hated back
Upon our kingdom: if, on the tenth day following,
Thy banish'd trunk be found in our dominions,
The moment is thy death.

Cordelia reluctantly heads off to a neighbouring institution which recognises her qualities, while Lear
sets off for a tour of his kingdom's new subsidiary units and finds himself neither welcomed nor treated in the manner to which he believes he is entitled. His new executives have their own priorities, and feeding a load of superfluous layabouts isn't amongst them:

your disorder'd rabble
Make servants of their betters.

despite Lear's claim that his management team are pushing the envelope of entrepreneurial skill:

My train are men of choice and rarest parts,
That all particulars of duty know,
And in the most exact regard support
The worships of their name.

And as for those trying to do their best, but for a few who flee to France, their only solution is to speak in riddles and lay low:

No port is free; no place,
That guard, and most unusual vigilance,
Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may 'scape,
I will preserve myself: and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast: my face I'll grime with filth;
Blanket my loins: elf all my hair in knots;
And with presented nakedness out-face
The winds and persecutions of the sky.

Or else stand witness to folly, and bear the cost, as the Fool suggests:

That sir which serves and seeks for gain,
And follows but for form,
Will pack when it begins to rain,
And leave thee in the storm,
But I will tarry; the fool will stay,

It does not, need I say, end well for Lear or anybody else.

He eventually realises the error of his ways, having relied on the flattery of his closest confidantes

They flattered
me like a dog; and told me I had white hairs in my
beard ere the black ones were there. To say 'ay'
and 'no' to every thing that I said!--'Ay' and 'no'
too was no good divinity. When the rain came to
wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when
the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I
found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go to, they are
not men o' their words: they told me I was every
thing; 'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.

but culpable or innocent, most of the senior protagonists are soon departed, leaving behind a shattered wasteland and a shell-shocked population with - no doubt - a somewhat jaundiced view of top-down strategy, given that there's not much chance of this occurring:

When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.

There's a vague hint of happier times ahead under new management, but it seems distinctly unlikely. Lear, though he saw the error of his ways, is not much missed:

 O, let him pass! he hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

The wonder is, he hath endured so long:
He but usurp'd his life.

and we bid farewell to this wretched place sadder, wiser, yet not empowered. 

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

And if you're wondering why I've treated you to this whistle-stop tour of high-handed ignorance and selfishness, why yes, it is an allegory. Have a good weekend. Tom's a-cold. 

Reasons (not) to be cheerful

I imagine you are as bored of my anguished rants about the twists and turns of Higher Education as I am, and I fully planned to turn to lighter or at least more intellectual themes for today's blog post. Instead, it's yet another howl of primal fury.

That was before I attended a series of Faculty meetings this week and received one of the Vice-Chancellor's chatty circulars. The Faculty meetings gave us the cheery news that rather than expand to 4000 students as originally planned when it was formed, we were going to shrink and lose 24 colleagues, particularly targeting senior researchers. Departments would be merged and each expanded department would boast a single Reader and a Professor each. Of course, this is only a 'consultation', despite the Dean announcing that courses would be suspended 'at Easter', which made it feel like more of a coffin-measuring appointment than anything I think of as a consultation. It's also not particularly consultative to inform the whole university that post cut in my faculty will be replaced by new jobs in other faculties.

It's not all doom and gloom though: while many colleagues are being fired, we are being promised a cafe in another building. I'm reminded of The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy, which features a planetary economy destroyed by the proliferation of shoe-shops. I can't help feeling that the solution to declining recruitment and absolutely incompetent, hostile and clueless management really isn't a reduction in the number of seconds away from a latte a student should be.

It feels like a fever dream now, but it's only 3 months since my department acquired its first professor, a Chair no less, and less than that since I watched my boss spend the entire marking period wrestling with REF and TEF reports. In them we demonstrated at great length and in great detail how world-class our research is, how it feeds directly into teaching, how we nurture early-career research and how our work impacts the world around us.

All this may as well go straight into the bin. Pretty soon we're going to have to explain to students why popular modules won't run; why non-specialists are teaching the remaining modules; why their surviving teachers' workloads are even heavier; why good researchers will never be promoted, and why there's no more capacity for them to do a PhD with us, and why people who have fulfilled their side of the deal – more research outputs, fresh new modules, better student support – are paying the price for structural problems and executive failure.

I also look forward to explaining the Vice-Chancellor's gnomic assertion that for our 'footprint' to expand, it first has to contract. I might also fill in some of the gaps in his cheery assertion that everything's fine by pointing to the new campus on which construction has stopped and which is going to cost many extra millions of pounds which could be spent on improving teaching provision. (In other good news, Faculty managers will be keeping their jobs under the proposed plan).

This is of course the self-satirising university: we bought a (derelict, contaminated) brewery and now we are very publicly failing to host a piss-up in it.

We are of course not alone. While executive pay in Higher Education has increased way out of proportion to staff pay, library investment or anything else in the sector other than fee income, things are far from rosy. You're wearyingly familiar with the USS Pension strike, driven by HE executives' desire to divert cash from old age to plate-glass prestige projects and their bonuses, but jobs are being lost all over the place: the OU is being demolished, Liverpool is cutting 200+ posts, Manchester is firing a load of academics, as are Aberystwyth, Southampton and a number of others.

If you're bored with this, and you should be, imagine my depths of tedium. My whole so-called career has been one of permanent crisis. Governments and executives (since when did universities even have executives?) have abandoned any concept of education beyond Mammonisation and much as New Labour imagined the working classes as greedy racists rather than meeting any, the HE sector has decided to cater to imaginary students whom they think of as selfish, grasping, anti-intellectual and unprincipled. The things we measure, the things we're judged on and the ways we're encouraged to behave all point to this concept of Homo Studenticus as a figure waving a receipt, filling in a survey and demanding 'customer satisfaction'.

I recently heard about a university which required its executives to produce research and do a minimum amount of teaching. I bet it's a happier and saner place than most. Apart from a delightful trip to Swansea yesterday, my week has been spent being threatened – and in some cases lied to – by managers, being told that some of my colleagues will be fired, and consoling colleagues and students in distress, some of whom have been shouted at and belittled by management. In one case, an HR executive shouted 'Who are you going to trust? Your employer or your union?' at a bunch of people threatened with disciplinary action for refusing to accept prejudicial new job descriptions. The laughter, as you can probably imagine, was distinctly hollow.

Still, I'm sure there's an online 'resilience' course I can take.

How I Learned to Love the Academy, or, Grounds for Optimism

One of the things that I find difficult is focus, particularly around work. I am, as you may have noticed, intensely interested in politics, structures, power and cultures: these things inform some of my research and provide the framework through which I view macro- and micro events.

I'm from a largely middle-class family with some history of higher education: as far as I can tell, my paternal grandfather was the first to attend university, taking a medical degree from University College Dublin in the 1930s. Both my parents took medical degrees, and all my five siblings have degrees (from much more prestigious institutions than the ones I went to and work at, they unfailingly remind me). Despite being the one with the worst school record of all (4% in a maths exam was a particular highlight), I'm the only one to pursue an academic life. Finding out at 18 that reading books and talking about them could be a way of life rather than an invitation to another playground beating was quite a revelation. The point being that encountering the idea of the academy has been enormously influential on me. I went to Coleg Prifysgol Gogledd Cymru/University College of North Wales in 1993 - by the time I graduated it was Coleg Prifysgol Cymru/University of Wales, Bangor and now it's Prifysgol Bangor University. It was small, buzzing with intellectual and social life, and quietly proud of its democratic origins, funded by subscriptions from slate quarriers.

Behind the scenes, no doubt, it was torn by all the tensions inherent in higher education: financial worries, political pressures, recruitment concerns, the balance between intellectual and skills development and all the other things that come with being a polymorphous institution. None of this was visible to students: I went to lectures and tutorials, read books, edited the student newspaper, stood for election (mostly unsuccessfully), went on demonstrations, partied, played sports, ran out of money, lived in terrible houses, met people from all over the world and from every background and generally had a great time. My tutors varied widely in personality and approach, but they were intellectually ambitious and caring at the same time. I came out of it, in short, a better person than I'd gone in. Did I know what I wanted to do next? Not at all. Going to university wasn't really a conscious choice, more an expectation, and leaving it seemed like being expelled from paradise. The problem was, I'd been turned into an idealist. I'd experienced the ideal of the university in what seemed to be its purest form: a community that fought its internal battles passionately and no doubt viciously, but always in the service of a higher purpose: the creation of a better world for everyone through intellectual labour.

I did an MA at Bangor and then a PhD at my current workplace, an post-92 HEI whose adherence to the polytechnic ideal of widening participation to the working class and the excluded proved equally attractive to me. I'm not only still here because I'm unemployable, I'm also still here because I believe that fine minds aren't solely the product of the comfortable suburbs.

The point is, and I'm sorry it's taken me several paragraphs to get this far, is that universities in all their variety are special places. They're full of people – students and staff – who engage in the common pursuit of knowledge and ways of thinking that transcend their immediate context. I have a contract (much-abused) with one chartered institution to teach a specific set of students and engage in particular research, managed by a group of people with medieval titles. They can hire and fire, and they can – and do – practice particular styles of management and discipline within a local culture. All of us, however, explicitly and with varying degrees of commitment, acknowledge that there are deeper connections and responsibilities which go beyond the immediate. I work for my students, for the wider intellectual community, for my colleagues within and without this and other HEIs, and for society. It's an enormous privilege not to have to serve burgers or hoe turnips, a privilege I'm conscious of. I think I understood some of this as a student because it was made clear by my tutors, and I hope that my students get some of this from me.

While my experiences have placed me firmly on the political left, none of these principles are inherently left wing : some of the doughtiest supporters of the university as a space protected from the chill winds of reductive atheism, capitalism or state interference have been conservatives, such as Cardinal Newman and Michael Oakeshott (and for a very interesting and different take, which rejects Newman as outdated, see this piece by Mark Leach). Last night I went to a launch for a very expensive book, Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education. Written, edited and supported by some of my friends, it traces the poisoning of the Higher Education ideal by marketisation and the idea that the sole purpose (expect for the children of the 1%) of HE is to fit young people for soul-destroying, insecure and badly-paid work, while telling them that they're 'investing' in themselves. Within the wider neoliberal social framework imposed by a government with no majority (building on the work of a Labour government which capitulated to the Invisible Hand), Hall and Winn's contributors consider whether universities as an autonomous sector of society can be rescued, and if so, by whom.

One of the problems, they say, is a leadership module of Big White Usually-Male Saviours, and several chapters look at alternative structures such as Co-operative Universities. In the case of the Birmingham Autonomous University, they say it's time to burn down the tainted institutions and start again. I can attest to this saviour mentality, having been a university governor for some years and an employee for longer. I went to a training course for HE leaders, and on arriving the programme director said 'Oh, you're from XXX: your VC is a visionary'. My heart sank. Visionaries run a gamut from Jim Jones to Joanna Southcott, with only the occasional Rosa Luxemburg and they're never good at challenging structural issues. They can bring energy and new ideas, but cultures and economic conditions rarely change in response to a single person's direction. In Weberian terms, I'd far rather live in a bureaucratic system than a charismatic one.

My view and always has been that universities should be vehicles for social justice and enlightenment, and that a university is a collection of groups united hopefully by an intention to understand and improve our lot. Although Liz Morrish has a wittier formulation:

Clark Kerr … said a university is a series of fiefdoms united by a common heating system

In that case, my HEI is united by bafflement at the (non)functioning of the heating system.

The contemporary university, however, is the sometimes-willing captive of its management. Our students and colleagues sometimes forget that they are the university and that managers should be implementing the carefully-considered policies set by academics, students and service department staff. Certainly my faculty and institution managers often behave as though students and staff are their minions, serving their visions. I have a lot of sympathy for them in many ways: it's almost impossible to work out where the money is coming from with no economic and political stability, but I do feel that we're becoming like the banks before they crashed: captured by their highly-enumerated senior executives, few of whom have ever published a paper or taught a class recently or at all, and captured by a mindset of metrics and income often through no fault of their own, in an atmosphere of doom and gloom. The neoliberal turn has produced universities run like businesses in which managers talk about 'business cases' and 'customers'; these universities produce students who think like customers and staff who are encouraged only to think of 'skills' and 'employability: a reactive institution and culture which has been described as the 'sub-prime university'.

At the launch last night my only contribution was to suggest that those of us who believe in universities as a public good need to recapture a sense of utopianism. There's no reason any subject shouldn't reach for the stars, whether it's astronomy, English or fashion design. Fashion is on my mind because on the other side of the glass wall from last night's launch, students were industriously designing lingerie: it felt rather like an episode of Father Ted. The joy of the current USS Strike is that students, academic staff and all the service department colleagues in the USS scheme are discovering the joys of being members of a community. Shorn of the disciplinary surveillance of the subprime-U, they've discovered that they're all on the same side. They've gone through the small print of the pensions assault, uncovered scandal, corruption, greed and plain bad maths, and communicated these things wittily and effectively to people who are discovering they aren't, in fact, customers but colleagues. It's been wonderful. Oxford University staff overcame the dirty tricks of their VC to reassert academic leadership of the institution, alumni everywhere are putting pressure on managers and Universities UK has been exposed as rotten to the core.

My view is that this provides an opportunity to end the discourse of decline. We have so much of which to be proud, and we are bursting with ideas. The public – apart from my brother, apparently – seems to understand that it's a good idea to teach critical thinking, to research things that aren't obviously and immediately profitable, that not everything should be run like a KFC and that the 'nice' bits of HE shouldn't just be reserved for the nice white children of the 1%. Last night Liz Morrish praised Birmingham City University for the bravery involved in setting up a BA in Black Studies (imagine the 'business case' for that, and the parents wondering how that will get you a job). We need to support and follow them. Every time a minister attacks degrees in Medieval Literature or whatever, we need to challenge them long and loud. We need to encourage our students to take the weird path, and we need to provide managers with the backbone required to buck the market. I can't remember who said it last night, but it was suggested that we should encourage the view that a Vice-Chancellorship isn't a reward: it's a burden. In the more civilised universities, course leaderships and department headships are rotated because it's understood that bureaucracy is a necessary evil that takes us away from students and research, and nobody should shoulder that load alone for too long. I've long thought it should work like that here, and now I'm very attracted to the idea that the VC should have her 5 years and then return to the ranks of researchers and teachers. A visiting senior scholar told me recently that at his institution, anyone in senior management with an academic profile has to do a minimum number of hours in a classroom per year, and make a REF return. It's a long time since most faculty and executive managers ran a seminar or submitted a journal article: they've long forgotten what it's like to do either, let alone both (while writing a TEF report…) and it's time they rediscovered those joys.

Above all, we need to take heart from the knowledge that we don't work for HEFCE, the OfS, the director of finance or the marketing department: we work for civilisation. That sounds massively pompous - because it is - but it's still true. The old slogan still applies: Another World Is Possible.

Because, in the spare time between tweeting GIFs about UniversitiesUK, I'm still a literature academic, I had a rummage through my memory for literary representations of universities. I'm not altogether in favour of campus novels: it's a bit too solipsistic, but I've accumulated a number of them across the years. I have to say: we're not universally adored out there. The posher, older universities are universally derided as the archaic playgrounds of bitter contemptuous snobs with no connection to the 'real world' (Porterhouse Blue, Lucky Jim); places like mine are laughed at for letting the (often over-sexed) proletariat rabble in (Sharpe's Wilt or Jacobson's Coming From Behind) or for aspiring to be like the old places (one aspect of John Wain's A Winter in the Hills which is actually a quietly wonderful novel). Spirits curdle, murders are committed, blood feuds emerge from petty differences and – almost universally – young women are sexual prey. Campuses provide authors with microcosmic cultures in which proximity exacerbates the worst aspects of wider society: Sayers' Gaudy Night is a classic of its claustrophobic kind: the academic Gormenghast. Alison Lurie's novels play it for laughs until you realise you're crying, while Donna Tartt's The Secret History reinforced all the suspicions about universities being carnivalesque spaces for a self-appointed élite (I hated it because I got the sense that Tartt secretly loved the monsters she'd created: I like Brideshead Revisited more as I get older because it feels less and less like Waugh wants us to celebrate rather than understand his cast). I loved May Sarton's The Small Room for its dated innocence and seriousness: an entire university is ripped apart over an accusation of undergraduate plagiarism, and John Williams's Stoner for its air of quiet dignity and simultaneous desperation. I hated Reginald Hill's An Advancement of Learning because it spoiled a good campus crime thriller with a pathological obsession with breasts: not a female character appeared on the page without the narrator giving you an update on the size, shape and movement of said glands. Oh, and it reproduced the same female-academics-as-hairy-predatory-lesbians trope which appears in Gaudy Night and Jilly Cooper's Riders.

Universities like mine don't usually get a look-in: campus novels tend to be about the kind of place that has cloisters, but I'll give an honourable mention to Frank Parkin's The Mind and Body Shop which, despite some knockabout xenophobia, uncannily predicted the modern university down to the high-street outlets and the VC clad in a tracksuit covered in sponsors' brands, doing workouts in the office he's converted to a gym.

The Vice-Chancellor of a large English college in Liverpool is remonstrating with the hapless Professor Douglas Hambro of the Philosophy Department: ""If you're still in the red at the end of Trinity term. . .you'll go the same way as Classics and Math and English."" In the modern university, all subjects have to earn their keep (there are coin-operated turnstiles in lecture rooms), and professors are supposed to act as hacks for foreign countries--one of Hambro's venal colleagues, Counselor Hedda Hagstrom, is doing research on a grant from OPEC to prove that children's IQ's are raised by leaded gas emissions.

Beyond the obvious novelistic attractions of the campus as a setting, the better ones are a good corrective: they remind us that we are privileged, and that we have responsibilities to the society that has given us – very reluctantly in the case of recent administrations – to use our time and power wisely, and to open the gates with pleasure rather than resentment. They also teach us not to take ourselves too seriously…

Full disclosure

The BBC salaries report has prompted me to do something I've had in mind for quite some time. I read a while ago that (now ex-)Google employee Erica Baker found the limits of her employer's openness when she circulated a spreadsheet with her salary on it, inviting others to join in.

All companies like to be secretive about salaries. This is partly because those in the magic circle get inflated salaries and bonus payments which are often way out of line with those awarded to the workforce, and partly because employees sharing their salaries leads to muttering in the ranks. This is certainly the case in HE. My VC's last recorded pay rise was of the order of 20%, in pursuit of the 'industry average': in my 8 years as a full-time academic I have never had a pay rise that exceeded inflation. In my four years as an elected staff governor, pay was never discussed in detail and I was excluded from the Renumeration Committee that decides on senior salaries, performance bonuses, and the university's stance on the the national pay award for teaching staff. The only fact I managed to establish was that senior management salaries are calculated after a confidential survey of management salaries across the sector, meaning that as long as they all stick together, there's never a chance of a below-inflation rise or a cut.

So here it is: my salary.

£48, 327.

I am 42, and have had a full-time academic job since 2008, when I was 32. At the moment I'm a Senior Lecturer and a Course Leader (i.e. I do all the validation and organisation for a couple of degrees but I don't manage people). Before that I took a long time to do an MA and a PhD, and taught as an hourly-paid lecturer in six different subject areas for 8 years. When things were tough, I did some supply teaching, which is why I admire teachers so much and feel so guilty about my behaviour in school. Well, some of it anyway. I also had a £6000 annual scholarship to do my PhD.

If you think 32 is late, the generations of academics behind me have it far worse. Being on a selection panel for an entry-level lecturing job was shaming: every single applicant had achieved more in terms of research, while doing huge amounts of teaching, while never having had a full-time job, a permanent job, or even a full-year job.

Salaries are not as transparent as they look either. Some academics negotiate, while others aren't aware it's possible, and there are ethnic and gendered aspects to this. I was once sitting next to a colleague who was offered a proper contract after working with us for years. To his enormous credit, the associate dean on the end of the phone talked her into accepting a higher salary than was technically on offer. I was also lucky: I'd taught for years in so many areas before the possibility of a part-time job came up that I quaveringly asked whether my length of service might justify making me a senior lecturer, and the panel agreed. I doubt this would ever happen now.

How do I feel about my salary? I feel rich. The average UK salary last year was £27,600. I live in a very poor area, so the gap is far wider. I have benefitted from being middle-class, white and male: lacking any one of these characteristics would result in a sharp drop: lacking all three dramatically reduces earning potential.

I do have other feelings about my salary, and they're mostly comparative. I work in a sector where managements work very hard to make sure that academic salaries fall behind while their own converge with industry. That annoys me. I feel that the long years of earning little or nothing (and therefore not contributing to a pension) and having no job security simply to acquire the qualifications and experience needed should be reflected in academic salaries. I'm also aware that this is my peak salary: the elevator stopped long ago, and insecurity is once more afield. I work hard to remind myself that my salary is way in excess of my neighbours and what most of my students will get, and that I don't even have a family to support. I mitigate the guilt by happily paying every tax I can, and by making sure that those earning less than me never buy the coffees: that's how it was when I had no money, and I'm just passing it on.

I also feel that I work hard for my salary. I have contracted hours, and they're officially exceeded by a significant amount every year, and unofficially exceeded by even more. Then there's the emotional labour involved in this kind of work: we don't just teach and write, we provide intellectual, cultural and emotional support to students and colleagues in ways that can't be quantified. The strong bonds between us means that there's a culture of overwork which is never acknowledged. It's true, however, that within a neoliberalised social system, being a lecturer in English Literature and a researcher in Welsh literatures is a luxury good. It shouldn't be, but it is.

So there we are. That's what I earn. I'm lucky to work in a sector with a national pay bargaining unit, and resigned to the ever-widening gap between my colleagues and our overseers. I'm conscious of the class, racial and gender bonus included in my salary. I don't aspire to riches, simply to security. I spend my money on books and train travel, and lust over extremely expensive bikes that I'll never be able to afford. I'd happily pay more tax and see a more level salary landscape, but I also think that there are a lot of people taking home a lot more tax for doing less useful work.

Don't feel you have to share your salary too - but do add your observations in the comments.

Ye Olde Annual 'Three Month Holiday' Post: special Adonis Edition

Every year, teachers and university lecturers are chaffed by friends and loved ones about their 'three month holiday'. Extrapolating from the sudden presence of children on the streets for 5-6 weeks, and dimly remembered long hazy undergraduate summers spent snorting marijuana and seeing Barclay James Harvest at the 100 Club (sub: check details?), they're under the impression that educators simply down tools in about mid-April, swan off to their agreeable second homes in Tuscany/the Hamptons, and read Iris Murdoch novels or translate Das Kapital into Serbian free verse.

This year, we have the added joy of an ermine-clad lord weighing in. You remember Andrew Adonis, don't you? That wonderful night in 1997 when after months of stump speeches and solid campaigning  he overturned a massive Tory majority in the constituency of…

Oh wait.

That was Stephen Twigg. Andrew Adonis was one of those white men in suits who went to a boarding school, then Oxford, did a short stint as a research fellow – having written a D.Phil on Politics and Aristocracy – and after a few years on the FT and the Observer, fortuitously found himself doing Politics amongst the Aristocracy courtesy of being made a Baron and a government minister by his fellow private-school/Oxford chum Tony Blair. It's almost as though sex, class and whiteness open the door to power and privilege…

So having never troubled himself to get elected to anything other than Oxford City Council, Andrew found himself in charge of education policy and landed with a permanent vote in the British legislature until he dies, and £300 per day just for turning up. Turning up, that is, on a schedule that makes his imagined university look positively Stakhanovite: roughly 130-145 days per year. Still, nice work if you can get it. But not the kind of lifestyle that entitles Andy to make comments like this:

My colleagues around the country have been slightly riled by this: the very best is a long, detailed exposition by Christina de Bellaigue, who knows the Oxford system inside out. Andy was a Junior Research Fellow in Oxford in the late 80s. Oxford wasn't representative of the HE section then (or now); a JRF was an untypical position with quite low formal expectations; HE was nowhere near as bureaucratised then as it is now; student numbers were much, much lower. And as Jonathan Healey of Oxford University points out, Dr Adonis's outputs were not exactly multi-volume works, despite being employed primarily as a research specialist.

One was a book based on his dissertation; the others are rather ephemeral – and not all peer-reviewed – to the point at which my research committee, at my not-even-in-the-league-tables HE institution, would be tutting and making pointed remarks about REF-ability.

Poor Baron Lord Doctor Adonis or however he's titled seems to have missed the expansion and bureaucratisation of higher education, despite having been the Father of Fees and the Minister for Academic Mayhem under New Labour. Many better academics than me are pointing out on Twitter that the '3 month holiday' is the period in which we: a) write new lectures for next year; b) get research done (the stuff that feeds into teaching and attracts funding, the only thing promotion and hiring panels give a stuff about; c; go through the results of every single student in the institution to work out whether they've passed or graduated this year; d) do the marking; e) do the resit marking; f) counsel students who've failed or just want to see us (79 appointments over the last month for me); present at conferences to make sure we're still current; examine other universities' courses to make sure they're up to scratch; attend administrative committees; sit on progression and results boards (2 in August in my case) and so on ad infinitum. And let's spare a thought for my colleagues on courses like nursing and medicine: while Andrew coped with 8 week terms, mine are 15 weeks long (with marking and prep in between) and health courses just carry on. Spare a thought too for all those hourly-paid and 10-month contract academics who produce the amazing new work required just to get a foot in the door, while not being paid for a single hour outside the classroom. No holiday pay, no pension, no lab space, no research hours, no payment for helping students outside the class: and still they get the books written. Like me, they will be judged on the quality of their research output, regardless of their working conditions or institutional structures. Was Lord Adonis measured and monitored in this way? I very much suspect not.

Although anecdotes aren't data, I thought I'd share my working situation with you. I'm pretty ordinary: I'm a course leader (which doesn't bring cash with it, just 150 hours to design and administer the whole damn thing). My contract theoretically divides 1597 hours p.a. between teaching, research, scholarly activity, administration and the rest. I counted up almost everything I do and found myself doing 2200 hours, and sent it off to the faculty committee so that they could take away some duties and make my workload conform to contract. Instead, they left every single duty on the sheet, but invented lower hourly tariffs. This year, they have decided that I can write a book – while being permanently present in my shared office of 14 people, and available to students at all times – in 30 hours. The fact is that all universities rely on academics and support staff putting in enormous amounts of unpaid and unrecorded labour simply because some of it pleasant and much of it will benefit the students that we care about. What's shocking is that they're happy to record some of it: while they've fiddled my workload data to falsify the stats, they've cheerfully left it significantly over the contracted hours because they know that I and my colleagues are too conscientious to leave work undone.

Despite my contract saying I'm entitled to 4 working weeks of 'unbroken' leave, boards are scheduled throughout August, and faculty events throughout September. Today I attended a research seminar and wrote a conference proposal; yesterday I assisted with a student writing skills event and wrote another proposal. The day before, I went to the Faculty Learning and Teaching Conference. Last week I attended two conferences and marked a lot of resits (more to come). I'm off next week to attend the board of another HEI in my role as an external examiner for two courses: before I get there I have to read all the essays submitted for 12 modules, if they ever arrive, then write a report about the teaching, the curriculum, the feedback and the courses' suitability. Then there are the PhD students who don't go away for three months either. We have a new VLE launching in September: before then, I've got to learn how to use it, transfer everything from the old one, and design new teaching methods utilising its whizzy new features – and that's in addition to writing an entirely new module (15 new lectures on 20 new texts, 15 new seminar designs, assembling primary materials), sorting rooming out and organising my subject's Welcome Week activities. I have a PhD to examine. We also have the Course Committee findings to address, an external examiner's report to which to respond, some troubling Equalities and Diversity committee statistics to look into, two literature festivals to help organise, the Estates Committee meetings to attend, school outreach events to do, journal articles to write, book research to do, grant applications to write and union members to advise – often about workload worries, unironically. Then there are the students, who work long, long hours in their own jobs and rely on us to be available to see them at any time – and we do, because we like them and want them to do well. Our teaching hours, by the way, are 9-9.

I get to work at 8 a.m. on many days, and leave 12 hours later. My boss is usually there before me and usually still there after I go home. My management's response – from their private offices and company limos – is to announce a crackdown because we're never there, and that those who choose to do their research at home are swinging the lead.

What's most pernicious about my managers and Andrew Adonis is their implication that academia is about 'product'. While he's a little disingenuous about his own output, he clearly only values what's tangible. He – and they – refuse to value the intangible work done. How can I demonstrate that I have made students think about new things in new ways? That I have in some small way changed their lives, my life, or my field of inquiry? Sure, there are cards and emails but I'm damned if I'll produce those as evidence. I could produce a paper a month and a new module per semester (actually I'll be introducing a new one in every semester for the next three years) but volume and quality are not the same thing, despite the efforts of REF, TEF and university managers – many of whom collect performance-related pay and credit when the metrics go in their favour, but are conspicuous by their absence when there's blame to be assigned.

I know, I know: plenty of people do longer hours in harder jobs for less pay, with more domineering and even less honest management surveillance. And yet I hope you understand why people go red and even cry when you say 'three-month holiday' to them with that cheesy grin. And to be very very clear: my students are not having a three-month holiday. All of them have jobs. More than I'd like are working full-time hours (i.e. 40 hours) while studying full-time too. During the summer break a lot of them work even more hours because they have families to support or huge debts. I continually nag them to take actual holidays for their own health, but for many it's just not possible. Surprisingly few of them have holiday homes in Chiantishire…

Lord Adonis is very much not one of them.

Postscript: Lord Adonis is also going to town on all those massively overpaid Vice-Chancellors and university executives. He is entirely right to do so and I support him on this every step of the way.

Pre-strike portmanteau post

It's Tuesday. I wouldn't normally post this early in the week (it's quite a while since I was blogging 4 times per day!) but the rest of the week isn't going to be normal.

Today sees the first Staff Summer Party over at the other campus. There are rides and ice-cream stalls and a bucking bronco because that's what academics really want to do apparently. Truth be told, a summer tea party after a long year is rather a nice idea, but this one falls on the eve of our strike. We all got a letter from the Vice-Chancellor explaining that we should all be satisfied with a 1.1% pay rise after 8 years of below-inflation settlements, and that he's very very disappointed with our ingratitude (I paraphrase, but only slightly). I've suggested that the party be renamed the Let Them Eat Cake bash, but apparently that's not helpful.

I wouldn't mind, but that very day the Times Higher Education Supplement published a report which singled out our VC for his 19.6% pay rise: a very handy £44,000 which should see him through the summer. The Chair of the Governors told THES that the rise is due to the VC's excellent performance, while forgetting to mention – and this is in the publicly available records – that the VC's salary is being increased to the median for the sector as a matter of policy.

Now, I'm a governor of this institution (though I'm excluded from the Renumeration Committee) and am bound by a duty of confidentiality, so I can't give you all the details, but I can give you my view. Academic staff are not rewarded for 'results': we're assessed and appraised and criticised and occasionally praised, but not rewarded. Only senior executives – some of whom are demonstrably ignorant of what goes on in classrooms – are afforded bonus payments and a salary scheme which depends on an all-universities pay survey. What this essentially means is that the senior managements of all universities are on a one-way conveyor belt of pay uplifts. If senior pay is benchmarked to a sector average, all they have to do is tell each other that this year, they've deserved an increase. Hey presto, they all get one! As we say round here, credit and money rise to the top. Only blame trickles downwards.

To be honest, if it wasn't for the sight of people on 20% pay rises sending out threatening emails telling us we're greedy I wouldn't mind so much about the salary. What I do object to is the complete absence of analytical rigour. Universities' monies are loans from students, to be paid off (over decades). I want to see a Vice Chancellor or a Head of Finance of a university – which is a charity, let's not forget – stand in front of a student and explain why he or she deserves to soak up the £9000 fees of 30 students (45 for Birmingham University's VC) while they're being taught often by insecurely-employed, part-time teachers who are expected to produce world-class research, generate external funding and top-class National Student Survey reports while often being employed on zero-hours contracts.

Academics aren't fat-cats. We're like footballers in that our careers start very late: I did 4 degrees to become fully qualified and worked on an hourly-paid basis until I was 34, so I've missed out on at least a decade of savings, pension contributions and housing costs. My female colleagues have done the same, except that those who take time off to have children lose out even more. Our pensions have been slashed while the contributions have increased. And yet I'm expected to keep quiet while the VC gets a top-up equivalent to my annual salary. We're not like footballers in that football managers don't get all the money when the team plays well.

We all know what happened to the banking sector. They were captured by a group of employees who treated their institutions as personal piggy banks, and therefore thought it was OK to use shady and often illegal methods to achieve short-term gains for themselves while bringing about a global recession for which we all paid. Education is too important to be captured by uncollegiate, self-reinforcing circles of sharp-suited snake-oil salesmen and women, convinced by their MBA training that they and they alone have 'saved' their institutions and deserve corporate rewards, while the teachers, technicians and support staff are simply fungible assets to be sweated and discarded.

Universities need managers, and the skills required to keep a complex, enormous institution like a university going aren't necessarily the same as those required to propel an academic to the top of her field – I don't think we can manage without them. However, I do now feel like the public service ideals which underpinned the collective enterprise of the academy have been replaced by a Directors and Hands structure whereby our views are unwelcome and our labour to be sweated.

How can I say to my nephews and nieces – and my fresh-faced PhD students –  that they should consider a career in teaching and research when they could get a decent job at 21 with a BA or even no degree at all? My life is mostly brilliant: I spend all day talking about books and get paid for it. I spend my classroom time with students and colleagues who are a pleasure to be with – but I'm old. If I were 21 and burdened with £50,000 of debts I'm not sure that the simple pleasures of intellectual enlightenment would make up for another decade of unemployment, another £50,000 of debt, of scrabbling around for enough hours to make ends meet, followed by decades of bullying and pay cuts delivered by someone with a chauffeur-driven limo and an air of bemused contempt? That's a tough gig.

That's why tomorrow I'll be out on the picket line with my bags of peanuts (representing our pay offer) and some 'filled pockets' Whiskas treats for the fat cats as they sweep past us.

Paying in kind(ness)

At the end of last week I wrote a fairly incoherent piece which boiled down to this: academics, students and managers need to be a little bit nicer to each other (it seemed to strike a chord out there and Music for Deckchairs even flattered me out of all proportion with this). Despite the rhetoric of (1980s) business which has infected the academy (certainly there's no sign of Google-style relaxation zones, massages and cereal bars at my place, though there is the pervasive surveillance and fiscal secrecy) we are one of the few professions which has a long and mostly proud tradition of collegiality – the clue's in the adjective. Here in Britain the government is systematically targeting the professions to reduce to the status of a proletariat and render them vulnerable to the vicissitudes (sorry, efficiencies) of the market: nurses, doctors, teachers and even lawyers have been undermined. Academics have only been left until because we don't matter so much, though universities certainly do. 

So anyway, having established the necessity for nurturing an ethic of kindness in the Republic of Letters, what are the barriers and how do we get around them? This is only a partial and idiosyncratic list in no particular order, but it's based on what I see around here and elsewhere. I should say at this point that most of what I say is drawn from my experience as a union representative and university governor: I've been very lucky in my colleagues.

A few years ago a friend of mine got a job in a very prestigious university's very prestigious English department, having previously been a senior lecturer in two other institutions. Within a few weeks she was physically removed from her office and walked – by the head of department – to a hall to oversee a day's worth of examinations. Why her? Well, it turned out that there was a high-powered speaker coming to do some research seminars and the HoD didn't want the bright young things to miss out. Entirely coincidentally, it turned out that all the Bright Young Things were posh young white men, each of whom was treated like Little Lord Fauntleroy by their equally posh, white male Gods amongst the professoriate.

Invigilation, it seems, is one of those menial jobs which is best left to women or other such losers, not the stars of the future. Other menial jobs include: first year lectures (not important, apparently); advising and counselling students; survey modules; study skills; visiting schools, attending meetings; organising and attending events; boring committee work; simply being available. You may have your own list and I invite you to add them using the comments facility. It's not solely stereotypically female work, but previous generations have a term for it: Department Mother. If you don't know who your department mother is, it's probably you and it doesn't matter what your job title is: I know plenty of Head of School Dept Mums. Sexist terminology aside, it's important work and you should be congratulated for doing it. More than that, you should be rewarded and promoted for doing it. When students and colleagues leave, they remember the person who was always there, who bought them a coffee or loaned them that book they lost, took pleasure in their successes, commiserated with them for their struggles, read their draft papers and gave them a generous reference that didn't mention The Case of the Vanishing Milk or the time they nominated you for the Positive Environment Working Group Sub-Committee C. At least I think they will. Roses inexplicably fail to pile up outside my door. Though as my old mother always said, your reward will be in heaven.

The question is, should we Herbivores – I regret the use of 'plodder' in my previous post and now substitute a taxonomy of Herbivores v Carnivores (it could be far, far worse) – bask in the expectation of eternal life, and is it good for us, our colleagues, our students and our institutions, let alone The College Invisible? I would suggest it isn't. If you spend your time being Department Mother, you're letting rather a lot of other people – the carnivores – be the Department Absent Father and yes, it is a patriarchal structure. They 'work from home' and hold cursory 'office hours' of 0758-0807 every third Thursday. They churn out the grant applications and projects and keynotes and books and make it look effortless because they've informally outsourced lots of the work of being a good academic citizen to we herbivores. It's not that we can't do the same thing, it's that we've allowed ourselves to become enablers of privilege. I refuse to believe that I and my friends, getting out a decent chapter now and then are constitutionally incapable of producing more and better research, or writing better lectures, or leading inspiration tutorials. Instead, I believe that we have been taken advantage of as a group. We have clung to co-operative values in a system which deforms co-operation.

The situation is of course rather more grey than this black-and-white construction implies: outside the very rarefied atmospheres of élite institutions nobody escapes the quotidian work, but some are better at avoiding it than others. Their work isn't not done: it's done by others and it's rarely acknowledged that their successes are due at least in part to the efforts of others. It reminds me, in fact, of Selma James's campaign for Wages For Housework. The underlying discourse is not generated by the Carnivores but by wider social pressures. The individualism which emerged from the Renaissance and Protestant capitalism in the 15th-17th centuries privileged the Individual Genius who rises above the herd to Achieve Greatness. It's a doctrine familiar from Trump to Carnegie, but from academia to pig-breeding, Obama's assertion applies: the Individual Genius relies on the work done by his or her entire society.

if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.) 

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. 

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

 Most of our carnivorous colleagues know this. They support the sentiment. But the system encourages them to behave as though it wasn't true. Research evaluation frameworks, sabbaticals, promotion criteria, appraisals, funding applications, the class structures of academia, the tacit division of work between Genius and Menial: all conspire to encourage the division of the Achiever sheep from the Nurturing goats.

As far as I can see, there are social and systemic solutions to this. At a personal level, we must develop and promote empathy as a core constituent of what it means to be a good academic citizen. Ask yourself how you felt as a first-year student, as a new PhD candidate, as an hourly-paid lecturer, junior research fellow or freshly-spawned head of department. If you didn't like how it felt, don't perpetuate the structures and behaviours which made life hard. Distribute 'plum' modules or year-groups around the department rather than treat them as rewards for instance, or (and I'm a big fan of this one) discourage the idea that teaching first-years or research skills or whatever are somehow less important than a module based on your book. Make sure your students are invited to events even if you strongly suspect they won't turn up: a few will. Treat everyone as a community of intellectuals and try to understand the academic and social landscape from their perspective even if their perspective is partial (whose isn't) or just plain wrong. Have high expectations of everyone but comprehend their starting points. Identify the Department Mother and formally or informally share their burdens. If you can't bear teaching and see it as detracting from your magnum opus: fake it. The Academy is nothing if not a collective effort and if you can't hack it, sod off. On which contradictorily rude note, I suggest that what we need to look at is the idea of Slow Scholarship. I didn't invent it: I only heard of it yesterday, but Alison Phipps has pointed me towards a very persuasive paper about it as a feminist space for resistance, while the ever-reliable Thesis Whisperer and Liz Thackray have been thinking about it as praxis for ages

A few years ago a Professor of Education gave a lecture in which she said that all students should be treated as tabulae rasa; that whatever their cultural contexts and experiences, they should be treated absolutely identically. It struck me as the worst kind of nonsense, derived from the spurious claims of 'equality of opportunity' and meritocracy that has replaced intellectual enquiry in the political classes. I think I would make a plea for the very opposite when we think about our colleagues, our successors and our students. They aren't stupid and they aren't identical. They have needs, desires and aspirations which should be examined, elucidated and in most cases nurtured. One of the reasons I'm a raving Red subversive is that I follow William Morris and the utopian socialists' belief that we all have enormous potential, potential which is stifled by the discourses of consumerism, acquisition and above all competition. Where Morris postulated revolution we have the struggle to reform our institutions and the social structures that construct them, but I also think that we have agency. Our institutions are not physical, nor the property of sectional interests but Imaginary Communities in Anderson's sense. We make them and remake them with every thing we do, every remark we make. Whether it's refusing to sit on all-male panels, surprising someone with the offer of a co-written paper   simply because you know they're working on interesting things, or going off-piste in a class because something tangential but intelligent has come up in conversation, we can subtly remould the institution under the radar.

We should, however, be remoulding the institution above the radar too. Rotating heads of department (not paid extra here: they get 50! hours) so those poor dumb animals get to have some fun too. Demand that managers still do some teaching. Replace your executive with a Senate. Democratise your departments whether the students want to be or not (one of my departments recently invited students to participate in the hiring process: none came). Unionise, always unionise. Talk, to the point of tedium, about exactly how big the sex and class and race gaps are between students, Herbivores, Carnivores and management. If you're a Herbivore, tell your colleagues about the interesting things you're doing and the interesting things you want to do. Take on a big scary job that might actually involve wielding power. Finally – and this is not something I've managed to do yet – learn to say NO  and Yes: No to that final straw, or to that task that attaches itself to you because you're the only reliable one, or the only one who reliably takes things on. Yes to the new, the weird, the opportunities that normally get grabbed by the Carnivores. If you are Carnivore, take on a class you'd normally avoid. Ask your herbivorous colleagues how you can help and what they get out of the stuff you'd forgotten needed doing. Colleagues are for life, not just for breakfast…

In all things, behave as though we're this close to Paradise. We have a special social space which is hugely privileged, and which can be a model for society. If you behave like a Utopian, you'll wake up in Utopia.

You're Fired. Enjoy your summer.

Hi all. It's Friday afternoon and it's been a mixed week, to put it politely.

Last weekend was rather glorious: a trip to The Globe for a matinee performance of As You Like It with my students (and ex-students, and their kids) and colleagues. I have to confess to having a heart of stone when it comes to Shakespearian comedy, despite being well aware (before you all write in) that comedy = happy endings in those days. However, this performance was a triumph. It was already ahead of last year's Antony and Cleopatra because lightning and thunder were conspicuously absent. All the coincidences and unconvincing doubling were played up and the knob gags and so on were done like panto, which I thought really worked. The actors from star to bit part were seriously impressive, doing everything from saucy bits to tenderness so well: I could even see a few people wiping away tears as the couples got hitched and Rosalind was reunited with her father (sorry to ruin the ending for you). I definitely wasn't one of them. Not at all.

So that was good: fine theatre, Greek food with friends, catching up with our graduates and then driving home past Walsall Stadium in the rain where – I found out later – Elton John was performing to the more tasteless of some other friends. I wasn't sure whom to feel sorriest for: them for preferring Elton John to – for example – rolling around in shattered glass, or Elton John for going from private jets and global fame to standing in the rain next to a motorway in the shabbiest, tiniest football stadia for miles. It's no dignified way to end a career.

After that, the week nosedived quite significantly. There were high points - presenting a preliminary version of the politicians' novels project to our staff conference and seeing other colleagues' research (one paper on Victorian prisoners was called Pros and Cons: I do love a good pun), and meeting our external examiners, who think we do a marvellous job. If only our management would say the same. Sadly, however, and with some truly wonderful exceptions, it's beginning to feel like there's nothing we can say or do which would persuade them not to treat us as some kind of incomprehensible enemy. There's an awful lot I can't say in public, but it's been one of those weeks in which jobs.ac.uk has been refreshed constantly.

My own worries aside, most of the week was taken up by preparing for and representing my professorial colleagues, 19 of whom have been shortlisted for redundancy. Why 19? Because 20 triggers a range of legal responsibilities which might impede management's (ahem) 'determined' style. It's been a long time since this institution felt or behaved like a collegiate body united by a set of educational values. Instead we get corporate platitudes and a 'leadership' (they love that word, and attend seminars on what it means) which derives its tactics and sense of self-worth from episodes of The Apprentice.



This time some of the professors are in line for the sack and others are up for bonus payments (as are lots of the senior management team, who consume lots of carrots but never catch sight of a stick). I have bored a lot of them with my views on this, and intend to carry on (what's the point of being a governor otherwise?) but I may as well rehearse the arguments here. Why stop at boring those around me when I can do it to The Internet?

In the corporate world, ordinary employees receive a salary for doing their jobs well, and get sacked for not doing them well (or, thanks to the Tories, for pretty much any non-existent infringement). The senior executives get massive salaries but can't be expected to do their jobs well without even more massive bonus payments. These are supposedly performance-linked, which has led to – inter alia – the banking crash. If you're offered a bonus for hitting targets, you're going to suggest short-term ones which are easy to fix rather than ones which are good for the organisation. Nor, if you're a bonus recipient, should you ever mention your sneaking suspicion that success is rarely attributable to individuals.

However, if you temporarily forget that corporate stupidity affects the wider economy and society, you might just about justify this on free-market capitalist grounds. My problem is that academia has been invaded by these corporate blackmailers, in person or in spirit. Fewer and fewer senior educational managers are academics, and those who are have sold out to the discourse of leadership and reward. It's below-inflation pay settlements for the workforce, and retainers and performance bonuses for themselves. These are, of course, in case they take their talent elsewhere. Personally I would invite anyone making such veiled threats to try their luck, but I'm heavily outnumbered on the board and the decisions are made in private sub-committees by people who speak the same language.

What is success in relation to a Higher Education institution? Is it increased recruitment? We could pack them in - but we might not be able to serve their needs successfully. Is is 'student satisfaction'? We have the National Student Survey, invoked in hushed terms at every meeting. We could ace that: just give everyone high grades and replace the library with a corporately-branded coffee area (this is why in the US the American Football coach is more highly-paid than the vice-chancellor). Is it attainment? We can fiddle with the grading algorithm like all the other universities. For every Key Performance Indicator, there's a way to fiddle the result so that someone gets a fat cheque at the end, as though any achievement – meaningful or not – is the result of one go-getting Leader.

So far, so seedily familiar. That boat has sailed. We all expect academic executives to behave (dress, speak) like those they see as their peers in the private sector. Whenever I say anything like this to them you can see the eyes roll as they wonder if I've just arrived from a WEA class circa 1937. But even though I'm not and never expect to be a professor, I want to weep at this extension of corporate amorality from administration to education (and oh yes, my appraisal includes the category 'appearance' but not 'intellect'):

In fact it's worse: the executives find ways to blame everybody for failure, while jealously guarding the rewards of success. With the professors, they're getting both carrot and stick. Nobody here doubts that some the profs may be exhausted, burned out or distracted (some might even just be plain lazy), but the management's decision to arbitrarily select a couple of appraisal points without any critical judgement smacks of contempt. It implies that professors are educational colossi, striding across the pedagogical landscape without any involvement with the rest of the place. It suggests that their achievements are the result of heroic solo labour, and their failures are purely personal. Never mind that the benchmarks are artificial, that research funding is not distributed fairly either here or in the sector as a whole, that other duties other than grant income or REF-able research is valuable and essential. Never mind that giving a Prof all the time needed for those papers requires everyone else to do their teaching and pastoral work, and diverts resources from collective effort to the Heroic model.

No: let's treat them as isolated demigods, masters of their own fates, regardless of local or wider conditions: educational, financial or emotional.

I'm reminded of a cheap TV show from some years back: Pets Win Prizes. This is what bothers me most about the Night of the Long Professorial Knives. Despite the protestations of fair play and impartial criteria, it seems to me that the twin approaches of the sack for some and cash rewards for others is the final power-play by an administration (not just here) that has got above itself. In theory – very much in theory, sadly – the Professors are the academic conscience of a university, particular one that isn't run by the academic staff. Their reputations and body of work enables them to contribute to the fundamental values and direction of the institution, informed by long experience and critical abilities. The title of 'professor' contains within itself a statement that what they do is more than a job: they profess a set of beliefs or values which transcend their formal terms of employment.

All this goes out of the window once the professor is left wondering whether the next phone call is to had her the price of a good holiday or summon her to an exit interview. Who will challenge (constructively or not) anything that happens when their are such serious consequences? You'd have to be hard as nails to resist the tide in this way or – like me – resigned to finding fulfilment in my small but steady academic niche rather than in the warm glow of management's regard. It's not good enough. My colleagues and I are summarily dismissed as union hacks: we would say this, wouldn't we? We no longer have any impact because the academic staff, like all the others, are no longer colleagues of the executive but work for it and should just shut up. This is why some of the executive refers to 'the university' when they mean themselves. I was always under the impression that 'the university' includes students, academics, support staff, the executive and all sorts of other people. The point of having a confident, self-critical and autonomous professoriate is that they can keep a check on the executive's schemes without being dismissed – as I and my UCU colleagues are – of being the 'usual suspects'. They might not always live up to this role, but they never will if they can be fired at will or be handed tips by an avuncular VC.

Last night, I went to Symphony Hall to see Andris Nelsons' last performance as conductor or the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Between the pieces, members of the orchestra spoke movingly of their relationship with him, and afterwards Nelsons gave a lovely speech about them, and the value of music and the arts to society. It was blindingly obvious that to him, the old model of the conductor as some sort of musical Mussolini bending the orchestral peons to his will was completely outdated. Instead, Nelsons built on the existing skills of the orchestra and introduced them to new ways of seeing music, to new repertoires, to new horizons. With collective goodwill, both he and the members of the CBSO part company improved by the experience.

I think it's time university executives shook off the embarrassing management models of Enron and Lehman Brothers. Universities have been around a hell of a lot longer than these corporate monsters, and contain enough collective wisdom to succeed on their own terms. These fads come and go, and we should rise above them. Let's learn from the orchestra, the convent, the commune rather than fall for every airport self-help huckster breezing through.

Last night was a transcendent experience. This morning I sat next to a dignified and professional man as he begged for his job, his livelihood and his personal and professional pride, watched across the table by a man in a suit who kept saying that he didn't have time for this. For all the abstract points I've outlined above, this is what it comes down too: sleek bonus-seeking sharks forcing honest people to justify their existence in the most reductive terms.

Progress, eh? Anyway, I'm off to a funeral, which in this context seems about the right way to end the week.

Memo to all staff: Graduation Deportation Protocol

To: all staff.
From: university security and ceremony directorate
Subject: Graduation Ceremony protocol.

Colleagues, like every university, we have a formal procession at graduation. The students take their seats in the Grand Theatre and we staff march there in pairs from the ivory tower in all our finery, escorted by a chap of military bearing carrying a great heavy mace. The traffic stops as the townsfolk pause to admire us and (hopefully) aspire to one day join us.

Next year, thanks to the Home Secretary and her leadership aspirations, some alterations will have to be made to the pomp and circumstance.

Theresa May to 'kick out foreign graduates' in new immigration plans

• We will still parade through the streets, but we'll be accompanied by a phalanx of G4S security personnel (Mubenga Division), resplendent in their ceremonial body armour and steel toe-caps. The billy-clubs and handcuffs will be merely symbolic detail and the Mace of Office will be adapted to include a spring-loaded net to ensure full attendance. 
• Outside the Theatre, gleaming black transport will await our honoured overseas graduates, complete with blacked-out windows on each bespoke, individual cell. 
• Each bright young student will hear their names called and walk on stage to collect their degree certificates from the Vice-Chancellor. Enclosed in the scroll will be a heavy parchment copy of the student's extradition order, personally electronically signed by the Home Secretary wishing the lucky graduate a safe and speedy trip out of the country. 
• Before they leave the stage, an accountant in gold-trimmed robes will formally offer each student a card reader to settle any tuition fees and deportation costs while an appropriate song plays to cover the sounds of any churlish and undignified protests. 
• Staff are reminded that weeping is undignified and that higher education funding is now dependent on informing the authorities on any student or colleague suspected of a) being foreign b) holding unauthorised opinions. (Please note: annual appraisal will now take place in the basement. Please ensure that you bring a signed copy of your Extremism Disavowal form CTCH-22 and warm clothes).
• As the beaming, freshly-minted graduate leaves the stage, the Mubenga Corps will offer them a congratulatory headlock and escort them into the airport-bound black maria. On arrival any survivors will be given celebratory 'bumps' by their guards of honour and waved off to start a new life using their new-found skills somewhere else.

We trust these minor tweaks to the annual ceremonies meet your approval.

Homeopathic education from 'alternative providers'.

Are you a student at an 'alternative provider'? You could be forgiven if you're not sure - the terminology is deliberately obscure (and pedagogically suspect). 'Alternative providers' are usually private corporations which happen to be in the education business, teaching mostly HNDs awarded by the giant vampire squid that is Pearson Education, though a small number are non-profit set-ups.

Like 'alternative medicine', 'alternative providers' of education (I hate the idea that we 'provide' education like a workhouse overseer ladling out porridge to waifs) appear not to work. Andrew McGettigan's explosive article in the Times Higher Education Supplement points out that a shockingly low number of students at one particular institution submit work or attain the qualification, despite being funded as full-timers for two years and having five years in which to complete the course. Recruitment material strongly promotes the state funding available to students recruited from the EU, while the quality assurance bodies have little or no access to retention and progression statistics.

The USA has long had a system of private provision of higher and further education, and a shorter but notorious history of provision by for-profit organisations. Most notorious of all is Phoenix, which started off as a decent enough degree-completion outfit, but later became the biggest 'university' in the US when it listed on the stock exchange, with half a million students at any one time. The problem was that only 40% of those students left with a degree: the rest stayed, on average, enrolled for four months. Phoenix is only the worst and most prominent example of these vulture colleges.

Why do they exist? Simply as a means to channel taxpayers' money away from the state and established non-profit HE institutions towards corporate America: it's an ideological move. The free-marketeers are convinced that for-profit organisations are efficient and competitive. Perhaps they are, if the bottom line is all you care about, which I don't think should be the case with education. Every penny of shareholder dividend and executive pay (and Phoenix's profit margins, despite massive student drop-out rates, were around 27% while 18% of the budget was spent on teaching) is removed from research budgets, equipment provision, student support and so on. Economies are made be removing the essential bits of the university experience: being taught by highly-qualified educators at the cutting edges of their fields. Instead, you increase class sizes, cut contact hours, teach from a website or textbook, and dump complicated subjects. Business English ahoy! This also means – pleasingly for a government and indeed political establishment across parties that doesn't recognise non-market thought as valid – that critical thinking will be very much off the menu. Forever.

The quieter motive of course is to lance what right-wingers see as the liberal boil: universities (as Mr Gove's assault on university teacher-education demonstrates) are thought to be hotbeds of opposition to the onward march of market progress.

The providers of for-profit education are, however, not free-marketeers. Like Serco, G4S and co., they pose as competitive capitalists, while making all their money from the state. The UK recently followed the US in providing state monies to private education providers. In the US, companies like Phoenix simply sucked on this cash pipe and forgot to even pretend that they existed for educational purposes. The cash didn't follow on attainment, just enrolment, so there was no incentive to ensure only students with potential for completion were enrolled, nor to ensure they stayed on the courses and gained their qualifications.

As one Phoenix student puts it, the organisation is

"kind of like a car dealership. They want to get you in the door," and "want you to have success with the car. They want it to go well for you. But if it doesn't, they've already been paid."

Instead, turnover became key: far more was spent on recruitment and marketing than on academic support. The shareholders aren't interested in attainment or whether their students should be taking on debt to pay for uncompleted or dubious qualifications, just as McDonald's shareholders couldn't care less about their customers' cholesterol levels as long as they keep ordering more.

The same happened in the UK. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private providers sprang up once the Tories and their Lib Dem colleagues authorised state funding. They employed agents across the EU and in the UK to recruit students, many of whom rarely if ever darkened the classroom door or troubled to submit work. The colleges were happy – they've been paid – and so were the students, who acquired a chunk of cash they had little intention of repaying either. So much cash disappeared for so little educational return that even this government had to suspend a swathe of these dodgy organisations, but the push is still very much on, and some very ill-advised universities and FE colleges have even supported this venture for no reason I can see. At least some of us traditional institutions still have a pang of conscience when Admissions recruit students whom we know aren't up to it: for the private providers, such people are the ideal customer. I'd love to see one or two of them invoke the Sale of Goods act and other consumer protection legislation, seeing as they've been turned into consumers.

This is one of the most cynical and scandalous stories of recent times, but it's also invisible (the banks and the DWP tend to dominate the few investigations into financial corruption, but we should be furious about it. For political reasons, a government decided that our money could be handed out to fly-by-night shysters to exploit vulnerable students and reward fake ones. I mention banks because they're a prime equivalent. Blinded by ideology, the government believed that the free market leads to 'best practice'. The banks stole from us, from each other and from the government via mis-selling, manipulation and crime (that's you, HSBC). They couldn't help it: that's what capitalism is. It's not about level playing fields and honour. Companies spot advantages and take them. The private providers of education were offered free money without regulation or responsibility, and they took it. That money was taken from funding for reputable universities and FE colleges with a history and reputation for fairness and student support. Higher Education funding is being reduced, and increasing chunks of it are being reserved for these vampire colleges. Massive debts have been loaded on to taxpayers and good educators have been weakened, all because a government blinded by theory (and their personal shareholdings) abandoned students and embraced rip-off merchants. They aren't educators. They're tax miners who happen to be doing a little educating along the way (to flog the 'alternative' point to death, they're taking our money to provide homeopathic levels of education).

There's an election in May. Just saying.