Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities #AcademicChatter #neoliberalism
#AcademicVenting
Yesterday we say a friend who normally works in different sectors but had recently done a term of teaching as a guest lecturer. He said he couldn’t believe what awful places universities are to work in: nothing works, management treat you badly and so do students. He found it *humiliating*. Perfect description - it is!
It really is weird - all that research, thinking, writing, and then you are just treated by everyone as an (underperforming) customer-service person.
#AcademicVenting All day long pleasant email exchange with someone from my virtual learning environment team. Something is not working on one of my pages. I have now been sent 3 short video tutorials (about things I KNOW).
Anyone else find it annoying, always being sent video tutorials when you report a technical issue? Implication: this is YOUR fault, you don’t know what you are doing; and as an academic you should be spending more time watching tutorials because you are so time rich
#AcademicVenting oh God
#AcademicVenting just out of a college wide “Transformation” meeting due to our ongoing disasterous financial situation. SMT need to take much more responsibility for their epic failures, but of course the larger context really is terrible. 40% of UK HE institutions are in decifit, and it won’t get better; nationwide 24/25 UCAS applications down 11%.
I am so so so SOOO incredibly angry how the Tories with their crappy values and policies have really destroyed UK universities, in so many ways
#AcademicVenting Now have to share this brilliant article - well, have only read the abstract so far, but: count me in! Here’s to #AdministrativeAbolition!
“we argue for administrative abolition, that is, the elimination of all college presidents, provosts, deans and other top level administrators who we argue form a parasitical group”
#AcademicVenting this is not venting, just crying. Things are bad enough at Goldsmiths but Kent announcing it is closing 9 humanities and social science departments - including #Philosophy and #Anthropology , and focusing instead on business and law as areas of growth, is just 💔💔💔
#AcademicVenting #Anthropology #Kent
Here is a petition you can sign and share to try and save the anthropology department. Please do.
I really do think that anthropology has so much to offer for navigating our way out of the polycrisis. The world needs so much more anthroplogy, not less.
https://www.change.org/p/save-anthropology-at-the-university-of-kent
#AcademicVenting Our financial crisis has, of course, resulted in a huge proliferation of work as we are all scrambling to try and salvage things. Hours of emergency meetings on top of all the usual stuff.
Meanwhile also been scrambling this week to support PhD funding applications; up all night revising proposals and writing Statements for two who will now compete against each other. This is the process. And now heard that redundancies will be announced next week.
#AcademicVenting But I also got an email that the staff #Wellbeing had reopened. There is now a special room where we can go talk. That will make us feel better! That will fix things!
The Neoliberal University
Yesterday we were informed we will have 130 FT redundancies. More with part time staff included. We are 644 so potentially a quarter of us. From 11 departments, including #anthropology.
We don’t know yet who. I don’t know how these decisions are made (it’s related to which programmes or modules will be closed). I feel completely sick the whole time. Far beyond venting, just existential fear.
#AcademicVenting It occurs to me that some of you might not know Goldsmiths - my university, now being decimated ⬆️.
So I want to tell you about #Goldsmiths. It is a unique, brilliant, important university. We combine arts, humanities and social sciences, producing amazing critical research, politics, practice.
I have the best colleagues and the best, best students. The fact that all this is being destroyed now is just 💔💔💔. Not just existential fear, much more.#UCU @ucu
#AcademicVenting. Today the opposite of venting. Taught the MA Applied Anthropology and Community (see this 🧵for more info) and then we recorded testimonies to use for publicity- something the students initiated & organised . All I can say is: ❤️❤️❤️. Our students are amazing and it is a privilege to teach them and learn from them. And our MA is amazing, too! A unique, necessary programme providing both critical thinking and professional practice training.
Attached: 1 image Hello! Just wanted to do a quick #ShoutOut here for a brilliant MA at Goldsmiths run by Anthropology and Social and Therapeutic Studies (STACS) at Goldsmiths. It is a unique programme combining theory and practice, academic with professional qualifications. There are three pathways: MAs in Applied Anthroplogy and Community Youth Work; Community Development; and Community Arts https://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/ma-applied-anthropology-community-youth-work/ #CommunityArts #Anthropology #CommunityDevelopment #Youthwork #Masters 1/3
#AcademicVenting well, we ALL (everyone in the 11 departments “in scope”) have to reapply for our jobs. The scale of proposed job cuts is just staggering.
Those of you who’ve been through this will relate: the physical manifestations of stress are something else. It does all feel quite existential- not just worries about mortgage, unemployment etc, but also because being an anthropologist at Goldsmiths is so central to my whole being. And to see something u love (G) falling apart is just 💔
#AcademicVenting Awful news from Kent University (see posts above). It really is happening.
“We have taken the decision to phase out Anthropology, Art History, Health & Social Care, Journalism, Music & Audio Technology, and Philosophy/Religious Studies.” 💔
#AcademicVenting there were hopes that the unique, important MA Ethnobotany could be saved by being transferred into Conservation, but apparently not. Just when the world needs more #Ethnobotany, not less.💔
The people who have created and run this wonderful programme are colleagues and friends.
[and if you want to respond with “well noone wants to study it ”; “you make more money in IT” - perhaps just don’t].
#AcademicVenting The irony is, when i started this thread, I honestly didn’t think things would happen so quickly; i had in mind something quite different, little, amusing examples of the neoliberal shitshow that universities have become.
I do have dozens of new ones every week- the handling of our “Transformation” is something else but also other universities- but the bigger picture is so dire that that dominates and also, well, fear.
#AcademicVenting Queen Mary @ucu are keeping a tally on UK universities currently reducing staff. As they put it: it’s all shrinking.
#AcademicVenting. Today a different perspective - a much needed critical, honest assessment of the key strategy that UK universities have been adopting to stay afloat: the mass recruitment of international students from China.
No wonder the author had to stay anonymous: it is virtually a taboo to say any of this, but good that someone has done so.
Good to see a Guardian article about what’s going on Goldsmitths, featuring Michael Rosen and all.
There really needs to be far more public awareness of the crisis in HE. Really hoping that, with a big public outcry, these savage redundancies can be prevented.
Though putting people through all this (more than 300 of us have been sent “you are at risk”letters - i am personally in a pool of 4, for 2 jobs to go) is itself pretty savage.
#AcademicVenting this piece by Gaby Hinsliff provides an excellent, worrying overview of what is happening in UK HE at the moment - the reasons why the tally above of struggling universities is expanding almost daily. Freefall is the right word 1/2
#AcademicVenting 2/2
The story starts with the freezing of tuition fees in 2017, creating a growing hole in university finances that many plugged by recruiting more foreign students (who pay more than British teenagers for the same degree). That kept the show on the road until the resulting immigration numbers became politically toxic, prompting a government clampdown on visas and a sudden 33% fall in foreign student numbers compared with the same time last year.“
#AcademicVenting ah! For years I have been thinking someone should write “Unlucky Jim” - a 21st century campus novel - now just came across this! Hope it contains all those little details I was thinking about when starting this thread.
https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Secret-Lecturer/Secret-Lecturer/9781914487217
#AcademicVenting Swansea is the latest university to announce major cuts. I think this brings it to 50 or more UK institutions.
This really is a major crisis. Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at non-elite universities are crumbling. The last few months of Tories and their disastrous anti-woke, anti-thought agenda is destroying the whole sector, all critical thinking. And many 100s of us out of jobs, all scrambling for the laar few positions. It is really bad!!
#AcademicVenting Please read this wonderful piece by Goldsmiths Emeritus Professor Angela McRobbie, capturing why we all weep and weep at what is happening at Goldsmiths now. It was and is something so important: brilliant arts, research, critical thinking in a very non-elite setting, for and by non-elite students. It is so important we don't lose all this. But read the piece.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/a-goldsmiths-diary
These are desperate times in the UK higher education system. Every week there are closures of degrees or departments, and sizeable redundancies. Disproportionately it is the arts, humanities and social sciences that are affected, a consequence of their downgrading in recent years. The frequency with which common-sense
"With low or no fees, undergraduates felt freer to pursue their own dreams of being taught by the kinds of leading scholars and world-renowned artists found in an institution like my own. They could afford to take the time to find their own feet, to chop and change courses and module options. Many would tell me they had discovered for the first time the wonders of anthropology, not having had any idea of the field previously."
So lovely that a colleague from a different
.. discipline talks about the "wonders of anthropology". It really is a wonderful field! Adding here a🧵 on 8 reasons why the world needs #Anthropology. But really what I should have said: the world needs non-elite anthropologists and non-elite institutions teaching anthropology. It can't just be for the privileged at Oxbridge; it needs to be what we do at Goldsmiths - by and for everyone, especially those normally marginalised.
My discipline, anthropology, is not seen as a “growth" discipline, and departments are being closed down. But the world needs Anthropology and Anthropologists now more than ever! Here are my 8 reasons for this: 1. POSSIBILITIES At a time of polycrisis, when the destructive fallouts of capitalist modernity are ever more apparent, anthropology highlights that there are myriad alternative ways of thinking and living; that there is so much to learn from other peoples in the world. 1/n
#AcademicVenting Ok so this piece by Glen O’Hara really is venting.
I am conscious that I & others might come across as incredible whiners. And of course I am aware that we are, for now (50% chance of unemployment for me in 3 months) incredibly privileged. But what O’Hara describes here is completely accurate. In addition to so much other awfulness in the world, the reality of academic life creates its own unhappiness - linked to ideals of what we feel it should be.
“The modern university has become a site of moral harm or injury, perhaps mildly so, but a hard place to work and keep one’s sense of purpose and morality intact. Universities have moved progressively out of line with their staff’s view of the world, and that gap is another element in the increasing difficulty of keeping a grip on reality.“
#AcademicVenting Yes this too happened. All just borrowing from each other, or the same SMT people moving from uni to uni, wreaking havoc everywhere they go, with every step enhancing their own careers
#AcademicVenting Was a bit hard at first to read - at Goldsmiths we tend to think of UCL as the “Hoover”, sucking up all students, and indeed cohorts of 300+ history students make you weep! - but of course awful for staff being made redundant there, too, and for students having fewer and fewer module choices, vast classes, etc etc.
Universities ARE staff & students, yet management cares about neither. This is what marketisation does.
“The redundancies show that UCL cares not for their students’ role as a ‘consumer’. With the marketisation of higher education, something that has been critical in making universities neoliberal hellscapes, the student has been poised as a customer, rather than a learner. University is now meant to be a means to a greater end, with that end solely being employment.”
#AcademicVenting I think i said “neoliberal shitshow” at one point somewhere above, but “neoliberal hellscape” excellent too.
Pondering now how UK neoliberalism really is always simultaneously shitshow and hellscape. Shitty hellscape or hellish shitshow maybe. HE, water companies, NHS, the lovely Tory government itself- everywhere the same combination of cruelty, ineptitude and, of course, MONEY thinking.
#AcademicVenting That is what this is: we are governed by money itself, and it brings cruel unimaginative rightwing mediocrity to the top everywhere. (Second crossover with #FollowTheMoney 🧵 here!)
Sadly forgotten name just now, (will edit), but remembering podcast with Cambridge prof saying people worry about being ruled by AI , nonhuman entities, but that is exactly what corporations are. Nonhuman entities are already running everything.
Attached: 1 image #Budget #UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it. “Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.” This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n) #FollowTheMoney https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/05/banker-budget-mega-rich-traders-jeremy-hunt?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
#AcademicVenting 🧵. Different theme but all related anyway: Dr Abu-Sittah’s truly brilliant inauguration speech at Glasgow. Highlighting the moral role that universities play, but also their complicity. He and Glasgow now provide important moral backbone, but all this has withered through neoliberal marketisation in English universities (see Glen O’Hara above). Mostly just shamefully neutral, bland statements on “middleeast crisis”.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/dr-ghassan-abu-sittah-tomorrow-is-a-palestinian-day/
#AcademicVenting 🧵. Just realised I hadn’t added here yet Zoe William’s excellently researched piece about our crisis at Goldsmiths. Really great we have had so many people speaking out for us. Loved this piece in particular as it’s also about the student occupation about #Gaza, and it cites a brilliant student who I have had the pleasure of teaching, Danna.
Best perhaps the final sentence: “But I don’t think ita done deal”.
Arts education is essential – yet on both sides of the Atlantic, the humanities and critical thinking are under attack. With massive redundancies announced at this London institution, is it the canary in the coalmine?
#AcademicVenting The vice chancellor of York (a Russell group university!), Charlie Jeffery:
“There is no other way of saying this. The UK higher education system is in crisis. The way it is funded just doesn’t work anymore. A rough guess is that about half of the sector is responding by cutting jobs and courses”.
#AcademicVenting 🧵 another really excellent piece on the UK higher education crisis, by Hannah Rose Woods in The New Statesman”:
Experts believe it is already “too late” to avert the oncoming funding disaster: “all everyone can do now is brace”.
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/04/university-funding-is-in-crisis
“With wearying inevitability, cuts will be borne disproportionately by arts, humanities & social sciences. Some will doubtlessly cheer the trimming of supposedly “low-value” subject areas. They may be less enthusiastic about the knock-on effect their demise would have on more expensive to teach science and technology subjects, or the wider impact of rapid restructuring in a sector that supports more than three quarters of a million jobs and contributes £130bn to the economy.”
One reason why it’s all falling apart this year are changes in visa regulations for international students - Tory gov trying to curb immigration - who are no longer allowed to bring dependents.
Hey James Cleverley and Michelle Donelan - stop denying and ignoring this MASSIVE crisis that you are causing! You are destroying a vital sector with your stupid short-sighted policies. You will lose anyway- stop wreaking havock now! (I know this is 💯 pointless)
#AcademicVenting Finally read Jonathan Miller's #DeathSpiral piece, and I wish all SMTs across the country getting rid of all their PRODUCTIVE lecturers (ie, the people actually making money for universities, through student fees and research income) would read it, too. They genuinely don't understand what they are doing!
Please, understand the British Leyland's 1970s coat [*EDIT: this should be cost! I copied a typo! See @rubinjoni
below!* 😅] allocation death spiral
#AcademicVenting Couldn’t have put it any better. Not just the redundancy process; just so sick of all it, what it has become. #Neoliberalism #university
“I am sick of higher education leaders, I am sick of neoliberal thinking, I am sick of scarcity mindsets, I am sick of austerity, I am sick of senior management lacking morals, I am sick of education being decimated, I don’t know how we hang on + do important work for students”
#AcademicVenting Good 2021 piece by Asheesh Kapur Siddique linking rightwing university politics - ie, the oppression of #Gaza student protests we are currently seeing - to this 🧵’s overall theme: the marketisation of HE. Tight establishment control (with all its crappy values) is a direct result of marketisation.
About the US but much of it applicable to UK and Australia too.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/campus-cancel-culture-university-boards
In the short term, the cost cutting makes the decision-makers (VC and pro-VC) look smart among themselves. Plus all they need is another year or two of holding the fort until stepping down – they “serve” a term, you see, they aren’t owners or dictators – to then pick up a golden parachute into charing a charity or towards actual retirement.
Accountability isn’t ever for them. It’s that old approach to crises from “Yes, Prime Minister”:
Bernard Woolley : What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley : What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton : Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
@pvonhellermannn Is it "employment", or "supply of potential labour"?
After all, it's students, not employers or government, who gamble their time and money on the skills and knowledge that might lead to employment in future. Get it right and neoliberal hellscape. But get it wrong and penury.
In that wager, a university plays the part of bookmaker, so naturally adopts the motives, methods and morals of a racetrack satchel-carrier, for whom the money justifies the means, whatever the result.
@pvonhellermannn
Exactly this. An essential part of education is discovering unexpected topics that you didn't realise you wanted to learn about.
I owe an unpaid debt of gratitude to Arye Finkle of Middlesex Polytechnic (as it was then) who obliged me to learn a bit of Fortran when I thought I was supposed to be studying social sciences.
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