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.
@pvonhellermannn I escaped academia a few years ago. It had become a stultifying atmosphere, where managerial control lay in the finance department, not in the Faculties. The enterprise of tertiary education has been captured by business interests.
@pvonhellermannn I left academia three years ago. At first, I thought I’d come back and adjunct just because I like teaching and would appreciate the extra money — but that died so quickly. Actually being paid a fair salary ruined me on ever coming back to a university, and I already have freelance side hustles in addition to my salary.
@Zeb_Larson@pvonhellermannn I left US higher education (was a tenured and unionized faculty librarian) after 15 years earlier this year and every day I am glad I made the move. Also now that I'm self employed I consistently find that the biggest headache clients I have are all from higher ed. The non-higher ed clients are remarkably easy to work with in comparison.
#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 i attended yet another local #UCU emergency meeting today and just want to say that, if you work at a university that you do, despite everything, really love - because of your genuinely wonderful, brilliant students and colleagues - and if that institution is in real peril, for all the usual reasons that UK HE is crumbling - then that adds yet another layer of sadness and heaviness to your days. It’s not just fear of losing your job; it honestly is more.
#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 What makes all this all the more sad is that we really do love Goldsmiths. Just these last two weeks, I have had truly wonderful seminar discussions. Goldsmiths students and colleagues really are amazing; depite all our problems there is so much #AcademicJoy , too. It’s just 💔 that all this is in peril.
“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 💔💔💔
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.
@pvonhellermannn I discovered the Univ of Kent Anthropology Department through some research into contemporary UK foraging behaviour by craftspeople. We need anthropologists who understand our current relationship to nature to inform responses to the multiple ecological crises we face.
@pvonhellermannn signed,
I have family relation with #UniversityofKent and they had high praise for the anthropology dept, it would be very sad if the dept did get disbanded. @ucu do you have info or can signpost any campaign against this?
#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!
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.
@pvonhellermannn Pauline, I heard rumours this was coming. Solidarity to you and everyone left (working way beyond what you are paid for) -- it's miserable, mismanaged decline.
@pvonhellermannn Dreadful situation. I've been through redundancy and the only thing I would say is get a hold of the redundancy policy. You would be amazed how many HR officers make a balls up of the procedure. If they do, you may have grounds for appeal/further payment if you can face a fight.
#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.
#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.” 💔
@highvizghilliesuit yes - apologies. Please see various responses, with workkng linls and discussion around this. For rrasons i do not understand, even when i copy and paste a new link that does work, for me it becomes that 404 one again. But others have shared and their links work
@pvonhellermannn no apologies needed. I was like 3 or 4 strangers profile-lurks deep when I found this reposted. I'm in the USA and not in academia, so new info to me and thought it was ironic (HTML title is in fact 404).
Shit sounds wack, but ironically I learned this in a math class[1]: (Paraphrasing) Rauschenberg to Cage: I can imagine a world without art, and it isn't bad. Source is somewhere in this vid: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WzPneYqBLAI
@benjamingeer yes - it was a full article, which i read, yesterday evening and early this morning. It now has this error message. Looks like they removed it, I don’t know.
@pvonhellermannn .....but these are surely subjects we desperately need more people studying right now given handwaves at the burning heaps of literally everything How terribly sad and shortsighted.
#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].
@pvonhellermannn Just a travesty. The whole fscking point of civilization is so that we can study things that not everyone is interested in to advance knowledge and humanity in general. I might add that ethnobotany should be even more important today than before as we are (supposedly) attempting to shift humanity to a sustainable future, but even if there were no uses, studying it would be a good thing in and of itself.
#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. 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.
@pvonhellermannn In a class on the architecture of public participation I once taught at [institution], I had cause to show the famous image of the Tiananmen Square “tank man.” Not a single one of the Chinese students in the unit, which was 11 of the 14, recognized the image (or would admit to recognizing it in front of their peers, which is another kind of problem but with the same effect on in-class discussion).
@pvonhellermannn I felt that by far the better part of the 11 were not prepared to discuss or do work relating to public dissensus at the graduate level they were ostensibly there to pursue, and that we were sandbagging the one or two who were really into it by facilitating their enthusiasm & then sending them back into the maw of a context where they had no way to act on it.
I hope the author isn't describing the University of Nottingham, which for decades has had a unique relationship with China, even to the extent of a replica campus in Ningbo, established 20 years ago.
@pvonhellermannn
The Chinese students dependency reminded me the pretext of Sino-British War in the 19th century, where Britain demanded free trade mainly to access the massive opium consuming market ( other #histodon may correct me here, at least that is what I as told in high school).
However, some counter examples here: We also have substantial Chinese students but in my case they are usually better students ( we are not a Russell group) also quite a lot of civil movement among them.
@kofanchen that’s good to hear! The counter examples, I mean. We don’t have many, and the ones we have are all very different and idiosyncratic- hatd to generalise
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.
@pvonhellermannn Sorry that you and your great colleagues have to deal with this so soon after last year's destructions. I'll be down to visit an RHB rally at some point as one of the recently departed.
#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
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.
#AcademicVenting No doubt the lovely - avatared- person above calling me an enabler & a coward for saying in the first toot of this 🧵 people might be afraid to really say what is going on will not be impressed that this book is anonymous!
#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.
"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."
.. 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.
#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.
@Ooze ??? Why on earth do you even start by assuming i am not a union member. Of course i am. I have been part of every single industrial action of oast 20 years. I have been writing this whole thread over months and published articles on the state of universities. Also organising alternatives. With my name. YOU, not using yours, accusing me of cowardice when i say not everyone will be venting every detail - i just don’t get it. And wasn’t asking for your sympathy either, btw.
“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 we have now all received invitations to atend our “Stage 1 Individual Consultations”. Lovely to be encouraged by the corporate booking system they used to “grab a meeting”. Grab a reduncancy meeting, yeah!
@pvonhellermannn 🤢🧐 they never fail to get the optics wrong do they. I hope it doesn't reflect the compassion that will actually be shown in the meeting. It's the real dirt and grime* of the "HR" era this stuff. I hope you have something else to lift you today. Water the plants in your office?
#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.
#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”.
#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”.
@mousebot yes, i am directly affected. Initially we thought anthro would be ok in this round as already lost 15 in last two years, good “staff-student ratio”, but no. They want to cut us from 15 to 10 now; i am in a pool of 5 that is supposed to go to 2 or 3. Even if it’s not me in the end it’s awful as we are all friends, with mortgages, etc etc. and anthro as a dep is not viable with just 10. The whole thing is self-destruction. But doing everything we can to prevent it from happening.
#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”.
“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 @rubinjoni
below!* 😅] allocation death spiral
#AcademicVenting I think I have actually not really expressed so far how awful the redundancy process is. To everyone who has been through this or is going through this right now: HUGE solidarity. To those who haven't: what has taken me by surprise is an exponential, unbelievable increase in work. All the normal stuff plus endless meetings, strategies, statements, reports, questionnaires, campaigns, counterproposals, for weeks and weeks on end. Frazzled!
“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.
#AcademicVenting 🧵 and now this piece by Jessica Wildfire @aral shared earlier today.
“Universities aren't institutions of knowledge anymore. They're assets. They're revenue streams. If they're not generating money for the top, then they only pose a threat, and they have to be weakened and destroyed.”
#AcademicVenting Reading "Tips for Redundancy" compiled by a UCU colleague elsewhere:
"Keep a Diary
Going through a redundancy process is traumatic but you will find that you become hardened and come to expect the mistreatment to which you are being subjected. Keeping a diary of how you felt at points throughout the whole process is a way of tracking how it is impacting upon your life (both work and personal)."
It's true, writing things down helps! But also: you definitely harden up.
@pvonhellermannn Forgive me for being cynical, but your (or students) best interests are not those of the administration. Best hold on to all of the paperwork and record of processes.
@EdibleFuchsia thank you! I am actually doing ok just now, mostly because we have had huge amounts of stress and work submitting counterproposals, but they are done now. Today first day in weeks and weeks where I can possibly think about work beyond the immediate emergency! Maybe even research! Will no doubt just be email catch but enjoying a calmer day.
May you find the strength to protect those tender, compassionate, altruistic parts of yourself from which authentic curiosity and research arise. I found that bitterness was my worst enemy.
@yetiinabox This is incredibly helpful. What a true and important thing to recognise in yourself and to share, I appreciate it hugely. And will make sure to hold on to those parts. Thank you! ❤️
#AcademicVenting I had not mentioned so far: Goldsmiths lectures and union are resisting redundancies in many ways, including a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). Senior Management have responded with highly punitive 50% salary deductions, for 2 months. So we are losing one month pay!!
This too is unbelievably stressful - in fact, is stressing me out more than anything at the moment (unappreciative teenage children for a start). Especially when you might still end up jobless. #UCU.
#AcademicVenting We now have a GoFundMe for our Goldsmiths #UCU hardship fund, due to 50% salary reductions for marking boycott. If you are in HE and in your union, perhaps you could ask your branch whether they could contribute? Feel awkward about saying this but: every donation welcome.
#AcademicVenting we are trying to fight draconian redundancies at Goldsmiths at a time when there is a concerted effort by government, the anti-woke brigade and others to reduce the HE sector as a whole. There are more and more articles like this one, talking about how little bits of optimism amount to a collective “cloud cuckooland”.
There is a real onslaught.
#AcademicVenting this coincides with the UK government’s calamitous attempt to combat “net migration” by reducing the number of international students; they are no longer allowed to bring dependents (neither are care workers. The cruelty!) This is a tweet by our lovely prime minister. We have a government that is actively hostile to HE (one of the economically most important sectors in the country)
I understand why, but I wince slightly when we make arguments for education in terms of economic benefits. Similar to how we frame the economic worth of ‘ecosystem services’ as a reason not to cut down a forest. And then… cut it down, bit by bit.
But we’re in so deep that we’re clutching at straws
#AcademicVenting They tried to go one step further by abolishing the current work visa for international students (allowing int students to stay for 2 years after graduating). Luckily the Migratory Advice Committee firmly pushed back on this last week, and hopefully none of this will come to anything once Tories are out, but it’s impacting
International students decision making - we already have offer holders pulling out of our MAs.
#AcademicVenting Just to say again: all this is so stressful- losing 50% of your salary for a marking boycott that maybe won’t make any difference, given the wider hostile environment. It’s not even about the reality of challenges; it’s the fact that all these reports are out there, right now. It gives ammunition to those wanting to fire us, and weakens our case.
#AcademicVenting The crisis in HE (higher education) is so tangible it’s making headline news; our dangerous exposure to changes in migration/visa regimes and therefore whims of government ever more apparent.
Who is completely silent on all this (as fas as I know), as on everything else? Starmer, Labour. It would make a massive difference, and would work for them. But no. Everyone beholden to the same - imagined! - anti-woke, anti-immigration, anti-university voter.
#AcademicVenting Anyway, here a nice comment piece by Polly Toynbee
“Tories and their pollsters see as clear as day that the growth in highly educated citizens, above the OECD average, is a social and political revolution not in their favour: the more educated people are, the less likely they are to vote for what John Stuart Mill called “the stupidest party”.”
@Roadwarrior29 i hope so but with so many universities (including my own) on the brink of collapse all this talk now affects international student decisions to come to UK this September and a significant drop there will be disastrous for some HEIs.
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.
@wibble you are so right. For students, for all
of us, this is merely the second of many stages of neoliberal hellscape. School, University, Work, work, work, old people’s home.
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.“
@pvonhellermannn
A couple of years ago, University of Leicester lost the Neuroscience dept.
Uni continues to recruit neuroscience undergraduates and the restructured colleagues were moved to our dept as teaching only. Apparently Neuroscience is losing money
But we haven't entirely recovered the research skillset and reputation, both crucial for Neurogenetics research in my dept.
Your thread and this below 👇 from @neuralreckoning made me seriously consider Uni fiance https://neuromatch.social/@neuralreckoning/112130922886185462
@pvonhellermannn If only university VCs would have the collective backbone to petition government, but instead they seem perennially happy to rollover, cut jobs, degrade courses, reduce pay etc ... #ucu
@pvonhellermannn But, but…..it’s such an important and rich area of study. So much indigenous knowledge is lost because many younger ppl see it as old and boring. (Context here would be South Africa)
@inquiline thank you so much. I am almost a bit surprised by how much it has been affecting me- it feels like everything is spinning all the time. I wonder whether that’s because it is so much part of everything else we are observing and worrying about; the #Polycrisis etc; or because of ongoing, stupid over-identiifcation with Goldsmiths and Anthropology; or whether that is just what it’s like. But working hard now on saving Anthropology at Goldsmiths (and our jobs)!
@pvonhellermannn
When I was an undergrad in '94 if I bemoaned the trend to see higher ed as being about prepping the youth for the job market rather than about knowledge and culture and building wisdom into society's institutions, the default response was "it's sad but probably inevitable".
When I bemoan the trend now the default response is "you're a naive weirdo, of course we can't prioritise anything other than employability".
@pvonhellermannn I have friends there in the humanities who have been sounding the alarm for years, and those of us are less prestigious universities have been incredulous. If they can do it to Kent, they can do it to anyone.
@pvonhellermannn Thanks for the hashtag that sums up the following ungrammatical email received when I requested university's permission to update Zotero on my own damn (non-Apple) laptop. #AcademicVenting
@pvonhellermannn It was many years ago now at a college dinner when one of the dons gave a speech for us alumni in which he expressed bemusement that the students were now treating the dons as shop assistants with whom they had a commercial transaction.
Seems logical to me as a direct result of the abolition of grants.
@pvonhellermannn Well, that unsexiness of getting into academia in the first place. "Yeah you can't be researcher anymore with a normal schedule. You need to re-invent yourself all the time, you need to be super dedicated to the cause or you are not a real academic. What? I heard you saying that you need to earn a living, then go off into the industry!"
@InkySchwartz 😄 i did go for it! It’s become quite a long, ongoing 🧵, though sadly a much grimmer, less sarcastic one than what i was initially thinking of, due to what’s happening in the UK now
@pvonhellermannn I've been working on this in a few ways: the Future Trends Forum video program, some books, my blog. Doing my best to record and forecast.
@pvonhellermannn I have stepped out of HE and as much as I LOVED being able to mentor students and see them blossom, and lead cool field trips and inspire people, I agree - it was getting so messy and dysfunctional. I worry about how long before something really bad that happens in UK HE. It seems to be burning through good people at a rate of knots.
@pvonhellermannn The collapse of UK higher education is definitely not helped by the fact that the Conservatives needed to invent some enemies for their confected culture war & plucked academics out of their top-hat. That and the disdain for letting the working classes have an education that prepares them for anything other than working in a factory or the gig economy.
@Ooze please read the whole thread. The destruction is now well under way. I do see your point of course but still find calling people who are v afraid of being made redundant (my own chances just now 50%) “enablers” a little harsh.
@pvonhellermannn The harsh reality is that people being afraid to speak truth in the academy is the ultimate destructive irony. You have the fear of being sacked because there is no solidarity among you. Inasmuch as you are all failing to unite and use your collective power you are absolutely enablers. You are clinging to a thing you know is corrupt because it pays well. At core the academy is about truth and right; the promulgation and inculcation of these things. If you can't stand up for your principles how can you teach others the value of truth, and about the price that has to be paid to protect it?
@Ooze also: what exacly do you think i hblabe been doing in this thread??? I habe been reporting, probably much more than i should. Honestly, again and again i get replies on here that show ZERO empathy or emotional intelligence.
Also: being accused of being coward by sormeone who has an avator and is not using their own name is also crap!! Honestly, i normally ignore stupid and annoying replies but have to just shout about this one.
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