The Secret Lecturer (eBook)

What Really Goes on at University

Secret Lecturer (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Canbury (Verlag)
978-1-914487-22-4 (ISBN)

Infos

'You don't have to read too many pages of this sizzling personal account of day-to-day life as a university lecturer to appreciate why the author has chosen to remain anonymous...' - Dennis Sherwood, Author, Missing the Mark 'It's pithy, political and revealing. It's a book that will astonish some and feel all too familiar to others... I urge you to read it too.' Linda Hill, Linda's Book Bag Odd students, racist colleagues and inept administrators. Rising business influence and crumbling academic freedom. Absurdly wasteful corporate schemes and broken toilets. Low student welfare, an unwillingness to fail anyone and an A+ explosion in cheating... For more than a decade, the deteriorating state of the higher education sector in the UK has been largely hidden from view. Now, after years of cutbacks, an academic who must remain anonymous is presenting a candid and no-holds-barred account of life on campus.  The Secret Lecturer takes you into the seminar room (a repurposed store cupboard, as it happens), the cranky staff meetings, the botched disciplinary meetings, a complicated town vs gown relationship and the secrets of lecturer relationships with professors. If you've ever wondered what it's like to study or work at many British universities in the 2020s, The Secret Lecturer will have you rattling through a book faster than a panicked undergraduate on an essay deadline. Whether you are filling in your UCAS form, moving into a university hall of residence, or just want to know what life is like in a modern college, this book has the low-down. The Secret Lecturer does for higher education in the UK what The Secret Barrister did for the law courts: reveal the unedifying, sometimes strange truth about a system we think we all know. Reviews 'Beyond the often amusing accounts of interactions with difficult people, there are also numerous moments where the author offers a glimpse into what reads as more systemic issues such as grade inflation and student cheating, the struggle for research time, casual instances of prejudice that appear to go unchecked, and a particularly poignant account of advising a disabled student who is struggling to get support... I found it an engaging read.' Debbie McVitty, Editor, WONKHE 'The Secret Lecturer conveys a dry, ironic and often self-deprecating humour and considerable humanity, particularly through consideration of mental health, sexism and racism.There's a real feeling that we ordinary folk are all in this together and if we support one another in subverting the ineffective status quo within institutions, not just HE, we can, and will, make a difference.' Linda Hill, Linda's Book Bag Extract The UK public seem to think a university lecturer is an idle, sherry-swigging stereotype out of a 1970s campus novel. Perceptions of students are frozen in the 1980s - they're either idle, undernourished wimps à la Neil from the BBC sitcom The Young Ones or like his housemates Rick (naïvely militant blowhard) or Vyvyan (shouty, intoxicated hooligan). Many of the students I teach are well-behaved, eat healthily and aren't uniformly obsessed with getting smashed. Some of them even vote Conservative. But an even more disturbing development that few in the '80s could have predicted is the epidemic of mental illness among students - and staff. Readers may be surprised to find out that legions of lecturers are overworked and underpaid, and on casual contracts. As you will also see, academic standards are slowly being obliterated, though that has more to do with financing than with a slide into 'wokery.' The conversion of students into customers we can't afford to upset has resulted in an upsurge in grades, non-attendance, abusive behaviour and plagiarism. Hardly anyone ever fails no matter how badly they perform. Not to be left out, lecturers can plagiarise, too - usually each other's lecture notes and research ideas.

The Secret Lecturer works in higher education at an undisclosed university in the UK. They've written this account to paint an accurate picture of university life and to question whether the status quo is in the long-term interests of students, staff, and the country.

Textauszug

January 15th

I’ve spent the Christmas holidays soul-searching. I don’t think I can stand it here anymore. Will that role at the foreign university come off? Should I quit HE altogether? If so, what else am I going to do? I don’t have the training or qualifications for a ‘proper job.’

I’m prompted to make a new year’s resolution to start resisting the mendacity and injustice of this place by a few nasty things that happen over the next few days.

This evening, I have drinks with colleagues in the pub and the conversation turns to ancestry. When young L mentions she is Jewish, O blurts out, ‘Oh, that figures.’ Visibly hurt, L changes the subject to the weather.

Later on, when I’m waiting for a taxi with L, she says, ‘Why would O say that? Because I have a big nose? Because he thinks I’m clever or talkative? Not penny-pinching I hope – I bought the fucker a drink.’

January 17th

L forwards me an email trail showing Z, another colleague, accusing L of ranting and speechifying. Earlier on in the trail, L has mentioned her Jewish heritage with reference to an equality and diversity consultation.

I call L to express my sympathy. She says that Z is probably unaware of the dusty old anti-Semitic stereotypes of ‘the big-mouthed Jew’ or of putting 10 Jews in a room and eliciting eleven opinions – the sort of thing that Jews can say about themselves in jest, but that gentiles really can’t... unless they are racist wankers.

January 18th

The first step to realising my new year’s resolution is to vote – with the majority of my fellow union members – to take industrial action. Already the right-wing press is libelling ‘lazy, greedy, lefty lecturers’ because we want a pay rise, though not even as high as the inflation rate, now high as Johnny Depp atop a heap of hard drugs. Teachers, nurses, junior doctors and firemen will all be joining us. This feels like an important moment, maybe on a par with the Miners’ Strike. If working people don’t do something about it our society will turn into a blisteringly unequal nightmare of low wages, food insecurity, meagre healthcare and state oppression.

On the same day, I attend my first meeting of our departmental EIHR (Equality, Inclusivity and Human Rights) committee. I know that breaking off our relations with the arms industry is a hard sell, so I try and explain it in basic moral terms. I start by saying that most legal and judicial systems around the world recognise that there are different grades of crime. Generally, more resources are devoted to stopping and punishing baby murderers than dog-owners who don’t clear their critters’ shit up – and rightly so. Likewise, if a fire engine arrives where there’s a Grenfell-style tower block ablaze on one side of the street and a cigarette smouldering in a dustbin on the other, most folks of sound mind would hope they’d tackle the towering inferno first. We ought to apply the same principles, I say, to our conduct as a large organisation that has committed itself through various charters and concordats to opposing racism, sexism and other forms of human oppression. If we did that thoroughly then we would – before addressing the no-doubt-important problem of too many pale faces and penises amongst our staff and students – divest from our gun-making and gun-toting partners in order to save the lives of many people of colour – often also female, often also LGBTQ+ – from Jenin to Jersey City, Mogadishu to Manila.

The reaction I get depends on where a colleague is in the pecking order. At my level there’s a degree of surprise. ‘What’s the extent of our relationships with these operations?’ asks one with a look of genuine concern. I show them the result of a FOI I made to the university. It shows that four arms companies have invested close to £2.5 million in our research and innovation activities. Think of a recent conflict – Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Israel-Palestine, Libya, Yemen – and these firms will have profited from it. I mention that our university also provides training to the militaries of human-rights-smashing states in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen has slaughtered 130,000 (25 per cent of whom are children) and crushed the dark-skinned, racially oppressed Muhammasheen caste.

‘But we’ve got to live in the real world,’ says someone higher up the pecking order.

I pause to consider what can be more ‘real’ than a poverty-emaciated foreign baby getting decapitated by a bullet, the profits of which are currently washing through our university’s accounts.

What follows is a flurry of fallacies that seem to confirm Newcastle University lecturer Sinéad Murphy’s contention that the near-abolition of subjects like philosophy from British HE has greatly dented people’s ability to think.

Another gormless rectangle of a senior manager drones to me, ‘Where would these ethical reforms of yours end? If we broke off ties with all dodgy partners who cause harm we wouldn’t sell Coca-Cola in the refectory or use Monsanto-made weedkiller in the park. Before we knew it the university would collapse.’ I think they call this the ‘slippery slope’ argument, which often enough results in conservative inertia i.e., we can’t possibly do everything, so why even try to do something? What’s worse is that I suspect this challenger is saying all this in bad faith. As an engineer, I doubt he wants to divest from oil-business funding, he’s just building the slippery-slope ramp to try to shut me up.

Next up is a young woman with her hair dyed luminous green and a big badge on her lapel reading TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. For self-professed and self-projecting ‘left-wingers’ like her, the struggle for LGBT+ people, women, BAME members etc begins and ends with their having attained legal equality and a vague feeling that these people are human, after all. It does not extend to proposals like mine, which would actually prevent the deaths of such marginalised people. I am therefore the diametric opposite of astonished when she reaches for that most degraded of tautological arguments: the virtue of continuing these relationships lies purely in the fact we have always had such relationships. ‘This institution has worked with the military for decades, so why stop that now?’ It clearly hasn’t crossed her mind that the same logic was – and still is – used by bigots who insisted that, since most societies throughout history have believed homosexuality is wrong, why break with tradition and make it socially acceptable? She’s also probably unaware that her ideological forebears resisted the banning of colour bars and child sacrifice on the same basis.

Although by my calculation we have 15 minutes left, the chair of the meeting announces that we’re out of time. In a variation of the common-sense-that-isn’t-common-sense theme, the chair deploys another tautology: ‘We are where we are.’ It’s an ugly, meaningless phrase that is wheeled out for reactionary ends. Ultimately, it’s a way of re-asserting the status quo: if we are where we are, then we can’t be anywhere else.

Like many bad ideas, I imagine it originated in the United States. The spoken register of HE functionaries is a bizarre blend of sporting, military and – shock horror – academic-sounding idioms. I say ‘academic-sounding’ because, further to Murphy’s point about the intelligence bypass that has afflicted universities lately, such terms are bandied about with little care for their meaning. ‘Liminality,’ for example, has a specific application to anthropology and cultural studies, yet I’ve heard it used to refer to the ongoing maintenance of fridge-freezers in our halls of residence. Everything from plastic waste around campus to the Teaching Excellence Framework has been imbued with a ‘narrative,’ yet not one that would be instantly recognisable to Truffaut or Tolstoy.

The sporting metaphors have been known to burst the blood vessels of anyone who gives a fig about language. When it comes to [insert university activity/policy/priority here], we must all step up to the plate and knock it out of the park – or, in other nebulous ways, smash it. Individual performance is as important as teamwork. Our IT systems are agile and involve sprints. And you must show resilience if you get athlete’s foot, a verruca, a cricket ball in the testicles or a broken nose from a criminally insane central defender called Kev or Trev. Alright, I made those last couple up. But they’re no sillier than the real-life phrases.

As for the militaryspeak, a younger faculty member rounds off our meeting on divestment with a plea to ‘send in the marines.’ I don’t know whether he means this literally or figuratively, since we have just been talking about soldiers and bombs killing people.

January 19th

At lunchtime I receive an email from a colleague with a specialism in human rights law who attended the meeting yesterday. They inform me that, while they broadly agree with my gripes, a university can’t be held responsible for the crimes of its partner organisations that exist geographically,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 28.3.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Familie / Erziehung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Erwachsenenbildung
• Schlagworte: academic discrimmination • academic standards • british student life • British university • british university league table • bullying university • campus life • campus memoir • corporate influence university • educational standards • English university life • higher education book • higher education standards • impact tuition fees • lecturer biograhy • lecturer diaries • marketisation university • private sector university • professor biography • professor diaries • Russell Group university • secret academic • secret academic book • secret professor • secret professor book • university life • university memoir • University rankings
• ISBN-10: 1-914487-22-2 / 1914487222
• ISBN-13: 978-1-914487-22-4 / 9781914487224