Some of the many legacies of Margaret Thatcher are alive and well within UK higher education. The pressure to show that we feckless academics are actually doing something worth doing, by insisting that we measure everything we do and write it down and compare it with what everyone else is doing; and the requirement that we try to attract as much external funding as possible to show that we are worth something to someone other than just ourselves, were twins both nurtured in her milk-rationed bosom. After all, money’s the only thing that really shows anyone values anything, isn’t it.
There are other avenues and aspects to this simple analysis but it’s good enough for a start. Together these have produced one of the most insecure, casualized workforces in the country, peopled by neurotics looking constantly over their shoulder at the next contract, the next research assessment exercise, the next so-called ‘blind review’ of one’s work; the brilliant idea that we could get more money by getting more and more people to come to do PhDs has turned us into a vast, teetering Ponzi scheme which further erodes any notion of security as we sit there, nervously teaching people who are lining up to stab us in the back as we compete for jobs with our own graduate students; the need constantly to produce outputs – no matter how good, no matter if anyone reads them – the need to list on one’s CV not just publications but grants successfully applied for – produces a constantly escalating hype with the continual need to make out how great we are as we push our academic wares to assessors and funders, with the concomitant casualty rate where many people end up smoking their own dope, believing their own hype, and become, far from dispassionate seekers of truth, partisan peddlers of an exercise in self-promotion.
One of the magic tricks with which Thatcher seems to have hypnotised the nation is that this has all been going on so long, one is hard pressed to find people who can recall anything different, or who question the basic assumptions behind this push to produce, produce, produce, or who really appreciate the devastating effect this has had on the humanity of the poisonous working environment to be found all over UK institutes of higher education. The few I know who would remember are on the whole long retired, deceased, or left the profession in despair.
So, in order to try to demonstrate its malevolent reach, it’s necessary to find instances where the normal operation of this ratcheted-up academic-industrial complex has had particularly bad effects on individuals. And that is hard to do – precisely because it’s become an accepted part of how the career ladder is viewed that it’s seen to be normal that many will fall off it – ‘you are the weakest link, goodbye’ – and, most people being so wedded to the system, there’s an assumption that anyone who suffers deserves to do so. They couldn’t cut the mustard, they weren’t absolutely dedicated, they couldn’t get any grant money, they only got published in peer reviewed journals with low impact factors. Tough.
Still, knowing full well that there will be many who will refuse to listen, I’m going to give just one example.
I applied for a job as a researcher at Oxford University in 2007. It was advertised as a three year position. I lived in Bristol at the time, but I applied, thinking that maybe as it was a research post I could perhaps commute a couple of days a week. At the interview, however, I was surprised to be told that the job was intended as a continuing post, and that ‘they fully expected the funding stream to continue.’ When MP, the centre director, telephoned later to offer me the job, I asked him about this and he confirmed that it was indeed intended as a continuing post.
Therefore, I both took the job, and moved my two children, kicking and screaming, to Oxford. I will leave out the part of the story where it cost me thousands upon thousands to move house, given that it was a recession and it took me a year to sell, a year in which I was paying rent, and mortgage, and two lots of council tax, as that’s just bad luck. What I go direct to is about nine months after starting, when we had a research centre ‘away day’. The two professors outlined their vision for the centre. It would be like a crucible, where people would come to stay for two or three years, get trained up in medical ethics, and then leave, hence scattering throughout the known universe the invaluable seeds of their unique wisdom. What struck me with a sickening thud was that there was just no vision, no wish, no expectation, that anyone else would ever have a continuing contract there. It was just them: the two ‘great’ men, and their ever rotating brood of servile lackeys.
Not so many months after this, I sat at a meeting of the international consortium of scientists for whom I worked. Looking through the papers about the EU funded project, I realised then with another sickening thud that there was no possibility whatsoever of any continuing funding. It came to an end at a certain date, and that was it.
When I saw my boss for my annual appraisal some time later I asked him what he had meant by describing my job as a continuing post. MP is one of the most laid back people you could hope to meet, but he was shaking from top to toe. (I’d emailed him to warn him I was going to ask him this.) Well, he replied, the Centre has got a very good reputation, so any research application you put in from here has got a very good chance of success. That was it. That was it. I had to apply for research funding from ‘somewhere or another’ and of course, I’d get it, because I was at his wonderful centre.
This is what I mean by somebody starting to smoke his own dope. How is it legal to tell someone a post is a continuing one, if they are going to be responsible for finding their own salary? He believed his own endless hype - he believed everything he touched turned to a successful research application. He sent me away to ‘do research’ to out what bodies might fund me. Why, when he knew of course in advance who all the funders were? Why, when of course he knew in advance that virtually all funding is either early career, or emeritus, or leave from an existing post, or for equipment and expenses only? I did put in for one grant, the only one I could possibly apply for, with no success. The Wellcome Trust stipulated that I had one referee only, and that person was mandated to be my line manager – I had no option but to have my boss write a reference. Normally, it’s all submitted electronically, but he took the option of sending a paper copy so that I couldn’t see what he wrote. Doubtless he didn’t want me to get too big-headed seeing the nice things he’d written about me.
Can you guess that I didn’t get the funding? I walked out of the centre on a Friday and signed on the dole on the Monday. I left work early that Friday, I was so upset. Funnily enough, there was one piece of post waiting for me that last day – a letter telling me I’d been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts Manufacturing and Commerce, in recognition of my contributions to research into ethical issues in genetics and genomics.
After a while, I picked up bits of casual tutoring at colleges, having applied for job after job after job – academic posts, care assistant posts, mystery shopper, washer-upper, you name it. I laughed like a drain this week at a confirmation of the age-discrimination I am sure I am also up against. I’d applied to teach at a summer school for visiting overseas teenagers, without gaining an interview. A student of mine, however did get an interview. I’m really very sure she’ll do a great job. (It’s just that I have thirty years more experience than her.) But I digress from my main point.
As a direct result of the damaging, irresponsible hype that now characterises the university sector in this country, my children and I, for the last three years, have been living below the UK poverty line. The university personnel department referred me to a counsellor who told me she’d seen so many examples of people who had sold houses, moved countries, dragged spouses thousands of miles, to be treated with similar disdain. The towers are built of poached ivory, and it’s time to stop this inhuman trade.