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 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.