Tag: universities

Using the communal kitchen at the Faculty of Education last Friday, I noticed that the lid had fallen off the bin and was sitting on the floor. In the middle of something and keen to get home, I didn’t stop to pick it up. I just came back from the same kitchen on Monday afternoon and noticed it was still on the floor. “Ah the tragedy of the commons” I said internally while stroking my chin and nodding sagely, before beginning to walk out of the room. At which point I realised how absurd I was being and stopped to pick the lid up from the floor, immediately wishing I’d done it on Friday.

It left me wondering how certain forms of abstraction, stepping back from a concrete phenomenon and subsuming it into a general category, make action less likely. There’s something about that moment of understanding, recognising a fragment of the general in the mundanity of the particular, liable to induce passivity. It’s hard to argue a counter factual but I suspect I would have immediately picked up the lid if I hadn’t experienced that moment of abstract recognition. However I’m aware I’m doing exactly the same thing in writing this blog, recognising a general propensity in a particular instance, encouraging others to do the same by raising it discursively in a public forum.

Notes for a panel I’m doing in April with Claire Aitchison, Inger Mewburn & Pat Thomson. The idea for the panel was partly provoked by this Discover Society piece.

I’m an enthusiast about social media for academics. But for all the examples I see around me of social media enriching and enhancing scholarly practice, it’s hard not to be concerned by the broader context within which this is taking place. These problems are hugely worrying in their own right: the casualization of academic labour, the ceaseless ratcheting up of the expectations placed upon academics and the replacement of professional self-regulation by hierarchical audit all contribute to an environment I’ve talked about elsewhere, with my collaborator Filip Vostal, as the ‘accelerated academy’. But what I’m increasingly preoccupied by is how social media for academics doesn’t just take place within this context but rather influence how academics, individually and collectively, shape this context through resisting or reinforcing these pernicious tendencies.

It’s easy to see how social media for academics might fit into the ‘gig economy’ which we’re seeking to explore through this panel. It’s straight forward to imagine how rootless and nomadic academics would make themselves available through their online presence and mobile technology. What was once loftily conceived of as a vocation, though in reality more often simply a career, instead finds itself reduced to an endless iteration of ‘gigs’. In a way, the only thing I find implausible about this Doonesbury cartoon is the lack of digital technology in the world of employment it represents:

Picture1

Digital technology further fragmenting the academic workforce, scattering overly earnest scholars who seek only to teach and research across the international system, measuring and scrutinising their activity as they are ranked hierarchically to determine who gets first access to gigs that are ever shrinking in number as MOOCs replace the bulk of university teaching. Is this the future we face?

There’s something dystopically intoxicating about this narrative. In fact that’s what makes me suspicious of it. The polarisation of the academic labour market was not something caused by digital technology and there’s no reason to assume it will be intensified by it. In fact, if we look at how doctoral students and early career researchers are using social media, we can see lots of examples of social media being used to enhance the autonomy of younger academics: raising their visibility, helping them create networks and sustain a sense of professional identity when their working lives are split across many institutions.

My point is not to counterpoise a ‘good news story’ to a ‘bad news story’. For what it’s worth, I do think the picture is pretty bleak. But if we reduce the uptake of social media by academics to an extension of managerial power then we’ll struggle to understand exactly what influence it is having. If we impute too much to the technology then we fail to do justice to the social processes through which any technological influence is necessarily mediated.

Much depends on how social media is taken up by academics. The potential outgrowths of it are diverse: everything from what I’ve elsewhere described as ‘networked solidarity’ (including, though not limited to, satire) to displays of academic incivility which can only fairly be described as ‘trolling’. The key question for me concerns which of these uses become more likely under present circumstances and how these influence might, in turn, feed back into changing that context or reinforcing its existing characteristics.

I wonder if the key issue might simply be why people are turning to social media. My fear is that we are seeing a growing sense in which people feel they have to use social media. There are many potential reasons why this perception might be becoming widespread:

– how central social media is becoming to debates about impact and public engagement
– the growing frequency with which training is offered in universities
– the message this implies about the desirability of engagement
– people seeking contributions for things like collective blogs
– universities, departments and research centres seeking contributions for such projects obviously has an additional dimension to it
– stories about career success founded on an online presence: a sense that this stuff is crucial for career opportunities, without anyone being able to specify quite why this is the case, perhaps propped up by a few mythical cases
– the anxiety about not missing out on opportunities which inevitably abounds within an unhealthy job market.

My fear is that if ‘social media is the new black’, something which everyone is expected to do, instrumental concerns will come to squeeze out the more nebulous joys and satisfactions which can be found at present.

Social media for academics might provide a framework within which the ‘Uberisation of Higher Education’ becomes entrenched. But it might also provide a bulwark against it, facilitating solidarity and collective action between those who are nonetheless dispersed across many workplaces. We simply don’t know yet. But that’s why we have to be careful about how we conceptualise these platforms, the tools they offer for academics and what it means for them to be taken up within a changing landscape of higher education.

On a cold Sunday morning watching Frasier in bed in my hotel room, I was slightly amazed to see an advert for Staffordshire university on channel 4. What makes it even more surprising is that they’re offering £1000 to people who enroll with them who registered it as their first choice. The advert proclaims that “it pays to visit an open day” but at least for some, it seems this is meant literally:

We believe in giving students a head start. Our Kickstart is exactly that. It’s £1000 towards the expenses of student life, and the best thing is you don’t ever have to pay it back. We know getting settled isn’t easy, so this’ll help ease you in. Whether it’s nights out, accommodation, travel, or books, you’ll be good to go in no time. How will you spend yours? 

http://www.staffs.ac.uk/openyourmind/grand-entrance/

Is anyone systematically tracking the growth of university advertising in the UK? In the past few months I’ve seen tv adverts, film adverts, a WBS branded airport run way and countless adverts at train stations. To what extent are successful ‘efficiency savings’, where they exist, being swallowed up by marketing and communications budgets? Where might this trend towards financial inducements lead? While the Staffordshire £1000 works through a ‘UniCard’ for campus retailers, it’s easy to see how competitive dynamics might lead to much greater inducements over time.

Edited to add: the next advertising break had a De Montfort university advert.

An excellent, though rather depressing, analysis of the TEF on Wonk HE:

There is a remarkable contradiction in all of this. The government is proposing a substantial apparatus of scrutiny, surveillance, intervention and interpolation, which will occupy untold hours of academic staff time. It involves delegating new powers to the minister and to BIS and creating a new regulatory landscape that will take years to bed in. In total it represents a very substantial incursion of the state into universities, even if the paper insists that the TEF will be administered at arms length from government. In the name of creating a dynamic market the green paper proposes to build a glorious state bureaucracy.

http://wonkhe.com/blogs/remember-remember-the-tef-of-november/

Bookmarking this so I can come back to it later. If I pursue this thread, Social Media For Academics is never going to get finished:

Reflecting their student populations, universities have long been bastions of oodles of consumer technology. We are awash in mobile phones, laptops, tablets, gaming consoles, and the like. If one combines mobile consumer technology with Big Data analytics, one gets a host of new possibilities ranging from new ways of providing students with basic support to new ways of getting students to learn what the faculty needs them to learn. If we can get the right information flowing through the minds of students, perhaps we can improve their success. We can potentially help transform the classroom from the 19th century to the 21st.

The byproducts of all this data are the new insights that can drive decision making in new ways. When one adds into the mix advanced data visualization capabilities, one gets something different for university administrators and faculty: better and approachable insight into university operations and even the minds of the students. Higher education is at the cusp of gathering an unprecedented amount of information using affordable tools and techniques.

http://www.sap.com/bin/sapcom/hr_hr/downloadasset.2014-01-jan-29-18.applying-big-data-in-higher-education-a-case-study-pdf.html

I included some material on this in a lecture on big data I did for the MA course I was convening this year. But it just struck me how enormously significant this is for digital scholarship: the more academics embrace social media in circumstances where managers seek to unleash a big data tsunami of change, the more they will be monitored as part of such initiatives.

I just stumbled across the ‘Free Speech University Rankings’ produced by Spiked Online. As one does, I immediately looked up my own institution. Warwick has been given a ‘red card’ but not, as one might expect, relating to the recent police action on peaceful protesters but rather because the student union has banned The Sun:

The University of Warwick and Warwick Students’ Union collectively create a hostile environment for free speech. The university, which has received an Amber ranking, restricts material that is ‘likely to cause offence’. The students’ union, which has received a Red ranking, has instituted bans on the Sun and the Daily Star, launched a campaign to have ‘offensive’ wallpaper in a local bar removed and banned ‘prejudiced’ entertainers from performing in the union. Due to the severity of the students’ union’s actions, the institution’s overall ranking is Red.

http://www.spiked-online.com/free-speech-university-rankings/profile/warwick#.VSTWpmavXZs

As I wrote a couple of months ago, it seems to me that we’re seeing an unprecedented attack on academic freedom at universities:

We’ve already seen the police ask a university for attendees of a fracking debate. The president of the Lancaster Student’s Union was warned by police, who she discovered taking photos of her office, that she may have been committing a public order offence by displaying a poster in her office window. Police used CS gas and pulled a taser on Warwick students who were screaming in terror.  They launch secret operations to spy on peaceful student protestors. University staff are increasingly expected to function as proxy border guards. Police violence is increasingly an expectation at student protests, including some astonishing and egregious instances of brutality. Punitive bail conditions are becoming the norm for student activists and some university managements have gone out of their way to exclude and persecute ‘trouble makers’.

http://www.spiked-online.com/free-speech-university-rankings/profile/warwick#.VSTWpmavXZs

But the self-professed freedom lovers of Spiked, who believe “university is a place for saying the unsayable and thinking the unthinkable”, want to spend their time campaigning against motions to ban pornography on university campus enacted by students unions which for all their many flaws are the only democratic organisations on said campuses?

This expression by Will Davies has stuck with me since I read it a few months ago. Teaching is a disturbing example of the process Will is alluding to: ratcheting up demands on staff to the point where many are unwilling to continue. In fact increasing numbers seem unable to continue:

The BBC has also seen a survey of 3,500 members of the Nasuwt teaching union which shows more than two-thirds of respondents considered quitting the profession in the past year.

Workload was the top concern, with 89% citing this as a problem, followed by pay (45%), inspection (44%), curriculum reform (42%) and pupil behaviour (40%). In addition:

  • 83% had reported workplace stress
  • 67% said their job has adversely impacted their mental or physical health
  • Almost half of the three thousand respondents reported they had seen a doctor because of work-related mental or physical health problems
  • 5% had been hospitalised, and
  • 2% said they had self-harmed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31921457

Much of the issue here stems from the demand for ‘excellence’: as David Cameron recently put it, “if you’re not good or outstanding, you have to change. If you can’t do it yourself, you have to let experts come in and help you”. For head teachers a bad Ofsted report can mean the end of their career and this tyranny of excellence mutates into something ever more brutal as it works its way down the hierarchy.

Replace ‘heads’ with ‘HoDs’ and ‘Ofsted’ with ‘REF’ and we can see the same trend at work in higher education. Meanwhile the VCs fly around the world, creating strategic partnerships to actualise latent synergies. Here on the ground, one in six universities refuse to answer freedom of information requests about their expenses.

Across both spheres, we can see people breaking the professions, one personal tragedy at a time, while rewarding themselves extravagantly for doing so.