Category: academia

So much of working life is about cycles. This is very evident in education with the pattern of the year. Depending on context— all sorts of things from career stage to how busy you are —the rate of repetition of that cycle can feel fast and slow, they can feel never ending or they pass on by. The phases of term can feel ‘new’ and it can feel like deja vu. The cycles of academic work and their apparent familiarity can be reassuring.

One of the many rituals of a point of ‘new’ beginning, of a year, a term or a project, is convening or attending meetings in which we have to (re)introduce ourselves and say something about who we are – which is, in a professional context like academia – inevitably about the work you do. The expression of identity in terms of a job is nothing new of course, there’s a reason we have so many surnames like Smith and Tailor. Even so, these moments can carry all sorts of subtext, both implied and imagined. Introductions can serve as ways to get to know people, they can connote an identifying of how we belong and they can be about asserting forms of authority. What unites all of those functions is the way in which we communicate how we are what we do.

Lots of the ways in which we make ourselves legible to others, in professional contexts, is by applying labels to ourselves. Sub-disciplinary labels, e.g. what ‘kind’ of ‘geographer’, theoretical or political commitments,—e.g. ‘left’, ‘post-‘ something, ‘critical’ or ‘radical’–and particular roles—e.g. ‘Chair’, ‘Associate’, ‘Pro-‘ or ‘Vice’ something, ‘Director of’ something—all freight various sorts of meanings for different audiences, within an institution, within wider academia and to non-academics. That legibility can be a source of pride and a source of anxiety; we are somebody with a title, what are we without?

How we identify ourselves as academics in relation to work and the ongoing wrestling with working ‘above and beyond’ for recognition, for impact and perhaps for self-affirmation carries the connotation that academic life as a form of vocation. If I had more time I would look up and read around studies of vocation and how people variously negotiate it, sadly, I don’t. Even so, while ‘vocation’ is a theologically laden term, it is noteworthy that sociology in particular and related disciplines (not least social policy and social work) have a history, dating at least to the time of Weber, of reflection on the study (teaching, learning and research) of social sciences as a form of vocation. If there is a ‘vocation’ in contemporary academia it is very much bound up with ‘career’, which is a pronounced divergence from the religious connotations of vocation.

Throughout this post I have used a plural pronoun, ‘we’, and yet much of what I have described is individual. There is an elusive (ongoing) play between ‘our’ and ‘my’ success. The kinds of work-based identity performance that I am suggesting here are, mostly, individualised. I think, there’s an interesting double bind to this: on the one hand many academics want recognition and they want to ‘succeed’ and, perhaps, feel part of ‘successful’ departments and institutions (with varying meanings, measures and values of ‘success’); on the other hand: the systems for recognition, the associated metrics, roles and awards, are all geared towards individuals. We (some of us) want to work in stimulating collective research ‘environments’ (in the language of the REF) with colleagues but are encouraged and incentivised to compete with those same colleagues.

Vocation can be thought otherwise. Not necessarily in grandiose terms, but perhaps in an ordinary sense – there are, of course, many different ways to make contributions to knowledge, across the full gamut of activities that academics do. ‘My’ success need not be at the expense of ‘yours’.

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Ironically, this post has taken three separate attempts at writing due to all of the other things going on relating to the ‘start of term’, which seems to spread further into the term now than ever. So much changes to apparently remain the same.

Two days in a row, I am surprising myself.

I have written before, twice in fact, about the advent of a new academic year and the strange sort of cycle it represents. At different points of circumstances, stage of life, of career, of relationships, this can take on different forms of significance. The last time I wrote about this, in 2019, I quoted Bowie’s Changes and I am deliberately returning to that song in part because of how I feel like I have changed since 2019 but also because I really like the song. I worry that these posts can seem a bit pompous, which (of course!) I’m going to say is not my intention. The conceit of using songs as a means of getting at feelings isn’t meant in that earnest sense of cultural critique but because I like popular culture, and music in particular.

So what ‘changes’ I reflect on in 2024 are written from the same ‘stream of warm impermanence’ evoked by Bowie’s lyrics but with different ripples flowing. In my last post I wrote about struggling to understand the ‘vocation’ of academia and used some touchstones of different versions, or even different periods, of how an academic career has been imagined. In both the posts I wrote on the beginning of a new academic year I quoted from Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, and while I still have a definite soft spot for Bradbury’s work, it feels far less relevant and more distant from my own workaday experience.

In between the two moments in which I wrote yesterday I had a coffee break with a lovely colleague, just catching up. I indirectly talked about, or around, my half-formed thoughts about wrestling to understand what it might mean to be an ‘academic’ these days. As is often the case, my thoughtful colleague sympathised but provided a grounded point of view: the churn of initiatives and changes to systems and structures may be unsettling, and it is tempting to focus on that, but the core of the job kind of remains the same. We still (try to) write and do research and we teach – the time available to do those things and the pressures they might involve change but they remain the central bits of the job. We remain in the stream, the ripples around us continue to ebb and flow but, for now, the stream is still going in the same broad direction.

There are all sorts of things that are affecting universities at the moment. Funding has long been on the minds of university leaders. I think that has become more acute of late and has become the driving bass line of the mood music in HE. Whereas once we were, more-or-less, told in relation to teaching ‘do more with less’ and that it would only be temporary, we are now being simply told to do less. Even so, at many institutions because we have lost so many of our professional services colleagues, and the administrative and technical systems within which we are instructed to operate are more demanding, all academic staff are conducting more administrative work than I have ever previously experienced. Last year and this, the ripples seem to be a bit larger and more turbulent.

I keep circling back in my own mind to the expectations that academic staff may variously have for what the job is, what it means, and where, in society (in the class structure), it fits. Some colleagues still seem to feel secure. Some of us are still able to travel, to visit other institutions to attend conferences and to find the time to perform something of the traditional expectations of the more don-ish version of academic life. I wonder how many of us though are making this work by paying our own way, from our own funds, rather than being support with reasonable expenses. Many of us, but not all, are well paid, when considered against the average earnings. But, as UCU (the main trade union for academics) argue, we are not as well paid as we once were. The dissatisfaction with pay and how academics feel they are valued, or not, is visible in the comments sections of the articles that cover pay on the likes of WonkHE and THE. In the comments of a post covering the 2024/25 pay negotiations, some commenters say:

It’s got to the point that the only way of even maintaining the purchasing power of my wage from 5 years ago is getting a promotion to the next band. So same pay for more responsibility and stress.

… staff on points 38 and above have been badly considered over the past few years like they don’t deserve a cost of living rise because they are on a certain grade. Staff work hard and have difficult stressful roles often requiring additional
Hours to be worked free of charge. 

Every time pay is minimised the gravitas of the roles reduce but expectation is still high from senior management. I hope that mid-management leave the sector for better conditions and pay elsewhere. The civil service pay better than universities now. It’s already extremely difficult to recruit into the sector now and has been for around 6 years but it’s getting worse and worse.

The comparisons are telling, perhaps. The civil service and lawyers are the comparisons I remember hearing in the common room when I was a PhD student. Though this is, of course, a self-selecting sample of people commenting here. Even so, as with many other jobs, academics appear to feel the pinch. There is, I argue (and I would, wouldn’t I – I am an academic), some justification for thinking in this way. Historically, academic roles were fairly well-paid. In part this recognises the sheer length of time it takes to get through all of the ‘training’, i.e. a PhD and entry-level roles (e.g. associate lecturer and research assistant), before you are in a full-time and ‘permanent’ position. Likewise, as was argued in 2018, academic pensions matter because many of us don’t even begin to pay into them before we are in our late-20s or early-30s. ‘Well, boohoo – try living like the rest of us’ may be the response from those on a lower wage, which, for some, may seem a fair response. However, on balance I think it remains true that we don’t want a race to the bottom. Pay the highly skilled and those we need in society more, don’t drag the pay of some down because others are not earning a good wage.

Quite apart from any of these ‘us’ and ‘them’ sorts of arguments about pay, I am really interested in the changing sense of what an academic career is, what it means to those of us doing it. There are now a not-insignificant number of colleagues just leaving the profession, more than any other time in my ~15 years working in universities. Even getting funded to do a PhD in the first place is very, very competitive, and not fantastically well supported, financially. So, the hapless but well-remunerated campus novel academic, of Lodge and Bradbury, is, I think, long gone, if they ever did exist outside of Oxford and Cambridge. I shed no tears, that vision of academia is/was deeply exclusionary and alienating for the majority of the population – anyone not White, male and upper-middle class. Who we as academics imagine “we” are feels more uncertain now than any point in my (not-so-long) career. As a geographer I am tempted to ask the question – where does the academic belong in society? And, for now, I don’t really feel like I have much of an answer.

I could try to contextualise this in proper academic terms, I could introduce a ‘clever’ observation drawing on one of the many dead white (mostly French) men we, in geographyland, like to quote to lend some gravitas or authority to our ‘big thoughts’ but I prefer not to, for once. I might just allow myself the suggestion that, with Haraway, we could think about staying with the trouble of understanding the vocation of academia. Regardless, the subtlety, and dare I say beauty, of Bowie’s echoes of Heraclitus are more than sufficient.

There is something sort of annoying and definitely ironic to WordPress calling the chunks of ‘content’ we write into on a post being called ‘blocks’. Writers blocks. That’s where my mind has been, off and on, for some time. What is the block? What can be done.

I prevaricate, procrastinate and/or pretend. Eventually, often unhealthily close to a deadline, I confront. I confront the block, the difficult feelings. Sometimes I even feel like I may have changed the habit. No such luck… yet.

Today we had an online session in my department with a coach. We talked about writing. An interesting part of the conversation happened at the very beginning when we were invited to summarise our relationship with writing in a word. After a pregnant pause, words came. They included – fraught, frustrating, unrecognised, slow, challenging and many others that are, I think, broadly around feeling dissatisfied and perhaps unhappy. The follow on was to try to identify words to express what we would like our relationships with writing to be, with enjoyable, meaningful and spacious words that I can recall being suggested.

I sometimes reflect on the nature of the ‘vocation’ of academic life, and what sometimes feels like a disconnect between the actually existing daily life of working in a university and the expectations we variously harbour for the role. For some it remains not only a lifestyle but a way of life, without wishing to be pretentious – what some used to call the ‘life of the mind‘. A solitary and earnest existence that relates mostly to the humanities, perhaps – as Arendt more or less argued in her work of the same name, quoting Cato (as she did in The Human Condition): “Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself”. And while Arendt argues that vita activa entails a withdrawal from the world it also, necessarily, involves an engagement with it.

For some, the vocation of writing, as an academic, is aligned more with the creative act of writing songs or poetry than, say, the pragmatic act of writing a report. As Les Back noted in his Academic Diary:

Sometimes, like this morning, I wake up at 4.30 a.m. and suddenly a link or a connection I was trying to make in something I am working on becomes clear. I find that I have no real control over that process because ideas can’t simply be willed to come. Leonard Cohen commented once that he didn’t know where the good songs came from because if he did he’d visit that place more often.

As PhD student I both admired and was fearful of the senior colleagues in the department who seemed to embody this sort of academic vocation. For a little while I think I probably saw myself on a trajectory towards being able to ‘think difficult thoughts’. Perhaps some academics still do. Where I have got to is, at least for me, a peculiar slightly uncomfortable compartmentalisation of the ‘thinky thoughts’ of research squashed into the moments in which it is possible and then the pragmatic doing of ‘life’. I don’t wake up at 4:30am with inspiration. I (mostly) wake up at 6:30 to everyday domesticity – unloading the dishwasher, herding children, making coffee. Please don’t misunderstand me, I am happy and wouldn’t have it any other way. But I don’t think I really know what that academic vocation is, at least for me.

Returning to Les Back’s Academic Diary and to briefly, in my mind’s eye, revisit the various fictional universities of the campus novel (a somewhat guilty pleasure), I cannot help feeling like I am reading about a completely different world. I don’t know anyone, personally, who has the kind of career Back recounts in his book. I’m not saying people don’t, its just not part of my own lived experience of working in a university.

What is ‘an academic’ meant to be then? For many of my colleagues, and I, are not the figures I have covered so far. I am not a clerical hermit in the Ivory Tower that Arendt both praises and critiques, neither am I the affable and politically astute Professor of Back’s world, or, I hope, the ethically problematic and weak-willed lecturer that populates the pages of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury novels. All of these are White men, of course, and there remains a significant skew in that direction within universities. To an extent, I am the beneficiary of that. However, the pages of scientific journals are more diverse. The voices heard in academia are becoming more diverse. The kinds of writing being published are also beginning to reflect that diversity.

The criteria by which we judge ourselves and one another, whether derived from things like job descriptions, promotion criteria, governmental research quality assessment exercises, journal impact factors and citation counts are, ultimately, not very health for the individual academic worker. The struggle to write, to be ‘productive’ might not always be the best measure by which we should understand our own worth.

It may be a naive or, for some, defeatist form of consolation but I am inclined to think that sometimes it is ok not to have something to say. While ‘my beautiful world’ is not always readily accessible, I may struggle for words, perhaps that is not a bad thing. Other voices can and should be heard.