Today’s blog seeks to draw your attention to the new (old) HE environment. I say new (old) for a reason. It has become apparent to me in the last couple of years that many academics – PhD’s, ECRs, established researchers, and tenured professors have a highly individuated experience of ‘academia’. Sure, we can all get behind some easy tropes: reviewer 2, tyrannical administrators; over-paid Vice Chancellors. But actually scratch the surface, and there is no one ‘academia’ we all seem to recognise. There are good reasons for this. Those at the beginning and at the end of their career have a lot in common in that they understand very little about what it is to be an academic for the vast majority in the trenches. They are both hopelessly disconnected from reality but for completely different reasons.

A professor who never even needed a masters degree to get a job has had (and STILL has) a very different experience of academia than the professor who needed and got their PhD sometime between the 1990’s and 2000. Professors and established academics who got their PhDs and needed multiple publications to get a (probably permanent) job (say between 2000-2010) have had a very different academic experience again. Those who got their PhD, need multiple publications, suffered extreme precarity, and probably needed a monograph and a grant, and needed a huge amount of luck and connections have had a different experience again. Those still doing there PhD know all about precarity and publications, yet still seem to have a hopelessly romantic idea (and ideals) about what it is like to actually work at a University on a full time contract. Throw in the intersections of discipline, geography, race, gender, and disability and these communities will describe an academia that the first cohort can never and will never recognise (although they sit in hugely senior positions).

I’m not talking about different experiences of the job market here either, but different experiences once you have entered academia proper. These shifts in the job market merely reflect the broader shifts within universities, that have in turn moulded the expectations of staff too. These expectations play out differently amongst the different cohorts.

The Covid era academia may look staggeringly different to some colleagues, when in fact all Covid has done is rip away the mask. It’s a business, run by people who know little about business. It has the legal trappings of a charity, but is operated as a purely for-profit enterprise. Accordingly it seeks to exploit its workforce at every possible turn, who willingly, in the name of vocation and believing in the charitable status, passion or a number of other tropes, will work 24/7 in order to maximise its profit. 

This is the old (new) university. It’s one of the most competitive careers out there filled with over-achieving type As. For the last 20 years, it has been nothing but chaos, with restructurings, department closures, redundancies, financial mismanagement, invention of new annual league tables with ever changing goal posts, and continual reinvention of the administrative wheel as an army of administrators seek to justify their existence. Covid is just another turn of the chaos wheel.

The Covid era University expects unlimited access to your personal space via zoom; scheduling classes at any time of the day or night; preparation for teaching on-line (without training) but also for you to come into campus and teach in person in a pandemic whilst offering no meaningful personal protection. 

 Is this so different to the old academia? Not so much. 

 You’ve been expected to work 24/7 for a long time via email and instant responses to students, journal editors and administrators. You’ve been a slave to timetabling officer for time immemorial, and some people have regulary taught on the weekend for many years, not to mention the away days and the open days that eat into your personal time. Training? You can be given a course you know nothing about a week before term starts. Transforming your teaching pedagogy at the drop of hat to meet some NSS target is commonplace. One year, feedback is the priority. Next year, its ‘learning communities’. And the wheel rolls on. Change for the sake of change is the watchword. Is on-line teaching such a jump? Giving more, more and then some more again is hardly Covid specific. 

Granted, being forced to come into work to contract a deadly disease is an untenable step further, but it’s not so far off the well-travelled path. Colleagues have been striking over workload and work conditions for the last two years, with a suicide and mental health crisis in academia ever present. Care for your well-being has been distinctly lacking for some time. We are all a little tired of the downward dog solution.

Navigating with the compass of truth

So, how do you navigate this new (old) Covid University. First, it is up to you to face facts and begin to see Covid academia as an extension of the same academia as before. Once you accept that perhaps exploitative and unreasonable requests are being made of you, most likely in contravention of basic health and safety and your employment contract are not a one-off (this is a crisis) situation, but merely an extension of the previous exploitation, your mind-set ought to shift towards what is possible and reasonable for you to do, and what is not. These will almost certainly fall short of what is being requested from one week to the next. 

Facing this truth will prevent you falling into the trap of self-doubt, imposter syndrome and wondering why you are just not good enough. These thoughts are a spiral downwards to abandoning research and writing in the never ending quest to be the perfect on-line tutor.

The boundaries you can put in place now, having accepted these facts, will keep you sane later. Become your own committee of no. Think carefully about the battles you pick.  It is important you think through your survival tactics early and doggedly define your priorities and stick to them, otherwise the next 12 months are going to be very difficult indeed.

Remember this – just like we don’t all experience academia in the same way, we will not experience Covid academia in the same way. The winners will keep winning. The losers will continue to do all the heavy lifting right until they have worked themselves into the ground. You must see your situation as it is. Be your own advocate.

See the old (new) University as its always been. It’s not you, it’s them.

Next time: the value of rest