The Tories will be leaving office having comprehensively broken one of the best and most internationally competitive sectors the UK had when they took power 14 years ago
Went to a party this afternoon with a bunch of academics from at least 6 UK universities. All but one - including RG unis - were facing redundancy / voluntary severance schemes. Some compulsory redundancies. UK unis are in free fall.
There's quite a lot of that, definitely -- more than makes rational / economic sense. And one problem is they've emboldened managers who also act as though their staff basically annoy them. Most insidious, though, is the insistence on 'employability' and measuring 'graduate outcomes' in salary.
Think it's deliberate, because a lot of people in higher education, the arts, and entertainment a) see what a bunch of corrupt, awful dipshits they are, & b) take the piss out of them for it in one way or the other, & they're so thin skinned at this point that they'd rather cause cultural vandalism.
Its more ideological than that even. The cultural capital associated with attending HEIs should be reserved for people like them, not us plebs. This has always been about rolling back WP and fully reinstating yet another class marker of privilege.
Yes, I think there's a total failure to appreciate the value of what they do, both culturally and economically. If they can't put a very specific number on it, they dismiss it as a waste of money.
What kind of managers? As a member of PSS with 'manager' in my job title, I'm always curious what powers fellow HE workers ascribe to managers in HEI. Mind you, it's rarely clear what academics mean when they say 'managers' beyond some amorphous class of monsters who make academics' lives hard.
Here, I mean the people at the top, who set the tone -- VCs and Deputy VCs in particular. But I've noticed the lack of professional respect and consideration for the academic core of the university spreading into other areas -- as though teaching/research/campus culture were a kind of inconvenience.
And perhaps I would add: having been Head of School, I know how hard it can be to manage academics! But, also: that's the job, and I have no time for people in HE management at any level who act as though they would rather be managing some other, more replaceable, less specialist kind of worker.
We have to remember to give full credit to Clegg, Cable and the FibDems during the Coalition years. The claimed stable future provided by their so-called 'progressive' funding strategy has been a significant contributor to UK HE's pending destruction.
