Tag Archives: local government

On moving over to the other side

On moving over to the other side

Early one morning recently I bumped into a colleague on campus who I’d not seen for a while.  He greeted me with the exclamation, ‘I hear you’ve moved over, Julie!’  Knowing exactly what he meant, I smiled and confirmed that yes, indeed, I had resigned from my management role; that I was now working as a research fellow and completing my PhD.  He kindly asked about the topic of the doctorate, wished me luck and went on his way.

This exchange came at a time when for me, as Schostak says,

‘the pragmatics give way to the lonely yet exhilarating reflections on ‘life’, ‘purpose’, ‘meaning’, ‘self’ and ‘otherness.’ (Schostak, 2002 p35)

The moment I completely gave up my ‘new management’ role (I had been part-time for a while) it all went quiet.  I don’t mean the embarrassed silence in the departmental meeting when I announced my impending move to a research role (I should’ve seen that coming).  I mean the absence of the day-to-day jingle jangle of new management;  the groans at yet another abuse of the university brand guidelines, the ‘kill Kodak’ rallying cries in the race for admissions, the laments over another conference crisis, the gripes about phone calls from eccentric alumni and rude remarks about former colleagues who had ‘moved over’ to the other side.  I could at last, on the other side, hear myself think.

(It also came at a time when four friends, Andrew, Estella, Jasper and Friso, died together on flight MH17.  We had been with Andrew and the boys on the Easter trip this year and whilst we were not particularly close, their sudden loss in this way shook my understanding of ‘moving to the other side’ in a very different context.  I’m still thinking that one through.)

I am of course still a member of the university community.  And it is far from lonely.

In examining morale in university life, David Watson, who sees universities as ‘membership organisations’, acknowledges the complex and contradictory nature of higher education and suggests that the mesh of psychological contracts, or ‘deals’ that it involves,

‘make much of the current discourse about happiness and unhappiness in contemporary life look simplistic and banal.’ (Watson, 2009 p3)

I wonder if this is so different from other sectors.  I recall difficult times at Norwich City Council in the 1990s with round after round of cuts;  when as managers we had to attend a ‘star chamber’ and justify the continued existence of our service.  I remember, despite some success, a palpable sense of bereavement as my own organisation suffered repeated losses of assets and morale.  I don’t imagine it is any easier in the current economic climate.

Watson repeats the tale that vice-chancellors like to tell each other – go around your university or college and ask the first ten people who you meet how their morale is and the response will always be ‘rock bottom’.  Ask them what they’re working on and the response will be full of life, optimism and of enthusiasm for the task in hand.

This almost certainly applies just as much in public and voluntary organisations. Generally, people care about what they do and they want to make a difference.

Jon Nixon, who writes about the moral bases of academic professionalism, describes academic practitioners as members of a ‘highly differentiated workforce’ having to ‘hammer out their sense of purposefulness within an institutional context which is morally fractured.’ (Nixon, 2008 p14)

Why this matters especially in higher education as opposed to elsewhere is that, according to Nixon, the university is the one place where we can, indeed must, ask awkward questions about why we do what we do.

I couldn’t agree more.  In the university we should have the space and the freedom to think the unthinkable.  It is what universities are for.

However, Nixon goes on to say that the task is virtually impossible in a context where the leaders of our institutions have ‘deserted the field’.  Their abdication of moral responsibility for the university sector as a whole represents a serious ‘failure of nerve’.

Perhaps, as practitioners on the ground we need to become subversive and move into the liminal space that enables us to breathe a different air.

Gary Rolfe, in echoing Bourdieu’s ‘community of unconsciousness’ offers freedom (and possibly happiness) via a parallel existence in his ‘paraversity’ with its ‘organic, fluid, rhizomatic, evolving community of thought’ in which the ‘values-based’ researcher and lecturer have the ‘freedom to be good.’ (Rolfe, 2013)

What a shame his invitation is to academic staff only.  His freedom, exercised by a ‘community of critical friends committed to the process of thinking together’ appears to be denied to those who he describes as the ‘ever-expanding administrative class’ thereby implying that the very opportunity to be good is the sole domain of the academic.

I may have ‘moved over’ but I’d like to assert a right for all members of the university, academic and administrative alike, to join in the thinking;  to be ‘values-based’, whatever their role, and to experience the freedom to be good.

Why have sides?

References

Nixon, J (2008) Towards the Virtuous University: The Moral Bases of Academic Practice New York, Routledge

Rolfe, G (2013) The University in Dissent: Scholarship in the Corporate University London, SRHE

Schostak, J (2002) Understanding, Designing and Conducting Qualitative Research in Education, Buckingham, Open University Press

Watson, D (2009) The Question of Morale: Managing Happiness and Unhappiness in University Life, Maidenhead, Open University Press & McGraw Hill Education

 

‘Busy in the world as well as in the mind’

‘Busy in the world as well as in the mind’ The History Man reflections (2)

This is the second of two posts prompted by a reading of ‘The History Man’ by Malcolm Bradbury (1975).  I had intended in this post to compare a university that I know today with Bradbury’s fictional University of Watermouth.  There are, however, too many features that deserve comment for a blog and I have chosen to focus on just three; activist academics, catering for meetings, and the departmental meeting.  And I stray into local government territory – in my experience, higher education and local government rituals can be inter-changeable.

ACTIVIST ACADEMICS

‘Howard is a well-known activist, a thorn in the flesh of the council, a terror to the selfish bourgeoisie, a pressing agent in the Claimants’ Union, a focus of responsibility and concern… busy in the world as well as in the mind’  (The History Man, p3 & p68)

Probably the most well-known ‘activist’ academic in Norwich is the former MP, Ian Gibson, in office from 1997 to 2009.  I suspect in earlier days in the late ’70s, as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, he might have been seen with other university colleagues selling the Social Worker outside Norwich City Hall.  I certainly don’t recall Ian being a thorn in the flesh of the City Council during my fourteen years as an officer.  The Council, led by a strong Labour group, was often more bent on in-fighting; what else was there to do in the absence of a credible opposition? (It was no different in Sheffield in the mid-80s.)  Ian did make a great rousing speech at the Assembly Rooms in 1999 when we launched the Council’s Equality Charter, one of my last projects before leaving for a job in the voluntary sector in 2000.  Today, as a trustee of the Silver Road Community Centre, he is actively campaigning for the centre as a base for community learning.  Perhaps not a thorn in the flesh, but a useful bit of grit in the shoe.

At the City Council today you will find university lecturers, postgraduate researchers and students in the Council Chamber, sitting on the Green benches as elected Members, fifteen strong; now a more credible opposition to the twenty-one member Labour Group and the miserly three member Liberal Democrat contingency.  And active – in my final month as Community University Engagement Manager, I received a call from the one of those Green academics, asking if the university could find a way of helping to fund a charity which had just lost its City Council grant.  Not long after, I heard lecturer and Green Party Councillor, Rupert Read, interviewed on local radio as he protested against the building of the Norwich Northern Distributor Road.  So, like Howard, these academics are busy in the world as well as in the mind but I would say, much better placed to agitate for effective change.

CATERING FOR MEETINGS

‘Two ladies in blue overalls come in with cups of tea and a plate of biscuits and place cups in front of all the people present’  (The History Man, p155)

I arrived at the university in early 2005, towards the end of the tea-lady era.  A lady in grey overalls wheeled her tea-trolley around the Registry and the Council House, serving beverages and biscuits to the Vice-Chancellor and his Executive Team.  If you asked Val (I think that was her name) nicely, she would service your meetings too as long as your request was logged in the Registry Receptionist’s diary. The Registrar held a tea-party in the Vice-Chancellor’s Office in honour of her retirement and uttered the most eloquent and profound tribute that I’ve ever heard on such an occasion.  The last of her kind, she wasn’t replaced.

Catering for meetings can be tricky as it seems we can never go too long without some sort of sustenance.  During City Council Housing Committee meetings over lunch in the late ’80s, as a council officer I struggled to make myself heard above the sound of Members slurping their soup. The soup option was later withdrawn; the sandwiches and sausage rolls continued well into the ’90s.  Anything, however, was preferable to the sight and sound of chief executive Anne Seex, chewing gum as she presented her reports to the Cabinet Meeting.  Observing my glares, she carried on regardless, seemingly oblivious to the effect of her ruminant impersonation.

THE DEPARTMENTAL MEETING

‘he has now prepared for the afternoon by placing here a backfile of bound volumes of the British Journal of Sociology; he is head-down at once, flicking over pages with practised hand’  (The History Man, p153)

At one time I would have been highly irritated at the presence of any distraction at a meeting that took someone’s attention from the agenda.  I recall over fifteen years ago, Councillor David Fullman’s habit of texting during Norwich City Council’s Housing Committee meetings.  No amount of glaring by me – the housing policy officer presenting her report – would shame David into putting down his gadget. The glaring was pointless (he was looking at his phone) but at least I was displaying my disapproval, should anyone care to notice.  But just when I thought he wasn’t paying attention, David would nonchalantly chip in, not only with a correction to a typo in my report that I hadn’t spotted, but with an incredibly insightful contribution to the discussion.  No doubt David didn’t realise at the time that he was ahead of the game.  Effectively utilising one’s time at meetings is clearly an art.

Today David is not alone.  During meetings at the university, many of us habitually log onto our ipads, macbooks, laptops and smartphones, perusing communications, dealing with vital matters during moments when attention is diverted to someone else around the table and even at times, when all eyes are turned on us.  No problem.  Like soap operas when you’ve missed an episode or two, it’s not difficult to pick up the thread of a departmental meeting after a few, or indeed several, minutes down time.  Perhaps I should take a pile of SRHE Research into Higher Education Abstracts into the next meeting and chew my way through those –

would this be viewed as legit, I wonder?

The History Man