Day 5 of the UCU strike, a sharp and shiny blue day, cold though, but the picket this morning was strong. In stark contrast to my emotions on Tuesday – isolated, unsure of myself – now I felt surrounded by colleagues, supported by students and part of a wider thing happening – what with the Youth Strike for Climate happening the same day.

It was just as well I had these emotional props, because the first thing I saw online over my coffee this morning almost had me spitting the coffee all over my laptop. As the university itself reports,

Sheffield Hallam University lifted the Outstanding Strategic Planning Team trophy at this year’s Times Higher Education Awards. These awards, now in their 15th year and widely referred to as the “Oscars of higher education”, shine a spotlight on the exceptional achievements of individuals, teams and institutions working in our sector today.

Wow. Outstanding Strategic Planning, when many of its staff are joining thousands of colleagues across the country striking in protest at the negative impacts of precisely that. You couldn’t make it up! I think the moniker ‘Oscars of higher education’ fits very well, in the sense it conjures of a glittering elite celebrating its own achievements in a rarified atmosphere far away from the muck and dust of day to day life.

Unfair? Perhaps, especially for the ‘personal’ awards to excellent teachers and researchers who I’m certain are fully deserving. And I’ll say this – I have acquaintance with many people working in the corporate infrastructure of the university and none of them give any impression other than that of dedicated, intelligent people passionate about the status and reputation of the institution and working their socks off to secure its future. But in whose terms, and to what purpose? Like my week, the university must look very different from either side.

The judges were impressed by the ability of the strategic planning team at Sheffield Hallam University to embed its “Transforming Lives” vision into every element of what the institution does.

Seen through the prism of the current industrial action – the heightened awareness that it has brought of the challenges facing the academy in a neoliberal economy; the many, many stories of suffering caused by the corporate change agenda at institutions across the country; and the reflection of these stories in the experience of colleagues and friends in my own team – the ‘Transforming Lives’ strategy (as outlined here) sets nerves jangling. Experience over the last year, as sweeping changes have been imposed on professional and technical services, academic teams and curriculum structures, requires one to pack a lot into the verb ’embed’, in describing sufficiently the feelings of brutality and confusion created at the sharp end of the plans.

Recognising that previous strategies had lacked clarity of vision, the team ensured that the plan pushed forward fundamental change in every aspect of Sheffield Hallam’s operations to advance it towards its goal of becoming “the world’s leading applied university”. At every stage, care was taken to see that the strategy was relevant, understood and implemented across the whole university.

Very clear, well understood. Like a big stick, perhaps. Relevant, understood and implemented are interesting words. Also interesting are others, not used to celebrate the strategy – accepted; sympathetic; accommodating. People-centred. Enabling, supportive. Participatory. Bottom-up. Adaptable. Rooted in the lived experience and deep subject expertise of the university’s staff. There’s a difference between being conscientious about telling people exactly what you are going to do before you do it (I’m going to build this tower-block next door, you have two weeks to lodge an opinion) and being truly inclusive how you go about designing and implementing change.

By reorganising governance structures, aligning business planning to the strategy, designing new staff capabilities and creating a strategic investment fund, the team has seen its work make a clear impact. The percentage of graduates in highly skilled employment or further study has increased, the university has risen up the recent Times Higher Education Europe Teaching Rankings and other UK league tables, and its performance in the National Student Survey has improved dramatically.

The structural changes have seen significant reorganisation of teams that are vital to support the delivery of front-line teaching and the growth and maintenance of research. Changes to date have seen numerous excellent staff laid off, forced to reapply for their own jobs, or redeployed into new teams with nominally similar skills sets but no embedded knowledge of systems, processes or those they are required to interact with. For the latter (we academic staff trying to organise routine tasks like timetabling, fieldwork and assessment schedules), this has meant a chaotic blur of new names, old names in new places, mixed messages, holding emails, ‘temporary’ arrangements and teething problems. The pace of change, coupled with failures in management and communication at local levels, has meant that in many cases it is simpler (but not simple, and very much not time-saving) to do it ourselves.

It is great that graduate employability indicators have seen an uptick, and the improvement in NSS scores (for what they are worth, which is to say very little in terms of practical benefit to student learning or teaching quality). It seems a little disingenuous to cite either of these indicators as the consequence of a corporate restructuring scheme which is less than two years old, rather than the continued hard-work, passion and inspirational input of academics and academic support staff over at least the three preceding years during which 2019 crop of graduates and final years captured in these data were educated.

The judges said the initiative caught their attention “due to its wide-ranging and effective approach to strategy formation, embedding and implementation”.

Yes, its caught our attention too, although we don’t get a dinner at the Grosvenor, possibly due to the radical drive for non-pay savings accompanied by chirpy requests for staff from across the university to suggest how others can ‘do their bit’. Hang on to those old paperclips, kids!

“The engagement of stakeholders from across the university has led to changes in governance, business planning and focus at an individual level that have resulted in significant jumps in NSS scores and university rankings,” they said.​

Engagement of stakeholders. I’ve run out of words here, so please go onto Twitter and search for the hashtag #HallamHorror.

Am I being disloyal to my employer here? Am I breaking the bond of trust between the institution and the employee, reneging on the ‘Hallam Deal’? Is my perspective all wrong? I honestly don’t know right now. The cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced over the past week as I move from a position of putting up with the construction noise while trying to get on with my job, towards one of deep realisation of the human and institutional damage being done all around me, is too much at the moment.

It is a bit like the climate change issue, and whether you think that Extinction Rebellion and the School Strike for Climate are a step too far or a necessary awakening. As I tried to outline yesterday, both in academia and in the wider world people are starting to really feel the scale of the trauma being meted out by what we’ve hitherto accepted as the way we run the world, the cage of norms and boundaries by which we define objectives and celebrate success.

But we cannot go on externalising that trauma in the name of strategic progress, just as we can no longer externalise the environmental impacts of our daily lives. If this strike is doing anything, it is laying bare the myriad human-scale problems which are ignored by the corporate gongs of the THE Awards. What is at fault then – the process, or the paradigm? We need to understand this if, when the strike is over, we are to push forward the process of effective change.