As we’re moving towards the end of this strike, I’m increasingly preoccupied with the question of ‘what next?’. Given everything I’ve heard and read, let alone my own naive written ramblings, there’s no way I can go back to work exactly as before without looking in the mirror each morning and seeing a massive hypocrite staring morosely back at me. So what can or should I – we, all – do as individual academics and as a collective?

Obviously, UCU and others are already working and planning to work on our behalf, in the continuation of the negotiations around the specific aims of the strike. Most pertinently for we individuals, UCU are asking us to take ‘action short of a strike’ until further notice. I’m ready to do that, although I’m still not clear about specifically what it means and what the implications are both for my performance or my relationship with managers and teams. So I’m not going to discuss that further, because I need more advice.

But ASOS aside, how has this strike changed my attitudes and approach to my work as an academic? I’m going to draw on the parallels with climate change again, so bear with me, because I do see the parasitic grasp of the neoliberal model on the finite resources of the academy as closely resembling the wanton degradation of the Earth’s natural resources by the global industrial economy. Within each, there is a wide disconnect between the agency of individuals and the scale of the problems, or the coordinated action needed to solve them. In both contexts, the range of actors and diversity of perspectives and politics makes agreement on the issues, let alone agreement on the solutions, remarkably complex.

The fact that we are all complicit in getting to this point, to varying degrees, stokes internecine conflict within communities and up and down the levels of institutional hierarchies which badly need to work together to effect real change. As I said in a post last week, for the university sector it is still not clear to me whether the only way forward is revolutionary paradigm change, or whether there is a way to redirect the marketised university economy to create a version of ‘natural capitalism’ in which the real values, rather than the hollow economic functionality, of the university can flourish.

My point in using the environmental analogy is sustainability. If we accept that environmental degradation is caused by unsustainable economies supporting unsustainable lifestyles then there is a mechanism, however small, for individual choices and actions to influence larger economic trends. We are increasingly making the choice to live sustainably in relation to climate change. So how can we live sustainably in relation to the university (defined in terms of scholastic sanctuary, rather than economic gains)? What does a sustainable academic life look like, and how can it seek to influence the marketised university economy?

The answer to these questions is too big to go into here; an ongoing conversation rather than a package ready-to-go. I think it is this conversation that we, as an activated community, need to pursue as we move on from this strike. Just a note here though – this activity aligns closely with the urgent need to rediscover and define our authentic identities as academics and academic disciplines.

Why so urgent? Because only with a strong expression of identity can we take a stand against the incessant question used by the neoliberal machine: ‘what are you for?’. This simple query, used pejoratively rather than to empower, is used to set agendas, redefine job descriptions and replace organisational objectives with a narrow set of economic parameters which don’t allow – or give time or space to – academic discussion.

So a key first step in academic sustainability is defining an identity worth sustaining. This will be a collective effort, and within our time at work as academic groups and teams we need to support each other to make the physical and mental spaces in which we can develop that discussion. This is fundamentally an act of scholarship, in defence of scholarship itself, and so we must push ahead with this while scholarship is still part of our workplans and our job descriptions. It is a continuation of the vital, affirmative discussions that have been going on all week among free academics online and on picket lines all over the country.