We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This excerpt, from T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding, was printed on the first page of the first textbook I opened as an undergraduate student at UCL in 1997. It is obviously vastly out of context on its own, particularly at the front of a book on solar system science. You can see what the authors were trying to do: set up the impressionable mind for a journey into the cosmos, while reminding the reader that the noble justification for an interest in space (and naturally the continued flow of money to support it) is a better understanding of humanity’s place here on Earth.

The lines have stayed with me over the last two decades as the focus of my own scientific research has gone almost literally from the stars to the gutter (I now work on soil, water and flooding, among other things). It has popped up again now as I think about academic identity and the challenge, following the strike and following my belated awakening to the need to stand up and fight for the university, to establish a counter-identity to the one presented by neoliberalism.

What are you for?, the neoliberal asks. If you can’t answer, they will answer for you.

What am I for, as an academic? What is my subject for? Who does the university exist to serve, and what is the place of its staff and students? What justification can we give that matches the drive to grow, to produce, to turnover, to stimulate activity, to become efficient, to change ourselves to fit the demands of a new economy, to innovate, to show impact, to gain prestige, to climb the rankings, to compete and win in a competitive, spectacular world?

To explore, to return, and to enrich the world we return to with the knowledge we bring. T.S. Eliot’s vision seems to me as concise a definition of the purpose of the university as any. But it is pretty intangible still. How about applying that definition not to the university but to individual academics or academic teams. Or, indeed, to students? That’s more interesting. Now, the university has a different role – to nurture, secure, protect and enable those engaged in this process of exploration. To provide them with the space and resources they need to create, retrieve, uncover and analyse new knowledge and ideas. To help us to disseminate and apply this understanding to better know ourselves, the communities around us, the place in which the university exists.

In this model, the rights of any discipline to be worthy of study are equally preserved and the institution derives and grows value internally by investing in and developing its people as its essential economic good. Academics and their teams, their specialist support staff and their students are placed front and centre here – they, we, are the good stuff from which the university draws nourishment, purpose and substance. A human-centred institution supporting a collaborative, nurturing ecosystem of human knowledge and transferring it outward into society.

Well there’s my opening gambit anyway. I mentioned yesterday the urgent need to engage in this sort of exercise, seriously and collectively, in order to present a real vision of an alternative future academy, one that underpins negotiation and ideation at all levels from the classroom to the boardroom. But it is still a rather far-away objective. The strike had specific goals – still not responded to at the time of writing – addressing much more pressing issues that affect us all in the present, here and now rather than some imagined future. What can I take forward at that level, from what I’ve learned this past week?

First – and I promise, I’ll let it go after this – is that I believe there is a deep trauma in academics and in students, stemming from a knowledge, conscious or not, that the current system is killing the ideals of the university such as I’ve outlined them above. That trauma preconditions the rise in mental health problems across the university sector. We hate what’s going on, and we hate ourselves for our complicity in it.

Second – we are complicit, all of us (and I’m thinking here especially about academics like me, on secure, non-limited contracts with benefits and rights and promotion pathways). And we are complicit in the failings of the marketised university as well as enabling its successes by performing to its requirements. What do I mean by that? I mean that rather than just the understandable activity of doing as we’re asked to; engaging with initiatives to keep the system running; working to promote the organisation because we are loyal to it, and to our colleagues, and students, and because we want the satisfaction of doing our jobs well, of meeting targets and expectations, and because we are rewarded for it; rather than just these, we are also responsible for perpetuating the grotesque situations of our casualised and insecure colleagues. How so?

In the way we organise, or disorganise, such that gaps appear in teaching loads that appear too small for permanent closure. In the way we often think of ratios before pedagogy, driven by reaction to events rather than careful planning of resource. In our failure, as individuals and as teams, to manage our workplace stress and mental health and prevent each other keeling over. In our inability to argue for sufficient resource within teams to enable provision for cover that does not amplify these issues through further use of short-term ALs or overburdening colleagues. In the way we systematically perpetuate the differential between our workplans and our real work, such that what is on paper at best reflects a scaled model of reality, correct in structure but sometimes vastly misrepresenting the size or time-consumption of a task. Why is this so bad? Well…

Thirdly – because by perpetuating the misrepresentation of our workload we don’t just hurt, or benefit, ourselves. If I take four hours to prep for every hour of contact time on a new module, say, my workplan still says one hour. Like most of my colleagues, I believe, I’ll work that extra time for free, in order to produce something of quality and satisfy myself I can deliver it. But that has to give, somewhere – hence the time in evenings or at weekends answering emails, marking, or wrangling with Blackboard or Sharepoint or trying to squeeze in research. Quite apart from all the additional work and pressures piled in to the black hole of ‘General Academic Duties’.

This has three effects: (i) the workplanning system persists unaware and content, while academics everywhere shake their fists and learn to ignore it; (ii) we systematically devalue the time that managers contend is allocatable to different tasks, so that when these are specified for casualised or short-time contract staff the hours are insufficient for the role; (iii) by doing work for free, we quite literally are eliminating the business case for taking on more long-term academic staff. 20 academics working just a couple of hours a week over their contracted time, potentially covers the work of an entire new full-time post.

So our teams stay small, too small to adequately cope when someone stumbles; the spare capacity that conscientious managers try to retain in the system as viewed through the prism of the workplans is not really there; and casualisation is undervalued and over-used.

Am I painting too bleak a picture? Should I try to finish on a high? I’m not so sure. As with most blogs, I’m really writing this for myself and I need therefore to make sure I have something hard and sharp enough to cut me again when I look back on it in a week, or a month, when I’m back in the routine and wondering what all the sound and fury of the strike was for.

Being an academic is, at its best, an amazing job. It has taken me around the world, given me unique and transcendent experiences, brought me to meet and work with wonderful people from many different cultures, and forced me to overcome chronic shyness and self-doubt to lead hundreds of students at all levels through higher education and into their careers, where I hope vicariously the values I’ve modelled in my teaching are impacting society. It is deeply rewarding both intellectually and, sixteen years after entering academia at the start of my PhD, financially too at last.

But it is hard work, mentally, and made harder by mismanagement (my own, and those above me) and by the crisis we are being brought to by the neoliberal agenda which is currently in control. In joining the strike I’ve realised I do not exist in a vacuum. My problems, hopes and fears are not just shared by others but impinge on others; my actions have consequences beyond my own situation; the academy is a collective. So going forward I have two new goals: to work with colleagues to reform our local workplace in spite of the current institutional orthodoxy; and to work more widely to challenge that orthodoxy at its core and repair the wounds of an academic identity lost in pursuit of the spectacular.