Dear students,

First off, I want to apologise for any upset or inconvenience that my absence this last week has caused you. I hope you’ll know, from past experience, that I work really hard to support your studies and give you the best direction I can to enthuse you, develop your knowledge and achieve outcomes that you can be really proud of. So my decision to strike was not taken lightly.

But, to be clear – I do not apologise for going on strike. As you are probably aware in the wider world, the actions of governments – whether national or institutional – can make or break communities and there is often very little that communities can do challenge those actions. In the university – your study space, my workplace – the last resort for those outside of the management, dealing with the consequences of constant change and pursuit of economic goals at the expense of other interests, is the withdrawal of labour. We strike to use the only currency we have which economics can account. And in doing so we draw down our reserves of other things – goodwill, collegiality and income. Don’t forget that all the staff on strike are giving up the pay and pensions that, in part, we’re fighting for. We’re breaking bonds with managers and colleagues which will take a long time to repair. So, my decision to strike was not taken lightly.

Is this really the last-chance saloon? Why strike now? What’s really gone so wrong? These are fair questions, which you have a right to ask, and I’m not qualified to give the whole response you need. To see the state of things, go online, search Twitter for #HallamHorror, #UCUstrike and others. Read through my feed @DrJonBridge.

To summarise though (it’s what I’m paid to do), I believe we’re reaching a tipping point in universities. From high up, top-down and all around we hear a constant noise – universities must change; the old systems are not fit for purpose now; quality doesn’t exist unless it can be quantified; experience not content; the end is more important than the means. The funding structures we exist within today, not just your fees, but core funds, research grants and more, have been designed to ensure that the spectacle – of ‘excellence’, of ‘value for money’, of ‘quality’, of ‘impact’, of ‘student experience’ – rules over the content.

But it is the content, and the process of nurturing and growing it, and bringing it to our students and growing it in you, that defines a university. So that process of capitalisation, marketisation, corporatisation which I’ve described above is literally decimating (dividing, chopping up, and tearing apart) the institutions on which it is imposed. This is not a sudden thing. You may have heard the gruesome story of boiling frogs – how, if you put one in a pan of cold water and set the flame to low, it will sit there and stew slowly, while the water boils around it; yet if you put one in a pan already hot, it will struggle and immediately jump out.

Like climate change, like boiling frogs, the thing we fight in universities is a slow death happening by degrees. And the water is getting hot now. The specifics of the strike – of pay and pensions; of workload intensification; of job insecurity especially for those at the start of their careers; and of inequalities of opportunities to work and progress – are evidence of this. We know that mental health issues in students are at an all-time high – but this is matched by stress and sickness among staff. The corporate university wants us to be flexible, ‘agile’, able to adapt quickly to the changes it imposes; yet passes on responsibility to us for doing so. The structures, people and creative spaces we require to do implement the change; the support we relied on up to now just to carry on the status quo, are being stripped.

Why should you care? You’re here (according to the university’s model) for a single purpose, to get a degree and realise the investment you have made. Three things:

First, and most pertinent – investment in us, your academic staff, is investment in you. When I stand up in front of class tired, stressed, under-prepared, my lessons are less good. When I rush through your marking, trying to pick out the bare essentials for each grade and cramming feedback into bullet points, your learning is less good. For those of my colleagues on temporary or zero-hour contracts, thrown into a module with minimum preparation time, I can barely imagine or recall the stress. The things we are asking for are not luxuries; we are focused on our ability to educate you well, and these are the necessities required.

Second, and still pertinent for many of you – the constant drive for change, for rapid change, combines with excess workloads to affect the way we plan, review and maintain the quality of your courses. As academics, we don’t just teach from week-to-week; we reflect and we review, and plan improvements for next year. There are established systems and cycles for doing this, collectively, which are being squeezed into ever smaller blocks of time, with less scrutiny and discussion. This impacts the future of our courses and our ability to protect their content and pedagogy.

Finally, and this is a plea to your future selves, as well as mine. No matter what path you take on graduation, whether you stay close to universities or move away, these issues will follow you. I’m trying to stay politically neutral here, and to make a case on conceptual grounds; but the project that we’re striking against now, the diminishing of real value in pursuit of economic value, the fallacy that the market rules and society follows – this will follow you. You’ll know about the gig economy, casualisation of employment, the idea that individuals all have agency and those who fail to demonstrate it have, well, failed – these will follow you.

Academic and other university staff are striking now, because for us these issues have caught up. If we don’t make a stand now, it may be too late. If not now, when?

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.

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.

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.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”

Today the strike bites. As I’m sitting writing this, I should be an hour into six hours of not-quite-back-to-back timetabled teaching. My absence will impact more than 100 students on four separate modules across all levels of our undergraduate courses. (Actually, that’s generous given recent attendance levels…). We’re not quite half-way through the strike and I’ve had a lot to think about how and why it has come to this.

So now I’m starting to think about what I’ll say to my students when I’m back in front of them this time next week, having to explain myself. I thought I’d draft an open letter to them all, while the strike is hot and as hundreds of colleagues march in Sheffield city centre and nationwide and stories still come in from everywhere to demonstrate the reasons why the strike has been called.

Dear students,

First off, I want to apologise for any upset or inconvenience that my absence this last week has caused you. I hope you’ll know, from past experience, that I work really hard to support your studies and give you the best direction I can to enthuse you, develop your knowledge and achieve outcomes that you can be really proud of. So my decision to strike was not taken lightly.

But, to be clear – I do not apologise for going on strike. As you are probably aware in the wider world, the actions of governments – whether national or institutional – can make or break communities and there is often very little that communities can do challenge those actions. In the university – your study space, my workplace – the last resort for those outside of the management, dealing with the consequences of constant change and pursuit of economic goals at the expense of other interests, is the withdrawal of labour. We strike to use the only currency we have which economics can account. And in doing so we draw down our reserves of other things – goodwill, collegiality and income. Don’t forget that all the staff on strike are giving up the pay and pensions that, in part, we’re fighting for. We’re breaking bonds with managers and colleagues which will take a long time to repair. So, my decision to strike was not taken lightly.

Is this really the last-chance saloon? Why strike now? What’s really gone so wrong? These are fair questions, which you have a right to ask, and I’m not qualified to give the whole response you need. To see the state of things, go online, search Twitter for #UCUstrike, #Imstrikingbecause and others. Brew a cup of tea and read back through @UCUHallam, @HallamStrike and even my tweets @DrJonBridge.

To summarise though (it’s what I’m paid to do), I believe we’re reaching a tipping point in universities. From high up, top-down and all around we hear a constant noise – universities must change; the old systems are not fit for purpose now; quality doesn’t exist unless it can be quantified; experience not content; the end is more important than the means. The funding structures we exist within today, not just your fees, but core funds, research grants and more, have been designed to ensure that the spectacle – of ‘excellence’, of ‘value for money’, of ‘quality’, of ‘impact’, of ‘student experience’ – rules over the content.

But it is the content, and the process of nurturing and growing it, and bringing it to our students and growing it in you, that defines a university. So that process of capitalisation, marketisation, corporatisation which I’ve described above is literally decimating (dividing, chopping up, and tearing apart) the institutions on which it is imposed. This is not a sudden thing. You may have heard the gruesome story of boiling frogs – how, if you put one in a pan of cold water and set the flame to low, it will sit there and stew slowly, while the water boils around it; yet if you put one in a pan already hot, it will struggle and immediately jump out.

Like climate change, like boiling frogs, the thing we fight in universities is a slow death happening by degrees. And the water is getting hot now. The specifics of the strike – of pay and pensions; of workload intensification; of job insecurity especially for those at the start of their careers; and of inequalities of opportunities to work and progress – are evidence of this. We know that mental health issues in students are at an all-time high – but this is matched by stress and sickness among staff. The corporate university wants us to be flexible, ‘agile’, able to adapt quickly to the changes it imposes; yet passes on responsibility to us for doing so. The structures, people and creative spaces we require to do implement the change; the support we relied on up to now just to carry on the status quo, are being stripped.

Why should you care? You’re here for a single purpose, to get a degree and realise the investment you have made. Three things:

First, and most pertinent – investment in us, your academic staff, is investment in you. When I stand up in front of class tired, stressed, under-prepared, my lessons are less good. When I rush through your marking, trying to pick out the bare essentials for each grade and cramming feedback into bullet points, your learning is less good. For those of my colleagues on temporary or zero-hour contracts, thrown into a module with minimum preparation time, I can barely imagine or recall the stress. The things we are asking for are not luxuries; we are focused on our ability to educate you well, and these are the necessities required.

Second, and still pertinent for many of you – the constant drive for change, for rapid change, combines with excess workloads to affect the way we plan, review and maintain the quality of your courses. As academics, we don’t just teach from week-to-week; we reflect and we review, and plan improvements for next year. There are established systems and cycles for doing this, collectively, which are being squeezed into ever smaller blocks of time, with less scrutiny and discussion. This impacts the future of our courses and our ability to protect their content and pedagogy.

Finally, and this is a plea to your future selves, as well as mine. No matter what path you take on graduation, whether you stay close to universities or move away, these issues will follow you. I’m trying to stay politically neutral here, and to make a case on conceptual grounds; but the project that we’re striking against now, the diminishing of real value in pursuit of economic value, the fallacy that the market rules and society follows – this will follow you. You’ll know about the gig economy, casualisation of employment, the idea that individuals all have agency and those who fail to demonstrate it have, well, failed – these will follow you. Academic and other university staff are striking now, because for us these issues have caught up. If we don’t make a stand now, it may be too late. If not now, when?

===

On reflection, it might need a bit of editing before next week…

As the strike progresses it is interesting to see how different perspectives and rhetorics emerge, propagate and flourish or diminish. In a connected, social media world, this can happen in the time between lunchtime and dinner.

Many of these relate, in one way or another, to the central tenet of the strike – solidarity. Solidarity, and how you demonstrate it, seems to cause a remarkable amount of division. Clearly, there are very obvious distinctions which seem cut and dried; some people are on the picket with the banner, some people are walking past it and going to work. But this black and white differentiation ignores a thousand shades of grey. As a relative newbie to strike action, I’m trying to decide where the threshold that defines solidarity actually lies.

Yesterday, I spent part of the morning writing my blog, some more time travelling into town to find I’d just missed the pickets, an hour trudging home in the rain, and the afternoon at home with my Twitter feed pinging at me, feeling rather sorry for myself. I’d assumed that I could strike by lurking at home, having an impact by withdrawing my labour and getting some much needed thinking time. But I was lonely – yes, I know, less than two days in – I missed my work colleagues and that thinking was already generating work-y ideas I was itching to progress.

On Twitter, however, every other tweet seemed to be about #digitalpickets. Strident voices warned of the dire consequences of checking emails, using online uni systems, tweeting about research. Tweeting about anything non-strike, in fact. I began to feel guilty – I had retweeted an article about natural flood management that morning, and liked a post from a major meeting on refugees and the university that I’d been following for a while. By straying off-message, was I diluting the power of the strike, undoing the efforts of picketers and negotiating teams across the country? Yikes! Am I doing that right now?

Another part of me fought back. No, I’ve withdrawn my labour, the essential functions which my department depends on me for, I’m making a stand by tweeting and writing my blog, trying to unpack the fundamental importance of the strike from a broader perspective than four bullet points on a flier. What’s more – hands off my grey matter! What’s next, #thoughtpickets? Should I suppress those interesting ideas I’d had and try to rethink them next Thursday back in the office? I had a vision of Homer Simpson trying to rid himself of his workplace crush on Mindy: “think unsexy thoughts, think unsexy thoughts…”

Anyway, this morning I found myself on my first ever picket outside the Owen Building. Curiosity? Penance?! I stood for an hour and a half in the drizzle alongside some interesting colleagues from across the university. We waved our placards, handed out some leaflets, smiled at students we knew going in and out (with varying responses). I gave an impromptu interview to someone who said he was a media student from up the road (query to the more experienced – was that wise?).

After the picket I went for lunch with a former colleague from Liverpool who was in Sheffield for the day. Both mid career, he a bit further on than me, we talked about work planning, management, workloads and that tension I’ve mentioned previously between intellectual identity, academic freedom and the job of work we do for our institution. Inevitably, after a beer, the talk drifted towards research and I do hesitate to disclose that we did produce some pretty solid-looking ideas. Did that undo the good things I’d done in the morning? Or was it OK, just as long as I didn’t tell anyone? Ah.

Apologies if I’m being a little facetious. I suppose the point I’m trying to make is about what solidarity looks like. Make no mistake, my support for the strike is strong and it is growing with every day that I participate, every hour that I have as a ‘free academic’ to think and explore further my own and others’ reasons for striking. That exploration includes having conversations about the reasons and rationales for the strike, and for me it includes thinking hard about the relationship between my research life as a whole and the specific projects I develop and run to the benefit of my institution. I’m working hard to promote and propagate the strong messages of solidarity that I’m seeing from all over the country, and add strength to the cause of the strike by adding my own.

But no one owns my solidarity or the way that I express it. Unlike some aspects of university management, the strike needs to accommodate everyone who comes with an open hand and support what they can offer to the cause, in all it’s different forms and to whatever extent they can.

Finally, one thing I’ve been trying to do alongside these ramblings each day is draw attention to other struggles and causes in and around academia globally and locally. This strike is not happening in isolation, and if we forget or diminish the urgent issues of academic persecution in many countries (see www.cara.ngo), the chaos going on around us in British politics (and what that means for the future of the university), or the growing climate crisis (great that UCUHallam will be joining the climate strike on Friday) then we risk losing sight of the purpose in pursuit of the prize.