Mild-mannered lecturer by day…mild-mannered lecturer by night. Welsh lit, politicians’ fictions. Fencing, cycling, UCU.
Barnau fy hun.
Also on Mast + Bsky
We hired a part-time Lecturer recently. We were shocked by how much every applicant had published while never having had a full-time or permanent post. An army of the exploited.
Look at all these Tory ministers withdrawing their labour to get a desired result. They must have learned it from watching
@RMTunion
’s Mick Lynch last week. Striking works, lads!
The CEO of the British Library (private school, Oxford, obvs) doesn’t have a PhD. He’s paid c. £170,000. The £7 sandwich in the café holds no fears for him.
I’d just like to point out to any potential philanthropists out there that there are quite a few universities - like mine - that would like to offer Oxford-level resources to thousands of students from rather less privileged backgrounds.
My UG students: 80%+ female. My PhD students: all female. My colleagues: roughly evenly-divided. My boss: male. His boss: male. His boss’s boss: male. His boss’s boss’s boss: male.
#iwd2018
‘I was alright at English but didn’t see the point of reading a book then saying what you thought it meant’. My mam, casually dismissing my life’s work, last night.
@RebeccaFront
George Osborne acquired a field on which the taxpayer paid the mortgage - he made a huge profit when he sold it. But that’s somehow different.
I teach mostly working-class students with a high BME proportion in an unfashionable university in a economically depressed area. Apparently their low salaries will be my fault.
Minister Sam Gyimah says graduate pay to rate degree quality and value. But degrees make minds not money. Top 3
#Archaeology
world rankings are all in UK. But archaeology is not highly paid: CIfA senior pay guide is £36,000-40,000. Bye bye archaeology
I’m entirely in sympathy with Braverman etc calling for a return to native traditions. My manifesto:
1. Proto-Celtic as the official language.
2. All churches to be torn down and Druidic oak groves grown in their place.
3. Political leaders strangled annually for a good harvest
And this, kids, is why I think Prevent should be abolished. University staff are amongst those legally required to inform on anyone showing signs of such beliefs. How can we discuss culture, history and science openly under these conditions?
I would describe University workload allocation modules as fraudulent - HEIs rely on huge amounts of unacknowledged labour at all levels. Not just academic staff either.
University: we’re closing 148 courses making entire ranges of subject inaccessible to our working-class, mature, parent and BIPOC intake many of whom can’t go elsewhere.
Also university: come to our two-day Inclusivity Conference.
Congratulations to Jo Johnson (Oxford) for his efforts in widening participation by appointing white male Oxford friend and Lord’s son Toby Young to the
#OfS
board.
Overheard on the train tonight: ‘I’m paying over £1000 per module and they expect me to learn it myself’.
Was tempted to offer to learn it for her for £500.
Congratulations to these two fine academics and
@ucu
for exposing one of Britain’s richest university’s systematic, decades-long exploitation of precarious staff. Hopefully lots of VCs are feeling very nervous.
If you could ask a v-c anything what would it be? Tweet us using
#VCquestiontime
.
@JG_THE
will pick the best of the bunch to ask our panel of v-cs at
#THElive
on Thursday
Magnificent VC’s newsletter today. 1. Thanks for working so hard and doing face-to-face teaching. 2. Redundancy news coming soon! 3. How’s your mental health?
#HigherEd
Here’s a tip for my management: if you’re offering ‘resilience’ training for work-based stress, perhaps you should take a look at the organisation instead.
Friend of mine at a Russell Group university lost 50% pay for taking part in the MAB last month: ‘partial performance’.
The same university has cheerfully signed off his workload at 153% of his contracted hours.
@rbrooks45
@BenHouchen
Houchen doesn’t have the benefit of parliamentary privilege and has just accused an MP of deliberately lying. I hope a libel trial follows.
@Ciara87C
Friend with a mass of long grey hair went to FCUM v Hednesford Town. As he crossed in front of the stand a cry went up: ‘What news from Nazareth?’ Cue applause from the entire crowd.
As intimidated as a Black girl stripped naked by police in school while menstruating? As intimidated as a Brazilian plumber shot dead by her team for looking suspiciously foreign? Spare me.
Let’s not forget that universities are being ranked by graduates’ salaries, so you sink down the league table if your students devote their lives to unlucrative life-saving - nursing, social care, social work etc - instead of hedge funding.
As programme lead for a health and social care degree at one of the largest HE institutions in the UK, reminder that to date the conversation of 'low value degrees' has included health and social care.
It takes a special sort of evil genius to deliberately screw down pay on socially useful jobs then punish universities for inspiring students to want to do them anyway.
Minister Sam Gyimah says graduate pay to rate degree quality and value. But degrees make minds not money. Top 3
#Archaeology
world rankings are all in UK. But archaeology is not highly paid: CIfA senior pay guide is £36,000-40,000. Bye bye archaeology
How’s this for classy? Our HR department, which claims it’s too stretched to cope with serious workplace issues, is chasing people they’ve made redundant for odd days of holiday allowance they say have been overclaimed, going back years.
‘Will begin’? Has the head of Universities UK not noticed that this has been going on for a decade or more? Or does she mean ‘will begin at the nice universities her friends kids go to’?
On
@BBCr4today
@viviennestern
says the financial pressures in universities will begin to be visible to students through fewer options, merged courses and fewer academic staff. She says certainty over international recruitment, increases in fees & direct govt funding all needed
To add to
@gabyhinsliff
’s piece, it’s not just the young who are affected. All my students, teen or mature, have jobs, often full time. Many of them are parents. When we close a course they can’t go somewhere else - their talent and social contribution is entirely lost.
How is it legal to declare a whole subject team’s work redundant (I.e. it doesn’t need doing any more) then advertise a post doing exactly that work?
(Everyone got fired before the managerial galaxy brains realised that the 2nd/3rd year students still needed teaching)
Rightly damning House of Lords report on the Office for Students: hostile to students and universities; politically biased; not competent as a regulator.
NEW on Wonkhe: Lord Hollick presents the findings of the House of Lords Industry and Regulators inquiry into the work of the Office for Students.
@HLIndustryCom
Delighted to see the university’s internal newsletter celebrate 25 years of the computational linguistics research group scheduled for closure in two weeks’ time, with multiple redundancies.
Magnificent work all round.
Horrific news about Humanities at Gloucestershire Uni. 2 major restructures in 3 years; 5 Heads of School in 5 years; 67% of fee income goes to the management echelon - now they’re firing people THEN a ‘review’ of humanities’ viability. Support
@ucuglos
150+ courses closed, hundreds of redundancies…and my VC says there’s no legal requirement to consult with unions because it’s not ‘structural change’. One bad faith move after another from our management.
@DarrenJohnson66
@michaelglasper
Arthur: remain
Ford: remain
Zaphod: Leave, him in charge.
Fenchurch: remain
Vogons: Leave with extreme violence
Marvin: oh god what’s the point.
It's "university rankings season" apparently. Want to see the % of academic staff on insecure contracts at your university (using HESA data 2016-7)? Use the handy "Precarious contracts in HE - institutional snapshot" page from
@UCU
#YesUniCan
#HEUnited
Genuinely feel for Simon Case: undercover agent. A mere 20 years of cigars and brandy with the chaps and he was about to spring his feminist trap when the woke lefty
@Guardian
blew his cover.
Did anyone else read the piece in the Observer on Dominic Cummings? The one that had the words ‘Oxford-educated’ and ‘autodidact’ in close proximity? A strange new definition with which I am unfamiliar.
Apologies to any working-class people who want to sing, act, compose, paint, design or write.
@GavinWilliamson
and his local henchman
@stuart4wolvessw
say it’s not for you.
The government’s newly-appointed Social Mobility commissioner (and a headteacher) explaining here that she sees all humans as sinful from birth and in need of correction. Genuinely terrifying.
My headteacher took the time to write secretly to every university I applied to telling them I didn’t deserve a place. Many thanks to the admissions officer who showed me the letter at an interview.
Despite my preference for milder language: me too. Poor A-levels; Bangor Uni took me in on Clearing; Sir Henry Jones Philosophy Prize; Danby Prize; 1 of only 2 1sts in my year; MA with Sherbrooke-Pitt Prize; PhD, PGC, Lecturer of the Year 2018 (for some reason).
So
@MishalHusain
asked my VC on
@BBCr4today
whether we were defrauding students by accepting them with very low A-level grades: taking their money and setting them up to fail. She also noted that my uni has a much higher proportion of BME students than most unis.
I.e I am a normal student at almost any university across the country from almost any point in time.
Literally all my students have jobs. Some work full-time hours and study full-time too: I wouldn’t have coped at all. That necessarily involves skipping classes sometimes.
Yet again I’ve fallen victim to the most middle-class crime imaginable: someone has stole the organic vegetable box from my doorstep.
#bringbackhanging
Desperately sorry not to be in class today. I should be teaching my favourite novel - Northanger Abbey - to a particularly bright, likeable group of students.
Instead I’m on strike and losing another day’s pay in the struggle to make this job attractive to the next generation.
Apologies for being so awful to
@michelledonelan
. I can confidently say that her 35 hours as Secretary of State for Education was the least damaging incumbency in political history. If only they could all be so hands-off.
@timloughton
Glad you think education is important. Perhaps given enough of it you’ll learn the difference between ‘peddle’ (to sell) and ‘pedal’ (foot-operated lever).
Firstly: incoherent nonsense. Secondly: literally all my students have jobs, some of them - somehow - full-time, alongside having children. But that doesn’t suit the populist narrative.
Strong words from ed select committee chair
@halfon4harlowMP
at
#CPC21
.
“Every single course that a student does, whether it is history, archaeology or science, should be about work.”
All students should spend “part of the week...doing a job”.
#cpc2021
🤲 Universities UK supports
#RowBritannia
, the mental health, fitness and wellbeing team challenge
👉 Raising funds and positive awareness, find out more about the challenge here
#mentallyhealthyuniversities
UUK President Julia Buckingham's message 👇
Congratulations on all the exam results. If you’re choosing a university, go for one that doesn’t call the police on its students and staff for having opinions.
Better than any REF output list or teaching award, I am delighted to discover that I have achieved the pinnacle of any academic career: blocked by
@toadmeister
at long long last.
Including me. Tired of establishment views being promoted unreflectively by a group of well-connected Conservatives. It’s like listening in to a Spectator party.
23 years at this uni and we’re suddenly told that dissertations no longer need to be double-marked, only ‘moderated’. And yet academic standards are definitely not being watered down as a response to
#MAB
.
If you’ve paid your taxes, still have a few spare millions, and don’t care about social cachet, get in touch. I’ll introduce you to bright students who could change the world if they weren’t (as happened this week) being made homeless, for example.