Class in Academia

[AnnO'Neemus]

Coincidentally, I've just turned on the radio and found R4 Thinking Allowed.

"Elite Universities - Working Class Students

CLASS AND EDUCATION
Laurie Taylor talks to Kalwant Bhopal, Professor of Education and Social Justice at the University of Birmingham, about her research into the inner workings of elite universities and the making of privilege.

They're joined by Iona Burnell Reilly, Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Education at the University of East London, whose latest study presents a collection of autoethnographies, written by working class academics in higher education, and considers how have they become who they are in an industry steeped in elitism.

Producer: Jayne Egerton"

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Elite Universities - Working Class Students

Elite universities and the lives of working class academics.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Idris2002]

Hm.

Judith Butler

Donna Harraway

TJ Demos

Yuval Noah Harari (snobbishly referred to as a "popular intellectual" elsewhere but did much work on the Anthropocene / post-human)

Mark Fisher

not to mention lots of other colleagues who don't have the profile of the above but who are still doing really great / interesting things in individual humanities disciplines.

It's a bit reactionary to just write off these people as "weak" because they're not Stuart Hall. Not really sure what "heft" means, either, or why we should care about it.

Mate, I don't know who TJ Demos is, but Mark Fisher is the only name I know from the UK in your list. And IIRC he wasn't based in academia?

 

[steeplejack]

TJ Demos is American. Fisher taught at Masters level at Goldsmith's.

(On your earlier Harari point, I guess I was addressing the weird point about 'heft' rather than drilling into his bizarre notions of "evolutionary humanism")

 

[equationgirl]

I had a job interview at St. Andrews just before the lockdown. They were very insistent to me that "our students aren't all poshoes anymore".

E2A: "Methinks they doth protest too much".

I applied for a job back in 2018 in their commercialisation team. They lowballed me so much in the job offer (after EXTENSIVE discussions about salary etc) that the recruiter wouldn't even tell me what it was. They didn't even counteroffer.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Hm.

Judith Butler

Donna Harraway

TJ Demos

Yuval Noah Harari (snobbishly referred to as a "popular intellectual" elsewhere but did much work on the Anthropocene / post-human)

Mark Fisher

not to mention lots of other colleagues who don't have the profile of the above but who are still doing really great / interesting things in individual humanities disciplines.

It's a bit reactionary to just write off these people as "weak" because they're not Stuart Hall. Not really sure what "heft" means, either, or why we should care about it.

And let's not forget the 'cultural studies boom' that followed Stuart Hall and the CCCS doesn't come with issues of its own when it comes to class and its decline (in academia and elsewhere) as a category of experience and a way of understanding the material world.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

After 26 years as an academic, I have been far far happier for the last 5 years as a postman...and that includes during the recent but long running acrimonious industrial dispute.

I think this is in large part down to the hugely flat job structure of the Royal Mail, which seems to create a climate friendly to solidarity (very very different to the heavy and intricate hierarchies of HE) and also the immediate social usefulness of the work (in both lecturing and research such social utility is always differed - sometimes massively - if it ever exists at all).

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[chilango]

I applied for a few academic roles towards the end of my PhD having enjoyed the lecturing I'd been doing. Got nowhere. Shrugged and gave up. Trying to summon up the enthusiasm to write some stuff for journals but am struggling to see the point. As one of my colleagues said to me "Just write a blog".

 

[xenon]

Higher education is institutionally classist This is obviously not new. but seemingly not changed much over the last 40 years either.

 

[steeplejack]

I applied for a few academic roles towards the end of my PhD having enjoyed the lecturing I'd been doing. Got nowhere. Shrugged and gave up. Trying to summon up the enthusiasm to write some stuff for journals but am struggling to see the point. As one of my colleagues said to me "Just write a blog".

Academic journals are fanzines with footnotes. Writing a blog is a good idea.

 

[chilango]

As a (largely) self-funded PhD candidate one of the things that I appreciated most was being entirely autonomous, accountable only to academic rigour and immune (largely) from institutional pressure. A luxury gained from having a career (of sorts) outside academia, yet vital to it

 

[Idris2002]

Academic journals are fanzines with footnotes. Writing a blog is a good idea.

And blog writing doesn't require submission of your work to "peer reviewers" who exploit their anonymity for the purposes of verbal abuse.

 

[equationgirl]

And blog writing doesn't require submission of your work to "peer reviewers" who exploit their anonymity for the purposes of verbal abuse.

Only time I ever heard my supervisor swear was when a joint paper of ours came back with it's third set of corrections and he said something like 'Fuck this'. We politely declined to answer the third set given they added nothing after sets 1 and 2, and it was just one peer reviewer being a dick. My supervisor was fairly well known in the field and said some people use peer reviewing to make themselves feel better by dragging other people down

 

[Idris2002]

Only time I ever heard my supervisor swear was when a joint paper of ours came back with it's third set of corrections and he said something like 'Fuck this'. We politely declined to answer the third set given they added nothing after sets 1 and 2, and it was just one peer reviewer being a dick. My supervisor was fairly well known in the field and said some people use peer reviewing to make themselves feel better by dragging other people down

I was going to respond with an account of the worst one I've received, but that project is still ongoing, so I think I'd better keep schtumm!

 

[equationgirl]

My supervisor also didn't get why I didn't want to spend years on fixed term contracts - I finished my PhD at 33, I had a mortgage, friends, a settled life - and I wanted to stay in Edinburgh. He refused to give me a reference for any jobs within the city and I when I found a fellowship to apply for at a London university he wasn't even supportive then. And that's when I decided to leave academia.

 

[equationgirl]

It's nearly 20 years ago, I've moved on. I got my PhD which was my goal - I didn't do it solely to go into academia, I was fairly certain that wasn't going to happen. But it was eye opening how much that I was discouraged from going into academia by the things that happened during my PhD.

 

[steeplejack]

My supervisor also didn't get why I didn't want to spend years on fixed term contracts - I finished my PhD at 33, I had a mortgage, friends, a settled life - and I wanted to stay in Edinburgh. He refused to give me a reference for any jobs within the city and I when I found a fellowship to apply for at a London university he wasn't even supportive then. And that's when I decided to leave academia.

academics are in the main absolutely horrific people.

 

[A380]

academics are in the main absolutely horrific people.

As compared with?

 

[steeplejack]

why should I offer a comparison?

 

[redcogs]

This is a rich seam

 

[A380]

why should I offer a comparison?

So that people can assess your statement by having some contextualisation of your opinions and experience.

 

[Idris2002]

My supervisor also didn't get why I didn't want to spend years on fixed term contracts - I finished my PhD at 33, I had a mortgage, friends, a settled life - and I wanted to stay in Edinburgh. He refused to give me a reference for any jobs within the city and I when I found a fellowship to apply for at a London university he wasn't even supportive then. And that's when I decided to leave academia.

 

[Idris2002]

academics are in the main absolutely horrific people.

This happened in . . . let's just say somewhere in Western Europe. I was walking through a campus with someone who "knew it of old". She pointed out a guy who had apparently physically attacked and beaten up one of his colleagues. Any other job in the world you'd get your cards for something like that.

 

[equationgirl]

academics are in the main absolutely horrific people.

Oh I don't know, I've met some fantastic people working in academia. I'm doing a workshop next week with some people who taught me as an undergraduate.

My supervisor could be very kind, as well as an arsehole. And the worst bosses I had were a) corporate people and b) women who were all about pulling the ladder up behind them rather than encouraging the women who worked in their team.

 

[equationgirl]

This happened in . . . let's just say somewhere in Western Europe. I was walking through a campus with someone who "knew it of old". She pointed out a guy who had apparently physically attacked and beaten up one of his colleagues. Any other job in the world you'd get your cards for something like that.

At another campus in western Europe I once asked the university a hypothetical question - if a tenured academic was convicted of murder would they lose their tenure? He had a bit of a think and said 'it's by no means certain that they would '.

 

[steeplejack]

At another campus in western Europe I once asked the university a hypothetical question - if a tenured academic was convicted of murder would they lose their tenure? He had a bit of a think and said 'it's by no means certain that they would '.

See also Sir Kenneth Dover's academic autobiography Marginal Comment- in which he confesses to having mused as to how how he might bump off an alcoholic Oxbridge don who was embarrassing his college with repeated public drunken-ness / bad behaviour.

 

[steeplejack]

Oh I don't know, I've met some fantastic people working in academia. I'm doing a workshop next week with some people who taught me as an undergraduate.

My supervisor could be very kind, as well as an arsehole. And the worst bosses I had were a) corporate people and b) women who were all about pulling the ladder up behind them rather than encouraging the women who worked in their team.

Yes, so have I, but far too many of the pathologies (amongst many others) that you list. Bullies, sadists, pests, charlatans, spivs.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

You get twats everywhere, for myself I've not really noticed them being more prominent in academia than anywhere else tbh.

What is a thing though is that PhD students/more junior staff are basically chained to their supervisor/professor and their whims in a way that isn't generally the case elsewhere. This can work out well for them - some will put in a lot of work on their behalf - but if they get stuck with someone who for whatever reason won't support them and back up their career then they're really going to suffer, through no fault of their own.

 

[Pickman's model]

You get twats everywhere, for myself I've not really noticed them being more prominent in academia than anywhere else tbh.

What is a thing though is that PhD students/more junior staff are basically chained to their supervisor/professor and their whims in a way that isn't generally the case elsewhere. This can work out well for them - some will put in a lot of work on their behalf - but if they get stuck with someone who for whatever reason won't support them and back up their career then they're really going to suffer, through no fault of their own.

vice-chancellors and heads of college are almost without exception twats of the worst sort

 

[redcogs]

Despite being quite slow witted, as a youngster i gravitated towards those who seemed destined for academia. i was in a council house where books were few, they occupied leafy detached type circumstances, with all attendant airs and graces and sometimes small libraries! i really fell for several of them. Admired them all greatly. When i became trot 'political' i was close up exposed to quite a few similars, and slowly began to despise many of those who i had once been worshipful of, what with their smooth delivery of complexities which often masked vile positional manipulations and bullying. There were, of course, exceptions to the rule, but they were ime quite rare. Can't say doing a late degree altered my perspective, so broadly agree with the 'twats are everywhere' view. It all seems to relate to an obnoxious blend of class/entitlement/managerialism.

 

[equationgirl]

You get twats everywhere, for myself I've not really noticed them being more prominent in academia than anywhere else tbh.

What is a thing though is that PhD students/more junior staff are basically chained to their supervisor/professor and their whims in a way that isn't generally the case elsewhere. This can work out well for them - some will put in a lot of work on their behalf - but if they get stuck with someone who for whatever reason won't support them and back up their career then they're really going to suffer, through no fault of their own.

I knew people that had to move universities partway through because their supervisor moved, enticed away with a big package prior to an upcoming research assessment exercise (yes, I know it's the REF now, I can't remember what that stands for thanks to long Covid). Very little help given with housing in an unknown city etc.

I also knew of PhD students that were basically abandoned in their final year due to not moving with their supervisor.

Mine had a change of research direction at the end of my first year. He suggested I change my PhD topic too. When I asked if I would be given another year's funding to make up for that abandoned first year he said no. He mostly lost interest in my research after that, but would occasionally berate me for not doing enough (unspecified) at our weekly meetings.In my write up year I handed him a very substantial chapter (90 pages, most PhDs in the subject barely broke 100 and I estimated I would be in the 250-300 range) he blinked and said 'oh, you were doing a lot of work after all'.