Another digression this week. There is currently a strike going on in UK universities and I have been asked to say where I stand (how the French do love the term “solidarity”).
I will do my best to be brief.
To understand strikes in the higher education business you have to go back twenty or thirty years. To the time when university teachers began the rather disgraceful process of abrogating their responsibilities. For a variety of reasons (but indolence played a part) governance which properly belonged to lecturers, senior lecturers, readers, professors was handed over to individuals allegedly skilled in the nebulous arts of administration. There is little point now moaning about these layabouts. I will just observe that in better days you “went into administration” if you turned out to be useless at your main scholarly activities. I refer to the person who ended up “doing the timetable” or chasing for exam marks. Barflies we called them. You know who I mean.
If you give people power they tend to deploy it. In the case of university administrators, it appears they engaged in a form of secret parthenogenesis, reproducing on a prodigious scale. Generally – and rather fancifully – they refer to themselves as “the Executive” the “Senior Management” or some such. Adopting a principle used in psychoanalysis the warrant of their merit has become their remuneration. I recall in my own university the chosen appellation initially was “the Professionals,” abandoned one assumes because it sounded silly and, in any case, there was no intention of issuing hand guns.
Of course, if you work in a university you know all this. Nonetheless, it’s always worth reiterating the irony in the fact that universities (from the very top down) are now ruled as little fiefdoms by people who might in better days have been defined as not quite up to the mark. Surely we never meant that? And yes, I’m afraid the term “ruled” is justified. Indeed, there is now a considerable cottage industry in the manufacture of rules in modern universities, all boiling down to defining “who shall kick whom,” a preoccupation so far neglected by psychoanalysts.
Now, a university that cannot even debate whether it wishes itself to be governed this way is hardly worthy of the name. Such a debate is certainly possible, because all the towering administrative creations largely rest on fictions. There is rarely anything in the formal structure of a chartered university (its Charter, Statutes and Ordinances) that licenses, still less demands, governance by “executive.” There are other, and better, ways of doing things.
Which brings me to the strike. The claim that “staff” of a university and “the executive” are in an employee-employer relationship is a fiction. A useful fiction for those attracted to the notion that workers should rise up and confront bosses, but a fiction nonetheless. The Vice Chancellor of a university is as much an employee as the lowliest lecturer. So if there are grievances (and there do seem to be) these two should make common cause. Lecturers who believe they should take strike action against the executive are guilty of a political category error- they are engaging in a kind of indulgent shadow boxing. It may seem witty to pretend that you are a downtrodden worker and let a group of your fellow employees play the role of wicked bosses, but it is no more than a game.
Don’t you go thinking I’m against strikes, but if “academics” need to strike they have options a-plenty without screwing the poor students. Research councils, advisory boards, this quango, that quango , the list is endless (as is the opportunity for foreign travel). Most of these bodies, I may add, exist to do the bidding of the real employer. Why not decline to serve on these august bodies? That would bring pressure to bear and would hardly affect students at all.
But I think you know why it would never happen.
A book for the week? Well, my long years in the academic mill were never far away when writing A Time to Tell Lies.