UK exceptionalism
The UK accounts for 2 per cent of global manufacturing and 2 per cent of global R&D. You’re not a science superpower if you do 2 per cent…You can’t go around claiming that in seven years’ time the UK is going to be a climate leader or leader in green tech, it just doesn’t make sense
The British economy needs to follow a policy of improvement, not a policy of chest-beating and claiming to be on the cusp of transformative breakthroughs.
David Edgerton, the historian of science and technology, quoted in The New Statesman 14-20 July 2023 page 143
Techno-Narcissism
Scott Galloway:Techno-Narcissism | No Mercy / No Malice
The tech innovator class has an Achilles tendon that runs from their heels to their necks: They believe their press.
A long-handled personal earthmoving implement
We should all be asking more questions | Financial Times
As a beloved journalism handbook of mine puts it, you have to be able to “call a spade a spade, instead of bringing in someone from Harvard to solemnly declare it a long-handled personal earthmoving implement”.
Confusion will be my epitaph
I entered academia as an established professional musician, and I continue to work as a performer, but my research and teaching are equally centred around traditional academic scholarship, as well as practice outputs. This is unusual; most music practitioners on research contracts primarily pursue practice-based projects (compositions, performances, recordings, multimedia works), outputs from which are submitted to the REF with the near-mandatory 300-word statement setting out why they should be considered research.
And people try and justify the REF. Utterly stupid:SRFM.
(Title: h/t King Crimson)
Meliorism certified
In 1947, Hobsbawm had excused his acceptance of the Birkbeck post by explaining that teaching preparations never took him more than two hours a week, and while he was an inspiring classroom presence, he always adroitly ducked administrative jobs. Evans tells a story of Hobsbawm backing the young Roderick Floud for a professorial chair mostly, Floud later realised, so he wouldn’t have to be head of department himself. It will be hard for today’s young academics, groaning under research assessments and short-term contracts at below the living wage, to read these passages.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘Eric Hobsbawm’ by Richard J. Evans · LRB 18 April 2019
The following is from Janan Ganesh of the FT. The title of the article was “The agony of returning to work in September”.
A personal ambition is to reach the end of my career without having managed a single person.
It seems to me a very sensible ambition, one which used to be the lot of many academics — usually the better ones. He goes on:
Friends who have been less lucky, who have whole teams under their watch, report a quirk among their younger charges. It is not laziness or obstreperousness or those other millennial slanders. It is an air of disappointment with the reality of working life. They will be among the people described in Bullshit Jobs by the anthropologist David Graeber….
A generation of in-demand graduates came to expect not just these material incentives but a sort of credal alignment with their employer’s “values”. The next recession will retard this trend but it is unlikely to kill it.
At one time the words ‘manager’, ‘management’, or worst of all, ‘line-manager’ were alien to much of medicine or academia. Things still got done, in many ways more efficiently than now. It is just that our theories of action and praxis have been ransacked by Excel spreadsheet models of human motivation and culture. It is the final line from the quote that those controllers of ‘managers’ should be scared of:
The next recession will retard this trend but it is unlikely to kill it.
Andrew Wathey its chairman [of the UK Standing Committee for Quality Assessment] and vice-chancellor of Northumbria University, said: “The UK delivers world-class education to students from all nations. It is therefore right that the sector commits to ensuring that the value of these world-class qualifications is maintained over time in line with the expectations of the UK Quality Code for Higher Education.”
Universities agree more openness on degree marking guidelines | Financial Times
The language betrays all you need to know: spoken by somebody who clearly has no idea what UK higher education once stood for, or who has any sympathy or understanding of the academic ideal. Will the last person who leaves please turn off the ….