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Offline: The pleasures of being an academic
The case against modern university life has never been stronger. In his new book, Les Back, a Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, describes the predicaments of surviving within today’s “neoliberal university”. Academic Diary (Goldsmiths Press, 2016) is his report from the front lines of higher education in Britain. He uses the terms of the academic year to uncover the vicious cruelties and small beauties of university life. He anatomises the audit culture, its individualised quantification of performance and value, together with its professionalisation, overspecialisation, managerialism, overproduction, selfish ness, hollow vanity, and even racism. He describes the way students have been turned into customers and consumers. Universities have become places of commercial exchange, selling knowledge as a commodity whose only purpose is to be traded in the world of work. The university has changed from being an independent retreat for learning into little more than “cheap degree shops” and instruments for immigration control. The financial constraints on higher education, the ever greater pressure for efficiency (cramming as many students as one can into a lecture theatre {и тут театр}), and the diminution of teaching in the university’s mission are examples of a gradual corrosion of academic purpose.
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But amid these reflections on decline, something quite
remarkable emerges. Back is not telling a story of failure
at all. He is writing a manifesto for why the university
matters so much. His book is a magnificent tract of
resistance. It is not a survival or self-help guide, but a
treatise on the remoralisation of the university. He writes
about the “resurrection of hopes”. The sense each day that
another kind of university is possible, one where students
and faculty think together, exhibit ideas, and foster “a
critical imagination that is truly global and cosmopolitan
in reach”. Teaching matters. The enchantment of ideas
provides so much more than a degree to be sold in
the workplace. The culture of the university is about
understanding life itself. Back does not lecture. But he
does distil. He uses his own experience of struggle (and
even error) to convey lessons he has learned, sometimes
painfully—slow one’s thinking down, take risks, be a
communicator of ideas, and consider what you do to be
an intellectual vocation. For his fellow faculty, he invites
them to convey their passion in their subject, and to be
interested in their students’ interests too. He displays an
appreciation for the whole life of the university, paying
attention to the hidden (and often unrecognised)
contribution made by non-academic staff —those who
“actually get things done and make universities work”. His
words are filled with the humanity of an academic life.
***
Academic Diary is a compendium of stories, each one
offering insights into the potential and possibility of a
university life. Back’s stories—a lost notebook, a mislaid
pen, a moving but ultimately devastating visit to the
home of his hero, Primo Levi—reveal the kindness of
scholarship and learning. He rejects the usual backbiting
criticism so common in academic writing.
He prefers instead to praise and applaud. He names
those he admires (Richard Hoggart, John Berger, and
Stuart Hall). He describes the pleasures of academia’s
rituals—welcome week (“a time of beginnings”), the
lecture (“a listening workout”), supervision (“intellectual
excitement”), invigilation (a space for thought), reading
(“the most important thing that any student does”),
writing (“an invitation to imagine”), the PhD viva (its
curious social etiquette), graduation (the university’s
New Year’s Eve), the open day (prioritising the student),
and the opportunity for renewed flourishing provided
by retirement. He gives short soliloquies on “stationery
fetishism”, the writer’s desk, the untimely death of a
student, the inherent unfairness of publishing, and the
(still high) importance of the library (a place of refuge
and serendipity). And there are moments of serene and
compassionate writing too: “thinking can suture and
balm lives that feel as if they are falling apart, where we
have the right to ask to be more than what we already
are”. He challenges the “miserliness in academic life”. His
ultimate message is one of generosity. Understanding
the world is difficult. The academic’s task—indeed,
privilege—is to develop and impart “an ethics of
thinking”. Whether you are a sceptical student or a
cynical professor, Academic Diary will remind you of why
a life of intellectual endeavour truly matters.
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