Associate Professor of Public Policy and Strategy
@angliaruskin
. My views only.
Next book: Britain and Ireland from the Treaty to the Troubles (Spring 2025)
NEW BOOK OUT 2025: Britain and Ireland from the Treaty to the Troubles
Independence and Interdependence, c. 1921-1973
If you’re at a university and want that library to have something on tourism, trade, tuberculosis and several other t’s, let them know…
I've seen the idea of lecturers communicating via WhatsApp to students been touted a few times by university higher ups now and I just cannot stress enough what a bad idea I think this is.
Keir Starmer’s turn for the BBC word cloud treatment - a mixed bag but “don’t know”, “nothing” and “not sure” indicate there’s more work for Labour to do.
Heads up: I've secured money for a fully funded* PhD on the Labour Party's relationship with Ireland from Wilson to Blair. To be advertised in the New Year for Sept 2023 start. Candidate can very much shape what element of that broad canvas they wish to focus on. More to come.
1. Stop blurring the boundaries. I want to use Whatsapp to message my mates mocking Dan Hodges or whatever. Or some in joke. Not announcing a change in seminar room.
I hurt my ribs a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t come in. Between vomiting and chugging pain killers I had to log in to four bloody things to send the same thing informing students. This is a stupid set-up.
It’s time to scrap the REF.
A cost saving measure for
@RachelReevesMP
and
@bphillipsonMP
that would allow universities the time and space to deliver on other aspects of Labour’s industrial strategy.
Honestly as a bloke with a secure(ish, it’s academia 2022) position I will get a tenth of the additional workload women/precarious employees get from this *roll out a billion platforms* misstep.
There are many facets of this - but universities desire to look beyond email for *no discernible reason* is fascinating. Someone should journal article it, and its causes.
Some of this must be Covid *do something!!* initiative panic. To some degree understandable - but roll it back NOW.
But it’s also just a product of bureaucratic jobs needing to be justified by looking busy, and launching/constantly reviewing stuff - however needless - to do that
Political historians: “hmm well actually we don’t approve of counterfactuals. They are unhelpful and a bit beneath us.”
Economic historians: “you move this number over here and boom Hitler - Adolf bloody Hitler - lands on the moon in 1942. Case closed.”
In a decade the number of UEA staff earning more than £100k has doubled. I don't know, and it's possible I'm wrong, but I'd hazard that zero academic/frontline admin staff earn over £100k. So what are these absolutely vital new jobs?
I have three email systems. Before we even get to Teams messages and future WhatsApp type massively inappropriate extra platforms. How is no one seeing that and thinking this is nuts?
The important thing with REF 2028 is we hold a lot of meetings to discuss it and appoint 12 people with intersecting responsibilities for it to each produce a set of slightly different forms, can’t stress this enough
Structurally - what actually is the issue here? Are a load of different people being sold a bunch of different magic beans (all independently impressed by “and it’s got a messaging service built in!”)? As I say, please someone journal article this, I’d be fascinated.
I think JFK was reflecting on UK HE when he said that “paperwork for new initiatives has a thousand fathers, but the case to roll shit that hasn’t worked back is an orphan.”
There’s a lot of this - initiative X rolled out, [results irrelevant], case closed! Onto the next rodeo.
@ref2029
@Economy_NI
@HEFCW
@ResEngland
@ScotFundCouncil
Feedback: this is dumb, will lead to hundreds of thousands of pounds universities don't really have being transferred to private publishers for some reason, and won't achieve anything that mandating a free public facing blog or two outlining said output's content/impacts wouldn't
If Truss goes before January 3rd, she will have the shortest tenure of any Prime Minister in British history.
That... feels pretty plausible, doesn't it?
How far are we following this “you gotta go where the students *are* mentality?
Me, back in Fez nightclub 15 years later like Foreman on his comeback trail, trying to grab 10 minutes with Dan on the merits of Stanley Baldwin before he gets another pitcher in?
Just. Do. Email.
@HowardDLeigh
I'm afraid the stipend will be well below the taxpayer funded £332 for clocking into the Lords each day but all applications are very welcome.
Every university meeting:
- recap emails you’ve just received
- describe a task you’ve all done before as if it’s new
- coffee
- someone in a non-teaching post comes in to tell you about their job
- “best practice”
- discuss the mechanics/theory of a thing you’d rather just *do*
@thetimes
You know when you guys don’t review every book that’s ever been written and/or post critical reviews which essentially recommend people don’t buy a book? That’s woke leftism and
#chilling
that is.
Whilst Charlotte bungs woke or snowflake or whatever into the AHRC project search function, worth noting that it receives comparatively naff all compared to the sciences.
That does feel the smallest of strikes. Like if in 2011-12 Carlos Tevez had dutifully turned up for all training and matches, but "absolutely draw the line at signing any matchday programmes - cannot stress this enough."
Makes sense: everyone agrees that consultants really add a lot of value, don’t worry about it.
Sidebar: if university leaderships either don’t know about their financial state or can’t fix it, what’s with the executive salary thing?
Look away now if you don't want to increase your stress levels this Monday morning: it's the government budgeting up to £4m for consultants to manage university insolvencies.
@drkierachapman
Ok, but can this tweet be a 30 sec video, which accords to the 12 values descriptors of the uni synergy tsar (dept of open days must sign off), uploaded to our new software FastTweet (which completely mirrors Twitter but we’ve bought it for some reason), and won’t work on canvas?
This statement defends history against the government. Great.
But the Hunger Games system of removing student number caps - and, crucially, Russell Group/others going full pig in trough - has also directly caused the problems it outlines. And there's really nothing on this.
I know VC salary is a nice easy win - and they are outrageous - but there's a lower tier of absolute Graeberian bullshit jobs for executive pay that needs looking at by UCU/any future government, really.
There’s a far more serious (basically predatory male) lecturer blurring of boundaries issue - but on the vanilla side of this is also less formal channels encourages less formal comms, and I (or more often female colleagues) shouldn’t have to lose time on high school level drama.
This is very good.
A spin off I've seen at some Post-92s/1994ers is the "running a masters degree with < 10 students on it doesn't make £ sense."
I can see a student exp case, but cost wise the lecturers are being paid the same anyway and the rooms are available? What gives?
Beyond Grimes there’s something really specific about political e-influencers of left and right who - around the age of 24-28 - want the gravitas of a world savvy adult coupled with the ability to essentially claim they are child when things go south.
VC salaries are a bit of a blunt instrument, but cap such offices at twice the salary of the Prime Minister - so £320k or so - and you’d bring this into play.
@lrbobrien
100%. If it was Tik Tok I might think *ok, they don’t really know what it is* (tho, they should). But WhatsApp: nope, they know. Teams has given a slight taste of this and it hasn’t been ideal. Plus THEY ALL HAVE EMAIL. On the same phone as this other stuff. There’s no hack, here
Might blog on this but one of the
#efficiencies
@Jacqui_Smith1
might look at for unis is clamping down on stuff like recruitment agency spend. We’re looking at a good £100m annually across the sector. Chuck in a similar sum for IT procurement, and £67m for the REF game. Savings!
Well this is just incredibly poignant. Mary Macarthur's letter to her daughter Nancy (then four) - to be opened on her fourteenth birthday. Macarthur had lost her husband, the Labour MP Will Anderson, to Spanish flu the previous February, and had incurable ovarian cancer.
I mean there’s the £40m of direct public money there; but the real win is in the saving hundreds of millions of bureaucratic busywork costs in playing a pointless game. This really is one of those where you can spend less and get more. And this is just one example.
On higher educational bloat/savings.
In places the crisis is too acute, but as part of a general rebuild (maybe post bailout/mergers) of the UK university system here’s the kind of efficiencies
@Jacqui_Smith1
@bphillipsonMP
and
@UKLabour
could look at.
One of the more amusing aspects of last night's debate w
@DAaronovitch
&
@arusbridger
is they all went for dinner afterwards and didn't even bother to invite me, despite me giving up my time for free to help make Prospect Magazine money! Classic New Elite
@prospect_uk
It’s in a book I edited but this isn’t a self serving thing -
@redhistorian
’s essay on “Tory Rebels and Tory Democracy - The Ulster Crisis, 1900–14” should be required reading on modern day populism/absolute lack of respect for parliament. Re-read it the other day: great stuff.
@DrSarahLKenny
“NATIONAL LOCKDOWN NOW!”
“Ok, but just checking - we’re including the two million mostly young adults who are really, really mobile, risk happy, and can’t avoid the freshers flu most years?”
“Well, no, obviously not them.”
@Samfr
It’s just an upgrade on the pretence that Lord Frost’s columns mean anything.
But yeah, it’s weird, like if Frank Lampard started writing pieces about how to win at Football Manager.
I’ve not really covered the “this being a product of unis shrinking mental health/student support provision” angle. Again, this is an area which will screw female staff over far more than me. But it’s still not my job to deal w/some of the stuff less formalised comms encourages.
Until Hitler's invasion, France sensibly used GMT.
After the events of May 1940, France was subsumed into GMT+2, while Brits switched to year round BST.
After the war, Brits went back to GMT, but France stuck an hour ahead.
So here we are today. Madly in different time zones.
Rob Ford and Matthew Goodwin bicker on twitter like an old married couple. It makes for great content/insight, but I just wonder how they wrote a book together...
Fury-Joshua is off? Don't worry about it. Carr-Portillo is on. 6.30 this evening, BBC 2.
Great British Railway Journeys. Childhood of Charlie Chaplin. Maybe some Nazis. I don't know what bits they'll show but it's all gold.
I've lectured history at
@angliaruskin
for less than five years. But in that time I've taught people now educating others at museums and schools, helping others through jobs at political parties and trade unions, and earning money for others/themselves in countless fields.
Supervised by yours truly. I need to write the formal advert and it needs to work its way through the bureaucratic channels that these things do but happy to take questions via email ofc.
Good thread this. There’s so many weird budget lines at English universities that never seem susceptible to management austerity - indeed only expand - but are hard to justify on really any bang for buck level. Central government can/must take a lead in ironing this stuff out.
You know what our managers think 'efficiencies' are,
@Jacqui_Smith1
? Cutting repeat 'costs' (i.e.: salaries) and instead spending on one-off fees to consultants &gig-economy firms. Those transactions don't build the future, it's money that just disappears but 'looks efficient'.
This is so, so bad. As the private sector has gone more flexible, more working from home etc universities have increasingly adopted a control everything from on high approach that is just maddening. One of the main benefits of this job (and a cost free one to the uni!) is eroding
Really, this a proxy for the bits of the job I like - research, teaching, helping students develop their skills - being ever shrunken as the lecturing role becomes a jumped up e-wellness hub. Cut to a shot of my British Library card expiring as I WhatsApp a link to a yoga class.
It's pretty clear to me that academic freedom is in decline, for multiple reasons that were not always intended. But the intense audit, metricisation and audit to which lecturers are subject is clearly one of them.
“Low value”? Sorry, who does the government think is providing more additionality? Oxbridge college giving mostly honed already 18 year olds three years to develop a bit (this is still a good thing), or the wider potential unlocking that Post-92s often do?