The world is going troppo: and things in universities are not looking up.
This week I went to a *really* good conference with the theme 'Looking Up'. But I was alarmed at the experience of those currently working in universities, many of whom are not able to look up rn.
Tuesday morning, 5.30am. I woke from a wonderfully long, refreshing sleep. The air is warm, but not hot. I login to my exercise app and open my favourite Pilates class. By the time I’m at the plank-series-stage, the sky starts reddening with the coming sunrise - a good hour earlier than it does at home in the mountains.
I’m in Townsville in North Queensland, staying in the beautiful guest room of a colleague’s next-door neighbour.1 The room opens to a lush tropical garden, where tiny yellow birds sing tiny beautiful songs, while in the distance the curlews sounds just as (somehow) the tropics should.
My hosts are so wonderful.2 I’m ready to adopt them as family.
We have a saying in Australia about ‘going troppo’ (I mean, of course we do…and ofc it ends with-o), meaning a kind of seasonal madness associated with humidity.
But here, in this stunning winter warmth, it felt like the whole world was troppo - but not here. The symptoms of otherworldly madness, however, were ever present.
The previous night I embraced environmental historian (and one of the conference’s keynote speakers) Andrea Gaynor. How are you doing, I ask - which seems ludicrous in the midst of polycrisis. Few have as deep an understanding of the present moment - and of spiritual and environmental regeneration - as Professor Gaynor. She replied:
Well, all the chickens are laying.
We share, Andrea and I, what is growing now, in our respective gardens: this way of f*cking capitalism, one home grown vegetable - and happy-chicken-laid egg - at a time.
Regenerative history, said Andrea in her keynote (with the hope embodied in a conference entitled ‘looking up’), is a place-based, community-engaged approach to our work - a disposition towards an ethical and grounded history also embodied in the keynotes we also heard from political activist Margaret Reynolds and her lesser-known historian husband, Henry Reynolds.
There was so much wonderful work in what is now a flourishing History of Capitalism stream, which I have proudly grown with my economic history colleague Claire Wright.
But.
In between all that, amidst the wonder of renewed and new friendship, acquaintance and collegiality, is a whole lot of misery.
It is not about genocide, though consciousness of it is in every room. Nor is it the imminent possibility of global war, led by illegal bombings and warmongers ‘re-arming’ across the world and at home, though anxiety about that infuses it all, too. It is not even the horrors of oppression, suppression and violence enabled and propagated by a Certain Orange Fella’s excuse for a ‘government’. It is not about the climate change, this week evident in a fucking cyclone, of all things, as far south as a Sydney. In winter.
All of these things sit heavily in hearts and historical consciousness. But.
The urgent problem for those I spoke to were the universities. Those beautiful, wondrous places where ‘ideas are born and nursed’, that literally build the future.3 Those institutions that are simultaneously awful, hierarchical places that facilitate colonialism, corporate and political corruption and economic inequalities - and which were already in desperate need of reform. But far from dwelling in the ruins, the ruins themselves are crumbling.4
Hear a few snippets of what I heard.
An only-just-senior colleague, a woman who struggled her way through a system that barely appreciated her brilliance, took a voluntary redundancy - a far-too-early retirement - to protect the young up and coming women whose jobs were all threatened.
A sub-discipline of history, a field for which this university is renowned worldwide, is being dismantled. And it is popular and making a $urplus. Everyone knows it is because that university’s management don’t like someone.
Axes are sitting above hundreds of necks, for month after month after month and the stress is killing everyone. These are jobs that were so hard-won, and then endlessly re-earned by doing everything that was required and so much more. Vocations, passions, whole precious lives.
Women seem to be targeted.
Union members and representatives, looking tired but determined to do the best they can, together. Others disappointed that their local union branch didn’t fight for their specific area.5
Management who are only trying to ‘make change’ (meaning sacking people, destroying disciplines and undermining student learning) that will get them their next job. Or to fuck over another manager they don’t like. Or to get rid of the handful of professors who objected to a corrupt decision.
Still more young scholars, filled with grief at the loss, not only of their own scholarship, but of the many beautiful scholars - mostly women - whose work will now never be written.
Those barely post-PhD, exhausted by now training for a new career, while still fulfilling the obligations of the old one - the old one they fought so hard to attain, and which they love.
Even among those whose jobs are currently secure, many are feeling broken. A young woman looked me in the eye and said:
I just can’t fit the work into anything that resembles the work day.
I am so sorry. Are you getting any research done? I ask, knowing what it is she will be missing.
None.
Isn’t 40:40:20 coming (this is the model where you do 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% admin…in reality 50:40:10 but it is still called 40:40:20)?
I’m already 40:40:20, she said.
The ways of calculating 40% teaching load take more than 100% of an actually existing person - and not just their work hours. This is wage theft.
I was conscious she has only only just started this job: and already burnout looms.
Another fella, one who trained around the same time as me, has a thousand-yard stare. He just taught 400 students. And did all the marking, alone. Three essays per student. I’m so burned out, he said, his voice barely a squeak.
Another colleague with a partner so bullied by university managers they suffer physical maladies and are on extended leave.
Stress leave, over and over.
Even in a relatively safe institution (for now), they are plagued by endless assessment reform, imposed from above.
Another is reducing all student choice, hollowing out the ‘product’.
I heard about future high school teachers who can’t write essays, enabled by university rules that inhibit them from being taught. Actual teaching is too expensive a luxury.6
Over and over I heard about impossible days, nights and weeks, marking essays written by ChatGPT.
Maybe I heard all this because I am a historian of universities and write about this stuff a lot, but the stories felt so much worse, so much more desperate than I’ve heard before.
Except for friends with family in a war zone, I have never felt such despair emanating from a group of people. The kinds of changes that these institutions need cannot wait any longer.7
Did I feel hope too? Hell yes - it was the best conference ever.8
As well as all the wonderful scholarship I heard, I also spoke to people who have left the university to pursue their scholarship another way - and a widening sense that one doesn’t have to be an academic to be a scholar.
I saw nodding (finally!?) at the idea that the hierarchies to which scholars are so attached might in fact be harmful to humans.
And there was Andrea’s regenerative history: for all that it seems the long slow fix for a fast-approaching apocalypse (meaning we need to do other stuff too), her way seeks wholeness and she is absolutely right in ways that go beyond merely ‘correct’.
I saw F*cking capitalism, in all senses. Not least the troppo one.
PS: Seriously people, if you haven’t already: please join your union.
Koen: thank you, so much.
She is a marine biologist, he is a boat person (ok there is totally a better occupational title than that but it is not currently in my brain) and they met several decades ago on the research vessel ‘so it worked out well for her’, smirked he this morning just before I left to fly home. All I could think was how they are both so blessed.
British university leader Eric Ashby described these dodgy old institutions growing a thousand years ago where nearby - and not coincidentally - ‘in lodgings and taverns ideas were born and nursed’. Even when the institution is so far from perfect, their existence nevertheless enables flourishing and growth for students, scholars - and the world beyond.
Dwelling in the ruins was and is a thing - my own understanding of it is from Bill Readings’ book The University in Ruins. That is all very well and often enough the best we can do. I still hope for better.
I know it seems useless sometimes, but unless you really can’t afford to, it is important to join anyway - not only because the union is only as good as its members, but also because the union can really only help you when you are in it.
And bosses that dismiss these claims by making it sound like these expert teachers do not know how to teach efficiently. A curse on every single one of them.
We need serious, data-driven research on the conditions in which people learn to evaluate evidence, synthesise prior narratives and produce narrative-driven arguments - and the reasons universities are failing to teach this (my assumptions are large class sizes, too little time with teachers, too many other pressures - but we should know this). This is not just about passion (not that passion should be reduced to ‘just’), but is also a skillset that every single workplace needs - and we should also gather data about that. I get that no one wants to publicly say that ‘students come to my institution and they hate it and don’t learn any of the stuff that we say they are learning’ because that might jeopardise already wildly precarious jobs. But a lot of stuff is at stake and some real knowledge about it might be a key step to making things better.
In what ways, I hear you ask? Here is an abbreviated list: we need universities that are democratic in purpose, in community engagement and internal logics. That seek truth and goodness over what is profitable - and never, ever anything that is corrupt, or individually self-seeking (especially for their leaders). We need to get rid of the whole layer of short-term management and the incentives that make them that way (but only eliminating the incentives will be too slow…urgent repairs are needed). We need employment and workload conditions that enable students to flourish and become the best that they can be - and that can be achieved in an actually-existing work week. We need to promote systems of knowledge that are inclusive and generative rather than rewarding, justifying and perpetuating old corrupt hierarchies or just as bad, installing new ones. And we need to see these as places where people work - and that when they are flourishing, so too will be the things that they do whether ensuring the zoom functions and the wifi stays on, the library is up to date, the students can write essays and new discoveries fuel imaginations that enable a better world.
Again, Koen - thank you. And many congratulations.
No argument here! With love from a working academic