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… get so annoyed with the facile and offensive nature of something in your email in-box that you hit Reply, slam out a response, and hit Send. Then you think a bit.
Another in an ever-increasing stream of hectoring emails from some VP or other arrived in my inbox today. It was banging on about some missing annual return from the 2008/09 academic year without which the world was likely, it seems, to stop spinning.
Academics are obviously too thick to appreciate the absolute necessity to …demonstrate compliance with the policy and the procedures outlined therein. So the email went on at some length about failure to complete… deemed to indicate … should information to the contrary emerge… viewed most seriously… and so on. You get the drift, I’m sure.
But bad as it was, it wasn’t this that really pushed the button. No. It was the public listing of all members of university staff who had shamefully defaulted on this essential act of probity and not returned the essential form. There we were @ after @ in the ‘To’ list: 225 in all. On The N@ughty Step, so to speak.
I was both a little angry and a bit surprised that anyone could be so casual about publishing this kind of information. So I replied. To all.
This seems to cause a bit of a flap campus-wide because my inbox buzzed for much of the afternoon with observations and comments from others on the ‘Wall of Shame’. Some were simply wondering what it was all about, others were just angry about the endless sand-storms of administration. One respondent put the whole thing in a wonderfully elegant way; it was all about meeting the ordeals (of the greatest triviality) devised by the VP’s office concerned.
For some reason I kept thinking of grey philistines and also of a conversation earlier today here. They connect – somewhere around the notion of direction, autonomy, and respect. Or lack of it.
Only one response – from an economist colleague – was in any way hostile to either my own contribution to the rather unintended thread or to those who kept the conversation going using Reply All. The message was pretty direct: I don’t care what you think. Using Reply All like this was, in a very clearly stated view, an abuse of email facilities.
Perhaps. But I can’t help thinking that sending an open-list email isn’t all that far behind in the abuse stakes. It also shows a pretty spectacular lack of timing to drop a fox like this in the hen-house when so many are struggling to meet marking and grading deadlines right across the university. But then VPs and straight-talking economists probably don’t have to think too much about that sort of thing. 
“Today’s students will learn nothing from such fatuous exercises as devising a marketing plan for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre … The whole notion of “marketing” in this context is completely misconceived. It invites students to bring a 21st-century, consumerist, mass-media mindset to bear on a cultural context in which none of its basic assumptions actually apply.”
Wonderful stuff…
Maybe it’s to do with fighting fire with fire. But I must admit I find parts of Mary Daly & Brigid Laffan’s response in today’s Times to Tom Garvin’s piece a little, in their own words, ‘distant from the challenges we face’. Or at least from those that I do.
There is no doubting the sincerity and zeal with which the achievements of the past decade or so at UCD are extolled. What I find most interesting though are the metrics that are used to nail the argument — CAO first preferences up, exponential rise in doctoral students, 230% rise in research income and so on. There is talk of a radical transformation of academic structures and promotion systems overhauled to suit research excellence in scholarship and teaching. (I may be wrong but I seem to recall that the writers were among those at UCD who not all that long ago were most incensed that the ’new’ system actively militated again promotions on anything other than a quasi-science worldview /model.) And I’m sure that there are merits in English literature students devising a marketing plan for the Globe in Shakespeare’s time. Even if I can’t, personally, even begin to think what these might be.
But I can’t help wondering a bit if this sanitized take on UCD and its life actually really offers anything other than an articulation of what the new order wants to see, rather than what it needs to see. To my mind it seems every bit as loaded as Tom Garvin’s view but towards an alternative reality.
There has been chaos associated with aspect of the move to Horizons. UCD Staff Association is on record as being concerned that morale at the university is at an all-time low. Pathways to professorships – and almost everything else – are gate-kept by the guardians of the new way and set within a performativity net of musts and shoulds that boggle the mind. And I seem to remember reading somewhere, now that I think of it, that there is a freeze on promotions in any event for the next lifetime or so, ‘unless you poison a (senior?) lecturer’. And on recruitment. Some schools here are running on vapour - with recently retired staff being practically begged to stay-on to plug the gaps.
Nevertheless, I’d have to say that their closing note – the bit about the reward for dedication to research and scholarship being knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge to the next generation – is both true and heartening. It sure as hell won’t mean advancement though; unless you do as both Professors Laffan and Daly have (each of whom I hold in high regard as academics) and, taking the zeitgeist of these days & time to heart, sing along to the corporate UCD line with gusto.
Tom Garvin may be wrong in parts of his Irish Times piece. But he is not wrong in anything like all of it.
“UCD, an historically respected Irish university, increasingly resembles an English provincial college, run on authoritarian top-down lines, profligate financially, and anti-intellectual. What is referred to with surrealist humour as “intellectual leadership” in UCD is in the hands of medics masquerading as businessmen (they’re nearly all men; welcome to 1961) and practitioners of non-subjects such as “management” and “teaching and learning”.”
Prof Tom Garvin in The Irish Times, 1 May 2010.
