if a tree falls in the forest....#1
As a Ph.D student some years
ago, I was walking down a hallway, singing “if a tree falls in the forest,
would anybody hear it”? Instead of this, the correct line from a Bruce Cockburn
song, I sang “If a tree, falls in the desert…”. One of my fellow students was
passing, and adroitly finished with “…that would be surprising!” in perfect
tune and tempo, no less. He is now a highly successful neurologist. My error,
the neurologist would tell us, was a “semantic paraphasia” (meaning the word
error was a related word, “desert”, to the intended word, “forest”). That I
was making such errors many years ago is worrisome, now that I think about it
(see below).
I digress. Why that song
line now? Well, why do any of us want to blog? Why do I want to blog, and would
it matter if nobody read it? In my case, in the words of Lilly Allen, it
certainly is to some extent to have a “whinge[1]
and a moan” in main part about the state
of British Universities. (If I do get a sufficient head of steam going, I may
also stray into British politics, British cuisine and of course British
weather. See above about whingeing and moaning).
But really! Another old bloke
droning on about how much better things were in the good old days?: ”Not only
did our undergraduates work 26 hours a day, 8 days a week, they wrote their
exams in their own blood from pricked index fingers. This requirement meant
they often didn’t waffle on, but got straight to the point on each question,
lest they pass out”.
I recognise this person, and
will do my best to let him control my typing fingers only in the most extreme
of circumstances. Anyway, why blog about British academia, etc.?
Hypothesis 1: The catharsis theory.
Get if off my chest, and it matters not a jot if anyone reads them. As Dire
Straits said
“He wrote
me a prescription, he said, "You are depressed
But I'm
glad you came to see me to get this off your chest
Come back
and see me later, next patient, please
Send in
another victim of industrial disease".
I of course remembered it as
“Certainly a victim of industrial
disease”. But that was back when I was a Ph.D student and we already know that
all was not well in my noodle[2],
even then.
Hypothesis 2: The social
affiliation theory, or, in layperson’s terms, “misery loves company”. If I
do manage to attract a few readers and some actually agree with what I write or
some small part of it, well, that’s affirmational, innit? Surely, the
self-inflicted wounds produced by successive British governments and their Vichy
collaborators in the Universities themselves can’t be lost on anyone sentient
can they (but see footnote on nariccism)? “It’s not just me who thinks that they system
is completely nuts and is bad for students[3],
for staff, for Universities, the country, and in fact the world!”.
Hmmm. This hypothesis makes me
sounds a bit too much like a MAGA gammon[4]:
“Someone agrees with me that the moon might be made our of cream cheese!”. Time
to generate a further hypothesis, although we may come back to misery loves
company shortly.
Hypothesis 3: Social and
political change! This blog will, by word of mouth, galvanise support for
UK University reform, as the staff and students, drawn to these words by word
of mouth will be brought to their senses after 20 plus years of stupor! We will
rise as a collective, led by Universities UK, and…and...
No this is not going to fly.
Academics, even soft-spoken British ones, are often highly motivated rugged individualists[5],
who worry about their own career development, thinly disguised as what is good
for the entire scientific world. They are the sorts who thought when they first
saw the film “Logan’s Run” that they would
have beaten “the Carousel.’’[6].
And member of the management class, for all of their flaws, are certainly not
Christmas-endorsing turkeys.
Hypothesis 4: Writing
might actually be good for you. Yes, of course there is a literature on
producing literature, so to speak. Learned papers, discovered in a 5 -minute
deep trawl in Google Scholar (for young people reading this, think of it as old academic people's ChatGPT), tell us that writing does all sorts of wonderful things for us. In
fact, writing about upsetting things, all the better! “Writing about traumatic,
stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both
physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations.”
Well this hypothesis has some promise, even if I don’t think I am as of yet in the latter said group. This section reminds me of how I was complaining about being disorganised to a friend. He said (more or less) “Carey your problem is not disorganisation, its classical procrastination. You avoid the task until the last minute cobble something together that is OK, and tell yourself what an excellent job you would have done if….if…if”.
“Nonsense Rob”, I replied. “THAT DOES NOT SOUND
LIKE ME AT ALL”, I continued, perhaps over-vigorously. He handed me a book, a
few days later, called “Overcoming Procrastination”[7].
I can still see the cover in my mind's eye. I looked at it, frequently, over the next 2 years.
The cover, I mean. Around the same time, I bought the first of my books on
getting organised, apocryphally titled “Getting Organised”. The punch
line is, I didn’t get around to reading the book on procrastination, and I lost
the book on getting organised. Sadly, all this talk of procrastination this
leads to the unpleasantly possible Hypothesis 5, which is that reading and
writing about marketisation in academia is less distressing than pursuing some
of the duties that academia actually requires me to do. Let move on,
swiftly, shall we?
As an aside, a chat with a new colleague convinced me that I should probably sign this blog, because my
style would give me away anyway. I replied “But only you, Gavin Buckingham and
Alan Beaton ever read anything I write!”. Of course the real reason to remain
anonymous is to prepare for the possibility that you will offend colleagues who
play a role in my embarrassing stories. Of course most of my stories are only
embarrassing about me really, so that’s not a huge risk.
Second, and in all seriousness, management at your University might, understandably take offence at anything you say that could be perceived as putting the place in a bad light (which in some sense is a nice summary of one of the big problems, more on that in a future blog). I have several thoughts that come to mind with a bit of thinking about this. First, can any of those people actually read? Of course I jest, but, seriously think about how they often write. Hinton (2002) comments “the goal of good managementspeak is not to provide clear content understood by their target audience, to communicate meaningfully. No, instead, the job is to give the impression to others that you are communicating meaningfully. If meaning is clear, it can be evaluated and even shock, horror, at a modern University no less – be criticised. Constructive obfuscation, for lack of a better word, might catch the ear of your management superiors, or might impress or distract the people you manage with your competence and strategic vision".
More on this topic in a later blog, as I am anticipating more time away from paid employment in
the near future.
In summary, I have yet to
say anything about anything (which, some of my students and colleagues might
note is not all that unusual). But of course I hope this gives you a small
taste of what is to come: “Left of political centre winge and a moan meets
Wernicke’s word salad”[8]
Which would not be a bad name for such a blog, no? other possibilities which
have crossed my fevered brow include “The delegation of dissatisfaction“[9],
“Meekly accepted subordination”[10],
“This all sounds shockingly familiar”, “Smells like Team Dispirit” and “Jeremy
Corbyn’s Allotment”[11],
If I can figure out how to do a poll, I will ask the three of you for a vote in
a future blog.
Further reading:
Hinton, D. A. (2002). Triangulating the circle: the three laws of Management Speak. Critical Quarterly, 44(3). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8705.00432
For an amusing piece on Gammons (I never imagined writing that wee fragment in my lifetime, take that "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"), see "Want to succeed as a middle-aged modern man? Google Kendrick Lamar". Evening Standard. Archived from the original on 12 May 2018. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180512112202/https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/want-to-succeed-as-a-middleaged-modern-man-be-more-like-ronan-farrow-and-google-kendrick-lamar-a3819366.html
(Please do not tell my Guardian reading lefty pals that I was anywhere near this right-wing rag. This was strictly research, on gammons. More on them and Brexit in a future blog).
Lots on how writing is good for you, but how good is the data, really (some of this literature is three happy thoughts sorts of stuff)? You could check out
Most of the literature is not very evaluative but positive and a bunch of other stuff is mostly on how writing interventions and frequency improves writing quality and so on.
[1]
Wingeing, for you non-Brits out there who always wondered what Lily Allen was
on about in that song, is sort of a cross between whining and complaining.
[2] My
crude neuropsychological understanding is that semantic paraphasias happen every
now and then (even to Ph.D students who are largely very young) and that they increase with normal ageing. It’s those topographical
problems - getting lost in what should be familiar environments that you
might look out for. I should probably check the literature to be sure, but have decided
that I really don’t want to know.
[3]
Even the Dutch, who I sometimes think of as the Americans of Europe, get that
it is bad: https://www.kritischestudenten.nl/krantje-boord/oktober-2011/yes-the-marketization-of-education-is-still-a-bad-idea/
. This comment may offend American or Dutch readers; as this blog has yet to go
international; I could always edit this out at a later date.
[4] A
gammon, in British parlance, is, well sort of the UK equivalent of a “meathead”.
Strictly speaking: “Gammon is a pejorative popularised in British political
culture since around 2012. The term refers in particular to the colour of a
white person's flushed face when expressing their strong opinions, as compared
to the type of pork of the same name”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gammon_(insult)#:~:text=Gammon%20is%20a%20pejorative%20popularised,pork%20of%20the%20same%20name.
[5] I
was going to say Narcissists, but someone I know will eventually read this, and
assume I was talking about them. (There’s a Carly Simon gag to be had here, obviously,
but I don’t want to push the song line schtick too far in Blog number 1).
[6] Younger
readers may not get this analogy, but I suppose they can google it. Or instead,
read about “the American dream”, or “trickle down economics”.
[7] No
longer in print, but boy apparently there is still quite a bit of
procrastination in our world because many thoughtful souls have written books
to tell us what to do about it.
[8] In
fact, this is my second Wernicke joke of the year. Not an easy thing to do,
neuropsychologists will confirm. See if you can find the first one in Carey,
D.P. Language lateralisation. Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (2nd edition), Elsevier. If you
don’t have access , write me, I’ll email it to you, because the publishers are
NEOLIBERALS and this will give me a rebellious neolimbic dopamine
hit.
[9] “This delegation of dissatisfaction and opposition very
efficiently disguises the fact that in our everyday working lives, the vast
majority of us meekly accept our subordination.” (Winlow, 2022)
[10]
See footnote 9. I have previously used footnotes in self-referential jokes. I
am sure than Alan Beaton, Sam Jones and Gavin Buckingham enjoyed them. Carey,
D. P. (2007). Is bigger really better? The search for brain size and
intelligence in the twenty-first century. Tall tales about the mind and brain:
Separating fact from fiction, 105-122. See footnote 8 if you want a copy.
[11]
What I was smoking when I came up with this one is anybody's guess.
Liked this so much I have signed up for more (yet another password for me to remember, damn you!! ;-) ). And I think all bar one hypothesis is likely to be confirmed....
ReplyDeleteLooks like readership has gone to n+1...
ReplyDeleteI've had some private comments, so n is at least 5! Interesting a couple say "let loose David, this is too tame!". A third suggests "tone about right, should keep you out of trouble". As I say above, one of the big problems, more on this in a future blog....
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