Year Note 4 – Fit the Third – Positions, stations, not jobs

One of the things I’ve found as being an academic is that it is much less a job and more a position or a station in life. Certainly that is the way it is historically constructed, and I think it is nice to take on a wider, social role and partake in the wonderfully victorian notion of having a station. Whether it should be like this is certainly open to debate.

I remember listening to an MP discussing his life and approach to what he on radio 4 and being struck by what he was talking about. I can’t quite remember the terminology he was using, but he was referring to the role that people like MPs, councillors, judges, etc take. There is a different sort of responsibility to the role you have, and it is not something that you just clock in and out of. He was reacting to the discussion about members of parliament hiding behind the “it’s just a job” line, that they needed to be fully responsible for their actions both within and without their ‘job’. Which I agree with. Not that they have to be working all the time, but that the role they take pervades their lives and the responsibility, and social context of what they do is now intrinsically tied up in who they are. As he was saying, this was a privilege as much as it was a burden.

One of the sad things that our corporatised state is doing is reducing everything to jobs, reducing the valuation of all activity through a neoliberal, capitalist approach. The value of a job is just the profit it can make for the individual or the organisation. And sadly universities have gone, or are going the same way. The academic is being forced out of having a social position and into a monetary producing unit. The same is true of police people, shopkeepers, librarians, that their value in a social and cultural ecology is discounted and only their purely economic value is kept. This is partly done by turning these positions into jobs, giving the individual the chance to clock off, and thus become a commodity, or a resource. It is only through having the richer engagement with a position or station in society or the community that this commodification process can be resisted.

The academic is set up to be exactly this, why else would you combine the weird plethora of obligations, activities and tasks that they are required to do. If it wasn’t intended on being this it would be much smarter to split up things up. The little rituals, and role in a wider community, that I blogged about the other week are also a part of this equation. If it is a job, why have those?

I want a position, a station, not just a job (or whatever the term should be, let me know if there is a better word for what I’m talking about, I’m sure I’ve got it wrong). There is more to being an academic that just doing what it says on the job description/contract… in fact it would be a pretty shit, boring job if you did.

Year Note 4 – Fit the First – Hunting the Academic

The search for what it means to be an “academic” reminds me of the The Hunting of the Snark; very aptly titled “An Agony In Eight Fits”. The snark is very suggestive of this thing that we call an academic, it comes in many varieties, some with feathers that bite, some with whiskers that scratch. They are very ambitious and also like to sleep late into the day. However as we learn from the poem, when seeking the snark, one must beware that it is not a boojum. It is unclear from the poem whether a snark does really exist, are they all boojums, or is that just the one the baker meets? Certainly snarks are very tricky beasts, and going after one will be a life changing activity.

My academic ‘birthday’ happened a couple of weeks ago, I started being an academic on the 1st November. But like a typical lecturer I didn’t actually have the time to stop and reflect at the time, so I’m going to grab that time now, or it will never happen.

Four years means that this is now the longest job I’ve held down. I spent just under four years at both syzygy and the BBC. Both of which were formative experiences, but one’s where I felt I got my head around the job much quicker, although each of them kept throwing curveballs to the end. I felt comfortable in each after a couple of years and then a bit uncomfortable towards the end of four years. Which is why I moved on from each. I’m still trying to figure out what being an academic at UWE is all about. Four years felt like a long time at each of those jobs, but four years in a university doesn’t feel long.

After four years here I’m still constantly reconfiguring my approach and attitude towards what I’m doing. The job-ness of it is quite interesting at this point in time, both through my own experience and also through what is currently happening to higher education under the current government. Being an academic is not a job, it is more like a lifestyle choice, the boundaries are blurry and whilst I can walk away from the computer, the things I’m working on are never far from mind. Though walking away is difficult.

There is this idea, from outside the academy, that being a lecturer is all about sitting around drinking tea and having lots of time to have erudite discussion and pontificating about esoteric subjects. I think, deep down, there was a naive kernel of that in me when I took the job. I though that it would be a nice easy move from the big smoke to a more laid back lifestyle in the provinces, do some teaching and work on a PhD. How mistaken I was, and I only learnt that after having my life nuked by the teaching workload; unable to concentrate on what I had intended to do, let along my personal life. Two years ago I went for a job at Nokia, and when they offered me the job (in the end I turned it down) they, very seriously, said that this job wasn’t like academia and it would require doing some actual work. I had to try very hard not to laugh out loud.

I managed to find some good-looking data on unpaid overtime, it is a bit old, but lecturers (with teachers) are at the top of the list of unpaid overtime. Over eleven hours a week. This bears out with what I’ve experienced, in the first couple of years when I must have been doing more like twenty extra hours every week during term time, but luckily for me it has gotten a bit more controllable. Though the last couple of weeks the boojum is back and I’ve been working every opportunity I can and sometimes into the wee small hours.

However, I’m not complaining, this is something I want, and part of what it means to be an academic. I think the point is that this is not a “normal” job in a “normal” company. But a discussion of that will have to wait till at least tomorrow and Fit the Second.