My timeline is absolutely full of people all across the higher education sector — whether striking academics like myself, or journalists and commentators — who are talking about “what universities can afford to pay” staff right now. This feels like a very important moment, in the middle of ACAS negotiations…

On 9 September 2021 my union called a special conference. Delegates voted to ballot for industrial action in our two disputes: over the USS pension cuts, and over the ‘Four Fights’ campaign. You can see what delegates proposed and passed right here, with respect to balloting in the Four Fights…

I have been trying, together with some elected union representatives, to get some form of motion supporting the reinstatement of student numbers controls passed for the better part of two and a half years. I have mainly done this from a position outside of any formal union structures, but I…

It is pretty obvious that, past a certain threshold of crisp data visualisations and internally robust statistics (which all end up referencing each other), the working knowledge of poverty that our most prominent information gurus possess is de-historicised. The sheer complexity and variance of poverty in past societies and up…

In managerial feudalism, ‘most of the important players are lords and vassals at the same time.’ (David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, 181) “While Graeber sees the increased bullshitization of the university as an outgrowth of managerial feudalism — basically as downstream effects of ostentatious displays of status and self-justification from those…

On May 27th,1933, the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave his official Rector’s Address to the gathered faculty of the University of Freiburg in a large hall decorated with Nazi swastikas.[1] There were no Jewish Faculty members in the room, all Jewish state employees had been suspended from their posts just over…

We have only just started teaching, and I can tell you already that it is over: this ship is going to crash. The course is set, the shoals are already upon us, there is no one at the helm, and no lighthouse in sight. Nothing guides university policy across the…

Lawrence M. Mead, third of his name, professor of politics and public policy at NYU and former speechwriter for Henry Kissinger, has recently published a ‘commentary’ on ‘poverty and culture’ in the American social sciences journal Society. A jeremiad against ‘racial minorities’ and the ‘non-Western cultures’ that they ostensibly hail…

Another day, another turgid intervention on ‘the future of universities’ in the digital pages of the Times Higher Education. This time, for those of us who actually work in universities either brave or masochistic enough to read on, we are treated to a breathless paean to progress from, well, this…