A world without experts: alienation in academia
Thoughts on the level of alienation in academic work, and how as much as we cannot exit the economy, we must recognise the inherent value of academia.
Academia is a peculiar place to work. I've worked in several places outside of it, and in all of them I had a very clear idea of how my labour produced value. When I worked for Sky in their retentions department, I produced value by convincing customers to renew their subscription. When I ran a box office in an independent theatre, I produced value by selling tickets and checking tickets. The people I worked most closely with were those paying the money, I was the one who processed the money, and I was able to see exactly how much profit I had earned my employer each shift.[1] Academia is not like this at all, and for that reason it can be one of the most alienating work environments possible.
For sure, in one sense the students are paying the money, and I interact with them a lot. Yet, even though the occaisional student will bother to work out how much each hour of tuition costs them, that does not really tell me that much about how much 'value' I have generated for my institution in a typical day at work, at least in the sense of cash value. My pay is not hourly, and for most of us the idea of sticking to our 'hours' is barely a dream. Further, for the vast majority of my students, who benefit from a student loan, their situation could more accurately be described as signing up for a graduate tax in all but name, since the primary source of funds remains the government.[2] Further, they don't start actually paying for it until after completing their degree, and they cannot simply withhold their funds today. Realistically, they might swap to a different course or university, but their fee has always already been paid. All in all, the relation my students' money has to my institution's bottom line is obscure and certainly indirect.
The real customer is the UK Government and the metrics against which I am judged are developed by them and the Office for Students, neither of whom care about me individually, and the latter of whom has been found to be seriously wanting.[3] Their main concern is with certain metrics that are taken to be a proxy for the value that an average student may gain by attending the courses I teach on at my university. Some of those metrics are under my control, some are not. My value to the university is determinable, then, only by judging my impact on these metrics, which is difficult to quantify and intuitively grasp.
As an academic then, I have an abstract customer and an abstract value. My working life is itself an abstraction, where my concrete labour, which is to say the actual work I do and over which I have control, has no direct, obvious financial value I can point to and feel secure and valuable myself. Each day, I may feel valued by my students, my colleagues, managers and in my research, but there is no tangible connection between this and my pay and the financial stability of my university. When I worked in that box office, I knew when my turning up to work was loss-making. When it comes to my job as an academic, I can only guess based on the information my institution gives me.[4]
This alienation is a result of how separated the structure of Higher Education has become from the values and goals of education per se. I have no doubts about the 'added value' that any sort of Higher Education gives a graduate, even--and perhaps especially--if they go on to an unrelated profession. There's plenty of evidence for this. For example, Vasquez and Prinzing in The Conversation discuss research into the profitability of hiring philosophy graduates. I have no doubt this is true, but if it is to remain true then philosophy lecturers need to be given the space, resource and support to teach philosophy well according to the academic judgment of their peers.
Our subjects need to be allowed to be their subjects, or else their value will fail. There remains some space to do this in UK Higher Education, but it is under pressure. I can't 'do' academia for the indirect goal that my students' ability to read Kant's 'Transcendental Deduction' might also make them good at project management. At bottom, all I can do is read and write in my discipline and try and find fulfilling and effective ways to teach it. That's our value as academics. It is incalculable. And, if our students demonstrably have economic value, then this is evidence that we should be allowed to focus on inculcating the virtues of our discipline in our students by being given the space to read, write and teach.
The present crisis in UK Higher Education is primarily a crisis of funding, but it is also a crisis of conviction and of hostility towards intellectualism and any other forms of expertise. It's a crisis that requires trade unionism, along with its respect for 'the trades' themselves. It may sound odd to describe academia as 'a trade', but it is. And, like any trade, it is vulnerable to false claims of redundancy.
Every worker who has lost their job in academia due to the spurious metrics and financial troubles that have become the norm is a victim of constructive dismissal. More and more we are asked to take our energy away from what we were primarily hired to do to work more and more on proving our financial value. The power behind this is real, and opposing it and defending our colleagues from the worst consequences requires rigorous strategy as well as action. However, we should also defend our rightful place in society as centres of tradition and learning, and demand recognition as worthy in our own right.
All knowledge will be lost if it is not taught to the next generation of students.
I don't want to live in a world without experts.
Not to mention knowing when I failed to generate a profit. ↩︎
Put more eloquently by Hawkes and Ferguson, 'The immediate cause of the present catastrophe is a broken funding model. This model is based principally on tuition fees, financed by publicly provisioned student loans. Such fees rank among the highest in the world. The system is fundamentally unjust because it individualises the responsibility to fund Higher Education rather than treating it as a collective treasure. It also places the stability and supposed viability of courses of study, departments, institutions, and entire academic disciplines at the whim of a government-manufactured market.' ↩︎
See Office for Students: Lords Industry and Regulators Committee report. Their primary concern at the moment seems to be defending our free speech to say things that no one believes. ↩︎
The flip side of this is, of course, that none of us have any real reason to believe them if they say we're making a loss, even if we are. Other than the rise and fall of student numbers, which is hard to interpret, our working situation remains the same. ↩︎