I had a pretty rough week last week and found myself (again?!) raging about the bureaucracy and audit culture that get in the way of me just doing my job. No-one needs to know the detail - I know I'm not alone in this sense of frustration. How do I know? Well, since I've started telling people I'm leaving Higher Education ('to dig my garden') I have found myself giving reasons for leaving that sound fairly harsh - and people join in, whole-heartedly. I should say that my grumpy old woman act seems to have a remarkably limited effect on my enthusiasm for doing the things I enjoy about my work with SCEPTrE. Anyway, it has been reassuring to find that it's not just me.
This week I bothered Lewis Elton (a well-known proponent of 'Collegiality and Complexity' - the title of a forthcoming article accepted by Higher Education Quarterly) with my grumbling. He was sympathetic and, better than that, pointed me to the Times Higher where, he said, you will absolutely see that you are not alone. Here I found a short piece about an article published in 2007 by Andrew C. Sparkes in, believe it or not, Qualitative Research - not a journal regularly cited by our favourite source of scandal and intrigue in HE. There are copyright reasons for me not to simply attach this as a pdf, so you will need to hunt down 'Embodiment, academics and the audit culture: a story seeking consideration'. It is described in the abstract as 'a story about the embodied struggles of an academic at a university that is permeated by an audit culture'. Although it's written as fiction, and is based on 'partial happenings, fragmented memories, echoes of conversations, whispers in corridors ...' with not a questionnaire or chart in sight, academics who read it are usually able to recognise themselves and their situation. In the body of the article are several responses from a range of un-named individuals that illustrate recognition of an emotional and political nature. People to whom I have recommended it as bedtime reading instantly respond with recognition.
Two things are worth noting, for me, particular with relevance to SCEPTrE. One is that (as I suggest in one of my digital stories about Fellowship) my research and evaluation job was offered following an explicit claim on my part that story has power to change and influence in ways that 'impact measures' would not recognise even if they came up and slapped them in the face. (Well, I'm not going to apologise for a bit of rhetorical shock - it's what got Andrew Sparkes the mention in the Times Higher).
The second point - and I have to say that it's come as a bit of a timely revelation to me - is that such research does get published. I'm already working to encourage and support some 'creative' writing with the participation of the Fellows and colleagues / students.
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