Over the summer I wrote a piece sort of in response to the furore surround Andrew Adonis’s attack on higher education. I returned to it this morning, after this weekend’s renewed attacks in the wake of the National Audit Office’s report on the supposed ‘lack of value’ in the higher education ‘market’. Based on what I have read and heard, in the print media, on Twitter and on national radio, I am starting to wonder, however, if it is not so much that academics aren’t very good at explaining what it is they do, as that those who enjoy pontificating on the subject don’t want to listen. Radio 4’s Today programme, for instance, managed to interview one lecturer that I heard in the entire course of a 3-hour programme focussed on the subject (a second presented Thought for the Day). Sonia Sodha’s dismissive response to Peter Mandler on Twitter is sadly symptomatic of this attitude.
Anyway, I’m sure Lord Adonis, Ms Sodha, Jo Johnson, Jeremy Vine and the editors of the Today Programme are far to busy to read what I wrote, just as I am rather too busy to repeat myself in another blog, but here it is again for anyone who might be wondering why academics are quite so angry about the implication that they have enough time to properly teach two- rather than three-year degrees. Now, if you will forgive me, I have work to do today (numbers 1, 4, 8 and 9, if you are wondering).
This isn’t going to be a response to the recent Andrew Adonis discussions, at least not directly. I’ve put in my direct tuppence ‘orth on Twitter already. It is, however, going to be a response to one of the more obscure byways that the discussion trickled into over the course of the day arising out of two comments. The first, from an academic, pointed out that academics really aren’t very good at communicating what it is we actually do. Listing all the jobs we have to do in a way that can give an impression of competitive business, yes; actually communicating to non-academics what our job entails, not so much. Which was reinforced by the second, from an anonymous Twitter user who, agreeing with Adonis’s argument about the laziness and unproductiveness of academics who don’t teach during the summer, stated that academics had never done a ‘real job’.
So the…
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