Good Boy

When I do something of positive note, my son sweetly says “Good Boy, Mummy”. He’s three so I guess that’s minus the sarcasm that I would automatically assume is attached to such words of praise. 

What I’m about to say is hardened through experience but I should premiss by saying that I think academic research is absolutely essential to the survival of any society you’d actually want to live in. I’m involved in academic communities of research practice on mental health, employment relations and public policy which consider bringing about positive change in the ‘real’ world our duty. I am regularly in awe of the quality of intellectual work in my field and I genuinely enjoy knowing and working with my colleagues and co-authors, some I admire and some I just plain love. Although we’re losing the fight for facts, our work is the difference between being able to challenge the politics of primal hoarding that now dominate.

But praise and affirmation are in short supply in the public services. Within the New Public Management school of grinding public servants down, writ large in the notes on the civil service desks, we’re forced to play the performance game.

Last Thursday was one of those days when I switched on social media with my hands over my eyes. The REF results came out ranking the research excellence of UK universities. 

All that eye-bleeding work over the last 6 years squeezed into metrics measuring excellent intellectual labour, it’s easy to miss the hard personal costs that underpin these results. I don’t wish to blind you with peer reviewed science but getting published in a high ranked journal is pretty much close to impossible. It’s really really hard. In addition to meaningfully impacting the world with your research, it means working over night and weekends for years and years, racing manically through your teaching-only contractual hours, swallowing your pride in the increasingly invidious review process and measuring out your intellectual worth in public. Far from feeling excellent it will rock your self-worth to its very core.

Preparing a university REF submission is really really hard. Maintaining your generosity in reviewing others’ work is really really hard. Motivating yet another research team to submit a statistically-doomed proposal is really really hard. As much as our government would encourage us to look upon this as self-pitying whining of the privileged, being an academic is really really hard. 

So when the REF results come through and Twitter drowns in celebratory tweets-by-committee rising victorious above this human misery its hard to be nice about it. 

As any good sociologist will tell you, context shapes the meaning of our labours. An important contextual footnote to the REF is the widely acknowledged culture of bullying within the research sector and its closely associated rise in professional inequalities. The Spectre at the Excellence Feast this year goes to Goldsmiths University. The current paradigm of how many of the academics and admin staff who contributed to these research rankings have had their jobs deleted through enforced restructure following the REF submission.

Real life-changing experiences have forced me to understand that excellence is partly driven by a sectoral sadism where despite everything we know about rights and wrongs we continue to engage and press repeat. The re-surfacing of profound inequalities for women in the professions is right there clear as daylight, and in the academy too (for an excellent read about inequalities and ‘knowledge hustlers' go here). This is not to denigrate the many beloved and feminist men I work with but it is to articulate an emerging fault line we will have to navigate where gender inequalities are not in the academic they’re happening at a desk near you. That 90% of STEM funding goes to male-led projects is an actual statistical fact significant enough for us to take sides. 

Several self-reflective years later I understood that it didn’t matter how many AJG4 ranked journal publications I had, I was working in a system that sets me up for failure. Tucked away behind the collegiality and recognition of All That Hard Work, I now know I can never be enough.  

A mean girl I admire who looks down on me for being kind once told me about why she was so unforgiving of her academic colleagues. She said that the problem with academics is that they think they are exceptional. They think that although the system sets others up for failure, their own elite status is based on merit. 

Throughout the pandemic I found myself repeating a grotesque phrase -  Dancing for Daddy. This was bequeathed to me by someone I love and admire not least because she’s the only person I know who makes me look like I’m in denial. These are my cruel-but-safe words, designed to tweak a nerve and bring me back down to earth. A mental elastic wrist band I use to trigger a repulsion at my own ‘internal oppressor’ the internal voice that demands I continue to play the game of excellence. The part of me that has led to my making the same self-defeating mistake decade after decade of working life to try to repair the academy by just working harder and trying to squeeze out yet another high ranking peer reviewed journal article that only 7 people including my mum will read and 12 will cite.

Whatever I do I’m set up for failure because I operate within a constantly re-calibrating system of winners and losers. It is both depressing and useful to know this because it allows me the realisation that overcoming my professional Stockholm syndrome is the key to my survival.

Congratulations and all if you did well in the REF but if you want to survive the next one back away from the seductions of magic and excellence and allow yourself to understand that within the metrics we’re all being set up for failure.