Hi All

I am energised by this list and I am delighted to see so many people reacting to this particular kind of "brave new academic world"; 

What worries me the most is that management in many institutions seem to be creating a "culture of fear" as an actual management strategy... 

Of course, I just cannot see the point in making people afraid to get them to work...  I often hear people constantly talking about the fear of getting caught out by the REF; and I have also heard people talk about the fear of having to cobble papers together at the last minute in the hope that some "4* journal" is going to accept your paper...

I worry that this new management culture will lead lots of people towards independent scholarship, which is not a bad thing in one way, but is in itself an indictment of the whole academic system.

In solidarity

Andy


>-----Original Message-----
>From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [mailto:CRIT-GEOG-
>[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jenny Pickerill
>Sent: 30 October 2015 09:18
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Sadness
>
>Hi all
>
>I am finding this conversation really helpful. I too was greatly
>affected by Stefan's story and I suspect that it is just one publicised
>case of many.
>
>There is an interesting parallel conversation going on in Canada. Run
>out of Queens, the MHGEOG-L Mental Health and the Academy email
>discussion list is a useful place of sharing, often research and case
>studies. You can subscribe via:
>https://lists.queensu.ca/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A0=MHGEOG-L
>
>I also support the Union because I feel it is a rare space where
>collective issues are fought for, despite all its limitations.
>
>But crucially, like others, I have found the only form of survival to be
>through collective companionship in the academy. Going to lunch with
>colleagues might seem a small step, but being able to share
>frustrations, laugh at the stupidity of targets, and remind each other
>why we work in the academy has enable me to stay. There are many of us
>who have never met our performance targets (I have lived through years
>of them and consistently failed) and yet are still here and doing OK. As
>things become more acute and pressured, we should spend even more time
>supporting each other, laughing, resisting, and ignoring. I, for one, am
>not willing to let targets push me out of the academy. But without
>academic friends I lapse into a competitive urge to comply and need my
>friends to remind me why I am here and what I (not the University) am
>trying to do.
>
>Jenny
>
>-------------------------------
>Jenny Pickerill
>
>Professor of Environmental Geography
>
>Department of Geography
>University of Sheffield
>Winter street
>Sheffield
>S10 2TN
>UK
>
>email: [log in to unmask]
>office phone: 0114 222 7960
>
>staff website: www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/staff/jenny_pickerill
>web: www.jennypickerill.info
>
>blog: http://naturalbuild.wordpress.com/
>twitter: @JennyPickerill
>
>Editor | Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography
>http://antipodefoundation.org/
>http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/anti
>
>Chair | Participatory Geographies Research Group http://www.pygyrg.co.uk
>
>New article: Pickerill, J (2014) Bodies, building and bricks: Women
>architects and builders in eight eco-communities in Argentina, Britain,
>Spain, Thailand and USA. Gender, Place and Culture, available at:
>http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/UPix9KpJRxPWjkWvvntE/full
>
>On 30/10/2015 09:00, Paul Benneworth wrote:
>> Dear all
>>
>> I was greatly affected by the Stefan Grimm story when I read it, and so
>many thanks to Andrew for unleashing a discussion that's attracted real animo
>in the group.
>>
>> Echoing Alison's point, I was at a union meeting this week where we heard
>of both the real damaging effects of work pressure, and also the roles of
>managers (who don't face those pressures) saying that people were very
>good at coping with those pressures.  There's so much evidence piling up of
>the extremely negative effects that these new target management regimes
>have on people; for me what has been compelling has been the way that they
>are 'made' and enforced locally, despite this rhetoric that they are a
>supposedly unavoidable part of academic life.
>>
>> My concrete contribution I hope relates to the issue of performance targets;
>performance is what you do, not the outcome that it has;  the issue about
>trying to management outcome targets is that if there aren't good pathways
>from the performance to the target then you what you are doing is futile.
>>
>> what Alison describes below at Newcastle are a mix of performance and
>outcome targets.  And what's most worrying are the outcome (income)
>targets, because we know that success rates for funding proposals have hit a
>real low in all sectors, to the point where it has become more a lottery; so you
>can 'perform' by writing a good proposal but that becomes completely
>invisible to the managers because you are judged on an outcome on which
>you have no influence.
>>
>> And like all indicators, the have a framing effect; for me what is worrying is
>the way that they purport to have an objectivity; if you don't hit an outcome
>target, then the responsibility passes to you rather than to the person who
>set the ill thought-through target for you.  So what you are really being judged
>on is how lucky you are, not how well you are performing (assuming you are
>good enough), and that's a rather pernicious basis for managing an institution,
>because you have people who think they are good or bad  purely on the basis
>of their luck, and luck can run out.
>>
>> You can say that it's individuals' own faults for not being in a field where the
>chances of success are higher, but given how long human capital in academia
>takes to build up and the proven fact that seemingly pointless knowledge can
>entirely unexpectedly become incredibly useful - scientifically and societally -
>that's a just a strange basis to run a knowledge portfolio.
>>
>> In my reading, the only way that this can be challenged is by speaking up for
>each other, and in particular the lucky ones speaking up for the unlucky ones,
>here in the Netherlands, the more popular courses speaking up for the less
>popular courses, the seniors speaking up for the juniors.
>>
>> Solidarity, in short, and that's a real challenge at the time when everything,
>tenure track, publish or perish, h-indices, journal ranking lists, is being set up
>to individualise, and critically to convince the lucky seniors that they are
>successful because they are better than the unlucky juniors.    So in that sense
>it's great to hear the 'seniors' speaking up for the collective in this
>conversation as well as the 'juniors'.
>>
>> There's a few movements like Science in Transition that can help to do this,
>but Alison nails the point here that the unions are organisations that actually
>exist to build this solidarity, even if they have sometimes become sidetracked
>for entirely understandable reasons into thinking more of the 'individual
>member offer' than the 'collective vision and movement'.
>>
>> And of course unions aren't 'out there', they are their members, so at least
>in the UK, and the Netherlands (two countries that I at least know about) this
>suggests at least one starting point for us in starting to challenge and contest
>these problems.
>>
>> So strength to Alison, and all those affected!
>>
>> Best wishes
>> Paul.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [mailto:CRIT-GEOG-
>[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alison Stenning
>> Sent: vrijdag 30 oktober 2015 9:29
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Sadness
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> In the light of all this, I'd be really interested to hear what colleagues'
>experiences, in the UK and beyond, have been of "performance
>expectations", or indicators, or whatever.
>>
>> Here at Newcastle, the university is in the process of introducing these, first
>for research, then for teaching. The research ones relate to income,
>publications, supervision of PhD students. Income expectations vary by
>seniority and according to two tiers of disciplines (high income and low
>income). Geography is a high income discipline within our faculty (of
>humanities and social sciences).
>>
>> These "expectations" will be used in assessing performance (though
>performance and development reviews), promotion and recruitment of new
>staff.
>>
>> It's not yet entirely clear what will happen if we don't meet the
>expectations.
>>
>> All of this makes me incredibly sad, that this is more and more the shape of
>universities, that these are the wishes of our managers, that there is so little
>imagination about what a university could be, despite wider
>neoliberalisations, that this reinforces a culture of expectation and anxiety,
>and so on.
>>
>> More hopefully, there was a really well attended union meeting earlier this
>week, where there were discussions of strike action, a vote of no confidence
>in the VC, and other plans for non-compliance.
>>
>> It would be really good to hear how others are dealing with this kind of
>thing, and how widespread these kind of formal expectations are across
>Geography.
>>
>> In solidarity,
>> Alison
>>