Progressive Geographies

Council for the Defence of British Universities – Restructuring Politics at the University of Surrey: An Unexpected and Questionable Decision

Marina Warner, ‘Learning my Lesson’ – on Universities in the LRB. It takes her own story, and broadens it to apply far beyond the University of Essex. Here’s one key paragraph, but the whole thing is well worth reading.

I was forced out of my professorship at Essex after being told, first, that I couldn’t retire because I was needed (for the next round of research assessment in 2020);​1second, that I should accept the job of chairing the Man Booker International Prize in 2015; and finally, that I was to be congratulated on gaining a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford – non-stipendiary and part-time, but a chance to do some research – only subsequently to be informed that policy had now changed, and I would be required to teach full-time. There was more to what happened, to others as well as to me, but I won’t go over the details here. After I wrote a piece about the experience in the LRB, letters and emails poured in to me – and to the paper.​ The correspondence reveals a deeper and more bitter scene in higher education than I had ever imagined. I had been naive, culpably unobservant as I went about my activities at Essex. Students, lecturers, professors from one institution after another were howling in sympathy and rage; not one of them dissented or tried to justify the situation. I had thought that Essex was a monstrous manifestation, but it turns out that its rulers’ ideas are ‘the new normal’, as the Chinese government calls its present economic plan. Cries also reached me from other countries, where the new methods have been taken even further: from New Zealand and Australia, above all; from Europe, especially the Netherlands, and from certain institutions in the US.