Reimagining the University Journal

One Response to Reimagining the University Journal

1. Tom | May 19, 2011 at 12:45 pm | Reply

   Dear ROU/Roundhouse,

   In honour of ‘openess’ and committment to discussion I wanted to give a response to the Reimaging the University Journal launched recently for those that have read it.

   ———

   Firstly, I enjoyed reading the journal and well done for the time and effort to write it. I just wanted to respond to a few things. I mainly want to ‘respond to a few things’ precisely because I presume this is why journals are made and noticed that within the journal itself, it does not explicitly say anywhere “we want to hear from you”, which is a tentative critique that Roundhouse itself would like to address in terms of spreading ideas and developing communicative practice (Editorial Principal No.5).

   In any case, two things related to the individual papers. Responding to Chanan’s, Richardson, and Gillespie et al’s pieces, clearly there’s a consensus being built around a sense of over-bureaucracy, over-metricisation, over-commodification etc in universities that appears inhabiting, devaluing and altogether not the sort of education or system of society we want. I would agree on many levels. The thing that concerns me slightly is that on pressing too hard on the line that statistics are a ‘managerial tool suppressing the lived experience of student and teacher’, as Channon writes, we forget that statistics are (past-tense) representations of these experiences. That they may, perhaps will never, portray a ‘true’ representation of student experience or academic performance of the researcher/lecturer is certainly true, but that does not erase or destroy the positive or worthy experiences gained by our practices and experiences. A National Student Survey by its very existence does not reduce our experience of the university as a fantastic place to be (hopefully for most people), nor does a RAE/REF exercise intrinsically devalue the positive achievements of any research projects and personal endeavours that people went through for it. I think it is a difficult (and worrying) situation when performance indicators determine money and reputation, but certainly we need to look at what is actually going in terms of representations. Indeed one can look at the RAE of 2008 for Leeds Geography department (where I currently reside) and see there are also qualitative overviews, information etc on the research and researchers, which I would to think many students or would-be students would find interesting or useful (see:http://www.rae.ac.uk/submissions/ra5a.aspx?id=32&type=uoa&subid=3040). Of course like, as Gillespie et al suggest (and people should look at Castree’s ‘Border Geography’ in the journal Area (2002) for a very interesting analysis of this) it is whether people are ‘playing to the game’ of stats for personal career development that I guess we become concerned with. I think it’s a little crass however to suggest all academics want to ‘out trump’ each other for sake of money, capitalism and greed though…

   Secondly, if one can last to read such a long email, I felt like Mike Neary’s article was very engaging and poses lots of interesting thoughts. The implicit assumption made by Neary that the marketising, consumption-led dynamic of the university means that currently we are not ‘producers’ or we don’t write critically-engaged material that challenges the system is perhaps not entirely true. Nevertheless, I think yes much more should be done to encourage people to write narratives of their views, their experiences of life and the university and then to a have a greater say in material being taught and researched. Of course not all people would want this – more that mechanisms to do so for those that do are in place. Too often for me people are very frightened to write in public, to share their work, to simply ‘put things out there’, because the academic mind immediately criticises everything, people feel like their work is inadequate or more generally, I think, there is not a culture of a public scholarship by students as such.

   This is perhaps a critique of the atomisation of much academic lives, the whole thing of ‘only two people in the world will ever read my essays’ kind of thing. It’s also about passion, time, priorities – spreading ideas isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But I would like to encourage the creative endeavours that people bring. Nothing has to be a “revolutionary transformation of pedagogical praxis” or whatever that means, but each moment of writing and ideas-making is, and will always be, a rewarding and gratifying opportunity to express ourselves, and something which we should be thankful for. (“Because we’re academically worth it”).

   Wish you luck with future publications and events,

   Tom Collins
   Masters Student in Social & Cultural Geography,
   University of Leeds