So this is the time of year when I’d usually write some kind of overly poignant piece that draws out themes from my last year as a lecturer in Higher Education. There are many things that I could write about so I started planning a long essay and was part way through picking out a pretentious alliterative list of themes like compassion, capitulation, complicity and critique or subversion, silence, scepticism, and self-destruction when I realized that there was only one thing that I really wanted to write about: ambivalence.

Ambivalent (adj) – “having simultaneous conflicting feelings or contradictory ideas about something,”

I think that I first encountered ambivalence as a developed concept in the work of Catherine Casey where she talks about individuals being acculturated into an organization incompletely, coming to both love and hate it – coping through jokes, sarcasm and humorous deprecation – saying for example that they love working at the organization, but also can’t wait to leave. There is something in the paradoxical duality of this kind of emotional double-bind that characterizes the last few months for me.

Permanent Contracts

As of the 7th of May, I am no longer a temporary member of staff at the University of Kent. I’m now on a permanent Teaching and Research contract and I’m also the new Director of Studies for the Bsc Management programme. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, I feel an otherwise inexplicable sense of relief that I am no longer facing the prospect of being unemployed in the middle of a global pandemic. Indeed, given that my contract for the current academic year only lasted until July 31st, 2020 and given that Kent has been having well-publicized financial difficulties, I’ve been applying for jobs whenever I could over the last year, operating under the assumption that my contract wouldn’t be renewed. In the spirit of the very first post on this blog, here’s a list of universities that I applied to who passed without inviting me to interview: Swansea University, University of Huddersfield, University of Nottingham, University of Glasgow, University of Leicester, University of Birmingham, University of Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, and of course the University of Manchester – my alma mater which didn’t invite me for an interview in the department where I did my PhD, even though they seem to be in dire need of someone to teach the compulsory management and organization studies modules on their undergraduate programmes after the mass exodus of critical scholars from the school in the last few years. I did get invited to Loughborough, Strathclyde and Exeter for interviews but they ended up not working out.

To say that I felt anxious and unsettled at the prospect that July would arrive and Kent would tell me that my contract is up would be a gross understatement. The last time that  I was unemployed my mental health deteriorated so drastically that to think about re-entering that psychological space is to confront a void of abject terror. Indeed, I recall vividly the profoundly uncomfortable and disquieting experience of watching colleagues on temporary contracts like mine from Bristol, Newcastle and Sussex getting laid off and not knowing if I’d be next. Finally having job security should have been a source of profound relief. Yet my response to it has been muted. I didn’t celebrate or do much of anything, I just kept doing exactly what I’ve been doing.

It is not lost on me that contractual flexibility as precarity is an incisive tool of corporate control, breeding certain acute forms of uncertainty and terror in the workforce in order to secure compliance and encourage enthusiastic self-exploitation. Indeed perhaps this is why I feel a curious kind of apathy about the whole process, as though the university had finally agreed to pay me for the job that I was already doing. Colleagues will know that I’ve been publishing, going to conferences, and participating in the research culture of the university (e.g. going to research seminars etc.) as though I was on a Teaching and Research contract for my entire time at Kent. It is a common enough story in which the protagonist has to prove themselves as virtuous (e.g. as dedicated, hard working, committed, capable and so on) in order to be accepted and accept themself as an individual. Yet now that it’s my actual job, I have a strange sentiment of ambivalence about it. As if to say: “OK … so I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing, shall I?”

The impossibility of moderation 

For those unfamiliar with academic work let me clarify that marking is never a one person job. On my 500 student Introduction to Management module there has to be a team of people doing the marking under my guidance. Readers of this blog who are familiar with my pathological control issues will anticipate how much I struggle with this. If there was enough time, I’d want to mark them all myself, that way I’d arrogantly be able to believe that they were “done properly”. Indeed, on my smaller modules I obsess over marking and split hairs over whether to award, say a 65 or a 68, but when you’re trying to direct others, you’re often just grateful if they can get in the same classification (2:2, 2:1, First and so on) as you. Indeed, fatigue even got the better of me this year and by the time I was 150 papers in, I was content to just get papers into the right classification. This became much worse once I started moderating.

At Kent, marks have to be moderated – a small sample has to be double-checked by a second marker before they’re sent to the external examiner to also be double-checked. In theory this is a useful bureaucratic system that ensures that marking is consistent, fair, and accountable. In practice, it’s highly flawed and subject to interpersonal politics. For example, on CB312, I ended up with a team of markers, all of whom were senior and more experienced colleagues. If a colleague awards a mark that you don’t quite agree with, what is the correct course of action for raising it, knowing how political academia is and that offending a particular colleague might be the difference between you getting a promotion in the future or not, and also because you think that your colleagues should know what the correct marks to award are (even if they aren’t subject experts) by virtue of their experience – when they don’t it creates self-doubt, uncertainty, and a profound sense of being uncomfortable, as though you had to explain how contraceptives work to your parents.  More pertinently, if a senior and more experienced colleague does a bad job, do you send it back to them with supportive commentary and tell them to do it again, or just do it yourself? I ended up remarking quite a few essays because colleagues didn’t pay attention to the plagiarism score of the essay and gave high marks to essays with significant plagiarised content, or because colleagues awarded marks that didn’t add up (e.g. Essay 1 = 78, Essay 2 = 72 but total mark awarded was 77), or a colleague delaying marking the essays until after the deadline had passed (so I just gave up and started marking them).

These are difficult questions and someone with more political skill than I would have had the sophistication to come up with better answers to them. Eventually, I think that I became ambivalent to the process and just capitulated, marking the papers myself to fix any errors, or just caving in to any proposed changes made by colleagues moderating my work – the supposed collegiate discussion that should be involved in negotiating marking, never really taking place because I was riven by this intense feeling of caring (and wanting to ethically ensure that my students get the grades that they deserve) and not caring and just wanting to be done with the politics of it all.

Much like my previous reflections on marking these are things that I am “not supposed to say”, because the human experiences of marking have to be scrubbed out in favour of presenting it as a neutral and “objective process” but I think that Higher Education would be a better place if more academics spoke openly about their experiences, so that’s what I’m doing.

There are more examples that I could give: ambivalence about my Scout Troop making a centralized decision to not even try to do any online Scouting, ambivalence about a paper that I’m working on which has now gone through so many revisions that I feel a sense of emotional and ethical detachment from it – not really caring about it’s nuance or whether it reflects my academic values – just doing and saying whatever I think will get it published, ambivalence about current events etc. etc. to the degree where I’m beginning to view ambivalence as pathological, as some kind of cultivated response to the current social milieu. As though, to return to Casey, I am being disciplined and acculturated in some way but incompletely and my unfinished character shows in my black humour, ambivalence, indifference, sarcasm, and so on. Who knows?