This is the day diary I submitted to the Mass Observation (MO) 12 May 2022 day-diary project. This year I didn’t post it immediately as I did in 2020 and 2021 because I didn’t feel like it and it seemed at the time to have too much academic-job-related content (which is a bit of an occupational hazard). However, as we are on the eve of the biggest strike in British university history, it seems like a good moment. A lot of this blog is directly or indirectly related to MO (there is an index to posts specifically on MO and ageing here) and the question of self-reflexivity and so what I did, and wrote about, on that day is as relevant as anything else. Here is my day diary:
I am 57 years old, a university academic and live in Aberystwyth with my partner ‘A’ (53), and our youngest son (15).
I was woken this morning by shouts of ‘Dad! Dad!’ because my son was stuck in the bathroom after his shower. The inside door handle fell off two weeks ago and although the door can be opened and shut, it does mean that if the bolt in the handle swivels a bit, then there is no handle inside the room to twist it back in order to let oneself out. I have not been entirely idle in that I have bought a replacement door handle set but I haven’t yet fitted it. But getting shouted at earlyish in the morning is an incentive to get on and do that (over the weekend maybe!). Anyway, I did let him out and he got dressed and went off to school.
I went back to bed, dozed a bit, and then investigated my phone for details of the results of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the periodical assessment of the quality of research produced by British universities. The previous one was REF2014 and this was REF2021 (the process and results were delayed by the pandemic, hence only being announced today). The REF has become a massive industry in itself, which ties up hours and hours of labour in terms of both the preparation of the entries and the effort required by the respective subject panels to assess the work. This is all on top of the vast amount of work that has gone into actually producing the research. So, before any other considerations, there is the question of whether all this work is really the most efficient use of the time involved. Without it there would be more time for doing research and/or teaching. It’s also problematic because it generates league tables of winners and losers, and supports gamification by the universities (although most of the ways this happened in 2014 have been stopped by changes in the regulations). In general, it is part of the culture of metrics and data that instrumentalises individuals rather than holistically supporting everyone. Furthermore, certainly in some departments and universities, there is the situation where the time for full-time academics on permanent contracts to do their research is created by using PhD students and precariously employed early career academics on fixed-term teach-only contracts, or hourly rate contracts, to do the teaching. There is an unacceptable dependency within the sector on a high level of exploitation of young and aspiring academics. Some of these criticisms were trending highly on twitter on the hashtag #REF2021. There were also criticisms connected to other problems with Higher Education in the UK, such as the gender pay gap and the still very raw spot for all academics in pre-1992 universities (i.e. the ones that weren’t formerly polytechnics) that we have had our pensions slashed for no good reason: the benefits have been significantly reduced and the accrual rate diminished.
For a variety of good reasons, therefore, there are a lot of academics – at whatever stage of their career – very angry with the system. Because of this – and because for some to win, many more have to lose – it is not generally the done thing for individual academics to promote the good REF results of their own institution (if they were good). It’s left to the various institutional and departmental social media accounts to flag achievements or spin the results. However, while I am cynical about the REF and the triumphal proclamation that Britain produces oodles of world-leading and first-class international research, there is also the case that for a number of people the difference between the department they work in being kept open or closed is dependant on these results, and for many more the continuation of their jobs is affected by the outcome on an individual level. Universities are currently looking to shed academic staff, so the stakes are high. As someone who works in a subject area in which we have been officially notified in the past that we will all receive redundancy letters (and then been reprieved at the eleventh hour because the financial calculations turned out to be incorrect), I am alive to this threat. Therefore, despite all the considerations above, I was pleased to see that my subject area had significantly improved its results on 2014. Of course, virtually everyone else had also done this but if we hadn’t improved then we would have plummeted down the rankings and therefore lost income, with the result that we would be more vulnerable. As it is, we are slightly better positioned than previously. What exactly that will mean in terms of income is not clear to me yet but given that we have been one of the most successful subjects in my university, I assume that we are not immediately in the firing line (but given the coming recession, who knows what will happen over the mid to longer term). To be clear, this doesn’t keep me awake at night (because of reasons I’ll explain in a minute) but it does worry many and creates a level of anxiety and tension throughout the sector – and some would say that the purpose of exercises like the REF, and metrical measures of performance, and micro-management of that performance, is precisely to induce this level of anxiety so that the workforce is more compliant and pressured into working long hours week in and week out (through the summer months as well as the teaching term time).
There is a further reason why I describe this at length and spent most of the morning looking at the figures, and talking on the phone to a colleague, and reading emails and the internal statements from my own university, and that is because until I was forced to stop due to ill health at the beginning of October 2020, I was the lead for the REF submission for my subject. ‘Why?’, you might ask. Well, because (a) I was being made to do some form of major role and this one was more interesting than the other ones on offer and (b) I really did think I could do a much better job than in 2014 when our submission was a complete dog’s dinner because the person in charge of it was all bluff and bluster (it was so bad that apparently it has featured in presentations on how not to do the REF). But from the point of being ill and having to relinquish the role (I was completely off work for three months and then had to make a phased return so there was no way I could continue), I’ve thought of the whole thing as being a monumental failure. Because the whole process is confidential, from that point on I knew absolutely no more about it until today and so I haven’t had any ‘closure’ on it. Reading the results was quite cathartic in that respect and gave me a chance to process the whole experience a bit more. This however was quite emotionally exhausting and so I went back to bed for a bit to lie down (and watch an incredibly slow and boring stage of the Giro d’Italia on the Global Cycling Network app on my phone).
A came home in the afternoon and after we talked about our various REFs, we had sex (#academiclife). I had a shower and drove into town in order to drop A off outside the opticians so that she could pick up some new glasses that were in for her. I parked the car so that she could drive back home and I walked back circuitously, along the seafront, getting a bit wet as a random shower swept in from Cardigan Bay. At home I cooked a pasta Bolognese for dinner for the three of us and then took a mug of tea out into the garden to sit on the perch (my seat half way up the garden) and read some of a book I have just been given for my birthday: Richard King’s newly-published Brittle with Relics: A History of Wales 1962-1997, an oral history covering the period from the beginning of ‘the extensive civil disobedience that eventually succeeded in ensuring that Wales is a now a visibly a bilingual country’ (as Richard Wyn Jones puts it in a recent Guardian article) to the point at which the devolution referendum was won. It’s a fascinating telling of a story not widely known outside of Wales and a testament to what non-violent direct action can achieve. It certainly contains a lot to think about for me, as someone currently reading and trying to write about the possible constitutional futures of an independent Wales and also still recovering from having failed to be elected as a town councillor for Plaid Cymru a week ago. (Standing in a ward I don’t live in, I wasn’t particularly expecting to be successful, but the experience was certainly interesting for reflecting on what I want and how that dovetails with the wider community).
Later, I wandered back indoors after feeding the rabbit, and was just sitting down to write some of this when my son reminded me that I needed to drive him to basketball at the leisure centre (which only reopened earlier this year after being requisitioned as a field hospital at the beginning of the pandemic). When I got back from this short trip, I checked my email and found out that I had been awarded research leave for the autumn term, which I experienced as another shock requiring ‘processing’. I had applied for this, but I wasn’t necessarily expecting to get it nor to hear until later. Obviously, I was delighted on the one hand because this is what I wanted, and it enables me to carry out some research plans (I have a defined programme to achieve) and also makes some other parts of my life easier for the rest of the year. On the other hand, I also feel slightly guilty, especially after feeling positive about our REF result earlier, for being doubly affirmed. I’ve had some bad times with (Covid-related) postviral fatigue syndrome (PVS) over the past couple of years and at the point when writing a three-line email sent me back to bed for the rest of the day, I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to do research and writing again. It really does knock your confidence (and this is why I haven’t been losing sleep over the fate of the HE sector, because I’ve been too busy worrying if I’m going to make it through the next week, day, hour without further ‘post-exertional malaise’). So, as I say, I feel affirmed in the face of what has been a monumental, dogged struggle to recover as much as possible. Yet, I’m participating in the zero-sum game of HE winners and losers, when it would be better if we had a completely different system that was universal and inclusive. It doesn’t get any easier to square that circle. I used to take the view that education was a straightforward public good but now I increasingly think that it has been reconfigured ideologically in the UK to trap people in a neoliberal system of deadlines, assessments, metrics etc.
Therefore (after picking up my son again from his basketball), I assuaged my guilt by completing my tweet thread on fiction representing or responding to the General Strike of 1926 [2025 Edit: this no longer exists because I shut down that twitter account], which lasted nine days from the 4th to the 12th of May. To mark the 96th anniversary of the Strike, I have been tweeting on each of the nine days on a book or books that fit this category. This has turned out to be a bigger undertaking than I originally envisaged and led to an extremely long tweet thread overall, which led me to some useful thoughts that I hope to expand on in the future. I managed to get the last tweet of the thread off at 23:58 and then went to bed.
In MO’s call for day diaries this year it says that ‘reflections … on how you felt while keeping the diary are welcome’, while last year the call noted that ‘Diaries can record 12th May and reflect back over the past year and look forward to the future and life beyond this year.’ I think that now these two functions have become completely combined so that 12 May is for me the day that I reflect on my life. This is partly due to the fact that MO is important to me personally and also because 12 May is only a few days after my birthday. Moreover, given that I now have 12 May diaries for 2010, 2020, and 2021, it is very easy for me to make direct comparisons and this in turn forms part of an ongoing project exploring self-reflexivity in general and my own self-reflexivity in practice (see my 2019 blogpost for the British Academy and find brief details of the upcoming extension of the project here). The downside of that I suppose is that this is no longer entirely a normal day, but nonetheless it still includes normal things such as the school routine and having to do work. On the other hand, the significance of the day also seems to be taking on a self-fulfilling prophecy. That 12 May this year coincided with both the REF results and news of my upcoming research leave lends itself to reflection on past and future (and also puts a rosier complexion on things than would otherwise be the case).
Looking at last year’s day diary for #12May 21 in comparison to the one for #12May20, I was clearly happier because I knew what was wrong with me (PVS), I seemed to be slowly getting better, and I was envisaging things to look forward to. In some ways that was correct because I had a good summer, I went down to part-time hours in September 2021 as I had planned and things were going well. By October, I felt the best I had since before the pandemic and was commuting in to work again and thinking it is all going to work out … Then on the train home one week in mid-October, I started feeling ill and that was that. I think that was Covid again. Neither A nor I tested positive for either lateral flow or PCR but our son did at that time. I certainly had classic symptoms (this is a joke because the symptoms seem to change all the time and now include any kind of indicator of bad health whatsoever): I was coughing so continuously I couldn’t sleep for several nights. I got over it, struggled on for a bit but then I had a further bout of ‘post-exertional malaise’ which left me off work for the rest of the term, and then working the spring term from home on medical advice. Getting through to Easter was a real struggle, but I took leave for 3 weeks to ensure I had a proper rest, and since then I have been feeling better. I’m hoping I feel good over the summer like last year [Nov 2022 Edit: in fact, I had Covid again in July] but this time I hope it continues through to the end of the year and I don’t get set back again by some nasty virus.
Looking back at last year, I was still preoccupied with Covid restrictions and how they were impacting life. They are clearly impacting much less this year – as they have mostly been removed – and so there is less need to speculate about how they are going to play out over the coming months. There is still some need in respect to work because of the continued mixed messages we receive. On the one hand, we now get a regular blog from the executive committee (whoever they are) and about the last five have all been very heavily about how great it is to be back in in-person meetings (hint, hint), and various messages have seeped down that everything is supposed to be on campus now. On the other hand, we also have been reminded quite strongly that there are supposed to be no more than two people in an office at one time, which inhibits any attempt to pretend things are normal. All these kinds of things were being said last summer before the beginning of the 21/22 academic year, but when I first made my 450 mile round trip commute to work last September, I spent most of the trip sitting on my bed in the hotel room with my laptop on my lap in online meetings because that was all that was going on and I couldn’t access them from the PC in my office (eventually, like most of my colleagues, I had to buy my own usb camera in order to zoom from the office). We’re being told that teaching is being expected to be in person but at the same time we’re asked to fill in forms detailing details of how students can access material both in person and remotely. So, there’s no consistency. This past year we ended up being made to provide a hybrid delivery although that wasn’t staff preference at all (partly, because there is limited technical support for this). Again, this forthcoming year, we (staff in my subject area) would very much prefer to teach in person with no simultaneous hybrid access (but with access to recordings and other support for students unable to attend). But I’m not holding my breadth on that. Also, I wouldn’t rule out the return of some form of Covid restrictions as rates will inevitably increase in the autumn. However, as I’m not actually teaching this autumn, I don’t have to factor in these considerations when thinking about the rest of the year. I think for many people, out-of-control inflation, the ‘cost-of-living crisis’, and social instability are going to be bigger problems going forward.
I must say that have reflected on these matters, I feel better about, and more in control of, my life. That is the value of this kind of life writing: it’s not just recording a day in the life once a year for posterity, it’s also a beneficial form of practice in itself. If things aren’t going well, it’s often tempting to try not to think about it and keep one’s head down, but I don’t think that’s a good long-term strategy. If I have to confront reality, then the advantage of writing about it is that it gives me a chance to regain some control over my own narrative.
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