The Academic Diary
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This is a pre-print accepted manuscript version of the original title from Goldsmiths Press http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/ The Academic Diary By Les Back 1 This is a pre-print accepted manuscript version of the original title from Goldsmiths Press http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/ Contents Introduction: where this book came from and how to read it Autumn semester: 10th September Graduation 17th September Letter to a New Student 27th September Ratology 15th September Everyone has a teacher story 28th September Students Not Suspects 7th October Open Day 12th October Stuart Hall Lessons 25th October Teaching 31st October The Uses of Literacy Today 5th November Death by PowerPoint 8th November The Value in Academic Writing 20th November Research Expenses 27th November Extra Curricular 29th November College Green 3rd December Meeting John Berger 10th December Class Mobility 17th December Bourdieu Behind Bars 29th December New Year’s Honours Spring Semester; 16th January Remembering Paul 18th January Recognition 10th January Holding the Fort 5th February Academic Uses and Abuses of Twitter 12th February Generosity as a Strategy for Survival 26th February Professionals and Amateurs 7th March Reading and Remembering 10th March Campus Watch 15th March Writing Routines and the Torture of Starting 21st March That Special Pen 1st April Viral Warning 10th April Ivory Towers 16th April Conference Etiquette 19th April Academic Rights 27th April The Devil You Know 2nd May Supervision 9th May Thinking together 2 This is a pre-print accepted manuscript version of the original title from Goldsmiths Press http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/ 16th May The Doublethink of Open Access 20th May Against Intellectual Suicide The Summer: 7th June Silence Please - Exam in Progress 9th June The Exam Board 14th June On the Occasion of Retirement 20th June The Writer's Desk 30th June Writing and Scholastic Style 4th July The PhD Viva 19th August "And what do you do for a living...?" 24 July Primo Levi's House 31st August Lost Notebook Tips, Leads and Follow Ups 3 This is a pre-print accepted manuscript version of the original title from Goldsmiths Press http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/ Introduction: where this book came from and how to read it An academic diary provides the time frame of university life: it also gives it a storyline. Early September marks the beginning of another year. Jay Parini writes says that academic life is renewed with the fall of autumn leaves: “shredding the previous year’s failures and tossing them out of the window like so much confetti.” It is a time to plan the year ahead. As Malcolm Bradbury put it in his seventies campus novel The History Man: “Now it is autumn again; the people are coming back. The recess of summer is over… things seem to be happening; back from Corfu and Sete, Positano and Leningrad, the people are parking their cars and campers in their drives, and opening their diaries…” The academic calendar re-starts when, as Bradbury describes, “intelligent people survey the autumn world, and liberal and radical hackles rise, and fresh faces are about… the sun shines fitfully, and the telephone rings.” Written in the form of a chronicle, this diary is comprised of a series of short essays. Each reflects the seasons of faculty existence located within what Elaine Showalter calls ‘academic time’. It isn’t a specific year but rather the accumulation of twenty years of reflection on the university and scholarship as both student and teacher presented as a single year. Each of the entries falls within what we might call the seasons of the academic vocation. Organised into three main seasons - autumn, spring and summer – the book tries to chronicle a sense of passing but repeated time. To the outsider, the cloistered world of the university can seem full of eccentricity and intrigue. For the uninitiated newcomer, campus life seems governed by absurd invisible protocols and mysterious unwritten rules. The diary aims to demystify them. The diary starts in September with graduation– the New Year’s Eve of academic life – a time when the fruits of university education are brought to life through the successes of our students. For a university teacher, the period before teaching starts is a period of anxious expectation. For faculty, before the beginning of teaching there is real academic excitement but also a tight-chested dread. They know the intensity of the teaching term is exhausting and by the eighth week they will be saying to their colleagues “just holding on for the end of term.” As the promises of September wane and the hopefulness of graduation fades, entries segue way into the wintery seriousness of topics focused on the autumn semester. Each entry addresses an important issue, ranging from teaching and advice to new students to widening participation initiatives and the professional ethics of anonymous peer-reviewing. Spring is a time when changes are afoot and when academic plots are hatched. Richard Russo writes “April is the month of heightened paranoia for academics… Whatever dirt will be done to us is always planned in April.” For this reason the entries in this section focus on the intrigues of academic life from issues like intellectual recognition, peer reviewing and the auditing of academic value. The spring is when the serious work of teaching is done and when students have to complete assessments. It’s also a time when students can run into difficulties as the serious business of revision, 4 This is a pre-print accepted manuscript version of the original title from Goldsmiths Press http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/ dissertation completion and the summer exams starts to loom on the horizon. Easter is also ‘conference season’ and when papers are given its possible to meet one’s intellectual heroes and adversaries. All these issues are treated in entries for this period. Summer is the denouement of the academic year. This section of the diary covers revision, invigilation, the stresses of marking and the annual exam board. It is also the period when PhDs have to be completed and vivas planned. By mid-July the academic cycle enters the languid pursuits of late summer when books are authored, articles written and holidays taken. The academic diary provides the annual cycle of intellectual life but it is also a navigation device, a compass ensuring – as a far as possible – that we are in the right place (meetings, lectures, seminars) at the right time. I also hope that the reflections offered in the pages that follow are useful in a similar way, orienting the reader in relation to the choices and values of higher education. It does not aspire to the dreary instrumentalism of a ‘how to succeed in academia’ self-help book. Entries aim to entertain but also to explore intellectual craft from techniques in lecturing, how to supervise PhD students, the challenges of developing one’s own writing style, balancing campus responsibilities with engaged research, dealing with the colleagues who constantly ‘name drop’ or exploring what happens when you meet writers you admire. At the same time, the diary offers a commentary on the quality of higher education and its relationship to the wider world. In these small tales of campus life a larger argument is made for the value of thinking and why university education still matters. Why write a book in the form of an academic diary? Isn’t it a bit old fashioned in the age of the iPad to bother with a diary? Maybe so. But in a way, the diary symbolises something ancient and profound about the rhythm and content of an intellectual vocation. As I assembled these stories written over two decades ago, clear seasonal patterns started to emerge. So the diary became a device to signal the tasks we fill up our diaries with as well as the tempo of times ranging from frantic busyness to quiet reflection. Apart from seeming a bit anachronistic, the diary form has another potential weakness. Clifford Geertz commented that a diary is always in danger of feeding an appetite for salaciousness, personal secrets and the confessional. This he called the ‘diary disease’ and while this diary is a reflection about academic life, I hope it isn’t infected with the malaise that Geertz diagnoses so ably. My intention was never to write some kind of campus exposé. It is not intended either as an exercise in ‘professional impression management’ which conveys tiring self-importance or an ‘advertisement for myself’ to use Norman Mailer’s telling phase. I have tried to write about small experiences that connect to larger issues relating to the ethics and conduct of intellectual life. I want to explain some of the practical and stylistic reasons why the book takes this form. Between 2003 and 2005 I wrote a regular column for the university teacher’s union magazine AUTlook. It was initially a real challenge to write something of interest to academics on a regular basis across the range of disciplines. I stumbled on a method drawing from my training in anthropology. In her book Killing Thinking Mary Evans 5 This is a pre-print accepted manuscript version of the original title from Goldsmiths Press http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/ writes: “Academic life has become subject to a degree of bureaucratic control which needs urgent anthropological investigation as a new form of social life and universities would repay the investigation of trained ethnographers.” I began keeping a ‘field diary,’ although one with a somewhat broader focus than is outlined here. Each column would begin with a small incident that had actually happened and a larger argument would be drawn out from it about current issues relating to the life of the university.