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I've had 2 absolutely cracking seminars today and yesterday with first year students, and they got me thinking.
Forgive me, this isn't a teaching thread, it's about union elections. Forces trying to deny my students an arts education, and I am standing for the NEC to fight that.
Forgive me, this isn't a teaching thread, it's about union elections. Forces trying to deny my students an arts education, and I am standing for the NEC to fight that.
This isn't hyperbole, it's happening across the country. Redundancies and restructures are targeting the arts and humanities, taking a hammer to programmes like mine, making disingenuous claims about what we do and how little it matters.
The majority of students I teach are first in their family to go to university, and it is a pernicious attitude from a century ago that says they do not deserve to interrogate past cultures and present medias and they should learn to code instead (nothing wrong with coding).
It reminds me of what has always been said about the poor in past societies, they must work (but only certain jobs!), they must remain in their place (both culturally and economically), and they must defer to their betters.
Don't get above yourself, studying culture like that.
Don't get above yourself, studying culture like that.
The fact that university management has not only bowed to this imperative but actively embraced it is a betrayal of current generations of students so enormous its outlines are hard to see. Their narrow interest in government financial support and grace and favour blinds them.
The grim necessity of these financial constraints, many carefully massaged so as to appear like the only real considerations, are exactly the sort of pabulum that was peddled centuries ago, and I train students to *see it for what it is*.
I train up historians and citizens and they train me too. That this so happens to also produce some of the most adaptable and innovative workers across many sectors is no accident. The data here has NEVER shown 'less value' in a humanities education. It never will.
I am 100% running for this reason among others, I'm not just running for the #UCUNEC South to protect staff and working conditions. I'm doing it explicitly for my students too. I share that vision with @UCUCommons, we're seeing the shape of the 'new normal', and it is grim.
