I have found myself the last two weeks reflecting daily/hourly on what is happening across Higher Education. A lack of sleep provides quiet hours in the early mornings to reflect back on the constraints and pressures everyone has experienced over the last two years. I’m aware that a range of voices fill this complex landscape – all viewing events from their own perspectives and standpoints.

It’s not an easy time to lead an institution. Having previously served in a management role (9 Years), I’m aware of the hard and difficult decisions that oftentimes need to be made at local levels. The decisions being made currently feel much more serious for the sector, particularly as we navigate our educational values and ideals within a landscape that is driven by a neoliberal market economy and where there is a lack of proper funding for higher education.

 

At the same time as recognising these challenges in leadership, I took part in a union rally this week at the Scottish Parliament with my colleagues across five universities, as we all feared compulsory redundancies and at the same time felt significant grief due to the severe cuts to a range of programmes across the Humanities. These were generally peaceful events. There was much support for one another. It brought us together into shared spaces to talk through our biggest anxieties, our collective anger, and the recognition of the toll the last two to three years has had on morale and any kind of sense of hope for the future of our educational specialist areas. This too was a valuable space to try to understand what is happening to the sector and to our institution - and at the same time wonder how decisions will be made about individual jobs.

 

While tensions can run high during such times, I became acutely aware of how inflammatory language was used across the media to either describe leadership, those of us on the ground, or the students whom we teach. I observed my own horror as I watched TV screens and read social media news outlets at the use of individual people’s names being used as the lightning rod for UK wide institutional anger and the perceived management failures across Higher Education - where names were publicized to wide audiences using damning and at times hate filled language. We have seen the impact of this kind of individual publicity across social media just recently in the case of Jason Arday, where intense public shaming took place and had a devastating effect. As higher education seeks to find a new way of being, I’m deeply uncomfortable with the use of individual names being used to spectacularise narratives of outrage and to carry the deep-seated anger felt by so many. Their names, rather than the issues, become marketable in newspapers and the humanity of the actual person can disappear from our view. Media and activities can become a ‘machinery of cruelty’ that seeks to hold up individuals as a public spectacle or to divide staff and students. There are other more humane ways of holding someone to account and the relentless use of division, public shaming and humiliation has a human cost that we often don’t see.

 

It raises questions for us in terms of how we raise questions around the deep injustices that are felt at structural levels. Compassion and recognition of our shared humanity is essential. However, at the same time, who will help us to hold this collective grief and anger? Who will help us to express and act in order to address the impact the cuts to certain programmes will have on students, society, the environment, teachers, children and young people in school settings – the reason for such colleactive grief and anger?