I’ve just had my first zoom meeting with Paul Higgs and Joanna Moncrieff from UCL. It was a poor substitute for our weekly coffees on Wednesdays in Tottenham Court Road but very welcome nonetheless. I even coped with the technology, having resolutely refused to engage in academic events via zoom for the past year or so. But I was reminded not only by this mode of communication but by the exchanges Paul, Jo and I had that the academic domain or ‘field’ has changed so very much since I was appointed to my first research job in 1972.
My first half-time lectureship a Charing Cross HMS allowed me a substantial amount of autonomy. I assumed that this was entirely okay, indeed proper and desirable, as long as I delivered my teaching and on other aspects of the job, like undertaking research and publishing. I had one or two salient ‘discussions’ with my head of department, Steve Hirsch (a psychiatrist), but emerged unscathed. He once asked me to keep a diary because he didn’t know what I did day-to-day. A touch cheekily I replied that I didn’t know what he did either, so I’d keep a diary if he did too. In retrospect I was lucky: he grinned and the diary was not mentioned again. The point of recalling this incident is to say that even then, in calmer and less frenetic times, it was important not to be put on the back foot. A second example of modest rebellion arose years later when I was told by another head of department, Rachel Rosser (also a psychiatrist), that if I didn’t buck my ideas up I had no future in her department. Her ire was based on a misunderstanding: she thought I hadn’t completed a task when in fact it was the secretary who was remiss, and I obviously wasn’t going to land the secretary in trouble. My response was: ‘you can’t intimidate me Rachel. Sod off!’ She slammed my door, didn’t talk to me for two weeks, then grinned as we passed in the corridor and all was ok. Again, I confess I was fortunate, but I want to underline the importance of refusing to be bullied as it’s now called. And yes, I readily agree that it’s much tougher in the contemporary context of generalised precarity with so many temporary, short-term contracts. But nevertheless …
These clashes were minimal. For the most part I was left to my own devices, as long as I delivered. So what of ‘delivering’? The bar was certainly lower in terms of productivity. As I recounted in an earlier episode of this ‘sociological autobiography’ I had one publication when I landed the Charing Cross post. Nobody blinked either when I took eleven years to complete my Ph.D (my supervisor, George Brown, was very supportive, and in my own defence I did plenty of other things during that period). The teaching was challenging in that medical students back in the 1970s were not enamoured of sociology, nor encouraged to be by many of our colleagues in the ‘pre-clinical’ or basic medical sciences. In fact I always found clinicians more receptive, not least when I was confronted with tricky but natural and sensible questions like: ‘so what implications does all this have for how I practice?’ In fact I enjoyed teaching undergrads, as I always have: you can actually witness minds opening up (occasionally). The medical students who took a year out to study sociology were exceptional, extremely clever and committed, a pure delight to teach! My early research studies on living with epilepsy as a potentially stigmatising condition (the fuel for my Ph.D), and a later study of women’s perceptions of menstrual symptoms (subsequently, and fortunately, taken over and completed by Annette after my pilot investigation), involved hard work and the odd negotiation with supervisors and senior colleagues, but were relatively trouble-free. Despite focusing later of social theory, I actually always enjoyed empirical research and have missed not being more involved personally.
I worked hard in those early days but was on the whole granted extensive autonomy. I spend a lot of time wandering up and down Charing Cross Road perusing the bookshops and drafting texts – with biro and notebook – in cafes. I did this too with my laptop in the 21st century, but was much more conscious of managers with alternative views of time well spent. Steve Hirsch had been okay, John Hinton relaxed, and while Rachel Rosser was a tad more hands on, Stan Newman and Graham Hart left me pretty much alone, while Patrick Vallance, a lab-based medic sandwiched between Stan and Graham, had no idea what I was about or for. The point to make here is that time to think is vital in academia (and elsewhere too I’m sure). If people’s time to think is closed down, as it undoubtedly has been during the span of my career, this is counter-productive. It is a paradox therefore that people’s time to think is being foreshortened and patrolled in the name of increased productivity.
I am often asked to give references with regard to job applications or bids for promotion. Nowadays I’m struck by how much more ‘productive’ colleagues are than I have been. So many peer-reviewed papers in leading journals! A word of caution is called for however. What surely matters is what one has to say, not how often one says things in well-regarded places. And there’s the rub. I often ask myself what one’s output amounts to. I would not for a moment suggest that my own relatively low rate of productivity ‘amounts to’ more than my contemporaries’ relatively high rate of productivity; but there are questions to be asked here. It’s not just the old question of what you publish mattering more than where you publish it, there are other issues to interrogate. Have editors lost a willingness, or the capacity, to actually edit journals for example? Have they been cowed by a bureaucratisation/McDonaldisation of the publishing ‘industry’? Why is there so little innovation or creativity in our leading journals? There seems to be a growing tendency to play safe (which often amounts to supporting the status quo).
I spend much time with my colleagues in the London Medical Schools trying to achieve a degree of respectability for sociology teaching. Now it frequently seems that the cost of respectability, and not just in Medical Schools, can be very high indeed. It is why I have written about the taming of sociology. This process of taming, I fear, could proceed apace with the (understandable) precautions put in place to counter the threat of COVID. Back to meeting and teaching via zoom. Is this to become an intrinsic part of the new normal? After all it’s cheaper, which is going to appeal to senior managers of universities starved of monies by a government with its own ‘neoliberal’ agenda for higher education. I know from colleagues that this rude and rushed introduction to ‘distance learning’ has been extremely hard work. Is it the future?
I’m a fortunate babyboomer (though I insist this is about class rather than generation). Would I enter higher education now? Probably, though I recognise it’s a different ball game. But then, I’ve always worked hard and being an academic in the 1970s wasn’t as easy as some might think. To more precariously-placed colleagues in contemporary sociology I would say, fight for time to think; fight back against senior management when you can; look for outlets outside of journals (maybe blogs etc); and resist being tamed. If too many in our community of sociologists are tamed, it all becomes a pointless, even collaborationist, enterprise.