You have to wonder where the Riverhouse Rat gets his barking ideas. His latest wheeze is twofold: staff will have to work in an open plan office, and home working is to be banned. And while these changes are being introduced, academic staff are expected to do more research (somewhere amongst the teaching, the administration, caring for the students so they don’t leave for a better university …)
So what will working on research be like in the new dispensation? I am reliably informed that research is actually quite hard to do and tends to need long periods of concentration. Some people might just find it easy to concentrate deeply when surrounded by other people tapping away at their computers, talking to each other, answering phones (walking past on their way to find somewhere private to talk), answering student queries, and all the many other busy things academics do during the working day at the office. But can staff really think or read a detailed academic source with all that going on? Can a musician compose a piece of music surrounded by extraneous noise, or study a work of musicology? Can a pharmacist write up a complex analysis? Can a mathematician work on difficult equations? Can an English lecturer appraise a dissertation, study a poem, write a learned essay without peace and quiet and time alone? Can any academic sit and gaze through the window, alone with their thoughts without interruption or a “space walking” VC looking out for someone not working?
Writing in the Guardian, Jeremy Paxman thinks that “the open-plan office tells us precisely what our bosses think of us – that we are employed to fulfil a mechanical task and that we are all interchangeable.” Of course we already know what our boss thinks of us — sackings and demotions gave that away some time ago, all part of his attempt to undermine us, harm us, and make it impossible to do our jobs well. Now he wants to corral us into a great enclosure with lines of desks and computers.
Of all the mad, demoralising schemes the Dear Leader has dreamt up, this has to be up there with the worst. We at Dissenter’s Blog can just see him up there on his podium at the head of the great open plan office, surveying all the academic proles as they try and do the impossible. Staff are no longer trusted to work unwatched, despite the long hours they put in. So research, if it gets done at all, will happen more in the evenings and weekends, assuming the exhausted staff can tolerate the extra stress. Sounds like a perfect recipe for staff ill health and the slow decline of the University. You’d think that was the Rat’s intention.