We value diversity and equality highly and therefore have designed these criteria to be fair and inclusive. [AP promotion criteria]
Principal Lecturers once again are dry in the mouth, victims of anxiety imposed by the University management and its unique brand of academic sadism. Once more they are being invited to fight for their survival as grade 10s through a demotion scheme that now looks like a thousand cracked mirrors, and every bit as unlucky; a school bully pushing a kid around while the others look timorously on.
So how does it work this time round? There are some small changes, none of which looks to be in the interests of the victims (applicants). Staff are to get “critical friends,” previous applicants who cleared the jump by, according to one, exaggerating their experience beyond credibility, which obviously impressed the incredible panel. These chums are supposed to help lick the applications into shape, all this to help applicants know what “good looks like.” If ever a phrase illuminated the arbitrariness of the whole business this is it. At least the dishonest “light touch” buzzword appears to have been dropped. More work has gone into these job-saving applications than for any real job.
But the most significant change is to the structure of the criteria which have been divided into must haves and might haves. This constricts the options for applicants; where before they could have satisfied several from the choices available, they now must meet exact criteria or fail again. Further, applicants must also have a KAPS award —fellow or senior fellow of the HEA. That plenty of APs do not meet this criteria is overlooked by devisers of the new scheme. Same goes for research. How can such demands be made by the research criteria when there are professors at the University who have barely a worthwhile research publication to their name? It makes no sense, nor is it meant to. It always was a means to harass staff out of their posts, a clearing of dead wood as The Rat no doubt sees it. Trouble is all the wood is dying now, infected with Ratty’s mycelium.