I quit! Why I am leaving UK academia

And the above observations are precisely the same reasons I took early retirement age 56 back in 2010. I can tell you the exact day our University broke. It was the day an order came from on high that exam marks for a course must average 50% for the class, and you had better come up with a pretty good reason if the average deviated significantly from 50%. Says it all in my opinion.

It's the loading of straw onto the back of the camel: increase clerical tasks for academics, increase administrative and bureaucratic tasks, reduce control over standards, changing systems without consultation, introduction of terrible software that actually makes work harder not easier, TEF, REF, performance monitoring, and the endless nagging. Daily communications up from one or two memos a day to 30 emails. The right wing politicians state that for there to be increased pay there must be increased productivity. Well, the productivity has increased massively - and pay has been cut by c.16% in real terms. The camel's back is in danger of serious injury.

....and in addition to this there is the painful disrespect and mistrust of administrators of academics. No one is trusted to be competent do his/her work - and it will end exactly so. Don't overestimate the situation in Germany though - they are on the same path with maybe a 5 year delay. At least at the moment as an academic you still have a bit to say in what happens in the department.

Absolutely true - it's high time someone wrote this. Every academic I work with feels the same and it's becoming a joke. Best of luck in your new post - I don't blame you at all!

I am mindful of a dated publication titled Warwick University Ltd, 'is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasing authoritarian efficiency, intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management?' I have yet to see the efficiency, instead a marvelous capacity for waste. Perhaps it time for a sequel, The Russell Group Inc?

Yes UK universities have sadly become captured by a bureaucracy that takes away all the increased productivity of the academics and researchers. Lecture sizes are bigger, student numbers are massively bigger, academic staff have grown a bit but bureaucracy has increased massively. Too much quality control on Research and Teaching quality - control by overpaid bureaucrats - you bring in research money and it mostly disappears in "overheads". Do not get me wrong there are some excellent course officers and people doing great administrative jobs in UK universities but there is an awful lot of overpaid good for nothing managers that often give themselves high pay while doing there very best to devise systems and controls to restrict the pay of academics and "underlings" that are doing excellent work.

Not just HE of course, everything: the rest of education, health, social services, the judiciary, the police, are any of our public systems not doing so? Job creation in this respect is as liable to lead to national impoverishment rather than prosperity. The state apparatus is suffocating itself with the social and economic equivalent of grey goo.

It all traces back to the spurious notion that 'Government must be run like a business'. Sadly many in the general public believe this bit of verisimilitudinous neoliberal mental detritus. The reality is that government in a democracy is fundamentally NOT like a business, nor should public institutions such as universities, state funded schools and the NHS be run like businesses, either. Business is based on custom -- you get services based on income -- while the public sector is based on rights, benefits and obligations of citizenship -- regardless of income. Money is a terrible way to allocate distribution of public goods since the market doesn't care how one accumulated his or her money. Working as a nurse or working as a mafia hitman -- doesn't matter. If you have the money, you get the service. I am optimistic it will change, however. A great die-off of older populist conservatives is beginning as the demographic curve begins to work against them, weakening the power of their cynical upper class manipulators. All of this can be reversed by a single, determined, progressive majority government. It happened once, then was reversed, and can happen again. Don't give up.

Having joined academia after a career in industry, I am shocked on an almost daily basis about the ludicrous amount of paperwork. A few years ago I looked at how I spent my time - approx 10 hours of admin (including sitting in pointless meetings) for every hour spent teaching, creating materials for students, research, tutoring etc. It's got much worse since then. Most academics spend their evenings and weekends answering the never-ending stream of emails that demand this or that form be filled in. This work could easily be done by the ever-increasing number of admin staff. But no, these folk seem to exist to demand more admin from academics, not to support academic staff and leave them free to do what they were actually hired to do in the first place. I, too, am seeing vast swathes of enormously experienced, respected and talented people take 'early retirement', pushed out by the relentless drudgery and the preference for bright young things (aka cheaper employees), with no industry experience . Like other posters I have seen the massive pressure to give higher and higher marks. Where once a First would have been given to only the truly exceptional, now it is seen as appropriate for the averagely good. It has become almost impossible for a student to fail, even if they never bother turning up, and even then, that is seen as the fault of the academic who has to produce endless reports on how they will do better to engage these students who don't attend in the first place. I, too, am truly fearful as to where it will end. I would be joining the rats leaving the sinking ship if I could afford to, but wage stagnation and rising retirement ages means I'll be writing thousands of words each day to fill out forms that help no-ne for the forseeable future

We use terms like neoliberalism and neo-managerialism to describe what's taking place in HE (and the public sector, NHS, schools, even the C of E). But I have a better term - Tyranny. One last heave-ho for The Good Old Cause, anybody?

Absolutely spot on. Our unversity is proudly run as a business with students being customers. I do not know where the money from the increasing number of students goes as most of us have not had an increment for years let alone promotion. Admin load is beyond ridiculous and behind all of the streamlining, scaffolding, engaging with stakeholders, looking forward and embrasing the opportunities there is a handful of overworked staff trying to deliver education and research despite the best attempts of the management. When they leave, the remaining buerocrats can continue giving themselves professorships and prizes and salary increase and congratulate themselves on the kobwell done...