TEF ‘is about much more than teaching’

I'm not sure why this article only reports on the men who spoke. Miriam David and I made contributions. For the record, here'a summary of what I said written with Rhiannon Firth, one of the event's organisers. I based my talk on my own positioning as someone who used to be an employed academic, but who has left academia, or rather, as I then corrected herself, has now become a ‘differently-employed’ academic. I suggested that institutionalisation is a kind of addiction. I described how, since leaving university employment and becoming freelance, I have become much more involved in politics, indicating a synergy between these two shifts. I argued that institutions, including through metrics and performance measures like the TEF and REF, shape and structure our lives and impact on the individuals within them to the extent that their perceptions of time, shape, space and possibility are entirely altered. Citing Deborah Talbot, I argued that employment at universities resembles a kind of Stockholm syndrome, whereby someone develops empathy with and seeks validation for and through their captor. I ended by saying that we need to think about and act against the ways in which we are captured, trapped and limited by the brutality of universities and other institutions.

I agree with the poster above. Why did the THE ignore the contributions of Prof. Miriam David and Dr Heather Mendick (both inspiring academics, by the way) to this event? While this may seem like a random decision, I have noticed the same pattern in other articles.