Being an academic is great, so start enjoying yourself

“Critically, the senior leadership of universities are academics.” Unfortunately, this is often not the case. It may be so in ICL and other good universities, but elsewhere we find failed academics and career bureaucrats causing demoralization and waste. It is part of the irony of much of British HE that ‘academic leaders’ are not academic (i.e. active in research and teaching).

Hear hear to the previous comment. And the article's emphasis on personal happiness and well-being risks a deeply conservative quietism. Personally, I'm committed to making my job as liveable and as benign vis-a-vis my mental health as possible. But politically the changes to Higher Education over the last few decades cannot but make me deeply unhappy. And involvement in the administration of my department only adds to the distress, making clear the extent of the capitulation of top-level university management to quite unthinking neo-liberal pieties.

This may be true if you have a permanent job in Higher Education. If you are one of those trying to work on temporary contracts, or "soft" grant money, then the rose-tinted glasses come off very quickly. For those of us without permanent positions, well, we have a pretty miserable time. And in many places we are now the majority.

Glad that some are starry eyed enough to believe that there will be jobs in UK universities for those whose jobs are cut. Try telling that to folk at York, Nottingham, Ulster or Leicester. Or perhaps they can all get jobs as cost cutters or Professors of Philistine studies?

Deeply problematic, presumptive and non-reflexive. After 15 years in industry and 3 now in academics, interacting with educational institutions across 3 continents, I can already see the academy increasingly as an extension of the corporation, most fundamentally with respect to ideology. Anyone with reasonable exposure to the corporation can point to the the tenuousness of job surveys. Also "and stops academics from doing stupid things in the name of research.... help us recruit better staff and fix the stuff that we break." Who decides "stupid", "better" and "break"?