Hell hath no fury like an academic suspended

Hell hath no fury like a professional de-professionalised by ambitious managerial neoliberal corporate robotic order followers. The bitten bite back. But does the public actually care a jot? No. And so the tyranny of rules and ever new target setting goes on. That is how corporations work. And our universities are corporations now. It is a very new phenomenon that many of our aggrieved academics really do feel they have lost their profession and now just have jobs. How that will play out remains to be seen.

Vice chancellors who suspend staff, impose ‘voluntary’ redundancies, and/or close departments should be dropped from Universities UK, and named in the Higher. The refusal of the Higher to list such universities is a craven surrender to the world of senior management, failed BP staff do not deserve such protection. Every student has the right to know quite how badly their university is run, how many staff are on zero hours contracts, and how many departments have been closed.

Of course I sympathise with your predicament and can appreciate how angry and bitter you must feel about how you have been treated. However, I have to say that my own experience of academia is one where more often than not academics are not held to account for their poor behaviour, whether that is poor supervision of PhDs, bullying of support staff or selectively ignoring rules which are put in place to make sure it's not just who you know. These are a minority, of course and I don't doubt that there is also a minority of trigger happy senior managers but there are definitely circumstances I know of where academic staff have been protected to the detriment of their students and others.

"But these days, I just have a job – and one that I don’t really want any more." "I'm going to hold onto it, even though I don't want it" sounds like a dog in the manger.