EXPOSING ACADEMIA
Survival of the dimmest: Secret Lecturer exposes reality of university life
British institutions are ‘ruthless corporations’ riddled with grade inflation and plagiarism, according to an anonymous writer lifting the lid on academia
May 5 2024, The Times
Angst-ridden students, dinosaur colleagues, overwhelming bureaucracy and wasteful corporate schemes are unpicked in a book written by an exasperated, anonymous academic.
He bemoans low levels of welfare support for students, their expectations of first-class degrees, plagiarism, the use of AI, and the impossibility of anyone failing their course.
The book is the latest in a genre that lifts the lid on various professions and echoes the irritations that plague characters in the campus novels of David Lodge and Kingsley Amis. However, some issues are more modern: mental health, transgender rights, social-media-fuelled conspiracy theories and trigger warnings.
“The UK public seem to think a university lecturer is a lazy, sherry-swigging stereotype out of a 1970s campus novel,” the academic writes. “Perceptions of students are frozen in the 1980s — idle, undernourished wimps à la Neil from the BBC sitcom The Young Ones or like his housemates Rick (naïvely militant blowhard) or Vyvyan (shouty, intoxicated hooligan).
“Many of the students I teach are well-behaved, eat healthily and aren’t uniformly obsessed with getting smashed. Some of them even vote Conservative.”
But he adds: “A more disturbing development is the epidemic of mental illness among students and staff. Legions of lecturers are overworked and underpaid and on casual contracts. Academic standards are slowly being obliterated, though that has more to do with financing than with a slide into ‘wokery’.”
Of accusations from politicians that campuses have become hotbeds of statue-toppling woke “snowflakes”, he writes: “Spend a fraction of time inside a university and you’ll rapidly discover they are ruthless corporations. Nothing screams ‘Watch out for those pinko tofu-snorting PC apparatchiks!’ quite like doing millions of pounds’ worth of business with arms dealers, fossil fuel companies and foreign dictatorships — or swiftly promoting colleagues who deny climate change and defend extra-judicial killing.”
Many in universities sway with the wind over controversies such as trans rights, he says. “Many of the academics I know are latter-day Vicars of Bray — or Groucho Marxes, for if the company they are in at any one time doesn’t like their principles, they’ll change theirs. Rather than leading thought, they genuflect to the prevailing intellectual and ideological winds.”
Trigger warnings are rife and “it’s hard to anticipate what might upset any given student at any given time.
“Reacting to a hypersensitive climate and the risk of knee-jerk reactions on social media, lecturers in other institutions have taken certain books and films off the syllabus because they represent slavery, sexual assault and suicide. But a representation of something terrible is not a moral validation of it — quite the contrary.
We’re back to that dilemma of needing to protect the welfare of students but also requiring them to recognise that the world is nasty, unfair and violent — and that a good deal of great art reflects that.”
On attempts to appear diverse, he describes meetings to discuss photos in a marketing brochure. “Most committee members believe that the more diverse the faces you put in such material, the pleasanter people will be to each other.
“Images of a ‘post-racial’ Shangri-La only conceal — and may even perpetuate — a reality that is anything but. If nothing else, first-year students will be mightily miffed when they get here and discover that we are not a rainbow nation of neurodiverse Nepalese lesbians linking hands and dancing with Bedouin transmen and Orthodox Jewish dwarves.”
Students are now seen as “customers we can’t afford to upset”, resulting in a surge in higher grades, non-attendance, abusive behaviour and plagiarism, he writes.
“Hardly anyone ever fails no matter how badly they perform … Plagiarism has gone untraceable. And now, spotting it is even tougher thanks to apps like ChatGPT that will generate a serviceable essay from a few typed commands. There’s been a record amount of plagiarism.”
During one outbreak of plagiarism: “We question five suspects in turn. Even without duress, two of the students confess and break down in tears. They all give mental distress as a motive/reason/excuse.
“The fallout won’t necessarily be negative. We tell our guilty students that they have failed this module. But they’ll get the chance to re-submit work in the summer and pass the year that way. Nobody is allowed to fail.”
Many are awarded first class degrees: on one course, 67 per cent of students. “No way are two thirds of them that smart. I read in our staff bulletin that the same course has been named best of its kind in the country, based on the votes of those same students — any chance whatsoever that grade inflation is a wheeze to ensure that students like us lecturers enough to give us positive feedback?
“Decisions to close departments have been based on such feedback — I dread to think how many lecturers have been fired because they were too honest to bribe students with over-generous marks.”
He describes a colleague as an “unapologetic grade-inflater, awarding firsts to submissions that are as coherent as Shane MacGowan after a four-day bender”.
The author held two seminars in a row attended by no one and said that mental-health problems left some students like “lost souls”, treated impersonally as customers but not valued ones, with “jaded lecturers, long waiting lists for services, extortionate halls of residence and sub-optimal workspaces”.
Bureaucracy is draining. The endless meetings include one setting the timeline for future meetings. He also experiences jargon about strategies, a new university logo that “looks like a 1970s cigarette brand” but cost £1.5 million, slowness, buck-passing and “jobsworthery” that would “impress the staff of a co-operative tractor factory in 1930s Moscow”.
Of management, he says: “The further up the university hierarchy you look, the thicker people get. It’s like a parody of Darwinian selection — survival of the dimmest.”