Lost it with academia

[purplepandas]

It can't be just me. I have totally lost it with academia. It's not the students (although I won't get started on unit evaluations) but the management and wider structures. I feel so jaded and demoralised. Hard to get out for various reasons with similar pay but if this is it, I am not sure how much longer I can last.

I’m closer than you but will be older before I get to write that letter. I plan it in my head too.

Solidarity to you all from across the pond!

Just to add, while my physical sciences colleagues tend not to be 'down with the kids' a significant fraction of them are still self-centered bellends.

I'm currently getting to grips with a major admin role (one of the joys of being a senior woman in a male dominated department...) while dealing with various personal crises. And this is being made far more stressful than necessary by other people not doing their jobs properly, for no particular reason other than 'being busy' (aren't we all...).

I’m mentoring a couple of recent grads who are desperate for a job in academia. I help them but can’t help also thinking I’m really harming them.

Oh I identify so hard with the two of you. Except for the gender nonsense - for some miraculous reason (perhaps because no one in my department works on gender) we've avoided the worst of it, although some of the very conventionally-presenting middle-age males have started adding he/him or he/they pronouns to their signatures.
Like you @NilPwa my day-to-day issues have to do more with close colleagues rather than with management. Which makes me feel kind of awkward, because I know full well that there are systemic issues and maybe people are partly pushed into behaving like d*cks by these structural conditions. For example, it is not university management, by any long shot, which brandishes the threat of "there will be job cuts" to keep us in line, but rather colleagues in my own department who in order to advocate for more resources and staff going to their teaching and research specialisms will say things like other areas of research (like my own) are "dead on the ground" and continuing them is a sure ticket to job cuts.

Talking of over-sharing and identity politics in academia, apparently "queers" in academia need a pay rise because being queer is itself a form of labour: https://wagesagainstinclusion.wordpress.com/

Well, they certainly do seem like hard work.

I'm so fucking done with this ridiculous sector.

The authors are based in the UK and the language/cultural references are entirely British yet they talk about "spousal hires" which is a purely American thing?
"Nordic model advocates" are privileged?
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Spousal hires happen in the UK too. I know of many married couples in the same department - very unlikely the spouse got the job on merit. Hell of a coincidence if so.

My DP's department definitely does spousal hires - 42 members of staff with 4 couples, used to be five. So 8/42 people in his department are in a couple - nearly 20%.

What I meant is that in the US a spousal hire can explicitly be (but happenss increasingly less often) part of the package a university offers to a newly appointed candidate. I doubt that in the UK it can be spelt out as such, for non-discrimination reasons, although no doubt it will happen unofficially.

I have posted this on another thread where It gained no traction. I thought you all might be more inclined to opine on It.

The reason that they have been allowed to get away with withdrawing so many resources is that a substantial percentage of academics are "uncle toms", servile to the master and backbitting and horrible to their equals or who they view as their inferiors. I have often wondered if I was seeing the same person when they interacted with a boss, a previously gruff and totally offish person was transformed into a model of congeniality.In that type of situation, the uncle Tom will escalate his performance, aka brown-nosing, while, of course, looking for any opportunity to downgrade a colleague. If there was more solidarity in academia, It would be far more difficult to introduce these measures. The late, great David Graeber analyses this issues very well here
publicanthropologist.cmi.no/2017/10/11/academic-politics-of-silencing/#david-graeber.

interesting observation!

i work with the human equivalent to hyenas - backbiting bunch of awful people with egos the size of little planets, and expectations that the world/uni would crumble without the gift of their input.

They surely do. I recently retired, but my previous school had two married couples in it.

Graeber’s comments are really illuminating, and applicable to a lot of behaviour I have seen. Behaviour like this is a large reason why I retired. I’d had about enough of it.

That's interesting. I actually see the opposite from many of my colleagues - people who are unnecessarily and disproportionately adversarial towards anybody remotely perceived as 'management'. It's not just unprofessional but embarrassing, and has damaged my Department's reputation across the University.
I'm in a very heavily unionise social sciences department. I hate it.

Thanks for making me laugh and feel less irritated. My interest is in women in my subject (can't expand without identifying myself) I've been invited to a research grouping with colleagues exploring gender. I can't even cope with the titles of some of their papers. I don't see how gender identity and trans and NB identify has anything to do with what I am interested in.

I'm going to just not get involved I think. I genuinely don't know how I can have a meaningful discussion when their work just makes my head explode.

@Wallywobbles thank you for this info. In doing this course, were you able to build a portfolio of work, and was that portfolio a key part of marketing yourself as an instructional designer?

@bernice28 yes building a portfolio is part of it. Honestly the just asked me to prepare something that showed my thought process rather than any actual work. It was for an NGO.

I'm thinking of training as a coach - just wondering about the time/money investment and if it's a good fit - teaching being so different to coaching. Contract end looms and I could do with a change.