As regular readers of this blog will know, my life during university term time can get somewhat hectic. In various states of play, at any one time I can be holding down six different jobs: I teach part time at a mainstream university and at the Open University; tutor in a residential college of a university; work in a university library; write reports for a major research institute; and do a bit of publicity work for my department. With all these cards in play, during the term time my six or seven day working week can easily equate to the 60 hours of this blog title.

The price I pay for this game of life is that I don't have much of one (a life, that is) outside of work during term times. The other price is that I have been unable to keep up with my research. I have a number of projects and papers that I might be working on, not least being editing my thesis for a book proposal, since I am unlikely to get a full-time academic post without that first publication. However, these all go on hold until the Summer.

With the vacation, my formal working hours drop to less than ten a week, with even these being done from home as and when I want. This time last year, I had grand plans for what I would do with all this spare time. I started on a leisurely little paper on empathy in Ian McEwan's Atonement, until I realised that to discuss empathy and the novel was to open a mass of existing research that I had never known existed, and that would need to be read before I could hope to do justice to my incidental ideas. Instead, I wrote a couple of book reviews. I built myself a jazzy website for my academic teaching the coming year. I filled in numerous job application forms. And then, towards September, when I was appointed to my Open University post, I found myself busy doing all the preliminary reading and administration for this new course.

Largely, though, time dripped through this fragile web of productive work. Bike rides, sorting the garden, painting the house, reading for pleasure, sprucing up The Pequod - all became reasons not to work as much as I might. I justified this to myself on the basis that, having only passed my PhD viva in April, I merited a bit of a break from four years of graft. And, of course, I could not possibly bear to do any more work on my thesis or put together a book proposal when I had so recently waved goodbye to my academic child. That could wait until next year.

Next year has now become this year, last Summer has morphed into this Summer. Over the past teaching year, in what time I could spare of my 60 busy hours, I hatched plans for research that I would definitely do in these comparatively lazy days, especially with regards to my thesis. The only trouble is, I can foresee this Summer passing me by again. Partly, this is due to a couple of quite traumatic and unforeseeable personal circumstances, which have already eaten into the first six weeks of the vacation by forcing me to spend it away from home. However, I can see that, now that I am back at my desk, I will struggle to get the necessary motivation to make up for this lost time. Partly, the stress of term is still relatively close, and I feel resentful of doing intensive, unpaid research now, when I know that September will bring a return to poorly paid, time-consuming teaching. Do I not deserve to live life at a more normal pace for at least these three months?

Anyone in the real world would say "yes." But I am not naive enough to believe academia to resemble the real world. I fully understand and am prepared for the fact that it is a beyond full time job that one does for the pleasure of it rather than for the money. So where has that pleasure of research that motivated me through my PhD gone to? In part, I think I lack a research plan. There are no meetings with a supervisor to aim for; I cannot afford to attend and present at more than a couple of conferences a year. Without these signposts through the year that were present in my PhD life, it is hard to find a direction through the next three months.

This leads me to something of a vicious circle, as I feel I have lost my inspiration - something critical to a literary and intuitive subject such as English. In plugging away at my PhD research, I'd often encounter interesting but tangential ideas, books, connections that were worth following through with a paper or conference presentation. By the end, writing my thesis became a comparatively tedious exercise to fill the day, whilst it was the shorter research questions that were not really related to it that became more interesting to explore.

With my current plan not featuring anything long term as another thesis or book, however, I find myself doing the reverse: I will plug away at a few journal articles, but because these are self-contained it's hard to see how they can lead me in significantly new, unexpected and exciting directions. Without the daily grind of a longer research project, then, it becomes harder to get inspired to write impulsively in response to other things that interest me. The loop is closed, because without some moment of excitement that I have discovered an unanswered question, I'm not going to be able to construct any proposals for post-doctoral research. This is where, I suppose, this blog becomes a bit of a writer's lifeline, because I can at least write in response to things in the media and cultural sphere, even if not really "research"; my recent article on Inception, which somewhat fits with my critical interests, is an example of this kind of excuse against sustained academic endeavour.

What I need to do is that first year PhD student's trick of setting up a nice looking timetable. It may get thrown out of the window by the end of the first week - indeed, if it did not I would be disappointed: only boring research is predictable. However, it would at least place me under some sort of necessary pressure. When I reflect on how much I am able to do during the teaching year, juggling my various commitments, I realise that I am someone who thrives on a bit of stress, who needs to feel the pressure of a looming deadline (and there is no pressure like having to stand before a class on To the Lighthouse having only read it the week before) to work to my capacity. Probably, if I were primarily a writer, I would do better in journalism, with its incessant, nick-of-time deadlines, than in academia, with its organic research agendas.

But it is the latter in which I find myself, and so I need to discover a way to respond to the 60 hours of a teaching term not by frittering it away with zero hours during a research Summer, not by reacting angrily to the amount of work I have to do during term time, but by taking the same energy and motivation that allows me to survive - even sadistically enjoy - the teaching year, into these last three months of Summer.

Labels: teaching, time management, University Life

I've just received an interesting (currently unpublished) UCU report on Student : Staff ratios (SSRs). In the absence of detailed information about contact hours being built into league tables, the measure of the allocation of staff to students at universities (which is taken into account by most of the major university guides), is a vital indicator of teaching quality for prospective students.

However, currently SSRs are calculated using data provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. It is a raw measure of the number of staff employed to the number of students attending a given institution. What the UCU report did was to take a different data set (the Transparent Approach to Costing, which indicates the staff time spent on different activities). This shows that on average in the UK, academics spent 41% of their time on teaching, 24% on research, 3% on other activities, and 32% on administration.

However, far from being average, Higher Education contains a broad spectrum of institutions, from those which focus intensively on research, to those whose main emphasis is on teaching. Correspondingly, the report indicates wide variations in SSRs across different types of institutions when the TRAC data is used instead of the raw HESA measure of the number of staff employed. It also shows a substantial discrepancy between SSRs according to HESA statistics  (which are the numbers published in university guides) and SSRs according to TRAC, which takes into account how much time staff at each type of institution can dedicate to teaching.

For example, on average the top Russell Group universities had one staff member to around 11 students when using HESA statistics; however, after adjusting for the proportion of time allocated to teaching as opposed to research (the latter being intensive at this band of universities), the SSR rose to around 33 students to the teaching proportion of staff time. In predominantly teaching institutions, SSRs according to HESA data were around 19 students to each member of staff; using the refined TRAC data, SSRs rose by around a third to 33.

This is quite interesting, and puts some statistical flesh on a common hunch. Wealthy, research-intensive universities typically have a larger number of staff than smaller, teaching-intensive ones. This seems to be reflected in the HESA statistics, which support the general impression that the Russell group universities and their ilk are better all round, not only for research but for teaching too. Remember that the Russell group SSR on HESA data was 11 students per staff member, whilst at the smaller teaching institutions it was almost double this. However, naturally at Russell group universities a greater percentage of staff time will be allocated to research. This means that when the TRAC data is used, there is more parity between teaching and research-intensive institutions, both being around 33:1.

Especially at higher ranking institutions, students often complain that whilst their prospectuses showed leading researchers at their institutions, their actual contact time with the stellar names was more limited. This UCU report goes to show that students certainly need to be provided with more refined information about the actual  amount of contact they can expect to have with academic staff, rather than the raw number of staff employed at an institution. If you only ever see Professor X in his photo on the front of the prospectus, because his actual self is always off running research groups around the country, you have the right to be disappointed. This new information, then, also endorses one of my key findings in my Contact Hours Calculator, which is that the lack of transparency and accessibility of Higher Education statistics is woeful.

Labels: contact hours, staff student ratios, University Life

Just a quick word - I supposed the hip word would be "shout out" - for the Latitude Festival, where I found myself this time last weekend. For a young, alleged intellectual, such as myself, this has to be the best festival on the calendar, with its vast programme of artistic, theatrical and literary events, to complement a really good music line-up. Just to illustrate, I know of no other festival where one can go from eating lunch whilst watching Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake on a beautiful stage suspended above water, to seeing Julie Birchall (who was a little disappointing and inarticulate, a bit like the silly schoolgirl who suddenly finds herself on the debating team), to releasing one's inner child of the '90s by jumping to James.

Other highlights included seeing Tom Jones (just to say I've done it); a brilliant Belle and Sebastian set, in which they played some old favourites and a great cover of Jumping Jack Flash, rather than doing their usual trick of sticking to esoteric tracks that only the most cultish of fans will know; listening to the tremendously entertaining Jane Bussman, a celebrity journalist with a moral heart and wicked sense of humour; realising that poetry is not dead after all as I applauded the hip-hop and poetry act of the Dead Poets; and emerging from Vampire Weekend's great headline act to chill out in the film tent with a haunting documentary about the decline of the Thames docks.

Sadly, Latitude will have grabbed the headlines because of two rapes. Largely, though, this was the friendliest festival I have been to, with none of the rampaging teenagers that blight Leeds/Reading, and more depth to its music acts than the mainstream V festivals. Of course, it is peaceful because it is utterly middle class. In this country park in rural Suffolk, I listened to Swan Lake with a hummus wrap in one hand, whilst the man next to me read The Times beneath his straw hat.

Labels: Latitude festival, music

I've just posted up my review-cum-essay of Christopher Nolan's new film, Inception. In in it, I focus on the way in which it closely references other Hollywood movies in its representation of dreams. By this, it uncannily blurs the boundaries between dreams and reality, fiction and truth, for the cinema audience.

"Clearly, Inception is a highly accomplished movie - for a Summer blockbuster. No one can possibly be so dulled to the dazzle of special effects and stellar cast, and the fast-paced action sequences, not to appreciate it at some level. The question that Nolan's unusually intelligent thriller wants us to ask of it, however, is whether this is a good, thought-provoking film by any standards, not just Hollywood's own seasonal one." Continue reading this essay on Inception.

Labels: Christopher Nolan, film, Inception

Just posted a short review of Donella H. Meadow's posthumously published introduction to systems theory, entitled Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Check out the full review here.

Labels: systems theory, thinking in systems

I'm picking up on this potential policy shift quite late, as I have been away at the Latitude festival over the weekend (more on this in the next blog post). However, based on my arguments on this blog and in my tuition fees and contact hours calculator, it should not come as a surprise to learn that I am a supporter of Vince Cable's proposal retrospectively to tax university graduates, rather than requiring them to pay for their tuition fees up front via student loans.

Aside from the question of whether tuition fees and graduate loans deter working-class students from university, there are two inequalities built into the current model whereby student loans are repaid whilst working. The first is that, in effect, the student loan has an interest rate applied to it. Although the interest rate is linked to the inflation rate, and therefore is supposed not to represent a real-terms increase, in practice salaries do not automatically increase with inflation, which means that lower earners will find it difficult to pay off the capital on the loan, instead merely paying off the annual interest. Connected with this problem, the student loan does not discriminate between those on larger incomes who work for the private sector, and those who opt to work for generally lower salaries in the public or charity sector. Because of the inflation interest rate, those who take their publicly-subsidised education into public sector work may well pay disproportionately more for their tuition than those who use their education for their own or private financial interest.

This is something that is not recognised by the old mantra that graduates earn on average £100 000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates, which seems at first glance to justify blanket payback for public education. The flaw here is in the focus on averages. Average salaries in the UK are around £24 000, and it might be reasonable to assume that graduates will be more likely to earn at or above this average than non-graduates. However, the median income is only around £20 000. About two thirds of people in the UK earn less than the average income. A comparatively few high-earners skew the figures; since graduates will comprise a significant proportion of those mega-earners, the idea that the average graduate earns £100 000 more than a non-graduate is probably also flawed. As more and more people attend university, the average graduate is not the city banker, but the moderately paid teacher, journalist, accountant, sales rep, engineer. These are more akin to the average school leaver who works their way up the career ladder.

However, the student loans model does not take into account what actual earnings are, because it is predicated on the assumption that all graduates will earn more than the average non-graduate. This is where a model of repayment linked to actual incomes is inherently fairer. I have no problem with the notion that graduates should pay some additional contributions towards their university education. Although in an ideal world the government would have a holistic vision about the benefits of greater education for all, and hence would provide universal and free university education, I recognise that especially in the current economic climate, such a vision is utopian and untenable. I can also see that tuition fees have successfully funded the expansion of higher education, although I retain many qualms about whether they deter the type of lower-class student who should be the very first in the queue for the education that will enable social mobility.

Where I do have a problem, though, is in disproportionately penalising those who work in public vocations on lower salaries. As Cable has argued, the graduate tax should help to reduce this unfairness: "if you're a school teacher or a youth worker you pay the same amount as if you were a surgeon or a highly-paid commercial lawyer. I think most people would think that's unfair."

Labels: graduate tax, tuition fees, University Life

The news this morning reports that North West water companies are to instigate a hosepipe ban from this coming Friday. Staying in Manchester at the moment, it is not surprising that they have had to resort to this measure for the first time in fourteen years. Coming across on the M62, more concrete than water is visible along the giant Scammonden Dam that runs parallel to the motorway. And, yesterday, we walked up from Dovestone reservoir to Chew reservoir higher up the valley.


Normally, this high up on an open moor, the reservoir should be full, sending a torrent of water down the great glacial grind of a valley to the larger Dovestone below. As it is, one could easily step across what is now little more than a stream. The sides of the reservoir reveal black slime and plastic bottles; plastic bags, now dried out, flutter in the breeze. This is the region's driest start to the year since 1929. Later on the walk, we have to cut across open moorland to reach another path. The peat - a great carbon sink - has the texture of dry sand, and is unbound by the sparse patches of dry grass; we send up whorls and miniature storms as we step across in our anxious walking boots.

Labels: Environment, water shortage

At the Lowry Gallery in Salford, where L.S. Lowry's "favourites" are laid out, it is clear just how much artistic range this wry observer had.

From the "grotesques" of his late phase (including the horrible "Man with Red Eyes"), to some early Impressionistic paintings inspired by art teacher Adolphe Valette, Lowry was about far more than the industrial landscapes imposing upon minute, semi-human figures that now grace a thousand posters.

In an excellent short film, it becomes clear that key to Lowry's art was his relationship with his mother, who took to bed after the premature death of his father and then thereafter "dominated by her frailty." Lowry's industrial landscapes, as well as his grotesque portraits and scenes (such as "The Cripples"), project his own lonely anxieties that he would never be capable of pleasing the one woman with whom Lowry (described by peers as asexual) had a significant relationship.

Partly with this knowledge in hand, and partly because they were inspired by his vacations in two places with which I am very familiar - Sunderland in the North East, and Lytham-St.-Annes in Lancashire - I am most moved by Lowry's sea paintings that became prominent towards the end of his career.


These are haunting in their bleakness, Turneresque but without the cathartic drama of the sky; they embody an especial sense of absence or lack because they are by an artist most renowned for his depiction of crowds of characters in urban settings. Perhaps the most intimate of all his pictures is this one, entitled "Self Portrait":


In the exhibition video, that large pillar thrusting out of the sea is, unsurprisingly, described as an "erection." The loneliness of the sexual battle depicted here is baffling but also somehow stoical, and intimately revealing.

Rather whimsically, though, I begin to wonder whether as well as an artist exploring his own trauma through projecting it onto any subject that came to hand - cityscapes, portraits of grotesque characters, seascapes - Lowry might also be seen as an environmental artist. Lowry once remarked, rather intriguingly, about his later fascination with the sea:

It's the battle of life - the turbulence of the sea...I have been fond of the sea all my life, how wonderful it is, yet how terrible it is. But I often think...what if it suddenly changed its mind and didn't turn the tide? And came straight on? If it didn't stay and came on and on and on and on ...That would be the end of it all.

With quotes like this from the end of his career, Lowry seems to have rehearsed in miniature the history of climate change. This man who started off painting the grime of industrial Manchester concludes with a turn to nature; it could be ironically said that not only the repressed of his mother comes back to haunt those lonely, sexualised sea paintings, but the repressed of pollution does too. What if the sea did - or does - come on, and on, and on? Might that black pillar in "Self Portrait" represent some kind of urban as well as personal apocalypse, a Cleopatra's needle in a flooded London?

Of course, this is all my daft meanderings - but that I can have them at all does serve to indicate that Lowry is certainly not a monodimensional artist of the city, but presents a vision that stretches and ranges far beyond his most famous industrial subject matter, provoking the viewer in ways he might not expect.

Labels: Lowry, Photography and Art, seascapes

I am currently reading my way through Dracula, one of those innumerable books that I should have read long ago (especially since my research concerns the gothic!) but have somehow never got around too, until now, when the kindly summer break from teaching gives me some precious time to read what I want to read. I don't have the energy or inspiration to string together any coherent thoughts, but here are a few jottings of interest:

• The novel seems quite deeply misogynistic, with women playing the role of passive beauties, as if from some pre-Raphaelite painting: pale, delicate, teary-eyed. They are victims of Dracula himself, but subject also to the passions of the men who seek to protect them. Lucy is particular evidence of this, literally sleepwalking into her seduction, with her three different lovers failing to save her by giving their blood (the sexual metaphor is barely concealed). Mina Harker, initially seeming more empowered with her intelligence and charisma, also fades out of the narrative as the men seek to prevent her from pursuing the vampire further - although at least she is allowed full knowledge of the demonic forces at work upon her. 
• Equally biased is its presentation of the lower classes, who are almost invariably drunk, or need the incentive of drink in order to divulge crucial information to the middle class doctors and solicitors who are the novel's heroes. Stoker does, however, clearly attempt to render dialect accurately: the Yorkshire conversations are almost illegible, whilst one can hear the Cockney in the London passages.
• In many ways, the construction of the text is its most interesting aspect, like Frankenstein it being comprised of a tissue of different sources (journals, recordings, letters and telegrams) that offer slightly different perspectives on events. Unlike Frankenstein, though, it is hard to detect any real difference between the journals and reports of the distinct characters. Mina, Seward, Harker all possess rational voices, trustworthily objective and strangely reliable in their recounting of events in great detail. This seems to artificially contrast with the voice of Van Helsing, a sort of nineteenth-century Yoda, with an affected tendency to invert his sentence structure, and use strange, faux-theological metaphors.
• Also of interest is the novel's close engagement with contemporary science. Technological developments, such as the telegraph and phonograph, as well as the railway, play an important part in the plot (the pacing of the plot would, indeed, be impossible without these devices of quick communication). The theories of Charcot and hypnosis also feature prominently. 
• Against this modern instinct, is a conservative Catholicism. The text is explicit in presenting Dracula as opposed to God, and the full paraphernalia of Catholic ritual is brought to bear against him: indulgences, the Host, crucifixes. Renfield's mantra "the blood is the life" is intoned liturgically throughout the novel.

All the above are, implicitly or obviously, criticisms that I - without researching or thinking about the novel more deeply - might level at it. Closer investigation might well add some nuance to my off-the-cuff notes above.

However, it remains to be said that in spite of the numerous loopholes and artifices in the plot (how convenient that Harker encounters Dracula at his castle, whilst his wife Mina is the first to encounter him in Whitby when he moves to England), it is undoubtedly thrilling. The use of letters and journals creates a delicious dramatic irony, as the reader can see the explanations falling into place before the characters can; we are the analogues for the impressive intellect of Van Helsing, the only other one to perceive the truth the moment Lucy is attacked in England. However, probably the most effective part of the novel is Harker's first journal; his sense of bewilderment as he is locked in Dracula's castle - in spite of the modern reader's familiarity with vampires and the name that is synonymous with them - is palpable.

Labels: Bram Stoker, Dracula, English Literature