On Redundancy

Four weeks ago, the university that I have been working at for 9 years announced massive, unjustified, reckless job cuts, predominantly targeting the humanities, arts and social sciences. This came completely out of the blue, and with an inhumanly rushed timeframe designed to push people out before term starts, pressured by fear and wilful cruelty into taking voluntary severance before the axe starts swinging. At a point in the year when academics are just beginning to take a breath, turn to research, hell, maybe take a holiday, this news crashed down on us with violent brutality.

I’m not sure I can describe what I’ve been doing in these weeks. Partly engaging with the whirlwind of a fightback masterfully coordinated by our union branch and my brilliant, brilliant colleagues. Partly sitting in shock. Partly writing bits and pieces more or very much less connected to the actual day job. This is one of them. It is less a specific take-down of the unjustifiable nature of these cuts (financially, morally, pragmatically) and more a keening stream of words as I stand on the deck of a burning ship.

A question first, one that has been dancing behind my eyes for two years or more. How can I work in this environment when it is quite literally making me sick? The thing is, despite throwing up this morning (waking early, trying and failing to quieten the anxious uncertainty looping through my brain) – the thing is, I don’t want to stop working here; I want to teach the course I was planning to teach and write the article I was planning to write and progress my research project. This is why I am in knots. I do not know how to resolve these things.

Part of me wants to take the money and run, set up shop somewhere else, even if it isn’t in academia, even if it is just anything I can get, so that I can parent my two small children and not cry or throw up in front of them. How has it gotten to such a point that I can write that sentence? And so soon after the slow-dragging turmoil that preceded my last role being made redundant, not quite a year ago? I was given a life-raft in my current role and was so grateful to get it. I just didn’t dream it would splinter and catch quite so soon.

Our bodies are on the front line, our children or loved ones are there too. Once again, a colleague stands up and asks how a job that continually asks us to choose between our work and our health, our work and our families, can turn around and wage war on us, and then expect those left injured on the field to keep working those passion-hours? Does the institution truly not realise that only our passion and goodwill have kept the ship afloat, as management boot holes in the deck? Forgive the military metaphors, all at sea, I’m reaching for whatever I can right now.

The humanities, arts and social sciences are cheaper to run than their stem cousins; most of the time, we need only the radical space of the classroom, though with annual timetabling chaos even this seems a large ask. In any case, we don’t need big labs and lots of equipment, aren’t often big on GPUs, but still we have been under sustained attack across the board.

Are we attacked because we offer critique? Maybe. I wonder if it is less intentional than that, perhaps we are attacked because we are anomalous. We do not fit into the narrative (ironically); we do not fit into the dominant model of production, of quantity and bluster, and we have been breaking ourselves apart as we tried.

Perhaps in some ways these are one and the same thing: our presence is a critique of a world order that prioritises compliance and profit, and so speed and efficiency. We are awkward, an irritant. Their double-think sets us up to fail, and now they are pushing at such extremes a true lack of comprehension is laid bare: what do you mean, 28 people in a seminar is not a seminar; why wouldn’t research excellence continue without research leave; what do you mean 3 hours is not enough to write a lecture? We have AI now, it writes their emails and ‘comms’, why not a lecture? Our target for ‘Business and Industry’ income has doubled – passive tense intended – we do not know who picks the numbers from the air against which we are seen to fail. Teach, research, diversify, tick every box, tighten and mark and meet the numbers on the spreadsheet and when you falter, you fall.

Humanities scholarship fundamentally does not fit with this metric-chasing, and that is why so many of us are burnt out. Don’t get me wrong, we have been excelling, we have been producing, but we have been shut out from the corridors of power, and those left judging our worth have little understanding and less interest in what it is we do. And so, all around us the terrific achievements of our colleagues seem only to raise the bar – it doesn’t take a stem mindset to see the logical conclusion here. We have fallen for their rhetoric of excellence, not realising it was a trick, and we have given our health and our families at its altar. Not willingly, but incrementally, and as we have aged, as our parents have aged, as we birthed and fed and mothered and fathered, what it asks of us has only increased. We need space to think, and with no space but constant pressure we become ill. We cannot do this work without more space, and as we say this, their answer rings back: do not do it, then. There are more to take your place, and we never wanted you anyway.

So, where now? To rise, to unionise, of course these are and always have been our best fighting chance, and work is underway. To imagine an alternative; to have radical, implausible hope. The moments of courage and pride I have felt in the midst of this unfeeling chaos have come from the outrageously impressive work of our union and my departmental colleagues, and what hope I have comes wholesale from them. Can we reach for something else, too? Something that tells you it is not your fault or your failing but rather that you are working in a hostile system. That you are not and never could be redundant. That gives you permission to give yourself grace, to put your needs and your health and your family first, whatever that means. If there is (for now, if we hold to hope) no safety, then at least the illusion that giving ever more will save us is, perhaps, broken.