Malcolm Gaskill, On Quitting Academia
Malcolm Gaskill, On Quitting
Academia
This week’s edition of The London
Review of Books has a long piece by Malcolm Gaskill analysing his decision last
May to take voluntary redundancy from the University of East Anglia and to
leave the academic world.[1]
It is partly a personal story about his journey from doctoral research in
Cambridge to a temporary lectureship in history at Keele University, the
completion of his Ph.D. and, in due course, his arrival at UEA in 2007 where he
became a Professor four years later. On this journey, there were moments of
excitement, of intellectual revelation, of articles and books being published,
of attendance at conferences and seminars, the supervision of postgraduates and
so on. Then, two years ago, came a turning point, the failure to win an
important research grant, two articles being submitted and rejected, one of
them on what seemed to him unsound grounds. It was an awakening: he had lost
faith in his career and decided, after much introspection, to leave his
profession.
But there were more than personal
reasons behind his decision. He has an engaging discussion of the changes
brought into university life by the tightening bureaucratic controls of the
1990s. Older, more informal forms of contacts between teachers and students
withered away: accountants and administrators, executive committees and
management teams have taken over.
Rankings matter, marketing slogans are vital, income from fees have become
critical. Some universities, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned, may
not survive. Covid-19 means profound changes, at least in the short term, to
students’ experiences of higher education.
Many of Gaskill’s colleagues
sympathised. Some had investigated whether they could retire themselves while
others agreed that they had lost their sense of enjoyment. They were
under-paid, over-worked and disenchanted with the bureaucratic apparatus of
their institutions.
I have a lot of sympathy for
Malcolm Gaskill’s views. I hope that he will not be lost to the discipline of
history and that he will write and publish for many years to come. It may well
be that, as one highly distinguished historian said to me a couple of years
ago, that history as a subject in the U.K.’s university sector will decline and
die. Its future may, indeed, lie in the exploitation of the resources of the
internet, in on-line periodicals, conferences and seminars, in the historical
equivalents of ‘Philosophy Bites’ run by Nigel Warburton. Ironically, if this
comes to pass, the adoption of distance teaching methods by universities in the
present pandemic crisis, will have brought such an outcome closer.
[1]
Malcolm Gaskill, On Quitting Academia (London Review of Books. Volume 42,
No.18. 24th September, 2020)
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