Continued from Sussex Stories 7
This is the 8th and final part of these Sussex Stories 1990-2024.
Zoom: COVID-19 and lockdowns
When COVID hit in 2020, VC (Vice Chancellor, university CEO) Tickell incredibly pushed on with face-to-face learning even though it was clear this was putting lives at risk. I don't know how he justified it. It was unbelievable. In my department one member of staff led the way in challenging this approach and many of us were starting to tell students they were welcome to stay away if they chose to when Tickell recanted and introduced distance learning.
For health reasons, I was allowed to teach completely online rather than in hybrid mode (a mix of face-to-face and distance-learning classes). I hate to say it, but in my narrow life lockdowns were, as for others, blissful for me, while tragedy unfolded all around us. I enjoyed the quiet life, the long walks through empty streets. With no people to watch while I was out and about, I started to see the urban art in Brighton that I hadn't really noticed that much before, and started photographing it and posting the photos online. I made bread, tried to find people who could do food deliveries, did Joe Wicks about 3 times, and my partner moved in.
My students that year were great, although many did not like the remote Zoom seminars. Students appeared at seminars from many time zones, in bed or in dressing gowns, with family members shouting or belching in the background. My cats appeared now and then behind me on camera. To the amusement of my students, my partner was heard shouting downstairs when a DIY project hit a problem during one of the seminars. One student wanted me to meet her dog and disappeared off to find him and bring him to the Zoom meeting. At one seminar a student appeared on camera in a deck chair at a garden barbecue, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and with a can of Fosters in his hand. When he disappeared to the toilet a random other person from the party temporarily took his place. At another seminar, I lost my internet connection and came back to be confronted with what seemed to be some sort of riotous anarchist takeover of the class. As things started to open up I met some of my students from the Alternative Societies course in person in a pub garden, after the course had finished. At least one turned out to be much taller than I had imagined.
Trans and decolonial issues
In the 2010s I began to notice more openly trans students. The Students' Union launched a campaign for gender-neutral toilets and non-binary pronouns were on the rise. A storm rose up around the Sussex philosopher Kathleen Stock because of her gender-critical views, seen as anti-trans, and some called for her to leave her employment. She then did exactly that. Tickell weighed in but paid a lot more attention to her freedom of speech (on the grounds that it was being threatened - in the end it raised her profile and gave her wider platforms for her views) than to trans rights and the experience of trans people at universities and generally in society. Staff who expressed opposing views to Stock got a beating in the media.
I didn't feel confident about covering sexuality and trans issues in my teaching and thought it was better not to, rather than to try to and do it badly. Decolonising the curriculum was another big issue in this period. I felt more comfortable about engaging with this area, and early on, before it caught on at staff level, I was invited to some student-organised meetings on the topic and I went along. I have always been committed to a more global approach and to covering North-South inequalities internationally. My globalisation course and book discussed these. My Ecology and Alternative Societies courses brought up decolonial perspectives.
Attendance
We moaned about student attendance at classes from my early years at Sussex. But in my final few years, problems with attendance took on a new shape and scale. In the early years I, like others, got drops in attendance in the last week or maybe two, especially the week before Christmas as students were weary and some had gone home. If you had a 9am class attendance could be a bit down, and if there had been a party or a student night at a club the night before it would be lower. But that was it really and the drops were from 80-90% attendance (with absences mostly due to illness) to maybe 60-70% usually and if you were really unlucky 50%. Looking back it wasn't that bad.
But in the last years I worked at Sussex a new phenomenon came along which was people stopping attending before the course had even started. The upside of this was that you could at least assume your own teaching was not the cause. These absentees never came from the start so did not have any experience of it. I started to find my attendance might be maybe 60-70% or so from the start and basically stay at that level. The end-of-term drops did not go down that much usually. Another thing that changed is that in my early days at Sussex I found lectures were generally better attended than seminars, but in later years that reversed. Presumably, some students were not attending lectures because they planned to listen to the lecture recordings that became more the norm in recent years. But then they did not get around to that.
This is one area where my semi-detachment from the university has meant I have not been in the discussions about this, other than the odd corridor conversation with a colleague. In such conversations, when I have complained about 50% attendance at a lecture that week I found myself talking to someone who had a 50-strong group and only 1 or 2 had turned up, or maybe even none. Lecturers across the UK started posting photos on social media with captions like 'My 50 student lecture this week' accompanying a picture of an empty room.
There has definitely been an element of students not attending because of paid work commitments. Many students have told me that is the problem for them, working more or less full-time and trying to fit their course in around that. Another possibility is that university is less an active choice than it was when I started lecturing, when the proportion of people who went to university was much lower and it was less an automatic next stage and more a consciously chosen one. Now as UK HE has expanded many students feel they have to go to university to get a degree and a good job but are not very committed to the course itself. One student emailed me in my last year to say that he felt student participation was being hit by current generations having been brought up on social media. People were used to commenting in one-liners but not with developed discussion, and in detached virtual fora and not face to face. The university seminar was not a natural forum for many students. And, of course, there was COVID. In my last year at Sussex my students had done their A levels on Zoom and face-to-face seminars took some adjusting to. Mental health problems have increased, not just, I think, more noted by better diagnosis and recording, but actually more incidences of them. This explains some absences. Some students find seminars or even lectures tough because of anxiety.
Poor attendance does affect grades. I have read essays where students miss the point and fail to engage with vital issues we discussed in the classes. The reason: they were not there. Their essays were poorer for this.
None of these explanations alone explain attendance problems. Even if you add them up I'm not sure they in sum account for attendance problems. But if you add them up and see the whole as more than the sum of the parts, this might go some way to explaining the low numbers. The factors add up and then that creates a new one which is a culture and normalisation of low attendance, a new extra dimension built out of and on the others. Non-attendance itself can be off-putting to students. Some of my students told me they were disillusioned by classes where many others did not attend and that put them off coming too.
When I started university teaching seminars were smaller, more cosy, informal, and personal. Relationships with students were less distant and formal. Now we have mass teaching. Increasingly huge impersonal cohort sizes, where student-student and tutor-student relations are more distant and alienating, must be a factor. There is less of a sense of a community of learning. With my longevity at universities maybe I have more of a sense of this contrast, compared to others who have only taught during the post-1990s era of mass higher education.
Some of my students report excruciating seminars where discussion is forced and there are long periods of quiet while the tutor tries to squeeze blood out of a stone. My seminars have never been like that, as much because of the kind of topics I teach as because of me. I have tried to teach in a way that follows the students' agenda as much as imposing mine which may help, but again my kind of course allows that more than others. Faced with a seminar with non-participation will be quite off-putting for students and a factor affecting attendance.
I never had a class with zero attendance, although I got close a couple of times. In my last year, I feared I would end my time at Sussex with a seminar with no students. I got through to my last week of teaching and approached the last class with trepidation, apprehensive I would end with such an experience. But 11 out of 22 turned up; 50%, not bad for the last class with an essay deadline looming. There was a lively and high-quality discussion. Thank you Alternative Societies 2024.
Sasha Roseneil: it was beautiful - the past revisited
In 2022 a new VC came along, Sasha Roseneil. She is a psychotherapist, sociologist, and expert on feminism. Her PhD was on the Greenham Common Peace Camp, which I visited soon after it started. This, in part, inspired me, at the tender age of 18 while a Students' Union President, to set up the Daws Hill Peace Camp in the early 1980s. It was in High Wycombe, outside a USAF air base which housed nuclear weapon launch controls. Roseneil is interested in non-conventional living arrangements, something we discuss on my Alternative Societies course when we cover communes.
On arriving she said that she sympathised with the Sussex anti-outsourcing movement of the Farthing years and recognised the importance of Sussex's interdisciplinary past, both of which I have discussed in these Sussex stories. Roseneil said she would re-insource facilities as much as possible initially. With those that have to be outsourced for now, it would be done on a more ethical procurement basis. Total Facilities Management was being dropped. Tickell had said he hadn't seen the case for the outsourcing. Now, Roseneil said she would do something about it. Sasha's statement linked to above meant a lot to me and others.
She also said she would introduce larger faculties, encompassing many departments and schools, that would allow the sort of cross-subsidies Farthing would not permit in the case of CCE (the Centre for Community Engagement), leading it to close. They would also, she said, allow more interdisciplinary research across departmental boundaries, of the sort the Alasdair Smith reforms had erected.
During the Gaza crisis, Sasha met the unions, staff and students, and said she would review investments, neither of which Farthing would have done, and possibly also not some other VCs in my time.
On paper and in principle, and leaving aside details, these are steps back to some traditions of the 'beautiful' past Sussex that I have discussed in previous parts of these Sussex Stories. They could also be steps to a better future. Changes that previous managements said were necessary and unavoidable were now said to be exactly not that. From a distance, it looks like a promising period of leadership just as I am moving on. I'll keep my critical hat on, just in case.
The Last Waltz
Over 2020-22 I made quite a lot of changes to my two courses on socialism and alternative societies to update them. I was enjoying the courses and the students were great. However, I felt I was losing my passion for teaching. I was 40 years older than most of my students and was feeling a bit out of touch. I began to think about retiring. I thought I'd rather leave on a high while I was still enjoying it and doing what I thought was a reasonably good job than hang around too long until I had really just had enough. There had been some voluntary redundancy schemes but they came too early for me. I wasn't yet ready. I thought about calling it a day in 2023 but my pension would increase a lot if I held out until my 60th birthday in summer 2024. At the start of the 2023-4 year, I wasn't that enthused at the prospect of teaching. But I had great groups and in the end thoroughly enjoyed the year. Nevertheless, by early 2024 I knew it was time to go, so I told the department not to offer my courses as options for the next year.
On Thursday 2 May 2024 I taught my last university seminar after 34 years as a lecturer, all at Sussex. It was, appropriately, on the topic of slow society, on my module on Alternative Societies. At the end of the seminar, one student asked whether the course would run next year and I said no. He looked dismayed. I hadn't meant to bring it up but I said it was because I was retiring. There were lots of smiles and thanks as they left and that was that. I didn't mention to the group that this was actually my last ever class and I don't think (quite reasonably) it occurred to them it was. It was a great group and we had nice discussions. I enjoyed it and it ended on a nice note (for me at least). I went home, drank a can of beer, and fell asleep on the settee.
When I joined Sociology at Sussex in 1990 there were 10 academic staff in the department. I was the youngest by about 15 years. 4 are no longer with us. The others are long since retired. I am the last of that group to call it a day. By the end of my time at Sussex I was by far the longest standing member of the department and the second oldest. Sociology has become Sociology and Criminology. There are about 30 staff, many young. More than a third arrived during my 5 semi-detached years of just teaching two classes a week and consequently I have never met most of them. Those I have met are friendly and I like them. Some are active in the union. I'm leaving it to them. Meanwhile, I'll hang out with the grandchildren, read some books, and work on my blog. I'll keep an eye on things from afar.
Previous post Sussex Stories 7
This is the last in these posts on Sussex Stories 1990-2024. For the introduction and contents see here.