Glasgow University’s Dave Featherstone has written the editorial to an important and impressive multi-voice consideration of the challenges facing those working in higher education. Featherstone’s piece introduces the latest (double) issue of Soundings, the ‘journal of politics and culture’ produced by the radical independent publishers Lawrence Wishart. It brings together a dozen high-quality pieces on different aspects of the crisis resulting from the effects of neoliberalism on university life, learning and culture.
Articles cover the ‘unprecedented wave of industrial action’ by lecturers and other university staff since 2018, including a substantial interview with two University and College Union (UCU) activists on ‘negotiating national and local activism’; a reflective piece by the journal’s founding editor Michael Rustin on what ‘a democratic university’ would look like, in contrast to today’s reality (and Rustin’s contribution is complemented by a German author’s perspective on the same theme); and the ways that the combination of ‘professed policies of widening participation’ and the ‘marketisation of the sector’ has resulted in unreasonable pressures and expectations being put on early-career academics from ‘non-traditional backgrounds’ (the managerial terminology which they are subjected to seems to combine a liberal rhetoric of inclusion with the whiff of disdain, but this remarkable article by Fatema Khatun, Gary Poynton and Josh Evans details how they nevertheless provide ‘hallways to learning’ and create ‘brave spaces’ for the students to whom they are committed).
The way these articles combine detailed, granular description with bracing critical analysis is exemplified in a fascinating and upsetting article by Johnathan S Davies and Adam Standring. It tracks and analyses their experiences of academic life at De Montfort University, Leicester, where both have been involved in the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity. This impressive intellectual caucus combined excellent research and teaching practice with the development of understandings which drew on ‘various traditions of anti-capitalist thinking’ – and was at the same time successful in attracting grants, funding and ‘ticking the right boxes’: the authors wryly reflect that ‘as researchers showing austere liberalism to be an eminently resistible dogma, we were nevertheless good neoliberal citizens’. CURA in due course ‘fell from grace’: together with Dave Featherston’s editorial and two other articles, Davies and Standring’s account is available open-access by clicking here.
Overall, the new issue of Soundings shows how a journal committed to both urgent activism and considered theory can offer an in-depth and up-to-date exploration of a pressing matter, here providing a case study of how neoliberal dynamics have dramatically mis-shaped a particular sector. Ways should be found to put this issue into the hands of large numbers of UCU activists and other academics who are up against the pressures of marketisation and precarity.
Perhaps resourced by the comradeship and stimulation of being a member of the Soundings editorial collective, Featherstone maintains some optimism about what higher education could and should be even in the face of all the negative developments discussed by the journal’s contributors: ‘at present the crisis appears to be entrenched, but the sustained resistance and opposition of the past five years points to the existence of pressures from below that have the potential to shape different futures for universities, and those who work and learn in them’.
Published November 2023.