Teaching is a drag

 Teaching is a drag. When I first did one of these teaching philosophy statements, for the FHEA application my philosophy was all about teaching as an empowering and subversive activity, and I railed against edutainment. That was a decade ago. For the past eight years, the core of my teaching activity has been a second year module of over 300 students, the vast majority of whom do not really want to study the subject they’re forced to study (Social Policy). And we had a pandemic which moved everything online.

I hear a drag queen answer the question why drag is suddenly so much more popular. She explains how people have discovered how empowering it is to have another persona; someone who is brash and can go out into the world confidently; a mask to put on to slay. And I realise my teaching is drag. I’ve realised there’s nothing wrong with edutainment. If students do not want to be studying my modules, why make it a doubly boring experience for them. Make learning fun! Spend two years of online pandemic teaching lip-synching for your life every Friday; in the absence of teaching support assistants, employ two sock puppets to teach Scottish devolution! Develop a postgraduate module that is famous for a distinctly middle-aged, ten minute rant about the inability of my neighbours to use a waste bin correctly! Literally dress up to pre-record teaching materials!

Does this cheapen the learning experience? It might do. Every year I get one or two students who think I’m not taking it seriously and I’m patronising them. But this is outweighed by the students who end up loving the subject because I make it interesting and fun. But in putting on my teaching drag, like a drag artist, I can reveal aspects of my true self, including my sexual identity, in a way that makes me vulnerable, but on my own terms. It enables me to “queer” the boundary of my self as an academic and my self as a queer, “39” year-old man who quite likes ABBA and Taylor Swift. This produces a deeper empathy with an otherwise anonymous group of students. It enables students to feel open about their sexual and gender identity with me and feel more included in the University space. It means that one of my favourite aspects of pre-pandemic teaching – the “front row fan club” in the Logie Lecture Theatre – are also there in the online teaching environment. They are inspired, engaged and ready to be the critical scholars I want them to be.

Edinburgh Council Want Poor Kids to Die

 I’m extremely angry. I’ve been ranting on Twitter; so I thought it might be an idea to write a blog post.

This time last year, across the world, people looked at their empty city streets and thought “this is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for to remake our cities for people, not cars”. In the UK, local councils sprung into action laying down new cycle paths and widening pavements. Us residents in Edinburgh got a bit restless though.

The Council here have been, slowly, trying to make the city’s streets better. Though they have good intentions, they still seem to get stuck with the road traffic engineers’ obsession with “flow” (the disastrous Picardy Place gyratory, that went from a “cyclist blender” to a horrific two-lane motor system) and the overly bureaucratic system (the Roseburn to Haymarket cycleway that’s been stuck in the statutory consultation system for over a decade). But the Council had been making some dramatic plans, including basically closing off the city centre to motor traffic.

Us Edinburgh residents wanted some of their more dramatic plans to come to fruition. Glasgow – the city that had a new motorway ploughed through the inner core a decade ago – was even laying out new infrastructure quicker than Edinburgh. Eventually the Scottish Government got a funding package together and in May cones started springing-up across the city to make the streets slightly better places to be with Spaces for People.

Where we used to live – in Leith – it was good. The road closures due to the tram works, combined with these measures, made the place really nice to walk around. However, I started to notice something was afoot. As the first wave of temporary measures were reviewed, I noticed our local measures – pavement widening on Great Junction Street – were slated for removal. It seemed that if you were a middle class shopper in Stockbridge and Morningside, then you deserved space to walk past a queue for the game butchers, or sourdough bakery, but if you were working class and wanted to walk past a butcher in Leith, then it didn’t matter if someone coughed the rona all over you.

However, we moved in November 2020 and that’s when I realised quite how egregious the inequalities in road safety provision in the city are. We now live in the north east of the city – Pilton to be precise. Our nearest Spaces for People provisions are the new cycle routes on Ferry Road and Crewe Road South. Both are really nice and I use them regularly, but essentially are just cones on existing paint.

We live just off Crewe Road North. It’s a lovely 1930s suburban avenue, surrounded by four-in-a-block housing, and mansion-style interwar tenements; a mixture of council tenants and owner-occupation. At the bottom of the hill there is a nice row of shops. The only pedestrian crossing is at the southern end of the road to control traffic onto Crewe Toll roundabout. Just across the road is social housing which is in the 20% most deprived neighbourhoods in the city.

Not long after moving in, I noticed how fast vehicles shot down Crewe Road. At the southern end, it narrows under the former railway bridge so the pavement is only one paving slab wide with a railing alongside. With the Kent variant of coronavirus surging through the city, if you wanted to socially distance, you had a choice of stepping into the road and risk facing-down a HGV travelling over 30mph; wait patiently for another pedestrian to pass; or don your mask, hold you breathe, and walk quickly while apologising profusely. We thought the traffic was going quite fast, especially since most of Edinburgh’s roads are now a 20mph limit. Surely this residential street had a 20mph limit? And then we spotted the 30 sign.

It got me angry. We’d been living in a very walkable neighbourhood, but now walking to our local shops was difficult because it felt very dangerous. I watched the terrified school crossing patrol officers for the local primary school tentatively step out into the road, just hoping that drivers would stop. I contacted one of my local councillors with my concerns – asking why the road wasn’t 20mph and had so few pedestrian crossings. It was passed onto the Council’s Road Safety Team. They replied that their last survey, in 2019, showed the average speed was 29 mph, so they didn’t feel a 20mph limit was warranted (a quick google shows that puts the kids at the local school at seven times the risk of being killed by a driver) and the same survey showed that very few pedestrian cross the road. I replied pointing out that this was no surprise – as a fit and healthy young man, I find it difficult to cross the road safely. The reply to that (which I eventually got after chasing) just fobbed me off into a bureaucratic process of the review of the 20mph limit that will happen some time in the future.

And then I started getting out-and-about in the city again. I noticed in Barnton, on a very quiet suburban road, where the house price is basically the phone number with a pound sign in front of it, there were some lovely Spaces for People cones out widening a very wide pavement. Meanwhile I was stepping out into the road to walk past people waiting for a bus. In the New Town, there was a quiet residential street which didn’t have a pavement on one side because that was where the shared private garden was, and in the early-nineteenth century you didn’t need pavements to save yourself from being killed by a Range Rover. I noticed there were some lovely Spaces for People cones marking out access to the private garden. Meanwhile, tenants of the Council’s housing don’t have safe access to the Council’s schools.

Frustrated by this visible inequity, I popped in an access to environmental information request, asking for details of how the Spaces for People provision was distributed across the city according to deprivation. It got rejected because the information was already in the public domain. The Council expected me to sit with a map of the hundreds of datazones in Edinburgh and plot on the Spaces for People provision myself. I have appealed this decision, pointing out they can do this with a couple of clicks of GIS.

And this all just leaves me angry. It has been known for decades that children in deprived neighbourhoods are far more likely to be killed by drivers. And I’m using active language because I loathe the passive language of driverless cars accidentally mowing down vulnerable pedestrians. It really feels like Edinburgh Council just do not care about the safety of residents in deprived neighbourhoods. Because our houses are worth less, so are our lives. My research has focused on middle class activism, so I know a lot of this is down to the active, able communities in these neighbourhoods campaigning for improvements. But it is also down to officers and councillors just not caring, or thinking, about deprived neighbourhoods. They should have actively suggested improvements in these neighbourhoods, not wait for residents (who are probably rather busy dealing with losing their jobs to worry) to respond to a consultation. Given this is a brilliant opportunity to make our roads safer temporarily, we should not be forced to have to wait until a review in the future to make our lives safer. Unless Edinburgh Council want poor kids to die.

A paper I'm very proud of

I’ve not blogged in a while because of 2020, but a paper I wrote with a researcher colleague Chris Poyner is now out in Public Administration Quarterly and I want to summarise it. I’m also extremely proud of it. It emerged from my research on LGBT+ homelessness and housing which I’ve written about before, and in it I valiantly attempt to set a new research agenda based on a very simplistic use of queer theory.

It had a pretty torrid time getting published. It was eventually (after three rounds of revision) rejected by one journal I suspect for disciplinary reasons – I think they had a very fixed idea of what social science theory, and queer theory, which is essentially a collection of ideas and concepts you can use to look askance at society and culture didn’t really fit that model. However, the editor and reviewers for PAQ were extremely helpful and it was published.

The paper focuses in on one particularly finding from the research: while housing and homelessness organisations were never explicitly homophobic, they were implicitly homophobic. To unpack this I used the concept of heteronormativity from queer theory to demonstrate how, in incredibly mundane ways, they reinforced compulsory heterosexuality.

A key way they did this was to completely ignore sexual identity. None of the organisations involved in the research regularly collected sexual identity data. I know this is a very tricky subject. If they had been LGBT+ identifying people talking critically about it, I would have been less critical. But this was cisgender, heterosexuals, saying they didn’t want to put sexual identity on a standard monitoring form for fear of insulting people (straight people). Ironically, these forms of equality then became forms of ensuring heterosexuality: you could be any ethnicity, gender, race, impairment. But you could not be non-heterosexual.

This became a real problem because the organisations then didn’t know if there were problems that needed to be tackled. The most obvious, and worrying, of these would be homophobic or transphobic abuse by neighbours. The tenants we interviewed talked in graphic detail about the impact this had on their lives (as discussed in this paper) but the organisations didn’t think it was a problem as they never sought to ask their tenants.

The bigger point I make in the paper though, is that if you look across the literature on LGBT+ people and politics and policy, quite rightly and understandably, this is focused on achieving basic legal rights, or combating direct discrimination and violence. This is still the case for the vast majority of places in the world.

However, the UK, and many other northern European countries, now have a legal framework that is largely progressive. In the UK, thanks to the Equality Act, this should also mean policy is progressive and inclusive as well. Therefore, we suggest in the paper, the focus on these contexts needs to be turned much more to these everyday ways that policy and administrative processes reinforce heteronormativity and make the lives of LGBT+ people more difficult. Therefore public policy, and public administration research needs more queer theory.

You can read the paper here or drop me an email for a copy of the pre-print version.

The emerging crisis in Scottish higher education

Given the demands of the current crisis and response to COVID-19, and the need for governments to prioritise expenditure on healthcare and income support, higher education has been nowhere near any government’s priority list. 

But a crisis in higher education is emerging, particularly in English-speaking countries. For decades now, demand for tertiary education from rapidly developing countries – most notably China – has fuelled an enormous growth in the sector. It is well-recorded that the UK has done exceedingly well in this market. Many universities now rely on this income to fund a large part of their activities. In the space of three months, this income has all but entirely dried-up. Higher education is counter-cyclical, so there may be some uptick in domestic students to make-up a small proportion of the income from international students. The impacts on universities will be highly differentiated as well – some have fostered strong local, domestic student markets so may be more resilient; others, particularly some of our most prestigious institutions, are probably looking at not being a going concern in a matter of months as their cash-flow dries up and they’re left with only enough to pay three months redundancy.

The HE sector in the UK itself is highly differentiated as well, and this often gets hidden in debates (including with ongoing industrial disputes in the sector). Indeed, higher education policy is probably one of the areas where there is the starkest difference between the four nations and regions of the UK. Therefore there is a need for analysis to be differentiated and reflect the different decisions by the devolved administrations.

It is easy to blame the current situation on my mate Neil Librul. The hens of market logics have come home to roost. If a company’s market vanishes it goes bust. This is capitalism in action. However, because I’ve used discourse analysis in my research to critique neo-liberalism, I do not like using it as a catch-all thing to blame as that disguises who is implementing neo-liberal policy decisions, why and how. So that is what I want to do in the blog post. 

One of the things that sets Scottish higher education policy apart is that, seemingly, the government explicitly rejects neo-liberal logics that higher education is an individual asset that can be purchased as an investment through a loan. Through its flagship policy of “free” higher education it publicly proclaims higher education is a public good. A former First Minister put a stone in the grounds of one of our HEIs to proclaim this very point.

However, I want to suggest that there is an emerging crisis in Scottish higher education because the Scottish Government has never fully funded its commitment to a public education. Indeed, in the operation of its policies it has pushed HEIs towards a market logic. To do this argument justice, I would need a barrage of links to old newspaper articles; SFC reports and university accounts. Frankly, I don’t have the time to do this as in my job I’m trying to stop the crisis in a Scottish university having a massive detrimental impact on the institution. If you want something like that, get a copy of Andrew McGettigan’s The Great University Gamble. Although it focuses on England, most of it also applies to Scotland; the only difference in Scotland is that we still have money coming into universities from the Scottish Funding Council paying for some tuition.

Of course, hair-splitters will point out that higher education was only not “free” in Scotland in a brief period between 1997 and 2001. After that, the up-front fees of just over £1000 were replaced by the “Graduate Endownment” that was tacked onto your student loan when you graduated. When the SNP won the 2007 Scottish elections and formed their first minority government they vowed to make higher education free and even abolish this fee. So, we have the totemic social democratic policy of “free higher education” in Scotland.

As many analysts and organisations such as the NUS in Scotland have pointed out though, this has led to particular quirks in the system. To fund the fees, student grants have steadily been eroded and replaced by loans to pay for maintenance, so that we end up with the odd situation that students in Scotland who come from homes with the lowest household incomes end up with the highest levels of graduate debt.

However, to go back to my core point, the fees policy itself has never been properly fully-funded. I first became aware of this when I was a PhD researcher in 2009 and the Scottish Government first started shuffling the cards to deliver the student numbers they wanted without the bill becoming out-of-hand – they shifted what subjects were in what funding bands, and reduced funding for degrees in the lowest bands (art, humanities and social sciences). When I got my first academic job in 2011, the Scottish Government were effectively only funding three years of the four years of a Scottish undergraduate degree. The idea had been that further education colleges would increasingly deliver the first two years on the cheap through HNCs and HNDs and there’d be growing second and third-year entries to Scottish universities. From what I know of the sector, experience of this has been patchy. Also, the “free higher education” policy was paid for by halving the budget for further education, amalgamating colleges in regional mega-colleges, and drastically reducing provision to highly gendered vocational qualifications in a limited range of industries. And then until this financial year, for a number of years universities have had a flat-cash settlement for the teaching grant and research quality grant from the Scottish Funding Council.

Now, I do have some sympathy for the Scottish Government on some of this. Until the recently increased powers over taxation, it was limited by the funding envelope provided by the Barnett formula. It was having to make difficult choices about what areas to fund and what areas to de-fund. Actually, compared to further education, policing, fire and rescue and local authorities, higher education in Scotland has not done too badly. We’ve not seen the wincingly painful cuts they experienced. And I know this personally from living with a local government officer and seeing the struggle he has to get basic things done because the resources simply are not there. But then again, the Scottish Government could have made painful policy choices in 2011 when they won their majority, such as to completely reform local government finance, getting rid of the Council Tax, and creating a new local tax that could have brought billions into the public sector creating more fiscal leeway. But we are where we are. 

Because of this situation, of an underfunded principle policy commitment, Principals and governing bodies of Scottish universities have been forced to make a choice: stick to a flat-cash income from the Scottish Funding Council and watch your university slowly wither away as it loses staff through voluntary severance and natural wastage as staff costs increase, and buildings and equipment fall into disrepair; or make riskier investment decisions in the hope than the return on these is high and allows you to expand. This latter choice of expansion is the policy agenda of the Scottish Government. It needs growing universities to: educate growing numbers of Scottish undergraduates as it seeks to meet its own targets for improving education equality; to invest in regional research and development; to bring in export income; and to be Scotland in international markets.

So we’re left with universities that have aggressively expanded into international higher education markets to pay for new staff, shiny new buildings and equipment, fantastic library resources and who are now horribly exposed as income from international students falls off a cliff. And students from Scotland will suffer because of this, as universities are forced to make staff redundant so class sizes increase and as very basic services like libraries and IT are curtailed to make budget savings.

I’ve tried to be measured about writing this and thinking this through, but I’m not. I’m angry. I’m angry and frustrated that the Scottish Government have pushed universities into this situation. Its made me angry during our current industrial disputes. We’re meant to be angry at our management, but I’m not. I can see why they made the decisions they made. I’m angry at the Scottish Government. And both my trade union and the employers have both been told, explicitly, by the current Higher Education Minister in Scotland that if the sector needs more money then it has to raise it itself through attracting in international students. The Scottish Government want a world-class higher education sector, but the money is not there. 

As I wrote at the start of this post, the current COVID-19 crisis is bringing this into stark relief. Some Scottish institutions will be just as exposed as those in England. So, what to do? This is interesting as higher education in Scotland is such a totemic part of our national identity that the government portrays on an international stage – Scotland had more universities than England until the late nineteenth-century. Higher education is what Scotland does. Therefore, I cannot see the Scottish Government allowing an institution to go bankrupt and a reduction in the number of HEIs through forced mergers (a proposed 2011 merger between Abertay and Dundee never happened). There is also the unquestioned assumption that a Scottish undergraduate degree is four years. Woe betide the Scottish HE minister who suggests that a Scottish degree should only be as long as it’s actually funded for. To clarify, I think the four-year degree is a good thing; I only wish it were funded. 

There was going to be a small real terms uplift in funding from the Scottish Funding Council for universities in Scotland this year anyway. Given the counter-cyclical nature of higher education, the Scottish Government could just chuck more grant income into the sector and hope for the best. Yet for some institutions this will only be pennies compared to what they will need because of the gaping hole from international student income. However, the economic collapse due to COVID-19 might put an almighty hole in the Scottish Government’s budget as income from devolved taxes falls. It remains to be seen whether Barnett Consequentials from UK Government expenditure will be enough to make up the shortfall, or if the Scottish Government’s limited borrowing powers are enough to tide it over until tax income increases again.

But why are we even talking about institutions going bust? Well, that’s the odd quirk of the British higher education system that, due to historical quirk and the demand for academic freedom, our universities are private charitable companies and governed as such. They just happen to get the majority of their income from government. I’m on the board of a similar organisation, so I know well the odd pressures it put on the governing body. On the one hand, you want to deliver a public service, but on the other, you’re subject to company law and have to ensure every year that you are a financial going concern. You have to borrow from commercial money markets, with all the limits that entails.

Which, oddly, brings us to another policy option that would be a sort of radical status quo – turn HEIs into public sector institutions, as they are in many European countries. Government agencies that shadow each HEI could be created and staffed TUPEd across. The charitable companies that are left, with their liabilities could be wound down over time. Academics and all university staff would become civil servants. The sector would become wholly dependent on the whim of government policy, rather than be subject to the “freedom” of the market.

I happen to know that crisis talks between representatives of Scottish HEIs, the trades unions, the Scottish Funding Council and Scottish Government are ongoing. And this is a crisis. There needs to be a policy resolution to the crisis in Scottish universities in the next few months otherwise there will be mass redundancies, massive reductions in investment in research infrastructure, and if the “market doesn’t correct” quickly then HEIs will be forced into the decisions their public sector cousins have been forced to make since 2013: cutting even essential functions just to keep some lecturing staff in the classroom; a fire-sale of buildings and land and an end to pretty much all ongoing investment in infrastructure. Yes, the Principals of Scottish universities have made risky, market-based decisions, that have led them into this situation, but as far as I am concerned, this is because an underfunded Scottish Government policy has left them with no other choice.

The rather staggeringly obvious face of racism and xenophobia in Edinburgh

I bloody love Edinburgh. It’s why I’ve lived here for 15 years. I fell in love with the city when I visited as a tourist in 2003. I love it when people I follow on social media visit the city for the first time and post photos in awe at the beauty and idiosyncrasies of this wonderful, unique city. It rekindles that love in me.

Over the fifteen years I’ve lived in the city the number of tourists visiting the city has increased dramatically all year round. This has, quite rightly, led to debates about what impact this is having on the city. Tourism was presented solely as an economic benefit to the city, bringing in money and creating jobs and opportunities. Now the costs of tourism are being highlighted and the debate about the Hotel Tax in Edinburgh began to suggest that the industry does not provide sufficient social economic benefit to outweigh its social costs. I support such a levy wholeheartedly and I found the hoteliers’ arguments that it would put off visitors absolutely laughable. This would suggest a truly incredibly elasticity for demand for tourism in the city. And, as I once ruminated on Twitter, the whole reason cities like Edinburgh are tourist hotspots is they have monopolistic qualities – there is only one Edinburgh. I’m not going to visit Birmingham just because Venice has a hotel tax and Birmingham has more canals. And tourists are not going to flock to stay in Stirling instead of Edinburgh, just because it’s got a castle in the middle of it.

The negative impacts of tourism on Edinburgh are becoming a much greater part of public discussion in the city due to the explosive growth of Air BnB, and the number of flats in the city shifting from the private-rented sector to short-term lets. It does seem there is some evidence that this is happening, and anecdotally I know it’s more difficult than ever the get a PRS flat in the city.

In many ways I’m very glad this debate is happening. I’ve recognised for some time that Edinburgh needs a proper tourism strategy that isn’t just about encouraging more tourists, growing the industry, and ensuring tourists have a great time, but is rather about balancing that growth with the sustainability of the wider city and the experience of longer-term residents.

What I don’t like, increasingly, is the way this debate is happening. Basically, this debate is increasingly racist and xenophobic and portrays Edinburgh as being like Royston Vasey – a local city for local people (although in my case, the Royston Vasey slogan of “You’ll Never Leave” does seem to apply). What is most concerning to me, is this racist dog-whistling is increasingly coming from heritage organisations.

The most egregious recent case of this, which caused me to write this blog post, was the reporting of a report carried out by Edinburgh World Heritage on the damage of tourism to the Old Town, in The Scotsman on 25 July 2019. The news article stated: “Surveys of more than 500 visitors found they were far more likely to feel “surrounded by foreigners” than “hear Scottish accents” on the Royal Mile.” The same is repeated in the EWH press release and their report (p.9). I’m sorry, but as an Edinburgher without a Scottish accent, funnily enough I find it deeply offensive that I’m not seen to be an “authentic” part of the Royal Mile by the EWH. The last time I noted that foreign accents were talked about in such a way in the press was when Nigel Farage was lambasted for saying he felt uncomfortable hearing foreign languages.

Edinburgh’s civic association, The Cockburn Association, is also quite bad at broadcasting similar views through its twitter activity. On numerous occasions this year I have sub-tweeted (for fear of a Twitter pile-on) when it has re-Tweeted people who are, in the most thinly veiled way, advocating for an Edinburgh that is only for white people, born here, who speak with a “local” accent (of course, anyone who knows the city knows there’s a BIG difference between the local accents of Leith and Wester Hailes and the local accents of Trinity and Morningside).

This xenophobia becomes even more of a problem for me when it spills over into other development controversies in the city. Here I see, with an alarming increase, a coalition between a xenophobic heritage lobby that wants to preserve everything, and a green/left lobby that believes everything that is local is good. Therefore, a proposed development is opposed, and in the opposition the developers’ nationality becomes a key feature. Why? Do you not want “them” making money in “our” city?

With four universities in Edinburgh, this xenophobia also emerges in debates about the development of student accommodation. Again, Edinburgh is seeing a massive expansion of private sector student accommodation. This has problems that could be better managed, in particular the poor quality of much of the building which means it cannot be used for anything else if the market for international study collapses. The biggest issue for me is I see it as a way developers can bring sites to the market which are economically viable and side-step requirements to build affordable housing, which they’d have to do if it was a residential development. International students are also brilliant for the city – they bring their expertise and skills to the city. If they could, I’m sure many would stay after they’d completed their studies, boosting the economy further. They help fund our universities.

Yet in the opposition to student development we see people explicitly saying that their issue is that this is accommodation for wealthy international students. We wouldn’t mind if it was accommodation for local students.

So, I ask you, please do keep debating the impact of tourists and other transient visitors on our city. But please don’t make these debates racist and xenophobic. Do not “other” these people, and recognise the massive diversity of the long-term residents of the city. The problems Edinburgh is facing due to these transient visitors are the root of global and national issues that the city can respond to the best it can. It needs to respond better and we need citizens to engage in the debate about what this response looks like. But we cannot continue blaming the “other” for this. Edinburgh is, and should be, an international city for everyone.

Collaborative studentships

This is a blog-post to help advertise a couple of doctoral studentships I have been awarded through the ESRC funded Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences (SGSSS). As funded studentships, they are open to UK/EU applicants and you will be given a monthly stipend and, if required, you’ll be funded to do our MRes in Applied Social Research. This blog post is just to give some more general background – please do follow the links below for the SGSSS website and the formal rules and regulations that we will be following in completing the studentships.

The first one is on Using administrative data to improve neighbourhood environmental services and outcomes and is a collaboration with The Improvement Service for local authorities in Scotland. A short summary of the project is: you will work with some case study local authorities to map the administrative data they have got from the information they record when citizens contact them with everyday problems – potholes, fly-tipped waste etc. Once this stage has been completed, the maps will be discussed with the councils and local citizens to understand if the mapped data is of use in understanding the challenges faced by councils in delivering these services in a period of austerity. This project builds on my long-term interest in middle-class community activism and the risk that in empowering citizens we might exacerbate existing socio-economic inequalities.

The successful candidate will work quite closely with the Improvement Service and the case study local authorities. The required skillset is therefore quite broad – an ability to spatially analyse statistics (or a willingness to develop these skills) alongside the soft skills in engaging with organisations and communities.

The second one is on Understanding student homelessness in higher education in Scotland and is with Shelter Scotland. It actually emerged from an almost throw-away finding from my research on LGBT+ homelessness – that a couple of participants in that study were students while they were homeless and their university accommodation services supported them in being housed. We know surprisingly little about homelessness among students in higher education. Given Shelter’s policy focus, and the small n of higher education in Scotland, this project will seek information from all universities on the extent of homelessness they encounter and their organisational and policy response to these incidents of vulnerability among students.

Predominantly this will be a qualitative research project, but an interest in homelessness and policy is useful. Again, the successful candidate will have to be prepared to work with Shelter Scotland to provide policy and practice relevant findings.

Potential applicants might be put off that these are projects that are already developed with partners. However, the studentships will still very much be that of the successful candidate – it will be up to you to synthesise the literature and develop the initial proposal further into a research strategy that can be implemented successfully to deliver the intended outputs for the partner organisations, as well as produce a thesis of doctoral quality. You will also develop invaluable skills at working across boundaries with organisations outside academia.

Why would you want to be supervised by me? Well, I generally get excellent feedback from my doctoral supervisees; it’s the bit of my job I enjoy the most. I am absolutely committed to the long-term development of doctoral researchers and will support you in your ambitions the best I can. I take a strong mentoring/coaching approach to supervision and aim to support my doctoral supervisees to become confident, independent researchers at the end of their projects. I know this is an approach shared by my co-supervisors on these projects.

One of my more controversial commitments is to support students to complete on time. This is a very personal commitment – doctorates in the UK are only funded for three years, and when I did my own PhD I had to finish on time otherwise I would have been plunged into poverty and/or forced to move back into my mum’s home. This doesn’t mean I will drive you to despair trying to finish on time, but I will work supportively with you to ensure the project is realistic and broken down into steps that can be achieved within the timescale. In particular, I will not expect you to overwork, work long hours and weekends, just to complete the PhD and get a good CV.

I am also committed to diversity in the academy as well, so if you’re a woman who loves stats, apply! If you’re a man who is interested in qualitative research with vulnerable populations, apply! If you’re disabled, we will provide reasonable adaptations, so apply! We’re an increasingly international and diverse Faculty, so if you a from a BAME background you will find a welcoming home and apply! If you identify as LGBT+ I’m as woke as can be, so apply!

If you are interested in applying, do feel free to get in touch directly with me with any questions pertinent to project design etc. or click on the links above to access the SGSSS website and start the application process. I look forward to receiving your applications.

PhD Supervision by Instagram

I’ve blogged quite a bit on here about using social media in my teaching – YikYak for anonymous questions when it was still a thing; and making a complete balls-up shaming my class on Twitter. But I don’t actually use social media much in my teaching. My Facebook profile is a very private place, so it’s quite locked down (I generally avoid being Facebook friends with colleagues). I use Twitter to get stuff out to students, but I don’t expect them to rely on it. It is completely unethical to expect students to use a commercial service external to the University for their learning.

One social media I’ve only got into using over the past year is Instagram. My use of it changed quite a lot when they started Instagram stories. I don’t use them very much, but on most days I’ll post something banal to my story. I quite like catching up with the stories of the people I follow too. It’s fun watching what people are up to and I occasionally chat to them. And as the everyday functions of Instagram have grown I find I use the messaging function quite a bit. I can have simultaneous conversations with the same person on Instagram, WhatsApp and email about different topics.

One of the people I follow on Instagram is one of my PhD students. I started following her after she suggested she might use Instagram to collect data for her fieldwork. I’ve followed PhD students on Twitter before, but most of the interactions there had been quite banal and work-like – just congratulating them on achievements and that sort of stuff. Like most doctoral supervisors I talk to, I find it is the most rewarding part of my job – I learn so much from my students and watching them flourish as scholars and rounded-individuals just gives me the greatest pleasure. Part of this is building up a trusting relationship, but I’m always wary to keep it professional. I don’t feel I should be the researcher’s friend, particularly when I’m in that supervisory relationship. We never know how a PhD is going to go, and I don’t want to be the friend who has to have an awkward conversation with a researcher telling them exactly what they’re doing wrong and that they have to buck-up their ideas and work harder if they’re going to finish this PhD.

Pretty early when Instagram stories started, I realised that following my PhD student was going to blur this line between a professional and a personal relationship. I was seeing everything that my student was up to across their life in a way I had not done before. It did dawn on me to stop following them, or just skip through their story. But I did them interesting – she’s a fun person with a rich life, and also seeing how she fitted the PhD into her life was interesting. I would respond to her stories and we’d message each other in the way friends day (we’re both gay, so this was common ground). However, that I was blurring the professional and personal did dwell in my mind and a few months ago I did say that their might be a point in future where I might politely end the supervisory relationship if mixing the personal and professional was getting difficult. I’d become friends, in a way, over Instagram stories.

But recently things have changed again with our supervisory relationship and Instagram. It all began when the student had a block on submitting a journal article that was just about written. I’m currently doing a coaching course, so I suggested we have a coaching conversation to work out what was going on and get her in a place to submit the article to her chosen journal. The conversation worked a treat and we set some pretty tight deadlines. And then it appeared on her Instagram story! I felt so pleased that she had got there that I had to engage with it positively – it’s what I would do as a coach and a friend. She didn’t quite make the deadline, but the paper was submitted and we celebrated through her Instagram story together.

She then went for a period of travel away through her research. And our Instagram story engagement, to me, took another little turn into a deeper relationship. Being away from our home and comforts pushes us into uncomfortable areas and we end up doing a lot of things that are socially brave, but doing so also brings out all the anxieties that hold us all back. I knew this as I’d done it a year before. So just occasionally I’d check in with her through the Instagram story, showing empathy, but also celebrating the many successes that have happened during this trip.

And I realised I’m sort of supervising by Instagram. What makes me a good supervisor, I think, is that I build a good, trusting relationship with my students. I support them to achieve what they want to achieve. And I’ve now just moved this onto Instagram stories. Hopefully it won’t all go horribly wrong…

The three per cent

It’s beginning to look an awful lot like three per cent of population are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Governments are now beginning to ask standardised clunky questions to capture sexual identity in population surveys – this is a case where Scottish exceptionalism is true, as the then Scottish Executive pioneered this with the Scottish Health Survey in 200#. As the number of surveys that include such a question spread, the finding ends up being that around three per cent of people say they are not solely heterosexual. Reassuringly, an analysis of Google search data (looking at what porn people search for) finds that around three per cent of people are solely homosexual, with another two per cent on top of that “curious” (of course I can’t find the link to that article now).

There are all sorts of well-rehearsed issues with this statistic, many of which boil down the basic issue of what are we actually measuring? We’re conflating identity, attraction and sexual behaviour into a category on a form. You don’t have to be a queer activist to quickly become uncomfortable with that – the data on sexual behaviour from NATSAL should be enough to get you questioning simple categorisations. But I very much fall into the camp (pun intended) that those categories of “gay”, “lesbian” and “bisexual” or “pansexual” are empowering. In a heteronormative world they allow you to label your difference and be with others that are similarly different. So, in a patriarchal, heteronormative culture like the UK three per cent of people will call themselves not-heterosexual; they will have sexual and romantic relationships with people of the same gender as themselves.

I’ve ended up thinking about the three per cent quite a bit recently. It’s been lurking in the back of my mind and keeps popping-up unexpectedly. This is mainly because when we consider the position of a structurally marginalised group in society, the focus tends to end up on representativeness. We are now, rightly, called-out for creating, or taking part in manels; the utterly shocking lack of ethnic diversity in many areas of public life is highlighted as an example of the outcome of structural racism; the disabling effects of our society are reflected in the marginalisation of disabled people in major institutions.

Representation is also said to matter because of the visibility of the group. Non-members of a group continue to have negative views of group members because they do not see them in everyday life in positive roles. Similarly, group members might not think that opportunities are open or appropriate for them as they do not see people like themselves in such roles. Achieving levels of representation when groups are quite large is difficult, but obvious – in a world where over half the population are women, manels are just inexcusable. But, what about when it’s three per cent?

Only gay in the village

I wonder about this in terms of my own life. I grew up in the homophobic 1990s. About the only stat on non-heterosexuals that was muttered then was the Kinsey one-in-ten. This statistic has now been roundly debunked.

I sort of came out as gay at secondary school when I was 15. I felt very, very alone. I did wonder where all the other gay men were. I was the only gay in the village. Now I know that in my school of 1,000 pupils, there were probably another 14 gay men. Probably another three in my year group. If I’d know that at the time, would it have made me feel any better about myself? What if I knew these other gay men and I didn’t like them?

When I went to university and started dating the feeling of being alone didn’t really go away – if anything it got worse. A lot of this was entirely down to how I was feeling about myself. But I can’t help but think what I would have thought about the 3% stat then. There weren’t many out gay people in my college – definitely not 3% – but ironically enough of my peers have come out since we graduated that I now realise there were more than 3% of us. Even in a very large university like the one I attended, 3% is not very many people.

From what data we have there are also a couple of other things I can’t help but consider. Firstly, in the UK, non-straight people are evenly distributed across the country. Us gays, and particularly gay men, have a tendency to congregate in London and the south-east. We’re better educated and less likely to be unemployed than heterosexuals, so we go there to get better paid jobs. This means, if you’re living in a small, northern town, the chances are there’ll be slightly less than that 3%. Alas, it also looks like they’ll be a “selected sample” who are different to those super-gays in That London. How would that make you feel if you were in one of those places?

We also know that there is a generational divide. Younger people are more likely to identify as non-heterosexual than older people; obviously this is linked to the declining significance of homophobia in society. Indeed, a colleague recently told me how her 11-year-old daughter is being pressured at school to identify as bi/pan – what a refreshing change from the homophobic bullying so many of us older people experienced! It’s great that young people have this openness to explore, but as I explained to my colleague, I’ll be intrigued how many people who have had sex with people of the same sex do end up settling on an identity as “not-heterosexual”.

Over-representation

The other issue with the three per cent I think needs to be discussed among the LGBT+ community is over-representation – where do LGB people make up more than three per cent of a group and is this ok? This came to my mind during the period that of the five political parties who had representatives in the Scottish Parliament, three out of the six leaders (or convenors) were openly LGB. This was celebrated, and incredibly rightly so. Even a decade ago, a politician would remain closeted for fear of the reputational damage it may do, so that we had so many openly LGB leaders was absolutely fantastic.

However, I think questions need to asked about this level of over-representation. Not necessarily to challenge, and end in a conclusion of “this is wrong”, but to understand what drives it, do we need to ask what barriers heterosexual people (particularly women) might face in getting to similar positions of power and responsibility. I would also be interested if this over-representation existed at other levels as well in terms of political-party staffers and other roles (I suspect it does). The question then might be what attracts LGB people to such roles?

If we accept, from political theory, that we need groups engaged in political processes to ensure policy reflects their needs and views, then perhaps we do need to question that it is good that LGB people are over-represented in particular roles? As with any example of over-representation, this also means that LGB people are under-represented elsewhere. 

What do we know about LGBT+ homelessness

Not a lot, is the answer. We know a little bit more thanks to a project I’ve been leading on that finished last year and that is now being published in academic journals. You can read my blog posts about the project as it ran on here – it led me to quite a discovery of my own sexual identity.

Anyway, the first paper from the project is now out in the International Journal of Housing Policy and, if I say so myself, it has an ABSOLUTELY CRACKING title: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer experiences of homelessness and identity: insecurity and home(o)normativity. Of course, this means it will never be cited, but hey-ho.

Blogging about your paper is supposed to increase its citations, although with my “Pink Pound in the Gaybourhood” paper it helped it garner one citation after three years. So, here is my blog summary of the paper.

In writing-up this project, I’m drawing on my positionality as a public policy and housing scholar who has recently branched out into research issues around sexual and gender identity. The mainstream literature in public policy and housing is staggeringly silent on issues of sexual and gender identity. Through this research I discovered the rich work in disciplines like human geography (queer geographies); sociology and cultural studies. In writing up the research I therefore wanted to do an activist project into public policy and housing research by bringing the lives of non-heterosexuals, and how we understand them from varying theoretical perspectives, into heteronormative/heterosexist disciplines. It’s, therefore, reasonably good public policy scholarship, and pretty shoddy queer studies scholarship, but it is trying to bring the literatures together.

In the case of homelessness among LGBT+ populations the literature is, let’s say, difficult. There’s some dated stuff that comes from an era of less socially liberal attitudes that suggests that it is caused by family rejection. But even a quite old study by Prendergast et.al. questions this simplicity. There’s also the “pop” social science of things like the “a quarter of all young homeless people are LGBT” which I rail against for their lack of evidential basis. I also get annoyed at that stat, and it’s presentation, because of the simplistic way in which it is assumed sexual or gender identity is a variable in homeless; i.e. it is a direct cause.

There’s also US and North American research. However, this is of limited applicability. Firstly, a lot of it is written from a public health/social work perspective so it is mainly focused on the risks of harm to health caused by rough sleeping, rather than detailed exposition of causes, experiences and routes out of homelessness. Secondly, the situation in the UK regarding homelessness and rough sleeping, although bad, is no way near as horrific as it is in the US. Particularly in Scotland, a lot of the people captured by US research would have a right to housing which would reduce their risks.

In terms of the homelessness literature, I was pointed towards the work of Carol McNaughton-Nicholls. She used the concepts of “edgework” and “thin rationality” to explore the agency of the participants in her research on homelessness in Glasgow. Thin rationality especially, really resonated through our data – how these LGBT people had to make difficult decisions at points of their housing pathways that resulted in them experiencing homelessness and then experiencing a feeling of being-at-home.

And I use the term being-at-home on purpose here (it’s not in the paper, but this is the argument we make). This is because, what we actually uncovered was not that sexual or gender identity was a direct cause of homelessness – indeed many of our participants would have experienced homelessness whatever their sexual or gender identity – but that sexual and gender identity was wrapped up in experiences of homelessness in complex ways. Importantly, it seemed that for our participants, being-at-home (as opposed to just being housed) was associated with a deeper sense of security in their own identity as queer people. This meant that being-at-home could be felt at stages of their housing pathway where, in legal terms, they would technically be homeless or at least inappropriately housed.

Thus the paper begins to “queer” the homelessness/housed binary to the extent that I have a fun opening conversation gambit now of “I don’t actually think homelessness exists”. This is a theoretical route I want to explore further – Dr Lindsey McCarthy’s recent paper in Housing Studies was interesting in this regard. I am reassured that two recent pieces of doctoral research on the topic of LGBT+ homelessness by Carin Tunaker who was at Kent, and Philip Mullen at Newcastle, found similar results. And I cannot thank both of them enough for their time in sending me stuff to read and talking to me about their research (which is a lot better than mine!).

This finding also led me to my policy recommendations – which are that homelessness service providers need to be less reticent about opening-up conversations with young people about their sexual and gender identity. I was quite shocked about how worried people were about doing this; yes straight people, it is difficult to talk about your sexuality, but us gays have to do it all the bloody time, thanks, because we live in a heteronormative world. Anyway, it is only by opening-up such conversations that the complexities can be understood. I would add, that in my opinion based on this research, that it is mainstream services that should be doing this for two reasons. Firstly, practically because arithmetically, in a country as small as Scotland, with a population group that is three per cent of the whole population, it is going to be difficult to deliver specialist services for LGBT+ across a wide area. Secondly, and normatively, be because mainstream homelessness services should be welcoming, supportive and tailored to all people, no matter who they are.

Is public administration and public policy education in Scotland threatened?

I recently learnt from a colleague that the Master of Public Administration programme at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh is threatened with closure. This leaves Scotland with one MPA and three postgraduate programmes in public policy. Therefore the closure of this programme brings into question the entire existence of public administration as a scholarly subject in our country. Yet in practice public administration is booming – there is more that we need skilled public servants to deliver: the Scottish Parliament is gaining more powers; Scottish communities are being asked to take a greater role in the design and delivery of public services; and the demand on our public services has never been greater. Yet many public service organisations, such as community councils, charities and local authorities do not have (individually) the budgets to support Masters level professional development.

In other parts of the UK public administration scholarship is seen as vital to the economy and to civic society and so is financially supported by Government’s, For example, the Northern Ireland Executive fund civil servants to complete the first level of the MPA at Ulster University; the Welsh Government have funded an ‘All Wales Public Services Graduate Programme‘ with University of South Wales and the Welsh Centre for Public Policy at Cardiff University; and in England there are major developments taking place at many universities including Manchester Metropolitan University, Northumbria University, Nottingham Trent University, University of Birmingham and University of Exeter.

Scotland risks being perceived in this context as being hostile to public administration research and teaching. This runs counter to the ambitions of the Christie Commission, to the ethos of our Scottish Government and to the nature of the Scottish Approach to public services. Yet currently we face the very real prospect that public administration and public policy scholarship becomes restricted to the rest of the UK. We can only hope that our elected representatives will take notice and act soon before this becomes the case.

My Big Idea by Peter Matthews aged 35-and-three-quarters

I’ve been in marking hell since the end of the period of strike action which I’ve just emerged from. I can’t read anything without correcting the grammar.

Anyway, during the strike, among all the amazing USS Strikes Tweets I saw one from the Times Higher about research that had shown that European universities spend more on getting European Research Council funding than they receive in grants awarded. This led to the usual moaning about the ridiculousness of the situation, and also the suggestion that grants should be replaced by a research basic income.

This got me thinking more about an idea I’ve had which I’ve discussed with a few people now and I now have time to tell the entire world about…

To start with, why do we have research grants? Basically they emerged (as I understand it) as there was an awareness that some research required levels of investment in people and infrastructure that were beyond the capacity of all but the largest universities. Over time, in the UK, as the other elements of state funding to universities have been reduced, they now have to account for the vast amount of research funding for universities. There are two problems (I see) with replacing grants with a fixed sum to each researcher. Firstly, is the ability to fund large-scale research particularly that which requires investment in non-staff capital resources. Secondly, it adds an odd perverse incentive for universities to just keep appointing staff even though they might struggle to cover the rest of their salary with teaching income, as you know you’ll get some money for the post.

This leaves us with a distributional problem – the pot of money to distribute for grants must always be limited. As a result complex mechanisms of measuring the quality of proposals to target funding at those which academic peers believe will be most important, have grown over time. At the same time demand for research income has grown as more researchers want to do more research; as the funding landscape for HEIs has changed; and as pressure is put on staff through HEI’s expansive strategies to bid for more funding. As a result, success rates for UK research council grants are now hovering around the 10% mark.

There are obvious massive sunk costs here. I’ve heard quite a number of people who have had “outstanding” scores across the board on research proposals which have not been funded because there’s just not enough money. The system also has massive in-built biases. At the most basic level, grants beget grants – as this recent paper shows. More problematic are the massive gender and race biases in who gets funded – what Deb Verhoeven hilariously calls the “Daversity” problem.

So, what’s my big idea? A lottery. Or actually something a bit like Premium Bonds.

How it would work is when a research-active member of staff joined a UK university you would be given a unique identifier – your research premium bond number. Every year there would be a draw for “winners”. If your number was called out you would then get £1 million to spend on research over the next few years. Within six months you would have to submit a short proposal as to what you will spend the money on. You would have to report every year on your progress and at the end of five years you would have to return any unused funds.

You could spend the money as you can spend research council grants now – employ staff, buy-out your own time, buy equipment, and share it between institutions. So, if you didn’t win, but your colleague who you had been working with on a research idea did win, you could work together using their winnings.

The advantages of a lottery for me are:

You remove most of the sunk costs in unsuccessful bids. There would be a shifting of resources to actually supporting good quality research to be developed and go ahead, and good reporting so the outcomes can be adequately captured and disseminated.

I think you would actually get a lot more innovative research funded. I imagine there’s researchers in UK HEIs who never have the time to even think about what they might do with £1 million of research money, but if they got it would probably do something really quite exciting. You would probably end up with a lovely mix of utter blue-skies, ivory-tower research and some really applied stuff from all kinds of disciplines.

It would reduce the inherent biases in a system of quality-assessed research applications. I don’t know what the research councils’ annual budget is – I’m guessing billions – divided by a million will mean enough prizes that all researchers would be equally likely to win. Also, institutions, and academic disciplines, would be equally likely to win, no matter what their level of research infrastructure.

Given the above, I reckon everyone would win at least once in their career and have a chance to do some amazing research. You might even win twice. It would be up to the random number generator.

You might say that people might just waste the money. This would be a small risk I reckon. I think the need to submit a research proposal and annual updates would negate this. Some of the current sunk costs in developing and assessing applications would have to be shifted to post-award audit. I also think if you were not a very good researcher you would also have trouble spending £1 million over five years and you would end up giving a lot of it back. Also, I don’t think you can say that our current system ensures that poor quality research doesn’t get funded – it just has well written research proposals to support it.

I think there would have to be a residual pot for the absolutely massive research projects (the big STEM infrastructure investments; humanities investments in new collections; social science longitudinal surveys etc.) and you would need a competitive funding system for that, but it would be a small part of the overall budget.

So, that’s my big idea. UKRI – hit me up.

What it means to be on strike

Members of UCU are embarking on a substantial period of strike action with some universities over proposed cuts to our pensions. Oddly enough, as a union member at a participating branch, I’m not on strike as it is our reading week, so we start next week.

As a union member and activist, I’m not actually that left wing – I hold some views that a socialist would wince at. But one thing I do hold as very important is strike action and solidarity with strike action. This is partly because there’s a long history of trade union activism in my family. So I know the number one rule is, even if you disagree with a strike, you do not cross a picket line. It’s about solidarity.

It’s also because as a lefty, I recognise that the only right we have as wage-slaves, is the right to withdraw our labour. In the history of the labour movement, all striking workers made the bargain that they will lose out less than the boss – that the loss in wages will be less than the loss of profits to the boss. This is especially effective when everyone engages in this level of disruption. The equivalent in a public service is to cause as much disruption to service provision that bosses pay attention.

One thing that especially angers me when academics go on strike is how bad we are it. I notice this particularly among academics who profess to be “radical” and then spend the strike action tweeting about how much reading and writing they’re doing.

So here goes my outline of what it means to be on strike:

Academic reading while on strike means you are doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.

Academic writing on strike means you are doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.

Preparing that grant application on strike means you are doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.

Ploughing through your inbox to clear it while on strike means you are doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.

Preparing slides for a talk while on strike means you are doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.

Preparing teaching while on strike means you are doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.

The sole point of strike action is to cause disruption, not just to leave the campus ghostly empty while you work from home. Come on, if you had the chance, you’d work from home anyway.

Now the argument against these, particularly around reading and writing, I hear is that “it will damage my career”. This really smacks of the over-individualisation of academic labour that we really should be railing against in our union activism. Let’s get this straight – YOUR career success benefits YOUR employer. If you get a Chair through writing a paper during the strike period, then that’s because you’ve met the performance targets set by your employer, which benefit it in terms of REF submission and prestige, so the VC gets paid more. If you write that successful grant application, then it brings in income to your employer, and your Pro-VC research gets a nice bonus at the end of the year.

The detriment to your career is the sacrifice you are making in solidarity with your fellow workers to the collective benefit to us all. And let’s consider what that sacrifice might look like. In a former job we had a period of rolling strikes about terms and conditions. A colleague at the time worked part time and the strikes were always on days they were supposed to be at work. They basically didn’t get paid for a month. They had a young child, a mortgage, and their partner worked part time. They really struggled. But they gritted their teeth and did not cross the picket line. They did this because their father was a miner who was on strike for a year during the miner’s strike. That’s what sacrifice for solidarity looks like.

So, please, before you even think of doing any academic labour during the strike, think of solidarity with your fellow workers. We need this dispute to be successful. The cuts to pensions are truly staggering. We need to cause as much disruption as possible. Don’t be a strike breaker. Don’t cross a picket, even working at home.

Issues with The Conversation

This morning I was reading a piece on the website The Conversation. As I got to the bottom, I noticed a bar asking for donations to fund “fact-based journalism”. I was a little taken aback by this, as I’ll explain why, so I tweeted about it.

I can't believe the Conversation have this at the bottom of their pages! It's basically a site for gobby academic men to explain why their opinions are right. I have read so many things on it that are factually wrong and based on ideology dressed up as intellect. pic.twitter.com/KdIv1Ztugr

— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) February 3, 2018

I was struck that it really hit a nerve with a lot of my fellow academics.

For those of you who don’t know, The Conversation is a website, funded by a large number of universities and higher education organisations, to publicise academic research. When you write for it, you work with an editor to get the angle right. When you input your text into the website it has an “intelligibility” gizmo that has to be “amber” so your piece is readable. The also commission pieces; and if your institution is a partner then they come around to do communications training.

I have written for The Conversation in the past – Bulldoze Belgravia and another piece on urban design. This was in the early days of the site when what it seemed to be aiming for was academic input into current affairs issues (what do we actually know about this issue?) and also for academic takes on other societal issues – what I produced.

What I wrote was ideological – it comes from my belief that state action should maximise equality between people. From that belief I then set out a fairly straightforward, logical critique of mixed communities policies that seek to diversify tenure in deprived neighbourhoods – that they’ll never work because we need to consider tenure diversification in all neighbourhoods. It’s a fairly simple argument in urban studies you could work out yourself with some coloured tiles. The ideological tinge of the argument got me vilified below the line when The Guardian reblogged the piece and a reader referred to me as an “envy-driven” and “masquerading as an academic”. I was quite proud.

However, I now wouldn’t write for The Conversation, and I’ll explain why.

Editorialising

This is what got me about the “fact-checking” ask. Far too often I have read things in The Conversation that are factually wrong. This is a wider ethical issue for me, which academics need to be more reflexive on. As a social scientist, I know “objectivity” is a problematic concept, and I can give you a cracking post-structuralist denunciation of “the truth” if I want to, but in my opinion, in the public domain, academics have a duty to be absolutely clear on whether what they say is their ideological opinion, or is based on their research.

To give an example. Prior to my doctoral research, I thought that the state was generally a Good Thing, and if not necessarily Good, it was at least democratic and reasonably neutral. It should be criticised when it gets things wrong; but with this ideological position I would have said I was in favour of nationalising a lot of services that were previously own by the state, such as the railways. During my research career, I’ve realised that the state can actually be really bloody awful at delivering services, can be grossly undemocratic, and other ownership models, such as community ownership and cooperatives, can deliver the aims of social justice and a pluralistic democracy that I believe is right. When I discuss this in public forums, I try to ensure that I am clear on what is my opinion, and what is based on my research. 

Now, why am I describing this? Because, a while back I read this piece in The Conversation: Nationalising Britain’s Railways is the Only Way to Fix Chronic Problems. I’m a bit train nerd, so much so that I know a lot of the way British Rail was run was bloody awful – I’d love to do a PhD on The Modernisation Plan of 1955 which lumbered the network with brand new infrastructure designed for the 1930s and a range of new diesel locomotives of variable quality. So I clicked on the link thinking I’d get a thoughtful piece on the pros and cons of private ownership versus state ownership. What I actually read was pretty poor editorialising with factual inaccuracies. The third paragraph I thought was particularly awful. It reels off a list of the ways the private railways companies are worse than British Rail, with an impressive set of links to back it up. I bothered to click on the links. What they actually point to is a load of analysis and statistics that start in 1995, when the railways were privatised, and then show how on these indicators performance has deteriorated. None of them compare their performance to that of British Rail. The entire paragraph was making a false statement. One example of this inaccuracy – a book I got last Christmas on British Rail design had a load of old train tickets printed on the inside. Quite a few of these were “regulated fares” – season tickets and peak-time returns. I popped a few of the post-decimal prices into an RPI inflator to find out what the price would be today. When I then checked the same ticket today, the price was virtually the same.

This is just one example of the sort of editorial writing that The Conversation seems to increasingly publish, where respect for the truth is subsumed to the ideological opinion of the author. Quite a few of the replies to my tweet had similar experiences.

To get all Habermasian on you – Habermas argues we assess truth claims on three bases: their accuracy; whether we trust the speaker; and whether they fit into existing norms. Academia is, arguably, the domain of third criteria, where we debate the existing norms and paradigms of knowledge. But in wider society, the second criteria is where we, as academics are privileged and we should be much more reflexive of that, and be absolutely clear when what we are describing is based on a disputed norm. In this case, there is a broad range of scholarship on privatisation. Some of this is very right wing and says all state intervention is distorting markets; some is very left wing and asserts that capitalism as a system of ownership is wrong. There is also a chunk of empirical work in the middle that uses a range of indicators and outcomes to make judgements as to whether specific cases of privatisation were good or bad. I would expect something like The Conversation to reflect this diversity and complexity in the scholarship in its published material. If you want this sort of academic reflection on railway privatisation, I personally thought this was a better much better piece.

The crisis in journalism

My other issue with The Conversation is I think it’s a problematic intervention in a market – that for news journalism – that is in dire straits. The fact that newspapers like The Daily Hate Mail and The Scum are now seeing falling sales, falling revenues and falling profits really shows what a state the market is in. You might hate their content, but for decades these two newspapers were journalistic powerhouses, selling thousands of copies and earning millions through advertising revenue. One only has to look at MailOnline – BuzzFeed before BuzzFeed existing – and see how different it is to its paper version to understand the way things are going.

With falling revenues, and readership driven through clickbait headlines to get someone to hover on your website long enough to kick-in an advertising fee, news is in crisis. News organisations can no longer afford to pay a lot of staff to cover the sort of things that an academic might input into – social and policy commentary for example; or science stories.

You might argue that The Conversation is therefore filling a gap that needs filled – it’s allowing academics to input into news debates with “facts”. But I don’t think it does do that because it falls into the same editorial traps of clickbait and sensationalism that mainstream news organisations use which distorts the news. And, as discussed, problematically they do this with authors who are trusted in society.

In an industry that is now driven by journalists maintaining their jobs through getting clicks, I would actually suggest that by providing free content, The Conversation is putting journalists out of work and is actually distorting the market. It is making the crisis in news journalism worse. Because of its reliance on income from partner institutions that are higher education bodies, The Conversation is state-funded news. Directly, it gets its funding from organisations that are funded directly (through grants) and indirectly (through student loans) by the government. It is also funded indirectly by the government as its writers (us academics) write for free for it and have our overheads covered by our state-funded organisations. Because of this, I believe it should be far more closely scrutinised than it is. When The Conversation gets things wrong, it should be more of a scandal than when the BBC gets things wrong. And, I’m sorry, but in a lot of the material it publishes, I do not see The Conversation meeting a high bar of accuracy and impartiality that we should expect.

The real risk for this is that, in the context we live in of “fake news”, distortions of the truth, and news organisations financially unable to do their job, that The Conversation could make discourse in society worse, not better. If it continues to publish editorialising statements by non-reflexive academics, then the public have every right to not “trust the experts”.