Striking, social media, and building a better university

During the past term, I was on strike for fourteen days and I’m now on “action short of a strike” and, like my colleagues up and down the UK, I’m waiting to vote in a consultative e-ballot next week that may determine whether we reach a settlement with the employers and go back to work. But this post isn’t about the rights and wrongs of the dispute, it is about what it has felt like to be on strike — the highs and the lows — and about how the shared desire for a better university that has emerged from our unity and solidarity may be helped or hindered by how the strike is resolved and by the stories we tell ourselves about it.

A big part of striking (at least for those who choose not to sit at home) is picketing. I’ve been on picket lines (a long time ago) where the purpose of picketing was to stop people from going to work, but our picket lines now have been more symbolic and demonstrative. They’ve been about standing together, feeling a sense of comradeship, and sharing jokes and conversation. In this we’ve been joined by many of our students, giving rise to a renewed feeling of the university as an intellectual community bringing together teaching and research staff, other university staff and students and joining us together across disciplinary boundaries. This experience, together with associated demonstrations, teach-ins lunches, coffees and social events, has been the source of a growing sense of collective determination that a different kind of university is possible and that we mustn’t go back to the normality of submission to bullying micromanagement, the obsessive chasing of metrics and rankings and individualized anxiety and self-loathing.

Social media in the forms, mainly, of Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp and blogs has been (“have been”, what’s grammatical here?) really important in this dispute, both positively and negatively. The good side has been the quick and effective communication and the sense that it is not just us in Bristol but people up and down the country, that we are part of a national movement. It has meant for quick reaction time and good access to arguments, reasons and rebuttals. The Universities UK PR machine has stuttered ineffectively when academics have been able to get out quick and forensic examinations of their self-serving and misleading claims. The philosopher Mike Otsuka, for example, has used social media to expose the flaws and dishonesties involved in the “consultation” that UUK conducted over our pension scheme valuation. When UUK and our union negotiators came back with an proposed settlement, following arbitration, twitter was very effective in mobilizing people overnight to meet in branches and reject the deal.

But that strength of twitter has also been a problem. Twitter is a powerful resource for motivated reasoning where people “like” the news that suits their existing convictions and where rapid sharing can build up the impression of a powerful consensus around “facts” that are anything but. As academics we pride ourselves on our ability to sift and evaluate the evidence dispassionately. Sadly, when caught up on a social movement and where our own vital interests are at stake, we are often as prone to discount information we don’t like as other groups of human beings are. As the dispute has moved to a crisis point, with a potential settlement in prospect which gets us less that some would have hoped for, twitter has done some damage in unpicking the fuzzy glow of unity we experienced on those picket lines. Ours has always been a divided union, and there have always been activists who have distrusted the leadership. So, inevitably, social media has quickly spread rumours of betrayal and tendentious and contested accounts of key meetings. Highly engaged people, faced with the prospect that this or that mode of consultation or decision might not secure the result they want, have warmed up old disputes in democratic theory to explain why the votes of some, collected in some way, should count for more than the votes of others collected otherwise. Ordinary members who have only voiced their opinions about the dispute have sometimes been subjected to nasty online abuse. Twitter magnifies the risk of being taken in by your own propaganda.

When the dispute ends, whenever that is, will we have a victory? I think we will, at least compared to what the employers have tried to do to us. Others will disagree, believing that we could have held out for better and would have done, but for the perfidy of our leaders and the pusillanimity of those they see as “moderates”. Which of these narratives prevails will make a big difference to how we feel after the strike and whether we can make good on that picket-line commitment to change the university, to start to take control from our managers. There’s something paradoxical here. To stay united, to make those changes, we need to feel positive and not defeated. If we feel crushed, because we failed to prevent any detrimental changes, then it will be harder to resist a return to atomization and apathy.

The other thing we need, if we are successfully to resist the managerialists and avoid a drift back to “normality” is organization. The impressive growth of the union during the strike can be the foundation for that and may be, so long as people don’t drift off, dispirited, afterwards. But we also need to continue to meet at the level of our departments, schools and faculties in order to contest the metric-chasing, the performance targets, the rage-producing diktats and the consequent quotidian degradation of academic life. We need to stick up for one another when managers turn nasty and threaten us, or others, with disciplinary action or carefully crafted redundancy criteria. We need to discuss how we can teach well and what education is for rather than how to boost those “student satisfaction” scores. We need to think, together, and together with our students about the essentials of the university so that they remain communities of education rather than turning into Potemkin villages behind whose shiny facades hourly-paid drones struggle to “deliver learning objectives”.