The Secret Lecturer

Oddball students, falling academic standards, lecherous colleagues, fortunes spent on 'corporate' follies, an over-reliance on foreign fees and business donations, striking lecturers, poor student welfare – and an A+ explosion in cheating... welcome to a British university in the 2020s.

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‘You don’t have to read too many pages of this sizzling personal account of day-to-day life as a university lecturer to appreciate why the author has chosen to remain anonymous...’ – Dennis Sherwood, Author, Missing the Mark

'It’s pithy, political and revealing. It’s a book that will astonish some and feel all too familiar to others... I urge you to read it too.' Linda Hill, Linda's Book Bag

Odd students, racist colleagues and inept administrators.

Rising business influence and crumbling academic freedom.

Absurdly wasteful corporate schemes and broken toilets.

Low student welfare, an unwillingness to fail anyone and an A+ explosion in cheating...

For more than a decade, the deteriorating state of the higher education sector in the UK has been largely hidden from view.

Now, after years of cutbacks, an academic who must remain anonymous is presenting a candid and no-holds-barred account of life on campus.

The Secret Lecturer takes you into the seminar room (a repurposed store cupboard, as it happens), the cranky staff meetings, the botched disciplinary meetings, a complicated town vs gown relationship and the secrets of lecturer relationahips with professors.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to study or work at many British universities in the 2020s, The Secret Lecturer will have you rattling through a book faster than a panicked undergraduate on an essay deadline.

Whether you are filling in your UCAS form, moving into a university hall of residence, or just want to know what life is like in a modern college, this book has the low-down. The Secret Lecturer does for higher education in the UK what The Secret Barrister did for the law courts: reveal the unedifying, sometimes strange truth about a system we think we all know.

Reviews

'Beyond the often amusing accounts of interactions with difficult people, there are also numerous moments where the author offers a glimpse into what reads as more systemic issues such as grade inflation and student cheating, the struggle for research time, casual instances of prejudice that appear to go unchecked, and a particularly poignant account of advising a disabled student who is struggling to get support... I found it an engaging read.' Debbie McVitty, Editor, WONKHE

'The Secret Lecturer conveys a dry, ironic and often self-deprecating humour and considerable humanity, particularly through consideration of mental health, sexism and racism.There’s a real feeling that we ordinary folk are all in this together and if we support one another in subverting the ineffective status quo within institutions, not just HE, we can, and will, make a difference.' Linda Hill, Linda's Book Bag

Extract

The UK public seem to think a university lecturer is an idle, sherry-swigging stereotype out of a 1970s campus novel. Perceptions of students are frozen in the 1980s – they’re either idle, undernourished wimps à la Neil from the BBC sitcom The Young Ones or like his housemates Rick (naïvely militant blowhard) or Vyvyan (shouty, intoxicated hooligan). Many of the students I teach are well-behaved, eat healthily and aren’t uniformly obsessed with getting smashed. Some of them even vote Conservative. But an even more disturbing development that few in the ’80s could have predicted is the epidemic of mental illness among students – and staff. Readers may be surprised to find out that legions of lecturers are overworked and underpaid, and on casual contracts.

As you will also see, academic standards are slowly being obliterated, though that has more to do with financing than with a slide into ‘wokery.’ The conversion of students into customers we can’t afford to upset has resulted in an upsurge in grades, non-attendance, abusive behaviour and plagiarism. Hardly anyone ever fails no matter how badly they perform. Not to be left out, lecturers can plagiarise, too – usually each other’s lecture notes and research ideas. A mania about external funding has destroyed research ethics.

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