James Sumner
@JamesBSumner
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Historian @ManCHSTM (all views mine). Computer users, brewing scientists, Manchester science & technology gubbins. Book: …
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Yes, it was me who smuggled a large seabird into the plenary and launched it at the speaker's head with the words "Actually this is more of a cormorant than a question." I am to be considered for possible readmission to the society in 2038, which seems fair.
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Been trying to explain to a reporter that if you can't find an epidemiologist to interview it's really not acceptable to give the airtime to an epistemologist. He said "How do you know?" I said "Don't you bloody start."
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@cath_fletcher
@rachelwinchers
I get the question about "attendance record" often enough to have a form of words ready. Never had "health" before (urgh...), but same would apply.
Text of my response is in the alt of the image here if you want to copy/adapt:
Another fun-packed day sharing a planet with the questions on the default reference form...
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Not-very-responsible reporting from
@BBCNews
. Established secure people on full-time contracts (such as myself) get these kinds of salaries. The big issue is that the system relies on a lot of folk living hand-to-mouth on fractional bits and pieces...
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State of this article. Didsbury Mosque "was once a church", hint hint.
To be exact, it was a Methodist chapel... til 1965. According to Tesco wanted the site, but the Methodists chose a buyer who'd use the building for worship. It became a mosque in 1967.
As things are slowly getting back to normal, so good to see the British media is too ☺️
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A question I often hear is "How did anyone write a monograph before word-processors?" And I suspect the biggest enabling technology was patriarchy. The "wife" role could span research assistance, developmental and copy-editing, proofing, and (for the tech of the time) IT support.
I always wondered how previous generations of historians were so productive. One secret it turns out is that their wives served as their (unpaid and unacknowledged) research assistants.
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@OfficialUoM
Writing as a colleague: please reconsider this statement.
The second and third paras, which seem more focused on disclaiming responsibility than on the tragedy itself, are bound to cause widespread offence. (They also seem to be based on a misunderstanding of developments.)
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Not unpopular in this household. I have given over way, way too much of my life to computing exactly which bits of the Palgrave/Macmillan empire are or were, at any given moment in the history of the universe, operating out of Basingstoke.
Unpopular opinion: we should stop using “Place of Publication” in bibliography references
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The right-wing press is gradually filling up with content whose defining trait is not so much that it's ideologically objectionable as that it doesn't make any bleeding sense.
How on Earth does the conditional work here? Jane Austen's work obviously *is* published these days.
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Feeling a weird nostalgia for the days when the BBC's anti-union bias was a matter of falsifying the order of events at the Battle of Orgreave to disguise unprovoked police violence, rather than continually cooing "What am strike? Do strike be not-work?" like a bewildered infant
Mass strike action on 1 February will disrupt daily life - No 10
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OK, you've worn me down, I admit it.
Students don't get ill, campuses are perfectly safe, and my pleas to move things online were just a great big ruse to make my teaching prep take up to ten times as long as normal so I can fall ever further behind on my writing plans.
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Normal person: Look at the funny Victorian hats!
Historian: THIS IS FROM 1831 IT'S NOT VICTORIAN YOU MANIAC
N: What do you call it, then?
H: LATE GEORGIAN. WILLIAM IV COUNTS AS GEORGIAN.
N: Wait, how come you get to do that and I don't?
H: BECAUSE WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING
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Another fun-packed day sharing a planet with the questions on the default reference form...
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Chalk up another one for "The FT often appears to be some distance to the political left of most of the UK press, by simple dint of the fact that its readership expects the claims it makes about money and power to be basically plausible":
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For anyone confused about the UK: the nearest thing to a water quality regulator is the singer from the Undertones. There's a footballer sorting out food poverty. This week we asked someone about workers' pay and conditions whose actual job it is, and LOST OUR MINDS at the result
You've confirmed that for 3 decades water companies have had all the funding needed to meet their legal obligations. Clearly they haven't been doing that.
Where has the money gone and as a regulator what the hell have you and the EA been doing the last 30 years?
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TIL: Billy Bragg relentlessly treats Twitter interactions as though they were sincere attempts at dialogue and responds in the style of a normal human being, with hilarious results:
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Nope, absolutely no idea why anybody still insists on using physical books:
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Just saved this to the Wayback Machine. I hope it gets deleted soon, for the sake of Norfolk's basic dignity, but it wants preserving as a lesson and a warning.
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Today in Strikes Don't Work No Siree Robert They Surely Don't:
Industrial action has been called off as over 2,000
@unitetheunion
Metroline bus drivers in London have won an 11% pay increase with a 10% increase on back pay (they were originally offered just 4%).
Collective action delivers results.
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I often wonder if the main reason there are no digitised archives of the Sun available to researchers (unlike the Daily Mirror or Star) is the sheer volume of stuff like this, and worse than this, that we'd uncover.
Some of it bylined to the senior print and TV pundits of today.
Back in 1987 the ‘not at all hostile to gays’ Sun newspaper offered to pay for gays to leave the country.
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Your regular reminder that "big strike actually happens as planned" is not, historically, a thing.
The idea is that the employers, noting the scale and intensity of the proposed action, come back with a serious offer, so we can suspend the action.
THIS IS STILL AN OPTION.
BREAKING: NOTICE SERVED ON UNIVERSITY EMPLOYERS
18 days of strike action in February and March
1 Feb
9, 10 Feb
14, 15, 16 Feb
21, 22, 23 Feb
27, 28 Feb. 1, 2 March
16, 17 March
20, 21, 22 March
RT if you back our members
UCU and PROUD
#ucuRISING
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Oof. Former Guardian tech editor. Had a visiting fellowship at CRASSH. This gendercrit business is a *hell* of a gateway drug.
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Where British HE has ended up (thread):
In the 2020-21, many students had to study mainly online with no real campus life, and were understandably very unhappy.
What the prevailing managerial mindset learned from this: NEVER MOVE CLASSES ONLINE, EVER, unless ordered to by HMG.
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Here is a joke.
A historian walks into a bar, and there meets a commissioning editor.
"I want to do a book on the Forgotten Man of Science."
"Excellent! Turing, Tesla, or Alfred Russel Wallace?"
"Nope. Henry Coddington."
"Bog off," says the editor, "nobody knows who that is!"
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I was marking essays, but I got distracted by the BBC's wretched Empire poll thing, but I couldn't stop marking.
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For the record: let me announce myself as one of the "Why is so much stuff re-opening in June/July, this is incredibly dangerous, stop treating it as normal, you're actually scaring me a bit now" brigade.
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I approve this interpretation.
(Experience in line art is basically indistinguishable from magic, isn't it? The face is perfect here: you can tell that the prof SOLEMNLY BELIEVES he is entitled to introduce that cormorant)
Now I really want to have buttons or T-shirts of this made up. They would be the perfect conference attire. What do you think
@JamesBSumner
?😂
(Rough mockup below... the cormorant needs work, but I think I got the professor dead to rights)
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Just think for a moment about the challenges involved in getting a properly spaced text here. Whoever did this has achieved the only well-planned action in recent British political history.
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This is fun. Vice-Chancellors all around the country all separately declaring that, while they'd love to help, they are but lone voices who can do nothing to modify their collective position. Often in much the same language, suggesting this is a co-ordinated UUK comms effort.
Seeing as lots of UCU members are on strike again this week, and those of us in
@BristolUCU
will be out next week, here's a 🧵of VCs bemoaning how powerless they are to influence the committee on which they sit.
They really would like to help staff, but their hands are tied ...
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I don't understand why Feargal Sharkey is in charge of sorting out the sewage issue.
I don't *mind* that Feargal Sharkey is in charge of sorting out the sewage issue. He will doubtless do a better job than elected representatives. It just feels a bit arbitrary.
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#UCUrising
A *lot* of
@ucu
people are asking "What should I do about stuff that suddenly has to happen next week?"
Hopefully we'll get some specific guidance from HQ soon but, till that arrives, there are a lot of reasonably safe decisions we can make on our own initiative,
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Science explained, with heartfelt apologies to the entire
#scicomm
community. In my defence, I was very, *very* bored:
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Now, I'm not going to say I *like* the Reach-era Daily Star. The tabs in general are not from my universe.
But it does provide helpful clues to the difference between the irreverent free-for-all the S*n claims to be, and the carefully wielded tool of the powerful it is.
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Perhaps unwisely, made my first attempt today to visualise what the small-group-meets-in-large-room teaching environment with physical distancing will... you know... actually look like.
Tell you what it *doesn't* look like. It doesn't look like a discussion seminar:
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Dear UoM announcements list: thank you for the update but I believe it's typically known as the "bi flag", "bi pride flag" or "bisexual pride flag", rather than the "bi sex flag".
Terminology is often confusing, but a useful test is: "Have I just called something a 'sex flag'?"
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There's your problem, right there. The fact that people tolerate this as somehow a relevant factor in the decision.
Far fewer than 12% of people use wheelchair ramps. Fortunately, our society has got as far as affirming in law that that really isn't the bloody point.
ministers argue that only 12% of people still use a railway ticket office
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Another day, another senior academic tweeting supposedly general advice that starts with about three unexceptionable points and then throws in something that might as well be "glue a wasp to your face: all hiring committees love to see a good face-wasp"
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On the failure of the 999 national emergency system. I try not to get angry about the ridiculous things people say on Twitter if they're not in the Cabinet, but this set me thinking.
Because, yes, the 999 system *does* have to run perfectly. This is actually an achievable goal.
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Blimey. This doesn't say much for Cambridge Modern History's academic standards.
If he's presented "entire pages" of someone else's work as his own, it doesn't greatly matter whether it was intentional or not. His documentation and writing habits are not minimally competent.
Dr William O'Reilly is an early modern historian. In case anyone was looking for people to definitely avoid working with or citing. I recall someone I was a student with getting a fiercer punishment than this for self-plagiarising one paragraph
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This framing is exhausting.
Why was anybody supposing this was *not* overwhelmingly likely to be true?
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I see the question "But what would be the *point* of trying to run seminar discussions masked and spread out across a 300-seater tiered theatre?" is not on the new Frequently Asked Questions list. That can't be right. I for one have been asking it ten times an hour since August.
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Concerned at false advertising of "tenure-track" here (there is no tenure in the UK).
I've seen it suggested that the wording is "to attract international candidates". Thing is, you could attract them even more by saying "salary is a billion dollars", but it isn't, so you can't.
We are recruiting 30 - yes, that's right, 30! - Chancellor's Fellows to prestigious, tenure-track, research-intensive early/mid-career roles at the University of Edinburgh. Please spread the word!
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In which an FRHistS makes an assertion about British history so wildly false it would be unprofessional to debate it.
(Discussing how far it's false and why might be interesting, mind. 1688, the Jacobite wars and Ireland 1916-98 are obvious, but what about the Merthyr Rising?)
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Could someone remind me which is the political system where the problem with it is that you run out of other people's money? I've lost track.
In other Great British news, Thames Water is on the brink because shareholders are refusing to invest any more money unless customer bills go up substantially
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See, if I'd known this was going to go viral-by-academic-standards, I'd have launched a podcast about terrible ebook UX or something.
Erm... I can try to sell you my monograph, I suppose:
Or if you want a Master's in
#histSTM
:
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It would be great if HE professionals and journos could stop with the whole "top universities" thing, given that
(a) it's what's causing the problem in the first place and
(b) universities that routinely mess up like this are, by definition, not very good
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Morning task: collecting the replies and QTs on this (without author details) and sending them to the relevant SLT members and comms people, with a request that they read them in full and confirm that they have done this.
A University statement on online reports about a student applicant.
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Plea to anyone writing emergency comms:
• day of week, date, month, AND TIME at top, always
• never "today"; never "on Monday"; always "today (Monday)"
• never "closed from Thursday". Disambiguate. "Wednesday will be the last operating day", "closing 17.00 Wednesday", etc.
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ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, C P SNOW?
Break through! This hole connects the Maths Institute with the new Humanities building.
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If I was the political editor of ITV News, and I noticed I had formed my picture of a national issue on the basis of what I know about my pal's daughter, I'd probably say "Damn it: I appear to be terrible at journalism. I must resign immediately. Please ignore my interpretation."
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Headline gives wrong impression here. This is a threat to dock all pay of WORKING staff.
As in: you could go in as normal, work a full-time load and then some, and they'd refuse to pay you because of *past* strike days.
(Is this lawful? No.)
#UCUrising
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Today's exciting discovery: being the only person in an exam board who was observing the MAB and hasn't returned any marks is... lonely and a little bit scary, to be honest, even though nobody made an issue of it.
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I am reasonably confident that a Black actor can play Winston Churchill but that Winston Churchill *cannot* play a Black actor, for a number of practical reasons.
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In a sense, the finest Education Secretary in living memory. Every major decision she made during her time in office served the public interest and was universally acclaimed by the teaching profession.
With great sadness I must resign from government.
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Painful to read and reflect that, ultimately, it's institutions like mine that are doing this to Dion and his colleagues. Our desperate over-recruiting without regard to capacity, our relentless appeal to prestige and bogus metrics – this is what it necessarily causes elsewhere.
🧵
I've tweeted cryptically of late about stuff not being good in our department at the University of Chichester, and with me in that context. So: about three weeks ago I was told out of the blue that our BA in Modern History was being axed and my post placed at risk. (1/12)
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Never change, Turnitin.*
The similarity match is here kicking off at the fact the student has placed a "1" in the bottom right corner of page 1. Apparently someone at Lboro did the same.
*Turnitin will, in fact, never change, so long as the sector keeps hosing it with money
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I'm glad I don't work at one of those Third-Rate Universities you read about in the papers. Teaching at a Not Quite The Best University is OK, because you can basically just put together the same class you'd do for the Best Universities, then add a few mistakes to show willing.
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I hope it is now clear that, on USS, those of us standing outside waving placards were the responsible professionals, whereas the people in nice suits putting out polite-looking statements were more or less at the "stealing a snowplough and driving it at the soft play area" stage
Absolutely ludicrous. A massive, massive battle about a set of payment needs that never even existed, and that everybody who knew what they were taking about understood were fictitious. 1/2
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Well, it's transparency of a kind, I suppose
RF later state that they "commit" to "keep an eye on twitter" and "flagging anything inappropriate" to funders. By inappropriate they mean (wait for it) "anti-researchfish behaviour".
UKRI actively reviewed RF's responding tweet, considering the tone appropriate.
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I have been supervising PhDs for 15 years, so I'm a bit gutted nobody told me there's a way to adjust projects so that students who are suffering unprecedented disruption to complete on the usual timescale with no compromise on quality.
Could someone send me the details please?
We are therefore advising all students funded by UKRI, including those on grants from any of the seven research councils, to speak to their supervisors about how to adjust their project to complete a doctoral-level qualification within their funded period.
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This is Very Bad.
Part of the problem here is that some journos who spread this framing are, believe it or not, genuinely unaware of what they're in effect saying. They don't grasp that self-ID is (a) already used everywhere (b) the only possible approach
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Full details of what academic Twitter says about this may be found by looking on academic Twitter, where the idea is raised about four times a year and comprehensively rejected for reasons which were arguably obvious to begin with and unarguably obvious the fifteenth time around.
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Really important to understand this situation. It's an extraordinary lose-lose-lose-lose. "Prestigious" institutions get crowds of under-supported students and overworked staff; other institutions get narrowed provision and job insecurity. (And some lucky places get both.)
The decision to shut History, Languages and Politics courses at Sunderland isn't (only) local philistinism but a logical consequence of the government decision to remove the quotas on student recruitment from 2015.
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This story has a byline to the "Head of Investigations".
Hello! I'm in charge of investigative reporting for the Times. I broke the news of how two university departments in the whole of the UK have each changed one of the texts on one of their reading lists.
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Here
@chakrabortty
paints an appalling picture of the MAB deductions by simply describing them. I wish others would do the same.
Employers (
@QMUL
among the worst as ever, but more widely) went OFF THE DEEP END and we don't seem to have processed this.
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The inability of the Prevailing Managerial Mindset to process this information becomes less puzzling once you know that it doesn't really engage with what the students think or want. Its focus is on minimising the risks of (a) successful legal action and (b) Government censure.
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A signature behaviour I've noticed among top-level University managers is a refusal to adjust to the fact that the UK Government is neither a wise protector nor an ultimate authority, but a loose cannon and a direct threat.
I'd like to hope this would clear that one up. And yet.
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Could've negotiated.
Could've negotiated and avoided this.
Just saying.
“It would not be right to stand here and not acknowledge staff who have been fighting for not more than the bare minimum”. How can we thank you enough for this brave and moving oration at Edinburgh Graduation today.
@ucuedinburgh
@ucu
@sssn_edi
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Sending loud signals that your project to correct women's under-representation is an optional extra that you'd cut first in a downturn is an interesting move, St Andrews.
#USSstrike
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Remind me: who is it I need to talk to to get this absurd practice annihilated across the sector?
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"How can we undermine the strike?"
"Well, standard practice is to find people in a state of utter financial desperation, and offer them money to strike-break."
"OK, how about we do that, *but* instead of offering them money, we offer them nothing?"
"..."
"It'll be cheaper!"
What’s that? The BOLD and PEOPLE ORIENTATED
@UniStrathclyde
want
#PhD
students to deliver modules? And to break the MAB.
AND NOT PAY THEM?
No cool
#StrathLife
bosses. Not cool.
#ucuRISING
#EnoughIsEnough
#phdlife
#RateLimitedExceeded
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the most important being: YOU ARE NOT EXPECTED TO SCRAMBLE LIKE A MANIAC TO RESTORE NORMALITY AT A MOMENT'S NOTICE.
We're still on ASoS, remember. ASoS categorically says don't do that. If you're working your hours, nobody can reasonably expect more.
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If I've understood this: this year's American Political Science Association Annual Meeting is collapsing because striking hotel workers have co-ordinated their actions with each other, a move the American Political Science Association was not able to predict.
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One thing that puzzled me about Ferocious Skeptics back when they were a thing is that they were always furious about astrology, which chiefly appeals to private enthusiasts, but never seemed to notice Myers-Briggs, which corporations and public-sector orgs drop serious money on.
It's embargoed so I can't give the details, but I've just seen a paper, in a major journal, that uses Myers-Briggs personality types for analysis. The paper devotes just one sentence to the fact that Myers-Briggs is essentially no more accurate than horoscopes. Ridiculous.
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Thus, for instance
St George's, Hulme: partitioned into flats
St Matthew's, Campfield: demolished 1952; now a ridiculously boxy office block
St Peter's, city centre: demolished 1907. Now a tram junction.
A mosque is in fact about the churchiest thing you can make of an ex-church.
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A thing these malevolent gits would know if they had the remotest sincere interest in "Christian values": Christians, at least in industrial England, have for hundreds of years frequently shut down and sold off churches because the population keeps moving. It's often no big deal.
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Status: even I'm absolutely sick to the back teeth of
@ucu
ballot reminder emails, and in some cases it's me sending them
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Hearing from
@UM_UCU
sources that UoM language tutors who've been on fixed-term contracts for >4 years (long-running issue here) have today started getting letters confirming they're permanent. Well done to everyone who pushed for this. See, it's not like there's *no* good news.
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My pet theory: there is also a kind of dogwhistling at second order. Writers and subs signalling (to their pals, to each other): "Hey, look at exactly how far I can push this and get away with it!"
The Daily Telegraph is Britain’s pre-eminent fanzine for racists.
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Terrible decision-making by whoever deleted that thread.
In the context of having a Pride flag as their avi, this sends the clear message "We are keen to talk ourselves up as helping, but will bottle it the moment there are any consequences for us", which is not a good message.
So the British Library tweeted about some fish that change sexes and transphobes got mad, ratioed the post, then the Library deleted the thread. As obviously embarrassing and pathetic as this is for transphobes, it’s equally so for the library.
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Ooft. I'm a mid-career SL and my gross salary last tax year was £50 754. Anyone in a senior permanent role who says they can't afford to strike is either lying, or really *really* needs to get a
@ucu
caseworker onto what's going on with their grade level pronto.
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In which a prof at my institution publicly expresses a pretty standard point about institutional racism in academic research, and his Dean of Faculty emails him a rebuttal, copied to various senior colleagues, citing a GB News piece to support his assertion there's no problem:
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Fair enough.
But I hope the V-Cs appreciate that "let's all stand down while a panel sorts this out" is not a solution we can work with, because that's exactly what we agreed to in 2018, and the USS Board then flat-out ignored that panel and carried on much as before.
#UCUstrike
NEW on Wonkhe: University of York Vice Chancellor Charlie Jeffery seeks common ground
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Strange as it may sound to some folk, I can only see the trend towards grant allocation by lottery as an improvement.
In most cases in the arts and humanities, as here, all it's really doing is making what's in practical terms the existing arrangement more transparent.
We've opened the call for our
@BritishAcademy_
small grants scheme offering £10k. We receive so many good applications so awards will be allocated randomly between those applications that meet our quality threshold.
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A lot of people have drawn attention to this operation's humanity and compassion. Here are some other things to admire about it:
• organised
• experienced
• works at scale
• knows how to prioritise
• not addicted to the bizarre supposition that the Government is functioning.
Sikh groups, including Coventry-based
@LangarAid
have arrived in Dover to help deliver food and water to stranded lorry drivers in Kent:
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You know people always say "Historians will struggle to believe [thing historians have already assimilated and are unlikely to forget]"?
The only thing historians *genuinely* struggle to believe is that there were real people called "Sir Horace Smirk" and "Eric Moonman".
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Quietly hoping history has in fact been murdered, as this would get me out of a significant hole REFwise
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I know there are a few people following me on here who are at least adjacent to the gendercrit movement, and candidly I do wish you'd have a think. It's uncommonly poisonous.
If it has representatives who know how to behave decently they have not made themselves known to me.
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So, UKRI has been helping ResearchFish – a clunky monopoly commercial service that sucks enormous amounts of staff time – to threaten and silence individual users for stating that it has a stupid name, which it does.
There's probably no fixing this outside of a mass boycott.
BREAKING: National research funder UK Research and Innovation has admitted it encouraged
#researchfish
to report some tweets from academics to it, after enraged researchers criticised the online service for doing this last month.
#researchfishgate
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Incredible scenes in London as a major HE institution does something other than smack itself very hard on the nose as a result of stepping on a garden rake. See, it *can* be done...
BREAKING! We reached an agreement with
@KingsCollegeLon
on the statement below on
#USS
. Key points:
- no need for contribution rises
- we can and should protect existing benefits
- governance reform
- divest fossil fuels
#OneOfUsAllOfUs
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This. You have the right *as an individual* to join a union or not. You may be a union member and *unable* to strike, for various reasons. But if you're in the union and it calls us out on strike, we've got to go out if we can. That's part of the definition of membership.
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JESUS CHRIST THE BNP HAVE WON A *adjusts glasses* oh.
Labour GAIN Medway from the Tories for the first time in 25 years 🌹
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No they don't. 100% pay cut for striking is perfectly bloody normal (it's a strike).
100% pay cut for doing a full day's work but refusing to cover for striking colleagues, or to make up lost strike days for which you've already lost pay, is aggressive.
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End of
@ucu
MAB, then.
Because Twitter, someone somewhere will respond to any opinion I express as though it were a proxy for something I don't agree with.
At the level of fact: the action will cost me £8200 after tax, or 19% of the year's salary. Could've done a lot with that.
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So... can I have my strike deductions back now, please?
Those strikes were the most useful and informative pensions policy consultation exercise they've ever had access to, and *they* billed *us* for managing it.
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...wasn't really "jokey", though, was it?
The wording was: "If it's any consolation, I ignore it" ("it" being an agreed reasonable adjustment). Now, perhaps it wasn't a true statement. But there's absolutely nothing cueing the reader to take it as a joke.
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I am probably the only person I know who was aware that the crown stamp had disappeared, or, indeed, had even existed in the first place.
And I have a PhD in the history of quantification in the beer-brewing industry, so I'm a bit of an outlier here.
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Not mentioned in the comms, but the big point to note here is that
@ucu
is now part of the
#BudgetDayStrike
alongside teachers in England and Wales (NEU), junior doctors (BMA), tube drivers (Aslef), civil servants (both PCS and Prospect), and possibly others, I've lost track.
Today, our union has called a further day of strike action in universities on 15 March
This comes after employers decided to impose the first element of their pay offer
As talks continue, we must get ready to deliver big strike action and vote YES in the reballot
#ucuRISING
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I keep seeing PhD-only studentships for really excellent projects in and around
#histSTM
, mostly AHRC-funded.
I DO NOT HAVE ANY MASTER'S STUDENTS TO SEND TO THESE PROJECTS.
PEOPLE CAN'T AFFORD TO DO A MASTER'S NOW. PLEASE FUND POSTGRAD TAUGHT STUDY.
Thank you.
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