Clearing – my thoughts
This week has been all about Clearing and A-Level results for me. It started earlier this week when the University got the results and we worked out how many clearing places we would have for our courses and continued through the week as we got more information, confirmed some more students and got ready for today – A-Level results day.
I have a weird sort of affection for clearing. I went through clearing, I loved my uni days and am grateful for the chance to study law and I get really excited about now being able to give that chance to some of our callers. Working the clearing helpline is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster though. There are the calls from people who are nowhere near the entry tariffs and you just know they will struggle to get a place and it’s heartbreaking; there’s those who are so close and you really want to take them but can’t because os university policy; there are those who have made it and are so excited about getting a place in clearing and those who have done better than expected and are even more over the moon. So basically today I have been in the business of making dreams come true and shattering them in pretty much equal measures. Here are my thoughts/tips whatever you want to call them for surviving clearing
1. Don’t panic – you don’t have to make all the decisions now – don’t let institutions pressure you into accepting a place you don’t really want
2. Come to an open day if possible – most unis have them (For Bradford’s clearing open days see the website)
3. Think about what you want – if it is to study a particular subject at a particular institution and you haven’t got in, can you resit and try again next year? Is it the place or the subject that grabs you? If the place, do they have other courses of interest; if the subject, can you go somewhere else?
4. Have all your info ready – institutions need your UCAS ID, Clearing ID, information about your results, what course you’re interested in and if you have called them before the reference number they gave you.
So for those who got the results and uni places you wanted – well done! For those who haven’t, it feels horrible, really horrible but you know what, I went through clearing and my student days were fabulous and with hindsight I’m actually quite pleased I didn’t get into my first choice! And if this helps a little bit – a lot of our best students have come through clearing. We don’t accept people who we think will struggle too much on our courses so if we offer you a place it’s because we believe in you and want to help you reach your potential. I’ll be back on the phonelines tomorrow afternoon and I am looking forward to it – I just hope that the dreams I can make happen far outnumber the dreams I have to shatter! (Oh and just in case you want to come and study with us at Bradford – we have some places available and all the info including the number to call is on the website.
Diversity – why it’s important and why it’s not easy
I am currently writing a paper on gender and the Court of Justice of the EU. In preparation for that paper and as part of my research I spent quite a bit of time reading material about why a more diverse judiciary might be a good thing. This got me thinking about diversity more generally and as usual my thoughts eventually turned to law schools and legal education. The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that diversity in law schools is really important for all sorts of reasons. So firstly what do I mean by diversity and secondly why do I think it is important?
Working at Bradford University Law School gives an interesting but skewed picture of diversity. The University as a whole scores very highly on diversity indicators but the experience in the classroom is very different. Our cohort is not particularly diverse. Most of our students are from an asian background and most live at home very close to campus. So yes, I am including ethnic/racial/religious diversity in my thinking as well as things like gender, sexual orientation, disability etc. However I am also thinking about questions of class, education, background, relationship status and, perhaps importantly position, in relation to the purpose of legal education, differences in aims and ambitions and career goals and reaosn for being at university. I am thinking about both students and academics here.
I, as most of you will know, am a firm believer in a liberal legal education. I don’t care much about the needs of the profession or at least not that they should impact on what we do at degree level. I don’t care whether students want to go into legal practice or do something else. I care about learning for learning’s sake and wanting to learn/know/find out just because… Not so long ago I would probably have argued that we should all take that stance. However, the more I think and read about diversity the more I think I was probably wrong there. Diversity of views is really important and it is crucial that students are exposed to a variety of views. It is part of learning to make up your own mind, to work out which views you find convincing and why and to form your own views which you can justify in a reasoned (if passionate!) way.
So diversity is important because it brings different views, experiences, stances and understandings to the table which will continuously challenge our own and force us to think deeply about why we think what we think and why we do what we do in the way that we do it. It may lead us to change our minds but even where it does not, or perhaps particularly where it does not, it helps us to formualte our point of view more clearly, to engage with critiques and to further the arguments in the ongoing debates about the purpose of legal education as well as substantive areas of law etc. Engaging with different views and experiences is a good thing. It helps us drive knowledge and understanding forward. It also of course is important for students (and academics) to have role models and people they can identify and feel comfortable with.
In a law school such as the one I work with, this is really important because our student cohort is not very diverse. Students come from similar backgrounds with similar aspirations and expectations. They are not really exposed to differing views from their peers so it is important for us to share our thoughts, our perspectives with them to give them alternative visions as to what law degrees can be about, what can be achieved with them and what the future may hold. We need to make them think. I don’t want students to think I’m right. I’d like students to think about why I might be right, or why my vision of legal education might work for them – or indeed why it might not.
And that leads me on to why diversity is hard. Genuine diversity only works if you have people who are genuinely diverse. As academics though some of the things that might have made us diverse have been eroded by the education etc that has brought us to where we are. It might be that as legal academics and law teachers we have more in common than not. Some of us will of course hang on to our identity as LGBTQ or feminists or working class or whatever more strongly than others but even then it is likely to have been influenced by also being a legal academic. Diversity is also difficult because it means we have to engage with what we think and why rather than just taking it for granted and then we have to go one step further and engage with what others think and why. And that engagement has to be genuine. A simple ‘well that’s just rubbish’ won’t do. We all like to be right, we all like to think that our view is the best, the most logical and the most convincing and if only people would listen they would see that. However to really benefit from diversity ourselves and help our students do so we need to accept that we might all be wrong but hopefully will all be right and that we can all learn something from each other – even if that is just to defend our views in a more considered and holistic way.
I am still thinking about this and I am sure there are flaws in my argument here but I thought it was worth posting and if you have any thoughts on this please do share!
Why I will be on strike tomorrow
I’ve had a number of questions from students about the next UCU strike called for tomorrow and also quite a lot of complaints about the fact that teaching will be cancelled. I therefore think it is worth setting out here why I support the UCU action. I have to admit that when initially thinking about it, going on strike over pay didn’t sit easily. I’m well paid, a lot of academic are. But here’s why supporting the action is important and why the action is about so much more than just pay. You can see all the facts and figures on the UCU website.
I struggled to articulate exactly why I think this strike action is important until I read the blog ‘What I wanted to Say on the Picket Line‘ by Johnny Unger. In the blog post he says
‘I’m not striking because I want more money, I’m striking because I am disgusted with the inequality in the sector, with VCs often earning more than 20 times what the lowest paid earn, and because I am deeply concerned by the ongoing marketisation and commercialisation of education.’
And that’s exactly it. I’m not after more money either, I’m after fairness within and across institutions. I want workloads, management structures, organisational strucutres, process and policies which allow us to fully support our students and conduct research and which recognise academic freedom in both of those arenas and I want hourly paid staff, graduate teaching assistants, casual staff, admin staff and academics fairly and adequately rewarded and senior management pay has to remain in proportion to what everyone else earns otherwise it cannot possibly be fair.
And to those students of mine who are still annoyed I won’t be teaching tomorrow and also won’t be rescheduling the cancelled classes – read the materials on the UCU website, read some of the blogs out there, follow #fairpayinHE on twitter and see what you think then. UCU called a 2 hour strike for tomorrow which actually wouldn’t have impacted on my teaching but as Bradford University has decided to dock a full day’s pay for 2 hour strike action, and UCU in response has escalated the action, I will be on strike all day. Feel free to complain to the VC or Director of HR about this one. Equally though I’m happy to talk about it when I see you later in the week or in next week’s seminars. I may not be able to articulate fully why this is so important, but it is.
My Conversations 