I’m packed, sorted and ready
I wrote about the excitement of choosing my notebook in the last post. Well I have chosen. In fact I have picked more than just the notebook- I have picked all the things I will take to my first day at work on Monday. I have put them in in bag and put the bag back in the study – all ready to go.
I have also put to one side the things I think I want to wear on Monday – although I may change my mind about that. I know, I know it is only Friday but we’re away this weekend and I do not want to have to think or worry about a thing while we’re away. This way, I don’t have to do anything when we get back. I can get up on Monday morning, open my wardrobe, pull out the clothes I’ve put to one side and put them on, pick up the bag in the study and go. I don’t feel anxious or stressed or anything other than excited and I’d like to keep it that way.
So, what do you take to work on your first day? Beats me! It’s been 9 years since I had to think about that and last time I’d seen my office space before and actually last time I didn’t really have any stuff! So here’s what I’ve gone for. This is my 1st day kit:
- My folder with information of how to find the Law School (that would be a good start), my certificates and other bits and pieces for HR and my contractual docs etc. Then the two notebooks I have chosen. One is my general one – you’re not likely to see me without it much. I’ve tried notepads and folders and bits of paper etc – I can never find anything ever again – so everything goes in the book – from research ideas to people’s contact details, to meeting notes, everything. However, I then worry about missing something so I also have a to-do-list book. That’s the second smaller notebook. I can see you rolling your eyes. Roll away, for a control freak like me it works. I have a little to do book on the go from Bradford. I’ve only used the first 3 pages so I was just going to go with that but as I picked it up to pack it my heart rate shot up. I didn’t want to open it and look – so I didn’t. I put it back in one of the yet untouched boxes from my previous working life and picked up the little green one instead.
I also of course need my magic pen. I like the look and feel and weighting of my Disney pen. I’ve hardly used it – it sat on my study desk at home gathering dust – well that’s about the change. As I said in the last post, I am hanging on to the magic and excitement of September and the pen will help! - Next we have the obligatory sticky note kit with some clips – I know I am not likely to need paperclips on my first day or perhaps ever but they’re cat paperclips! And anyway, you just never know!
- My magic pen might not be enough. I know better than to go anywhere with just one pen. That pretty much guarantees that the pen will disappear or worse, run out. So I have a collection of pens, blue, black and green as well as a highlighter and some more sticky notes which all nicely sit in a gorgeous little mug that my lovely friend, colleague and co-author of my next book Sanna bought me to cheer me up after my first stretch of sick leave. It’s a reminder that academia is about collegiality and therefore it is absolutely coming with me on day 1.
- Finally, my coffee mug which reads ‘Today is the Day Everything Goes According to Plan’ and my Herdy coaster as well as a selection of teabags and coffee. I went for all non-caffeine first and then thought ‘who am I kidding’ and headed back into the kitchen to hunt for sachets of the proper stuff. Finding good coffee is pretty high on my list of priorities for Monday!
I am still debating electronic devices. I am getting a work laptop and I will enjoy setting up folder structures and email folders etc so I think I’ll be going without my Mac and iPad. All I really need now is a book for the commute!
To New Beginnings
1st September always seems to signal the start of a new academic year. Attention turns to teaching which starts in just a few short weeks, the research done and not done over the summer, the sort of inevitableness of the academic cycle and the fact that once teaching hits it won’t be long until Christmas – but it will feel long because there’s no half term or break to let you draw breath. I remember the last couple of early Septembers as being times to grit my teeth and tackle everything with a ‘right, here we go again then’ attitude. However, I also remember early Septembers which were full of the ‘back to school’ excitement – the same excitement I used to feel as a child shopping for new notebooks and pens and folders. You know what I’m talking about, right? That promise that a new academic year holds, things to learn, to discover, to talk about, to read, to find out…
Today I realised that I am recapturing some of that magic of the childhood back to school wonder. I start new job on Monday and the closer it gets the more excited I am. I am no longer anxious or worried about it, I am just excited. Excited to get back into the classroom, excited to see what a new academic year in a new institution holds, excited to push my research forward, excited about the conversations I’ll have and also quite excited to head upstairs to my study at some point today and choose a new notebook from the collection of notebooks I seem to have amassed over the last couple of years. I’ve stuck to boring, ruled, institution supplied ones for the last year at least. Now I feel it is time to choose something else. A new notebook for a new chapter of my academic career.
So on Monday I start as a Senior Lecturer in Law at Leeds Beckett University. Once I decided I was leaving Bradford, I knew that if I was going to go for another job in academia it would have to be something that allowed me to get back to teaching and to my research and to make a real contribution. I have been told again and again that I did a good job in management, and maybe I did, but I don’t get excited about it. In just 2 years it managed to extinguish the September magic. Now that September magic is back and I intend to hang onto it with both hands – sod that, I’ll sit on it if I have to.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suddenly cured of the crap of the previous job. I can’t read my previous blog post without crying or without feeling slightly sick. I am cautious, very cautious, all institutions are mad and the sector is in a right mess. I know all this and I am not going into my new role with rose tinted glasses. I still wonder if I am good enough sometimes; I will, I’m sure, get frustrated at the idiocy of things but that’s not what this is about. It’s about new beginnings, it’s about the promise of those new beginnings, about the excitement and wonder and about hanging onto that promise and the excitement for as long as possible into the academic year – and then finding ways to renew them.
Thank you for all the lovely, kind and inspiring messages of support. Please join me as I step onto the next rollercoaster in my journey through this academic theme park.
End of an Era – Please
The last 2 academic years have been awful. They have been full of the worst that HE has to offer, full of the worst that people have to offer and it made me question everything. It made me question whether I want to be an academic, whether I am capable of being an academic, whether I can teach, whether I can research, whether anything I have ever done has ever been good enough, whether it was worth doing, made a difference. It made me question my management skills, approach, and philosophy. It made me second guess everything I have ever been sure of and it pushed me far further towards a total darkness than anyone should ever have to go.
The last academic year ran me over like a freight train and some days I didn’t know if I’d ever get up again. I had days where I physically couldn’t make myself get out of bed, I had days where I just cried for no reason, I had days where I couldn’t breathe, where I couldn’t leave the house, where I couldn’t read, didn’t understand anything anyone said to me… days where I just didn’t function and yet – on some of these days I did function. I functioned at a stupidly high level. I spent the best part of a day in an ‘Academic Portfolio Review’ meeting answering question about the Law School, the courses, the research etc. I was apparently ‘very impressive’ – I barely remember it. I’d got off the bus a couple of stops early on the way there because I couldn’t breathe.
I spent most of the academic year on high alert waiting for next ‘attack’, crying in the toilets, smiling vaguely in meetings because I had no clue what had just been said and just trying to breathe. I knew, when I took on the Head of School role, first on an interim basis and then permanently, that there was a lot of work to do. What I didn’t know was that I would get no real support to do that work and that there would be a small but significant group of people who would happily undermine me, stab me in the back, lie, cheat, make stuff up and do it all with a smile. I don’t like to be a victim, I don’t like what my experience says about me. If I don’t succeed then that is down to me – that’s the way I work. Success and failure are my doing BUT the more distance I get the more clearly I can see that I was bullied from the minute I stepped into the role. I hate that, I absolutely hate that. I am not someone who is bullied. This doesn’t happen to me. I am in control of my own destiny, my own actions, my own future, everything. I. Don’t. Get. Bullied.
But I did. I was promised a mentor when I took the management role. I suggested a couple of women in management or senior roles who I admired and my suggestions were laughed at and then nothing happened. I had no management experience but I tried – I signed up for an MA module in leadership (I got a distinction just for the record), I read as much management and leadership stuff as I could get my hands on and I concentrated on some of the gendered stuff – I wanted to be ready for this shit. I spent lots and lots of time talking to Law School staff, my staff. We figured out together how this was going to work for us. The Law School worked, it was the least dysfunctional part of the university as far as I am concerned. I was ‘disciplined’ for raising Law School concerns about an admin restructure with the restructure steering group (as in hauled in to see the Director of Administration and the Dean) and very quickly some very clever people had constructed a narrative of me as inexperienced, emotion led and hot headed. And they fed that narrative throughout the next 18 months.
I was lied to about my staff and lied about to my staff. I was told confidential information that was then leaked to others and I was blamed for the leak. I was told information and told it was confidential and then reprimanded for not having ‘cascaded’ it to my team. I was patronised, ignored, laughed at and dismissed more times than I care to remember. I was asked to do stuff, delivered and then asked why I did the things I’d been asked to do with a room full of people insisting I’d never been asked to do something and this was me ‘going it alone’ again. I was told to completely re-write our Law UG provision in about an 8 months period. Later all the issues that come with having to do this sort of thing quickly are all my fault because I insisted on doing it for the 2016/16 academic year. People offered help, then didn’t help, then ignored my pleas for some assistance and then swear blind they never heard from me.
I was told I was doing an excellent job – but only ever behind closed doors. I had two performance reviews as Head of School – the first was 5 minutes about how amazing I was and 40 minutes about how I need to learn to keep my temper in check because it undermines everything I do. The second was even more bizarre than that and I won’t say any more about that one. I had a meeting with a senior figure another time and was sworn at, asked if I now realised how wrong I was about everything and told to get a grip. My staff were told that if I learned how to manage and they could keep me in line, the Law School might not be in so much trouble (it never was!). I made a complaint, a formal one, to the Dean and he refused to engage with it and told me he did not agree with my assessment of the situation and to let it go.
So, I have cried, I have screamed, I have run stupid miles to get the adrenalin out of my system, I have taken time off sick, I have gone back, I have tried again but my body won’t take the miles I need to run to keep doing this shit, I don’t have any more tears left, I have run out of energy and out of self belief. I cannot work in that toxic environment. I cannot keep crying myself to sleep at night. I can’t get to the point where being bullied feels normal. So I resigned a while ago. My finishing date was the 14th August. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. The Law School means the world to me. The colleagues there are everything HE should be and they reminded me every day that we need to fight for collegiality, honesty and loyalty within academia but my little Law School oasis wasn’t enough to combat the crap outside of that. I do hope the university realises what a gem it has.
I do have another job lined up and more on that soon. For now I am just trying to remember that I am good at my job, that I can teach, that I can research and that I can lead, not manage, lead.
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