I’ve zipped through Les Back’s very enjoyable book [amazon_link id=”1906897581″ target=”_blank” ]Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters[/amazon_link] (the inaugural title from Goldsmith’s Press, always pleasing to welcome a new publisher of intelligent non-fiction). The book, the descendant of an earlier online version, is a kind of field notes about the academic life. Although I don’t entirely share his sense of the decline of the academic vocation and the role of universities – more on this below – it’s a warm, interesting read making a lot of wise observations.

[amazon_image id=”1906897581″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters[/amazon_image]

 The book has a lot to say about writing, and I’m wholly in accord with Les Back on this subject. On the obscurantism of academic writing when it isn’t necessary (occasionally it is). On the importance of reading for writing. On the merits of George Orwell’s [amazon_link id=”0141393068″ target=”_blank” ]Politics and the English Language[/amazon_link]. On having a stationery fetish (oh yes!). On the joy of libraries – that serendipity of taking a book off the shelf, and its immediate neighbours calling out, ‘If you’re interested in that one, you’ll want to read me too’ – something unavailable online where the serendipity has a very different structure. On the kinetics of writing by hand in a notebook. On desks – & I discovered here there is a book of photographs by Jill Krementz called [amazon_link id=”0679450149″ target=”_blank” ]The Writer’s Desk[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0679450149″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Writer’s Desk[/amazon_image]

There are sections of wise advice about the job: supervising doctoral students; marking exams; invigilating; dealing with administrators. I particularly liked Back’s emphasis on the importance of teaching, and the need to be interested in students’ ideas; the incentive structure is changing a bit, but there is no doubt that for people who choose academia as their career, the incentives are all to get the right kinds of research published in the right journals. It has to be done to get hired and be promoted. But it damages the true life of the mind and the purpose of universities – especially in my subject, as the lock a very small number of top journals have on the REF process in economics (and equivalent assessment processes in other countries) has warped the character of the research done and therefore the subject. You get rewarded for small and technically-sparkly tweaks to the existing body of work. I meet some academic economists who remind me a bit of the prisoner in the movie Colditz who pretends to be mad to get out and ends up in fact becoming insane. They pretend to care about the highly abstract models to get papers published, and then that ends up being what they think is their purpose in life. Talking to students is a great source of immunity from the scholasticism.

So on to my small reservations about [amazon_link id=”1906897581″ target=”_blank” ]Academic Diary[/amazon_link]. I’ve only had my academic perch for a couple of years, and it is indeed a very odd environment compared with my other work experiences. Still, I’m less sure than Back that all the recent changes have been terrible. Of course the REF has had serious counterproductive consequences, but holding researchers to account for their research must be right, and similarly now requiring them (social scientists!) to think about impact. By all means improve the mechanisms, but the principle is surely correct. Universities do indeed seem extremely bureaucratic, but they could hardly remain the only important institutions that do not need to change in the face of technology, demographic trends, and political demands; or refuse to improve their accountability to a much-changed student body. So are there many things wrong with universities and the academic life? Yes. But I’m not persuaded the good old days were really all that good except in providing academics with a more comfortable life. Still, I’m sure lots of academics will love reading this book and will share his take on the issues. And with Les Back, I very much agree that higher education still matters, in fact more than ever as the value of institutions enabling face-to-face engagement increases.