Canbury Press 2024, 208pp. ISBN 9781914487217 (paperback), 9781914487224 (ebook)

Review by Rob Cuthbert

If you do research in higher education, this book might make you angry – but probably not for the reasons the author hopes. The blurb says: ”For more than a decade, the deteriorating state of the higher education sector in the UK has been known to insiders, but not to the public. Now … an academic who must remain anonymous … presents a no-holds-barred account of life on campus.”

I had high hopes. The Secret Barrister was a runaway success, earning the respect of professionals and public alike. The Secret Doctor trod much the same path. Surely The Secret Lecturer could not fail to do for higher education what its predecessors had done for law and medicine?

Yes it could. So why was it such a disappointment? Not because it is full of jaw-dropping anecdotes and stories which could be hard to believe. I believed all of them, and too many HE staff will have had many similar experiences. The disappointment is at an opportunity wasted, with the book’s opening sentence enough to deflate all expectations:

“For many people the question, ‘Are British universities f***ed?’ is as rhetorical as ‘Does the Supreme Pontiff devoutly believe in the monotheistic faith he leads?’ or ‘Do members of the Ursidae family of carnivorous mammals defecate in arboreal regions?’”

Many would be tempted to stop there. This “no-holds-barred account” comes from someone too bitter to let his professed love of higher education show, and not as clever as he thinks he is (the text suggests it is a ‘he’).

Where other secret professionals enrich their anecdotes with insights on how their profession could be better and develop a convincing narrative, The Secret Lecturer just indulges in stereotypes. Students are either lazy drug-taking plagiarists who make fantastic excuses for their lack of effort, or disadvantaged and benighted souls who have been cruelly betrayed by their schools, lecturers, departments, university or the system. Academic and professional colleagues are mostly treacherous, cowardly, prejudiced, ambitious, lazy backstabbers, apart from the few who share the world view of the author, and a dedicated administrator or two. Managers are all intellectually dull time-wasting control freaks who get in the way of proper academic work, often with “meaningless HE rituals”. Academics in business, marketing and law collude in lowering academic standards – “it’s all poster presentations and multiple-answer quizzes” – which in other disciplines are jeopardised mostly by fear and management pressure – “If you exhibit talent round here, you’re likely to be hated rather than appreciated.” And when The Secret Lecturer steps outside the campus he finds only a dystopian ghost town where all the shops have gone out of business and the bureaucrats’ blood runs even colder than in the university.

Clunky similes and metaphors keep popping up: the inflation rate is “as high as Johnny Depp atop a heap of hard drugs” before “another gormless rectangle of a senior manager” intervenes. They become even more mysteriously obscure – on just one page not only: “feeling more forlorn and nauseous than if I’d been forced at gunpoint to watch the complete television work of Ross Kemp”, but also “It’s hotter than the air that issues from Adrian Chiles’ mouth.”. The author presents events as if they are from just one academic year, which is a perfectly legitimate device, but his day-by-day account through two semesters is the only structure for the text. The longer-running threads such as a job application to a foreign university and giving a paper at an overseas conference are less convincing, suggesting lack of due diligence by the author as much as bad faith by others. And surely hardly anyone who still does it believes that external examining is “a nice little earner”.

The brief Epilogue purports to suggest a way forward, involving abolishing fees, culling the massed ranks of management, decarbonising, demilitarising, decolonialising and restoring institutional democracy. But these remain mere slogans in the absence of any coherent narrative, and the horror stories remain as symptoms in the absence of any coherent diagnosis of the underlying problems. “My idealistic aim is that someone, somewhere might read this book and be cheesed off enough to clear up the mess.” Higher education may be a mess, but ranting while waiting for someone else to clear it up is not a solution.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter @RobCuthbert.