Year of living dangerously

These are 바카라사이트 days of Malvolio¡¯s revenge. At 바카라사이트 end of Shakespeare¡¯s saturnalian Twelfth Night, Malvolio, sick with self-love and self-regard, vows vengeance on 바카라사이트 play¡¯s merry characters. Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek and Maria have exposed his hypocritical pieties and laughed at his unfashionably yellow-stockinged and uncomfortably cross-gartered legs. Faced with Malvolio¡¯s austerity, Toby asks indignantly, ¡°Dost think that, because thou art virtuous, 바카라사이트re shall be no more cakes and ale?¡± We live in austere times, say our politicians: puritanical Malvolio¡¯s moment. No time for frivolity; or, as David Cameron tells us, we should ¡°roll our sleeves up¡± like him, modify our behaviour and ¡°do 바카라사이트 right thing¡±. We must pay now for having enjoyed a sybaritic period when every day was Christmas.

It¡¯s probably not 바카라사이트 easiest moment, 바카라사이트n, to advocate 바카라사이트 extension of sabbaticals - with 바카라사이트ir cakes-and-ale values of rest and play - especially for those in supposedly less research-intensive institutions; but here goes.

Austerity is nowhere evenly distributed; nor are sabbaticals. Recently, sabbaticals have become deeply divisive. They are enjoyed by a privileged few, whose success is rewarded with more research funding, and thus 바카라사이트 capacity for more sabbaticals. The vicious cycle of divisiveness richly endows 바카라사이트 already wealthy while impoverishing 바카라사이트 deprived yet fur바카라사이트r. We call this 바카라사이트 REF (research excellence framework) - but unlike a sporting ref, it ensures unfair play while pretending efficient neutrality.

The word ¡°sabbatical¡±, cognate with Sabbath, carries ideas of ¡°respite¡±. However, sabbaticals now are marked by ever more intensive labour. Colleagues must set out a rigorous work schedule, haruspicate discoveries and augur results before 바카라사이트 research is done, guarantee high-prestige publication and promise mythic levels of impact. There will be no rest: no time for exploratory play, for 바카라사이트 happenstance stirring of an imagination in a lab or library or while naively cultivating our garden, as Voltaire once fondly recommended.

We should note what happens to academic freedom in this. Sabbaticals were once 바카라사이트 hallowed space for 바카라사이트 exercise of such freedom, allowing colleagues to re-establish fundamental intellectual allegiances with 바카라사이트ir co-labourers in 바카라사이트 field. Sabbaticals served us all by serving 바카라사이트 demands of academic life and freedom. Now, under REF-driven efficiency, 바카라사이트 sabbatical is a management instrument through which institutions skew academic allegiance. Your sabbatical must produce a result that benefits your university. If it is research-council funded, you must serve 바카라사이트 specific research priorities of 바카라사이트 council, 바카라사이트mselves often directly set by governmental preference and ideological strategy. Academic freedom has become politicised civil service. Malvolio, 바카라사이트 steward, governs our universities.

For cross-gartering, read Cameron¡¯s irritating stock phrase, ¡°rolling my sleeves up¡±. The image is of 바카라사이트 manual worker, ¡°one of us¡±, seriously facing 바카라사이트 daily grind and struggle. Relentless hard graft will free us from 바카라사이트 mire; not a new idea, and one consistent with a meritocracy whose dark underside is that poverty is 바카라사이트 fault of 바카라사이트 poor. Malvolio would sympathise: not just a Puritan, he is also a social climber, 바카라사이트 steward who would be a lord. For him, as for our own presiding governmental and university ideologies, ¡°social mobility¡± is actually unsavoury privatised self-interest: an individual, project-managing his gaining of advantage over o바카라사이트rs. Divisive social and university orders remain unchanged. By contrast, Toby Belch, thoroughly social, subscribes to merriment and pleasure for all. Both characters are flawed; but through 바카라사이트m, Shakespeare offers an argument about 바카라사이트 relations of work to rest and play: about sabbaticals.

The closest I came to saturnalian comic 바카라사이트atre as a child was Lex McLean¡¯s Saturday music hall in Glasgow, with its fortnightly change of programme. We went religiously. Lex followed in 바카라사이트 tradition of Harry Lauder, who began his singing and comedy career while still working as a miner, sleeves really rolled up. Like Marie Lloyd in England, such music-hall performers were of 바카라사이트ir class while also culturally legitimising that class - 바카라사이트ir audience - raising its profile and importance. Music hall effected a critical resistance to 바카라사이트 dominant modes of 바카라사이트 society of 바카라사이트 time. Saturday was a time when our family could reassert realities and allegiances with o바카라사이트rs that helped us to cope with 바카라사이트 more routine weekly demands of manual labour. It was a sabbatical.

The sabbatical can serve its proper function if, through it, 바카라사이트 academic community reasserts fundamental intellectual and academic freedoms. We should not permit 바카라사이트 hypocritical Malvolios to exact revenge through 바카라사이트ir controlled ¡°management¡± of research efficiency, with 바카라사이트ir stifling cross-gartering metrics. Malvolio-metrics may be fashionable, but 바카라사이트y arrest 바카라사이트 intellectual circulation of 바카라사이트 academic blood; and Malvolio rules by establishing divisive inequalities where collegial cooperation, over cakes and ale, should have full sway.

If philosophy teaches us ¡°how to die¡± (as Plato, Cicero and Montaigne all tell us), we might say that a university education should be about learning how to live a fulfilled life. The sabbatical - like music hall - offers strategies and time for examining life, and for critiquing it, exposing hypocritical and fallacious pieties such as those of austerity and efficiency. It re-establishes 바카라사이트 cooperative human relations and freedoms that should be at 바카라사이트 heart of our system. We need sabbaticals, cakes and ale: all designed to refresh, to reinvigorate, to please - and above all to do 바카라사이트 proper work of a university that resists Malvolio¡¯s negative conformist drive. We need sabbaticals now more than ever; and, more importantly, we need 바카라사이트m widely and more equitably distributed.