Thirty Years in Higher Education: Surviving or Thriving?

The Dilbert Principle

My session was grounded in Scott Adam’s seminal comedy book ‘The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads and Other Workplace Afflictions’. The Dilbert Principle was published in 1996 when I was struggling to adapt to academic culture in my first job as a lecturer (see https://dilbert.com/about. The Dilbert Principle saved my academic career by giving me a broader perspective on the reality of working in HE, or any large organisation, in the 1990s. In essence, the tongue-in-cheek Dilbert Principle is that we expect others to act rationally even though we are irrational. As Dilbert says, “If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by idiots, you’ll realise that resistance is futile, [and] your tension will dissipate, …” (page 7). I used a plethora of cartoons from The Dilbert Principle to demonstrate how I had used Dilbert’s principles to survive to thrive in HE.

From Nappy to Professor to Incontinence Pad

As part of the session, I delivered a short lecture ‘From Nappy to Professor to Incontinence Pad’ in which I charted my educational journey into HE. I argued that new managerialism and target culture had not only stifled curiosity driven learning but also impacted in a negative way on day to day activities of academic staff and students. Ironically, the results of REF 2022 were being announced as I was talking about Metric Mayhem, Measurement Madness, Acronym Apocalypse and Grading Gridlock. I argued that there is ample opportunity for academic endeavour to thrive within this metric milieu to serve universities in positive ways.

Curiosity has driven my meaningless life

I was trained as a physiological scientist, and this has fostered my curiosity to understand existence. Will Storr starts his book The Science of Story Telling (2019, page1) with the following:

“We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love. And then there will be a heat death. All the change in the universe will cease, the stars will die, and there’ll be nothing left of anything but infinite, dead, freezing void. Human life, in all its noise and hubris, will be rendered meaningless for eternity“.

I used this quote as a launchpad to discuss the importance of curiosity and perspective in academia.

I explained to the audience that we are the lucky ones - we die! In order to die we have had to live. Consider all things that have ever existed, both living and non-living. We are the miniscule proportion of all these things that have been able to think about our place in the universe. In academia we get paid to inspire others to ponder such things. What a privilege. Perspective is everything!

Create yourself to thrive

I ended my session by saying that for me, getting comfortable with ‘being’ rather than ‘having’ was the key to my success as an academic; and this is best achieved by surrounding yourself with people who energise you to create the academic you want to be … whether that be an Educationalist, Researcher, Manager or Vice Chancellor.