I suppose I'm doing the proud auntie thing here, but it was really nice to hear that my niece's drawing of Marge Monroe won her an (apparently nasty) plastic spider pig object and is star letter of the week in The Simpsons comic. That, and her getting a prize from her MP for winning a drawing competition recently, are the best things to happen this week. Thank goodness for the odd nice bit of news amongst all this redundancy crap. Life goes on...
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Marge Monroe
I suppose I'm doing the proud auntie thing here, but it was really nice to hear that my niece's drawing of Marge Monroe won her an (apparently nasty) plastic spider pig object and is star letter of the week in The Simpsons comic. That, and her getting a prize from her MP for winning a drawing competition recently, are the best things to happen this week. Thank goodness for the odd nice bit of news amongst all this redundancy crap. Life goes on...
5 comments:
I'm really sorry to hear about the redundancy Claire.
An email has come from the University of Westminster saying there will be redundancies there and we were told there will be at UEL too.
Horrible.
Somehow I think there's going to be an upsurge of academics and creative people doing their own stuff again. Funny to think it's going to affect the punk generation again: it's all sounding very familiar.
Thanks Helen, it seems to be happening everywhere. They got rid of 16 courses at LCC last summer which got a lot of publicity, the students were quite active too, with lots of videos on youtube, a blog http://lccoppose.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-happening-at-lcc.html and the rector being told to apologise by the high court for taking legal action against some students.
With us, it's my whole department and equivalent staff in all the other colleges. There is a move to centralise for 'efficiency savings' and to address the bad RAE results, though one gets the feeling there is more to it than that. I don't think our students will notice until the cuts gather pace, especially cuts in AL hours which make up the bulk of staffing at my college, or unless it affects their ability to do their work on a day to day basis (ie at LCC students suddenly had no tutors to supervise their dissertations) or if changes to the institution devalue the 'brand' of their degree in some way.
It is horrible. I guess we'll survive but I think this year will be really bad for HE.
Hi Claire! I'm around and doing lots of reading but seem to be lacking in commenting.
So what will you be filling your time with now that PHD is done with?
Hi Deb, yes I've been doing a lot of reading and lurking recently too! Don't feel very talkative at the moment.
It's funny but it doesn't feel like there's loads of time really, just less dealine stress. I'm trying to force myself to write a book proposal right now, and a few articles from my thesis. There are few other related smallish projects I'd like to do as a break from the PhD, so I'll try the lot and see what works out best.
Hey sweetheart. I just dropped by to see how you're doing.
Many, many hugs.
I have friends in academia who are also in the same boat and it's not a good time.
Hang in there. All will be well.
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