A while ago, I put myself through the process of making a submission for Fellowship of something called the Higher Education Academy.
The Higher Education Academy is an imaginary, hallucinatory thing conjured by AdvanceHE, a training provider and ‘member-led charity’, whose published mission is to ‘help higher education institutions be the best they can be, by unlocking the potential of their people’.
You can probably tell by now from the tone that my misguided attempt to have the honour of HEA Fellowship conferred on me by this distinguished institution was unsuccessful.
It was.
The process of preparing one’s ‘claim’ for fellowship is a lengthy one, which mostly involves several long webinars instructing hopefuls in how to complete a Word template created in 1994 in such a way that one’s experience of teaching (>20 years, in my case) can be shaped to a ‘framework’ of criteria, so as to make it quick and easy for an unidentified ‘peer’ to assess whether or not one’s professional contribution is worthy of having these sought-after letters after your name.
Gotta write to them marking criteria, girls and boys.
The cute part is that one is ‘invited’, while trying to live with the hideous formatting of the Word template, to ‘reflect’ on one’s pathetic and unworthy experience through the ‘lens’ of ‘scholarship’. In other words, here are some links to some tedious articles by tedious worthies from the pygmy pantheon of higher education learning and teaching. Read them, worm, and despair at thy lowliness. Then repent! State in thy Word template how thou wilt make amends for thy trespasses in your forward development plan, which should be submitted as an appendix to the main template in no more than 300 words.
Dear reader, I’m proud that I failed.
The feedback on my miserable, worm-eaten submission makes clear to me that the published criteria are not the same as the criteria applied by evaluators.
The same feedback also makes clear that below-stairs ‘professional services’ staff cannot realistically meet the undisclosed criteria.
Asides from the designed opacity and unfairness, the exercise is a retrogressive one that rewards looking back over up to seven years (back to the good ole days of F2F teaching), and ‘reflecting’ through the ‘lens’ of published ‘scholarship’, which by definition is also superannuated.
It’s everything that is wrong with HE: boring, backward looking, pompous, opaque, unfair, inconsistent, gate-keepery, self-indulgent, elitist, and insular. It demands mediocrity, rewards conformity, and is entirely dismissive of the student voice and real measures of impact and value.
In fairness, I could have pulled the forelock, taken on board the feedback, and resubmitted, and maybe now I’d be rocking them coveted letters after name. But it would have taken another 10 months of looking back and raking over even more small-sample, methodologically dubious, and barely literate ‘scholarship’. While our institutions are slowly, and now quickly, dying.
Maybe I’m wrong, but there are more interesting, more important, and more urgent things to do.
AdvanceHE? More like RewindHE. The future is elsewhere.
Matthew Moran 