Up close and personal: Beware our litigious society

The incident brought to the fore the increasingly litigious climate that affects the university. More importantly, it starkly reminded me that as academics we are supposed to do only what we are paid to do - which in my case does not include counselling 15 year-olds.

It seems that personal experience has no safe place in the university. This puts me in a pickle. I’ve spent some 20 years arguing that, at least in the humanities and social sciences, the personal can be academically productive. This encompasses the very basic point of saying that students can use the first person singular in their essays. It shocks me that this is still a query. And it extends to the more difficult methodological and epistemological questions about the status lived and personal experience may have as evidence or as strategy within an academic essay. I emphasise the difficulties of doing the personal well, but I’d be a fraud if I disallowed its use. I’ve built a career on doing precisely that, and in prestigious refereed publications that facilitated my progression up the ranks.

While not directly related, questions about what to do with the personal also invade our academic working conditions. The prevailing view, increasingly entrenched in work policies, is that anything outside the university should not affect the evaluation of our performance. This is good when it comes to protecting sexual or religious practices, but not so great when it means that lecturers are seen as a one-dimensional teaching and researching machines.

It’s a sad and unproductive day when the only place in the university for the personal is a personal chair. Excluding serious attention to how we combine different aspects of our lives means that many will never be promoted to one.