In one of David Lodge’s famous campus novels, a young English literature lecturer pictures her university as “the ideal human community, where … people were free to pursue excellence and self‑fulfilment, each according to their own rhythm and inclination”. A non-academic friend comments wryly: “Well, it’s nice work if you can get it.”
Nice Work was written in 1988, in part as a fictional response to the Thatcher cuts to higher education at the time. It’s safe to say a contemporary equivalent would need a different title. Forty years on, universities like to sell themselves along the lines of Robyn Penrose’s romantic vision. But the marketised reality for modern university staff, particularly those at the sharp end of a deepening funding crisis, is another world altogether.
