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subtext ***************************************************** 'Truth: lies open to all' ***************************************************** Issue 142 4th February 2016 ***************************************************** Fortnightly during term time. All letters, contributions and comments to: subtext-editors@lancaster.ac.uk subtext does not publish material that is submitted anonymously, but will consider requests for publication with the name withheld. subtext reserves the right to edit submissions. Back issues and subscription details can be found at www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext For tips to prevent subtext from getting swept up into your 'junk email folder', see: www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext/dejunk/ CONTENTS: [General content warning: subtext may contain mildly to heavily critical reports of university management decisions, nostalgic reports of bygone days on campus and beyond, extensive textwalls, satire, parody, ennui, nuts and the ghosts of a lively culture of dissent on campus.] Editorial, your questions, corporate stuff, trigger happy, court, upscaling, big brother, donations, more donations, stand-up, Shart attack, Owen Jones, not a concert review, letters. ***************************************************** EDITORIAL [Content warning: may contain opinions] Any subtext subscribers who have left the safety of their offices or rooms this month may well have read about the arguments about 'safe spaces' and 'trigger warnings' in education provision. Mercifully the worst of this is taking place across the Atlantic, (see for example: http://tinyurl.com/njnnk32) but it flares up here too. The recent furore over Germaine Greer's planned appearance at Cardiff University is just one example of how this sort of thing can overflow into unexpected areas. Subscribers of a certain vintage will recall that the policy of the Students' Union in the 1970s and early 80s was simple: 'No Platform for Racists'. This was usually taken to mean something like 'No Platform for Hate Speech', which meant that in practice it could include those who were considered to be contributing to minority oppression generally. Of course, there was still heated argument about the principle of banning anyone at all no matter how nasty their views, and there were long discussions about whether a given speaker was in fact encouraging discrimination or were just expressing themselves clumsily, but the policy had the virtue of simplicity – in essence, we wouldn't allow people to express themselves if they were putting forward ideas that would deny that same right to others. That didn't mean that the speaker couldn't hold those ideas, just that students weren't going to facilitate their dissemination (which would also include challenging them if they spoke elsewhere). Now it appears that the ground has shifted. Instead of students banning speakers (and by this we mean both invited speakers and lecturers – and accept that the latter are likely to be more frequently the problem) on the grounds of principle, they are refusing to listen to them on the grounds that the speaker's views are simply contrary to their own. (Before anyone starts sending irate emails, we acknowledge that the idea that 'students across the land are banning entirely inoffensive speakers purely because young people find their views too challenging to face up to' is subject to the First Law Of Any Story About Political Correctness, which states that the story very probably isn't true.) The scale of the problem is surely being exaggerated, but there is nevertheless an argument to be had here. Before we hang out our colours for all to see, anyone fancy setting out some guiding principles? ***************************************************** ASK SUBTEXT [Content warning: may contain references to the VCs ablutionary habits] The above editorial is by way of introduction to a new subtext service. Subscribers sometimes ask our advice privately as to matters of manners, etiquette and decorum. This advice has, they report, been most useful, so useful in fact that it should be shared with all our subscribers. So, we invite your questions. Whether your dilemma concerns the appropriate behaviour on encountering the Vice-Chancellor in the Gents (answer: it depends on what he's doing in there…) or what to do when your Head of Department is playing Angry Birds in his phone during a particularly riveting section of a staff meeting, we are here to guide and serve. ***************************************************** CORPORATE STUFF [Content warning: may make you feel funny about buying things due to its implicit critique of late capitalism] It's easy to spend an hour or two diverting oneself thinking about the sins of others, so that's what we do quite a lot of the time. One of the things that the internet makes simple is finding out about misdemeanours that large corporations would rather we didn't. Just for fun, we tried it out on the various enterprises now situated on campus. To be fair, none of the present campus businesses appear to have direct links with either the arms trade or to any of the larger puppy farms. (Though a familiarity with both the nuclear industry and Big Pharma proves not be so unusual.) It's also true to say that if you Google the name of almost any firm providing a catering service, and follow it with a phrase like "rat droppings" or "horsemeat", there are very few companies who would escape mention. So we attach no significance to the fact that "Spar", "Costa" and "Subway" can all be bracketed successfully with these phrases in this way. However, it is always fun to note when a company's image slips in a way that they would rather it didn't. Blackwell's, for instance is a cracking bookshop, no question. It also has a staff share-ownership model which closely resembles that of John Lewis Ltd, which is indubitably a good and enlightened thing. So the news that the owner of Blackwell's remains a substantial donor to UKIP may perhaps be overlooked, if we're all in the mood to do that. Similarly, WH Smith has, they may think, just about got over the merriment caused by putting a book on Joseph Fritzl, the Austrian kidnapper and rapist, in their 'Top 50 Books for Fathers' Day', although the memory of VAT charges in airport shops won't be extinguished quite so quickly. Nor, incidentally, will their insistence on customers using self-service pay machines – it's one thing to offer them as a convenience, quite another to force the unwilling to use them. Costa get off comparatively lightly, though the fact that their parent company is Whitbread will not endear them to CAMRA members of a certain age. On the subject of Costa, remembering that Andy Warhol said that soon everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, we are left wondering how close Costa have got to their apparent ambition to have every student on campus work there for just one day… ***************************************************** NICE AND COOL, TRIG [Content warning: references to triggering] While we're on the topic of trigger warnings in lectures and seminars and on academic materials, subtext wonders what the practicalities are of endorsing such a thing. If Film Studies is putting on a course titled, say, "Comparing and contrasting Salò and The Human Centipede", then a warning is probably a good idea. At the very least, courses of this type need a caveat emptor message at the start, although you'd hope students would research things like this before signing up to them. To be fair, giving content warnings doesn't take much effort. So, if it makes everyone happy, why not…? But - there's also the proposal that, if a student decides they don't want to risk being traumatised, and so declines to attend a lecture or seminar, then they should be able to do this without it affecting their academic record. That could lead to some interesting stand-offs, e.g. "I decline to sit this examination on The Tempest - I'm scared of storms and fear that I won't be able to cope. Can you calculate my final grade based on my coursework only?" How easily can an institution accommodate a students' sensitivities if it stands to deprive them of large portions of the curriculum? subtext would be interested to read any letters on the subject. ***************************************************** COURT REPORT [Content warning: maintains a critical perspective] Members of the Court, which met on Saturday 30 January, were greeted on arrival - as they were last year - by a student demo. This year's protest was on rent levels, and although it wasn't the largest of mobilisations against the establishment, it added to the atmosphere of the day and got its message across. Well done, then, to all three of you. The Court is basically political theatre, and the opening act is the Chancellor. Mr Milburn was on good form, sharing his memories of Lancaster vs York croquet at Roses, before turning to more serious matters. Conventional wisdom tells us that a university either extols excellence or equity, but not both: "we tell a different story." The Chancellor spoke especially warmly about Lancaster's longstanding partnership with Blackburn College, and the opportunities this gives to mature students. Over to the Deputy Pro-Chancellor, Mr Garside, to take the chair and present the minutes. In what seemed to be an attempt to head off any disquiet over the fate of last year's motions (see subtext 128), the University Secretary was asked to summarise what had happened when the two resolutions went to University Council on 20 March. On rents and fees, Ms Aiken said, the Council had been sympathetic: a working group had been formed and a more transparent process for setting rents and fees was now in place. On college principals, the Council felt that nothing more needed to be done at this stage, as a review had recently taken place. Ms Aiken told a rather more positive tale of Council's discussion than subtext's correspondent at the time (see subtext 132), but no dissent was heard. The University Secretary concluded her summary with a coded warning: all motions in future should, she thought, be accompanied by a "factual briefing" to assist Court members. Last year's motions were accompanied by factual briefings, but many members had seen these as thinly veiled attempts to sway the debate against the motions' proposers; if anything, they ended up boosting the motions' chances. Next - the Pro-Chancellor. Lord Liddle was very enthusiastic. He thought the university's response to December's floods and power cut had shown that we weren't just "academic pointy-heads", and thanked those who had helped out. Twenty years ago, he thought, most decisions affecting universities were taken by central government, but "that's all changed" and the question for us is "how do we market ourselves?" Liddle felt we needed to land more research contracts. He endorsed the Northern Powerhouse and hoped that the UK would remain in the EU. Lord Liddle thanked retiring Council members and lavished praise on this year's new recruits to Council. He somewhat gave the impression that the new recruits had all been recruited personally by him, but subtext trusts the nominations committee was as diligent as ever. Liddle gave the first of what would be many tributes to Fiona Aiken, for whom this would be her last Court as University Secretary. Court's most memorable speech this year, though not entirely for the reasons the speaker intended, came from the LUSU President, Will Hedley. Last year's president, Ms Clayson, had given an unashamedly political speech, accompanied by a well organised demo outside the meeting and two SU motions that were passed by a landslide - what would we get this year? Engagement dashboards, apparently. Not to mention student voice roadshows, killer questions and big data. It became clear that Mr Hedley is not a supporter of the political approach. His style is a mix of Radio 1 DJ and management training video, including quotes from Harper Lee, plenty of statistics (some of them very impressive, such as 3200 students either fully or partially completing LUSU's recent survey) and relentless support for university management. "The students' union is stronger when it works with the university, and the university is stronger when it works with the students' union," Mr Hedley assured Court members. Furthermore, "a top 10 university should have a top 10 student experience to go with it." It was difficult not to be swept up by the optimism and, indeed, Mr Hedley did have one big achievement to celebrate - next year, over 1300 beds on campus will be available for under £100 per week. He closed with a picture of a Rorschach inkblot and another Harper Lee quote. Questions came from two student members. Was it true that the reduction in standard rents had only been achieved by increasing en-suite rents? The answer seemed to be "yes". Secondly, why did members of LUSU Council not have Court explained to them until a few days before the meeting, at which point the motions deadline had passed. This was, Mr Hedley said, partly due to the chaos at the end of last term and partly because "rushing through policy" to form a motion would be "an ill-advised use of officers' time"… Court members responded to the President with a respectful ripple of applause. The students' questions elicited pained expressions from some members, many of whom were from a Labour or trade union background; for them, rule number 1 is that you put on a united front when your chief representative is speaking. The Director of Finance, Ms Randall-Paley, presented the accounts. Lancaster continues to show a healthy surplus and strong asset ratio. The year 2014/15 had been the biggest year of self-funded capital expenditure in the university's history. Staff costs, linked to USS and National Insurance, were a concern (this was the first mention of staff all day). Now, the main event - the Vice-Chancellor. He gave a confident presentation on the current state of English higher education: years ago there had been around 100 universities in the UK, plus some HE in FE, but "this is not the view of the current government," which sees HE as being much more fragmentary than that. The VC covered TEF (with a degree of scepticism), the government's green paper on higher education, the introduction of postgraduate and part-time loans, the Prevent strategy on countering radicalisation amongst students (this sounded worrying, although we were assured that Lancaster is viewed as "low risk"), and research funding. The VC was keen to point out that Lancaster has the second-highest success rate for research council grant applications in the UK, behind only Loughborough; his pride contrasted markedly with the Pro-Chancellor's earlier scepticism on the subject. The VC thanked academic staff for their work - we were now 121st in the QS world rankings and 130th in the THE world rankings, with our MBA ranked 35th in the FT world rankings. The VC spoke about the impact of Storm Desmond, saying that the reaction of staff and students was one of his proudest moments. Finally he thanked Fiona Aiken, at her 17th and final Court meeting, and closed with an announcement on Lancaster's investment strategy: henceforth we will only invest in technologies that underpin a sustainable future. UCU President Rory Daly, during the VC's Q&A, thanked the VC for mentioning and thanking staff, in contrast to all the other presentations. The LUSU International Students' Officer, Aisha Iya Abubakar, asked if the university was competing for international students' talent or money: the VC replied that we were competing for both. Claire Povah, Principal of The Graduate College, noted that all four of the people appointed to the Court that day had been white and male - would the VC take on the challenge of making its appointments more representative? "Yes" was the reply, it's a struggle to fulfil our ambitions but "we will try harder". Over, finally, to the Chancellor to declare Court closed after exactly two hours. And so the Court ended for another year, as members joined the queue for lunch. ***************************************************** UPSCALING [Content warning: refers to old technologies that may predate the existence of some readers] We noticed a very smart new red Jaguar parked in the VC's parking space last week, which for some reason brought to mind the University Chauffeur, who used to hang around University House in a smart peaked cap, in case the VC needed ferrying somewhere. The present University Chauffeur is a chap called Geoff Bell, who we have no doubt is an individual of immense probity and blameless reputation, but we remember twenty years ago when the post was filled by a very personable young man, who the inhabitants of Glasson Dock recognised as the bloke who used to come around every Friday evening flogging mucky videos out of the back of his car. Not, we hasten to add, that the car he was using as his shop window was the VC's official motor. Unless, of course, anyone knows better – times were hard back then, and the University deficit had to be paid back somehow. ***************************************************** PANOPTO [Content warning: you are being watched. Always.] In the interests of clarity, and further to our piece in the last issue of subtext and the subsequent correspondence (see Letters, below) on the subject of recording lectures using Panopto, we feel we should tease out a few differences between a whole bunch of things that could be conflated: 1) The practice of capturing a whole lecture in one go and using that recording later in lieu of a real-time, live lecture 2) Using videos of an academic speaking to camera on e-learning platforms 3) MOOCs, which are specifically designed for distance learning by large groups of participants 4) 'Flipping' classrooms, which usually means putting lecture-type (i.e. mainly uni-directional information flow) content online or making it available as self-study resources, thereby freeing up class time for more interaction or for students to work on assignments and ask questions if they get stuck. 5) The procedure for when students miss a lecture (for whatever reason) 6) What happens when a lecturer is ill (or on strike, for that matter, or just not present) 7) Issues around rights (this is larger than just the lecturer's right to be acknowledged as the author of a text; for example, a potentially bigger legal issue is what happens when copyrighted material is used in the lecture, which typically academics are allowed to do in lectures but not to distribute electronically). Dealing with the above in the order they appear: 1) anyone who has used it will agree that Panopto as it stands is a bit rubbish, and / or productive of downright surreal effects as well as being unnecessarily restrictive for the lecturer in terms of moving around/interacting with the audience. But then some academics think that lectures are generally pretty rubbish as a form of teaching anyhow - as someone (we don't know who, we weren't paying attention) put it many years ago, 'a lecture is the practice whereby information flows from the notebook of the lecturer to the notebook of the student without passing through the minds of either'. 2), 3) and 4) should be judged on their own merits, not in relation to the particular not-very-good platform that can presently be used to record lectures at Lancaster. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a number of Lancaster's MOOCs originating in various departments have had really excellent feedback from participants. It should be noted though that these recordings had much higher production values than Panopto. Some lecturers think that flipping classrooms is a fantastic idea and have already started building some elements of this into their courses wherever possible. The problem is it takes an awful lot of effort to do it well - probably considerably more than planning the equivalent amount of lectures, and it is hard to find this time amidst all the other things that need doing. Some colleagues might feel that there should be a university-wide drive on this to free up time to allow the creation of good electronic resources that cover much of the content currently taught via lectures, and to plan more creative, applied, project & task-based activities for the time previously used for lectures. However, let's face it, this isn't very likely in the present climate. 5) & 6) are certainly issues, but some would suggest that Lancaster (and the UK in general) is absolutely terrible anyway at dealing with teaching-staff illness. There is often no clear procedure for what is supposed to happen when a lecturer is scheduled to give a lecture on a given day and – for whatever reason - cannot, which results in the sorts of situations that our correspondent (see Letters, below) describes. One might argue that no-one should be giving lectures anyway when they have anything that is more severe than a minor cold - it just infects colleagues and students and in the long term causes significantly more downtime for the institution as a whole. Even if it's not contagious, it can delay recovery. But with no clear system in place, and no recognition that it is the right thing to do to stay home when you're ill, what choice do staff have other than struggling to do it ourselves or shifting the work to colleagues at the last minute? One very irate subtext subscriber contacted us to report his astonishment that when he stood in for his colleague at the last minute it was suggested he should just get the workload "credits" for that lecture instead of the originally scheduled lecturer - this would have meant that the colleague would have received no recognition for the time he spent preparing the lecture, and effectively would mean he was not receiving paid sick leave(on a very minor scale, admittedly, but the principle is important). 7) Is something that we currently ignore for the most part, at least partly because it's a minefield. But we can be sure that it won't go away, and that it will become a bigger issue the more that content moves online and the more that it becomes publicly accessible/open to public scrutiny. We could, of course, hope that the University will grasp the nettle (or jump on the mine) on this one. But, to paraphrase Michael Frayn again, it's not the despair that we can't stand, it's the hope. ***************************************************** PG TIPS [Content warning: Where's the money, Lebowski?] Lancaster graduates are no strangers to communications from the alumni office, and the alumni office has never been backward in coming forward when it comes to asking graduates for donations. Just recently, a letter 'personally written' by the Vice-Chancellor landed on graduates' doorsteps telling them to expect a call, from one of his lovely student fundraisers, asking for donations. Interestingly, the alumni office includes graduates who have stayed on to begin a PhD on their list of individuals to be gladdened with a phone call. It's a tough sell, getting postgrads to bung in an extra tenner on top of the thousands they've paid for the privilege to stay in HE, and even tougher to compel them to part with even a dime of their measly teaching pay, but we wish the fundraisers the very best of luck! ***************************************************** AND ANOTHER THING [Content warning: contains content] Within a few months of UG graduations, the alumni office fires off a blanket email (subtext understands that the industry term for such a thing is an 'e-shot', which sounds like something you would consume orally in a club toilet or intravenously during a medical emergency) to all graduates asking what they're up to nowadays. Sometimes, just sometimes, the office will receive a response along the lines of; "I'm sat two seats away from you – I started last week." ***************************************************** NOT STANDING (Contributed Article) [Content warning: features discussion of content warnings] The Students' Union's latest campaign, 'I Won't Stand For It', could have done with the following content warning: 'will at some point question the contradiction between the idea of critical education and duty of care within a university setting, which will inexplicably lead to postgrad tutors feeling a bit rubbish.' Why? A student blogger wrote about the need for content warnings on academic reading and lectures, in case students come across something they may find triggering. As a disabled, female academic with a family history that reads like a Yewtree case file it's odd that it was this well-intentioned blog that fired a decline. It shouldn't have done: that presumably is the last thing the student will have expected, but in a teaching environment where undergrads expect more and more, many a postgraduate tutor has found themselves reduced to a nervous wreck trying to meet expectations. It came at a bad time. It's marking week: that means many of us are currently working for less than the minimum wage (I'm on £4.60 an hour this week, just £2 more than an apprentice, which is illustrative of how bad things are for apprentices). Fortunately most of us are also working other jobs, which helps to keep both our bank balances and the bags under our eyes in the black. If it had come a few weeks earlier, that would also have been a bad time. It would have been deadline week(end), which means no weekend, because the emails start at 10pm on a Friday and finish sometime early Monday morning, as questions students have had all term to ask suddenly occur to them. We could of course not respond, wait till normal working hours as we are supposed to, but think of the angry 'Overheard At Lancaster' posts. If it had come a few weeks later, that would have been a really bad time. It will be NSS/module evaluation time, and feedback will get pulled up – again – and we'll be told it's not helpful enough – again – and we'll sit in our office hours waiting for the student who had 'come see me so we can discuss this more' written to not show up – again. And then we'll feel all angry at the undergrads and not the system, and then realise that maybe that's all part of the divide-and-rule agenda of increasingly marketised HE, which wants to promote students as partners in their education, but also tells them anything as they ask for they should get because they're 'paying-nine-grand-for-a-piece-of-paper-that-will-get-you-a-job-that-doesn't-involve-fast-food–unless-you're-stupid-enough-to-do-a-degree-that-encourages-critical-thinking-in-which-case-here's-your-barista-apron'. And then we'll feel all disheartened and sad. We'd love not to stand for this constant strain on our mental and financial wellbeing, but if we went on strike undergrads would complain that they're not paying nine grand to have their postgrad tutors exercise their right to withdraw their labour (even though it's the state that's actually paying nine grand, while we PGs fork over our own money back to the University, in a sort of vicious mockery of the circle of life). And, at the moment, the Students' Union would probably call us out on it too, even though in a few weeks they'll all be talking about how much they want to 'engage postgrads'. So, content warning, we'll probably just have to lie back for it. ***************************************************** SHART ATTACK [Content warning: contains anagrams] FROM: Mike M. Shart, V-C, Lune Valley Enterprise University (LuVE-U). TO: All students. SUBJECT: Exciting new investment! Dear all, It is my pleasure to announce that LuVE-U has secured another exciting investment in our "innovative global campus of the future opportunity for social transformativity of creativity in public understanding of the world". You may be aware of 'fracking', which is an environmentally friendly means of energy production, achieved by extracting shale gas from underground via the use of enormous drills and friendly chemical-enhanced pure water. I am not fully aware of the process or the detail, but Hewlett Venkkline (formerly Chief External Amplifier of Institutional Existence, recently promoted to the post of Chief External Amplifer (Institutional Existence, Enterprise Productivity and Library)) tells me that 'fracking' has been the topic of much discussion in the national press, and that LuVE-U's involvement will grant us plentiful media coverage once we begin its implementation on our campus. Our campus will, with immediate effect, facilitate the use of 'fracking' to alleviate our reliance on fossil fuels. Far be it from me, however, to be ignorant of the student voice and its mild trepidation on the sensitive topic of 'fracking'. As Vice-Chancellor, I recognise the importance of delegating to a member of staff the responsibility of keeping me vaguely abreast of what your concerns are once in a while. Hewlett has told me all about the various protests that have taken place on campus, in which you have made clear your legitimate concern that 'fracking' on our campus and in the local area will, you say, cause severe disruption to your day-to-day lives and significantly hinder the ability of our community to thrive. I have taken the student voice into account, and it has played a significant role in our decision-making. As such, after extensive negotiations, I can categorically assure you that NO 'fracking' activity will take place on our campus during the quiet period. Yours sincerely, Mike. ***************************************************** KEEPING UP WITH THE OWEN JONESES [Content warning: Owen Jones describes himself as a Macaulay Culkin-lookalike. Anything connected to Macaulay Culkin surely requires some kind of warning…] When political discussion and dissent grace Lancaster with their presence, a member of the subtext collective is never far behind. Thus it was your intrepid reporter found himself at Owen Jones's talk at The Dukes last night as part of the Lancaster Arts "Festival of Questions", an attempt to mash together politics and culture and… re-politicise the apolitical masses, perhaps? The auditorium was packed, and with good reason: Jones was a fluent, engaging and entertaining speaker, relying on notes only while giving his introduction a local flavour and making the connection to Lancaster-based or born chartists, suffragists and other dissenters who had spoken truth to power. A number of Jones's arguments seemed to hit home with the audience: that we needed to challenge the "politics of fear" promoted by a whole gamut of politicians in Europe, the US and elsewhere, by the Camerons, Trumps and Le Pens of this world, with a "politics of hope" as epitomised by new or newly ascendent parties such as Podemos, Syriza, the SNP and - you guessed it - Jeremy Corbyn's Labour; that those who wished to challenge the politics of fear needed to become better than the other side at using language to get their arguments across persuasively; that the precarious position of young people in Britain with regard to income, jobs and welfare meant they were the first generation who would not necessarily be better off than their parents on average; and that we needed only to look to other countries such as Germany to see what was possible when the state acted in the interests of the majority, not the wealthy elites. But if the largely supportive and inquisitive rather than challenging questions from the fine folk of Lancaster in Q&A session at the end, which Jones used skillfully and humorously to reinforce his earlier points and cover additional ground, showed one thing, it was that Jones was preaching to the converted. Although there wasn't much that was new to an audience no doubt mostly familiar with Jones's oeuvre in print and on the screen, there were some crackers. This reporter's favourite was a paraphrase of a poem which subtext reproduces here in full for the benefit of University Management, should they ever have trouble dealing with dissent among the rank and file staff: 'The Solution', by Bertolt Brecht (translated by Derek Bowman) After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another? The Festival of Questions continues until February 20th and features a wide range of talks, performances, discussions, exhibitions and other events that explore social, political and economic issues both in more conventional ways and through innovative cultural experiences. Owen Jones will also return to Lancaster on May 19th; further information available here: https://www.lancasterarts.org/festival-of-questions ***************************************************** THE TRAIN – review [Content warning: may contain culture] Audience members entering the Nuffield Theatre to see a performance of The Train late last month were asked not only if their mobile phones were switched off, but also if they suffered from claustrophobia. Surely this must be a case of the health-and-safety culture being taken to a ludicrously defensive extreme? Then, as twelve of us squeezed on to three wooden benches in a box representing a compartment in an old railway carriage, the question began to seem justified. We put on headphones, shutting out all extraneous sound. Finally, the lights went out. Claustrophobia could certainly have been a problem. We were clearly in for an unusual and rather unsettling experience. The small audience sat facing the window from the compartment on to the train corridor, where all the action was to take place. The impression of being on a moving train was skilfully created by sounds in the headphones, by images projected on the opposite side of the 'corridor', and by motion of the compartment, which vibrated as we crossed track joints and rotated and tipped forward and back to give the feeling of cornering, braking and accelerating. The engineering of all this was well done: disbelief was readily suspended. The story centred on a woman who, in a session with a psychotherapist, has recounted a dream in which she is searching a train for a missing child, which everyone she meets denies seeing. The audience was very close to the action, even though it was outside the window and in a different space: it was impossible not to feel involved and almost to be a participant in the drama. For the audience this was a surreal experience, as we watched the action through the window on to the corridor. An atmosphere of tension and suspense was skilfully created in the running time of just 45 minutes, and we were left at the end feeling both disturbed by what we had watched and searching for its significance. Written by Andrew Quick (of Lancaster Arts) and Pete Brooks, the play was first performed at Teatro delle Muse in Ancona at the end of September, and premiered at Lancaster Arts on 21 January 2016. ***************************************************** LETTERS Dear subtext As an enthusiastic supporter of LUSU's campaign to expand the practice of lecture recording, I feel beholden to point out some of its virtues. Most of us have our off-days, and students do too. Not every lecture can be perfect and notes aren't always taken optimally either. Panopto enables us to achieve that elusive best performance from the comfort of our own offices, correcting slips of the tongue, hesitations, brainfade and all the other problems with which most of us are doubtlessly familiar. That recording can then be reused for as many years as one wishes, until the necessity to modify content arises. Its length can be variable, everything from 10 minute knowledge-bites to marathon 90 minute discourses. The tyranny of the 50 minute slot, interrupted by latecomers and prematurely terminated by the arrival of the next impatient lecturer, is gone. Pre-recording the arduous business of delivery frees up programmed lecture time for other things - answering students' questions, letting students perform their own presentations based on the lecture material, discussing publications or past exam questions on the topic in the recorded lecture and so on. The mythical "flipped classroom" of student-led learning is finally an achievable prospect. And if students don't want to come - then why not respect their wishes? We can use the time for other things, like research. I have known colleagues who have arisen from their sickbeds, driven to work on icy and dangerous roads, or fought through picket lines, simply because the administrative hassle of missing a lecture was more unpleasant than any illness or ill-advised journey. I've even done it myself on a couple of occasions. This is wrong. This is archaic. Assembling 150 teenagers in a barn and shouting at them for up to 5 hours in one day was fine in the 11th century Sorbonne, but a millennium has passed and it is time for change. And as for MOOCs, since coming to Lancaster 3 years ago, I've had the privilege of leading two. They were among the most satisfying pedagogical experiences of my life. If university teaching becomes more like a MOOC, then so much the better. Well done to LUSU! Sincerely Derek Gatherer (BLS) ***************************************************** Dear Subtext, I was interested to read your piece on the paperless Court, as only the day before the papers had popped up in my inbox. At the meeting on Saturday I will have completed my nine permitted years as a Class IV member. The University will have saved many trees and a not inconsiderable amount of money on printing and postage by doing this and as you say will undoubtedly give these reasons for change. The problem as I see it is the demise of the physical reminder, when the papers drop onto the doormat in the middle of December to put the date in your diary. This may impact on the number of external and internal members attending Court. We live in busy times and women do not have empty Saturdays available to be filled at the last moment and there are precious few of us on Court as it is, but that's another story! Judith Grocott ***************************************************** The editorial collective of subtext currently consists (in alphabetical order) of: George Green, James Groves, Ian Paylor, Ronnie Rowlands, Joe Thornberry, Johnny Unger, and Martin Widden. |