Sphinx

It’s interesting – I can’t work out whether it should also be sobering – to reflect that my main ‘legacy’ to academia, broadly defined, may have nothing at all to do with any of my miscellaneous scribblings about Thucydides, the ancient economy, historiography, the influence of classical antiquity on the development of 19th-century social theory or counterfactuals. It won’t even be directly related to my teaching, but rather to my past identity – somewhat out of step with my usual academic persona – as ruthless academic bureaucrat, determined to bring order and consistency to the organisation of teaching and learning at department, faculty and university level. As a legacy of my time as Faculty Education Director in Bristol, and more specifically being named on the website in such a role, I still occasionally get invited to apply for positions as Pro-Vice-Dean for Educational Enterprise, and even occasionally wonder about that alternative career path. A certain preference for tidyness leads to guideline writing, guideline writing leads to subject review processes, subject review processes lead to the dark side…

More particularly, as part of that role I developed an assortment of guidance for students on such things as referencing and grammar (including a load of online quizzes), as well as support for colleagues in assessment criteria, plagiarism detection and the like. How much of this stuff survives in Bristol I’ve no idea – but it also has had offspring elsewhere, as over the years a fair number of colleges and universities have asked permission to make use of different bits for their own students. I never quite understood these requests, as my conception of education management was that it’s all about imposing my, clearly superior, approach to everything, rather than borrowing from elsewhere, but I can recognise that others may not be quite so obsessive.

It is doubtless a sign of the times, and how they’ve corrupted me, that my initial response yesterday to another such request, this time relating to some guidelines I once wrote about assessing student presentations, was to wonder about signing over my Intellectual Property to a private company. It’s not, on reflection, that I would expect to make any money, or even to be given a credit; the people in question could very easily just have done a quiet cut’n’paste job and I wouldn’t be any the wiser, so the fact they bothered to ask me is probably a good sign (unless it’s a sign that they are expecting to make lots and lots of money out of this and so wanted to cover all the bases for fear of future lawsuits – but that doesn’t seem terribly likely).

No, it’s more about the pervasive sense – accentuated by the fact that there simply isn’t enough time ever – that everything should be ends-driven in one way or another, or what’s the point? Why write an article that isn’t going to be REF-able, unless it’s useful in some other professional way? Why do engagement activities if they don’t count for Impact or personal progression? It isn’t that one doesn’t then do things that don’t offer such a return – but there is a tendency to come up with ad hoc rationalisations for them, and/or to start thinking, yes, I did that thing because it was interesting/fun, but it ought to bring me more. I’ve even been wondering about adding one of those ‘Buy me a Ko-Fi’ links to this blog, because, while the primary purpose of the thing is to let me ramble inconsequentially, there are people out there making money from blogging, and this is all my Intellectual Property after all…

From a different perspective, however: I don’t need to monetise my stray ideas and writing, so long as I keep jumping through job-related hoops to a sufficient degree. During the annual runner bean glut, I don’t feel the need to sell my surplus beans; in a similar manner, I can give away my surplus ideas to anyone who wants them, especially as that doesn’t deprive me of the use of them – and the likelihood of anyone else making a fortune from them is on a par with the risk that someone takes a bag of my runner beans and then sells them at a market. Insofar as any of this stuff counts as Intellectual Property, there’s every reason then to practise Intellectual Altruism, giving it away to anyone who finds it useful or interesting. And if that means I contribute to improved assessment performance among students of advanced metallurgy and casting techniques, then that’s a bonus.

Update: I should clarify that when I talk of ‘developing’ online guidance about grammar and referencing, I don’t mean to imply that I wrote all of them; a fair amount of the material (including, I should stress, the obsession with sausages in the Referencing examples) was produced by a student intern under my direction. Which just goes to emphasise the idiocy of claiming this as the Intellectual Property of an individual or institution – he deserves a share of the film rights as much as I do…

But it’s another sign of the times that it didn’t for a moment occur to anyone that even should sign a form relinquishing any creator’s rights, whereas for a current side project making use of students reading bits of Thucydides, I’ve been careful to get them to sign bits of paper giving permission for me to use the recordings for academic, non-profit purposes.