“enthusiastic exciting
teaching needs staff doing cutting edge research”
~
uhm!
No evidence from my own
demise for doing exactly that (signature to cabbage link) ~ jealous mediocrity
is my main recollection of the meddling managers who exacted envious revenge for
my success on this score and within weeks of (Sir) Michael Thompson’s departure
as BUVC turned ocean yachtsman. Take a look at my links to see the yawning gap
between Sterling’s virtual vitality and my rubbish reality of disillusioned
denial, since shared by too many others who jumped the sinking ship since I was
despatched.
Brit Unis have slid too far
down the slippery slope into that ubiquitous self-serving swamp overpopulated by
bureaucratic bunglers who like weeds steal the visionary sunlight that is vital
for vibrancy of enduring excellence. Their pervasive eutrophication of
enthusiasm has evaporated the excitement that I acquired from my HE experience
and in turn exported to my guys across the board from encounters with
educational exotica to pocket money procured from practical plumbing. Take a
look at my signature links for flavours of my fun from insightful
inquisitiveness, in sadly stark contrast to current caricatures cultivated by
committee careerists whose byword is compromise, never commitment!
Whilst such tossers have
always strutted their bureaucratic boardwalks they never before procured potent
power to destroy determination, only hinder it. We live in dangerously damaging
times with scholastic truth invariably beholden to populist spin and all of it
politically policed for promotional publicity at the expense of introspective
individuality that had invariably been the fount of that enduring wisdom which
delivered the goodies we (used to) enjoy as privileged pleasures.
Nowadays so (too) many of
these benefits (bonuses) are expected as entitlements and riding on the backs of
these expectations are armies of lawyers, accountants and administrators only
too eager to puff up percy public’s increasing inclination to not just complain
but to campaign for compensation. It could all be merely a culturally chaotic
comedy of correctness claptrap were it not for the nightmare nosiness of covert
coercion and the selfish squandering of scarce supplies.
Worst of all by far is the
not just in-your-face but up-your-nose prissiness of our posturing politicians
and their piratical pretenders who all appear to have been primed as part-time
pulpit preachers perpetually posturing with hapless hyperactive heaving from
hypersonic hysteria to hypocritical humility. In earlier eras persecuted Brit
professionals fled to the States to escape insufferable intrusion on
individuality and obstruction of opinion but that option just ain’t available
any more to anyone with a concerned conscience about many aspects of American
attitudes, not just “The War” which wasn’t a War at all but an Invasion although
no-one notices the distinction any more.
My own advisers are
increasingly encouraging their clients to escape not to Maryland but to
MaoriLand as perhaps the last remaining vestige of values from our earlier era,
not so much when Miss Marple held sway instead of Ken, Tony and the rest of that
motley mob, but rather when our distinctive national trait was commonsense
stoicism (at least as seen by Johnny Foreigner) and people ploughed their
preordained pitches with fearless fortitude and never even a fleeting thought of
(human) life’s absolute sanctity or entitlements to compensatory counselling and
the rest of that claptrap.
No coincidence then that I take pride in styling myself “meldrewismic flowologist”, the former in tribute to my greatest antihero of our postmodernist times, the latter in tribute to an educational eccentricity I was privileged enough to win and sustain on merit ~ at least I like to think so but more likely serendipity sustained me more than merit. And maybe that’s the saddest facet of our insidious “socialism-with-a-smile” ~ that its insistence on systemising everything in everyday life has squashed our scope to see and select for serendipitous solutions.
Big “S” almost always played a plentiful part in evolving excellent endings (check out just about any history of inventive science and technology or simply see it ubiquitously in nature) whereas our modern little “s” (spawned from Teutonic-Yankee obsessions with sledgehammer schemes, adopted and amplified by the EC of course) has given us grief just about whenever and wherever we’ve been bitten by that bug ~ or rather bugs and riddled with them, as witnessed by software scams across all administrative arenas.
Serendipity inevitably isn’t
something that lawyers, accountants and administrators can ever access because
they lack genuinely informed insight so no coincidence that their explosively
inflated fortunes in recent times have squeezed it out so successfully. Saddest
of all then is the sight of systemisation being embraced in academic arenas,
especially by quisling scientists who know it kills inspirational individuality
every bit as much as cigarettes kill smokers ~ and that’s a tough tag line
coming from this unreformed addict!
I’m time out on this twaddle
so maybe more next month or the month
after.