by Paul Temple
Call me a sad old geezer, but I’m finding the never-ending positivity that characterises LinkedIn’s sunshine world rather wearing. To take one example, the “comment” options you’re offered after each post might run from “awesome“, through “love this,” to merely “impressive”: where is “misleading”, “time-wasting”, or “plain wrong”? Anyway, turning this negativity (my “inner snark” as a kindly colleague once put it) into a business proposition, in a way that LinkedIn’s owners (Microsoft paid $26 billion for it back in 2016) would surely understand, I’m about to pitch a rival version, provisionally titled PissedOff – though the investors might want to focus-group that first. (Warning: if this title offends you, please stop reading at this point.) It will instead tap into the deep wells of pessimism that characterise so much of British life (though the French surely are just as good at it). The sociologists refer to this kind of thinking as “narratives of decline”, supported by Britain’s unofficial national motto, “Could be worse”.
So a typical post on my new site might be: “Dave has just been fired from the University of Hounslow – ‘I always hated the place anyway, and the VC was a complete ****er,’ he said.” “Dave, absolutely with you, mate, the place is beyond awful, surprised you stuck it as long as you did”. “Dave, you speak for all of us who have suffered at Hounslow – I got out as soon as I could. Nobody who values their integrity should think of working there”. I’m confident that the latest from PissedOff will be the first email that everyone working in higher education will open in the morning, to see who/where is getting the flak. An absolute rule of the site will be that references to “seeking new challenges” or similar euphemisms are banned: if you’ve been fired, let’s hear about it, it’s (usually) nothing to be ashamed of – be loud and proud. What you’re now going to do is make them very, very sorry…
What will then happen is that everyone with a grudge about Hounslow (and which university doesn’t have an army of grudge-bearers?) will pile in, Four Yorkshiremen-style: “You think you had a bad time, let me tell you about what happened to me…”, and pretty soon the place will be a national laughing-stock. After the VC has had a torrid meeting with the governing body, and the HR Director has been fired as a pointless gesture, there might possibly be some improvements. I’d be surprised to learn of any institutional changes as a result of another glowing LinkedIn endorsement.
LinkedIn’s Californian roots are its problem. Up to a point, and having seen it working first-hand, I am actually in favour of American-style positivity in organisations: there is a sense that if the people around you are saying “Yes, we can do this!”, then maybe the difficulties can, actually, be overcome – what the Navy calls the “Nelson Touch”. But equally, some of those difficulties may be intractable, and pretending they don’t exist won’t make them go away. If you want some actual American examples of difficulties being overcome, or not, look at George Keller’s still-excellent Academic Strategy (1983), or my own more recent reflections on it (Temple, 2018). Or my review of some honest American case studies of university leadership and – the book’s best bits – of its failures (Temple, 2020).
What these studies show is how real problems are identified and how they then might be overcome. One of the weaknesses found in too many university strategy documents is the inability to face up to problems and creating instead a make-believe world (call it LinkedIn World) where everything always goes well and everyone is enjoying themselves. The danger, of course, is that strategy documents like that will make everyone pissed off even if they hadn’t been before. I once got into trouble with the VC of a post-92 university by asking, quite innocently (no, really), about the basis of a claim in a staff recruitment ad that they were a top-ten research university (something like that, anyway: as my then-colleague David Watson drily remarked, “Another fine mess you’ve got us into”.). This was a perfectly good university, doing a fine job in supporting regional development goals, doing next-to-no research (as measured by research income), but feeling it necessary to buy into the apex research university model. They were assuming that they had to live in LinkedIn World, rather than the world they were actually in. (I’m glad to say that the VC and I eventually parted on good terms – he even bought me a beer.)
Anyway, once the IPO for PissedOff goes through, do join me for a cocktail on the deck of my yacht in Monte Carlo. But leave any whingeing about your job back in the office – I don’t want the real world intruding on my Riviera idyll, thank you very much.
Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.