An anonymous academic has lifted the lid on what life is like on university campus in modern Britain, with trigger warnings rife, knee-jerk cancel culture, and lecturers dishing out inflated grades with it impossible for students to fail their course.
Although most students are well-behaved and more interested in eating healthily than ‘getting smashed’, there is an ‘epidemic of mental illness’ spreading throughout, The Secret Lecturer reveals in a new book.
Financing issues are causing standards to be ‘obliterated’ while universities are striking murky million pound deals with ‘arms dealers, fossil fuel companies and foreign dictatorships’.
Some lecturers are taking books and films that represent slavery, sexual assault and suicide off the syllabus out of fear they might upset some hypersensitive students.
‘But a representation of something terrible is not a moral validation of it — quite the contrary,’ they say.
‘We’re back to that dilemma of needing to protect the welfare of students but also requiring them to recognise that the world is nasty, unfair and violent — and that a good deal of great art reflects that.’
The advances in AI mean and the arrival of Elon Musk‘s ChatGPT mean plagiarism is virtually ‘untraceable’, reported The Times.
Even when students are caught out they break down in tears and blame mental distress for cheating, with their punishment being allowed to resubmit their work in the summer.
‘Nobody is allowed to fail,’ they say as students are now seen as ‘customers we can’t afford to upset’.
The anonymous author suggests some colleagues are ‘bribing’ students into giving them positive feedback by handing out over-generous marks.
One colleague is described as ‘unapologetic grade-inflater, awarding firsts to submissions that are as coherent as Shane MacGowan after a four-day bender’.
They write about in one course where 67 per cent of students were given first class degrees: ‘No way are two thirds of them that smart. I read in our staff bulletin that the same course has been named best of its kind in the country, based on the votes of those same students — any chance whatsoever that grade inflation is a wheeze to ensure that students like us lecturers enough to give us positive feedback?
‘Decisions to close departments have been based on such feedback — I dread to think how many lecturers have been fired because they were too honest to bribe students with over-generous marks.’
They bemoan the culture within campuses with ‘jaded’ lecturers ‘underpaid, overworked and on casual contracts’.
On academic standards, they write they ‘are slowly being obliterated, though that has more to do with financing than with a slide into “wokery”‘.
For two seminars in a row no students turned up with mental health problems leaving some walking around like ‘lost souls’.
‘Spend a fraction of time inside a university and you’ll rapidly discover they are ruthless corporations. Nothing screams “Watch out for those pinko tofu-snorting PC apparatchiks!” quite like doing millions of pounds’ worth of business with arms dealers, and foreign dictatorships — or swiftly promoting colleagues who deny climate change and defend extra-judicial killing.’
In terms of transgender rights, students will change their minds based on who they are with ‘for if the company they are in at any one time doesn’t like their principles, they’ll change theirs. Rather than leading thought, they genuflect to the prevailing intellectual and ideological winds’.
They say endless meetings are draining with ‘the further up the university hierarchy you look, the thicker people get’.
‘It’s like a parody of Darwinian selection – survival of the dimmest,’ they add.
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Matt Strudwick
