UK universities can be tiring and joyless places to work.
This is an interview with David Lodge.
Despite huge book sales, he prudently chose to remain as professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham University, only retiring in 1987 when he became eligible for a pension. By then, of course, the academic golden age his novels immortalised was coming to an end, with the mass expansion of higher education.
“It was the right time to leave. All my former colleagues say: ‘You are well out of it.’ There’s a weary disillusion to university life now and that’s a shame because, when I was there, there was excitement, a joie de vivre. Now it has become like a machine, servicing large numbers of students, and much less attractive and interesting.”
We discuss this week’s “record” A-level results. “When I first went to Birmingham, they awarded two firsts a year on average. Now, even taking into account that student numbers have increased, it’s vastly more, when people obviously haven’t got much cleverer.
“Expanding education is a good thing on the whole, but in our typical British way, we didn’t think through the consequences of changing from an elitist system to a mass one, and that there would have to be a loss of quality.”