I had the opportunity to stay at the Manchester Hyatt. Its an unexpected 20 storey highrise building about 2 miles South of the down town area. Its located next to the Allianz Manchester Business School. It has a 4* luxury hotel and serviced apartments. A few minutes stroll away is the Kantorwich library (architecture library) and the Arthur Lewis Building (social sciences building). There is a brand new book shop with a chain coffee shop inside. There are also gorgeous landscaped herb gardens with scented flowers. Its all very beautiful and relaxed with a much more relaxed feeling than the frenetic energy of Piccadilly or Deansgate.
Today B and I went for a walk to the bookshop. We sat outside the social sciences centre. A man was having a loud cell phone conversation in Portuguese. I was telling Ash that if I had not done my anthropology masters in Covid year I would have attended the Arthur Lewis Centre. It felt a bit sad that I had invested all that money but received next to nothing.
It’s the US context but I had been reading about how in America there are so many people with Phd’s that there is a vast pool of interns and ‘adjunct’ professors teaching undergraduate level and most of them can go for decades never achieving tenure. That could have been me teaching at Manchester, MMU and Keele or Edinburgh, Aberdeen and St Andrews, bussing, training and ubering between teaching gigs that gave maybe £50 a session or just library access and the ability to put the university on your business card.
Even now nearly 2 decades after I started my undergrad I still have a strong pull to do an anthropology masters and phd but I dunno why. B says that I am always disappointed by the lack of community and the avaricious competition in academia. I really wanna go back but I dunno how I would ever get into a tenure track position when there are hundreds of supremely qualified candidates for every position. Its like a complete non starter.
Also who reads academic texts? Social sciences are like the cindarella. Its like being the cindarella of cindarella.
The Manchester campus has had millions of pounds worth of investment and I admit it looks good. I feel slightly angry that its partly on the backs of the dreams of people like me that the university has raised money to pull in more and higher paying post graduate and international students and also selling conferencing and business to business events to the local corporate community including research. The university is a pleasant environment and there is nothing really stopping members of the public from wandering round. It really is the ‘groves of academe’. In a way Im still longing to be part of it but in some ways its an elitist environment. Maybe I am just too disabled, mentally ill or too weird to fit in. Or maybe I kept trying to broker connection with the university long after I should have moved on. Part of me feels like I should have been a professor. I know academics moan about the corporatisation of higher education and the bureaucracy and back biting but it still looks and feels to me like a pretty privileged and cushy job where you can choose your research interests and follow your own passions, travel, conferences, sabbaticals, social status and also an ‘income’ which is not insubstantial. Essentially a structure to life other than being a freelance writer trying to eke out an existence on substack.
I dunno. Walking through this corner of Manchester University feels like peeking into a life I never had. But now I have another life working in media, journalism and radio production. I have sort of spiritually bypassed academia and wound up as a slightly jaded 40 something with an interest in writing anthropological material. Life has played me a trick. I grew up and my dream of being a professor remained a dream except I can indulge it a little by wandering round the campus book shops and coffee shops and over hearing the earnest conversations of foreign postgraduates. Oh well.