Thursday, May 2, 2024

The Secret Lecturer: A book of what goes on in the head of one windging British academic

"The Secret Lecturer : What Really Goes on at University" (Anon, 2024), is a very annoying book. I would like to say, despite that, it makes some good points, but it doesn't. The book is innovative in that a UK academic, who wisely chooses to remain anonymous, has taken the sort of thing we might think, and in a lapse of judgement write in a Tweet, and set it all down in a book for people to buy. 

When a graduate student. I made the mistake of accepting the instructor's invitation to the class to provide comment and suggestions on the program. They were so upset by my comments, I had to study at another university, for a year, until they calmed down. After that, I used a private journal to express my frustrations, with the though some researcher might be able to use it for background one day*. However, Anon has taken their stream of consciousness, about everything wrong with UK universities (real and imagined) and put it out for all to read.

This work is not a particularly engaging read, it doesn't make suggestions for improving the university system, nor does it suggest alternatives. Hopefully it was cathartic for the author, assuming it wasn't written by generative AI. This book becomes tiresome long before the end of its 224 pages.

This book should not be confused with "The Secret Lecturer: An Insider's Guide to Working in a Modern University" (Anon, 2016). Despite the same main title, this appears to be by a different annoyed academic: Australian, rather than British.

* In three years study wrote 1,200 postings in my journal, made up of about 100,000 words: enough for me to write my own tell all book, if I did not have more sense. ;-)