my next door neighbour has just taken a new job on the continent. As an academic, his position became insecure due to a large drop in student numbers immediately after the Brexit vote. He is about 50 and has accepted a big drop in salary – it’s clearly not a decision that has been made lightly. He will take his family so my son will lose his best friend.
If your neighbour lost his job, that is really a shame. However it illustrates stupid management, because the drop is a knee-jerk reaction driven by social media, which is especially effective on the (young) target audience which gets virtually its entire world view from FB and other social media.
“The young” never (in my lifetime) really read printed media (on which you can choose anything from far left to far right according to your desire) but today they spend an average of hours per day on social media. I saw some utterly stunning stats yesterday. No wonder employers are trawling social media.
Whoever can harness social media almost completely controls the, say, under-25s, and the slick job which Labour did on this at the last election was the principal reason for Mrs May’s election gamble backfiring so badly.
I have learnt many years ago to never act on fear (in broad politics I mean, of course, not an intruder in the house, or an in-flight engine stoppage). Every time (I mean 100% of the time) I read a scary article in the papers about the stock market, and acted on it, I lost money. One could argue this was because various interested parties got a copy of the article from the “journalist” who wrote it, 2-3 days in advance, in return for a “lunch”, and shorted the relevant stock. I once proved this with the notorious Investors Chronicle when I found every stock plugged in it rose about 3 days before publication date 
Again, the reason why acting on fear (in a way which costs you a lot) is usually a waste of time, is that humans constantly act to deal with adversity. And I have a lot of faith in that. Warren Buffet said betting against America has not worked since 1776 and I will confidently say the same about any major country with a functioning law and order system. That’s why we are here reading this on Ipads etc but monkeys are still swinging in the trees.
I’ve gotten Australian nationality for my son, and Irish citizenship for myself so this is our exit strategy should everything go south
This is a popular sentiment but looking at it rationally what you really need to cover that scenario is an AK47, a load of ammo, a course on how to use it, and a big stock of cans of baked beans in a bunker. As I said, the chances of travel visas is 0.000%. It is different if you are old and want to sponge off somebody else’s social security system 
The right to work might change but the EU has huge structural problems right now and that whole scene is in a state of flux. But by all means collect a few passports; there is no downside unless you have to pay income tax there
I have a “get Czech passport” on a post-it sticker on the wall; it’s been there for about 15 years because I can’t bear the thought of wasting a whole day up in London at the embassy, and Tottenham Court Road is mostly junk these days. The main advantage would be that that passport could live permanently in my travelling backpack so I would never forget my passport I managed to sneak a good number of trips to Le Touquet without it but you can’t do that today since Mr Macron has a house there so the police have to show 24/7/365 due diligence at the airport
Brexit has always been a choice between a bird in the hand and two in the bush. The people of Britain voted for the two in the bush and so Brexit has to happen.
I think that’s an accurate summary.
The EU has always offered the “bird in the hand” and they have been very good at it. They threw a massive and supposedly unforgettable party for Greece’s entry. It turned out to be unforgettable allright… The “bird in the hand” didn’t last all that long for Spain, either.
My neighbour jumped rather than waiting until he was pushed, but the writing was on the wall. Student numbers overall are down 25% and international students are down from 28% to 9%. Brexit certainly doesn’t account for all of the drop, but there was a flurry of people who called to cancel their places immediately after the referendum and I think it’s fair to attribute a large proportion of the drop to it.
It may be that foreign students have been misled by social media in not wishing to come to the UK to study, but at the end of the day the university has to make large savings due to the real drop in its income and it is doing so by cutting jobs left, right and centre. Those that are left are by and large seriously overworked.
Yes; I would not argue with the explanation. I do think he acted with unnecessary haste.
But academia is indeed a difficult area, due to its reliance on external funding:
A big thing, which happened within 24hrs of the vote, was a huge loss of research funding. For political correctness reasons, the EU allocates funding prefentially to collaborative projects (regardless of any synergy between the applicants) and what happened literally the day after was that the mainland-based partners dropped out, because the funding application pipeline, while being a well oiled machine employing lots of admin people everywhere, takes a couple of years, so they realised the UK would not be participating by the time the funding arrived. That loss of funding undermines a lot of the UK university scene, because of the focus – traditional in academia – on constantly doing and publishing research, in order to keep the job (the “job” being a teaching job too of course). To paraphrase the ancient Victorian proverb, teaching is the price you pay for having fun funded by somebody else doing research
That is the risk of living off research grants. You are constantly chasing the next one while spending the current one. But everybody “knew” that grants can just dry up. It is like having a business where one customer accounts for say 50% of your sales. Normally one tries very hard to avoid that, and upon picking up such a customer, one tries to diversify, but this is usually difficult. In this case the EU has a near-monopoly position on these, so it “owns” much of UK academia. Accordingly the support for brexit in academic research is somewhere below zero
I think that’s all very true, but probably not applicable in this case. Who knows if it was the right decision? Perhaps he wouldn’t have lost his job. Perhaps he would have lost it, then lost his house whilst waiting for another offer to come up.
I’m afraid not many people in British academia find it fun these days. It is a privilege of course to be paid to do research that often has no immediate practical benefit, but judging from my days in A&E, university staff are as likely to attend as a psychiatric emergency as the students are.
Just spent 20 minutes catching up on the posts and what fascinating comments from the last few. It is really interesting to read the reaction in France for example and also Peter’s experience having come from his own very interesting background. It is so refreshing to read some of these comments.
judging from my days in A&E, university staff are as likely to attend as a psychiatric emergency as the students are.
To clarify: I mean to say that academia is very competitive with long working hours, little job security and a host of other stressors. Universities can be very unhappy places.
My OH left academia a few years ago. It got non-satisfying and frustrating; the univ did a load of money-grabbing from foreign students who mostly could speak virtually no English (the old days when you needed an English Language O-Level are long gone; I had to do mine on an evening course a year after leaving school) and who mostly blatently plagiarise from the internet (even leaving page numbers within the text) and for whom the course tutors more or less write the (Masters) essays. A PhD is still quite hard to get (she got hers c. 2005) but again you get a lot of “help” so you can get it if you have stamina and pick some silly subject. So I can see where kwlf is coming from. However compared to the world of commerce it is still likely to be a pretty good beano especially compared to working for an aggressive employer in Wales where jobs are scarce to say the least and the corporate working environment is ultra stressful due to the high resulting % of corporate climbers and brown-nosers
Changing tack as this one has prob 90 now been pretty well done – what do people think about hose pipe bans, and are these common in many parts of Europe.
They really annoy me. In my part of the UK I dont think a new reservoir has been created in maybe the last 40+ years, yet the population grows at an alarming rate. The water company thinks the need for hose pipe bans is something to do with climate change or people using more water.
I believe there are many elderly people who love their gardens – after all in the UK we are a country of gardeners. Why should they have to carry buckets of water to enjoy their hobby?
and by all means what are your thoughts on the wider subject of what appears to be fewer and fewer services for the community – and I dont even mean new services but a growing population in some places, but services actually diminshing be it sports centres, swimming pools, community facilities etc.
Peter wrote:
I think you will just continue to see the same polarisation as we always have here i.e. a group of mainland Europe pilots angrily hoping the UK melts down
Peter wrote:
The reason I don’t go for these gloomy scenarios (regardless of the obvious fact that many people wish them to happen
I think you are confusing what people want to happen with what people expect to happen.
what do people think about hose pipe bans, and are these common in many parts of Europe.
Too many people, too little investment in collecting water from the winter rains, and too much house building causing rainwater to run off into the drains and into the sea instead of seeping into the soil…
A private pool uses almost no water. A refill is done every few years only. And I suspect a public pool just uses a high level of chlorine
I think you are confusing what people want to happen with what people expect to happen.
Not if one reads the venom in some of what is written
