Politics of rhythm and crisis in the slow death of higher education: implications for academic work and student support

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the role that conflicting rhythms of academic life and crisis have on the ability of academics to meet their commitments, such as providing support to students. Drawing from our experience in UK higher education, we argue that contemporary academic life can be seen as a constant process of being taken over by different crises. These crises tend to follow a rhythm of brief periods as emergencies subsequently operationalised into forms of ongoing, unresolved crisis. In turn, these crisis rhythms intersect with contrasting rhythms of different actors in university life, specifically that of academics, the institution itself, and students. Drawing from Lefebvre’s vocabulary of rhythmanalysis, we argue that the arrhythmia between these different groups in the university is a key part in the failure of higher education to do more than proliferate crisis. Illustrated by our experiences in student-support focused roles during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, we explore how this particular crisis imposed itself as emergency but was then absorbed into the group of ongoing crises which impact on academic life. The paper concludes with suggestions of alternative approaches to university workload for staff and students alike, which might render university life more eurhythmic and equitable.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhythm
• crisis
• emergency
• student support
• university
• academic workload
• Covid-19
• slow death
• slow scholarship
• rhythmanalysis

Introduction

‘To grasp a rhythm, it is necessary to have been grasped by it; one must let oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself to its duration’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 27)

As academics working in the British higher education system for over a decade, we have felt grasped by, taken over, and abandoned to multiple rhythms of crisis. Alongside other academic work, both of us have since 2019 held positions in our geography degree programmes with responsibilities for student progress and well-being. These roles have required extensive work with students experiencing personal challenges, whether from ill health, family or personal relations, or other barriers.

In this paper, we start from a focus on such student support responsibilities and present the value of thinking rhythmically about academic work in order to better understand the politics of time in the contemporary university. Our core argument is that the arrhythmic nature of higher education in the UK means that staff, students and institutions lack the flexibility to change practices to deal with crises. What flexibility exists is taken up with a focus on the latest emergency, which is then rendered into a background crisis as one of many ongoing constant crises. We begin by introducing our conceptual framework, drawing primarily from Lefebvre’s writing on rhythm, as well contemporary theorisations of crisis. Lefebvre’s work draws attention to the structuring effect of rhythms, in other words, he shows how rhythms are much more than just the effects of the timing of particular practices or actions. Rather, rhythms and their interactions are major producers of social structure, as well as potentially the source for difference and disruption.

Following this exploration of Lefebvre, we discuss the arrhythmia which characterize the contemporary overlapping crises of British higher education and show their rhythmic characteristics. We outline how higher education can also be characterized as producing and a product of the contrasting rhythms of students, staff and the institution, which together generate arrhythmia which prevent student support among many other academic practices from functioning well. The paper gives a more in-depth illustration through the emergency of Covid-19, showing how it aligned the contrasting rhythms of higher education and briefly generated the space for flexibility and attention that many other crises require, only to be absorbed subsequently into the rhythm of constant crises. Through this, we argue that the framework of rhythm adds the ability to describe and understand how everyday practices of students, staff and university management combine to (re)produce crises despite attempts to resolve them. In this sense, we are offering an account of how these crises function and, importantly, how attempts to resolve emergencies tend to fail to deal with the bigger crises.

We therefore argue that addressing emergencies and crises without rhythmic change is to doom higher education to what Berlant (2007) calls a slow death, in which rhythms of crisis-emergency-crisis suck life gradually out of the creativity and functionality of the sector. We end with a series of tentative suggestions which might apply these insights to alleviate some of the failures of the current arrhythmia of higher education in the UK and elsewhere, while recognising that such suggestions are mitigations to current relations rather than attempts to deal with the structural causes of crises. The original contribution of this paper thus lies in analysing the importance of rhythms in the politics of time in the contemporary university, advancing the existing scholarship that has explored flexibility and organisation of time and speed and control over time (e.g. Crang, 2007; Currie, 1996; Gill, 2014; Gill & Donaghue, 2016; Hartman & Darab, 2012; Martell, 2014; Mountz et al., 2015).

Our work draws explicitly from our own experience, and we speak empirically to the situation in the UK and more specifically to geography undergraduate programmes at Newcastle University. Key features of this context include: a large number (over 200) of students admitted every year; a large majority from the UK, immediately or shortly after finishing secondary education; compulsory tuition fees (currently set at £9,250 per year for UK-based students); a government-run maintenance loan programme including the tuition and additional expenses, amounting together to about £19,000 per year (i.e. an overall debt of close to £60,000 at the end of studies); marketization of the university sector, including governmental audits of teaching and research, a variety of league tables and national evaluation of student satisfaction (National Student Survey); only a small number of students continuing with postgraduate education. The level of applicability of such insights to other institutional contexts varies, though we suspect that experiences will relate to those in other higher education systems with significant levels of marketization and neoliberalisation.

Rhythms in Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre’s work Rhythmanalysis (2004), published first in French in 1992, is typically understood as an addition to his three volume Critique of Everyday Life series. This series, produced over Lefebvre’s lifetime from 1942 to 1981, applied a Marxist analysis to the mundanities of daily practices, particularly in cities, which is where Lefebvre saw capitalism expanding and being reproduced (Elden, 2004). This attention to everyday urbanism differentiated Lefebvre from most Marxist writing, although it aligned him with the work of Benjamin in particular, in that both explored how city streets were the frontline of capitalist expansion, and the potential source of its unravelling (Cunningham, 2010). Rhythmanalysis extended this argument by providing a framework from which to explore the everyday, which attempted to explain the structuring power of everyday activities as they formed rhythms and the embedded potential for change within them.

This relationship between structure and change, and how it is embedded within rhythm, is expressed by Lefebvre through the relationship of repetition and difference. These two components make up the rhythm; for there to be a rhythm there must be ‘repetition in time and in space’ but also ‘no identical or absolute repetition, indefinitely … there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 6). In other words, a constant, repetitive beat is not rhythm. Rhythm is instead characterized by repetitions which have difference inserted into them. This insertion of difference into repetition is crucial in accounting for the possibility of change in social order (‘not only does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them; it produces them’ p.7). This series of repetition and difference generates ‘interferences of linear processes and cyclical processes’ (p.15), that is, there is repetition (which is cyclical) and difference (which is linear). Lefebvre produces a sense of temporality which prioritises neither the cyclical nor the linear, but instead their interactions.

Contemporary life for Lefebvre is characterised by the rhythms of capital, defined by production and destruction (p.55). Production is not just the rhythm of mechanized commodity production familiar from most Marxist work, but it is the production of ‘everything: things, men [sic], people, etc’. (p.55). Lefebvre tends to contrast socialised rhythms of capital with rhythms of nature and the body. He sees the everyday as a space in which the reproduction of social rhythms drives the reproduction of capitalism, through a process which he compares to the sport of dressage: ‘humans break themselves in like animals … one breaks-in another human living being by making them repeat a certain act, a certain gesture or movement’ (p.39). If there is to be a source of difference within these repetitions, it lies in ‘the sensible and the corporeal’ (p.45), in our embodied encounters with the world that still fall outside or below the purview of capitalist rhythm. Rhythms can both seemingly become immovable structures which dominate the everyday, while also containing within them gaps or sources of their own unravelling.

Lefebvre uses three rhythmic concepts to break down how rhythms function: eurhythmia, arrhythmia and isorhythmia. They are not mutually exclusive, but usually combine to form ‘polyrhythmia composed of diverse rhythms’ (p. 67). Eurhythmia are the ‘healthy’ rhythms of normal everydayness. This ‘normal’ is in fact ‘normed’, that is, it is a constructed product of ‘force in social relations’ [driven by the rhythms of capital] (p. 68). As such the ‘healthiness’ of eurhythmia is to be understood not as a judgement of whether these are rhythms with positive or negative outcomes – they may have either, and Lefebvre describes for example the disciplinary power of military training as a eurhythmia – but as a description as to whether the rhythms are likely to continue functioning without breakdown. These contrast with the arrhythmia of discordant or pathological rhythms. Arrhythmia are always present within relations, and while Lefebvre describes these as pathological or destructive, they may destroy with (morally) positive consequences. The third rhythmic relationship, the isorhythmia (‘equality of rhythms’ p. 67) describes a situation of rhythmic equivalences in harmony, which for Lefebvre are both rare and mutually exclusive to the more normal eurhythmia of everyday life. Throughout Lefebvre’s analysis, there is an emphasis that within most polyrhythmia, all three forms of rhythms are present. ‘Rhythmanalysis, therefore, essentially consists in the forming of these concepts into a work’ (p. 68); in other words, Lefebvre’s project is to understand the interplay between rhythms and how these align to produce social change or not.

Within studies of education generally and higher education more specifically, Lefebvre’s work has been used to help understand the intersection of temporality and spatiality in the production of educational experiences. Christie draws from Lefebvre to focus particularly on the intersection of the local and the global (Christie, 2013, p. 777), while Davies argues that Lefebvre helps ‘to articulate how space constitutes situated school practices’ (Davies, 2023, p. 2). From our geographical disciplinary background, we draw from a range of perspectives which start with the presumption of a mutual construction of space and society, and so for us what is helpful about Lefebvre is that his version of this argument pays attention to the production of space and time together in order to explore the possibility of a socio-political excess to society. Lefebvre helps attend to the ‘internalization of temporal double binds’ (Alhadeff-Jones, 2017, p. 8), which are the contradictory demands that emerge from the crisis-laden rhythms of many education settings. As well as grounding work in space and time, a Lefebvrian concept of rhythm requires that we pay careful attention to how structures of power are produced through everyday repetitions of practice.

Lefebvre’s work is useful in that it presents us a picture of a world of rhythms, which are themselves composed of rhythms. These rhythms contain both repetition and difference, circularity and linearity. This analysis is part of Lefebvre’s wider Marxist writing, although Lefebvre was a heterodox Marxist who argued for ‘a methodological and theoretical relativism, an epistemological pluralism’ (Lefebvre, 2011, p. 192), in which Marxist thought was important but ultimately just one framework for social understanding. We point in particular to the wider tradition within geography and urban studies of incorporating Lefebvre’s work into and alongside other thought that might be seen as broadly phenomenological or poststructural (Elden, 2004; Kinkaid, 2020; Simonsen, 2005) or feminist (Buckley & Strauss, 2016). While not rejecting the use of Marxism in understanding many of the dynamics of labour, capitalism and social reproduction in the contemporary world, what we draw from here is Lefebvre’s focus on the structuring role of rhythms, which is particularly helpful for us in understanding the emergencies and crises of contemporary academic life, and to which we now turn.

Rhythms and crisis in British higher education

Since 2019, we have worked together in academic roles with responsibilities for supporting students struggling with well-being and degree progression. Matej was Senior Tutor from 2019–2022 for our geography undergraduate degree programmes, covering approximately 650 students each year, taking the lead on support to student well-being, broadly defined. Along with physical and mental health struggles, this included support for students with difficult family or personal circumstances, financial difficulties, or significant caring responsibilities. Rob was Degree Programme Director for the same programmes from 2019 to 2021, a role focused on ensuring student progression through the degree, inevitably (though not always) overlapping with well-being matters. Since 2021, Rob has been in a Director of Education role across three subject areas (geography, politics and sociology), a position which is engaged more in the strategic planning and delivery of student education, but which still involves consideration of student progression and well-being. While what follows draws from our own practice, this was not work done alone, but alongside dedicated professional services colleagues, and with the support of many of our academic colleagues either in proximal administrative roles, or through their own personal tutoring and other day-to-day student-facing support.

Our work in this period can be best characterized as constant crisis management. Largely overlapping with the period of COVID-19 disruptions, it included an interrupted 18-month period when due to national and regional restrictions, we did our work almost entirely from home. Much of our day-to-day work was supporting students struggling with their degree because of personal or health problems, or (more accurately) because of failures of university and social structures to offer adequate support for personal or health challenges, which have led to these becoming barriers for study. This entailed frequent meetings with students, some to provide direct academic support but more commonly to provide what is broadly labelled ‘pastoral’ support: an odd mixture of providing reassurance, identifying the problem and its context, crafting personal and study advice, aiding in negotiating often overwhelmed support services, and simply acting as a sounding-board for someone struggling with their work.

Our rhythms were responsive, characterized by a constant churn of new problems. Our work agenda would be often determined during the day, as emails of various degrees of urgency arrived over a 24-hour cycle. Attempts to engage critically with university policies, to shift working patterns, or to pre-emptively introduce support structures for students, had to be fitted in and around this daily cycle of crises. Other activities on weekly or fortnightly recurrences included checking on whether assessments had been submitted, following up on students with known difficulties who did not communicate or failed to attend appointments, advising on and assessing requests for extensions or other mitigations, and providing advice for students who were considering changes in their degree pathways. This also involved responding to queries or referrals from other academic and professional services colleagues and contacting them about issues pertinent to specific students. While there were some regular, recurring elements to the work – an agreed fortnightly meeting with a student, for example – most of it was sporadic and responsive, engaging with a student after a problem had started to emerge.

The challenges that students faced cannot be reduced to ‘unfortunate’ personal circumstances, as they were shaped by, and often emergent from, the rhythms of various fast and slow crises, which also impacted our and our colleagues’ work. COVID-19 added to these, exacerbated some of them, and generated mutually co-constitutive effects, but the structural factors of crises enveloping UK higher education existed separately to the pandemic situation. To provide a non-exhaustive list, crises of various temporalities that seemed to have been shaping British higher education in recent times include: marketization of student education (Raaper, 2020); COVID-19 and the impacts of lockdowns (Watermeyer et al., 2021); a crisis in student (Cooper & Jones, 2022) and staff (Loveday, 2018) mental health and well-being; gendered and sexualized inequalities and abuse (Bull & Page, 2021); precarity of staff employment (Mason & Megoran, 2021), long-term reductions in pay and pensions and a workload crisis causing a bout of industrial actions (UCU, 2022); governmental and management’s focuses on metrics (Raaper, 2020); colonial and racial inequalities in academia (Singh et al., 2023); structural heteronormativity (Batten et al., 2020), ableism (Brown & Leigh, 2018) and classism (Morrison, 2020); Brexit (Luthra, 2021); and the climate crisis (Latter & Capstick, 2021).

These issues are linked by two features. First, as crises, they are defined by moments of rupture,¹ during which time they may be framed as emergencies (Anderson, 2016), grabbing attention and effort but following which they dissolve into the background. These crises are thus polyrhythmic; they evolve through a robust linear process of a destructive impact on individuals and institutions, yet they palpably manifest in cycles as emergencies whose intensity, even if not existence, appears to be delineated in time. Crucially, this manifestation happens as an embodied experience of a crisis event, itself shaped by the juxtaposition of individual positions in relation to structural factors of privilege and marginality (Borsa, 1990). For instance, the colonial legacy of the UK higher education is a constant quiet force that underpins inequalities and fosters marginalisation, yet it only tends to be recognised as a ‘crisis’ through events that highlight these injustices as a matter of emergency, such as the Rhodes must fall or Why is my curriculum white? campaigns (Peters, 2018). Second, this proliferation of emergencies with background crises results in a situation of ordinary or constant crisis, in which governance becomes a form of never-ending crisis response, diverting attention from other capacities. The result of both is a slow draining of energy, akin to what Berlant (2007) have labelled a ‘slow death’. As Berlant explains, ‘[s]low death prospers not in traumatic events […] but in temporal environments whose qualities and whose contours in time and space are often identified with the presentness of ordinariness itself’ (Berlant, 2007, p. 759). Rather than on shocking events, slow death of academia feeds on the individuals’ everyday experience of embodied drainage of energy from the tacit impacts of ongoing crises. Berlant indeed notes the importance of ‘environments’ that actuate slow death in contrast to ‘events’ that are fundamental to some other forms of destruction. The assertion that a ‘slow death’ of academic capacity is ongoing can be seen replicated across the personal testimonies to contemporary demands on academic workload: see the proliferation of blog posts, opinion pieces or Twitter threads from academics of all career stages which depict their alienation, departure from academic employment (Gewin, 2022; Kis et al., 2022). The slow scholarship movement has emerged as a critical response (Hartman & Darab, 2012), arguing that a form of speedy academic practice, associated with the broader intensification of neoliberal life (Crary, 2013), has come to dominate in the academy. Much academic work and especially student support becomes entirely absorbed by an ‘ongoingness, getting by, and living on’ (Berlant, 2007, p. 759). Importantly, as well as squeezing some of the more enjoyable or creative aspects of academic life – creative pedagogy, creative meetings with colleagues, speculative research projects – this slow death hinders responses to structural inequalities, which themselves are exacerbated by the constant crisis. This is first because, as Berlant argues, amid constant crises inequalities are dispersed and fragmented out to individualised experiences rather than pooled in particular places and moments (see Ahmed, 2021 for more on this); and second, because big and difficult to respond to challenges are kept on the horizon by the more immediate issues of the emergency-crisis cycle.

This dominant eurhythmia of emergency-crisis sits alongside the arrhythmia of three intersecting rhythms that are inscribed into embodied experience of UK higher education and define its everyday life. First, there are the rhythms of student experience, an important aspect of which is the process of learning new temporalities. The shift from a more rigid organisation of pre-university education to independent learning at university is among the major challenges in transition to higher education (Ayala & Manzano, 2018; van der Meer et al., 2010), and one of its key features is the requirement for students to reframe their organisation of time. One factor that bridges the academic and social domains of university transition (Tate & Hopkins, 2019) is students’ ability to see their allocation of time for independent study activities, leisure and other personal commitments not as a sacrifice of one for the other, but rather recognising that a balanced everyday rhythm conducive of personal wellbeing will underpin academic achievements and vice versa (Kyndt et al., 2014). In contrast with the highly structured time organisation and amplified pressures of the final stages of secondary education (Ferreira, 2018), students have the liberty to explore and learn different rhythms of attending classes, studying independently and pursuing new freedoms and responsibilities (Holton, 2015), managing these alongside a three- or four-year degree programme with its own internal timings. Students learn to manage intersecting cyclical rhythms (e.g. weekly class attendance and organisation of house chores) along with linear elements (the build-up towards the exam period or the entrance to the labour market at the end of studies). However, these rhythms are relatively short-term. Students are ‘perpetually in motion, in transition’ (Guyotte et al., 2021), with relatively short degree programmes – particularly in the UK – meaning that students’ focus is on tasks scheduled over days or weeks initially, only progressively stretching to months for projects like the final dissertation or job-search. Such temporalities may be particularly problematic for students who face extra challenges because of wealth, identity or health (Pillow, 2015). For most students that we teach, all of this is contained within three academic years, such that just as any sort of routine is taking hold, it starts to get swept away by the imminent ending of the rhythms at hand.

This is in contrast with the second, institutional rhythm of academia, which consists of a mixture of both the long and the short term. For research elements of university operations in the UK, this can amount to several years, such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) evaluation of research that takes place approximately every seven years, or with large-scale investments into research centres and programmes. Yet the bulk of income, which is obtained through teaching, comes from a much more cyclical recurring rhythm. In 2011, teaching grants in England and Wales were abolished and university financing turned to a student-fee-based model. With tuition fees as the proportion of university income in England increased from 48.9% in 2014/2015 (when a cap on student numbers was removed and universities gained the freedom to determine the number of admitted students) to 55.7% in 2020/21 (HESA, 2022), the annual cycle of student admission and retention has become arguably the chief rhythm for planning and governance processes, shorter in its frame than key research domains. Long-term plans can be disrupted by one poor annual recruitment cycle. Yet some elements of institutional life are inevitably longer. Estates and infrastructure planning will deal with decades, and the lifespan of departments or colleges may be measured in centuries. Within our university, strategic plans for academic units look around 5 years into the future: longer than the typical undergraduate cycle, finding some balance between the mid- to long-term planning of research and the short-term cyclical nature of teaching income.

The third rhythm of practices is that of academic staff. These are defined by the competing demands in various roles and the positioning of staff between the contrasting rhythms of the short-framed student experience and longer-term planning and operational processes of universities. Those in roles involving both teaching and research are expected to organise their work rhythms between strategic long-term thinking and planning of research, the much more rigidly organised rhythms of academic teaching with timetables, marking deadlines and board meetings, and pastoral support with its unpredictability, urgency, non-cyclical nature and lack of regular schedule. In our institution, student support roles are typically allocated as three-year positions. Such timing again seems a compromise between the REF-cycle, the desire to have consistency in the role, and the emotionally draining elements of the jobs. Competing demands have been linked to the matter of missing time, of academics working in excess of the hours stipulated in their contracts (UCU, 2022), and to what Gill (2014) called ‘the intensification and extensification of [academic] work’, i.e. working ‘harder and longer’ (p. 21), yet with uneven impacts on individuals depending on their seniority, job security or commitments outside work (Gill & Donaghue, 2016). These jobs thus inevitably carry the need for prioritisation and avoidance, and ‘saying no’ is recognised as an important element of self-care. An additional rhythm, exposing deeply entrenched inequalities in academia, is the long-term temporality of waiting for an established employment position, which for many delays personal goals outside of academia (Hughes, 2021).

These rhythms are themselves composed of interactions of the cyclical and the linear, and produce together the slow death of academia, manifested through embodied experience of individuals as well as through the decline of institutions. This slow death is the pathology of these arrhythmia, contrasting with the eurhythmia of emergency-crisis, which appears very successful at replicating itself. The recognition of temporal conflicts is not entirely fresh. Crang argued that ‘conflicts between … temporal perspectives have been growing’ (2007, p. 511), though the details of his argument focused on the amount and flexibility of time rather than its rhythm. Going further back to 1996, Currie argued that academics ‘are working longer hours in more fragmented roles’ (p. 104), in research which identified the growing demands of marketized academia as the underlying problem. It is not (just) therefore that academics and students are short on time as a quantity, but there is also the dissonance between rhythms of competing demands and needs – the long-term forward thinking of a major research programme clashes with the 3 am email from a distressed student – which themselves are fragmented. This is where delivering pastoral care for students becomes particularly dissonant, as the long rhythms of research responsibilities and stern organisation of teaching leave little capacity for tasks that are immediate and urgently responsive, such as student calls for help on personal matters. Engaged in student support, as academics we jumped into servicing the rhythms of student life, which inevitably means neglecting some of the other rhythms identified.

Covid-19 and the temporality of university rhythms

In March 2020, all of the arrhythmia and asynchronicities stopped. For a brief time, the various crises were displaced by a new emergency, Covid-19. This quickly became a huge rupture, a point of rhythmic difference unlike most. It had started for us as a slow rumble: first impacting travel for international students returning to campus in January 2020; then leading to the cancellation of a student fieldtrip to Singapore planned for April; until an early March meeting, which had been scheduled to discuss a wider set of international student fieldtrips planned for Easter 2020, turned on very short notice into a whole-department crisis meeting, the last time we would gather together in-person for over 18 months.

Covid-19’s dominance seems to be related to the broad alignment of how different groups within higher education responded to it. Anderson argues that emergency response will be driven by ‘a moral and logistical imperative’ (2016, p. 15), to turn the emergency into a series of logistical problems to be solved, with the solving of these problems being framed in terms of a moral responsibility. In March 2020, the moral and logistical imperatives of responding to emergency became briefly aligned for the three arrythmia of university life. There was a shared mutual moral imperative to support (inter)national measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 while also supporting student learning and education, and a shared logistical imperative to manage learning and education so that it could continue up to the end of the academic year in June 2020. The temporal framing was particularly important: the lockdown began within 3 months of the end of the academic year and with the bulk of teaching completed in most universities, making the temporal-logistical imperative clear.

This resulted in fast and aligned actions. Within a few weeks, academics had learned how to record, edit and upload online lectures, students had adapted to access complex software via remote servers, or to write essays on kitchen tables at home, and universities had brought in new policies to distribute technology to students who lacked it, and to adapt grading processes to avoid enhancing inequities of student experience of the pandemic (Chan, 2022). Decisions were made much more rapidly than usual, and normal bureaucratic processes were simplified. This is not to romanticize what was a very challenging time, and we emphasise that these challenges fell unevenly often according to other structural inequalities. Nonetheless, the rhythms of higher education briefly became more (not fully) harmonious, particularly in contrast to the conflicting rhythms of previous months and years. This was driven by an agreed-upon approach to the moralities and logistics of response.

Such stability could not last. The first major rupture in rhythms came as the new academic year in the UK approached, and the institutional reliance on the annual financial rhythm of undergraduate students became dominant. At many universities, promises of ‘normal’ or ‘hybrid’ teaching were made to both new and returning undergraduates, encouraging them to return to halls of residence or student homes to study (Cooper & Jones, 2022). These halls are a major source of income for most British universities, and the loss of students from halls would significantly impact university finances. Across the country, the result was a huge spike in COVID-19 cases in cities with large student populations immediately after those populations returned in September 2020, with the examples of Newcastle, Manchester and Exeter contrasting with the numbers for the UK in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Covid-19 cases 7 day average sep-nov 2020 (source: UK government coronavirus dashboard).

In university cities, rapid spikes in cases occurred in the second half of September 2020 to a peak in early October 2020, in contrast to the national trend in which cases rose more gradually and peaked in November 2020 (Leeman et al., 2022). At this point, universities had fundamentally decoupled from the moral imperative of public health, driven instead by the annual financial rhythm of their own finances. The result was more than just increased caseloads, and the associated deaths. Across the UK, stories emerged of students locked into halls of residence, as localized lockdowns prevented cross-household socialization. In Manchester, large security fences were erected around university halls, and these were eventually torn down by students (Cooper & Jones, 2022). At the two universities in Newcastle, the local public health authority intervened to prevent the universities from in-person teaching. For their part, academics and students became more split over priorities during this period, with a variety of views developing over the right approach to in-person teaching, student presence on campus, and these evolved with the rhythms of the COVID-19 emergency. The annual rhythm of budgeting and the notion of an emergency situation permeated other facets of the university organisation; our institution, for instance, terminated any expenditure other than ‘absolutely business critical’, implemented a pay freeze, and halted the staff promotion process, with those promotions already approved to be ‘in status’ only without the usual remuneration. Other crises started to reassert themselves, such as higher education’s systematic racial and gendered inequalities, and the many issues which had been driving the industrial action of 2019. COVID-19 stopped having the moral and logistical imperatives of an emergency that required response, and instead began to be absorbed into the system of ongoing crises. Where once radical changes were made to respond to the imperative of the emergency, COVID-19 became subject to the same processes of crisis management as others: health and safety evaluations that declared in-person teaching ‘safe’, lateral flow tests that provided securitization, etc. The arrhythmia of university took over, resulting in severe struggles of staff and students alike to meet the competing demands of their respective roles (Knight et al., 2021), struggles unevenly exacerbated along the lines of inequalities endemic to higher education. UK universities evaded a sudden demise from COVID-19 only to slip back to slow dying.

Covid-19 functions as an illustrative example of a rupture with normal rhythmic practices, and how we have returned to them. However, it was not a sui generis event. Rather, it was a more extreme case of the processes that have happened when other crises switch to emergency mode. The three rhythms of university life started to reassert themselves, as did the long-term crises which were sidelined during the response to an emergency. While short-term emergencies can overtake the slow crises that structurally underpin higher education, the situation of permanent overlapping crises reasserted itself. Furthermore, COVID-19 illustrates that the good intentions and actions of the emergency period are often undermined by the processes which absorb it into the state of constant crisis. This shows how far we are from imagining modes of governing higher education which are outside of the logic of response. This is perhaps unsurprising: we should not expect our own/higher education’s logics of governance to fall outside of those which pervade society more broadly. However, the key is that the repeated cycle of emergencies intersecting with ongoing crises in higher education becomes a major barrier to attempts towards strategic, long-term proactive thinking.

Figure 2 is an attempt to diagram this rhythmic relationship between emergencies and crises. We see in the diagram a mixture of the cyclical and linear: each crisis follows its own linear pattern, but there is a cyclical nature to the production of emergencies. Whether through the temporary ‘emergencification’ of an existing ongoing crisis or, as we illustrated with Covid-19, the sudden arrival and eventual absorption of a new emergency, resources and effort are being constantly dragged from one crisis to another. In returning to think more concretely about student support roles, any attempt to respond to one of the many ongoing crises impacting students, is weakened by the latest emergency to capture attention. COVID-19 was a uniquely strong emergency, as it was able to align the three rhythms we identify as constituting academic life, but even it was unable to resist both the reassertion of ongoing crises as they called for attention, or the imperative for the emergency to be absorbed into a world of crises. Writing in 2023 and after stepping away from the frontline day-to-day student support roles, we hear from colleagues who took over how the crises we were struggling to address in 2019–2022, such as mental health, class inequalities or on-campus sexual violence, keep reasserting themselves while new emergencies jump to the front, such as about the cost of living and students’ struggles to afford food and heat.

Figure 2. Rhythm of emergency and crisis.

Conclusions: for eurythmic universities

How to respond to a slow, arrhythmic death? The concept of slow scholarship (Hartman & Darab, 2012; Martell, 2014; Mountz et al., 2015) is arguably the most influential recent intervention in the debates about politics of time in academia. Slow scholarship is not necessarily about the speed of work but rather about ‘control over volume and pace of work’ (Martell, 2014; emphasis added). The goal is to change time rather than carve more of it (Mountz et al., 2015), and both to generate a ground and establish legitimacy for activities that are marginalised under the fast-paced politics of neoliberal academia. We are supportive of many of the aims of slow scholarship, but we hesitate at its own attempt to impose a particular temporality on all elements of academic life. For one, as Meyerhoff and Noterman (2019) highlight, a politics of time cannot be separated from other matters of inequality in academia. The possibility to ‘slow down’ and reclaim time to do things differently without a more radical transformation of universities will present itself only to more privileged academic workers who inevitably rely on others picking up the slack of urgent and yet less valued activities such as marking or pastoral support (Gill & Donaghue, 2016). The uneven divisions of labour and the uneven recognition of different activities indicate why the rhythms of crisis management and the arrythmia of academia are felt unevenly by those on the margins and at the core of academic institutions – although we talk about a slow death of university, not every individual experiences this drainage of energy. In addition, our experience with student support work suggests that speed is sometimes necessary to engage with certain rhythms. In its purest forms slow scholarship seems both a problematic attempt to impose one rhythm of university life on others and a danger of reinforcing professional inequalities in higher education, and while we therefore want to draw and learn from its insights, we do not feel it offers the full response needed to the arrhythmia we discuss here.

We showed how arrhythmic practices of university life intersect and mutually contradict each other. These arrhythmia shape and are shaped by a rhythm of crisis-emergency-crisis, in which the logics of emergency response and crisis management prevent resolution of problems while simultaneously reinforcing the slow death of academia. This analysis opens up answers as to how rhythms of higher education in the UK push towards slow death, rather than responding to the structural issues which underly this situation. The ultimate uchronic organisation of university would inevitably tackle the matters of work amount and pace as well as the structural and embodied inequalities, and it would provide more resources, more and better-paid staff, better facilities and funding for teaching and student support, and more equitable forms of labour management. However, we believe that even within the current institutional, financial and political framework, there is a potential to generate alternative rhythms that would be more facilitative of different facets of academic work, staff and student wellbeing alike, and the student experience. These rhythms would reject a pure focus on the linear but would be infused with linear and cyclical elements. In ending this paper with a series of prompts for intervention in current rhythms, we are not attempting to undermine or contradict arguments which might seek bigger or more revolutionary change to the governance and funding of higher education – we suggest changes that are compatible with such bigger visions and yet plausible at this time.

With that in mind, we suggest interventions which might reshape the three rhythms of higher education already discussed:

First, for students, we should look at rhythms which remove the intensity of the three-year degree. Greater use of credit spreading, part-time study, and less emphasis on completion in three years (as is practised in several countries in continental Europe such as Germany) allows students to integrate studies with paid work and personal commitments, and it is more compatible with health problems and family life. This would bring benefits to students in various marginalized groups (Pillow, 2015). This change would intersect with the financial implications of UK student fees and maintenance loans and would not be straightforward in that respect, but it is often the institutions’ unwillingness to divert from the established fast-paced linear rhythm of a degree that presents the biggest obstacle.

Second, for staff, there is a need to reduce the spread of responsibilities across rhythms. The interface between teaching and research is important, and we are not proposing a decoupling of the two. Rather, we suggest that a more rhythmically manageable career path may be for early career academics to have a balanced research and teaching training, before having more specialisation through middle and later careers. The need to constantly negotiate the two may be one of the key temporal double-binds of higher education (Alhadeff-Jones, 2017) which needs unpicking. This might include longer secondments into administration, teaching heavy or research-heavy roles, allowing academics to return to more balanced roles at later points, and giving sufficient credit to different forms of contributions rather than celebrating only certain ones. It might include returns, repetitions, seen not as backwards steps but as re-engagements that would counteract the gradual drifting away from the ‘front-line’ of teaching and research that many academics on linear pathways experience. Such pathways would avoid the problem of academics having to simultaneously manage day-to-day emergencies alongside strategic or long-term crisis resolution. Rather than persisting with the idea that academics constantly respond to multiple rhythms, we propose that simplifying the rhythmic complexity of academic practice might have multiple benefits. Such a pattern would also generate the space for slow scholarship in research, not necessarily by creating more time for it but by stimulating an eurhytmic organisation of time where a different pace of work can be adopted thanks to the more singular focus. In making such a suggestion, we note the importance of any change being accompanied by a rejection of the structural biases that have undervalued pastoral work, academic administration, and collegiality, in what has been called the ‘Paperwinner’s Model’ of academia (Rajan, 2022). Further, we note that such structural biases have often had gendered, classed and racialized elements to them, such that women, working class and minority ethnic academics have been more likely to be pressured into taking what is lesser-valued work (Kinahan et al., 2020). Any change to academic rhythms would be damaging if it did not include a usurping of this traditional valuing. Nevertheless, a considered simplification of academic rhythms could allow for improvements across student support and academic well-being.

Finally, institutional rhythms are perhaps the hardest to imagine shifting. A first step would be to recognise the polyrhythmia of its members. Here we look to incorporate many of the suggestions of the slow scholarship movement but reject their own dismissal of speed as only enabling ‘students to view snapshots rather than the fuller picture, let alone engage in reflection and or praxis’ (Hartman & Darab, 2012, p. 56). Rather, we agree that “the rhythmic nuances of educational praxis requires a gamut of expressions that goes beyond ‘“fast” and “slow”’ (Alhadeff-Jones, 2017, p. 210). In other words, at times, speed is necessary in response to emergencies. At the extreme end, COVID-19 vaccinations could not have been produced through slow scholarship; from our experience responding promptly to students’ distress was often essential in order to provide appropriate support. There are also benefits to intensive learning and research (as geographers, we value the intensity of fieldtrip education, for example, and many academics benefit from intensive writing retreats).

We therefore advocate a university structure which facilitates both speed and slowness, intensity and reflection, in communication with one another, again recognising that such a shift would require a reorientation of current prejudices for and against certain academic career trajectories. Such a university would not be free of crisis or emergency, but there would be a resistance to the logistical imperative that Anderson (2016) identifies. Rather than a matter to be ‘solved’ through the correct logistics, emergencies would be recognised for what they are – urgent flare-ups of either new or longstanding crises. While the immediate problem may require a quick response, the university would look to provide longer and more structural solutions to the underlying crises. Alternatively, there may be a recognition of which crises are in the university’s capacity to resolve and which are not. Universities could resolve many of the issues around pay, workload and casualisation with sufficient will; whereas no number of university-sponsored well-being apps are going to fix a student mental health crisis underpinned by a lack of government funding for healthcare, squeezed career opportunities, social media pressures, and a high-stress schooling system. An over-stretched institution responding to all crises is unlikely to be able to respond to any, whereas a more targeted prioritization of those problems in which it can have an impact may be more effective, and it would create additional capacity to deal with other crises through an effective, eurhythmic organisation.

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Notes on contributors

Robert Shaw

Robert Shaw is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Newcastle University, UK, and is the author of the book The Nocturnal City. He is interested in geographies of the night and darkness, with a focus on how the night reveals some of the interactions between the psychological, the social and the environmental.

Matej Blazek

Matej Blazek is Reader in Human Geography at Newcastle University, UK. His scholarship focus includes geographies of children and young people, race and migration in post-socialist Europe, emotional geographies, and mental health and politics of emotion in academia.

Notes

1. Readers familiar with Lefebvre’s work will know that he also theorised the importance of such moments in earlier volumes of his Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre, 2002). It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the relationship between moments and rhythms as concepts, though Elden (2004, p. 173) argues that rhythmanalysis was a deeper development of this earlier theorisation which helps conceptualize the emergence of moments through the interplay of repetition and difference.