Dear @Jeremy_Hunt , who just said on @Channel4News that “nobody could have predicted the current situation at Universities”, I will happily grant you access to my inbox so you can read the many email exchanges where my academic colleagues and I, you guessed it, predicted this.
Sadly we were ignored. We were ignored because your government does not view higher education as a public good, refused to provide financial support to Universities and thus forced them to lie to students that we could provide a “normal” student experience...
... to get them to enrol in programmes and sign accommodation contracts to prevent them from going under.
The plans we made to control this were based on the assumption that students, once they get here after six months of lockdown from all parts of the UK and the world, would behave like no student ever behaved in the history of forever.
A sector where half the people (staff and students) goes down every year with Fresher’s Flu and norovirus had to pretend that it could protect everyone from the deadliest and seemingly most infectious virus the world has encountered in several generations.
“Completely unpredictably” that didn’t work out so well, and now it is academics, admin staff and the students concerned, who carry the can while the likes of you cry crocodile tears on public television.
Thanks for that! I just hope people will remember this at the next election!
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.