Opinion: I've got an opinion
Here's why you should listen to it
It’s election time here in the UK, and so opinions are even more widely available than normal. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that reading too many of other people’s thoughts can slowly drive you mad, to the point where you become irritated even by those with which you broadly agree.
As will soon become obvious, I have no desire to contribute to the noise, or indeed to get into anything too serious here.
But I have written a book about a semi-serious subject, one that could at least be said to touch on the Extremely Big Topic of The State of Britain Today, and there’s a thread about who is willing to consider themselves an expert, or suitably qualified to comment, on such things that I subsequently became tempted to pick at.
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At the risk of getting too political, I’m not one of those people who think that the succession of Conservative governments since 2010 have done a great job and left the country in a better state than they found it.
Until relatively recently, I worked in one of the many sectors left battered and bruised by their decisions, and the accelerating sense of panic and chaos engulfing my workplace ultimately contributed to my decision to leave it.
On the basis that I didn’t think there was anything really out there that offered much of an insider’s view, that I had some insight to share, and – frankly – a few things to get off my chest, I wrote a book about it all.
The aggressive, but dishonest, pitch for this book would have been something like: ‘I worked in Higher Education for 20 years. Here’s how to fix it.’
You can almost imagine the same headline above an opinion column in The Guardian: a bold, confident statement which grabs the attention, accompanied by a picture of the writer making a very serious face.
Except, obviously, I don’t know how to fix it. Lots of people who are much cleverer than me and sufficiently engaged and empowered to do so have probably tried, or are trying, to find an answer to some of the trickiest dilemmas.
For example: tuition fees are currently too high to be sustainable for students and too low to be sustainable for universities. Politically, that’s too sticky a problem for either of the two main parties to really want to engage with.
Confronting the big questions is also beyond the wit of most university workers, particularly those in non-academic and support roles, who likely just find themselves bogged down by the everyday nonsense that is their working life. By the end, my feelings on those big questions were: this is a mess, who cares, I’m tired, I’ve got to get out of here.
But while I didn’t want to overstep the boundaries of what I knew, I also felt that I could offer more than the semi-regular opinion columns that I occasionally read and was riled up by, which either regurgitated previous surface-level observations and/or kept the stereotype-o-meter for academics firmly pointed at ‘gentle intellectuals frustrated by wrong-headed bureaucracy’ rather than considering other possibilities, or what kind of people and behaviour the system of academia encourages and rewards.1
We increasingly operate in an opinions economy, in which most people are in some form doing their own version of a regular column via social media. There remains, however, something uniquely odd about the traditional opinion columnist, the one who holds court on a variety of subjects on a regular basis, with supreme confidence that they are qualified to do so, and – I hesitate to labour the point – next to a picture of their extremely serious-looking face.
The notion of it is quite mad, really, particularly to someone who even lacks the boldness to position himself as having specialist knowledge of the arena in which he had spent his entire working life.
Some 25 years ago, I signed up with the student press at university, based on nothing more than a vague notion that I wanted to write and the idea that I should ‘put myself out there’ (as shy and timid people were repeatedly urged to do back then) by getting involved in some kind of club or society.
I enjoyed my time on the paper, but it also introduced me to the kinds of characters that I’d never encountered before, like 18-year-olds who were already declaring their intention to pursue a career in PR. The notion that someone already knew who they were, or what they wanted to be, or that they wanted to be someone or something, I found strangely disconcerting.
Which meant, of course, that our humble student press also had its own opinion columnists. True, they might have had to be a postgraduate (for men, some semblance of facial hair helped) and pose for a picture that implied knowledge and gravitas, but still, there they were: people in their early 20s who already thought that their opinions were very important and should be listened to.
Most of the time, those opinions were to do with student union politics or debating society nonsense that only interested the same select group of people already involved in such things, which admittedly might have been appropriate training for a future career reporting on Westminster tittle-tattle for the benefit of people already engaged in Westminster tittle-tattle.2
(It might also explain why a disproportionate number of articles about UK higher education still focus on student union politics and debating society nonsense, which are, and always have been, of little relevance to most students, particularly if they also happen to be grinding their way through an expensive and substandard degree course).
Against my better judgement, a couple of months ago I broke and wrote a letter in response to an opinion column in The Guardian. It was a moment of weakness, but the piece in question featured as evidence a) what an academic that the writer knew thought was going on in the sector and b) a comment made by the son of one of the writer’s friends, who was about to start his course after returning from a gap year.
Rightly or wrongly, I thought that was a little bit on the weak side — maybe not for a conversation at a dinner party or barbecue, but certainly for publication in a national newspaper.
(What was it that old Mitchell and Webb sketch3 said? “You may not know anything about the issue, but I bet you reckon something…”)
Anyway, they didn’t publish my letter, and I was relieved that they chose not to do so.4 I allowed myself to be drawn into the opinions economy, and have now compounded my hitherto unpunished error by publishing this.
And it leaves me with very little room for manoeuvre. Unless, of course, this piece is itself an opinion column, of another sort — arguably the very worst sort — which purports to be about something serious and important but is actually an advert for someone’s book.
Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks by Ben Richards is available now.
Yes, these were also mainly published in The Guardian, the only newspaper of record in this country for people of a broadly similar political persuasion. In this respect it is rather like the Labour Party, in that the full spectrum of views contained within might not necessarily be to your taste, but it nevertheless remains the only viable option.
Thankfully, no-one I knew or worked with back then ever became a famous journalist, opinion-haver or politician; I imagine it would be unbearable to see someone you knew as a teenage wally later ascending to a position of influence, or even one of the great offices of state, and having an active and ongoing influence on your life.
Ironically, David Mitchell is one of those comedians who also gets to commit — to borrow his own phrase — the full majesty of his ad-hoc reckon to the same newspaper on a regular basis, although at least comedians entrusted with regular writing gigs do at least cloak their views in a semi-sheepish, I-probably-am-not-qualified-to-talk-about-this form of self-deprecation.
The ultimate opinion columnist is, of course, Adrian Chiles, whose brief contributions covering topics that definitely don’t matter to anyone act as a masterful parody of the entire genre.
Looking back, I didn’t actually disagree with the main thrust of the article, either, which only serves to highlight the futility of allowing oneself to become so easily riled.