News From Amphipolis 4/8/26

How is it August already? It’s not that I got nothing done last month, but too much time was absorbed by online meetings, online chats, reading lengthy and often mendacious documents from management and just trying to process what’s happening at the university – above all, the sense that there really is no plan or strategy beyond “smaller and cheaper” when it comes to humanities and social sciences. It seems all too plausible that the lack of attention paid to the possible REF impact of the job cuts is down to the fact that consultancy Nous comes from Australia where they don’t have a REF – but what a dereliction of duty that would be by the senior management team. Anyway, here’s Hector, who has recently dedicated himself to taking my mind off things by going wandering well beyond his ‘safe’ zone (as set up on his GPS tracker – which he managed to lose the other day), including going into a garden a hundred yards down the road to intimidate their chickens. As I write this, our phones…