Media Review: The Secret Lecturer Anonymous The Secret Lecturer: What Really Goes on at UniversityKingston upon Thames, Surrey, UK: Canbury Press, 2024.
评论匿名讲师日记体著作，揭示英国大学在商业化与官僚化下的真实困境，包括过劳、零工合同、心理健康危机等，适合关注高等教育现状的学者与从业者。
After the popular book The Secret Barrister, I was thrilled when a new book titled The Secret Lecturer crossed my social media timeline.Most of us working in business schools, particularly in the UK context, are only too aware of how flawed, or even broken, our current systems are.In 2021, Peter Fleming showed in his book Dark Academia that this is largely due to commercialisation and bureaucratisation, which he claims are key characteristics of the so-called "neoliberal university.""Lifting the lid on academia", according to The Times (2024), 1 The Secret Lecturer gives an anonymous account of the experiences of a (male) UK-based university lecturer, amplifying our understanding of what it is like to work within neoliberal universities.It is written in the form of diary entries spanning roughly an academic year.The book discusses a number of important challenges and the emotional and material impact they have on the author and those in his direct environment.The list is long, but to give a taste of the breadth, this includes overwork, zero-hours contracts, pressures due to instrumentalisation, the disappearance of humanities disciplines, blackmail and bullying, sexism and racism, global academic inequality, tokenism in promoting diversity and inclusion, funding from the arms and fossil fuel industries, grade inflation, and social media trolls.Although these issues are not new (e.g., Clavijo & Mandalaki, 2024;Colombo, 2023;Korica, 2022;Prothero, 2024), what is novel is the explicit link to the individualisation of responsibility, which is central to neoliberalism (Fleming, 2021).The author rightly argues that business schools increasingly push for "individual responsibility" (p.65) in dealing with the stress these issues cause.This is particularly evident in the mental health crisis among students, for which the author states: "I feel like I am mopping up the mess that is early-2020s Britain-except I'm not a social worker, doctor, psychologist, or politician" (p.79).According to the author, mental distress makes student-lecturer relationships harder to navigate, including issues such as poor attendance, fear of speaking out, and plagiarism.Other mental health challenges the author cites include students being susceptible to fake news, conspiracy theories, and far-right ideologies.Rather than another "neoliberal paradox of controlled freedom" (Ciuk & McCabe, 2025, p. 425), this feels more like being thrown in at the deep end.In the epilogue, the author talks about what he sees as the way forward: "decarbonisation, demilitarisation, and decolonisation."These are all important solutions that most critical management scholars would support, but perhaps more novel is the fourth D: "democracy."How can business schools include more consultation, transparency, and accountability?Strengthening democratic processes in business