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Beestonia Our resident uni ‘insider’, Prof J, gives us the skinny on the good, the bad and the grant proposal of academic life at the thin end of the summer term...
The fish ladder
Our monthly salute to the Best of Beestonians.
F
ish use ladders. I didn’t know that. I have a ladder that goes into my bedroom and when Lord Beestonia bestowed this strange new knowledge upon me, my thoughts immediately turned to that.
The end of an academic year is a time of mixed emotions. For most students there is time to celebrate and be relieved that they’ve got through another year, or for some a whole degree and they can move on from university with a whole life to look forward to.
A ladder, like that one what I use? Don’t be stupid, stupid. Of course not. None the less, the idea was so intriguing I had to go and see it for myself. I took a trip to Beeston Weir, where a search told me such a thing could be found. Well, it’s not exactly a ladder per se. It looked to me more like a kind of tiny white water rafting course. I began to imagine the fish in tight skin wear, each competing to beat the other’s time. Who knows? Maybe they do. But what the heck is it for? Forgive me if you already know. I admit I’m not that well educated on fishy matters. I can teach you how to roll a cigarette. I can write an essay on fairytales and feminism (in short most fairytales are pretty sexist). I can even do a pretty impressive chicken dance. But I know cod all about fish…
Making sure each student leaves with the result they deserve is something all academics I know take a great deal of time and effort over, and we collectively spend many a man/woman hour checking spreadsheets and tables to make sure there are no mistakes with the final marks. No one likes to give a student a bad mark, not for one piece of work or for an entire degree, but at the same time we can only mark the piece of work that is put in front of us and some aren’t as good as others.
So anyway, hurrying on from that terrible pun, basically a fish ladder helps fish to migrate. It’s a series of steps (hence the name) that a fish can jump up to bypass a man-made obstruction, in this case the Beeston Weir. Isn’t that brilliant? I really can’t get over the concept that centuries ago (the earliest fish ladders date back to around the 17th Century) some men built perhaps a weir or a dam or something, then sat around afterwards one of them suddenly jumped up.
All marks are checked against a set of marking criteria, by our colleagues, and by external examiners from outside the university. This ensures, as much as can be ensured, that quality is assured and guaranteed from one year to the next as well as between students. It’s important to do, especially in a world when we are increasingly looking at how our students are employed.
“Dick! We’ve only bloody forgotten about the fish!” “What the heck are you carping on about?” “We’ve blocked this river. The fish can’t migrate!”
Employment prospects are something potential students are looking at more and more as they choose their university and their course, and who can blame them given the costs they now have to pay to attend. But this means university has now become somewhere that we have to provide transferable skills training as well as passing on subject specific knowledge. But this also means we have to ensure that students are leaving with a degree they deserve and that the quality of a given degree class is known by employers, hence the time taken to get the result right. Now the marks are all signed off and the students have gone and meetings have taken place to tie up the odds and sods a quite sort of calm descends over the university, largely as colleagues disappear for a holiday or two, or at least spend a substantial amount of time ‘working from home’. Some of us have one last crisis to manage as grant deadlines loom on 2 July (I should write about that sometime) or have Beestonian columns to write. But then two or three months of clear diaries before we start to think about next year’s teaching. Academic papers and books will be written, I’ll be heading out to look at a desert or two, and the odd conference will be attended. I trust you enjoy your summer, I’ve got a grant proposal to get back to… Prof J Campus may look pretty quiet and tranquil, but some of us are still busy.
To which the answer wasn’t a shrug and a “So what?” but a resounding “Gadzooks! We must right this terrible wrong… How about with a ladder?” The fish ladder must surely be a testament to mankind’s innate desire to be in harmony with nature. Then again, perhaps it’s a form of colonial guilt. We’ve taken, industrialised and polluted their waters, killed and devoured countless numbers of their kin, but hey, here’s a ladder. Buddies? I doubt you’ll ever wonder why fish eyes look so blank again. They hate us. They’d throw the fish ladder in our stupid faces if they could. And we’d deserve it. CF
Beeston fish ladder by Alan Murray Rust (www.geolocation.ws)
S
ummer is a funny (peculiar rather than haha) time at the University of Beestonia. The students have now all gone and the staff are giving a collective sigh of relief that can probably be heard all the way to Chilwell, or at least in the beer garden of The Vic.