Tom Cutterham

You can now register for our twentieth anniversary conference! blog.bham.ac.uk/18c/2025/05/08…

I love medieval history. You can make so much progress with ideas like “what if we stopped relying on books that don’t have any citations or footnotes.”

@BruceHistorian My institution: "The scheme is generous compared with similar schemes at other universities. It provides double the statutory requirement, with no cap on weekly pay and up to a maximum of 60 weeks salary depending on age and length of service."

Question for UK academics: how much is/was your institution offering for voluntary severance? One claimed "up to nine months gross basic pay for colleagues with two or more years’ service [was] among the most generous in the sector" but I hear another offered 15 months.

THIS👇🏻 And the resistance to the damage is also a shared collective endeavour - there has never been more urgency to join #UCU (despite - or perhaps because of its problems - since we are the union?) and organise against the decimation of #UKHE #HigherEducation @AcademicDiary

Sometimes something pops off on the primary school parents' WhatsApp group [a petition to oppose a modal filter, keeping traffic off the road the school is on] and my beloved partner has to hold me back from posting, like, "don't you people want a planet left for your children?"

As a reminder, the #JERWinter2024 special issue on "The Revolution at 250" is freely available from @UNC_Press and @ProjectMUSE through April: muse.jhu.edu/article/948033

@ProSocAcademics Hi friend: like most UK universities, the one I work at has never had shared governance in all its 125 years. It has always been governed by a self-selecting "Council" with no democratic accountability to staff or students.

I thought a university was a universitas, with shared governance, so how is this possible at the institution who hires and fires you while you control its (finance/budget) actions as part of your social contract to steward tertiary education? Did the employer trick you? Were you on sabbatical or sick when the votes were cast to spend public money this way? I love how employees call institutional employers their university that is, until its time to renew contracts or decide tenure, or debate academic freedom... Get your heads our of your collective assumptions (bit.ly/InheritedAssum…) and start taking control of higher education, as professionals, not Starbucks employees (bit.ly/WeAllSufferHEIs). You might begin with some research that has never been conducted, but should be by someone like you (bit.ly/AofResPSA).

My institution currently has nine deputy pro-vice-chancellors. They advertised for another new one last week.

@DMLangshaw It's the third rung of senior management at the university -- Vice Chancellor is at the top (Chancellor is a ceremonial role only), pro-vice-chancellor is second (kind of like "vice president of x" in corporate speak), then DPVC.

@tomcutterham Please forgive my ignorance, but can you tell me - what on earth is a deputy pro-vice-chancellor?

If you’re a PhD student working on anything related to “States and Spaces” in HPT broadly conceived, please consider applying to this conference I’m co-organising! 19th-20th June 2025, LSE. Deadline 14th March. CfP linked here: …yofpoliticalthoughtblog.wordpress.com/call-for-paper…

I’m back on here to do the least I can for my country: share and tell the history of Early America as fully and truly as possible because I refuse to let fascists rewrite US history.

@amwilson_opera @BruceHistorian It's completely horrible, destructive, and anti-intellectual, not to mention the harm to individuals--I agree! Unfortunately, the people who make these decisions work by a different set of priorities.

@tomcutterham @BruceHistorian Ouch. How can someone in their 50s jump ship? The challenges of getting a new job at this sort of age are well documented. There are almost no jobs in my field, but cheaper youngsters are far better placed to get any that might come up, and more likely to be mobile.

Also announcing a doubling of teaching workload since there will be no "unfunded" research. So unless you're lucky enough to get external funding, it's teaching-only for you. A real shame that the Framework Agreement was never understood or defended years ago.

@amwilson_opera @BruceHistorian I don't think the management logic is hard to reconstruct here. To teach out the courses slated for closure, keep on the staff who have mainly been doing teaching and who are less likely to be able to jump ship.

@tomcutterham @BruceHistorian Well, of course. But working purely within the parameters of what's open to humanities scholars, why sack the people who won the grants and published prolifically over those who didn't?

@amwilson_opera @BruceHistorian I wonder if the specific type of grant -- fellowships that buy one person out to actually spend time on research, not huge science-style project pots from which the uni can cream off a big cut -- was also a factor here.

@BruceHistorian @tomcutterham Winning large grants (I'd had a BA mid-career and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship) was not a way to save your skin. In fact, I can't help but wonder if it was somehow a factor that counted against me.

Our first event of the new year is a big one! @AnnaFranJam @knott_sarah @naomipullin and @KHarveyHistory on "Feminist Histories: Care, Loneliness and Embodiment," 4-6pm Tuesday 4 Feb (on campus in Birmingham, or on Zoom) birmingham.ac.uk/schools/histor…

New "AI" note for this semester's syllabus.

Francois Furstenberg sees it all clearly: Universities and the Coming Storm prospect.org/education/2025…

It's been a solid year of your government sustaining serial-murder in Gaza. 2024 is the year of infant ghosts.

A new Birmingham City Council scrutiny report has highlighted the enormous financial burden of road harm, with road casualties costing around £205 million in Birmingham EVERY year. The current status quo is not only unacceptable on a human level but also economically ruinous.