I remarked that I was writing an article about friendship in academic life and the recipient of the remark replied, “That’ll be a short piece, then”. One should perhaps recall the old MP explaining to the young one that the people on the other side of the House were the opposition while those on your side were the enemy. Or Steve Archibald’s remark that team spirit in professional football is something that exists for ten minutes when you’ve just won a major trophy, the normal relationship between team members being dominated by rivalry and petty jealousy about selection and contracts. Academic life is surely full of aspiration and ambition like politics and football, isn’t it? That is certainly how it is portrayed in fiction, particularly crime fiction. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?
And that isn’t how it was for me. During the core of my career between half a dozen and a dozen of my colleagues were close friends. Our friendship was instituted through something called “the lunch club” which had us sitting in the departmental common room with our “brown bags” and discussing everything under the sun. To give a sense of this institution one of its members (still a very good friend) has reported in print that he used to eat his lunch early so that he could get his arguments in while I had my mouth full. (Yes, specifically me: I may be shy and retiring in my heart, but apparently that’s not the impression given.) Others have admitted that when supposedly working at home they would sometimes “nip into the department to pick up their post” in order not to miss the lunch club. We also extended to the “Friday night drink” which is self-explanatory though it is probably worth remarking that this was possible because we all lived fairly close to each other and I’m guessing that would rarely be true of the members of a contemporary academic department.
We have remained friends insofar as dispersal, old age, illness and the other thing allow. We occasionally erupt into email discussions and very occasionally we quarrel. One old friend announced on social media that he was not going to speak to me again after I had said that as an Englishman I favoured Scottish independence. He is a Scot and a Unionist and I admit it was a bit of a wind-up, my real view being a much more nuanced, “It depends what you mean” sort of thing. Anyway, cutting me out of his life lasted twenty minutes before he was on the ‘phone and we were friends again.
I have no idea how common this sort of solidarity between colleagues is or was, but the historical context is important. From 1976 to 1989 was a period of stability – or stagnation – and a total of one “new blood” appointment was made in our department in all those years. The founding professor of the department had recruited on the grounds of what he called “assimilability” which turned out to be the opposite of what is now called diversity. We had the residual, British, version of tenure and promotion was as rare as recruitment. I, for one, did not think of myself as having a career, but as having a particularly nice job which allowed me to do lots of other things. Colleagues were like family in certain respects, perhaps most obviously in that you were stuck with them and warm relationships were much more fun than cold ones. We knew that some of us were better at teaching and some far more likely to produce published work of significance than others, but that was no kind of issue at all, just the way things are in human communities.
I even had another sort of family in the form of a remarkable – and remarkably successful – staff cricket club which contained a core of players of the same age who played together for decades. This had more of a senior common room atmosphere insofar as players came from all departments and faculties. What little I know about physics was learned in cricket club changing rooms. These friendships have also been enduring: I note that my most frequent email correspondent now is an emeritus language professor who used to stump batsmen off my bowling.
After the calm, the storm. From the end of the eighties we faced a tidal wave of change to our way of life: massive expansion, internationalisation, research assessment, teaching assessment and above all what came to be known as “precarity”. At the last departmental meeting I attended eleven new members were introduced, all but one on temporary contracts. On reflection I realise that in the first twenty years of my career friends were acquired mainly from university life, but in the last fifteen it was almost entirely from the town we live in. I have, however, acquired a really good friend in the peripatetic, retired, “emeritus” and “visiting” life purely through academic work. We have eaten and drunk and holidayed together and written a book together. It does help, though, that we share something more than royalties and citations – we both support Burnley Football Club.
Lincoln Allison February 2023
(An edited version of this piece was published in Times Higher Education in April 2023 alongside two other reflections on academic friendships. Rather disturbingly – to my mind – they both suggested that it was pretty difficult for academic staff to be friendly to one another.)