‘Confin’d within the verge of their occupations’: sectarianism, class and the contraction of political and intellection horizons in UK’s higher education industry

This chapter reflects on my experience as an academic from a working class background in the north of Ireland, situated at the intersection of capitalism and colonialism, sectarianism and class. It acknowledges the dislocation experienced in transition from a working class habitus to the social surroundings of professional middle class life, but it also considers why such a transition might have been ardently desired in the first place, as a route out of a stifling conservative and sectarian milieu and into one that promised intellectual, political and cultural fulfilment. However, during my thirty years in the university sector, as a lecturer in the field of media and cultural studies, I have witnessed the imposition of free market nostrums that have diminished the space within which working class experience and knowledge might be examined and expanded. A slavish dedication to industry and metrics has shrunk intellectual life on campus, devalued socially purposeful work and striven to confine the learning of working class students within the verge of whatever future occupations they might anticipate. Having regarded working in higher education as a vocation, I explain here my growing political and ethical alienation from universities UK and look to a future free of it.