Car Park Education

You can tell a lot about the state of the contemporary university by looking at something peripheral: the parking. You might think there is only so much that can be said about parking. You would be wrong. Parking at my university is an issue of surprising intricacy and strong passions. Presumably this was not always the case. There may have been a time, not so long ago, when you could simply drive to work, park and work. But those days are gone.

Now you have to pay for the privilege – 0.28 per cent of your salary, plus other charges – and there is a complex set of options: season tickets (termly or annual) or a pay-as-you-go system (which you still have to register for). Pay-as-you-go is more like pay-as-you-arrive (not when you leave, like at hospitals), which can be tricky because (as with hospitals) you don’t always know how long you’re going to be there.

There are no payment machines in the car parks any more, so you have to download the ParkSmart app to your phone – or, if you don’t have a smartphone, you have to go straight to your office and pay on your computer. If you don’t do this – if, for example, something more urgent comes up to delay you on your way to your office – then you get a fine. Or for a first offence, something arguably worse: a passive-aggressive note saying ‘Oops!’ and reminding you that ‘At Essex, we’re considerate parkers.’

The university’s standard response to any parking-related gripes from staff is that we should really all be coming in by bicycle, if not for the sake of the planet then for our own well-being – both issues dear to our managers’ hearts. That doesn’t work if you live in Ipswich, though, and nor does public transport. So car it has to be. Last week was ‘Welcome Week’ – officially the first week of term, but without any teaching yet, only an endless series of Welcome lunches, lectures and walks – and the physical presence of most teaching staff was required, even if few of us had any idea what we were supposed to be doing. I got ahead of the parking game by registering online the day before. I left the house around 9.15 a.m. and got to campus around ten.

I soon felt like a character in the world’s shittest computer game. The first car park you come to has many empty spaces but is marked ‘Students Only’. You can’t park there: the computer knows from your number plate that you are not a student, and you will be fined. You carry on to the Valley car park, which is for both students and staff (there is no car park for staff only). It is full, but you do not know this yet. You drive up and down the rows looking for a space. You used to be able to turn from the end of one row into the next, but the gaps have been turned into more parking spaces, so now you have to make a several-point turn and go back the way you came. Sometimes you see someone entering the row you are just leaving and try to convey to them that it’s full by means of a ‘thumbs down’ or similar gesture, but they usually just gaze fixedly ahead with a lost expression and don’t notice.

Watching the cars creeping round the car park in search of spaces, you wouldn’t guess that the university is a proud supporter of the ‘Clean Air Colchester CAReless Pollution campaign to prevent unnecessary idling and promote better environmental practices on campus’.

It is not unusual to find, after ten minutes or so of searching, that all the spaces in Valley are filled (management’s usual answer to this is that you should get there before nine if you want a space, as if there would somehow be fewer cars if we all arrived earlier). So you leave Valley and go on to the multi-storey. If that’s full, you have to go to the overspill on Capon Road, a dirt field about about ten minutes’ walk downhill, next to yet another car park with plenty of free spaces reserved for ‘Business Users Only’. By the time you have walked back up the hill with your bags to the main campus you are probably late and also in need of a shower.

The multi-storey has five levels (the top one, usually mostly empty, is reserved for senior management) as well as a few spaces outside. Some of these are empty, but they are marked ‘Sports Centre Staff Only’ (there are no spaces for lecturers only, or for librarians or administrators). If you are lucky, you find a space on the second or third level. The process can take up to twenty minutes, depending on the day (on ‘visit days’ – aimed at attracting prospective students – or graduations, you can pretty much forget it).

It was not a visit day or an open day or a graduation, and I found a space in the multi-storey after a mere fifteen minutes and walked down to the central squares. The place was weirdly dead, considering it was Welcome Week. But I found my colleague in our shared office. We don’t have individual offices any more, following a ‘redistribution of the space envelope’ sometime last year. I don’t mind sharing, but it does make things more complicated for both of us. She has five PhD students and plans to supervise them in the office on Mondays and Tuesdays, which means that I can’t go in there before my lectures to drop stuff off or pick stuff up or quietly scream into my fist.

Fortunately, my colleague knew where we were meant to be. We walked together to the Business School for an ‘Inspirational Welcome speech’ from the new head of the new School for Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies (one more merger and we will be the School of Everything). This was followed by an address by someone from the Students’ Union, who told us the SU is run ‘by students, for students’ (actually, many of its roles are filled by paid employees, appointed by management). She told us the SU is there to make sure students get the ‘academic experience’ (and the grades) they deserve. Thanks to the SU, the library is now open 24 hours a day (she didn’t mention that this involved tearing up the contracts of library staff).

From the university’s point of view, the SU’s role is to provide a unimpeachable rationale – in terms of ‘student demand’ – for the changes that management wants to make anyway. (Bursaries or lower rents are inconceivable, but squeezing staff to do more and more, faster and faster? Every time.) To this end, feedback – more and more, faster and faster – is solicited from students via course reps. The norm used to be to have one rep for every subject. But more reps means more feedback. The more the better, the SU woman says, showing a QR code on the screen and asking students to scan it with their phones in order to sign up for ‘training’.

After the Inspiration was over, another colleague and I went to a basement where we were due to meet around fifty students who have been assigned to one or other of us as personal tutees. There were two students there. We didn’t know where the others were, but most of them are international students and my colleague thought they might not have arrived in the country yet. They could have been having visa problems. Or they could just not be coming. In total, there are two hundred students signed up, not for philosophy but for an interdisciplinary course which pieces a degree together out of modules from other subjects. It’s part of the effort to solve the ‘recruitment problem’ – i.e. that not enough 18-year-olds want to study philosophy.

International students pay much higher fees, so many universities have ‘agents’ in India and South-East Asia whose job it is to sell their courses to those markets. But it seems that people there don’t want to study philosophy either. They want to study business. An interdisciplinary course can offer modules in business studies. So now we have an extra two hundred students – or rather, an as yet unknown number between two and two hundred.

It occurred to me that the clues to all this – to the nature and priorities of the modern university – were there already in the car park. In the hierarchy of worth, senior management and business ‘partners’ are at the top, both of the institution and the multi-storey. Then there are prospective students, who are valued highly (if instrumentally) for the fee income they represent. Then actual students (less important because they are already in the bag, but important to retain and also to milk for rent). Then, at the bottom, there are academic and other staff, who represent a costly inconvenience (though one that cannot be eliminated entirely).

One of the stranger things about the atmosphere of the university today is that its supposed central functions are increasingly peripheral, its peripheral ones increasingly central. Sports centres and pudding bars and entertainment expand as offices and teaching rooms contract. The actual teaching and learning, which throughout Welcome Week we tell students is the heart of the university and their main concern (if you have to say it, it probably isn’t true), feel increasingly like a sideshow, something that happens in the gaps and against the odds. At some point it also occurred to me that I’d forgotten to pay for my parking.