Monthly Archives: June 2018

ILLUSION OF PERMANENCE

Lancaster’s fascist would-be student society, whose behaviour at a public talk on the politics of fear (subtext 173) and rejection by LUSU as an official society (subtext 176) is well documented, are at it again. This time, they’ve publicly promoted an event, ‘What is the Value of Capitalism?’ It might sound like your bog standard management school student style debate, but any debate seeking to discuss whether capitalism leads to the ‘destruction of natural hierarchies and identities’ is bound to raise eyebrows.

Local activists didn’t disappoint. subtext understands that the group in question (who we continue to refuse to name) attempted to book a table for ten at a Lancaster venue on Tuesday 5th June. Upon being made aware of the sort of company they were about to keep, the venue in question immediately cancelled the event. The advice from the local police to venues who might unwittingly be hosting far-right functions is to cancel any such event, the worry being that the opposition from decent people would lead to a public order offence. Failure to comply could lead to the revocation of licenses. Thankfully for the far-right student group, they had booked multiple venues, and had publicly urged supporters to meet a delegate at Common Garden Street in order to be directed to the correct location.

According to numerous eyewitness accounts, one member of the group in question, who is known to have joined Generation Identity protests, was present on Common Garden Street to welcome attendees. No attendees showed up, but the member in question was flanked by three individuals, who were acting as his ‘private security.’ He was also joined and, indeed, outnumbered by, a number of individuals from various local anti-fascist groups. A vociferous conversation ensued, in which our fascist declared that the ‘SS instilled a sense of national pride’, adding that he didn’t believe in ‘pride’ as a concept. He claimed that he didn’t personally know other members of the group who had behaved in the ways described in subtext’s reports (even though he has publicly shared photographs of himself with them). Indeed, he even suggested that a splinter-group might be in the works, due to differences in ideology. After affirming that he was ‘scared for [his] white skin’, he complained that he had once been assaulted for being white, failing to add ‘supremacist’ and ‘by antifa’ to various junctures in his sentence.

The behaviour of our fascist’s security detail is also worthy of note. One of the trio was unhappy with the idea of being filmed or photographed in any way, and the anti-fascist protesters duly obliged and put away their phones. She then proceeded to unsheathe her own phone and record the vast majority of the altercation. Another ‘guard’, who was variously described as ‘a whirling dervish’, ‘tired and emotional’, and ‘clearly on something’, made many memorable interjections – including to declare himself a national socialist. In general, it was felt that he frequently invaded the personal space of those in attendance, at one point nearly elbowing a pensioner in the face. He was difficult to pin down verbally – in some instances he was admitting to his ‘boss’ that the protesters ‘had a point’, in others, he openly mocked a protestor’s Polish accent. All throughout, he was reportedly laughing like a hyena. Our fascist’s entourage are said to have distanced themselves from his views, insisting that they were simply his mates with his personal safety at heart. Stockholm syndrome?

Our fascist has announced that a ‘report’ and ‘video footage’ are forthcoming. It’ll take an awful lot of editing to present him in a positive light, but we await it with bated breath all the same.

HOUSEKEEPING

The ‘like’ counter on our The FaceBooks profile continues to soar. We occasionally upload original content onto our page, so if you don’t want to miss out, then don’t forget to ‘like’, ‘poke’ and ‘comment’ on us, at facebook.com/lusubtext

We are also still on the lookout for new editors to join our team and help us to maintain the quality and regularity that subtext has enjoyed for many years. We sent out a general call for help last Monday, and we would love to hear from people who want to know more.

BUNGLED, RE-DRAWN AND QUARTERED

As if the building works on campus weren’t enough to deal with, our eagle-eyed subtext narrowboat drivers have spotted another concrete block on the horizon. Readers who keep up with the local news will have spotted much recent to-ing and fro-ing by Lancaster City Council over the area formerly known as ‘The Canal Corridor’ in the centre of Lancaster (perhaps better called ‘The Car Park Corridor’ as most of the Council-owned land in the area consists of the income generating car parks off St. Leonardsgate and to the South of Moor Lane).
 
Over the years there have been many twists and turns in the fate of this area, including the recent discovery that British Land (who own much of the old Mitchells Brewery buildings on the site) are based offshore for tax purposes, the plans for an arts hub to rival the best, and the lack of consultation with less ‘PR friendly’ residents such as the Musicians Co-op and Lancaster and District Homeless Action Service. The more recent complications were brought to light by a City Councillor who defied the Council embargo on sharing information with the public. (See: https://virtual-lancaster.net/news-story/green-party-spills-beans-risky-canal-corridor-leases)
 
This set of revelations also brought to light the huge financial burden that would be placed on the Council if the deal with British Land went through (don’t mention Blobbygate or the Market!), and funnily enough shortly afterwards the Council announced it was pulling out. However, it also highlighted just how much our venerable institution was also involved in plans, and in fact the University is still a ‘key partner’ in the new, sexy ‘Canal Quarter’ plans. (See: http://www.lancaster.gov.uk/news/2018/mar/canal-corridor)
 
Of course, you would expect a higher education institution with a strategic focus on engagement, who is a key partner in a landmark redevelopment of a city centre, to ensure that adequate public engagement might actually take place, in a best-practice style. But, apparently the Council know best, and have decided on 9 ‘principles’ for the development of the Canal Quarter, which are then accompanied in the online questionnaire with a series of rather narrowly focused ‘explanations’ of what each principle means, resulting less in actual involvement of local people, and more in ‘do you like this list we wrote?’: http://www.lancaster.gov.uk/news/2018/may/have-your-say-on-canal-quarter-principles)
 
subtext observes that there is no limit to the number of times you can complete the questionnaire, and encourage all readers to ‘engage’ as much as they can before the survey closes on 13th June.

GARDEN VILLAGES OF TO-MORROW

It’s consultations galore at the moment. The city council is presently carrying out an ‘Issues and Options’ consultation on Bailrigg Garden Village, including several drop-in events during June. For details, go to:

https://www.lancaster.gov.uk/planning/planning-policy/bailrigg-garden-village

The first drop-in session was on Wednesday 6 June in the Bowland Suite at the Lancaster House Hotel, so subtext dropped in to take a look. The room was busy, with over 20 people poring over the maps, diagrams and artists’ impressions.

At the moment, Bailrigg Garden Village is just a shaded area on a map, the ‘Bailrigg Garden Village Broad Area of Growth’. It’s bigger than you might imagine – north to south it goes from Collingham Park to the outskirts of Galgate, while from west to east it includes the canal, the railway line, the A6, campus, the M6, Forrest Hills and a large part of the Conder Valley. Council officers were keen to stress that much of the land in the shaded area will not be developed but instead ‘retained as existing’ or designated as ‘Village Greenspace’ – how much development, and where, is the main subject of the consultation. An initial meeting with local landowners – subtext was told there were between 60 and 80 with ‘land interests’ in the area – took place this week.

Three ‘spatial options’ have been worked out, and all of them situate the majority of Garden Village development in Burrow Heights, to the west of the railway line. The village centre is likely to be close to Burrow Road. None of the options envisage any residential development east of the M6, due to the risk of flooding in the River Conder catchment area, and there’s not much scope for significant university development there either. Despite the name, the existing Bailrigg village looks like surviving largely intact.

The three options are the ‘concentrated village’ (Burrow Heights, basically), the ‘dispersed village’ (Burrow Heights plus most of the land north of Burrow Heights and Bailrigg, not including the land either side of Burrow Beck which would be left as ‘greenspace’) and the ‘concentrated village with possible site extensions’ (covering the same area as the ‘dispersed village’, but only Burrow Heights would be developed in Garden Village style, the rest being earmarked for regular residential development). The first option scores highest for all the policy objectives, except (predictably) meeting our future housing needs.

How many dwellings are we talking about? The likely density is between 30 and 50 dwellings per hectare. According to a table on housing supply shown to subtext, the planners currently forecast Garden Village construction to start in 2021/22, with 205 houses built between then and 2023/24, a further 700 built between 2024/25 and 2028/29, and a further 750 built between 2029/30 and 2033/34.

What about transport links, then? There will hopefully be funding to reconfigure Junction 33 of the M6, although no plans for this were on display at all, except for an ‘illustrative transport sketch’ showing a pair of red arrows pointing to where Hazelrigg Lane currently passes under the M6 at the southern end of campus. Despite many calls for ‘Bailrigg Halt’ railway station, this seems highly unlikely to happen. Instead, we get ‘Bus Rapid Transport’ (more buses, in other words, although probably more bus lanes as well) and a ‘Cycle Superhighway’ between Bailrigg and the city centre.

Our verdict? subtext was cautiously impressed, although if we lived in Burrow Heights we might be a little more sceptical! Readers are encouraged to attend a drop-in session (six more are planned), question the officers, and respond to the consultation. The deadline for responses is 11 July 2018.

SPORT, SPORT, MASCULINE SPORT

Another exciting new opportunity on the Lancaster University jobs site – Lecturer in Sports Science (Biomechanics) with the exciting prospect of a ‘Human Performance Laboratory which will have teaching, research and commercial functions. The Human Performance Laboratory will initially be housed at a separate site which is presently being developed.’ Errm, would this site have any connection with UA92’s Human Performance Lab (they’re informal, like, so it’s lost the ‘oratory’ in their literature)? Hopefully ‘being developed’ will shift from the present continuous to the past tense faster than e.g. the Spine redevelopment, as the first cohort are due to start in September. The curious will note that senior figures in sports science at Lancaster have failed to update their websites to include this connection.

IMPACTED WISDOM

With the REF looming, our leaders’ thoughts turn to imaginative strategies for increasing our research ‘impact’ other than simply adequately funding and allowing researchers the time to do it.. These range from University-wide projects such as IDEAS for Impact, to the neoliberalisation of funding via the sacred concept of competition. Across the faculties, FASS apparently likes impact from ‘mew’ projects (sic), and FHM pronounces a ‘Biannual Impact Audit and Report’. Leading the way is FST, which promises ‘Research Impact Fund-Grants of up to £5000… to support academics in the generation, tracking and evidencing of impact, linked to excellent research… enhance the Faculty’s impact return to (REF)… supports the impact environment… internationally-leading outputs and a rolling set of impact cases’. Well quite. Here’s hoping they don’t roll away pre-REF.

So, in order to assist going forward in the impact environment, what does the researcher have to do? Firstly, hold meetings (obviously) with departmental and faculty impact champions and managers, and fill in an application to be assessed by a committee ‘comprising the Faculty Impact Manager and 3 nominated members of a designated RESEARCH IMPACT FUND SUB-COMMITTEE of the FST RESEARCH IMPACT COMMITTEE’ (our capitals). In this example, a psychologist, an ecologist and a botanist could be judging an astrophysics project. Does anyone REALLY think that this is a sensible idea? Is the free market ethos so firmly embedded that just funding good research without introducing some element of competition is anathema to the facultocracy? Or are they simply accepting that they aren’t wise enough to take the decisions, so delegate to subcommittees in an attempt to show ‘due process’?

Experience has shown that any success involves many follow-up meetings with both impact champions and managers, where beleaguered academics find themselves repeatedly explaining their work and why it has yet to feature in the FTSE index despite faculty assistance. Apart from the risk of funding inappropriate projects – the ones written by the best sales-people and not the best researchers – this policy has another unintended drawback (wasting huge amounts of time in form fillings and meetings is assumed to be regarded as a plus – a mutual job creation scheme for those who prefer talking to doing). Unfortunately, many good researchers find the meeting-heavy process so aversive they might just get on with their research and not engage with the process at all – possibly no bad thing for the march of progress but unlikely to be what our leaders intended.

ACCESS ALL AREAS

We are all mightily fed-up with navigating our way around the building site that is campus. Yes, it is inconvenient and means a few more minutes walking from one part of campus to another. But what does all this chaos mean if your mobility is restricted in any way? Below we reproduce some edited selections from announcements made by Disability Services over the last couple of months.

28th March: To access the North Spine from Alexandra Square […] Approach the North Spine from Alexandra Square keeping to the left. When at the top of the steps in Alexandra Square turn half left and head towards the entrance to the side of the Learning Zone. Proceed through the Learning Zone to the right and follow the route through to the doors opposite. Once through the doors turn right and head through the cut through, bringing you out next to the Pharmacy and Santander. Please note that the accessible route to the North Spine leads through the Faraday Complex. Please be aware that the route through Physics garden may be temporarily restricted in width due to works in the area. Access North of Blackwell’s Bookshop is closed along the Spine. To access the Spine North of Blackwell’s Bookshop use the following route from Physics Garden. Here there are two routes – a route through Bowland Quad and an alternate route through the Faraday Complex (Faraday Route is accessible, Bowland Quad is not accessible unless proceeding to the perimeter road). Faraday Complex Route: Proceed from the North Spine up the ramp towards the Physics Building. Halfway up the ramp, follow the route round to the left towards the Faraday Building. Enter the Faraday Building and turn right. Proceed through the building turning Left and continuing through the corridor to exit the building via the Chemistry main doors. Turn right on exiting the Chemistry Building and follow the wooden fencing 10 – 15 metres before following it left and continuing on the pathway. At the end of the wooden fencing, proceed forwards on the pathway until you reach grass. At this point you may turn left down some stairs if you are able to do so. This will take you in to County South Quad where you may access the Spine via either cut-through. If unable to take the stairs, turn right and follow the pathway, keeping to the left which will lead you to the County South PDR’s (Private Dining Rooms). Proceed through the doors which will lead to the Lounge restaurant in County South Quad. Bowland Quad Route: Proceed from the North Spine, back through either cut-through in to Bowland Quad. Once in the Quad, turn right and follow the pathway route towards the Welcome Centre. Once you have navigated the Quad, cut-through the building by turning right and proceeding to the Welcome Centre at the top of Bowland Avenue. Join the pathway on Bowland Avenue on the North side and follow the road until you reach Great Hall Square. Once you reach Great Hall Square, the route through Great Hall Square to reach Great Hall Court (County Diner etc.) is clear as usual. Please note that access is closed from County South Laundrette to the Bowland North entrance of the North Spine. County South Laundrette is out of use. The nearest launderette to this location is County Main.

11th April: Edwards Roberts Court will be shut from 8am Thursday 12th to 6pm Friday 13th April. Access to the ramp and the Deli will be restricted.

13th April: From Monday 16th April, the cut-through from Bowland North Quad to the North Spine will close for the duration of Summer Term, in addition to existing closures in the area. An alteration to the existing closure along the North Spine, between FASS and Bowland North will prevent pedestrian access from the North Spine in to Bowland North Quad. Access to the Bowland Building remains available from Bowland North Quad but a diversion is necessary to gain access from the Spine. Heading North on the Spine, the steps to the right leading to Chemistry remain open, the diverted route from there is across the bottom of John Creed avenue entering back towards the spine by the back of the Private Dining Rooms (County South). The accessible diversion route will remain; up the ramp in Physics Garden, through the Faraday building into the Chemistry building, across the bottom of John Creed Avenue, joining the same route.

1st May: The main entrance of the Faraday building will be closed, however, the current diverted route will remain accessible through Physics Garden. A pedestrian route along the North Spine is in place via a set of steps up to Chemistry. Please note this is not a wheelchair accessible route. Alternatively, for travel to the Great Hall and County College, an accessible route is available through Bowland Quad.

11th May: During the works, a diverted route will be signposted through the Learning Zone in to Bowland Quad. The cut-through adjacent to Blackwell’s Bookshop is open and leads to the North Spine. Access to the ATM at Santander will not be accessible during these works however; all retail outlets will remain open and accessible via the diverted route. The diverted accessible route to FASS and beyond remains in place through Physics Garden, in to the Faraday Complex and out of the main entrance to the Chemistry building.

Also 11th May: New handrails will be installed in Great Hall Court […] The ramp in this area will need to be altered as part of the works and as a result will be out of use for the duration of the works […] An accessible diversion has been put in place to mitigate the impact of the ramp closure.

25th May: Over the next 4-6 weeks, a series of phased works will be carried out to the South Spine between the Science and Technology building and Engineering building. The first phase of works shall be conducted over the next 10 days to the ramp adjacent to the pond in Engineering Square. Drainage is being installed to the ramp and as such will be closed for the duration of the works. An accessible diversion is in place through the Science and Technology building, although please be aware that the building closes at 9pm each night and reopens at 7:30 a.m. each morning. Fylde Quad to Engineering, Science and Technology, LUMS and beyond: Leaving the South Spine from Furness College Court, turn left in to Fylde Quad (at the top of the ramp at Engineering Square). Continue through Fylde Quad being cautious of planters and pillars within the Quad. When through the quad, turn right heading towards the rear entrance of Science and Technology. (A pathway leads half right through the courtyard). Enter the Science and Technology building keeping to the left and head towards the exit on the opposite side of the foyer. Use the left hand doors to exit, as the right hand doors are closed-off. Upon exiting the Science and Technology building, keep the fence line to your right hand side, follow the fence line left, turning back on yourself to head towards the Engineering building or continue down the Spine to reach the Management School and beyond. The steps alongside the ramp are still open for pedestrian access but are set to close from Monday 4th June. It is planned that at this point the ramp will open in order to maintain the thoroughfare. Please allow extra time to navigate this diversion.

29th May: The Science and Technology building will be kept open 24 hours a day between now and the 6th June to allow for the accessible diversion to be maintained during the closure of the ramp in engineering Square.

30th May: The lift near the entrance to the library will be out of order for up to two weeks. This is the only lift that accesses the upper part of C floor, so affects the Postgraduate study area and ISS training rooms.

LETTERS

There’s been a distinct lack of letters. Let’s hope for a bumper postbag next time.