10 October 2026
A lesson in pronunciation
Many years ago, a professor corrected my pronunciation of the word précis. Apparently, I had been saying it incorrectly. The professor suggested something resembling ‘press-eye’, when the usual British pronunciation is closer to ‘pray-see’ (Cambridge University Press, n.d.).
I said nothing.
I wasn't particularly embarrassed, nor was I especially concerned about the word itself. What interested me was the confidence with which the correction had been delivered. There was something in the exchange that suggested the professor's position carried an expectation of being right. Challenging that expectation seemed unlikely to achieve very much, so I kept quiet.
The encounter probably lasted a few seconds. I doubt the professor gave it another thought. Yet I still remember it, which perhaps says something about me as well.
I had formed an impression of the individual's character, although I recognise that one brief exchange is hardly sufficient evidence upon which to judge another human being. Perhaps it was simply an unfortunate moment. We all have them. Nevertheless, after many years working in universities, I have encountered enough variations of this behaviour to wonder whether there is something rather more interesting going on.
I have spent much of my adult life in higher education, first as an academic and subsequently supporting psychology teaching and research in a professional services role. Along the way, I have worked with some exceptionally generous and thoughtful people. I have also encountered individuals who appear to regard institutional seniority as a form of intellectual infallibility.
It is an unfortunate confusion, particularly in a university.
We encourage students to challenge assumptions, evaluate evidence and question received wisdom. Indeed, these are among the qualities we claim distinguish higher education from other forms of learning. Yet I have sometimes wondered how enthusiastically those principles are welcomed when directed towards the people exercising authority.
There is something faintly absurd about teaching critical thinking in the morning and treating it as insubordination in the afternoon.
The authority to be wrong
I have no particular objection to hierarchy. Universities are complicated organisations, and leadership requires decisions that will inevitably disappoint somebody. Nor do I imagine that every disagreement with management represents evidence of institutional dysfunction. Sometimes a decision is simply unpopular, and sometimes those making it have information that others do not.
What concerns me is the tendency to confuse occupying a position of authority with possessing intellectual authority.
The distinction ought to be familiar to academics. Knowledge is provisional, expertise has boundaries, and even the most accomplished scholar is capable of making a spectacular mistake. One might reasonably expect that spending a career surrounded by unanswered questions would encourage a degree of humility.
Occasionally, the opposite appears to happen.
I suspect part of the explanation lies in professional identity. For someone whose sense of worth has become closely associated with being regarded as knowledgeable, important or influential, admitting ignorance may carry a psychological cost beyond the immediate embarrassment. A challenge to their judgement can feel like a challenge to the person they believe themselves to be.
This is an interpretation rather than a diagnosis of anyone I have encountered. Nevertheless, it raises questions about the relationship between professional identity and institutional reward.
In previous essays, I have written about what I call the transactionists: individuals who became particularly adept at navigating the managerial structures of contemporary higher education. Their success may be measured through income generation, institutional influence, strategic initiatives, committee positions or the various indicators by which universities now assess themselves.
Some of these people are undoubtedly excellent at what they do. The problem arises when institutional success is taken as evidence of wider intellectual or moral authority.
The ability to secure a promotion does not necessarily demonstrate an ability to recognise one's limitations. Nor does the ability to manage an institution establish that one understands everything of value within it.
Yet those distinctions can become rather blurred, particularly when the people responsible for deciding what counts as success are themselves beneficiaries of the system.
If you don't like it, leave
There is another expression I have encountered over the years, usually offered when somebody has become tired of hearing criticism.
'If you don't like it, leave.'
It has the advantage of brevity. Unfortunately, it also manages to avoid whatever prompted the criticism.
The implication is that remaining within an institution requires accepting its present arrangements. If those arrangements trouble you, departure becomes the appropriate response.
I have always found this a peculiar argument.
People can be dissatisfied with an institution precisely because they care about it. Someone who has devoted twenty or thirty years to teaching, research or supporting students may have developed an attachment to the place and, more importantly, to the principles it supposedly represents.
Criticism can arise from disappointment rather than hostility.
Albert Camus provides a useful way of thinking about this. In The Rebel, he examines rebellion as a response to a perceived violation of something valuable. The rebel's refusal is not necessarily an expression of personal resentment. It may reflect a conviction that a boundary has been crossed and that something worth preserving is being threatened (Camus, 1956).
Camus was also concerned with the limits of rebellion. Resistance does not confer moral superiority, and the person challenging authority must remain capable of recognising their own mistakes. Otherwise, rebellion risks reproducing the very dogmatism it opposes.
I find that qualification particularly important. I have been wrong about many things during my career, and I expect to be wrong about considerably more before it ends.
But the possibility of being wrong is hardly a reason to remain silent.
If someone tells me to leave an institution because I question its direction, I am inclined to ask why the responsibility for departure should fall upon the person raising the concern.
Perhaps I still believe in something the institution once claimed to value.
Perhaps that is why I am disappointed.
The luxury of being able to leave
There is, however, something else about the phrase that deserves attention.
Leaving is not an equally available option for everyone.
It is relatively easy to advise somebody to resign when you are financially secure, professionally established or sufficiently well connected to find employment elsewhere. It is rather less straightforward for someone approaching retirement, supporting a family, paying a mortgage or working in a highly specialised field where alternative opportunities are limited.
For some, leaving might involve little more than an inconvenience. For others, it could mean substantial financial insecurity, the loss of professional identity or the abandonment of a career built over decades.
The apparent simplicity of 'If you don't like it, leave' conceals these differences.
I have become increasingly conscious of this as I approach the latter part of my own working life. After spending so many years within one profession, leaving is not merely a question of finding another job. There is also the matter of what happens to the person who has spent much of their adult life understanding themselves through their work.
I have written elsewhere about the psychological consequences of academic identity becoming inseparable from professional status. I suspect that the changes now affecting higher education, including financial pressures and the increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence, will make these questions particularly uncomfortable for some people.
But the consequences of leaving are not confined to those who have accumulated impressive titles or institutional standing.
A technician who has spent twenty years developing specialist knowledge may discover that their expertise is difficult to translate into another employment sector. A lecturer with caring responsibilities may have little geographical flexibility. A researcher whose work depends upon particular facilities or professional relationships may face considerable obstacles to starting again.
These circumstances affect how freely people can express disagreement.
When someone in authority suggests that a dissatisfied employee should simply leave, they may be overlooking the practical circumstances that make departure difficult. The remark can also carry an implicit reminder of who possesses greater freedom within the relationship.
It is worth asking whether criticism offered under such conditions can ever be entirely separated from the consequences of offering it.
What silence costs
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety is relevant here. In her influential study of work teams, Edmondson (1999) examined the relationship between a shared sense of interpersonal safety and learning behaviour. Her ndings suggested that teams in which people felt able to take interpersonal risks were more likely to engage in behaviours associated with learning.
The original research was conducted in a manufacturing setting, not a university. Nevertheless, the underlying questions are relevant to academic organisations. Do people feel able to acknowledge mistakes? Can they question established practices? Are concerns treated as contributions to organisational learning or as evidence of an undesirable attitude?
An institution does not need to prohibit disagreement formally to discourage it.
A dismissive response during a meeting, an uncomfortable exchange with a senior colleague or an implication that someone is being difficult may be sufficient. Over time, people learn which subjects are worth raising and which are best avoided.
I certainly have.
Sometimes I have remained silent because the issue seemed trivial. Sometimes because I doubted that speaking would achieve anything. And sometimes because I was conscious that the person I might challenge occupied a position that could affect my working life.
I suspect many people working in universities will recognise that calculation.
There is nothing particularly heroic about challenging authority, and silence is not always evidence of cowardice. People have responsibilities beyond their employment, and preserving one's livelihood is a perfectly reasonable consideration.
Nevertheless, I wonder what happens when an institution accumulates years of unspoken disagreement.
A meeting may conclude with apparent consensus, although several people privately believe that the decision is mistaken. A policy may proceed without substantial challenge, not because it is particularly well conceived, but because those who recognise its weaknesses have learnt that their observations are unlikely to be welcomed.
Eventually, the absence of criticism can be mistaken for evidence of good leadership.
I find that possibility rather troubling in organisations whose intellectual purpose depends upon the identification and correction of error.
What remains worth defending?
As I approach retirement, whether by choice or circumstances, I find myself reflecting on what has actually mattered during my working life.
It isn't the committee memberships, the institutional language or the endless attempts to demonstrate that something valuable has occurred by finding a convenient way of measuring it.
I remember students.
I remember the student who suddenly understood something they had been struggling with, the conversations that wandered away from the intended topic and became more interesting as a result, and the satisfaction of helping someone develop confidence in their own abilities.
I remember colleagues who were generous with their knowledge, who could admit when they didn't know something and who treated others with respect regardless of their position within the institution.
These are the experiences that have made the work worthwhile.
They are also remarkably difficult to capture in the performance indicators through which universities increasingly describe themselves.
I have no objection to accountability. Publicly funded institutions must demonstrate that resources are being used responsibly. But I do wonder whether we have become so accustomed to measuring what is convenient that we sometimes neglect what is important.
The quality of an educational encounter does not necessarily correspond to the seniority of the person providing it. A technician helping a student understand an unfamiliar piece of equipment may make a lasting contribution to that student's education. A lecturer who notices that somebody is struggling and spends an additional twenty minutes with them may achieve something that no dashboard adequately records.
Such moments rarely attract institutional recognition.
Yet they are among the reasons I still care about universities.
Sisyphus and the annual performance review
Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus offers another way of considering the relationship between effort, meaning and circumstances that may appear beyond our control (Camus, 1955).
Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down again. Camus uses the myth to explore the absurd condition of human existence and the possibility of finding meaning without the promise of an ultimate resolution.
I occasionally think of Sisyphus when contemplating contemporary university administration.
One imagines that he would now be required to complete an annual performance review explaining how the boulder had contributed to institutional strategic priorities. There would probably be a working group examining opportunities for improving the efficiency of uphill delivery.
Someone might eventually suggest replacing him with artificial intelligence.
The joke, of course, conceals a more serious question about where meaning resides when the structures surrounding our work seem increasingly detached from the reasons we entered the profession.
For me, the answer has become clearer with age. I care considerably less about institutional recognition than I once might have done. What matters is whether I can still contribute something useful to the people around me.
Perhaps that is a form of rebellion, although Camus might reasonably object to such a comfortable interpretation of his work.
I am not seeking to overthrow anything. I would simply prefer to work within institutions that remain capable of questioning themselves.
The professor and the précis
I still occasionally think about that professor and the incorrectly pronounced précis.
It would be easy to conclude that I was right and the professor was wrong, and leave the matter there. But that would make the story rather less interesting than it is.
The important part was my decision to remain silent.
I had made a judgement that challenging someone in a position of authority was unlikely to be worthwhile. Whether that judgement was fair to the individual concerned is another matter. But it was a judgement informed by my experience of working within hierarchical institutions.
I wonder how many similar calculations are made every day by people whose knowledge, experience or observations might otherwise improve the organisations employing them.
I also wonder how many people occupying positions of authority are unaware that those around them have stopped offering honest disagreement.
Perhaps the most dangerous consequence of institutional power is not that it allows people to make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. It is that power can gradually insulate people from discovering when they have made them.
I have spent enough years in universities to know that they contain some extraordinary people. I have also spent enough years in them to recognise their capacity for absurdity, self-importance and occasionally breathtaking contradictions.
I still believe they are worth defending.
Which brings me back to that familiar instruction.
'If you don't like it, leave.'
Perhaps I will, eventually. Most of us do, one way or another.
But I would rather leave knowing that I had cared enough to question things than spend my remaining years pretending that everything was fine.
And if I have occasionally been wrong, I hope somebody will have the decency to tell me.
Preferably without first consulting their job title.
References
Cambridge University Press. (n.d.). Précis. In Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/precis
Camus, A. (1955). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays (J. O'Brien, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1942)
Camus, A. (1956). The rebel: An essay on man in revolt (A. Bower, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1951)
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999