The Secret Lecturer : what really goes on at university

‘You don’t have to read too many pages of this sizzling personal account of day-to-day life as a university lecturer to appreciate why the author has chosen to remain anonymous...’ – Dennis Sherwood, Author, Missing the Mark Odd students, racist colleagues and inept administrators. Rising business influence and crumbling academic freedom. Absurdly wasteful corporate schemes and broken toilets. Low student welfare, an unwillingness to fail anyone and an A+ explosion in cheating... For a decade, students and academics have been painfully aware of the deteriorating state of UK universities.

But the public has only been able to glean anecdotal accounts about poor value for money, underwhelming lecturers, falling standards and creaking facilities. Now, after a decade of frozen tuition fees, an anonymous academic presents a no-holds-barred account of life on campus. The Secret Lecturer takes you into the seminar room (a repurposed store cupboard, as it happens), the cranky staff meetings, the botched disciplinary meetings and a complicated town vs gown relationship. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to study or work at many British universities in the 2020s, The Secret Lecturer will have you rattling through a book faster than a panicked undergraduate on an essay deadline. Whether you are filling in your UCAS form, moving into a university hall of residence, or just want to know what life is like in a modern college, this book has the low-down.

The Secret Lecturer does for higher education in the UK what The Secret Barrister did for the law courts: reveal the unedifying, sometimes strange truth about a system we think we all know.