I had taken over the role of School EDI lead, and thus the person responsible for Athena Swan accreditation, from my colleague Katrien. She had been mainly responsible for the previous application. And some of the work had been done when she was on parental leave, and Martin had been at the helm, but as soon as she was back he handed the whole responsibility back to her.
With me writing the new application, in a way my job was to assess whether she had done a good job. The main parts of the application are an evaluation of to what extent the promises made 2018 had been fulfilled. And then, of course, the new action plan.
The old action plan didn't have any promises that reached beyond 2019 (except those on continuous processes), so it should have been clear quite a while ago how much of it we had actually done. But that was not documented anywhere. Hence that it had become my job to find out how many of these 70 promises we had kept several years ago. Quite laborious! A lot of responsibilities for these promises were laid at the feet of the Head of School and the Director of Research, and people like that, but we had new ones since, and I don't think these were even aware of what had been promised in (by now) their name. So it was a bit of a searching game.
This had made me a bit annoyed. Why was this my job? That part of the applications should have been ready a long time ago. And then I could just focus on the new action plan.
Katrien hadn’t been sitting still over the years, of course. She had achieved all sorts of important things; progress with respect to promotion of part-time workers, decolonisation of the curriculum, etc. But that was largely outside the 70 promises. And an application has a rather tight word limit! Once you have explained how many of your promises you have kept and why, and what your new promises are and why, you have run out of space. You can't really go on about what additional stuff you have done. At least not in the main part of the application.
That lead to some friction. I was grumpy that I was doing a lot of work with difficulty, that she could have done with ease four years ago. And she was grumpy that I wasn't giving her credit for all the work she had done. Not in the application; not in meetings. I suppose we both had a point. She totally did great work; it was just that I had to focus on the requirements of the application. And I may have overdone that a bit. The situation also arose that she started editing her own work into the draft application. But she had misinterpreted the word limit, and I had to take it all out again. As I write this, I don't think she is aware of it yet. Once she does, this might not help the situation. But I don't set these word limits!
I also came up with a trick; the one place where I figured quite a lot of her text actually would come into its own was in the description of the School. That part was written by John, but I sent him the bits of text Katrien had written. Could he find a home for them? And he did! So I did managed to save a fair amount of it.
It's Easter break now and I won't see her for a while. We'll see what the damage is when I do again. I think we will be okay. We have had friction before, and we always solve it again. I’m sure we will this time as well. We’re just flawed people both striving for better conditions in the School! Let’s focus on that.
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