Notes from Ivory Flats: Reflections on the Changing Landscape of Academic Life
Robert Foley is an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist. He is Emeritus Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge and the British Academy. Professor Foley has published numerous papers and books on human evolution, ecology, and behaviour, and is a recognised authority in his field.
How do professors spend their time?
What happened to Charles Darwin’s risk assessment for the voyage on the HMS Beagle?
Why do academics grumble so much?
Can biology help stop the flood of emails?
Do lecturers spend their day folding napkins?
Are you an institutional burrower or surfer?
University life for professors and lecturers has changed beyond recognition in the last few decades. In these witty and perceptive essays Robert Foley explores the landscape of modern academic life and shows how these changes have moved academics from their Ivory Towers to the more impoverished Ivory Flats.
The hallowed halls of academia, once likened to ivory towers, have in recent years come to resemble something rather more mundane - perhaps a block of flats. Professor Robert Foley’s latest work, Notes from Ivory Flats, offers a timely and witty dissection of modern academic life. The book launch, hosted by Cam Rivers Publishing, took place on Friday, 18th October 2024, at King’s College, University of Cambridge.
The attendees ranged from students to literary enthusiasts to senior academics across all fields within the university itself. The discussion following Professor Foley’s reading was lively from the many rungs of academic society, likened by several people to a ‘crisis meeting’ to consider the decline of life at this most prestigious of institutes. The atmosphere was not one of grumbling, as Foley jokes in Ivory Flats, but rather one of passionate motivation to build towards diagnosing the source of this content and remedying it. Gillian Tett, the Provost of King’s College, among many other guests, noted how desperately this book has been needed to offer the pause to reflect on how much has changed in university life over the course of Foley’s stellar career. Not only this, but he is able to identify the specific concerns, such as the rise of bureaucracy and the increasing pressure on staff, and to offer solutions with perceptive and humorous concision.
What is most evident is the opportunity this book offers to reflect on the troubled state of academic life and the very future of education, revealing the deep love and worry for our University of Cambridge.