The Spinning Wheel Has a Line Manager

Lecture theatre B4 was built to make everybody look at one thing. Twelve raked rows descend like a quarry towards a lectern, a whiteboard nobody has cleaned since the refurbishment, and a projection screen the size of a garage door, and every seat in the room is angled so that the eye slides down the slope and lands on that screen. Sixty students sit scattered across two hundred seats in the pattern of people avoiding one another at a bus stop. Each of them has a laptop open, and each laptop lid glows with the sticker of a brand or a cause, and behind each lid a face is lit from below in the blue of an aquarium. The garage door shows a grey circle. Every laptop shows the same grey circle. Sixty-one circles turn in perfect unison in a room engineered for attention, and the attention has nowhere to go, so it pools in the aisle beside the fire exit with the smell of instant noodles.

The lecturer stands at the lectern in the bottom of the quarry, the only person in the room who is looking up. Beneath the circle a line of grey text says the service is temporarily unavailable and thanks everyone for their patience, and sixty thumbs press refresh at slightly different moments, so that the room fills with a soft irregular clicking, like a hillside of crickets. In the third row a student photographs the big screen for the group chat. In the ninth row two students have a lecture from another course open in a second tab, and that platform is down as well. The lecture she came to give is on the rhetoric of failure. She had a slide, on the platform, about the difference between an apology and an accounting. She closes the laptop, walks to the whiteboard, and shakes a marker.

The marker

In the mid-1990s a graduate student fresh from a newsroom could be handed a class in media writing and a room with a whiteboard, and that was the whole of the infrastructure. Some of the markers were dry. You shook one, you drew a line that faded to nothing halfway across the board, you dropped the dead one in the tray and picked up the next, and the class lost eleven seconds. Students wrote on paper. The teacher stood at the front and talked to people who talked back, and the only interface between a person and a person was the air in the room. Nothing needed a login. Nothing was unavailable. When the room was cold you closed the window, and when a thing did not work you could see why with your own eyes, and the repair was in your own hand.

Nobody sensible wants the nineties back, with the overhead projectors and the photocopy queue and the reading list held together by a bulldog clip. What deserves attention is the length of the chain that now runs between a lecturer and a working classroom, and the number of salaried people standing along it.

The platform

By 2026 the platform has become the one door through which teaching is permitted to pass. Lectures go up on it. Readings go up on it. Assignments come down through it and grades go back up through it, attendance is measured by whether a student's account touched it on a given day, and the university's assurance to the government that teaching happened at all rests on a log file the platform writes to itself at night. It was purchased after a procurement exercise, licensed from a company in another hemisphere, and launched at a town hall with a video in which young people laughed at a tablet. The slide said it would transform the learning experience. The word transform appeared four times, and the same circle now turns in Palmerston North and in Leeds, in Adelaide and in Vancouver, on screens bought from the same three vendors.

The platform has moods. The quiz tool that worked on Monday declines to open on Wednesday. The gradebook loses a column. The video that uploaded at midnight is, by morning, a black rectangle with a play button that plays nothing. The discussion board decides that a first-year student is not enrolled in the course she has attended for six weeks, and the student, being nineteen and polite, assumes the fault is hers. Every one of these events is called a glitch. Glitch is a beautiful word for the purpose, because it describes a happening with no author. Weather has glitches. Nobody is responsible for weather.

The Form

When the platform fails, a lecturer cannot ring anyone. That is the first thing to understand and the last thing a new colleague believes. There is no number. There was a number once, and it went to a man called Trevor who knew which room the server was in, and Trevor took the voluntary redundancy in the second restructure, and the number now rings through to a recorded voice that recommends the portal. The portal has a form. The form is the only acknowledged route by which a problem may travel from the person who has it to a person who might address it, and locating the form is itself a small field of scholarship.

It lives behind a link in an all-staff email sent in February, subject line Important Update, Please Read Thoroughly, which the lecturer filed in a folder she can no longer find. It is absent from the intranet home page, which shows a photograph of the Vice-Chancellor planting a tree. It is absent from the platform, which is down. She reaches it, in the end, through a colleague who has kept the link on a sticky note since 2023. The form asks for the course code, the semester, the browser version, the operating system, the time of the incident to the minute, a description of the expected behaviour, a description of the observed behaviour, and an impact rating on a scale of one to five, with guidance that five is reserved for outages affecting the whole institution and that a lecturer whose whole institution at this moment is sixty students and a grey circle should probably select two.

She selects two. A ticket number arrives, warm and cheerful, thanking her for helping the university improve its services. It promises that a member of the team will be in touch within five working days, which is a way of saying that the lecture already happened, Friday's will happen, and the platform will have healed itself or not by the time anyone reads what she wrote.

The manager

Somewhere above the form sits a manager. The manager's title has the word learning in it, or the word digital, or, in the larger universities, both. The manager did not build the platform, cannot log in to its back end, has never met anyone at the company that sells it, and reads the same status page the lecturer reads. What the manager can do, with great fluency, is say that they are working with IT. This sentence is the manager's entire toolkit. It can be said in an email, in a Teams message, in a corridor, and in a meeting called to discuss why it keeps needing to be said. It commits to nothing, names no one, and passes the fault sideways to a department that is, at that moment, working with the vendor, which is working with its engineers in a distant time zone, who are working through a ticket queue in which the university's ticket sits somewhere in the middle, rated two.

The lecturer and the manager exchange emails. The chain grows. Each reply quotes the reply before it, so that by the eighth message the email is longer than the lecture it concerns and the original complaint has sunk to the bottom like a coin in a well. On the ninth day, with a lecture to give and a room full of people who have paid to be in it, she does what every teacher in the building eventually does. She puts the slides on a shared drive, emails the students a link, and tells them to bring pens.

The heresy

A different manager, alerted by a dashboard that shows her module page has recorded no activity for a fortnight, writes to remind her that all teaching materials must be delivered through the platform, per policy, for reasons of consistency, accessibility, quality assurance and the student experience. The email is friendly. It contains a link to the policy. The policy contains a link to the form.

She replies that the platform has not worked for nine days. The manager replies that they are working with IT, and that in the meantime she should log the issue through the proper channel. She replies that she has, and gives the ticket number. The manager thanks her for raising it and asks her, going forward, to please continue using the platform. The word going appears next to the word forward. They travel together, like a pair of shoes.

Nobody in this exchange is a fool and nobody in it is cruel. Every person is following the process. The process has been designed so that responsibility cannot settle anywhere, in the way a roof is pitched so that water cannot pool. The vendor blames the network, the network blames the configuration, the configuration blames the vendor's last update, the manager blames none of them and works with all of them, and the lecturer, the only person in the chain who has stood in front of the students, is the only one who has broken a rule.

The ecosystem

Here is the arithmetic. In 1995 the infrastructure of a class was a marker, a board and a person, and when the marker died it cost eleven seconds. In 2026 the same class runs through a platform, and around the platform a population has grown. There is the learning technologist, the learning designer, the digital learning manager, the associate director of digital learning, the project officer for the platform migration, the change lead for the platform migration, the business analyst who mapped the processes the migration would change, the communications adviser who wrote the emails announcing it, the quality assurance officer who audits the module pages, and the committee, meeting monthly, that reviews the audit. None of them can make the grey circle stop turning. Every one of them holds a role that exists because it turns.

The old joke asks how many managers it takes to fix a platform. The honest answer is that the joke has the wrong verb. Managers manage the not-fixing, and the not-fixing is a growth industry. Each failure generates a form, each form generates a process, each process generates a role to own it, each role generates a report, and the report goes to a committee whose existence is the strongest evidence anyone will ever produce that the problem is being taken seriously. A platform that simply worked would be a catastrophe for this arrangement. Half the organisation chart would fall off.

Accountability, in this ecology, is the one species that has never been sighted. It is invited to every meeting. It appears on every slide, usually inside a circle beside the word transparency. It has a policy and a values statement and a line in the annual plan. What it lacks is a person, because the whole architecture has been arranged so that the question of who is responsible returns, like the module page, a message that the service is temporarily unavailable.

The tray

At the end of the semester the lecturer will complete an evaluation of the platform, on the platform, which is working that week. She will rate the experience. She will be asked what could be improved, and she will write in the box that a human being with a phone number would be a start. The survey will be aggregated. The aggregate will appear in a report as a satisfaction score of 3.4 out of 5, up slightly on the previous year, and the report will recommend further investment in change management to support staff through the transition to the platform's next version. The next version has a new colour scheme and a different form.

In the lecture theatre the marker tray holds three pens. Two are dry. She has learned to shake them before the students arrive, and to keep a working one in her bag, because in the whole apparatus that has been built around her teaching, the pen in her bag is the only part that still answers to her.