Melbourne, It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain an academic career. What does this mean for the future of Australian universities?
It was a cool June morning when the message arrived. Zoom call at 9.30 am with Deans, School Heads and HR to discuss the new organizational chart.
We were three months into the COVID-19 pandemic and had just finished the many challenges of moving all teaching content online. But here I was — one of the few female professors at a regional campus, with a new book At the top of his academic game, boasting a series of excellent teaching evaluations, boundless enthusiasm and co-leading a budding research centre.No place on the charts for me.
Instead I was part of a sobering statistic: one in 27,000 university staff across Australia lost their jobs in the first year of the pandemic that were considered essential as a result of COVID.
Like the rest of the country, this university and the system were reeling from the shock of the pandemic. No doubt, it was a personal shock, but not entirely unexpected as the profession I had entered several years ago was unrecognizable. Was left.
Six months ago when I reviewed my annual performance and carefully noted my many accomplishments, my head of school barely glanced at the document before praising my energy and asking if I had considered retirement. Took a look.
It was one of many moments where remarkable performance was silenced or encouraged to do more: more successful grants, more publications, more teaching initiatives; Or even better, departure to make way for someone younger.Or cheaper. An accident. Because this has been one of the big changes in the last few decades.
From a university system that offered secure employment that was also lucrative and valuable, there were increasingly fewer and fewer tenured positions and more and more sessional staff.
In fact it is estimated that at least 50 per cent of all undergraduate teaching is now done by casuals. From 1990 to 2011 there was a 250 per cent increase in casualisation, compared to a 55 per cent increase in non-casual academic employment.
Many other changes have also taken place, including increased competition and alliances across sectors, the proliferation of managers who are increasingly being seen as a business, the massive quantification of all aspects of it and, underlying all, government funding. Involves long-term shortages.One of the many consequences of these changes was a sense of ongoing crisis, which, along with the adoption of managerialism, produced a series of reorganizations in the name of greater efficiency, cost savings, supply in line with demand, and continuous improvement. But now There was a real crisis.
During the pandemic, universities that have had healthy balance sheets for years were undoubtedly impacted by the closure of international borders and the refusal to extend the JobKeeper wage subsidy to the region.
Its response was to fire large numbers of employees, an estimated 27,00 jobs in the first year of the pandemic alone. Over two years, the system as a whole was cut by 10 percent, amounting to a total financial loss of about five percent. Was.
These crises have had a significant impact on employees.There was a growing sense of employment insecurity – employed workers were insecure, but even more so if you were on a short-term contract or session. Many Fair Work cases have proven that many of these workers are not paid for their work. . There is rampant theft and exploitation of salaries of university employees, whether employed or not.
There is an increasing reliance on the goodwill of all academics to work overtime without pay to keep the system running. A six to seven day week was and still is the norm.There was also a growing sense of the client being a student with the authority of the client's point of view rather than that of a trainee scholar or professional. Hence there was pressure to deliver quality through unpaid feedback and high marks to satisfy the newly empowered consumer of our educational service. In addition to ever-increasing teaching, technical and administrative demands, most academics were expected to conduct research.
Generally it is given importance above all other activities which are expected to generate income.
But the success rate for such grants – which are awarded by the Australian Research Council – runs at 20 to 40 per cent, meaning failure is a more likely outcome.There are other sources of research funding – government, community, industry – whose topics are shaped by the needs of a discipline rather than by a sense of social responsibility.
Obtaining funding becomes essential to shaping projects to meet the funders' needs, a possibility that lends itself to intellectual and ethical compromises.
The simple solution to making universities better workplaces is not just to spend government money – although that would help – but to have greater transparency about how it is managed. As a long-term member of academic boards I have been told repeatedly That budget-related questions were "operational" and therefore a matter of management.
Not only may such bodies be directly elected, but they may also monitor management and be able to restructure staffing and budgets, as well as question teaching quality.The issue of casualization is an industrial issue – including wage theft, underpayment and insecurity – that can be addressed through new agreements that set limits on flexibility, fair payment and guarantees of ongoing employment and academic freedom. It would be beneficial to strengthen the idea of academic freedom, not just to teach and research what years of professional training have achieved, but to include the guarantees of continuity of employment and respect that are guaranteed by current enterprise bargaining agreements. Far beyond the soft recommendations within.
The new army of university managers will also benefit from genuine education in academic work and social ethics and integrity rather than just the financial and narrow academic role of universities.(360info.org) PYPY
It was a cool June morning when the message arrived. Zoom call at 9.30 am with Deans, School Heads and HR to discuss the new organizational chart.
We were three months into the COVID-19 pandemic and had just finished the many challenges of moving all teaching content online. But here I was — one of the few female professors at a regional campus, with a new book At the top of his academic game, boasting a series of excellent teaching evaluations, boundless enthusiasm and co-leading a budding research centre.No place on the charts for me.
Instead I was part of a sobering statistic: one in 27,000 university staff across Australia lost their jobs in the first year of the pandemic that were considered essential as a result of COVID.
Like the rest of the country, this university and the system were reeling from the shock of the pandemic. No doubt, it was a personal shock, but not entirely unexpected as the profession I had entered several years ago was unrecognizable. Was left.
Six months ago when I reviewed my annual performance and carefully noted my many accomplishments, my head of school barely glanced at the document before praising my energy and asking if I had considered retirement. Took a look.
It was one of many moments where remarkable performance was silenced or encouraged to do more: more successful grants, more publications, more teaching initiatives; Or even better, departure to make way for someone younger.Or cheaper. An accident. Because this has been one of the big changes in the last few decades.
From a university system that offered secure employment that was also lucrative and valuable, there were increasingly fewer and fewer tenured positions and more and more sessional staff.
In fact it is estimated that at least 50 per cent of all undergraduate teaching is now done by casuals. From 1990 to 2011 there was a 250 per cent increase in casualisation, compared to a 55 per cent increase in non-casual academic employment.
Many other changes have also taken place, including increased competition and alliances across sectors, the proliferation of managers who are increasingly being seen as a business, the massive quantification of all aspects of it and, underlying all, government funding. Involves long-term shortages.One of the many consequences of these changes was a sense of ongoing crisis, which, along with the adoption of managerialism, produced a series of reorganizations in the name of greater efficiency, cost savings, supply in line with demand, and continuous improvement. But now There was a real crisis.
During the pandemic, universities that have had healthy balance sheets for years were undoubtedly impacted by the closure of international borders and the refusal to extend the JobKeeper wage subsidy to the region.
Its response was to fire large numbers of employees, an estimated 27,00 jobs in the first year of the pandemic alone. Over two years, the system as a whole was cut by 10 percent, amounting to a total financial loss of about five percent. Was.
These crises have had a significant impact on employees.There was a growing sense of employment insecurity – employed workers were insecure, but even more so if you were on a short-term contract or session. Many Fair Work cases have proven that many of these workers are not paid for their work. . There is rampant theft and exploitation of salaries of university employees, whether employed or not.
There is an increasing reliance on the goodwill of all academics to work overtime without pay to keep the system running. A six to seven day week was and still is the norm.There was also a growing sense of the client being a student with the authority of the client's point of view rather than that of a trainee scholar or professional. Hence there was pressure to deliver quality through unpaid feedback and high marks to satisfy the newly empowered consumer of our educational service. In addition to ever-increasing teaching, technical and administrative demands, most academics were expected to conduct research.
Generally it is given importance above all other activities which are expected to generate income.
But the success rate for such grants – which are awarded by the Australian Research Council – runs at 20 to 40 per cent, meaning failure is a more likely outcome.There are other sources of research funding – government, community, industry – whose topics are shaped by the needs of a discipline rather than by a sense of social responsibility.
Obtaining funding becomes essential to shaping projects to meet the funders' needs, a possibility that lends itself to intellectual and ethical compromises.
The simple solution to making universities better workplaces is not just to spend government money – although that would help – but to have greater transparency about how it is managed. As a long-term member of academic boards I have been told repeatedly That budget-related questions were "operational" and therefore a matter of management.
Not only may such bodies be directly elected, but they may also monitor management and be able to restructure staffing and budgets, as well as question teaching quality.The issue of casualization is an industrial issue – including wage theft, underpayment and insecurity – that can be addressed through new agreements that set limits on flexibility, fair payment and guarantees of ongoing employment and academic freedom. It would be beneficial to strengthen the idea of academic freedom, not just to teach and research what years of professional training have achieved, but to include the guarantees of continuity of employment and respect that are guaranteed by current enterprise bargaining agreements. Far beyond the soft recommendations within.
The new army of university managers will also benefit from genuine education in academic work and social ethics and integrity rather than just the financial and narrow academic role of universities.(360info.org) PYPY
