Departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty.I have previously predicted that post-Browne that we can expect UK higher education to fracture teaching from research along the US model. A relatively small pool of faculty will focus on research, competing for whatever funds happen to be available in the public budget (with research satisfying the demands for public "impact"); some of these well-established academics will be recruited as brand names to gloss prospectuses, and may teach a couple of exotic modules. But the majority of university staff will be teaching-only, satisfying the more immediate demands of students - now consumers - of higher education. And the grunts bearing the load of basic module teaching will be the postdocs, teaching-only staff, and casual lecturers recruited in accordance with fluctuating demand. Unlike tenured academics, these are easily sacked when the income from student numbers falls.
You’d think departments would respond to the Somme-like conditions they’re sending out their newly minted PhDs to face by cutting down the size of their graduate programs. If demand drops, supply should drop to meet it. In fact, many departments are doing the opposite, the job market be damned. More important is maintaining the flow of labor to their domestic sweatshops, the pipeline of graduate students who staff discussion sections and teach introductory and service courses like freshman composition and first-year calculus. (Professors also need dissertations to direct, or how would they justify their own existence?)It suits universities to continue to pitch the notion that a PhD will lead naturally and easily to an academic career. On their graduation day, as cohorts of postgraduates face joblessness, any alternative such as casual, teaching-only work is welcome, partly to bring in some sort of income and partly to sustain the fantasy that their shiny new PhD was, after all, worthwhile as preparation for an academic career.
Teaching is part of the training, you hear a lot, especially when supposedly liberal academics explain why graduate-student unions are such a bad idea. They’re students, not workers! But grad students don’t teach because they have to learn how, even if the experience is indeed very valuable; they teach because departments need “bodies in the classroom,” as a professor I know once put it.This is something that is already sadly familiar in the UK, which looks set to get worse. The UCU's campaign against fixed-term, hourly-paid postgraduate or postdoctoral staff continually butts up against the argument that they are not really staff at all; in fact, they should welcome the opportunity to teach for a pittance, with limited employment rights (such as contracts that can be reduced in line with student numbers without invoking redundancy), because they are being "trained" for a full time academic career that allegedly awaits at some putative point in the future. Such arguments do not only come from university managers. I have heard them being made from the same tenured academics who are supervising the PhDs of students suffering under poor working conditions. Far from protesting against the system, the words "Be thankful for what you can get" are the mantra circulating on university campuses from both PhDs and academics alike.
Labels: Browne review, higher education, teaching, tuition fees, University Life
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