Staff at 68 UK universities are on strike over threatened pension cuts and unfair working conditions. So here I am again, on strike, sitting idly at home fighting the temptation to catch up on reading, finish *that* paper, or the (lesser) temptation to finish my marking or prepare the teaching that will resume after the strike.
And it is a difficult internal fight because, when it comes to research (and teaching too, mostly), academia is a vocation and a source of intellectual stimulation that is hard to resist. Sadly, this vocation and curiosity are in good measure the fuel on which the unfairness we are resisting keeps burning.
Universities (in the UK, and elsewhere) are only viable (or even profitable) organisations because they can access talent and dedication under often exploitative, and mostly below-market terms. It is well known that universities abuse the flexibility of (highly deregulated) labour markets to minimise payroll relating to teaching activities (eg through hourly-paid contracts or teaching only contracts not covering eg summer months). Universities also try to keep their ‘research competitiveness’ by eroding or simply dismantling progression systems for research-focused colleagues. Not to touch upon the derision of career opportunities in the professional services pathway. Even at the *higher-end* of the academic recruitment scale (lecturer and above), it is glaring that in many disciplines universities can hardly recruit at salaries that are a fraction of what industry can offer, and that the only reason they continue to recruit at all is either the attraction of academia as a vocation, or privilege that allows some (like myself) to take underpaid jobs because of other sources of privilege, or a mixture of both. All of this unavoidably leads to casualisation, gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps, and inadequate and exploitative working conditions.
There is also the issue of Universities being made to run as a business in a very badly regulated quasi-market, with the most insane of the regulatory issues being the impossibility of sustainably operating under a fixed (excessive) fees income stream for teaching and dwindling research funding pots, while costs (should) raise (especially under high inflation scenarios, such as the one the cost of living crisis in the UK is evidencing). The only ‘way out’ that University managers (let’s not call them leaders, please) can find is to grow and try to find economies of scale (ie bums on seats) in courses with low infrastructure demands (and online/blended is helping them there), as well as to try to push costs down even beyond reasons, such as systematically offering below-inflation pay increases and seeking to chop pension costs. There is also the added strategy of sinking even lower down the exploitation chain and further resorting to labour under casualised and unfair terms and conditions.
Maybe somebody (in Government) thought that all of this could last because, as I said earlier, academia is a vocation and an occupation that can bring many (non-financial) rewards. But surely there are limits, and those were long exceeded.
What I do not understand, and may never get to understand, is why University managers do not realise that in pursuing their policies and doing the Government’s dirty job (of pushing UK academia down this unsustainable path), they are killing the institutions they are meant to steward (albeit in a timeframe that, they probably hope, will mean that their demise will not personally affect them).
Would it not be a more sensible approach to listen to staff and student concerns and *quickly* realise that the root of many problems is in the funding model, the poor regulation of the higher education quasi-market, and the exploitation and unfairness that underpins it all? Would it not be more sensible to galvanise the sector to lobby for a proper reform of the system that allows for its sustainable redirection?
I guess it would be, both better and more sensible, but it is certainly easier to continue cashing six figure salaries to try to firefight systemic issues … or so it seems. Shame on those who perpetuate the unfairness.