After that, it was a staff seminar on routes to and strategies for publication, which was useful and interesting. On the way, I stopped at our UCU campaign against casualisation. Certainly neither of my departments could survive without the hourly-paid staff whom we exploit massively. We used to have a pathway to fractional contracts, but it's been abandoned. So we won't pay to train and educate our teachers, nor give them proper employment rights or support their research: we'll just selfishly leach off their hard work and good will, safe in the knowledge that there will always be more desperate people ready to replace anyone who gets above their station. Some of our visiting lecturers have published more (and better) than us, and teach way more hours than permanent full-timers, yet we can't even regularise their employment.
And a banner on the website advertising the 'anti-casualisation' action was deemed 'offensive' by the Director of Marketing. That'll be the Director of Marketing whose Twitter feed includes these gems:
Now that's how to run a university's communications department!
And now I'm off to see Steve Reich!
2 comments:
Thank you for your point about Visiting Lecturers. As a union member and hourly-paid lecturer at a Midlands university, I appreciate that you highlight the difficulties (add to that sense of futility at times) that hourly-paid staff face despite having publications, book contracts, and years of teaching experience.
We're nowhere near as bad as the US, where humiliated and underpaid 'freeway academics' are the backbone of the system, but we've enough to be ashamed of. I was an hourly-paid lecturer for 8 years and struggled to even get paid regularly, let alone paid properly. At my place, one HPL works more scheduled hours than any full-time colleague. She has a book out and multiple papers, yet we can't or won't employ her. Disgraceful.
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