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Posts tagged ‘Academia’

26
May

Thanks from the picket line and the sofa

It’s day two of the UCU strike for fair pay in HE. I’m at home sitting on my sofa feeling a little lost. Truth be told, I’m worrying about work. I’m worrying about the pieces of assessment I haven’t yet marked, the meetings I haven’t organised, those I haven’t prepared for and whether I really have the time to go to an training course that is useful for me rather than the institution more widely tomorrow afternoon. I worry about my to do list, or rather I worry about looking at it because I know it will be overwhelming and already scarily out of date. I am resisting the urge to open my email and start dealing with stuff because this is what I am talking about, feeling like this, under constant pressure is part of the problem. So for today I will keep feeling a little lost, I will keep fighting the urge to deal with stuff and firefight and keep the balls in the air.

Yesterday I spent the morning on the picket line. It was slightly disappointing to see some academic colleagues heading into work and some of the driving  by staff was a bit aggressive as people did their best to avoid eye contact as they drove up to the barriers and hastily waved their staff cards at the sensors. If you’re an academic and the picket line makes you uncomfortable, maybe you need to think about why. If you’re not an academic and therefore not part of this strike action, stop and show us a bit of support; Smile, say hi or wave or something. Thanks to those who did! Thank you thank you thank you to the guys driving a university van who turned around and didn’t cross the picket line – you’re awesome.

I spent a lot of time yesterday and this morning keeping an eye on twitter – thanks for the support shown there. Thanks to the students in particular for tweeting your support and for understanding that we are doing this for you as much as for ourselves. But what happens tomorrow when we all got back to work? The temptation is to try and cram the last two days worth of work plus tomorrow’s work into tomorrow. The temptation is to still try and meet those deadline, get those exams marked, those meetings sorted, that paperwork done. My instinct is to do that because it needs doing. Let’s be honest, it needed doing last week, last month… But that can’t be how this plays out. The strike cannot result in us all being more stressed out. If I give into that temptation then basically I’ve just not been paid for two days but I still do the work and the university just gets even more of me for free.

Tomorrow I will make a huge effort to work at a sensible pace, starting at a sensible time and finishing at a sensible time. I will not work all weekend to catch up. The strike is supposed to have an impact, that’s the point of a strike! I do wonder whether sometimes we let ourselves down by going back to work and trying to catch up – if we do that we negate the effect of the strike.

I’m struggling- partly self-preservation is kicking in and I want to work to make sure I can keep afloat. I don’t want the ‘well if you hadn’t been on strike you’d not be so behind…’ conversations. I don’t want to be behind… So I’m getting off the sofa and I will find something to do to distract myself from the possibility of work. Maybe I’ll make jam.

30
Dec

Questions

So I haven’t blogged in a while. That might be because I’m not currently working. If I’m off sick does that mean I am still a legal academic? Are my ramblings still those of a legal academic? Interesting question there about identity… Professor Huxley-Binns posed another interesting one at the start of the Lord Upjohn Lecture – the Association of Law Teachers’ Annual London event relatively recently (forgive me but my sense of time is completely off lately). She asked ‘Do you think like a lawyer?’. ‘Hell no’ was my initial reaction. But…

Well, yes that but has been bothering me ever since. I loved her lecture and I was going to blog about it immediately after but then sort of didn’t and anyway, here we are. Anyway, as Becky was talking I started wondering if maybe I do think like a lawyer and I have been thinking about that question and what it means ever since. I think the question is on my mind because I’m not sure what my place is in this world of legal academia. I always loved being an academic and maybe because of that I sort of forgot to look after the one person who can shape my career into what I want it to be: Me. Maybe after the years of long hours, living, breathing, dreaming work and then 18 months of working in a management role that highlights things I knew but could just pretend weren’t real before and that requires 60+ hours a week just to stay vaguely on top of things it’s not that surprising that eventually I crashed.

So not only am I asking if I think like a lawyer, to me the more fundamental question is do I think like an academic lawyer or even more complex than that: Does my current role, or even any academic job, allow me to think like me. I think that’s it. I want to think like me, and often that is thinking like a lawyer if we define lawyer broadly and often I think like an academic but thinking like an academic isn’t all that compatible with the neo-liberal, corporate crap that goes on in most institutions.

I go back to work on 18th January, after my holiday and first ever marathon (I’ve been blogging about the running here). I’m not sure I want to go back, not because I am not well enough, I probably am, and not because I like the being at home not doing much, I’m getting bored, but because I don’t actually know that I want to be an academic . I’ll continue to explore the why of that in my head and will, I’m sure, be ready to share that soon. I don’t know what else I would want to do so it’s not that I’ve found something I enjoy more…

I know this is a real ramble and I don’t have answers but I wanted to put this out there before we hit all the new year resolutions stuff because I don’t really believe in them and this isn’t about changing my life in 2016… Maybe I just need a good long run to get some clarity.. oh wait.

29
Aug

Performance related pay? Really?

I got a bit cross about an article in the Times Higher about paying academics bonuses to boost our productivity. You can read the article here. The article reports on a study carried out in Germany which suggests that paying bonuses (it seems some fairly substantial bonuses) to academics means that productive academics cluster together and that the practice got rid of lower performing candidates. The bonuses are paybale for research outputs /attracting funding and taking on management duties. Universities have discretion as to how they pay bonuses with some dividing up the pot at the end of the year based on relative performance of its academics. I feel slightly sick thinking about this. I am probably in danger of just ranting. I haven’t thought this through fully and I haven’t looked at any research on this but my initial reaction to and gut feeling about performance related by for academics is that it is just wrong. It is wrong on a number of levels and for a number of reasons. I’ll try and articulate them here.

  1. Performance related pay by definition introduces competition  – particularly where a finite pot is divvied up amongst staff based on performance. Academia should not be competitive, it should be collegiate. We should be working together to think about complex and interesting problems. We should not be guarding our knowledge, we shouldn’t be afraid to share it. We shouldn’t be encouraged to take all the credit for work we had help with. Competition for research grants etc is one thing but asking us to compete for a big chunk of our livelyhoods is not going to help research or our students
  2. That brings me nicely to students – where are they in all this. I don’t see mention of rewarding good teaching here. Are we saying that good performance in relation to teaching doesn’t matter? It’s not worth rewarding? Well that’s just great isn’t it.
  3. How do we measure performance? If performance related pay is linked to publishing certain types of outputs in certain types of outlets what happens to all the other types of really good an important work? How to keep doing that? How do we keep researching things that are not currently fashionable or rather how do we keep researching things that aren’t related to money?
  4. A closely related point is about assessing performance in academia generally. This is utterly subjective and of course the metrics put in place across the sector or by individual institutions will be fairly crude and will not be able to capture the complexities of what we all do, the variety of what we do and the fact that we all do some of those things better than others.
  5. There is of course also the point that academics, while not badly paid really, are hardly paid according to our level of education, knowledge, skills and expertise. We have battled our way through undergraduate degrees, postgraduate degrees,  in many cases professional training and eventually PhDs. We are considered very junior in our sector at a point in our lives and at an age where many sports stars have retired and where in the commercial sector you can expect to have established a career with a salary that goes with it. I don’t know a single academic who is in it for the money but it would be nice to feel that our contribution to society is valued.
  6. Academics don’t need to be paid to perform better. In areas where maybe we do struggle it is not because we don’t want to do a good job. It’s not that we can’t be bothered to write that latest article or spent the day sitting on our backsides watching daytime TV rather than preparing teaching materials. The reality is that academics are expected to do far more of everything and the pressure on our time is ridiculous. Most departments are under-staffed, all are under-resourced. We are expected to teach more, research more, do more of our own admin because why pay administrators when the academics can just do it, we are expected to comply with more and more processes and policies with time-consuming and largely pointless paperwork… Staffing departments properly and providing crucial funding for networking, conference attendance etc will make our research and teaching better on all sorts of levels.
  7. And that I think links nicely to the thing that really pissed me off about the article – the insinuation that we (academics) need to be bribed into becoming more productive. The idea that we are a bunch of lazy good for nothing layabouts who don’t work from early May to late September and have 4 weeks off over Christmas. Every academic I know works really hard and every single one of them wants to do a good job whether that’s in teaching or in their research.

So, do I think we should have performance related pay? No, no, no. It’s a stupid idea. It’s an idea that will damage academia and HE further. It’s an idea that really does make me feel sick. There’s so much wrong with it, I still don’t really know where to start. Urgh.

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