Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Academics’

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.

19
Jul

Post-Graduation Lull – it’s important

The Faculty of Management and Law graduations took place last week. I like graduations. There is something really quite special about watching your students walk across that stage, shaking hands with the (in this case) Vice Chancellor and collecting their certificates. It’s the end of a journey we have been privileged to be part of and the start of a much bigger journey for them. You can feel the sense of excitement, the sense of a future to come.

This year, like every year, I feel a little lost after graduation. It’s not that I don’t have anything to do – I am weeks behind with my own work, my inbox is out of control and there is next academic year to get prepared for. I miss those students leaving us, I sort of miss the last academic year and I can’t quite bring myself to really focus on the new academic year. I’m inbetween. I suspect this time of year used to be real academic downtime and that downtime is being eroded. You can now find academics on campus between the end of June and end of September and mostly they are quite harassed academics. The academic hamster wheel seems relentless. We finish teaching, we finish marking, we finish exam boards, we finish revision sessions, we finish re-sit marking, we finish re-sit exam board and suddenly it is August and we’re into clearing, then induction, then teaching… repeat…

But that downtime is important, really important. More important that I had really registered before. We need to be able to recharge our batteries, we need to be able to take time to reflect on the academic year just gone by and we need time to prepare ourselves mentally (as well as practically) for the new academic year. We need time to think, to read, to do nothing, to think about what the next year will bring, what we want to achieve and we need time to plan and we need time just to be.

So, my post-graduation lull comes at a time where I really don’t have time for it but then I never do. My job seems ever more relentless (if it is possible to be more relentless) so I am embracing the lull whether I have time for it or not. I’m just allowing myself to drift for a week, to just see what happens, to do the things I want to do, minimise the crappy paperwork as much as possible, reduce the hours to a more manageable level and to put the last academic year behind me and get ready to be part of a whole set of new journeys and dreams.

30
May

Being Head of School

I have been Head of the School of Law at the Unviversity of Bradford for nearly a year now. I have on and off thought about blogging about that and have started one or two drafts and then deleted them again. Now though, it seems to me, is a good opportunity to reflect on the last year. Being Head of School was never part of my Master Plan (as far as I have one). I always saw myself, and still do, as an academic, not as an academic manager. I applied for the interim post out of necessity rather than because I really wanted the job. If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone external and I don’t think at the time that would have been the right thing for us.

So, what’s being Head of School like? Hm, it’s bloody hard work, that’s what it is. It is frustrating on so many levels. There’s so so much pointless admin; there’s the impossibility of herding academic cats (says the worst anti-hearding academic cat ever); there is meeting after meeting with no time between meetings to follow up on things discussed in meetings; there’s only really seeing students for the wrong reasons – for plagiarism, for behaviour issues or when they have serious problems… there’s other people not doing their jobs (or my perception of them not doing their jobs, let’s try and be fair) and then there’s people doing their jobs perfectly well but just not doing things my way (yep, control freak).

Being Head of School is also rewarding on all sorts of levels. There’s something really amazing about shaping the School, it’s programmes, its research and in a way there is also something amazing (if insanely infuriating) about having to justify, explain and fight for that vision. A visison which is so common sense to me and so alien to almost everyone else in the Faculty/Institution: That of a liberal legal education that is focused on learning, skills and personal growth not employability, labour markets and making money. A vision that has thinking about social justice on all sorts of levels, well actually that has thinking – full stop – at its heart. It’s a battle, every day is a battle to try and keep true to some key principles – people and their academic freedom are the most critical thing in a Law School. Freedom to shapre their careers, do their learning and research, interact with each other and learn from each other (I mean both students and staff here) – freedom to not be constrained by corporate PowerPoint slides and uniform VLEs, freedom to think and challenge and freedom to be wrong. This might sound great but then the realitiy of day to day and disengaged students and overworked colleagues hits and dumbing down, not questioning templates and processes etc is just easier. Not fighting every singly idiocy (and there are many) is easier. Not forcing your students to think is easier. Add that a lot of this goes against current university policy – Corporate PowerPoints are a must – and you can perhaps understand that I have very mixed feelings about the last year and the future.

If I am going to be Head of School for any longer (shortlisting for the post takes place Monday) I need to think really carefully about which principles are red lines and I need to think really carefully about how I can protect colleagues and students from the far too prevalent neo-liberal crap we are spoonfed daily and I need to think really carefully about how I look after myself. Because this is personal, this is about everything I believe in as an academic and a law teacher and as such, I can’t just leave it on my desk  on a Friday to come back to on Monday; I can’t just stop thinking about it so I have to find a way to deal with all the crap that I will inevitably take home with me… I don’t know whether I want the job for any longer but I do feel like it’s a job I have to keep doing for a Law School I passionately believe in, for students who are for the most part amazing and for colleagues, academic and administrative, who are an inspiration every day

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »