The academic underclass - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Inez Baranay
AS BUDGETS TO UNIVERSITIES HAVE BEEN CUT and as they have been pressured to think of themselves as businesses, they increasingly employ casual labour. "We're told, ‘we can only afford to pay so much, so work accordingly'," says another casual in a similar position. "The message is that teaching doesn't count."
But, of course, conscience, passion and career-building mean that casuals do put a lot of work into the quality of their teaching. And it is widely observed that casuals usually put a lot more work into their assessments than permanents. They are often painstaking in providing useful feedback, individual comments and carefully considered grades. And they are often told about the tenured staff who hand back student work with nothing on it but a tick and a mark. And about the tenured staff who seem to think a lecture is telling stories about yourself or showing films.
"I don't want to be a bad teacher. I don't want students thinking I'm a bad teacher," says a long-time casual who conscientiously marks assignment with precise and individual responses and advice much appreciated by her students. It's a matter of personal standards, of knowing how much such comments mean to students and how much they can learn from them, and of being careful of one's reputation and the student assessments that might matter to future job applications.
The phrase "reasonably contemporaneous assessment" is used to indicate that the hourly rate for teaching includes an hour of assessment, but there is no definition of "reasonably contemporaneous assessment". For some casuals, their employer recognises that this would include an assessment of student seminars but not of marking written assignments (and they would be paid extra for it). Others are expected to mark all the essays and creative work their students submit as requirements of the course for no extra pay.
Some casuals mark all their students' work without any guidance or advice on the standards expected and the application of marks and grades; sometimes without any sessions for consultation or moderation where they might compare their marking with that done by others teaching in the same course. Who has the time? And who wants to pay casuals for these consultations?
"It took me five long days to mark the assignments," said a recently appointed casual, shocked to discover what is expected of her. "I couldn't believe I wasn't going to get paid anything for that. Everyone just laughed at me."
Occasionally casuals are paid extra for marking. "I get one paid hour per student," says a long-time casual who had negotiated hard for this. "I was offered a job at another university but they weren't going to pay extra for marking – there were 70 undergraduates each handing in 3,000 words and 20 masters' students handing in 25,000 words!"
As for plagiarism, widely acknowledged as a growing problem: "I don't bother checking on it anymore. It takes too much time and you never hear the result if you report it." Similarly, you soon find out that where students are fee-paying customers, giving someone a fail mark makes too much trouble for the university, for your overworked colleagues and for you.
I'm also told about casual tutoring work where the tutors are obliged to attend the lectures given by the course convenor or go to meetings unpaid.
"At one university I was paid under $100 a time [basic rate rather than specially prepared or guest lecturer rate] to give a weekly lecture that would take three days' preparation. ‘That's all they could offer,' they said."
Apart from preparation and marking, casuals also do a lot of extra unpaid work talking to students. "As tutors in our subject we, the sessionals, are the interface between the students and the university. We're the ones who teach the courses, mark the assignments, and talk to them about their problems. They come to us."
I heard a lot of comments about students not understanding the constraints their lecturers and tutors work under. They generally have no idea that their teachers are not paid full-time salaries and don't understand why they can't find them, why they don't have offices. Students need advice, they need to talk about their ideas and they seek out the people who teach them.
"I sit in the cafe at a set time per week so students can talk to me. No, of course I don't get paid for consultation hours."
"Sometimes I spend ten hours a week on student emails," another told me.
"Email has changed the horizon for casuals," says another. "You're never out of contact with your students. Again, the university gets away cheaply."
"Don't do unpaid work. Talk to your students in the class break," one convenor advised the casuals teaching his course. "Tell them to walk over to get a coffee with you. Tell them not to send emails but to bring things up in class."
Nice try.
AS A CASUAL, YOU ARE NOT ONLY NOT EMPLOYED FULL-TIME, but you are only employed for half the weeks of the year. Explaining this to Centrelink is a challenge. While many casuals have the support of spouses and, especially in the case of young postgrad students or recent graduates, of parents, many are also self-supporting adults, some parents themselves. "And it's been cut down, semesters are shorter," says a long-time casual. "We used to get a contract for fifteen weeks, then fourteen, now thirteen." No matter how many semesters, how many years, you have worked, you never get a paid holiday, a paid sick day. Casual rates are meant to cover this; of course they don't. If your normal teaching day is a public holiday, if the department decides that it is a staff development day (casuals not invited), your class is cancelled and you don't get paid. You don't get paid in the week of mid-semester break and you don't get paid in the several weeks between semesters.
It's not as if you can find some other paying work to supplement your income. Your teaching hours are scattered all over the week; if your two– or three-hour seminar is in the middle of Tuesday that takes up Tuesday.
At the end of second semester, Centrelink offices must be crowded with all the casual academics who turn up to sign on for the dole. Not only does this offer income support even lower than the causal work, you are subjected to the usual Jobsearch requirements, all the attendant absurdities and humiliations. You have to prove that you have applied for two jobs every week, anything; you are made to attend seminars on how to apply for a job and how to write a résumé. You might have done one of these every year. But until the next semester starts, you have no pay, no guarantee of being offered work and no idea how many hours you might be given.
"I would like not to worry about how I will support myself during the semester breaks and wonder whether the next semester I will actually be offered more hours or go to a staff meeting just weeks before the new semester and find out that my hours have been cut in half and nobody told me because they don't have to."
Even casuals who enjoy good conditions (adequate guidance, appropriate rates, paid marking) invariably cite the problem of finding employment out of semester time. That's about half a year. If, that is, they are self-supporting adults. Spouses and parents help support many casual academics, as no doubt many casual workers in other industries. Other industries. This is how we speak of universities these days.
THE NATIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION (NTEU) has a current membership of just over 27,000; its casual membership is just under 2000 – about 7 per cent. The percentage has stayed fairly steady since the union was formed in 1993 as an amalgamation of university and TAFE-based unions with 22,000 members.
Ask the union and they'll point to their handbook Smart Casuals and their occasional specific campaigns focusing on the recruitment of casuals. But, with such a small proportion of casuals as members, the union is not pressured to do more. As it is perceived not to do very much on casuals' behalf, casuals tend not to join. The union fee ($77 a year) makes a significant dent in the hand-to-mouth budget many casuals work with. And as casuals generally spend little more than their assigned teaching hours at the workplace, they are less likely to hear about union campaigns, and so less likely to become involved in them. Another vicious circle.
There are no clear, reliable statistics for the number of casuals employed in Australian universities. Casuals are more widely employed in the newer disciplines, such as business, and less in the older disciplines, such as engineering. The numbers have risen since the NTEU negotiated a new award in 1996; to try to maximise permanent jobs, short-term contracts were replaced by casual work. Cost containment and even cost cutting while student numbers rise have meant that many departments increasingly offer casual work amid disputes about whether current limits should remain.
Casualisation in academia is controversial. Policies and practice between universities differ, but there is a sense that the data is reported and analysed in a way that understates casualisation and lauds "more flexible" employment.
The crux is the way that casuals are counted. There is no count of how many academics are employed on a casual or sessional basis, nor is there a count of what proportion of university teaching and research is done by casuals. Instead, there are conversions made of how many casual hours add up to the equivalent of a full-time job. The Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee counts ten hours of lectures a week, or 25 hours of teaching or research, as equivalent to a full-time job. "Universities do their counting according to a system of FTEs (full-time equivalents). Effective full-time staff equivalents might be seen as three or four or even five or six casual appointments," says Margaret Buckridge at GU's Centre for Learning Research.
Reform, rationalise, restructure, reconfigure: such words are heavily employed as universities consider their staffs' research and teaching loads, and it is widely thought that there will be less employment for casuals in several areas while overall the casualisation of universities will increase.
As I conclude this piece, casuals are still contacting me with tales of iniquity, more and more grievances. And grief, too, over what looks like a total destruction of any past idea of universities as places where the life of the mind, the spirit of inquiry and the value of student-teacher relationships were nurtured. With the insidious growth of the language that refers to all university endeavours as "elite, irrelevant" and other neo-con soubriquets, the idea of academics as workers barely exists, just as those who would once have been proud to call themselves working-class are now Howard's "battlers", being seduced by the idea of individualism in workplace agreements.
One can easily imagine the effect on student life of this grim picture. Anyone who has had a university education or been associated with universities in the past will barely recognise today's realities. ♦