What Really Makes Me Angry…

 

…is injustice. And there are times when I despair of the injustices which rage unchecked within my university. I’m going to be writing to my college’s Master today, the complaints bureau for registering the most grievous offences, and I thought it would be better to get things off my chest first, in the hope I can then write a reasoned and incisive letter to him, rather than a dismissable rant. Last week I saw the young graduate woman who is covering my teaching while I’m on leave. She has nearly finished her PhD, and so it should, in theory, be helpful to her to take on some teaching while writing up, and earning some money at the same time. However, she confessed to me that my delightful college has failed to tell her how much they will pay her, or how they will pay her, or even when they will pay her, with the result that she’s been working now for two months without being paid or knowing when a cheque will arrive. She has already emailed the college authorities about this but hasn’t heard anything back yet and ‘doesn’t want to keep bothering them.’ I was somewhat outraged on her behalf; it is a classic manoeuvre within the university as a whole to exploit those members who have the most hope for advancement and the least certainty of achieving it. No one would dream of making some old high-ranking professor wait a second for his conference expenses to be reimbursed, but some poor soul way down in the academic food chain, well, they’ll just have to manage somehow.

 

It reminded me of the time, a couple of year’s back now, when I opened a letter from the finance department that calmly informed me I’d been overpaid in my last salary instalment, and so they were simply going to dock this month’s pay. The sum in question was over a thousand pounds. Well, to this day I am not sure that this move was legal. At the time, I was frantic about it as my husband was on an 18-month course, which meant I was the main breadwinner. Now, don’t make me laugh with the thought of academics as breadwinners – the secretary who will open my letter to the Master and hand it over to him earns more than I do. And perhaps you’re wondering why I didn’t notice the overpayment? Well, I get paid quarterly, that’s right – four times a year, with a little each month deducted from the quarter, to be going on with. My pay is a mix of teaching, admin, and base salary that is calculated in a manner so opaque to me that I have no idea how much money to expect each quarter, and indeed, it is wildly different every time. It’s little wonder that academics have such trouble getting mortgages! OOOHHH it makes me SO cross that this stupid, outdated, bureaucratic system exerts a stranglehold over what ought to be the straightforward business of earning a living. The entire university is crippled by a top heavy administrative structure that decrees our fate without insight or generosity. My colleague once quoted an article to me that described how the top fifteen or so apparatchiks in the university earn more, together, than all the lecturers in the entire university. And then when the university gets into debt, as it so frequently does, who do you think has to carry the fall for that?

 

I’m afraid that’s not all: you’d better brace yourselves. This attitude of ‘once I’m in power I can feather my own nest at the expense of everyone else’ is hopelessly endemic. Effectively I work in a strict hierarchy with no welfare state, hence the degree of political apathy that abounds. Once you have a nice, warm nest, there is little point in disturbing it for the sake of chilly fledglings. Now, just over a week ago I received a shock email from another university inviting me to apply for a chair. I’m sorry, that probably sounds ridiculous. A chair means a professor’s post and it’s the highest level you can reach in a UK university. Once I’d rescued my eyeballs from the carpet and dusted them off and put them back in, and once I’d stopped checking the email to make sure it hadn’t been wrongly addressed, I was still in shock. You see, I’m at quite a lowly level here. The big distinction is whether you’re employed by the university or a college. If you’re employed by the university you are instantly on a scale of progression, which offers the opportunity to improve pay and status depending on assessments of teaching and research. If you are employed by the college there is no corresponding progression. No pay rises, no nothing. The unfortunate thing is that the job is exactly the same, in fact for CTO’s (those employed by colleges), yup, you’ve guessed it, there’s a little more grafting on the coal face to be done. I’ll bet you’ve also guessed by now who employs me.

 

So why am I not rushing to apply for this new post? Well, it’s not solely my decision to make. My husband earns more than I do, even if I were in a professor’s job, and my son has absolutely no desire to move house. And between you and I, flattering though it is to be invited, a chair’s job is essentially admin and I have not reached such a state of eminence that I can face getting up in the morning to a day of committee meetings. I don’t know as I’ll ever be that eminent. I really like teaching and I really like research. I just wish that, as my career progresses, I could do a few hour’s less teaching in a week. I promise you it’s not empty whining. The average UTO teaches say 60 or so hours a term, maybe 80 if they’re very oversubscribed. The last term I taught, I did 120 contact teaching hours, and it’s no wonder that I was exhausted. I really don’t want to return to that. So of course, I made the usual move of contacting the necessary authority in college to see if I could use the invitation as any kind of leverage with my own employer. Want to have a guess now what happened? You’re right! Absolutely nothing at all. What made me very angry, however, was to find out that the UTO’s (those employed by the university) had decided last year to award themselves less teaching if they felt like it, but had not decided to extend this courtesy to the CTO’s. They made the decision for them that they needed to teach just as much as they ever did, with no concessions. Like I say, if you’re low in the academic food chain, these things just happen to you, and you have to manage. When I return after my year’s leave, it will be back to the old 120 hours and exhaustion for me.

 

What makes me the angriest of all is that this unequal structure works at the university-wide level of arts and sciences. Sciences are smiled upon by the university because the nature of the work they do means they bring in research grants of millions of pounds (when put together) from government and industry. That’s what it’s all about in the universities these days – who can bring in the most money from outside. Now the nature of the arts means that that inevitably we lose this particular battle. But the administrators are unable to accept this and have insisted that we all start our own fundraising, or else lots of jobs will be lost. Now excuse me, but I thought we already had sufficient work educating the young and researching for the good of our society’s sum of knowledge. Now we have to run businesses as well? What are we supposed to do? Set up a crêperie in the corner of the French department? I did suggest that I could take my tarot cards to the empty office alongside the Year Abroad office, and declare myself the Year Ahead office. But of course we can’t do these things. The result is that we’re facing job cuts. Actually I was wrong to say that makes me angry; in fact it just makes me very, very sad.

 

Fundamentally, what’s wrong with the system is that it’s all too easy to be complicit with it, either as a young lecturer, working every hour in order to climb the greasy pole in the hope of recognition and advancement, or as a settled professor, reaping the rewards of power and influence. But I don’t like it one little bit, and I’m not afraid to say so, either. If anyone would like to construct a barricade in the Humanities’ car park, I will happily stand on it. In the meantime, the best I can do, and it’s very little in the face of all that ought to be done, is to try to get a pay packet to the lovely young woman who is filling in for me. Wish me luck.