More Evidence of the Morale Draining Effect of Corporate Higher Ed
By The Guardian ran this a couple of days ago, written by an academic who finally grew frustrated enough to pack it in. The takeaway:
Universities in the 21st century no longer aspire to become beacons of knowledge, even though they would like to promote themselves as such. Instead, they are trying to turn into large corporations. Their customers are students, their product intellectual property.
As I’ve discussed in the past, in the UK we face constant employment insecurity. Programs and whole departments come and go, occasionally based on only one year’s worth of data, other times with no decision transparency at all. Additionally, continual institutional re-invention is the norm. Both have a predictably deleterious effect on faculty morale, so stories such as that linked above never surprise me. Indeed, I seriously considered it myself. The commercialization angle was a strong secondary motivation for considering the exit option, along with permanent institutional instability, but the primary motivation was cringe-inducing bad management above the level of our department.
When one considers the low rate of pay we receive compared to similar positions in the private sector, and the huge economic opportunity costs we pay during the years spent training for these positions (especially in the United States, where Ph.D. training is considerably more comprehensive, and as such takes significantly more time, than here in the UK) I’m surprised I haven’t witnessed more colleagues simply quit. If we’re going to face the pressures to justify our continued employment in profit and loss metrics, we might as well receive similar remuneration. That of course is not forthcoming; universities have offered us a 1% pay rise, which the union rejected. We went on strike once in November, and are scheduled to strike again on 3 December. Of course, if I were to apply a P&L analysis on going on strike, the marginal increase over the 1% offer would have to be quite high — it would need to at least double — for the money I’ve lost on strike to pay off in the end, but that’s an entirely different post.
Ultimately, I’m glad that I didn’t pull the trigger. Managers changed, and yet another institutional redesign landed my department in a new School of Government. The new school is led by an academic we hired externally, and one who is an excellent manager of people. We got lucky, and as we just started this new school, we should enjoy three, perhaps even four years of stability. And I still get paid cash money to do my hobby.
Nevertheless, I’m not at all surprised by the column in the Guardian. I’m surprised that it doesn’t happen more often.
