Higher education has a problem. Academics are increasingly burned-out and demotivated. Attempts to foster interactions between universities and industry is underpinned by unpaid overtime and wage theft. Junior academics and prospective academics face uncertain career prospects.
The result is a descent into mediocrity that is bad for everyone.
A life of uncertainty and risk
Many young prospective academics become a postdoctoral student, or postdoc, or teach on contract. For a contract teacher, your income depends entirely on how many classes you are given the next term. For a postdoc, life is “better” but there is significant uncertainty about whether you will have a job next year, what that job will be, and whether there will be grant funding.
As a postdoc, you might not even know what city you will be in next year. This is because postdocs often only last for a couple of years. Thereafter, there might not be a faculty position in that university or in that city. Some people like moving – but usually it is better to do so voluntarily rather than because your job ended, grant funding was exhausted, or the university was downsizing.
Whether you get a postdoc or contract work prepare for long hours that far exceed your contracted workload.
The obvious result is burnout. Leaving aside whether such a situation is even “fair”, it is bad for everyone.
Faculty positions: dead-end jobs
To some, a faculty position might sound like the ideal outcome. After all, having ongoing employment is nice. However, faculty positions are not as permanent as people believe, as was evidenced during Covid.
In Australia, “tenure” does not really exist. Although it is a faux pas to cut faculty staff, this can still happen either directly or indirectly through ever-heavier teaching loads for supposed “underperformance”. Universities, like other workplaces, suffer from bullying and nepotism. This might be like all employers. But, unlike in in other industries, where there are often many equivalent positions and skills are portable, there are often only a couple of universities in each city and even fewer job openings at one time. Escaping a toxic environment can prove difficult.
Then there is the pay issue. Universities take academics for granted and assume they will not leave. The hours are long and have increased since the pandemic. Student expectations have increased, external engagement is now expected, research outputs are still required. Academics are now expected to work more than their contracted load.
Industry engagement exacerbates the problem. Universities push academics to engage more with practical problems. This is great. But it is additional work that adds to existing workloads. It is essentially unpaid consulting. The push by universities and government to engage more with industry can become a form of wage theft: work in excess of contracted hours for no more money.
The public might say “so what?” Who cares what academics are paid in their ivory towers? But undermining the health of our higher education system is to the detriment of us all.
A tired, defeated workforce is hardly going to produce the best outcomes either for students or for universities that attempt to push academics towards industry engagement.
Are academics’ skills valued?
The private sector doesn’t always value higher education. A PhD graduate will often get the same job on the same pay as someone with a bachelor degree. This is despite the fact that writing an academic paper – or a PhD thesis – is inherently entrepreneurial, requires creating thinking and critical analysis. If nothing else, it shows discipline.
This creates a problem. If a price tag is not attached to PhD grads’ skills, you will get fewer of them – and even fewer with any interest in making a genuine impact in the private sector (as opposed to merely escaping a postdoc). This harms industry because it deprives it of the skills it says it wants.
This whole situation creates a problem. The higher education sector looks set on the path to mediocrity. Sadly, there does not seem to be a solution.
The author works as an academic at a university in New South Wales
