The Uber-ification of University Professors
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 พ.ค. 2023
- Every episode of Induction is available two weeks early at go.nebula.tv/induction
Check out Tom’s chat with Dr. Rohin Francis at nebula.tv/videos/induction-ho...
In this fortnight’s episode of Induction, Tom chats to Zoe Bee (@zoe_bee) about why university professors in both the UK and the US have been striking so much lately, and the broader crisis in higher education that has brought academics to breaking point.
Check out Zoe’s videos at / @zoe_bee
The Induction Team
Hosted by Tom Nicholas
Edited by Georgia Burrows
Thank you so much for asking me onto the podcast - it was so wonderful to chat with you! 💜
Thank you for saying yes! It was a lovely chat!
Thanks for being there, Zoe. I'll go and watch your video later.
Btw. I don't think the quote with the "they learn to rule the world" is overly dramatic. Because the poor people are exactly _not_ learning those things. They learn to be busy working bees and not active citizens.
We have this nice saying in Germany: "Who doesn't _know_ anything has to _believe_ everything."
And that's how some people can tell all the others some bullshit and a large swath of the latter believe it.
@@InductionPod could you name the books you were talking about?
Yet another example of public good being sacrificed for corporate profit.
Corporations in general do not want an educated population. An educated population will think independently. What they want is workers with the very specific skills for specific tasks. Whatever creativity they desire is narrowly focused. The more workers with the skills these corporations desire, the easier it is for them to keep wages down. Paying for teachers is just overhead from a corporation’s perspective.
It is very short sighted.
I totally understand why you’re trying to be as diplomatic and neutral as possible, this conversations can be very inflamatory and challenging. But I want to highlight the amount of emotional labor and self-regulation you’re doing here to try not to make people mad or angry. It’s pretty telling. To everybody who listen, even if they were calling out more explicitly the privilige of being born in a confortable financial situation, and the access to higher job or role, nepotism etc… nobody is undermining your individual achievement or ability, we are talking about the system, not the single person. A lot of emotional labor can be trasfer to check our own privileges to make society a better place, minority can’t always carry the burden of try not to offend anybody and play “respectability politics” when they highlight injustices. ❤️
I really appreciate your conversation and insight, keep doing an amazing job
I’m sorry if my comment is messy, english isn’t my first language, please feel free to correct me❤️
In 2022 The University of Alabama Head Football Coach made $10,957,000 in total pay. In many states, a college football or basket ball coach is the highest paid state employee. The University of Alabama is a state government school, not a private one.
The football players have no salary, but some have scholarships. The also may have image rights. On the whole, most of the athletes receive very little compensation for their work as an athlete even though the school takes in loads of cash through ticket sales and television rights. Keep in mind that American college football players risk serious injury, and very few go on to the professional level.
The University of Alabama is in a Southern state that was part of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and many of the players are descendants of people that the Confederacy once enslaved! The team is called The Crimson Tide! The state flag is essentially a stripped down version of the Confederate flag, other Southern states have the full Confederate flag os part of their flag.
One thing not said was the pricing in the UK for higher education which is wildly different to the USA. So all university's from Oxford ones to Russel group to your local university charge £27,000 for 3 year course for a bachelors degree, you then get student loans to pay for everyday living that ia means tested against parents pay. You also pay it back in a different way you only start paying when you earn over a certain amount and it's not much at all it is then written off after 25 years. Then college which is what you do when you are normally 16 - 18 years old is free and if you are doing apprenticeships like Plumbing you get paid by the business you have a placement with
this is so entirely alien to the public university experience in brazil. it feels like a completely different dystopian hellworld up there
My experience with academia, and that of everyone around me, has been always a net negative, even for those who have not abandoned it. Poor pay, tyrannical or absent supervisors, next to zero help in most academic matters (like getting a scholarship)... Now several unis here are embroiled, even, in a lawsuit, since it's been found out that unis are keeping the social security taxes from scholarship money. Taxes the employer should pay, but the limbo situation of scholarships (are they job contracts?) allows colleges to get away with a lot.
There are cliques of old dinosaurs who now run the hallways, and they are just as rotten as the people they rebelled against back in the late 60's.
And then there is a system that pays lip service to equal opportunity, giving out scholarships in such a way you need to crank out papers every month, regardless of quality, which ignores that research needs time and focus, and which intrinsically says "do this if your family is rich, if not, don't". A culture which doesn't respect expertise or academic achievement.
These people should usher in new solutions for our problems. Instead they're stuck.
Meanwhile in germany, fixed term contracts are limited to 12 years (6 before 6 after PhD, there is even talk to limit the time to just 3 years) and afterwards you're not allowed to work in academia anymore. Only professors have tenured positions afterwards because lecturer positions etc don't exist (anymore). Reasoning being that scientists wouldn't be motivated to work anymore if they didn't have to worry about their employment every 6 months 🙈
The stuff you get onto at the end about education being training for a job reminds me of some people I met during my PhD: some of my cohort had their research funded (at least in part) by some research/technical companies, so one of their supervisors would be from those companies. I saw some of these people semi-regularly, and their opinions on 'What university should be for' were horrifyingly hilarious.
They legitimately expect the university to train people for their specific company and complained about how their new hires didn't know enough about the subject areas from doing a related physics/engineering masters (fun fact, this guy's company was working on microwave metamaterials and transformational optics, which I'm pretty sure there wasn't a master's course on anywhere in the country at the time [and just checked, can't seem to find one now either] - it's PhD level stuff, which is probably why they were part-funding my colleague's PhD). Other business types were agreeing with them, and our university staff were dutifully taking down notes for them without ever stopping to ask what the 5 or 6 different companies would require training in. No one MSc course could possibly prepare students for all these companies even in their similar fields, and if there were enough people to justify running a course then those companies would lose all their competitive edge they liked to boast about so much; also all the students they weren't hiring wouldn't be qualified for much else because it's so highly specific. I contemplated asking them if they'd consider hiring someone first, then sending them on this hypothetical courses (which our uni did do with some MSc level condensed classes already actually) just to listen to them whine about how they could possibly take such a risk on some untrained youth without the prerequisite skills; but I was trying not to get told off again.
From what I have seen, most companies desperately try to outsource all the training they might once have had to do in house onto the universities; while also complaining that the universities aren't doing enough to prepare students for their specific company. I'm pretty sure this is why we have the glut of 'entry level' jobs requiring 3 years of experience.
Also entirely separate university nugget: While waiting for some model too run I worked out how much my university was taking in in rent: ~£26 million per year. They've built two massive student dorms since then. But they can't get our department the nice soft chairs the business school gets, huh?
THIS. UK HE suffers badly from this. Universities run by rich people from business and industry are the worst offenders for this. They close the traditional academic departments (history, philosophy, even chemistry was targeted 20-odd years ago), and penalise staff whose research doesn't neatly align with business and industry, and high profile knowledge exchange.
About 15 years ago I realised universities had become about "spin out companies" that have very exploitative T&Cs attached to them. Universities take a huge chunk of any profits from them. Biotech spin offs are a big thing.
Technical point: intro and outro are fine, but I need to crank up my audio fourfold to properly understand everything else
i listened to another podcast a while ago that discussed how university level plagiarism rose significantly during the pandemic and the hosts made an excellent observation that this isn't out of laziness but students struggling trying to take a shortcut to stay on top of their work. from the instructors perspective it then becomes an issue of having to deal with academic dishonesty but not really being able to get the necessary supports for students who clearly have more than just trying to cheat going on. especially for adjunct or casual instructors i would imagine it's also something that admin breathes down your neck about and forces you to pursue.
For what it's worth, in Italy the principle of the teacher's freedom on how to teach ("Libertà d'insegnamento") is even enforced by the law
1:09:25 it seems that learning for the sake of learning is more of a luxury than something that is good for society as a whole.
That's what Big Business and the present-day cadre of college and university leaders would have us believe. On the contrary, "learning for the sake of learning" is a real boon for society as it fosters an informed, thinking, engaged citizenry. Actually, I disagree with the phrase "learning for the sake of learning" as it undermines that to which it really refers, to wit, developing the whole person, including, but not limited to, the brain. As I mentioned above, what we, as a society, need are people who can think and reason for themselves and thereby be engaged and involved in the civic and national affairs which, after all, directly affect them. That may be a bane to Big Business and its supporters within the present-day college and university leadership, but it can only aid society. Far from being a "luxury", as you put it, it is an absolute necessity.
Employers have managed to get away with the idea that it is not up to them to invest in training their employees, including new employees, but is the responsibility of HE. While your average undergrad uni course can develop general skills in its students, it was never designed to teach specific skills. This is a failure of employers who have been successful in peddling this argument
I imagine the 1st/2nd year would get the "grade too easily" as a preference, but the best folks in the 3rd and 4th years was "just because you did badly on the midterm, you can still make those marks back up by getting the full learning for the final"
Capitalist, For-profit edumacation.... What could possibly go wrong...
Stanford?
Universities are such a broken system. The undergrads and good instructors really need to be pulled out from the research institutions
The mistreatment was so very obvious in my undergrad. The best teacher stopped having an office half way through the year, for instance, so you couldn't even go visit office hours
I think that a Tenured Acadmia is the 5th estate of Democracy. Academics must be free to make statements, and follow many of different rsesearch efforts, without fear of being fired by a Universiy or being shut down by Govenment, even if they are unpopular. A free and couagious Academia is critical for any Society. The Philosophy Kings if you will.
Tenure also allows you to research whatever you want, and not have to chase the grants and publications
That's not necessarily true. You still need grant money to hire PhD students and postdocs, pay for equipment and reagents, lab upkeep etc. And with success rate for an average grant around 10% both in the US and Europe, tenured academics are forced to waste ridiculous amounts of time to participate in what essentially is a lottery.
Maybe for someone working in humanities, maths, or theoretical sciences, grants are not such a big deal, as they can do a lot of work themselves or with a couple of students at low cost. But that's definitely not the case in experimental research.
Zoe may have overlooked a tier of post secondary in the usa: unaccredited grift diploma mills like trump uni, etc.
0:22 Totally random, but is that guy leaning over the table exhausted from hours of studying or just frustrated with the crap furniture.
I'm doing a video essay anthology on all the issues academia as an institution is dealing with and I'm definitely going to have an episode on academic employment. the situation in my country/university is a bit better than in the US but it's still far from perfect. the fact that universities collect substantial fees from grants that their researchers get is a big part of the problem imho. it's The Thing that turns the institute from an employer (and a community) into a collection of resources that it just rents out to researchers for a price. I think to change the system, we should start with that, as well as with the tenure track pyramid scheme structure
The UK has some universities who "double dip" on UK Research Council grants. They scoop most of the Staff money and divert and supplement the Estates and Indirect costs. I call this fraud. The universities call it price of doing business
Oligarch: how dare commoners expect not to be exploited!!!!!
I feel like I'm sometimes straining to hear what Tom's saying in a way I'm not with Zoe. Maybe som compression on the audio or move closer to the mic? Maybe Zoe could give some input. For some reason the audio is better in the 29:45 intermission segemnt.
Couldn't imagine being taught by Tom, I'd have to fight the urge to pick him up and put him on a tall shelf
So students are paying rising to the point of obscenity tuitions just for the one group of people whose service is most observable and impactful to get less?
At the University I taught at, a single student paid more per credit hour to take my class than I got paid to teach it.
If Socrates was Tenured he might have lived a longer life, and he might have been teaching until the end. I am sorry for what you have been through•🙃
Great video, loved the conversation. But to be honest, I can't relate to some of the issues being brought forward (or, at least, the way they are presented).
To "only" have a 2 year contract seems like stability to me. I've been at the same place for 9 years but have no guarantee of employment tomorrow, or any hour during that day. I serve at the pleasure of the king.
The lack of discretion concerning your duties (curricula, lesson plans, and scheduling) is just the condition of my employment. While off-putting, it's not extraordinary. If I don't do what the boss tells me to do when they tell me to do it, I could be unemployed seconds after. I have no presumption of being allowed that kind of latitude.
I suppose my point is, if there is one: what is being described as an aberration in your field is the expected normal for mine.
I want you to read how you just described your employment. Fallacy is life’s boot on your neck.
Perhaps you deserve more from life.
@@TheIgnoramus that's literally what I'm pointing out (if I'm understanding your second sentence as intended). Maybe my tone was off, it was depressing to put that into words.
@@barryrobbins7694 that's what I'm implying.
I imagine that such arrangement is relatively fine if you are well compensated for your work. If you have to work for poverty wages such as adjuncts, with little to no disposable income, you need more predictability and stability to not end up living on the streets. Career readjustments in academia are really slow due to the semester structure of universities, and even if you find a job, sometimes you may end up having a semester gap between employments. This mix of uncertainty and vulnerability can lead to major stress, depression, disruption of productivity, etc.
What’s up with that glass clinking? Lol interesting episode, but the glass clinking every time Tom began to talk was very distracting for me.
The sudden realization that every previous guest Tom has had on the show have been in Europe, when he finally has an American on the show and it's clearly rather late for him, lmao
wtf is this schedule