Many, although probably not enough, academics across the UK are on strike again this week – the latest round of industrial action over pensions, pay and working conditions.
Personally, I quibbled over whether to vote for this strike. Previous action seems to have yielded no results. Moreover, I am teaching MA students this semester. This is a cohort who have had a particularly bad time at university: assuming they took no breaks, they were affected in their first undergraduate year by strikes and in the second and third years by the Covid pandemic. Now we are potentially ruining their final year.
However, despite all these misgivings, and despite the fact that only the pension dispute has any real-life consequences for me personally, I chose to go on strike in solidarity with my younger colleagues, too many of whom are faced with what has become, frankly, a terrible job with terrible employers.
I’m now on the other side of short-term contracts and of moving all around the country for jobs. But too many youngsters today have no hope ever to join me. Fifteen years ago, when I first went on the job market, many freshly minted PhDs used to take one or two postdoctoral contracts for one to three years. However, the expectation was that after this, we would all end up with permanent lectureships. Now, many departments offer nine- or 10-month contracts, renewed again and again, but with “breaks” over the summer. Those breaks mean that the employer has no legal obligations towards people who, in reality, they need and employ for years.
This state of affairs also means real financial struggle and constant uncertainty. And casualisation gets even uglier: many institutions offer single courses to be taught, obliging many new academics to give multiple courses at different places. Such a chaotic life removes any time to publish: the only way to break the vicious circle of short-term teaching jobs.
For those lucky enough to get the open-ended contract, the realities of pay are almost as terrible. The starting salary for someone with a PhD is pretty much the same today as it was 15 years ago, and while it was a lot of money then, it is emphatically not now: certainly not for a person who had to study between seven and eight years to qualify for their job. Many of our younger colleagues will never afford a house, especially in expensive cities such as London and Oxford. “Professor” used to be a solid middle- to upper-middle-class job. Now it is looking increasingly like a lower-middle-class job. And with all the precarity and low pay comes lower prestige.
Why does it matter? A loss of talent is one of the major consequences, not only harming the international attractiveness of a sector that has traditionally been one of the most successful British exports, but also draining the domestic talent. Why would someone choose this job over finance, law or managerial jobs in businesses? And while the public might not care that their English literature professor is not the smartest person in the room, they will surely start taking note if professors of medicine or engineering are no longer recruited from among the best and brightest.
The decline in academia’s working conditions also prevents it from becoming more diverse. Yes, there are biases that prevent diversification from within, but the truth is that we will struggle to persuade a diverse group of people to even enter academic careers in the first place. How can you ask people without rich parents to do this job? How can you ask women, who will not be able to start a family because of their job insecurity? How will you be able to ask ethnic minorities, who do not have the kind of financial safety net that would allow them to scrape along on terrible pay for decades before they are promoted to a level with a decent salary?
It is clear that if we continue like this, we will soon end up with a mediocre academia, full of mediocre, privileged white men. Breakthrough innovations will dry up, and future generations will be poorly educated. A vicious circle will be created.
It is time that universities’ leadership realised that their business rests on human resources. It is not the buildings and labs that make a world-leading university – it is the people who work in those buildings and labs. And their talents can be taken elsewhere in our globalised economy.
How will our terrible employers feel when they end up with terrible employees?
Maria Sobolewska is professor of political science at the University of Manchester.
