What’s in a word?

In English, it’s a university. In Welsh, it’s prifysgol. (Pronounced something like preeve-us-goll.) A bit of digging into those two different words can tell us a lot, I think, about the underlying reasons for the industrial action taking place in many UK universities today and for the coming days.

The industrial action (I think technically it looks like two different but overlapping actions) has a number of immediate causes. One is pensions – a dispute about USS contributions, the nature of the scheme and sustainability. The other is pay and conditions, including equality. (nb I’m not trying to provide a detailed account of the issues, just giving the context. The UCU website https://www.ucu.org.uk/heaction sets out the issues as they see them.)

The two words help us to understand the underlying issues.

Let’s go English language first. University comes from universitas – a Latin word meaning, roughly, a single body. A university is, in the medieval concept, a single corporate body, staff and students alike being subject to specific laws and rules, distinct from the laws which apply to others outside the community. And although the legal framework has changed in the last 800 years or so, universities do (claim to) hold values of collegiality. Members of university Senates and Academic Boards – at least those who aren’t on the university executive – behave in ways consistent with universities being a single corporate community.

Now the Welsh language word. Prifysgol is a compound word: Prif – meaning something like ‘main’, or ‘chief’, and Ysgol, meaning ‘school’. So a Prifysgol is the main school. Universities are the most advanced teaching organisations we have. And in the last twenty years or so (perhaps longer if you go back to the Jarrett report in the mid 1980’s) there has been an emphasis on value for the student and the transactional nature of the student contract. This is most pronounced in England – where there is now a regulator in the student interest, rather than a steward looking out for the sector as a whole – but the change can be seen across the UK in, for instance, the rise in the number of complaints made by students. There’s a correlation with the introduction of tuition fees for full-time undergraduate study, but I suspect you’ll also find a correlation with the increasing size of universities and the increasing proportion of people within an age cohort who go to university.

On these understandings, the strikes speak to two things. Firstly, as satisfying the students becomes more explicitly important, and university managers seek to identify what is wrong in a given situation and how to improve it, the autonomy of individual members of staff – academic and professional service – is diminished. The desires for consistency of approach to students, and for economy of action and cost, mean that universities increasingly try to agree standard approaches. This, coupled with increasing numbers of students, means that the job of teaching can become more routinized, and more subject to scrutiny. Greater micromanagement clever people is rarely a recipe for organisational happiness.

Secondly, the reality that universities are not really single communities. They are complex organisations, closely regulated, which require management. The sense that academic staff can control their work, and that they are working within a system which is fair, is diminishing. Let’s look, for example, at tweets from one academic - @sstroschein2 - to understand a perspective on strike action (I’m going to paraphrase rather than quote directly):

• Incremental changes over 15 years which make the job increasingly unmanageable
• High turnover of staff
• More students, larger classes
• Increasingly active but inapt management of teaching 
• More automation
• Research ranking which harms organisational dynamics and adds no value
• More pressure to compete in research
• Casualisation of junior academic staff roles and exploitation, leading to morale problems

Without trying to get into the rights and wrongs of these concerns (although from my observations there is a lot of truth in there), it is clear that there isn’t a broadly shared vision within many universities of what the university is for and how it should be run in the world of mass, student-focused higher education. This contrasts with the apparent culture of collegiality, and leads to discontented staff. In the long run this can’t hold.

What’s to be done? At some point the industrial action will end, with some sorts of compromises. Who knows what and when.

In the longer run, there’s a need for universities to find a stable way to work, which provides for sustainable and fulfilling academic and professional service careers, and which recognises that students are the raison d’être for most universities. Maybe this is a single sector-wide question; maybe it’s a question which each university needs to answer in its own way. (It’s probably a bit of both!)

A precursor, though, will be good leadership, and that means listening not fighting. If we like the notion of the university as a single community, and if we recognise that the students in the main school matter, it would be best to start the sitting round the table now.

The haves and the have-nots of the academic world

The Guardian today ran a story on the casualisation of academic staff at UK universities, headlining a Sports Direct comparison. The story is based on a UCU campaign against a lack of security for academic staff. What’s behind the numbers and the issues?

Firstly, the issue. Universities have three types of employment: permanent contracts; fixed term contracts; and ‘atypical’ contracts. Each of these comes in full-time and part-time mode. ‘Atypical’ is a tricky category: there are lots of reasons why. Here’s what HESA have to say about the definition (scroll down and expand 'Terms of employment'  for the source):

"Atypical staff are those whose working arrangements are not permanent, involve complex employment relationships and/or involve work away from the supervision of the normal work provider. These may be characterised by a high degree of flexibility for both the work provider and the working person, and may involve a triangular relationship that includes an agent. Source: Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Discussion Document on Employment Status, July 2003, paragraph 23.

In addition to this definition from the DTI, some HE specific guidance has been devised by HESA in consultation with HEIs. Atypical contracts meet one or more of the following conditions:

• are for less than four consecutive weeks - meaning that no statement of terms and conditions needs to be issued,

• are for one-off/short-term tasks - for example answering phones during clearing, staging an exhibition, organising a conference. There is no mutual obligation between the work provider and working person beyond the given period of work or project. In some cases individuals will be paid a fixed fee for the piece of work unrelated to hours/time spent,

• involve work away from the supervision of the normal work provider - but not as part of teaching company schemes or for teaching and research supervision associated with the provision of distance learning education,

• involve a high degree of flexibility often in a contract to work as and when required - for example conference catering, student ambassadors, student demonstrators."

Notice here that of the four special conditions the second and fourth cover a lot of ground. And this is the UCU’s point: teaching a module on an hourly-paid basis counts as atypical; being a tutor bought in to cover a short-term teaching need counts as atypical. These are the hourly-paid lecturers which universities often rely upon.

(It’s worth noting that ‘atypical staff’ can also include PhD students who do some teaching as part of their PhD study. This is a normal part of their PhD; witho7ut this experience they would be hindered in their future career.)

Universities say that they need flexibility: sometimes running a course depends on getting sufficient students to make it worthwhile. In this case, if your staffing cost is flexible, then the threshold for being able to run a course is lower (you don’t have to factor in the risk cost of redundancy if it doesn’t run). On this argument, the possibility of employing people on flexible contracts means that more courses are offered than would otherwise be the case.

The other problem highlighted by UCU is academic staff on fixed-term contracts. Such people have a job with regular hours – they can be full-time or part-time – but the contract has an end date. Legislation means that there has to be a reason for the fixed-term-ness (such as time-limited funding), and universities will argue that most research grants, for instance, are a fixed pot of money, to deliver specific outputs by a certain date. There’s also reasons like maternity cover: a person is needed for a specific period for a specific reason.

So what does the data show? It’s possible to recreate (or nearly so) the UCU data using HESA staffing data. HESA staff table 1 gives you numbers of full-time and part-time academic staff and also atypical academic staff at each university. Table 6 gives the number of academic staff – full-time and part-time – in Teaching only, Teaching and Research, Research only, and Neither teaching nor research roles at each university. And finally table L gives the proportions of staff, across the whole sector, in those same four categories who are on fixed-term contracts. With some simple arithmetic it’s possible to work out how many academic staff at each university have what UCU calls insecure employment – that is, are on a fixed-term contract or an atypical contract.

The headline data is stark.

• 52.3% of all academic staff – that is 145,575 people - are either on atypical or fixed-term contracts. 

• 67.4% of staff on ‘Research only’ contracts – 32,488 people – are on fixed term contracts.

• 54.4% of staff on ‘Teaching only’ contracts – 28,251 people – have fixed term appointments.

• 35.3% of academic staff on full-time or part-time contracts (that is, excluding those with atypical contracts) are on fixed-term contracts. That’s 70,015 people.

There are some things that the data doesn’t show.

One big one is that fixed term contracts can become a career pattern. 20 or more years of renewed two- or three-year fixed-term contracts is not unusual for researchers. It’s hard (very hard) for people to plan on this basis. Starting a family is a brave option without security of income. Getting a mortgage can be difficult without permanent employment.

A second big question is the proportion of teaching that is done by staff on these contracts. It isn’t unusual for a researcher who has been awarded a large research grant to ‘buy out’ their teaching duties. This can mean an hourly-paid tutor, or a fixed-term part-time role. So teaching, particularly at a research intensive university, may not proportionately be carried out by the faculty whose names you’ll find on the website. This doesn’t mean that the teaching will be bad: the tutors will still be knowledgeable, keen and expert. But is it quite what was expected?

It’s important to be measured. ‘Sports Direct’ are notorious for Victorian working practices; universities are not in the same league. But there are a lot of people who are not making a stable career in academia. They’re working on the margins. They’re the ones without an office, or even a nameplate on a door that students can find. And the data shows that there’s a lot of them about.