◆ RESEARCH Image:Pxhere Name
Fractured futures? Recent transformations of academic work In the 2012-13 bargaining round, the NTEU negotiated a new category of employment for academic staff. Drawing existing casual academic staff into on-going, teaching-focused positions, the Scholarly Teaching Fellow (STF) was introduced to reduce casualisation and promote job security. By 2018, 30 out of 35 university enterprise agreements established a total 850 STFs or STFlike positions; around 800 of these positions have been filled. Meanwhile, the proportion of casual staff in teaching and teaching-and-research roles has increased slightly or remained the same. What was the impact of the STF on the structure of the higher education workforce, on the daily lives of STFs themselves and on the future prospects for academic workers? We recently completed 5 years of research to explore precisely these questions. Based on 80 interviews with university staff, primarily people employed as STFs and senior university managers, as well as 4 focus groups and a deliberative conference, we evaluated the recent transformation of academic work that is facilitated by the STF and other teaching intensive roles. Given the deep crisis that higher education currently faces, this work offers important insights into existing working conditions in universities, prospects for the future, and strategic challenges for the Union.
Claire Parfitt, University of Sydney
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The shape of today’s academic workforce The historical and institutional backdrop for the transformation of academic work includes a financial crunch, driven by falling per-student funding from the Commonwealth, and changes in performance indicators and rankings for both universities and staff, including the increasing prevalence of research metrics. Also, since the 1990s, universities have been amongst the most avid employers of precarious labour. Today the academic workforce is deeply segmented between people employed in on-going roles with a balance of teaching and research responsibilities, and people employed on contingent contracts, usually to perform either teaching or
Keiko Yasukawa, University of Technology, Sydney
ADVOCATE VOL. 27 NO. 3 ◆ NOV 2020
research work. The STF category and other teaching-intensive roles, sit outside the existing academic work structure and career pathway. They lock workers into on-going, teaching intensive positions, usually with little prospect of progression or sideways movement into teaching-and-research roles. While many STFs have hoped to use their positions to springboard into on-going balanced roles, STFs are typically unable to develop a research profile due to their debilitating teaching workloads. The STF, along with the expansion of teaching-intensive work in other ways, is creating a risk of further entrenching existing divisions between workers in academia.
James Goodman, University of Technology, Sydney
