Fractured futures? Recent transformations of academic work

Claire Parfitt, University of Sydney Keiko Yasukawa, University of Technology, Sydney James Goodman, University of Technology, Sydney

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.

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 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.

From precarity to security?

Senior managers and teaching-intensive workers alike recognised the extraordinary financial pressures and the practical challenges faced by academics in precarious employment. The drive for economic security was the primary reason that many people applied for STF positions. Having obtained the roles, many teaching intensive workers also felt that on-going employment gave a sense of belonging and legitimacy in the institution that was lacking for casual academics.

But it also became clear that a physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting workload was the price to be paid for that security and legitimacy.

I’m working every night ... when the assessment all comes in at once, you can have 150 people’s assessment to complete in three weeks. Chained to the desk day and night, that’s really unhealthy. (Female STF, New Universities)

Some STFs were able to provide estimates of their weekly working hours. One claimed he was ‘clocking up around 60 hours a week’ (Male STF, Sandstone), while another said, ‘I clocked up 90 to 110 hours a week’ (Male STF, New Universities).

Of the 40 STFs and EFRs (36 STFs and 4 EFRs) interviewed for this study, 32 respondents experienced workload issues, and 22 reported effects on work/ life balance, or family, physical health or mental health issues as a result of workload stress or overwork.

As one respondent put it:

You’re being exploited harder than everyone else. (Female STF, Sandstone)

Confusion and contradiction in the STF role

Teaching intensive work is often pitched as a means of developing teaching specialists and enhancing the educational experience of our students. Indeed, several people employed as STFs expressed their preference for teaching over research and their enthusiasm for becoming expert teachers:

I see myself as a teacher first and foremost ... My research at the moment is in teaching, not in my discipline. ... I’m also driving the curriculum renewal for the undergraduate course in my discipline. I’m exploring different approaches to teaching and learning ... (Male in EFR, New Universities).

But the heavy workloads and the numbers of students STFs were responsible for, made this kind of specialisation and enhancement impossible:

When you are taking 500 students, I think everyone needs to move their benchmark down of what good teaching can be.... you are not going to get stellar, amazing commendations ...when you’ve got 500 (Female STF, Sandstone).

The lack of clarity regarding the place of the STF within the overall academic career structure created confusion over the proposition that these staff would be teaching experts. One teaching-focused worker explains:

‘everybody was appointed on their research, not on their teaching. So ... teaching has been neglected’ (Male EFR, New Universities).

Similarly, another respondent explained that they did not have the required authority or respect to deliver changes to curriculum:

‘I don’t have the status. I was in a ... faculty board meeting on curriculum review and quite clearly there were others in more senior positions who had a much stronger voice. It sounds like you’re at the end of the table saying ‘pedagogy, pedagogy’. They’re saying ‘what?’ No, I don’t see that that will ever be equalised’ (Male in EFR, New Universities).

This tension regarding the expectation that STFs provide ‘leadership’ on teaching and student engagement but do not have the sufficient institutional recognition to drive change is hardly surprising given that STFs were appointed at levels A and B.

The lack of clarity regarding the STF also applied to the ‘scholarship’ expectation. There was widespread confusion and disagreement among STFs and their managers as to whether ‘scholarly teaching’ meant being informed by scholarship in the pedagogical literature or in their subject-area literature.

Scholarship linked to pedagogy and teaching, and learning is how we define scholarship in a teaching role...Teachers that don’t do research are simply actors mouthing the words of others. (Male Middle Manager, New Universities).

Another manager offered a more flexible view:

It doesn’t have to be education related scholarship for it to benefit someone’s teaching. (Female Senior Staff, Sandstone).

And several STFs felt that their performance would we reviewed unfavourably:

My own research program has kind of collapsed and I’m really concerned about what kind of plan I’m going to muster for my [performance review] meeting... (Female STF, Sandstone).

Importantly, STF respondents also observed the importance of the link between research and excellence in teaching:

When I am teaching those subjects [which are the areas of my research] I do better… You can only do that if you’re teaching three subjects a year in your area of specialisation. (Female STF, Sandstone).

What does this mean for the future of the university in Australia?

The STF experiment is inherently contradictory. Junior staff are appointed, but with the expectation of being ‘leaders’ and ‘experts’ in teaching and student experience. Teaching excellence is demanded of staff with workloads so devastating that many of them have suffered physical and psychological consequences and who are working outside their areas of expertise.

Workers are appointed as teaching focused, with no time for research, but driven by aspirations to join the academic career structure in a balanced teaching-and-research role. The opacity of expectations regarding ‘scholarly’ teaching is so deep as to defy neat summation.

STFs were established to decasualise the workforce but have in fact created a new category of employment outside the existing career structure, creating widespread confusion about its function.

These conditions demand urgent action:

• Existing STF roles should be converted into balanced teaching and research positions.

• Casual academics should be appointed to Level A positions, with teaching loads no more than 60 per cent of total working hours.

• Workload models are utterly unrealistic and should be redrafted to reflect the actual hours worked. ◆