Looking ahead

Posted on | March 24, 2008 | 2 Comments

Without wanting to read too much into this, it is becoming clear that if I can’t find some assistance soon, I’m going to have to think about moving elsewhere to continue my research. One of the downsides of being a ‘research intensive’ staff member is that access to a pool of students looking for work is quite limited, and depends on building relationships with teaching staff who work on on different schedules – namely the temporality of the semester – that don’t easily match those of fixed term contracts. Unfortunately these efforts are also regularly thwarted because of a degree of mutual envy that goes on between staff in either position, a kind of ‘grass is greener’ problem which makes researchers jealous of the security of tenure and its benefits (precisely the ongoing relationships with students and co-workers that enable research teams to be built) and teaching staff assume researchers have it easy being able to spend all their time reading and writing books without the imposition of admin and contact hours. Having a 75/25% research/teaching split before this current postdoc, I saw this from both sides, and probably have more to say about it than others, if anyone had a spare 5 minutes to think about any of this stuff anyway.

However, there are some wider issues at play that contribute to my current problem, which includes a decline in Honours and postgrad enrolment in the areas I do research (which isn’t helped by the few advance studies options available at these higher levels, and a backlog in PhD completions – itself partly a result of RHD students being employed as teaching, research or general staff elsewhere in the university). Add to this the increased staff:student ratio, the trend toward specialisation to cater for students’ vocational aspirations, better funding for research in other disciplines and unis, and a booming employment market outside academia…

And even if these other factors weren’t an issue, the interdisciplinary nature of my research means that the kind of expertise I need is particularly hard to find in the disciplines of my own training. Like so many other forms of cultural work, being a research fellow means developing a suite of entrepreneurial skills to entice people to invest in, work with and just generally help you, without the reassurance of any ongoing structural support, and without anyone with the time to show you how to do it.

Last week’s address to staff from the new Vice Chancellor showed just how stretched teaching staff are across the country, particularly in line with the 12 years of stalled funding under the previous Howard Government. And while this is a genuine problem, from my experience there is little imagination or effort on behalf of school management to address this medium-term blow-out* by drawing on – indeed, expanding the contract length for – the growing numbers of research staff. Unless we are talking about recruiting already established senior scholars to do this, which has the added outcome of boosting pre-defined research strengths for quality assessment purposes.

Hopefully there are already Heads of School and Faculty Deans with the foresight to have seen the imbalance in research-only appointments and current teaching capacity, recognize that a large number of experienced teaching staff are nearing retirement, and figure that it’s in everyone’s interests that they be replaced by scholars who have spent a few hours in the classroom. And here I mean time building a coherent syllabus and disciplinary framework that students can follow rather than being contracted, on successive 4 month binge-sessions, to assemble an ever-changing suite of guest lecturers for the hundreds of students currently being crammed into theatres. If this is the experience of most undergraduate students over the past 8-10 years, it’s little wonder they aren’t continuing further.

Meanwhile, the Humanities have a long way to go in providing adequate career resources, facilities and support for the amount of government and industry money their researchers are bringing to universities, which is worth bearing in mind as the global financial meltdown begins to bite on the past decade’s main revenue stream: international students.

*Current figures at the VC’s disposal suggest that undergraduate student enrolments have reached a plateau, and from next year will probably begin to decline.

Category: Academia, Research, Teaching

Comments

2 Responses to “Looking ahead”

  1. Mark Bahnisch
    March 24th, 2008 @ 6:03 pm

    Mel, what’s the time frame for an RA? Is it immediate or would after this semester be ok? I might be able to think of two who would probably be a good match for the skills and project – anyway, email me if interested is probably best.

    mbahnisch at gmail dot com

  2. melgregg
    March 24th, 2008 @ 7:15 pm

    Oh, just to be clear: I need the general RA to start ASAP. The next round of interviews for my Working from Home project needs to happen May through July, so that particular job won’t suit someone teaching. I will also be away for some of that time, so they will need to be working fairly autonomously by that stage.

    Cheers but.

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