The RED Report: The contribution of sessional teachers to higher education, Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2008

From the introduction, by Professor Rob Castle, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic and International), University of Wollongong:

To maintain for permanent staff the ideal of being teaching and research academics, we have had to rely on sessional staff. The analogy I’ve always made with sessional staff is to describe them as the proletariat of the academic profession, but that Victorian description of an industrial working class just doesn’t fit as well as that other part of Victorian life, the domestic servant.

In many ways the lifestyle of the traditional teaching research academic is totally dependent on the contribution of sessional staff, in the way that Victorian middle class lifestyles were dependent on the domestic servant. They slept in the attic, ate in the kitchen and you grumbled constantly that what they did was actually not quite what you wanted. But nonetheless, they were absolutely essential to your being and to your lifestyle. I think this applies equally to many sessional staff today.

From the opening summary:

The analysis of current policy and practice across the participating institutions found that

- Evidence of systemic sustainable policy and practice is rare;

- There is a general lack of formal policy and procedure in relation to the employment and administrative support of sessional teachers;

- While induction is considered important in all universities, the ongoing academic management of sessional teachers is not as well understood or articulated;

- Paid participation in compulsory professional development for sessional teachers is atypical; and

- Despite various national and institutional recognition and reward
initiatives, many sessional teachers continue to feel their contribution is undervalued.

What follows are some notes compiled from one such meeting – the postgraduate students’ panel that is the final session on day 1. I wanted to post these before the conference so that anyone interested might get a sense of what we’ll be talking about; also because the group decided they will finish their session with a list of “10 things graduate students want.” This seemed like something that could benefit from some dialogue. So after reading their ideas, maybe some of you might like to leave your thoughts to add to the mix. We can then draw them in to the conversation on the day.

The panel comprises:

Tammi Jonas (University of Melbourne & CAPA)
Brady Robards (Griffith University)
Simon Sellars (Monash University)
Hannah Stark (University of Adelaide)

Their task is to respond to the day’s events and present their own perspectives on ‘the state of the industry’.

*Notes compiled by Alison Huber*

NB: These notes are designed to reflect some of the things we talked about on the day, not what the presentations will consist of themselves. Speakers will now prepare presentations that build on what we discussed. Also, while some of these topics will have been covered earlier in the day, the panel felt it would be useful to offer the postgraduate’s perspective on these matters. In no particular order, the four topics that will be addressed are:

1. Sessional teaching, inc. course coordination and tutoring

* Lack of adequate training and support; lack of work space in which to meet with students; what sort of impact does this have on the experience and quality of teaching?

* Disparity across institutions in relation to wages – some universities expect their tutors to attend lectures and meetings and mark essays all without payment of any kind, while other institutions pay for much more of what’s involved in tutoring; some institutions are no longer paying postgraduates for giving guest lectures, claiming that its real payment is the experience. At stake here is: what should be reasonably expected from a tutor in a time vs. wages analysis? With increasingly time-consuming models of assessment for markers (eg, monitoring blogging or other online tasks), and the increase in the numbers of email rather than face-to-face contact with students, old models of remuneration are becoming increasingly redundant.

* Payment in relation to experience – while tutors with PhDs are paid more than those who are still postgraduates, what about rewarding tutors for their years of tutoring experience? There are several issues that could result from this though – it could lead to disadvantage for those who do have experience (because they will be more expensive to hire); at the same time, it could also return tutoring to its original purpose, which was to give postgraduate students access to the experience of teaching undergraduates. Also noted in this conversation was the fact that some departments continue to give tutoring work to very experienced tutors, many of whom have long finished their PhDs, and so take the work away from those inexperienced postgrads who are then never given the chance of sessional tutoring. The question here seems to be, what is the status of ‘experience’ in sessional tutoring?

* Morale – to what extent do the conditions of sessional teaching contribute to a lack of morale, and to what extent might this impact on the learning experience for students? Under these conditions, is the standard of education being compromised?

2. Professional development and mentoring

* the obscure nature of the PhD candidature and its processes at many institutions – there were a variety of stories shared here about people needing to muddle their own ways through their candidature, with little guidance until reaching milestones. This is an issue partly to do with supervision, but also to do with the way that the postgrad is often left to his/her own devices in a ‘survival of the fittest’ model of candidature. Again, the disparity across different institutions became obvious here. Can there be a coordinated effort to ensure that students have equal access to professional development throughout their candidatue?

* since it seems clear that there are not enough jobs in universities for the volume of PhD graduates in Australia, to what extent might departments and institutions have a responsibility to help students think about work outside the university, and how the skills of the PhD transfer into the wider workplace? How can we avoid the pessimism that many students feel about their prospects when they are constantly told that there are ‘no jobs’?

* what about the end of the PhD, when students are often ‘cut loose’ from their scholarship, their office (if they had one), etc? is there a way that institutions can assist students in that post-PhD moment between submission and reports, to help them transition into (full-time) work? The NTEU has lobbied for an extension of scholarship to include this time, so that students can get on their feet following submission; this is a time of confusion and exhaustion for many students.

3. Collegial atmosphere/ growth of a departmental culture/ networking

* everyone talked here about the importance of feeling part of a research culture in a department that includes both the academic staff and the postgraduate students. A variety of examples emerged here about models that have been successful in producing a sense of community, as well as some about the lack of a supportive environment in which to study.

* in an ideal world, ‘supervision’ is not just a one-on-one hierarchical model, but actually a ‘peer’ model, where students have access to other academic staff in a collegial context (eg, seminar series), and where they work with each other; this is part of the way to avoid the sometimes lonely life of the solitary postgrad.

* the group noted the importance of physical spaces in developing this atmosphere: meeting rooms or tea rooms, as well as offices on campus that allow students to use their postgrad experience like a ‘real job’ where they go in daily, 9-5 (or similar), to an office where others are doing the same thing around them.

* the encouragement of networking outside the home institution – this can be an issue of funding (in terms of enabling students to attend conference etc), but how can universities further help their students form or access a network of scholars in their field? This is particularly important for students who find themselves isolated in their department because of a specialised PhD topic.

4. Post-PhD career path

* in a similar vein to Topic 2, the panel thought that many of the challenges/ decisions that a student faces post-PhD are not discussed openly, and again people are left to trial and error to find out ‘what happens next’. What are the options for post-PhD? How prepared should one be for this time during candidature itself? What is an academic job interview like, for example, and can institutions help to prepare for these sorts of experiences during candidature? If publications are so important to getting jobs and grants, why are they not made more of a feature/ requirement during candidature?

* increasingly, the experience of work in the immediate years post-PhD is one of piecemeal casual employment; what does this mean in a broader sense for universities, and how does it affect the purpose of the PhD? How long should one be prepared to pursue this sort of work in the years following a PhD qualification?

Other things we noted

We did discuss the idea of presenting a Utopian model for PhD experience; while some of the panel liked this idea, others thought that it was dangerous for giving the impression of this being a panel of ‘dreamy’ or naïve postgrads who don’t live in the reality of university budgets and policies (which is not the case). So we want to find a balance between outlining an ideal world, and finding a way that this ideal can operate within the current constraints of university politics.

It’s also important to find the balance between complaining about things that are inadequate/ wrong in the system, and offering suggestions for ways in which conditions could be improved.

We realise too that there is not really any new information here in what we discussed; rather we see this panel as being important in highlighting what we already know to be the deficiencies and strengths of the current postgraduate/ PhD experience in order to have an open discussion in such a forum. The group represents a range of positions/experiences, both positive and negative, and we want to highlight these differences in the panel.

I wrote this paper while living in Brisbane, and it has had several initial airings – at AoIR 2006, in a fantastic panel with Jean Burgess among others, and Cultural Studies Now in London. That was the Sunday morning time slot that all long-haul flying Australians lament as their fate but it was acutely memorable for me… it was perhaps the only time I’ll share an academic platform with the remarkable Nadia Mizner and Kiley Gaffney: such amazing women doing incredible things.

A lot of HCT readers will see themselves in this piece in one way or another, so I wanted to thank those of you who were part of the moment it’s trying to capture. The more I see of graduate and junior faculty life the more I appreciate the generosity and significance of what can take place here and other precious online spaces. (If you don’t have access to the journal and would like a copy, let me know).

In the past year especially Facebook and Twitter have irreparably changed the sensibility and community described in the piece, and in many ways that is hardly a bad thing. But their more encompassing reach and their capacity to make familiar the broadcast impulse behind blogging hardly change my concerns about the split between virtual and actual labour politics. Both must be realised in combination to change the present conditions of academic life.

Taking account of the number of registrations already on hand, we’ve had to move the State of the Industry conference to a bigger venue. We’re basically at capacity before our main advertising campaign has started. If you haven’t checked the line up for a while, we now have four plenaries, Simon Marginson (Melb), Genevieve Kelly (NTEU NSW State Secretary), Margaret Shiel (ARC) and Genevieve Bell (Intel). On top of this, some of the biggest names in Australian cultural research will be speaking in a way that will be unfamiliar to many – no power point, no papers, just honest insights on things they’ve noticed working in academia. Open discussion is the main focus.

If you haven’t registered and plan to come, please help us out by going to the website and downloading the form (which goes to Alison Huber). This is really vital for planning. There is also a Facebook page if you are into that sort of thing. It has the draft of the promo poster we’ll be sending out soon. Let me know if you want one for your workplace.

The response to the event so far is really encouraging. I still regret coming up with the idea, in the sense that it has meant more work on top of everything else. Starting a new job this semester has been busy enough. But it has been fun (and unusual) to work collectively on a project that is bigger than the regular – read insular – academic concerns. It’s given me the chance to get in touch with a range of people working in various roles around the country, and to learn from different age groups how much has changed (or not) in academic employment.

To that end, I should probably report that when I met with Genevieve Kelly last month to outline the conference mandate, it was clear that the union has yet to really catch on to the problem of casualisation as a lived reality. In saying that, I certainly appreciate that the present bargaining campaigns are featuring limits on casualisation as a core objective, and that’s absolutely appropriate. My concern is that “casualisation” doesn’t begin to convey the difficulties that young scholars in particular are facing.

Casual teaching on contracts has happened for a long time. What seems genuinely new now is the amount of people doing this and other forms of work without much pretense of supervision. I’m talking about those who are employed across several campuses in a range of teaching and admin roles. These multiple jobs, and the forms of institutional negotiation involved in keeping them, don’t register on the radar of fellow staff, who are stressed out enough with their own workloads. They are given out as if they are a privilege to people who don’t even get a place to hang up their coat, let alone make a cup of tea or dock their laptop. Well, they can’t afford a laptop that works anyway.

Union membership presumes a steady relationship with a single employer. Genevieve mentioned her experience showing up to meetings on campuses where members were present but not on file. The idea that there could be several unis employing them simultaneously was foreign. But this happens regularly.

Then there’s the casual research assistant or postgrad who also doubles as general staff. Do they join the same union? Maybe not, if the NTEU can’t recognise their chameleon status. The industry as a whole fails to account for these workers who don’t fully occupy a coherent employee identity – as if this situation were only temporary, and not deeply structural.

There’s no one in particular to blame here: in fact, it’s the constant management and administrative flux internal to organisations that allows these tiny incidents of casualised labour to go missing. Who notices when casuals don’t come to work? Who cares if there are dozens of RAs working in the library rather than having offices? Surely postgrads should be able to pay for home broadband to mark 100 online assignments in a week? So what if a student has to miss class if their tutor falls ill?

I’m all for a Kafkaesque attitude to bureaucracy, but some of these things can be fixed. When a government promises an education revolution, it needs to provide a frontline. And in the shift to flexible work cultures, it is too convenient for organisations to pretend not to know, let alone take responsibility for what’s going on.

This is particularly in light of the number of PhD graduates whose challenge to pay the rent is the first priority that detracts from their ability to “plan” “careers”… starting in their mid-30s or older… by publishing articles, writing books or applying for grants that position them for ongoing employment. These “casual” workers cope with crap from both ends – they do the teaching that tenured staff don’t want to do, and in some places the co-ordinating too. As research support or “professional” staff they also get to implement the increasingly horrible corporate jargon and branding initiatives of management.

If they are trained in critical disciplines, that is, the humanities and many of the social sciences, this sort of experience can only feel like the worst kind of schizophrenia or hypocrisy.

Last week’s LH Martin Institute briefing concluded that without better efforts to create long term strategy, good people will simply leave the academic profession. Oh, but *so many* already have. If your experience had been routinely dismissed as passing by management cultures perpetuating a permanent state of exception, would you really wait around for Baby Boomers to retire, just to be invited to fix such ingrained indignities?

The sense of invisibility many young scholars know so well is precisely the structure of feeling unions are designed to address. What I’m hoping is that the State of the Industry conference can bring the NTEU’s work and cultural research into better dialogue, to reawaken a labourist project for a very different academic workplace. These are also some of the thoughts I’ll be taking with me to Canberra this month as an NTEU delegate to the HASS on the Hill meeting. I’d be happy to take more – and to hear others’ ideas both here and elsewhere…

Apart from highlighting the inadequacies of workload formulae across every level of academic life, it’s also one of the best reports I’ve read showing the impact of online technology on academic work.

The figures are stunning enough. Number of those surveyed who worked on weekends: 100%. UWS staff/student ratio: 1:23. And be sure to check out the pie chart comparing Level A appointments.

A sample of quotes:

- “It is now 5.15pm. I have been up since 4am marking assignments and I still haven’t finished”

- “I had to turn around 86 hours of marking in 10 days. 86 hours is what I actually get paid presuming I can mark 1,000 words every 20 minutes, which I can’t…”

- “In 2008 I have taught 7 different units none of which I have taught before”

- “This year I travelled to other campuses twice per week. I had a WLA for 7 return trips but had to undertake 13 return trips to see students and collect exams. $300 in tolls”

I came across this amazing research while trying to find out about the union’s recent campaigns – part of ongoing preparations for the State of the Industry conference happening in November. We may yet hear more about this, and hopefully one of the study’s research team will agree to speak on Day 1. But so far, in spite of numerous emails and phone calls, the NTEU President doesn’t seem available, or at least hasn’t told us one way or another over the past 3 months. I’m quite disappointed about this, since so much anecdotal evidence would suggest the NTEU’s profile could do with some boosting. I had thought the conference offered a timely opportunity for the industry’s peak representative body to prove its relevance to a significant part of its constituency.

Maybe I’ve just gone about asking the wrong way. If the report is any indication of the wider experience of contemporary worklife, our President is probably drowning in email and can’t imagine any way of handling the amount of communication requests she receives…