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Re Owen Jones’s article (We will all pay for the crisis in our universities, Journal, 14 February), I am the mother of a young academic who, since her graduation three years ago, has jumped through every hoop required and yet is still employed on a casual, short-term basis with no career structure, and no security. These young scholars are being continually forced to take on administrative work by senior staff, working regularly through the night so they can not only serve their students but also pursue the research they have to carry out to progress.
The brightest and best young scholars, after seven years of academic endeavour, are being hung out to dry by our government’s market ideology, seemingly assisted by universities who have forgotten their responsibilities to nurture their most talented young academics and by older staff who are in danger of creating a lost generation. I despair.
Julia Miller
Barrowby, Lincolnshire
• Owen Jones states that “seven out of 10 higher education researchers are stuck with the insecurity of fixed-term contracts, and 30% of teaching at many institutions is done by … casual workers and paid by the hour”. The seven out of 10 are overwhelmingly postdoctoral research assistants on short-term funded projects, while the 30% figure largely reflects PhD students who teach tutorials a few hours per week. Both are routes for junior academics to gain the experience needed to move into permanent posts. Is Jones suggesting these individuals be made permanent “assistants” and never move on to lectureships? Some academics do suffer from long-term and persistent casual appointments, and those practices should be stamped out. But Jones suggests precarious employment is the norm, a nefarious strategy of university managements bent on “marketisation”. In fact, two-thirds of academics are on permanent contracts and are still rewarded with the “status, security and top salaries” whose loss Jones laments.
The underlying problem is that universities are producing more qualified people seeking permanent academic posts than the system can employ. With this chronic excess supply, all universities can do is mitigate the effects, by, for example, providing funding between short-term contracts, and encouraging postgraduates to be realistic about the labour market by helping them access jobs in other sectors. Pursuing these and related policies would be far more helpful than a strike based on misleading claims about the academic labour market.
Prof Jim Tomlinson
University of Glasgow
Prof Beth Lord
University of Aberdeen
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