Opinio Hiberno: Don’t Blame the Lecturers

It’s that time of year again. The time that all academics hate and all students love: the start of the summer. As Ireland enjoys its 2.5 days of sunshine for this year many of us are stuck inside our offices and living rooms with attractive piles of pink, yellow and blue exam books correcting what feels like an endless stream of information. No matter how much someone loves lecturing, researching and writing you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who enjoys marking papers. However it’s an essential part of the job. You do it twice a year and you try to do it well, because it’s a part that really matters to students. You go through scripts slowly; you read things twice; you try to decipher the handwriting of 19 year old boys who’ve been up all night, are high on red bull and cigarettes and whose handwriting resembles a spider’s web. You do it because that mark actually makes a difference in their lives.

It’s precisely because it makes a difference and because we care so much about examination results that lecturers who go on strike tend to focus their energies on not correcting examination scripts. We’re no fools: we know that if we were to refuse to teach our classes our students probably wouldn’t care that much, after all there’s ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Doctors’ and ‘Countdown’ to watch in the same time as you’d cover a basic concept in a property law lecture…and television requires no supplementary reading apart from the odd glance at the schedule. Refusing to teach would have practically no impact. So lecturers refuse to correct examinations.

How successful is this tactic though? In order to strike successfully you need to not only cause disruption that makes your value clear to your employer, but also to garner a large amount of good will from the public at large. It strikes me (if you’ll forgive the pun) that our colleagues in the UK are failing to do the second while excelling at the first, largely because they’re failing to get their message across (the perpetual curse of the academic…).

The academic strike in the UK is really about one thing: pay. The UK is a strange place for academics: loads of opportunities, seemingly endless streams of universities, but atrocious pay. By means of example take this job, currently advertised for Warwick Law School – one of the best schools in the country (the salary and conditions would be the same anywhere…). There’s nothing unusual about the job – you need a PhD, good research profile, innovative teaching methods etc… Salary? £29k - £37k per annum. Sounds like good money, right? Wrong – degree, masters, PhD, student debt, 8-10 hours teaching, curriculum development and independent research means most people have studied at least 7 years to work at least 50 hours a week for a pretty average wage.

So there’s no question that UK academics have the short end of the stick when it comes to pay, and yes, they should have this problem remedied in a way that really shows the UK values third level education and the role that it plays in society (‘education, education, education’ as John Prescott et. al. would say….over a game of croquet and a G&T). Is this strike the best way to go about it though? The only people suffering are the students and, presumably, overworked and even worse paid people in examinations offices throughout the country. Some academics are feeling guilty about it – I know of at least two in my own field who are secretly correcting their final year examinations because they don’t want to hurt their students’ prospects. Some students are angry and some support the lecturers (for sample views see here), but few people are talking about who’s really to blame. It’s not the lecturers – this is the only power they have, their only bargaining chip and it’s understandable that they’d use it. A lot of people, however, are directing ill-will towards them taking students hostage in this way, and the academic union is failing to put together a successful PR campaign that’ll turn the tide.

In reality, however, that ill-will would be better directed at university authorities. They are earning more money from top-up fees but not paying lecturers a decent rate, despite the fact that the academic staff in a university is probably the top attraction for prospective students (except in the top notch of LSE, Oxford, Durham etc… where faculty is really the last thing on students’ minds). Those lecturers are bringing students in and making sure they stay there by being innovative, cutting edge, writing well and inspiring their students. Universities need to start valuing their academic staff and realising that really, it’s the people who matter.