As UK academics prepare to go on strike this week, I ask all of you to remember a few things about what our jobs have become. #UCUstrikes 1/11
First, academia is rarely a 9-5 job. Academics are typically expected to work extremely long hours, work over weekends, and catch up on reading, marking, and of course research, they've missed during holidays. 2/11
I've not encountered any other sector in which workers have internalised this drive to work above and beyond what is contractually required. Universities get so much more work out of us than they pay for. Despite this, they continue to cut our pay and devalue our pensions. 3/11
Second, we all came into this field because of a passion for learning and a passion for sharing what we've learnt. Academics go through, usually, about a decade of tertiary education and training before starting their first job. 4/11
Instead of starting from the assumption that anyone willing to go through all of that might be knowledgeable and committed enough to design a programme of research that holistically combines our strengths and interests, universities instead assume bad faith. 5/11
Bloated administration teams manage our jobs through short-sighted teaching and research metrics that misunderstand what the purpose of a university should be. 6/11
The underfunding of universities compounds this problem. There is incessant pressure for us to apply for external research funding: forcing the full spectrum of intellectual creativity into a set of narrow bands of possible activity. 7/11
With success rates below 5% on many funding schemes, just think of all of the wasted effort that goes into this machine. If we chose to actually fund universities properly, this effort could all be spent on doing our core job: researching, writing, teaching, sharing. 8/11
My colleagues are brilliant, smart, dedicated, hard-working, kind, and generous people. They are doing their best within a system that has lost sight of what academia should be: not just for those of us who in it, but - more broadly - for society as well. 9/11
We need to push back against universities taking advantage of our goodwill, our care for our communities, and our passion for our work. Please remember this in the strikes. Support those of us on the picket lines. Join the union and do not cross picket lines. 10/11 #UCUstrikes
It is the only way that we can show that the power to change the direction of travel in academia can be exerted not just from the top, but also from all of us at the ground-level. 11/11 #UCUstrikes
