To think academics are seriously entitled??

I’m an academic. Starting pay for a lecturer is about 36/37k I believe so not amazing pay. I could definitely earn more back in industry.

The workload has massively increased recently as most departments have lost at least 25% of staff. When you also factor in the fact that professional services have also been decimated and we have to pick up a lot of what would previously have been done by them then I’m not surprised people are moaning about workload, etc.

The too many emails is an interesting one. I get probably between 50-100 emails a day. Bearing in mind I may well be teaching 9-4. Admittedly not every day but last week was 4 days of teaching and next week is 3 days of teaching. I only work 4 days a week currently and I’m also programme lead so am meant to have a lot of time for course admin. Then I don’t have a lot of time to deal with emails. Which is why most days I am sat at my desk at 7am and also answering emails in the evening. But it’s not a great workload.

Students have definitely become more “needy” and that seems to get worse every year. I am workload planned an hour per student per year to deal with them. And that’s only for the students who I’m personal tutor for. That hour a year includes 3 personal tutorials, any academic support and answering emails from them. Some students I never hear from, some I hear from a few times a week. Quite a bit of the time the email will be asking a question about something which they have been told or have access to that information. However is easier for them to email be rather than actually read the program handbook or assessment handbook! 😁. When I was a student my lecturers didn’t have email addresses or phone numbers so you either figured it out yourself or waited till you saw them in a lecture.

However overall I love my job and am passionate about it. I love supporting the students and seeing them develop over three years. I cry on their last day (we always have an end of course celebration), I cry at graduations. I consider myself lucky and privileged to have this job. I think I’m good at my job, my students seem to appreciate me. I try and be approachable and kind even when I’m drowning under my workload. It’s never boring, no two days are the same. But might I moan at a party about my workload? Quite possibly! 😁👍

Up to 5? I work in a 10-period school (10x45-minute lessons a day) and I definitely have colleagues whose TTs have 8 lessons a day on some of their days (and no, they are not teaching under 5 periods on the other days).

Saying that, I have never been called the sort of names you have suggested in your post, and I have been a teacher for 18 years, in 3 different countries (private and state schools). Thankfully.

I was an academic in the 1990s before all this dreary wokeness and gender nonsense came creeping in.

Im now retired and do private postdoc tutoring. Several posters upthread have mentioned the demanding and entitled attitude of students - mostly the home based variety. For that very reason I only take international students who need help with their thesis. They are highly motivated, hard working and respectful in a way that many home based students could learn from. Too many uk students have an "I pay your wages I want some service" attitude.

Well this is why I wondered if it's discipline specific. I use active learning in my methods training but I still consider that teaching, it's not secondary school type teaching but that is not the only kind of teaching there is. And then I have more traditional teaching sessions too.

I think we really sell ourselves short as a profession if we just say we're facilitators.

I can state that senior academics are in general the most needy and entitled people I've ever worked for. I work at a major university in a senior technical position and certain professors are the worst people I've ever worked with, incredibly rude, entitled and disrespectful. I actually refuse to work with a number of them unless they go to my director and he forces me.

There are a lot of different jobs underneath the “academic” umbrella… how unreasonable you are being depends on which discipline you’re talking about (and which university). Many academics are overworked and underpaid. University infrastructures are now so governmentally underfunded, you get professors doing five administrators’ jobs on top of their own teaching and research requirements.
I wish we could even better appreciate what higher education means to us as a society: eg class mobility, critical thinking development. But sorry you were offended at a party :( One clutch of dickheads needn’t represent an entire profession, eh?

Exactly. Most of the time, we’re trying to undo the damage of the secondary education system that students leave having been spoon-fed and taught to the test.

I use the term teaching but I’m not teaching in the same way a secondary teacher is teaching. I aim to facilitate learning using a variety of approaches. I’m particularly partial to active learning approaches. They suit my discipline well.

Tbf I get them complaining about emails. I’m a mature student and some of the things my peers tell me they email lecturers about baffles me. We have a WhatsApp group and it’s constant inane questions about information that is available on the portal if you just look for it. Generally I end up sending everyone links because despite being in my 30s apparently I’m the only one who knows how to google things like University Name + exam policy/exam dates/academic calendar or how to navigate the idiot proof module guides.

It winds me up and I’m not getting emails from a cohort of possibly 100+ students in each year about this crap.

And given your previous comment about students deserving a bit more than a bit of facilitation, you obviously have no understanding of pedagogy or modern instructional design. Creating an active, facilitated learning environment requires actual pedagogical skill. Claiming academics "don't know what we're doing" because we don't spoon-feed information simply exposes your own outdated view of education. Dismissing facilitation doesn't prove a lack of teaching ability—it just proves you don't know how people actually learn.

Many on MN are obsessed with children getting into RG universities but don't appreciate that the quality and quantity of teaching is often better in post-92. I've been to and taught in both and know which I prefer.

So yabu for that

I'm not a teachER
As an academic I am definitely teachING
I.e. imparting knowledge, skills, understanding to students

I'm shocked an academic would say they don't teach but perhaps this is a discipline specific thing

Lecturer pay is shit

There seems to be confusion about the difference between teaching, lecturing and facilitating. The terms are being used interchangeably which again indicates a lack of clear understanding. Most secondary school teachers fully understand what teaching actually involves. Academics claim - in some cases - to be teachers and have no actual understanding of what it is. This thread and discussions therein being a case in point.

Yeah, in my experience this rings true

Oh, how I wish you were correct. You've obviously never taught a group of undergraduates whose constant refrain is "do I need to know this for the assessment/exam?"

This sounds so relatable, and it was partly while I left.

I find this thread quite heartening. I think it has been a tough (again not Battle of the Somme tough) time for academics over the past few months. I have been saddened by some of the public flak we have received when, if they are paying home fees, students' education is subsided by our unpaid overtime and we still often offer up additional national service (such as government advisory roles or obviously public facing research) alongside teaching.

It's nice that not everyone thinks we are ivory towered freeloaders :)

Do a job you love and you ll never work a day in your life!
As a teacher i would go onto academia in a heartbeat if i were smart enough!

@whoshouldItalkto yes, this is true. I revalidated my course a year or so ago. I wrote most modules myself, and all other documentation. Did I receive any workload for doing this? Nope! Huge amount of work.

And now you are bitching and whining about them.

I have to admit my experience of academics in a professional context was not a positive one. I’m going to have to be annoying and not talk specifically because I’d hate to be identified (and they weren’t bad people so I wouldn’t want to identify them either and it’s a niche area) but they were studying an area which very much fit their (and my!) liberal ideals, “isn’t this great” (something Labour delivered) but the reality was a very challenging long term environment for the working classes that had to experience the ramifications of this policy decision in the modern era, something these academics celebrated and publicly lauded, but personally (and purposely) lived in the opposite circumstances, the only kind of comparison I could give is celebrating the NHS or state education system, and then choosing to use private sector health or education. It was SO hypocritical (as they were so judgemental of people who challenged this policy) and yet….they didn’t choose that for themselves. As someone who was working with them but working class living the experience of what they were celebrating, I found them to be hugely ignorant.

Also, in the profession I am in, I had to do a masters and was taught by people who only studied the material theoretically, they had no practical
or operational experience of the work I now do, and my opinion of them has only reduced over the years. So sheltered and ignorant.

BUT I am talking to quite a narrow area of academics, I hugely respect many academics and all they bring to society. Mostly Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland 🤣🤣

And differentiation is also more complicated when with the current race to the bottom in clearing you can have students coming in with wildly different qualifications. So you have 250 (say) students on your module, 30% roughly with statements of additional support needs which you need to facilitate and adjust for typically with little support and grades from, say, A* to C in core subject areas.

Again, it is different to teaching in a classroom but it is still teaching and still requires skill and expertise to do it well.

It has got better over time I think. Some of my lecturers did very little. I had one very bright lecturer who was known for sleeping most of the day on campus. He had a bed in his room and when we went in for tutorials you could see he had just got up.

Yes. Elective modules are so much easier to teach as they have at least chosen it.