To think academics are seriously entitled??

Exactly. I’ve got some new sessions this year and it’s taking me 3 - 4 hours to prepare one hour of teaching and that’s fast going!

Is your role really that unique? Then perhaps it’s not comparable to most academic roles.
I teach a course that is quite niche but my actual role is pretty standard compared to other academics.

They’ve just reduced the hours we get for prep at my place. Doesn’t mean we can do it any faster but it does mean my workload looks like I can take on more duties!

lol. How convenient. Saying ‘teaching only contract in a Post-92’ or ‘Reader in a red brick’ is hardly outing!

Im going to assume research does not form part of your job, and that you’re in a practitioner based field - nursing or teacher training for example.

This happened to a colleague who is the first to admit being a pushover. This particular student was obsessed with H.P Lovecraft and talked about him for an hour solid in their first meeting. He then sent a manuscript he’d been working on which was essentially like a postmodernist retelling of At the Mountains of Madness and it was indeed around 70k words.

Anyway, that aside. Most of us academics are simply charming and not entitled whatsoever. The worst and rudest academic I have ever met was a classics professor. Nothing against the classics, I’ve met Mary Beard and she’s delightful but this prick was something else.

‘Nice pay’? Not so sure about that! And you do know that they work beyond the hours they actually teach? My DD had to interview academics for a research paper and it was a real insight into how they felt about their workload and conditions (they assumed she was a PhD student not the first year she actually was). Put her right off becoming one herself.

Senior post 92. No research.

You realise “no research” makes a colossal difference, right?

Still workloaded according to contract.

I'm an academic. I'm constantly expected to work unpaid overtime or do roles that carry no funding. Teaching takes up a LOT of time, from offering pastoral care to students to checking their essays for AI slop. People expect you to answer emails on holiday, at 10pm, on Sundays. There're huge redundancies and lots of uncertainty in the sector. My salary is in the region of 60k and I spent years studying for this job.

It's really not a walk in the park or an easy ride. And if the student numbers fall short, your department faces huge cuts. Every year is stressful. My hours have been cut this year too.

Sure, but this fundamentally changes the nature and demands of the role.

No research is a massive reduction on workload and frustration

Where I work there are loads of staff stacked high with teaching on teaching only contracts. Staff on standard research contracts are not managed robustly with the expectation of research. There are tons of them with precisely zero outputs and doing nothing but getting less workload for teaching and taking research leave as holiday! It's quite unbelievable really.

The teaching only staff feel a bit aggrieved.

There was a good times HE article about the two types of contract this week actually.

No research makes a huge difference.

Ive taught in FE and primary (no younger teens) and absolutely teaching adults is better.

However teaching is a small part of most academics workloads so to compare a teaching focussed contract to what others are doing is madness.

Most of my time is spent on PhD research, supporting research officers and managing research staff - all of which I have to find funding for or attract. We essentially bring in our own salaries whilst being employed and not profiting ourselves but facing daily pressure and criticism of our ideas and efforts. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve spent weeks writing grants for one reviewer to misinterpret it (deliberately sometimes) and for us not to get it which puts our jobs at risk.

Sure - many jobs also have similar pressures but they complain it’s hard too. In fact I’ve realised most people are stressed by work, just in different ways which is either reassuring or depressing or both.