'Teaching only' contracts- thoughts?

[90daychallenger]

Our VC wants to switch current academic staff to the US system of grading so lecturers become assistant profs and senior lecturers and readers become associate profs.

This move would only be for the 'best' academic staff, those with excellent teaching scores and performing above what's required for REF.

The rest of the permanent academic staff who don't make the grade to go onto this new grading system will be shifted onto 'teaching only' contracts. I assume permanent contracts but who knows.

This is just his plan, there's been nothing consulted on yet but I think it's coming very soon and it's got me thinking.

It strikes me that these 'teaching only' contracts will be regarded as a sort of consolation prize for those who don't make the grade in research terms. 'Teaching only' colleagues will, I think, be seen as not 'proper' academics. It does also raise questions about the 'research-led teaching' approach though this seems to be mostly marketing.

However, a 'teaching only' contract sounds really appealing to me. I don't like research, I'm not very good at it, I find writing papers hard and boring, I don't have any particularly good grant ideas and I'm not motivated to get grant money in. OTOH, I really enjoy teaching!

So, do you think universities will adopt the US grading system? And, consequently, do you think there will be more 'teaching only' jobs? If so, what do you think the implications of that will be? Would you take a teaching only contract?

fluffikins You raise a really interesting point about gender which I'd only vaguely considered before bad feminist

It's really interesting to hear about your experiences. May I ask, what type of university are you at? Post-1992? RG?

I think the time allocated to research in a lot of places is notional now. A lot of RG unis allocate 40% but I don't know a single person who actually gets anything like that, unless they buy themselves out. I know a lot of senior professors who work 50-60 hour weeks without getting a single piece of research done due to admin load, teaching. Evenings/weekends have to bet used, but to be honest I fear that research that requires real brainwork is really quite difficult to fit in this way, and can often only be supported via an unequal division of labour in the home, which inherently disadvantages women.

I think it's about time we started demanding a more realistic accounting for time from the management. If a 70 hour week is necessary to do the job, salaries ought to increase commensurately.

Oh, and on distribution of work - there should be a Workload Allocation Framework (WAF) in place in your institutions! This should be there to ensure that everyone has the right loading for their level. While there is some variability between loads, there shouldn't be anywhere near the discrepancy that some of you are describing. I think in your shoes I would be tempted to ask for an anonymized version of the WAF, with my place highlighted so I could compare!!

One slender upside of managerialism is that this is getting tackled in a lot of well-managed departments now. I get the impression some are behind the curve though, with the arts & hums particularly recalcitrant!!

What I get annoyed by is that often those on teaching only contracts actually have less teaching than me and are paid more. I'm at a plate glass uni.

We have a WAF but it's cleverly manipulated by some and others get hours allocated to them for specific roles but don't actually do half the work required for those roles

Yep, agree with Fluffikins about manipulation of workload models.

In academia it's hard to deal effectively with very strong researchers who don't do admin jobs well. I often think that I should copy them but I would have a bad conscience about not doing admin passably well.

We also have a WAF which has recently been made public.

The issue is that those of us, like me, on the 'base' which adds up to 35 hours a week are seen as not having enough of a workload. One of my colleagues who is in this situation is desperately trying to increase his workload so he's not one of those on the 'base'. I find this ridiculous- people are scrambling around for work to take them over the 35 hours a week that we're paid for.

A key way to to this is through more PhD students and more administration but I find people who do this spread themselves far too thinly as PP have said.

haybott - I suspect that there is a sea change here. DH's department is very, very intolerant of bad admin these days, even if the research is good. It's seen as uncollegiate, and if you do it badly, you'll find yourself on a Personal Improvement Plan pretty sharpish. But they are very, very managerial - to the point that it's sort of gone too far the other way IMO.

But if you are a really world leading researcher, winning international prizes and pulling in prestigious grants, UK universities can't put you on a PiP for not doing admin properly because you will just leave. US universities don't expect academics to do the admin required in the UK.

In DH's department, they've started doing it, and you're right - some people leave. Others knuckle down. The losses are (privately) seen as a bit of a win, because these people require a lot of management and are often difficult colleagues more generally. Furthermore, they have hitherto been able to recruit high quality young academics who are able to do the whole job. It's helped by the fact they are very, very well run, have one of the best REF scores in the field, and they have a very good rate of income capture as all members of staff have to write at least one bid a year.

Personally, I am skeptical about it as a solution, but that's partly because I'm quite elitist and a believer in special people doing special things under special rules . I do agree that the admin is ridiculous and, in many cases, unnecessary, and is growing like topsy. I partly blame the expansion of professional services and the career-building initiativitis that comes with that, but I don't think managerialism really acts as much of a bulwark against it.

Being unperturbed by the loss of a strong researcher who is continually difficult I can understand. Somebody who acts like a prima donna and does teaching as well as admin poorly would not get away with it with us unless they were truly exceptional.

But it depends what calibre people we are talking about. It is unrealistic to expect a Nobel prize winner/Fields medallist (Maths equivalent) to go on a PiP for being poor at admin and the loss of such a staff member could never be seen as a win, even privately. Realistically there are going to be special rules for the very top people (as well as special salaries).

Yes, exactly haybott. How many departments have people who are genuinely in that second, world-beating category? There aren't that many Nobel laureates around, and very different rules can be demanded with recognition like that.

The trouble is that I do think a lot of people in the former category are difficult precisely because they have strange delusions of grandeur that they're in the latter category! There's so much ego out there in some places, not much of it that substantiated. I do think there's a kind of attitude out there that people with very average research careers can get away with doing admin poorly, with the result that they aren't ever given anything important to do - leaving other, equally able but less selfish colleagues overburdened. It's the academic equivalent of the husband who pretends he can't hoover properly in order to get out of ever doing housework.