Anyone else not striking?

[goingpearshaped]

I am not in UCU so not striking. Anyone else? I can sense the divide already between those striking and those not in our dept, I really hate this. Agh, what a mess all round.

I cannot find it now but I did see someone suggesting that there should be an indefinite strike starting in September and the Students' Union should back it up by boycotting "scab" lecturers.
Which simply means everything would get moved online, with more strict controls to exclude anyone causing disruption. After all, as UCU kept repeating for the whole of the pandemic, online learning is as good as face to face and we shouldn't fetishize f2f teaching.

That’s true about online lectures @aridapricot. That whole thing was such an own goal and probably paved the way for several redundancies. Not to mention all the non-academic staff who would have lost their jobs if campuses had closed as per UCU’s wishes.
i saw this tweet about a placard during the strikes: https://twitter.com/DrTELS/status/1466052412418969608?s=20&t=6Vak2dI1iszl6u99hz5Ltg
I get its tongue in cheek but this whole thing about eating cat food or resorting to sex work when they will be getting a six figure lump sum on top of the DB element of the USS pension really isn’t going to endear them to any member of the public.

i don’t know what decisions were made at the meeting this week but I think that there is another HEC meeting next week where they will finalise strategy. Apparently it’s fairly evenly split between people who want to escalate and people who want to stop and build the union.

I find those placards really, really deeply offensive.

For a group of people who claim to care deeply about inequality, injustice and poverty, they are very quick to make light of the genuine financial precarity that working-class people find themselves in. Vile.

twitter.com/ankahajkova/status/1516819132917985290?s=21&t=zal_r9rCuNPeZLu-rVW5gA

this isn’t very nice either

In my field, a significant number of people go on freelance careers, and most of them that I know manage to cobble together a retirement of sorts (yes having a partner with a steady job makes it easier). I am happy to concede that the recent changes to the pensions make academia less attractive a prospect (relative to freelancing) than used to be the case in the past, but still, I think many freelancers, while generally sympathetic to lecturers, might object to this overdramatization of things.

I wonder if any of you have seen this hot mess?

Oh dear. I think some PGRs are going to get a terrible shock if they get an academic job, if they think they are currently doing the same job as their supervisors . . .

That would be a faintly amusing read were it not for the fact that this is the kind of poor thinking and "activism" that is driving UCU policy, and which is one of many reasons why the union doesn't adequately serve its traditional academic membership any more.

Uh-huh.

I was tempted to reply to the tweet about it but I've resisted. There's way too much to pull apart. That's before you get to your point that this kind of simplistic thinking is driving UCU policy.

Uh-huh.

I was tempted to reply to the tweet about it but I've resisted. There's way too much to pull apart. That's before you get to your point that this kind of simplistic thinking is driving UCU policy.

Absolutely no clue why I've posted that twice.

That would be a faintly amusing read were it not for the fact that this is the kind of poor thinking and "activism" that is driving UCU policy

These are all examples (of "poor thinking" as you put it) I've seen from my institution, all to great applause and outrage in social media:
-GTA complains that they were being paid less than £1 per hour, because they were allocated a 1-hour lecture that they need to spend 2 full weeks preparing for. I suggest that if you need to spend 2 weeks preparing a 1-hour lecture then you should politely decline - or, more likely, think of ways that you can streamline your preparation. Or how are you going to survive when you have a job and presumably have to lecture outside of your narrow field of expertise?

-Someone else was saying that they were allocated to GTA on a course, and upon seeing the syllabus they realized it wasn't sufficiently "decolonized" so they would need to "decolonize" it first, which they had to do for free. Right, this would be like being in a restaurant and being brought all kind of extras I didn't ask for but was expected to pay.

-Someone else complaining that they had had a different contract for every year of their PhD, because if you teach for more than a certain number of years on the same contract they would have to make you permanent. Ok, so we make the current cohort of PhDs permanent and after that any new PhD cannot get any teaching experience anymore until someone from the current cohort leaves.

I think some PGRs are going to get a terrible shock if they get an academic job, if they think they are currently doing the same job as their supervisors . . .

I have worked in one of the countries named, where PhD students are paid salaries. In return for their salaries they are also expected to spend some of their time teaching, for no extra pay, so they have a smaller fraction of their time for research. And of course the number of PhD students/academic is much lower, given the higher costs per student.

I don't see how the UK/US/Anglo Saxon systems could move to paying PhD students full salaries with pensions etc -- all of these make substantial profits from fees from international PhD students in subjects like business and management. One can't pay one set of students to acquire a qualification while at the other hand charging another set of students vast sums of money to do the same.

The whole thing is ridiculous. People have convinced themselves that postgrad researchers should be treated like permanent staff and that they do the same job as senior staff (I’ve actually seen people say PGR research on the whole is BETTER than that of senior colleagues - will try to find that one). For soc sci and humanities, students pick their own projects and their role can in no way be equated to a staff member. They are students, not staff. Being admitted to do a PhD does not by itself guarantee you anything, let alone a permanent job. And if we do as they say and make a PhD a salaried role, 80% of those currently enrolled as PGRs wouldn’t be anywhere near academia.

https://twitter.com/DrFloraPoste/status/1384581795845398528?s=20&t=d79heJ9CLVUnh-Yz7NW4mw

I think this was the thread I was thinking of.

Sod off with that. I am resentful enough having to write grant refs for former students, who only contact me because I am a prof and a 'name'.. Deep mentorship.and writing workshops. No fucking way....am running fast enough to get my own work out which I actually think is more brilliant than the ECRs anyway. Learn it and earn it! Am I a bad person?

I'd actually be happy for PhD students to be employed and have a proper contract etc. It would mean that (a) we would not have self-funded PhDs which is brutal on the students and bad in principle because only rich students can do it (b) the students would get proper sick leave & maternity leave and (c) we could sack them if they are no good. At the moment, it is almost impossible to get rid of a failing student who doesn't want to leave which can be a big problem for a supervisor.

But as for postdocs & RA jobs, yes those are short-term contracts and that isn't going to change.

I understand STEM might be different, but in the Humanities a PhD is largely training/apprenticeship, and not "free research work for the university", as the article linked above argues.
I was recently involved in a viva of what was considered a very good PhD (passed with few corrections). The external examiner, who has a ton of experience in the field, said they would be happy if the thesis resulted in ONE good journal article, after some years more work - and I think this is not at all uncommon. Getting some publications out of my thesis also took me years of post-PhD work, often receiving brutal peer-reviews for what I thought was very good work - but helped me realize that, although ok for a PhD thesis, the standard required of good research was much much higher.

(and I also sometimes fantasize how things would be like if PhDs were more like professional degrees, rigorous and structured enough that the day after you graduate you could walk into a permanent position. But of course this would mean capping numbers - like they do in the medical professions - and quite stringent requirements that I am sure would not be to the liking of many either).

Yeah totally agree with the description about humanities research. I know many people who have published precisely zilch from their PhD. Yet people are saying that just doing research and a small amount of teaching should fetch a 30k+ salary. If phd students were employed, they’d need to do all the admin we do too. I do know people in some fields like education where they have got a job without a PhD due to having a professional qualification and they then do a PhD part-time alongside their lecturing (with an hours allocation in their workload plan). That route is quite a tough one though and I bet that a lot of the people going on about full salaries for PhD students wouldn’t want them to do more actual admin/teaching. They just want the stipend hugely increased with a promise of a permanent job afterwards.

I understand STEM might be different, but in the Humanities a PhD is largely training/apprenticeship, and not "free research work for the university", as the article linked above argues.

Very few STEM PhD students are producing independently research of the same quality as senior researchers. They may well be co-authoring major research articles and doing lab/theoretical work for joint articles, but this is different from independently conceiving the ideas, bringing a team together to realize the ideas, putting together articles that are publishable in top journals. The writer of the article works in a field where nobody would get a permanent job without 5+ years of postdoc experience, during which researchers gradually transition to leading their own research programme, so really not so different to humanities. The probability of a PhD student getting a permanent post is low.

My god, they are going to strike for a further 10 days during summer term. Wonderful (given that all teaching has finished at most places). And apparently a marking boycott (probably after marking has finished). Seriously, as if people haven’t lost enough. If my branch were taking part this time around (we missed the turnout), I’d be positively cartwheeling over the picket line. Surely nobody in their right mind will take part in this latest round of salary sacrifice?? Although people always do surprise me.

So presumably if we don't currently have a mandate for strike action/ASOS we don't have a mandate for the marking boycott?
With my "I hate marking" hat on I'm annoyed but with my "involved in exam boards" hat on I am happy we won't have yet more delays.

No, you won’t take part unless you have a mandate. The strike and boycott isn’t due to begin until the end of May at the earliest anyway so lots of places will already have passed their marking deadline by then. And of course we’d end up doing our marking at some point anyway - might as well get paid for it.
As for 10 days strike when there is no teaching going on, words fail me but nothing surprises me about UCU incompetence anymore.

OMG and apparently indefinite strike action was on the table. I also cannot get over the fact that Edge is now one of the reasonable ones:
twitter.com/hagenilda/status/1518974957778354176

I honestly can’t understand what seems to be blatant irrationally (although interestingly Jo Edge seems to be offering a rational voice in all of this). But then again I also can’t understand how highly educated people can fall for gender-bollox so I think I just have to conclude that my previous opinions about education and intelligence were misguided😂