To think academics are seriously entitled??

[Bananavibez]

Met a bunch of lecturers at party last night. Dont think ive ever met such an entitled bunch. Nice pay for minimal hours but complaining about how they have to answer loads of emails (??). One of them in their 60s actually admitted they would't meet the qualification requirements for their role if they were applying for it today.
So much bitching and whining and all i could think was "so how come you've stuck with this job for decades then, you could have gone out to work in industry if its so awful"...

Guess we’ll never know

Depends on the field but yes a lot of people are limited to where they can work and many of my colleagues commute very long distances (as in several hours, staying over in hotels).
A lot of people say what the 60-something academic did because the standards are ridiculously high these days. You used to be able to enter my field 40 years ago with an undergraduate degree. Now you need a PhD plus many publications to even get an interview for a lectureship.
Minimal hours - nah sorry this isn’t true although I admit the classroom hours are less than for school teaching. I would be so physically exhausted if I had to do more though. There are insane amount of admin to do plus constant marking and huge volumes of emails (that bit is true). I have 45 personal tutees. In a school, I would have about 20.
Good salary - I actually think it’s okay because there is a degree of flexibility for a lot of the year that you don’t get in other jobs but it’s not a huge amount. Starting at about 40k. I’m on low 60s and need to be promoted to the next band for it to increase which is very unlikely to happen.
Moaning - maybe read about what the sector is going through at the moment. Mass redundancies more or less everywhere, pay and promotion freezes, poor morale, uncertainty.

I left academia.

firstly the pay is shit. My first job after my PhD paid 14k, admittedly a while ago but band 5 technician in the nhs paid 18k at the time.

secondly job security is also shit. Usually 1-3 year contracts, 5 if you’re lucky. If your grant is not renewed and you need another job it’s usually so niche there won’t be another one at that uni, so you need to relocate to wherever is carrying out related research.

lecturing, in my field anyway, isn’t just teaching. You lecture in between carrying out your research, planning new grant applications, supervising PhD and final year projects, conferences, attending your own lectures by guest speakers…

it probably depends which field they’re in, but it was shit 20 odd years ago and I’d probably expect now the cost of a degree is so high students are now more demanding of lecturers time (hence the emails) as the are paying for it. That model probably doesn’t work so well as students will need more input and a higher level of guidance.

Your OP was signalling ‘chip on shoulder’ to me, and this has sealed it.

How strange to be unaware of the huge changes and cuts Universities have gone through for decades, excelerating wildy now...no joy in a pick me colleague. ...much joy in solidarity 🥂

I just just imagine this group having a Friday night beer and totally normal whinge about work, and @Bananavibez standing there with a cat’s bum expression on her face sipping her tap water, imagining the Mumsnet thread she’d start the next day!

One of my sons is a post doc mathematician and lives in a beautiful nordic location. He gets lots of international travel to conferences and spends most of his day getting paid to think about what he's interested in.

😂😂😂 love this reply 😂😂😂

Lovely but in a couple of years he will be unemployed. Maybe he lives in a country where there are plenty of permanent lectureships that he could apply for after his postdoc (and is a place he wants to stay) but in many countries eg Germany or the UK, permanent academic jobs are as rare as hens teeth.

People are allowed to moan, FFS. Academia is no longer a cushy job and most younger academics in arts/humanities are terrified for their futures. Lots of UK universities are on the brink of collapse .

Agree that teaching in a school regardless of level is a lot harder. Especially as at universities there are seldom unrealistic or entitled parents to deal with.

No but there are entitled and unrealistic student by the bucketful. If I release assessment marks, within half an hour my inbox will be full of furious emails demanding an immediate meeting, asking about appeals, demanding a remark etc. I have students who didn’t attend a single seminar brazenly demanding I tell them how to get a first because that is what they want. But yeah I couldn’t personally teach secondary school because of the behaviour issues. At least that bit is better at uni.

Law by any chance?

Well, as an academic, I would say that 90% of academics who would now be in their 60s had a very easy time of it. Generally speaking (though all fields are different), they entered academia at a time when workloads and expectations were less and pay was higher compared to hours put in. They moved to a very cushy secure place that most of us a generation or two behind will never experience. Now, pay is fairly low (I earned £34k a year at 80% FTE, so PT 4 days a week, after 20 years in academia with a PhD in the social sciences when I left a couple years ago).

Workload is high - all of my colleagues are still working at 10pm most nights, they take marking on holiday and book whole days of meetings on holiday! Mental health is in the pits and I’d say at least half of my close colleagues have gone off sick with long COVID, autoimmune diseases, I have been off 2 years now with cancer, all in our 40s. We are also supporting students who are really suffering with mental health challenges and financial ones given cost of living. We provide a lot of pastoral care in addition to teaching and supervising research and heading up administrative committees and writing to make our publication targets and doing lots of other ‘free’ labour like serving on editorial boards of journals and leading committees that award student funding or review applications.

Anyway, talking to a bunch of academics in their 60s is a bit like taking advice in buying your first house from someone now in their 70s. Of course, it’s going to sound easy! It was in the late 70s when you could buy a nice family home in a market town with good schools on one income! But times have changed a lot since then and they haven’t changed with it.

Quite a lot are fine but yes there are some massively self-important and pompous knobheads.

In my experience, they do think they are pretty special just by virtue of being academics.

There are academics in industry too, they are not all lecturer's, you find them in research and development roles. The ones I've known in those sort of roles love their jobs and have a real sense of achievement improving and creating products and pushing technology forward.

😂 how did you guess? Yes, Law at an RG uni. They definitely seem to have the skills needed for their chosen career…

I don’t think this thread delivered what @Bananavibez hoped for ie ridiculed!

This, and the world has changed completely. None of my grandparents or their friends would have dreamed of going to uni, and having a degree was very unusual. With my Millennial friends, most of us do, and of course entry requirements change.
Saying any specific group is entitled is just stereotyping/prejudice. There will be some people in every profession who are harder working/more effective/more entitled than others.

Depends what they teach. Real subjects - massive respect to them, I don't know how they manage it all. They have to supervise real subjects, publish and beg on all fours for funding most of the time. Nothing is guaranteed for them anymore, tenured status these days is a thing of the past.

The thing is most of those emails are probably completely pointless and take them away from their actual work. I worked in a school and we received so many ridiculous emails and had to spend so much time dealing with things that had nothing to do with actual teaching. I moaned and still do!

Surely you're aware that academics have to work hard? Lecturing, doing research, writing funding bids, supporting students.

Nice pay for minimal hours

You show your lack of knowledge of the job! Older lecturers/teachers would not have had the stream of whining emails at all hours in the earlier parts of their careers, personally, were I still teaching no email would be opened out of working hours. Do other professions deal with work emails out of working hours, especially the Friday night wine-fuelled moans?

It does sound a bit outside your comfort zone, if you feel like you do. I've mixed with all types of people, different classes, different intelligences etc through life, and never felt like that.