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"...

I think this reveals your real issue.

It's ok for people to be more educated than you. It doesn't mean you are 'less than' and it doesn't mean they despise you (though you clearly feel chippy about it).

You have no idea what it’s like to be an academic and your naive judgement isn’t cool.

You don’t know or understand the hours of prep, the hours of marking, office hours, lecturing, study groups, supervision of masters and phd students, constantly under pressure to publish and apply for grants and money, entitled children who think they should have better grades, entitled parents who barge into offices and demand grades for their kids, low pay etc etc etc.

YABVu

I've worked directly with academics for 15 years and there are academics and then academics, like in most industries. Some of them are absolutely brilliant and grossly underpaid. Some of them are incompetent and grossly overpaid. The brilliant ones end up being asked to do more, because they will do it well, and the rubbish ones tend to be given as little as possible.

Yes and No

DS is an academic. He brought home firsts and developed his PhD into a four star monograph swiftly. He got two Post Doc roles in the UK but has had to move to another continent fir a oermanent job in the Humanities. He is an active researcher and regularly publishing. With his quals he could have entered a different sector and could be earning double or triple now. But he didn't want to. He works long hours but loves his discipline and agrees when he works, outside of teaching and faculty commitments, he can work very flexibly. He is eligible for a sabbatical.

However, I also work in the sector and whilst there are many academics who give it their all, there are an equal number who are not publishing much of quality or quantity or even bidding for research funding. They are the ones who decline alternative duties and complain bitterly about taking on addituonal teaching because their research allowances have been cut after several years of being non productive. I shall not comment about how some of the second cohort speak to support staff. It is excrutiating.

Have to say as a teacher I am not remotely envious. Sounds like we earn more and have significantly better pensions and job security ...

Did you discuss politics with them?

I am a PGR, I am also very far from privileged. So far my student loan is sitting at £60,000 with another £20,000 to be added. I am working full time in addition to researching towards my EdD. I think it is important to reach PhD level in some cases. In my area of research it shall be the only way that change is genuinely implemented for those it impacts. The alternative is to stay without the status quo and continue to have legislation, policy and practice dictated by those who no lived experience of the situations. Therefore, I agree partly with what you are saying in terms of privilege. However, I originally graduated in 2008 and could not re-start (2016) and complete my MA until 2019 then had a short wait for the PhD loans to be offered. In that way at the playing field is a tad more equal than pre-2016. When you were excluded if you did not have the financial means no matter how academically capable you are.

Academics are not teachers. I work with both. Believe me academics wouldn’t last a week in a school.

But you do have to deal with pupils calling you a fat bitch to your face and things like that, which we do not. As well as being on your feet for up to five lessons a day with only 13 weeks respite per year. I couldn't do that personally and would burn out. I teach 6 hours a week for 20 weeks of the year (although with marking and admin, it's full-on all the time but personally I find face to face teaching the most draining). You do have better pensions, although academics at post-92 unis are also in the TPS so have equal pensions to you. Pay-wise it varies. I'm on 62k as a senior lecturer. Top of the scale is 67k. If I was promoted to Reader, the salary scale would go up to 82k. So I'd say permanent university lecturers (not fixed term or teaching fellows or hourly paid) earn at least as well or better than teachers and, for me at least, have better working conditions.

Everyone moans about their job- you should hear us( retail!) They’re just luckier than most and to be fair when I was in college to get a lecturer position you had to have over a hundred scientific papers written so it’s not like they didn’t earn it in some way!!

This. And it's perfectly possibly to be both a pleb and an academic.

My parents are a retired binman and a hospital cleaner, I grew up very poor and went to a shit sink estate school, was the first person in my family to stay in school past 15, but was able to get grants and scholarships all the way through to my DPhil.

DH (former academic) is from an identical background. We do exist.

Where are you that a Reader gets £82k? Most professors in my RG university are not on that.

And? A lot of people wouldn’t last a week in a school, not just academics. Same as most people, including teachers, wouldn’t have the skills to be an academic.

This in spades. DH is a semi retired lecturer - in his mid 70s he still works writing books and researching. He really wasn’t well paid for the number of hours he put in, but entitled, certainly not. In RG universities there is huge pressure to publish, give conference papers etc on top of teaching and tutoring.

That’s because it’s a very different job.

Lots of people “wouldn’t last a week in a school”. It’s not the only measure of value for someone’s worth whether they would last a week in a secondary school.

Some of the students are also interesting....
As pp mentioned I've also been asked to move exam dates because of holidays; student asked if they can take an exam a week after everyone else because they've 'got something else on'.
One put in a formal complaint because the email they sent on Saturday afternoon was not responded to until Monday morning. I've had a complaint because I asked some to stop taking selfies during a lecture. More complaints about grades than I care to think about.
A favourite example....
Why have I failed?
You only submitted 500 words.
So?
It's a 3,000 word assignment and you didn't address the subject matter or use any references (you produced a rambling stream of consciousness and think that because your parents are successful in this field you don't need to put the effort in).
Parent demands to attend the complaint meeting, which the university agrees to because the student needs support😡
Parent suitably humiliated when I produce the evidence that their DC is a lazy, arrogant little *

And lots of teachers wouldn’t last a week in academia. So what? We all have different skills, preferences etc, which is just as well, as otherwise we’d all want to do the same job and nobody would want to do the rest of them

I will DM you as I don't want to be outed... It's the top of the salary bracket so if you're newly promoted, you'd not get that. It's also technically discretionary as the top of the bracket is 'contribution points' but in practice, people get an increase each year.

I actually like it when parents are given permission to attend meetings. Too often, problem students hide behind GDPR and tell their parents a whole pack of lies about how hard they’ve been working. Parents then email us with a stream of abuse and we’re not able to put them right.

Your post is really interesting. I know nothing about any of this.
When I finished school I had to get a job because money was tight. I would have loved to have gone to university though. I keep looking at The Open University even now. And i'm old.

But 'teacher' doesn't necessarily imply a school. Part of an academic's job is being a university teacher.

However, that, and associated admin and pastoral responsibilities, is only part of it -- there's also the obligation to bid for funding and produce and disseminate peer-reviewed research. It's comparatively rare to be just a Teaching Fellow. Any promotion criteria will involve research, and 'contribution to the discipline'. Most school teachers aren't bidding for hundreds of thousands of pounds of research grant money and employing postdocs in what is essentially a small business to further that piece of research, and then disseminating it at regular intervals in both scholarly journals/monographs and to the world at large via newspapers, TV, podcasts etc.

Absolutely PhD’s are required.

lecturing and university education isn’t just about the content and passing exams.

it’s about methodology, about pushing forward new ideas, inspiring minds.

most universities aren’t churning out a’level students with 3 years more learning. graduates should be able to think critically, assess others work, use it to drive their own research. It’s not simply repeating what others have done, you need to be able to read a paper and think “oh, I wonder if anyone has tried this to see if this happens, or shown that this related theory is true” - then think of how you would do that, how you would structure your process/experiments/reading, then gather the information, the evidence and interpret it.

if you haven’t done that in an academic setting- ie a PhD, it will be almost impossible to teach.

decent uni’s want to produce thinkers, not memorisers. If uni’s employ people without, simply to teach, then that is not university level education.

again, I am out of date since I did my PhD, but the vast majority were funded. The only people I knew who “paid” to do a PhD were international students. Generally, if you weren’t funded it was pointless doing the research. Granted it wasn’t much, but was enough to live on reasonably comfortably.

The other things that is laughable about academics Jim’s the complete and utter lack off any commercial understanding. The pay demands at the uni I visited were insane. The uni was on its knees financially, and the academics were demanding totally unaffordable pay rises. Strikes went on for ages, some uplift in pay because of all the whining, then lots of redundancies, because guess what, if your employer is skint it’s no pay rise and a few redundancies or pay rises and lots of redundancies. Money doesn’t just appear from nowhere.

Academics are teachers in higher education. Schoolteaching isn’t the only kind of teaching that exists.

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