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"...

@Bananavibez what is your link to these professors, do you also work in academia?

Why does this sound like OP's second account?

Which uni?
How much where they demanding
When did this happen?

Good grief, lost for words!

I expect it was supposed to deliver another "universities/degrees are a waste of time" pile-on

You have a mile-wide chip on your shoulder, OP. It's quite unedifying and very revealing of your own particular prejudices.

Not least, the description you give of this supposed overheard conversation is so far removed from the average academic's workload in 2026, particularly in UKHE which is currently in freefall from Oxbridge to post-92, that it resembles a sector unrecognisable since about 1995.

Only 2/10. Must try harder.

Visited in what capacity? You do realise that pay demands are usually national actions led by the union, of which many academics are not members? I can't recall a significant national pay increase in recent years based on industrial action/'whining'. No, money doesn't appear from nowhere but it's also not reasonable to expect people to work for low pay (a lot of these actions actually relate to the conditions faced by hourly paid staff, which are often really really bad). If the university makes poor financial investments, which many have, that's not the problem of the staff either. There are a lot of these 'on their knees' institutions that somehow manage to pay their VCs £350,000 a year for instance.

Yeah from my experience the vast majority of academics are paid by research funding, not by the uni.

the chair of the dept might have been on a salary, but they then employed their staff according to funding- which was usually broken down per project- to do this work over 3 years it will need 1 lecturer/senior post doc, , one post doc and two PhD students.

they weren’t paid out of uni money.

Hmmm.... I think you are being rather disingenuous there. Comparing a senior lecturer post to a main-scale teaching post is not really appropriate is it? A more realistic comparison might be an Head of Department of an Assistant Head. And I'm not sure I recognise the conditions you describe either. Something isn't quite right if you are regularly being called a fat bitch. Unless you work in a fairly specialist setting. (For what it's worth I went into leadership and my salary has outstripped anything you've set out above for some time now btw).

I'm just drawing on my own experiences when I was at secondary school. There were some really nasty kids at my school and the way they spoke to the teachers was quite shocking, especially younger female teachers or supply teachers. But I'm glad you work under much better conditions and hopefully that is the norm.
How much would a HoD earn at a secondary school? Personally, I'd not consider an SL a particularly senior role, despite the title. It's one level up from the entry level and carries no managerial responsibilities at all. I'd probably liken it more to a teacher at the top of the upper pay scale. I'm glad you're on a good salary as a head/assistant head, as you should be. Our senior leaders are also on salaries far above what I posted for SL/Reader.
Anyway, people will definitely have different preferences for their job. As I said, I find classroom teaching quite draining, so I couldn't do 39 weeks a year of it. Having a job where I do 20 weeks of it and only 6 hours a week suits me better. There are also lots of downsides to my job but the teaching level compared to schools is not one of them.

I would argue that you can’t compare school teachers to university lecturers, it’s a completely different skill set.

lecturers don’t need the people skills or cat herding skills that teachers do, or the management of learners who may not want to be there.

lecturers don’t really teach. The students are there because they want to learn, and it’s more about breaking down what can be complex ideas, it’s often a more interactive discussion of concepts and “here’s how you find out what you need to know” rather than than “here’s what you need to know”.
that plus the majority of the job is working on their own research, grant writing, supervising etc.

It’s that many academics class themselves as teachers and I have significant issues with their pedagogical skills. Haveing spent time with many people having just been through university the quality of education provided is ‘limited’.

The VCs of your average Russell group unis are running a business with turnover of billions. How much do you think that sort of expertise usually earns? And how in demand do you think the skills of an expert in late Iron Age pottery or whatever is? How much are those skills worth on the open market? Not a lot. An academic on the cutting edge of say AI could earn a fortune elsewhere, the niche academics have no other outlet for their skills and should be glad to have a job.

If a university makes poor financial decisions its not the fault of the staff, but 99% of staff at financial institutions that were badly affected by the financial crisis were totally blameless too, and yet they sucked up pay freezes and redundancies for years as they realised their employer had no other option. It all seems so childish, stoking about pay and redundancies when they’re just a fact of life.

There are plenty of school teachers who are rubbish teachers too. I spent a fortune on tutoring for my dc to compensate for poor teachers.

I work with some academics who are amazing in the classroom and some who are rubbish. Some are excellent researchers, some are poor. I also worked in industry in past. Guess what? Some colleagues were excellent at their jobs, others weren’t.

Most of them will have come up the ranks as academics. Few have run a non university business.

What was the event?
I think the environment in which this moaning was going on is good to know.
It’s common to have a winge with your peers. Then you go home and resume normal life, get on with your job - the good and the bad bits.

Lecturers don't teach??? Come on.

I am speechless.

I bet she didn't say anything to them either.

You are entirely correct, but school teachers are regularly observed and attempts made to improve. Also, you are not forking out 9k a year and being effectively taxed on your income for the rest of your working life for crap teaching.

Oh, how I wish you were correct. You've obviously never taught a group of undergraduates whose constant refrain is "do I need to know this for the assessment/exam?"

I would entirely agree that they don’t really teach. Their major focus is on research and their attitude is that students need to sort it out themselves. You’ve summed up my issues with academics as teachers.

35% of academics are employed on teaching only contracts whilst another 43% are employed on teaching and research contracts. If, like me, you are fortunate enough to be on a full time, permanent teaching and research contract you are probably now doing less research, more teaching and much much more administration.

This, absolutely. So glad I’ve retired.

We’re still paying out for teachers via our taxes and teachers need to be pretty crap for action to be taken. Also, if they are teaching in an affluent area, they can still have decent exam results if parents pay for tutoring to compensate.

Personally, I don’t think my role as an academic is to teach students. My role is to facilitate their learning. That involves a lot more effort on their part (and mine) than if I simply went in and taught the material.

This is really odd some academics say they teach and others think they facilitate. You can’t even decide amongst yourself if you are teachers or not. All my anecdotal evidence suggests you really, really, aren’t teachers.

Yes, general education is paid through taxation and teaching is mostly of a very high standard - check the PISA scores for evidence. Also, the complexity of a pre HE classroom is well beyond an academics skill set. Students in HE are now encumbered with significant life long debt they deserve better than a bit of facilitation.

Many lols at “simply went in and taught” the more academics post the more they prove the OPs point.