F inalienable year students affected by marking boycott

[fUNNYfACE36]

How is your final year student being affected?
Dd(dutham) will graduate on the planned date with a transcript of grades so far ,but not receive a classification until October.

You sound delighted about it so you must be very happy at how things have worked out.

By 'care' I mean responding to emails from worried students asking for clarification, not tucking them in at night.

Depends where you look. An employee in professional services who cares little about losing clients won’t last long. They’ll be let go.

This isn’t “care”, though. This is doing a job that fulfils the customer’s contract with you. Students don’t have a contract with a university to be cared about.

As in any “professional services”, being paid to pretend you care is not the same as caring. Do you imagine that when you go into a store in America that the assistant really does very fervently want you to have a tiptop nice day? Or is it just the appearance of “customer service”?

What you get in universities these days is the appearance of “customer service”. This isn’t the same as “care”. When I am living constantly two hundred pounds into my overdraft each month and exhausted from the admin burden of an 80 hour week, I still smile and say hello to my students. That doesn’t mean I feel that I somehow deeply care about whether the university delivers its product to them on time.

Exploiting old-fashioned expectations of “education” and goodwill of staff is how the sector has been progressively marketised, just as in healthcare. And there’s no use in self-importantly telling us that we ought to care when our actual employers don’t give a flying fig.

Jesus. Just change job?

If students are looking for clarification, they should request it from someone not involved in the boycott. We haven't burnt the universities down. There are plenty of managers and administrators about to help.

My university has sent all students an email address to use for queries. It has 9-5 live chat, helplines etc for students anyway. If others have nothing similar in place, that's a bit negligent.

“It makes no sense to say students are “customers” and lecturers chose to be poorly paid, and then turn around and complain that lecturers owe students some kind of ideological care for their hard work. That’s like expecting the girl on the shop floor at Sports Direct to care if your son’s trainers fell apart.

If you want lecturers and staff to care about your children’s feelings and hard work and wellbeing, why are you so keen not to care about theirs? Lecturers aren’t some kind of paid replacement Mum for your kids — and if that’s what you really want, why aren’t you reciprocating? Why don’t you see how entitled it is to expect staff to be treated like shop workers, but still somehow deeply care about your kids’ educational wellbeing, feelings, future careers etc.?”

Well said.

And those who think students are paying masses for their courses, of course it’s a lot per individual. But state primary school funding is something like £5k per year per pupil, and student fees have been frozen for years and years. Universities are not, in general, swimming in money. That’s why international student fees are higher, and PG fees are higher, because electricity and buildings and cleaners and IT and libraries all need to be paid for as well.

“May be we can ensure their pay cannot be calculated even for the weeks they are working between now and next year and their pay comes 6 months late to them”

You do know that between 50% and 100% of pay is being docked for the marking boycott?

Do you not realise that most staff in the sector feel like this now?

You want to pay peanuts for monkeys, but somehow your extra special kiddie gets Mr Chips to lead them to the sunlit uplands of Education circa 1950? That’s fantasyland, I’m afraid.

You sound utterly jaded. I do feel sorry for you. Surely there must be something else you can do if you see that the system is so fucked?

Care is a funny thing to debate but yes if you work with clients you will very much care if a client lets your boss know you’re not good at all.

You’ll likely be gone before long.

And care can mean various things, putting the effort in, getting it right, winning work, making sure they feel looked after. Providing a service isn’t just a store in the US. Professional services are large chunk of the U.K. economy, not retail btw.

It can be providing work to a standard people are paying for over a long period of time. If it’s substandard there’s an easy way to remedy that. Students can’t do the same as clients though.

But none of that is relevant to a legal dispute with employers.

The university retains its duty of care. Some employees have withdrawn their labour, after serving notice. How they feel about that (or about students) is their own business.

The universities, in announcing the measures they are taking against staff participating in the boycott, have confirmed that this is a lawful dispute.

When nurses go off shift, they don't stop caring about patients, but they have no further obligation until back on shift. When we withdraw our labour from our employers (not from students) it is for our employers to deal with the consequences. They have the power to do so.

Well the point about caring came up and the poster talked about stores in the US or plumbers.

That’s ignoring a large sector in professional services where employees are paid to care. Or appear as if they do.

And yes of course you can close your laptop and think all kinds of things but if you don’t deliver you’re out.

The idea that calling it a service means you don’t have to care seems misplaced, it seems to be focussing too much on retail and trade.

It’s a different dynamic but one that makes me feel for students who have had a substandard time over the last few years.

“It’s a different dynamic but one that makes me feel for students who have had a substandard time over the last few years.”

You can feel for students, particularly post-covid, and strike. Just as medics can feel for patients, and strike. Teachers for pupils. Train workers for commuters who need to get to work to be paid. Etc.

Sure - and I think there are very few lecturers in the system who don't actually care about students in the way you describe. I don't know many like that.

But, if we are told we can't protest about problems with the system which affect students too, we have to be able to point out that our working conditions affect them too.

I could sit and weep and care very much about students, and watch their and our conditions get worse and carry on marking. Or I could take strike action which does - unless universities step up - affect them in the short term. People can care (or not) whether they strike or not. We have to be able to withdraw our labour in a legal industrial dispute. Universities have had time and years of warning to prepare for this.

Having visited my DC student yesterday,and talked to her and a number of friends, I ask you to please consider your position,and do your job
I feel so sorry for the students

@titchy

Exh gets 32 days plus bank holidays plus university closed days (23 dec-2nd January, 2 extra days at Easter) so 45 in total, far more than me (33) the statutory min is 28). Starting salaries for lecturers are £38 but most earn more, he's on more than double plus earns significant speaker fees, fees for assessing external students, fees for doing consulting for companies etc. He doesn't strike.

Have your DC and friends asked the university what is happening? Bear in mind that in my department we probably have more vacant posts or staff off sick than strikers. What is their university doing to get this marking done? What does it do when people are ill or absent?

I am sorry if these students are anxious but they may need to ask these questions. I would be interested in hearing any answers. It is right for students to be concerned. It would be sensible for them to make these concerns known to some of the vast majority of university officials and employees who aren't taking part in industrial action. It is hard to take this repeated pleading from you seriously when you don't seem to listen to advice on who is responsible for helping your child and friends now.

If your ex is on more than twice 38K he is at professorial grade, where national pay scales no longer apply. If he's gaining significant income from those other sources, his workload is very manageable. Nothing remotely representative of the profession as a whole here, and up to him whether he wants to strike for the vast majority of people working in much worse conditions than he is.

I'm not aware of anyone striking because they consider that kind of remuneration too low!

yes of course they have asked what is happening
But no proper answers
Feel so sorry for them
And nothing I can do to help

Have you asked who they have asked, and what answers they got? Universities will be very keen to sort this out. I think you could help them by advising them not to panic, and to ensure that they are asking questions in the right place.

There is no point in them asking lecturers who may be participating in the boycott, for example. A student services or students' union representative might direct them to the right place, if the university hasn't set up an official communications line.

If the university hasn't set up an official communications line, a practical step would be to ask the university to do so, perhaps through the students' union.

My understanding is they are getting lots of emails but none that answer the fundamental questions
Just a lot of guff
It really is an absolute disgrace

Yeah, it's your problem for not asking the right questions 🙄

Here is what I would ask (and this really is to help, not to argue with you).

Are any marks and feedback late already?

(because I promise you, some students will not be affected at all).

How long is the gap between their last assessment submission and results publication date?

(because it will be clear within a week or two what scale of problem most universities are dealing with and how quickly they can deal with it)

And for the university - ask someone at level of dean or through SU:

What assessment or quality assurance processes are being implemented in response to the boycott? What plans are in place if the answer is "none".

The answers may be "not yet", "a few weeks", "working on it". I would find that okay for now.

What subjects are they studying, if you don't mind my asking? That makes a bit of a difference too.

Students pay a lot of money, but actually it often doesn't cover the full cost of running degrees. For many STEM subjects, student fees don't really come close to the actual cost of running the degrees. The current model of higher education isn't viable at the moment.

Many unis employ temporary staff on unstable contracts, or have PhD students on stipends doing a proportion of their teaching- it's not universal that university staff have good pay/conditions. This is part of why people are striking and joining marking boycotts.

As others have said, university bosses could find a way to get final year student work marked. But they're choosing not to.

UCU members who are striking feel they have a duty to the future of higher education, the benefits to potential future students outweigh the negatives to current ones.

The alternative to improved conditions in a lot of cases is that more junior staff will leave higher education.

Do you have any younger children?

Even if you don't, do you not care about the wider situation in higher education?

Not at all. But there are useful questions to ask if you're not just here to snipe at lecturers.

If a poster begs us to help by stopping the boycott, I'm happy to suggest other approaches that may help. I'm not going to be marking her DC's work. So that's probably more use to her than melting a few strikers' hearts on Mumsnet!