Tuition fees

[stoatsrevenge]

So we are to expect a massive increase in university tuition fees, as well as increasing interest ib student loans...

Here is the 6 year plan from the LibDem manifesto:

1
Scrap fees for final year full-time students

2
Begin regulating part-time fees

3
Part time fees become regulated and fee loans become available to part time students

4
Expand free tuition to all full-time students apart from first year undergraduates

5
Expand free tuition to all part-time students apart from first year undergraduates

6
Scrap tuition fees for all first degree students

How are they going to square this one?

That would indeed be a start.

Employment practices in my university sometimes make my eyes water, tbh.

Completely agree about employment practices. Here, our line managers see their job purely in terms of transmitting university policy to us, and compelling us to hit particular targets. There is no sense of duty of care to us whatsoever. Also complete cluelessness about ML, sex discrimination legislation etc.

To be fair, BM, bad employment practices need two to tango: a bad management, and a workforce who will take it. Professions in which people see it as a vocation, or that that this is a calling higher than the employer, or where they think the interests of students/patients/whatever trump their own, are ripe for exploitation. I suspect that most people who aren't on the UCU Activists List are ordinary academic staff are too busy to get involved, which makes university management (who seem to have rather proliferated in the time I was away) have a very strong hand. But the staff do seem to put up with shit that wouldn't happen in other areas.

"There is no sense of duty of care to us whatsoever."

That certainly chimes with what I've seen. I worked in a pretty roughy-toughy end of manufacturing in which, in the 1980s, the employment practices were the stuff of the factory Robyn Penrose found herself in in "Nice Work". But that was twenty and more years ago, and no-one, not even the roughiest and toughiest managers, wants a return to those days. There was a clear-out in which a few dinosaurs who had been openly harassing women were dismissed - I don't mean retired, caused to resign, made redundant: I mean dismissed for cause - and short of a morning singing of Kum-bye-yah it couldn't have got much more right-on.

But universities don't seem to have had that experience, usually triggered by young, often female, HR people. Instead policy is in the hands of ageing white male senior academics who see it as the way of the world, and ageing white female female academics who see it as what they experienced and therefore so should everyone else. And so it all continues. The same goes, mutatis mutandi, for hospitals: ageing consultants prevent the 21st century from breaking in.

I know there are an awful lot of tribunals and payoffs going on in universities these days.

So people are not putting up with it.

Jenny, sorry - had to go and do my job... REF is still the plan but the word is that it won't happen; until it's actually cancelled though there will still be panicky presure to prep for it. If like me you are in the humanities there won't be any money anyway. It's just a way of getting us all to chase our tails.

The university which offered 85k two years ago was Bristol, and I know two people on six-figure salaries. All guys...there's a star transfer market, which pretty much means any shreds of fair hiring have vanished. More fruits of RAE.

interesting re star transfer market. I just heard of a prof on £100k who's research outputs are almost exclusively chapters and collections & textbooks.

I have noticed that some profs are able to get jobs anywhere even if they're not advertised, that explains it.

mad day. some interesting reading on the times higher blog. Some claiming Browne will introduce a new focus on teaching with quite a lot of support for that (though not the teaching/research dichotomy).

boffin - I love the idea of a common room. I think this collegiality is missing big time now - atomism v. the collective ...

still can't spell - sorry v. tired. - stupid man reduced me to tears today [in my office of course in good MN style]by tearing apart my paper without pointing me to a single authority or reference just vague statements that were incomprehensible. feel worn out.

WhoKnew, would you like me to impale him on an encyclopaedia for you?? Nasty little man.

Just having a Twitter punch up with @scienceisvital whose campaign was great. But the patting on back is somewhat grating as they make a case which is actually about universities and not just STEM subjects (ie the economic benefits). They gave me a pasting ('entitlement, sickening, fight for your job...') and you know what, today, when I realise me and my colleagues' livelihoods are massively at risk, I really DON'T want to hear that kind of divisive shite.

Just been watching some of the cuts. They are "protecting" education (but that apparently does not include HE)- who will get 40% cuts. Whilst on one hand, it is great that science will get some protection from this, esp. MRC, which is my major funder, I understand the frustration from other fields (and perhaps lack of thinking of cross-disciplinary research i.e. crossing the basic science-social science border).

Wilfshelf good for you and poor you. On the Times Higher there is a fair bit of 'we're all in this together' but maybe it can't last.

I think it would be a very temporary short term gain if STEM subjects used this approach. Prioritising economically valuable or near market research spells deep cuts for blue skies research whatever your discipline.

Is it too cliched to use Wilde - knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing?

Depressing little coverage of HE in the media now. I wonder whether they will cut the non-STEM research block grant as much as they have cut the funding allocation?

I can see students still applying to study courses as a desperate bid to better their prospects. Will we also have a world where we have to apply for funding for every non-teaching & admin bit of time?

p.s. should we move this thread given that we appear to have jijacked it completely? (Sorry OP )

Wilf - at scienceisvital

Their sense of superiority is the only thing that's sickening.

I also thought the Sheffield VC's article that you linked to was great. Made me wish he was my boss! Hope we can preserve this spirit in the months ahead.

The problem with the 'science' budget being protected (ie ONLY a 10% cut) is that we don't know yet how that will pan out in terms of internal ring-fencing. I'd bet many pounds on STEM subjects beings protected there as they are in the teaching budget. The govt have already said they'll invest in medical research, large capital equipment for STEM projects (diamond synchrotron anyone?) and will - I HAVE NO DOUBT - disproportionately favour the Science research councils. And how could they not? Public support is behind the idea of 'proper' science, however little the blue skies stuff is understood, and however much we social scientists have influence over policy.

The reality is that the money for the natural sciences WILL come from the A&H and socsci budget.

And in terms of my particular spat, I think the science is vital message to me is confused: on the one hand they're saying 'we were fighting for ALL science, why didn't you join us?' and on the other they're claiming 'we had to focus on the natural sciences, fight your own campaign'. As above, the claim that ALL of science will benefit is just not true. I (and I think the socsci community at large) would support natural science funding. Indeed for years, when we had millions of students in the arts and socsci, we cross-subsidised the expense. I don't think the same respect and support is afforded in the reverse direction, except from a few medical types who realise the relationship is more complex.

And what of the arts and humanities? We just abandon them because they're, um, cheap? Yeah right. It's the same delusion that the public have about scientists: that we KNOW what it is and how it is done. I think scientists think because they ARE humans or they live IN society, that it is somehow easy, cheap or even free to understand these things. A massive delusion, and an arrogant one.

I think I might return to my blog. If I've now outed myself, please don't out me further

When they wonder why they have run out of NatSci postdoc cannon fodder due to social circumstances only we can explain, we will be able to laugh in a hollow fashion whilst returning to our DK franchise bookselling activities.

Unless we are all working in HR by then of course .... they will need loads of people to cope with laying everyone off.

Right, I'm re-starting up the academics thread. Will be off till later but will post link here if I can...

here you go...

"Their sense of superiority is the only thing that's sickening. "

Oddly, while Gideon was laying it all down, with the smug air of a sixth form bully whose father has just paid for him to have a new sports car, I was in a Grad School induction meeting. I was sat next to a rather charming young man from English, with whom it turned out I have people in common. He was surprised that a bunch of engineers wanted to talk about - and had read - the poetry he was studying, and that our immediate response to his rather diffident "well, I realise you lot help the country be successful, but perhaps there's a role for some research into TS Eliot" was "absolutely, bloody right there should be." And then we all talked about theatre, which is more interesting that our PhDs.

If there's anything more embarrassing to those of us with science and engineering qualifications that our undergraduates' dress sense and personal hygiene (isn't it odd that humanities undergrads can afford soap and clean tops?) it's no-nothing philistines who believe that anything which you can't adjust with a spanner is worthless. They're mercifully uncommon: you won't find a physics department without a good string quartet (although they tend to be Bach and Shostakovich kind of guys, no Debussy please), the mathematicians tend to play piano and computer science people can't help catching literacy off the linguists they collaborate with. But when the philistines get into the public prints...well...

Oh yes, by "their sense of superiority" I meant the Twittering young upstarts, not STEM colleagues in general.

Talking to friends in the hard sciences, it always strikes me how much we have in common and how similar our academic lives are, despite the superficial differences.

But actually they cant afford to lido arts and social science because it is pretty much the case (well certainly in the uni I am in) that money is pulled into the centre and then given back out and guess who gets the lions share? So under this arts etc actually subsidise the sciences..

This was happening quite frequently in my Uni but the RAE was an eyeopener, as those with comparatively small block grants from the central administration were scoring highest in the RAE.

Interesting. My department was one of them and we did feel a bit smug, it has to be said.

Yeah, but blackduck, the whole point about tghe spending overhaul is that tuition fees and the slashing of the teaching budget is deliberately intended to remove the cross-subsidy: sciences are keeping their element of the block grant precisely to fund them centrally. Some socsci, arts and hums depts who cannot recruit enough students will go to the wall: I really, really doubt sciences will wish to or be able to cross-subsidise their arts colleagues...