John Robson: What happens when the university sessional treadmill finally breaks?
John Robson, National Post | March 19, 2015 | Last Updated: Mar 20 3:10 PM ET
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Tyler Anderson/National PostTenured professors are a pampered elite doing little work, complacently ignoring the toiling masses on whose backs they prosper.
Canada’s research-heavy universities make curiously little effort to track the data or publicize it. But about half of all undergraduates are now taught by sessionals. I do not think it is what parents believe they are paying for. Nor should it be.
I am myself a sessional. I love teaching, and for me the money isn’t a big issue because I have a real job … or did until Sun News Network collapsed. But the way the system exploits young sessionals who would be professors strikes me as a singularly unjust, complacent example of entrenched privilege.
According to the CBC last fall, “A full course load for professors teaching at most Canadian universities is four courses a year. Depending on the faculty, their salary will range between $80,000 and $150,000 a year. A contract faculty person teaching those same four courses will earn about $28,000.” Minus benefits and pensions. And while professors are expected to research, publish and serve on committees, part-timers usually try to do the same in a mostly futile quest for the coveted tenure-track job.
The CBC also claimed sessionals teaching big survey courses “put in 60- to 70-hour weeks grading hundreds of essays and exams,” which is not true. My TAs work 130 hours per semester total, 10 hours a week per 13-week course, attending lectures, preparing, grading and seeing students, and as I split the grading with them I do roughly the same.
The problem isn’t how much sessionals do. It’s how little. Sessionals don’t get six courses a year; it would show up the professors. They’re lucky to get three. Meanwhile a full professor’s four courses a year averages out to 10 hours a week, a quarter of a real job, for pay and benefits out of reach of the typical taxpayer. Granted they also endure burdensome and largely pointless administrative duties. But they get ample time for research they presumably enjoy, of no necessary worth to the rest of us, including a sabbatical every seventh year.
Some of course are superb teachers; others do important research. Some do both. But the current system does not work and cannot work.
It’s a fundamentally broken model, in which a PhD is a golden ticket for a shrinking group who take too muchThe Globe and Mail recently opined that “The problem is simple. At best, between 1,500 and 2,000 tenure-track jobs are advertised every year; yet universities produce about 6,000 PhD graduates. Only 20% of them will end up in full-time positions, while 60% aim for this kind of secure employment.”
I think the problem is more complicated. It’s a fundamentally broken model, in which a PhD is a golden ticket for a shrinking group who take too much, give too little and feel much too good about it. When I was an undergraduate, no one ever heard of a sessional, so the lavish salaries and pensions seemed fairly reasonable. By now the crisis of governance is felt here, as across the public-sector board, with skyrocketing costs, diminishing results and astounding complacency. Universities must attract students, probably more than should attend, for the subsidies they bring. But the subsidies aren’t sufficient to teach them. It’s a vicious circle.
It doesn’t help that research is the big trendy deal today. Universities increasingly cut back on humanities to build labs for stars who will bring in huge grants and invent cool technology that is surely the job of the private sector anyway. The primary purpose of university should be to expose young people to the best that has been thought and said. But if universities are shifting away from humanities teaching, well, so is the humanities faculty.
I don’t know how much longer they will find a fresh supply of PhDs keen to jump onto the sessional treadmill from which one day they tumble bitter and exhausted. Or how much longer parents will consent to pay high fees to have elite professors disdain their offspring.
Professors should have to compete for work based on performance … just like everybody outside governmentIf a tenure-track job jumped into my boat I would not throw it back. I would happily teach six courses annually at sessional rates, and getting twice that for less teaching, plus benefits and ironclad job security, would be good for me. But not for society. Nor is it good for society that I could never now get onto the permanent track no matter how well I teach.
Even if you could somehow persuade full-time faculty to teach full time, it would not make the system financially sustainable. Worse, there isn’t any guarantee it would improve teaching. It might sound absurd to question whether the best teaching comes from inside the charmed circle. But what’s really absurd is that we have no way of knowing, because academic advancement is unrelated to teaching.
Universities should be privatized. They should have to compete for students and their fees. And professors should have to compete for work based on performance … just like everybody outside government.
Instead academe resembles a John Kenneth Galbraith parody of capitalism, with a pampered elite doing little work, cutting themselves great, rich slices of pie and complacently ignoring the toiling masses on whose backs they prosper. And if it were anyone else, the typical humanities professor would be up in arms at the lack of social justice.
National Post
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/19/john-robson-what-happens-when-the-university-sessional-treadmill-finally-breaks/
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