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1. Greg said on 12:54 Wednesday 9 Sep, 2009

   [ -2 ] Gee, where do I start in talking about workload, pay, and condition working as an academic? Let's start with money... Pay I am currently a level B near the top of the level B pay scale. While my pay rate may look ok to most people, when you factor in a capital-city mortgage I have less than the minimum wage left per week (and I bought a house $200k below the median price!). I also have two young children. I spent 8 years as a student to get my degree and PhD, for many people these are years when they earn an income and start accumulating wealth. A good, but not spectacular, income doesn't make up for the fact I didn't start earning it until I was nearly 30. Pay would be less of an issue if my wife could work too but here are the issues: (1) Like many academics I moved to a new city to take up my current job, this has meant that we cannot rely on family for free childcare and paid childcare is expensive, (2) it is bad for young children to stick them in daycare several days a week - as a good academic I've done my reseach on this, (3) If I do some of the childcare on my non-teaching days I have to work later at night and longer on the weekends (I work at night and on the weekends as it is). So much for work-life balance. Promotion? Of course, my financial situation would be substantially improved by a promotion to level C. However, every year the bar for promotion gets raised, just like the bar for appointment has. 10 years ago a PhD would have seen someone starting at level B. I started out at level A even though I had a PhD because the bar had been raised. About seven years ago, two of my colleagues went from level B to C. One had a teaching award and was promoted for teaching, the other had about half-a-dozen publcations in poor-quality journals, only one as first author, and was promoted for research. I have more publications in better journals than most of the level Cs in my Department and I have a teaching award to my name. Yet, it has been made very clear to me in the last couple of years that NO ONE will get promoted to level C unless they get an external grant - something that I'm yet to get. A couple of years ago a junior colleague of mine with a Masters, a PhD, a publication, and a great teaching record failed in an application to be promoted from level A to B!!! This colleague has now been stuck at level A for 4 years. Workload At my institution we get a workload allocation from research based on what we have done - e.g. publications. This means that you have to do the work above load in order to get the workload to do more in the future. And, if you want to increase your research further you have to keep working above load. There is usually some scope for discretionary research workload. Despite my research output increasing each year I got only 5% (2 hours per week) additional research workload this year. Two years ago, I made the case to my Department that although my output entitled me to a certain percentage I should get a discretionary research workload because I had papers "in press" and submitted. The Head of Department agreed I should have an additional research allocation, but then I wasn't allocated any because there was no money in the budget! Recently, a level A staff member in my department was told by an Associate Head to "get up earlier" when she mentioned that her teaching load (coordinating and teaching in 3 units) prevented her from getting much research done at the moment. The level A staff member felt that 6am was early enough! As I said earier, I almost certainly wont get promoted without an external grant. Every year I slog my guts out to teach well and produce a few papers and at the end of that year I am well and truly burnt out. It is at that point I'm expected to apply for external grants! To try to get some leverage and experience for to apply for external grants I have tried twice at my institution to get internal grants. I got knocked back the first time on two grounds so the next year I wrote explicitly - "This is the same as last year where the grant was rejected because of X and Y so this year I have changes X and Y to overcome the problems highlighted by the grant committee". However, my application was rejected again. What I noticed later was that on both occasions all the internal grants went to people in research centres, mostly associate professors and professors, or research-only staff. An old definition of madness is to keep doing the same thing expecting different results, I'm not mad so I have given up on internal grants, but where does this leave me?

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2. Erin said on 13:57 Wednesday 2 Sep, 2009

   [ -4 ] Thanks for the video. I can definitely relate to what the woman in it is saying. I am a Level B academic on a one-year contract (my second AON, next year I’ll be on a one-year competitive contract) and I work 50-60 hours per week. My partner is an acadmic and he works significantly more than I do. In the last six weeks I have had two days off. I really enjoy working but from now on I’ve decided to take at least one day off per week, because I'm concerned about my health and my social relationships! The main problem for me is teaching. I find it very rewarding but it takes up a huge amount of time, and the rest of my time is filled up with administrative commitments. I can only get research-related work done by doing it on the weekends, plus 3-4 days per month on weekdays. Nor is there much time out of semester to do research. Once you take out holidays and time spent preparing for teaching, there are approximately 10 weeks left (correct me if I've miscalculated). According to our workloads formula there should be approximately 20 weeks in total to spend on research. I don’t think I will ever have children because I’m not willing to give up my research. I probably would if teaching was managed differently, such as less contact hours, or less students, or some way of putting all teaching in one semester.

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