Lecturing in a UK university is starting to feel like working for a business
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Loading... - AGNES LEHNERT
- 23 Feb 2021
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I am a scholar with several full professorships from different countries and extensive experience in teaching and research. I like working with others and have been fortunate to have collaborated with talented colleagues. When I landed a good job at a top UK university I was naive enough to think it might have been for one of these reasons.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that none of my experience would be needed for the job. I didn’t even need my doctorate for most tasks. No use was made of my research skills, nor of my explicit interest in mentoring early career researchers.
For my teaching duties, I was assigned modules that had little connection with my expertise. I had no contact with doctoral or more advanced students. My work schedule was unpleasant, not just because it contained mostly repetitive seminars but because the teaching load was fragmented, forcing me to commute long distances to different locations. I was made to supervise undergraduate students seemingly allotted at random given that their specialisms often had little to do with my expertise.
I was expected to conform to a set of rules, some of which I felt went against my professional judgment, such as that I should not advise students about literature or method. Everything was prescribed: we were told when to meet students and for how long, as well as what to focus on and in what way.
For a long time I thought there was some misunderstanding or cultural difference that would eventually be clarified. When I raised the problems with my schedule and mismatched students informally, colleagues were sympathetic. When I raised them formally, I met hostility, sometimes from colleagues who had been supportive behind the scenes.
This may sound familiar to UK academics, but none of this existed in my other European workplaces. There, academics – especially senior ones – are expected to organise their work as they see fit. They can concentrate teaching so that one semester is free for research, reading and writing. They usually teach courses within their area of research. They have long summer holidays – at least one full month – and many other periods when they are not expected to be in the workplace but can read and think. The system trusts us, unlike in over-controlled UK universities. We know how to do our jobs, and left to do them we do them well.
For doing a job that was barely connected to my experience, I received an extremely high professorial salary. This was also very much unlike my other experiences: elsewhere in Europe, there is much less difference between the salaries of professors and lecturers. There are also far fewer junior staff employed on precarious contacts, and everyone has full entitlement to holiday.
Eventually, feeling depressed and demotivated, I left my university and the UK. It strikes me that UK academia is in danger of devaluing experience and expertise, taking away academics’ freedom and focusing instead on delivering a standardised product. The marketisation of higher education makes working in a UK university feel like working in a business, transforming it into a stifling, rule-bound environment that damages collegiality.
