• Kat Gupta’s research blog

    caution: may contain corpus linguistics, feminism, activism, LGB, queer and trans stuff, parrots, London

on strike and on striking

Just over a year ago, I got my first permanent academic job. It’s been a weird experience – a lower teaching load than I have previously had, but more administration and pastoral work. Perhaps the hardest thing to get used to is that I don’t have to move unless I want to. I’m not having to send off endless applications that will inevitably get rejected. I applied for conference funding and got it. These should not be unusual working conditions but they are. I carry something like survivors’ guilt with me: that I landed a permanent job while so many of my brilliant, talented peers didn’t.

Years of precarious employment have demonstrated how broken UK universities are: running on the goodwill of their staff who are themselves exhausted and running on fumes, engaged in a corporate project to turn students into consumers and staff as mere learning providers, and moving further and further away from a vision of the university as a public good, for knowledge and enquiry and exchange. Perhaps I am still a starry-eyed idealist but I want to work somewhere with a sense of justice and equality, that values the diversity of everyone in its community, and which rewards the labour of everyone – cleaners and professors, security guards and programme administrators, PhD students and librarians. The university would fail to function without any of us.

This post is necessarily focused on the experiences of one academic in the UK. The University and College Union (UCU) represents workers in UK universities and its work is focused on the UK, but many of the broad issues outlined here – inequality, precarity, high workloads and pay deflation – are seen in universities more globally.

UCU membership is limited to “academics, lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, managers, administrators, computer staff, librarians and postgraduates”. Other members of the university are represented by GMB and Unison but experience similar issues, especially in regards to insecure contracts and high workloads. I strike in solidarity for everyone employed by the university and who experiences these or similar conditions.

Finally, I strike for all those who want to strike but cannot due to their contract, visa or finances: I see you and I recognise your struggle.

Inequality

On average, women are paid 15% less than men are for the same work across the sector. This tool from UCU allows you to compare your salary to the average earned by the other binary gender and to other institutions.

Black and Arab academics at Russell group universities earn 26% less than their white colleagues. These inequalities are exacerbated by multiple axes of inequality: the same report shows that Asian women earn 22% less and Black women earn 39% less. There continues to be massive inequality at the level of professor. I would also argue that universities strategically recruit BAME academics internationally to hide the problems in UK BAME academic attainment. This is not to say that international staff don’t face unique problems: the threat of deportation and visa fees are just two of the ways in which the hostile environment is realised.

The existence of a national pay scale is meant to reduce these inequalities, but what happens in practice is that women, BAME and disabled people are appointed at the lowest rungs of the scale and face more barriers for promotion. One of these is realised in teaching evaluations: women and ethnic minority academics are more likely to be judged harshly in teaching evaluations which then becomes a barrier to promotion. Women in particular are expected to take on more administrative and pastoral duties, which either means doing less research, saying “no” and developing a reputation as someone who is “difficult”, or attempting to do it all and working far beyond your contracted hours. BAME or LGBTQ+ academics may find ourselves becoming a person that our BAME or LGBTQ+ students trust and someone they approach when trying to make sense of the unwritten rules and structures of academia. Again, this results in doing more pastoral care. It becomes incredibly difficult to juggle these things: as someone who is queer, trans and Asian, I feel responsible for my minority students and I want to help them navigate what can be an unfamiliar and even hostile place. However, there’s only so much of this I can do as an individual and a part of me knows that to get promoted, I would have to be ruthless about offering less in this area. I’m not going to because I think my LGBTQ+ and BAME students are amazing and deserve the best (and, in the absence of that, me), but it is something that I’m aware of.

Here is a link to material about racism in the British academy and here is a link to a comprehensive bibliography on gender and racial bias in teaching evaluations.

Precarious labour

There are more people chasing jobs than there are jobs in academia. Many academic jobs will have at least 100 applications, if not many more. In the UK, everyone who is invited to interview meets at least the essential and probably many of the desirable qualities listed in the job criteria: from my experience talking to other candidates, everyone will have a PhD in hand, some publications, appropriate – and in some cases, extensive – teaching experience and experience on a precarious contract, and it’s very much a case of who fits best with the department’s needs. Which is to say that universities rarely struggle to recruit academic staff, and people are desperate to get or keep a foot in academia.

There are two main types of precarious labour in academia: fixed-term contracts (often between 10 months to three years) and hourly-paid contracts. Being on one of these means that you are always, always worried about your future and whether you can stay in academia. It is constant, lurking stress: I started a 10 month contract and almost immediately started applying for jobs, It means that you can’t make long term plans: there’s no point settling somewhere because you will almost certainly have to move when your contract comes to an end. You don’t know what city you’ll be in – or even which country. I applied for jobs in Denmark and Scotland and Ireland and England – as a queer, trans person of colour, there were places where I simply wouldn’t be safe living and working. I had to limit myself to places where, ideally, there was legislation to protect me from discrimination and at the very least, I was less likely to get my gay brown ass attacked. I have moved city at a month’s notice, at one point sleeping on a friend’s air mattress because the contract on a flat had been delayed. Things like buying a house, having a child or even getting a pet is out of the question because you simply don’t know if you’ll have a job in six months time, let alone where it will be. It means that you don’t get to build a network of friends and a sense of community where you live because you don’t have time to establish yourself and will have to move again in a year anyway. It means that, if you have a partner and kids, you have to consider whether it’s fair to move your children and disrupt their friendships and education, and you have to decide whose career to prioritise: theirs or yours.

Hourly-paid contracts rarely recognise how much labour is involved. One job paid me £35 for each hour of teaching – but this didn’t include prep time, time dedicated for office hours, time spent answering student emails or marking. If I did the job properly to the best of my abilities, I would end up paying myself under minimum wage; if I didn’t, I would be letting down my students and jeopardise my future employment, there or elsewhere. I was lucky enough to work with some lovely colleagues who made every effort to shield me from taking on additional admin that I wouldn’t be paid for, and who made me feel that I was part of the department by inviting me to research events and to staff drinks or dinners. However, at my worst hourly paid lecturing job, I literally came in, taught for two hours, held office hours, then disappeared without seeing a single member of the department. I didn’t get any kind of induction and wouldn’t have known who to call in case of an emergency. No effort was made to even meet me on my first day or show me where I was teaching. I wasn’t part of that department – just a hired body to teach a module that no one else wanted to teach.

Hourly-paid contracts don’t allow any sort of research development funding; fixed term contracts may or may not allow this. Without institutional backing it’s difficult to develop research projects – you don’t have funding to attend conferences so you either don’t go or pay out of pocket, you don’t have the money to pay for access to research material, tools or software, you don’t have money to fund travel for research purposes and you don’t have consistent access to a library or electronic materials.

Hourly-paid contracts also don’t allow for sick leave or parental leave. If you get sick and are unable to work, you simply don’t get paid. I had surgery on a Wednesday in January 2017 (general anaesthetic, exciting painkillers etc) and was marking again the Saturday after (I wasn’t on the exciting painkillers by then because they made me…well, let’s just say that we didn’t get on). I was lecturing again barely two weeks afterwards, every jolt as the bus made its way up a bumpy road sending another shock through my stitched-together body. This isn’t something that I should have had to do, and it isn’t something that anyone should have to do. It’s not a sign of commitment or dedication; it’s a sign of exploitation.

Perhaps one of the saddest casualties of my years in the precarious wilderness was a relationship. My then-partner and I were both actively seeking academic employment. We couldn’t see a future where we could be in the same country, let alone both have academic or academic-related jobs reasonably close to each other. While there were other things that meant that the relationship couldn’t last, our stress about precarity, Brexit, internationalisation and visas was a major factor.

I was lucky enough to have the financial and emotional support of my parents, and indeed moved back in with them while I was on hourly contracts. I wouldn’t have been able to stay in academia long enough to have got a permanent job without their support, and even then we had some serious discussions about how long I could afford to keep doing this. There are so many who didn’t and don’t have familial financial support. The academic voices we are losing are the least privileged: disabled, female, BAME, working class, first generation to go to university, LGBTQ, with caring responsibilities (and any of these combinations). Academia will – already has – become a preserve of the privileged, and we lose diverse voices and perspectives and research and skills.

Did being precariously employed make me a better academic? Well, I got to see how other departments in other universities worked: I taught at five of them, including my PhD institution. I gained a lot of teaching experience: I taught 16 individual modules, and only one of them twice. I worked with a lot of people and learnt how to adapt to a new environment very quickly. However, it’s shaped my anxious tendencies: constructive criticism throws me into a spiral where I convince myself that I’m going to get fired any day, and I’m still not entirely sure how to build relationships with people who will hopefully be my colleagues for years. I’m not sure how to have input into something rather than adapt myself in the short term. I find it hard to think long-term at all: about what my research plans are for the next five years, let alone about what my career will look like for the next ten years, hell, even what the next year will look like.

This is what precarious labour is creating: a generation of academics shaped by uncertainty and anxiety. Some are simply not there, forced out by exploitative labour practices. Others are deeply entrenched in precarity and, without time or institutional support to develop their research, see little way out. Those of us who are permanently employed face a different set of challenges, not least that we may become complicit in it. Our hard-won research leave and parental leave is scope to create another precarious position.

Workloads

I am contracted for a 35 hour week. That means five days of seven hours a day. Admittedly my work schedule skews later (I’m a dedicated night owl) but the week before last I found myself pulling 12 hour days because there was no way that I could teach and attend compulsory meetings and hold office hours and get my marking done and respond to emails and meet my colleagues to discuss teaching, marking or students and respond to reviewer’s comments for a journal article and prepare teaching material for three modules, two of which I was teaching for the first time. I try to be very disciplined about not responding to emails outside working hours, but it’s hard to fit in that much work into a 35 hour week. It’s an even greater challenge for those employed on fractional contracts, for whom workload modelling never takes into account how long it actually takes to do any of these things. All of these issues are again exacerbated if there are any reasons at all that affect your ability to overwork: caring for children or other family members, disabilities, mental health issues, fatigue.

It happens at every level, from the teaching fellow who doesn’t have research built into their contract but who knows that their ability to get a permanent job depends on their publications to professors on whom work pressures are piled on. Compared to academia of yesteryear, we deal with much more admin, from the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to the Teaching Excellence Framework to the incoming Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF). We are much more aware of student voices in the form of module evaluations and the National Student Survey (NSS), and the repercussions of a poor result. League tables are a constant source of stress

The second part of the UCU strike is taking Action Short Of a Strike (ASOS) which basically means working to contract. University senior management in some institutions have already threatened to dock pay if ASOS means you cannot fulfil your duties. They know that it is impossible to cram all of this into a 35 hour week, and indeed, universities are built upon the goodwill and free labour offered by their staff. We don’t want to leave a panicking student in the lurch so we respond to their evening or weekend emails, we don’t want to disappoint our co-authors so we work on revisions late at night, we can’t let marking deadlines slip so we scramble to get our marking completed within the 15 day turnaround period, we know that publications are how we get promoted so we squeeze that into an already strained workweek…

Part of the problem of academia is that the people who get into it tend to have a big streak of perfectionism and, I hope, an equally big streak of compassion. We don’t like failing our students, our colleagues, ourselves. We hold ourselves to high – even impossible – standards and get upset with ourselves when we don’t meet them. We suffer stress, poor mental health, burnout. And perhaps inevitably, the modern neoliberal university has seen this with bright, eager eyes and gone yes, yes we can exploit this.

Pay deflation

Academic pay in the UK has fallen at least 17% against the rate of inflation since 2009. What I get paid simply doesn’t go as far as it did a decade ago. According to this UCU tool, I would be earning an extra £8000 a year if salaries had risen in line with inflation since 2010. As someone living in London, it’s also important to note that London weighting hasn’t kept pace with the fast rise in living expenses in London. Significantly more than 35% of my salary goes on rent. This hits harder because after a PhD and precarious labour, many early career academics don’t have much in the way of savings. Assuming I don’t become redundant or otherwise unemployed, I basically have about 35 years of a proper salary before I retire (assuming I retire at 70, ahahahaha excuse me while I lie down and weep). I have to earn a lot in those 35 years to make up for the 15 or so years when I was not earning enough to save because I was studying for my BA, MA and PhD and then in the precarious wilderness.

Despite all this, I want to believe that universities can do better, can be better. I want contracts that will allow staff to flourish. I want an end to pay gaps and precarious employment. I don’t want anyone to be employed on an hourly contract unless it’s something that they actively want because teaching is a side gig that they fit around a substantially paid job. I want space for wonder and curiosity and imagination. I want to not spend my weekend working or prone on the sofa. How about it?

Hope’s a burden or it sets you free

I tend to keep job talk off this blog; as a precariously employed academic, it is a constant, heart-bruising process of hope and imaginings and trying to pick up institutional knowledge as swiftly as possible. Since 2013, I have not been entirely sure what I’ll be doing the next year – I’ve worked at four universities and taught over fifteen very different modules, and my summers are generally me hustling for work.

Last year I was lucky enough to land a full-time ten month position as a teaching fellow at the University of Sussex, my joy tempered by my knowledge that in a matter of months I would be leaving and that time was ticking, speeding, trickling or whatever it does in your movement metaphor of choice. I never bothered to unsubscribe from the jobs.ac.uk emails and was preparing further applications even as I met my students and gave my first lectures.

Lebanese cedar

I had a marvellous year living by the sea: storms and sunsets and snow on the beach; reading as I basked on the pebbles on the blazing days of 2018’s glorious summer; pacing along the shore at dawn after another sleepness night, tiny, soft wavelets shushing against the stones and a hushed pastel sunrise.

It was an academic year that I was determined to enjoy, knowing that I wouldn’t be staying and that I had no idea what would come next. Precarious academic labour is cruel, giving you just enough to feed your hope; if next year it will get better, if you can stick it out another year on the chance next year will be your year.

This is to say that this year, I have been one of the lucky few to secure permanent employment and I feel kind of conflicted. I am so, so angry at the state of academic labour, so full of grief and fury for the brilliant people being exploited by institutions that have figured out that perfectionist, compassionate, highly motivated people are eminently exploitable. It’s a weird sort of survivor’s guilt.

I am having to learn new things: how to build relationships with colleagues that aren’t going to end in six or ten months; how to build a rapport with students that will steer them through their full programme of study; that I can develop teaching materials and be able to use them more than once; perhaps even to feel invested in a university and to build a relationship with the institution itself. I am still nervy, wary, wondering, unable to believe that for now at least, I don’t have to fill out job applications and, as Rachel Moss so eloquently describes,

lay out the pieces of yourself as teacher, scholar, writer, administrator, colleague, present each in a slightly new and polished way for the specific criteria of each post, and then rebuild yourself in the narrative of the cover letter, framing yourself as the person they need. It is a fiction, but a powerful one, requiring imagining yourself into that place and space. And if you get to interview it is a deeper fiction still, where you must say: these are my colleagues, these are my students, even if I have not met them yet. And then, when the answer is no, you will unpack yourself again, wondering what can still be sifted and refined, so that next time the answer is different.

Perhaps I can be the person I polished for them, let these imaginings solidify into something more tangible than promises.

The photo is of a Lebanese cedar tree on the University of Roehampton campus, my new workplace. It is huge, towering, magnificent. It is perhaps coming to the end of its lifespan. A few metres away is a tiny, slender sapling, a Lebanese cedar of whip-thin branches and tender foliage, planted for renewals and futures and hope.

In which I get a new rucksack and am overexcited about it

Photo by K Gupta

Photo by K Gupta

This term I’ve been teaching in London. As I still live in Nottingham, this has required me to hoof myself down to London for a 10am class. Thanks to some kind friends who’ve let me stay on their mattresses, airbeds, beanbags and sofas, I’ve managed to all but avoid the expensive 6:30am train (and accompanying horribly early alarm). However, I’ve had to carry a lot of stuff around me and it was therefore with dismay that I noticed my faithful rucksack’s shoulderstrap coming off one morning on the tube. I’ve had that rucksack since I started my MA in 2006 and it’s been with me through my MA and PhD, two universities, three departments, trips to India and Egypt, many conferences and numerous visits to friends and family all over the country so I suppose it’s earned its retirement.

However, this left me without a rucksack.

A friend suggested Osprey and I splurged on the Osprey Momentum 30. This is totally Sam Vimes’ Theory of Economic Injustice – I am hard on my bags, and at the moment I’m being paid. It therefore makes sense to spend money on something that will last (I hope) than buying a cheap bag that will fall apart when I load it up with library books, leak on library books/my laptop or be uncomfortable to carry or cycle with.

This review is of an older and slightly bigger model but I was impressed by the thoughtful design and quality. This review and this review are both of the model I went with. The photo below is of all the stuff I routinely carry with me.

Photo by K Gupta

Photo by K Gupta

Going from left to right we have a hardback book (unusually, only one), my university ID cards, my laptop and charger, a shirt, assorted highlighters, the grey notebook I use to keep my conference notes together, my wallet and keys, my filofax, bike lights, shower soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, forks and paracetamol. I’d usually also have PJ bottoms and underwear with me but you get the idea.

The Momentum 30 copes admirably with all this and more – I even got my softbound thesis in there as well as everything else and it was great not to have to lug that around in a carrier bag. The pockets are spacious enough to be useful; I use one of the side pockets as a washbag and can easily fit shower soap, moisturiser and facewash in there. So many pockets means that I can use them for different things and as a result, no one has to know that I’m taking my PJs and toothbrush into work as I won’t accidentally pull them out along with my laptop charger[1]. The small zipped pocket in the main compartment is big enough to fit keys, my wallet, pens and my passport but small enough that these don’t get lost among the other stuff.

I live in an area where cycling is an everyday thing. While I’ve seen (and admired) a proper Dutch cargo bike chained up, I’ve seen more bikes with interesting cargo-carrying modifications – shopping baskets are a popular addition or, as in this fine example, a washing up bowl. I’ve not been doing my cycling commute much recently but this bag did very well on a trip to the shops – it comfortably held 4 litres of laundry liquid and fabric conditioner as well as my food shopping. The side straps can be tightened to make the bag more compact and it means you don’t have the bag shifting weight while cycling.

The bag can also be used for hand luggage on planes and I easily fitted nearly a week’s worth of clothes as well as laptop, book etc when I visited my partner recently.

About the only thing I’m not sold on is the laptop compartment against my back; it’s a bit big for my laptop so more a personal preference than a design flaw. Instead, my laptop goes into the document pocket in the main compartment and I use the laptop compartment to keep shirts flat when travelling. It would also be nice to have some way of tucking loose straps – I’ll probably make some ties or find clips but the lack of these seems odd in an otherwise thoughtfully designed bag.

It’s made me think about how things can be so much easier with the right tools and equipment. This term has been stressful enough as it is – among other things, I’ve been working three jobs (four if you count monthly invigilation), organising a module and working out the logistics of travel – and I simply don’t want to have to think about how I’m going to transport my stuff or for how long I can comfortably carry it or the chances of my stuff getting damaged or left behind somewhere. It’s been so nice to have room to keep some things in this bag permanently (and therefore not risk forgetting them) and it’s made my crash course in survival skills for the young academic that much easier.

As someone who cares for the environment, is broadly anti-capitalist and is against buying stuff for the sake of it, I am trying to surround myself with things that are good at what they do and which will last. I don’t want to keep having to replace things that wear out too soon – I want to be able to get something and be confident that it will be usable in 10 years or 20 years or longer. Hopefully this bag will be one of them.

[1]It pains me slightly that my life has become one where I consider not pulling out a toothbrush in front of my students/colleagues to be a minor triumph, and yet here we are.

IT and the itinerant academic

Last week I lost access to my institutional email account. This is a problem on several levels: I am on the organising committee for a conference and have access to the conference email account – which has to be accessed through my institutional email account. I’m working on a project at the University of Nottingham and need to communicate with other members of my team and have computer access for when I’m working on campus. I’m in talks about a publication. Finally, I’m teaching at two other institutions and (probably) won’t get an institutional email address at either.

Luckily my access to my Nottingham postgrad account was extended by a week so I could get on with my work, I have been set up with an Associate account and I have an email account attached to this domain so I do have an email account slightly removed from my personal one. I find it’s crucial to have this separation between personal and professional identities – not least because I don’t want my academic contacts to be able to see when I’m online, add me on a messaging service without my consent and so on.

Having graduated and currently working several part-time jobs yet without a long term contract, I am merely one tiny cog in an academy increasingly built on casual labour and short-term contracts. Melonie Fullick outlines the problems with this precarious existence, and I suggest that some of the issues crystallise around my (lack of) institutional email account.

As for early-career academics, they’re not even sure if there’s a place for for them in the university anymore or if so, what it will look like. What this adds up to is a special kind of chaos that exists alongside, intertwined with, the still-stable roots and structures of academe; and it takes a lot of privilege to be able to close one’s eyes to that.

In my academic world, an institutional email address is one of the structures of academe; it gets added to departmental and career-stage email lists so I know what’s going on, I use my user name to access electronic and teaching resources, I can use the staff and student directory to contact people. More than that, it signals a professional identity, an institutional aegis, an academic belonging.

What does it mean to send an email from an address ending in @nottingham.ac.uk versus @mixosaurus.co.uk? What does it mean to give my students an email address that will expire in a few months time, as my Associate account probably will?[1] What does it mean to give my publisher an email address that will expire in a few months time? What does it mean to give them an email address that the domain name reveals as personal rather than institutional?

What does it mean to build up relationships that occur primarily through email (and occasional meetings/conferences) without having a consistent long-term email? What does it mean to have friends, former colleagues, (former) mentors in academia without knowing that if they want to contact you, they know where to write?

I am reminded of a friend at college who changed her email and livejournal accounts regularly; I inevitably missed one change, she probably assumed I no longer wanted to be friends and we drifted apart. A good friend, one that I would like to have stayed in touch with – and yet, I was thwarted by the fragility of an online connection, the difficulty of maintaining it through account changes and deletions.

Moving back to Fullick’s observations, I am reminded that a stable email address comes with a stable job – one that is largely located in one institution and can be reasonably be expected to last years rather than months or weeks. This system of short-term contracts and precarious employment is difficult in so many ways. The fact that even the method of communication underpinning academia does not account for such experiences of employment highlights the disparity between the conditions of work found in “still-stable roots and structures of academe” and the way that many early career academics work, and are expected to work. It draws attention to the fact that the way I am expected to teach and research unsupported by the roots and structures of academe, but at the same time thrive in in an environment where these same structures are necessary and relied upon.

Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions as to which contact email address I should give my students?

[1] While I won’t be teaching them then, what if they email me later to ask for a reference?

(not) writing in public

It’s been very quiet on the blog and there’s a reason for that. I thought I’d write about the reasons behind it.

At the moment I’m juggling several things – an early career researcher’s portfolio, if you will. There are numerous things that I’m involved with, some short term and one longer term, all focused on my area and which will hopefully open doors in the future. However, none of them are things I’m happy to talk about yet – or indeed discuss in detail with anyone but a few close friends and my immediate family. In some cases this is due to the sensitive nature of the project, in others it’s due to the wishes of other people on the project, in others still it’s because things aren’t fully confirmed and I’m loath to count my chickens before they hatch, in yet another yet it’s because it’s still a tentative thing and I’m not sure how closely I want to connect it with my academic identity.

If I were a cleverer writer I’d be able to write carefully, giving you enough to make me seem busy and exciting while withholding juicy details of the stuff I want to keep close to my chest. But I am not that writer, and my current situation is such that none of the things I’m involved in suitable for public consumption (or at least, not yet).

It’s all making me wonder about the nature of blogging and writing in public, and what this means for the early career researcher. Is blogging about our work always an unqualified good thing? What are the disadvantages? What does it mean to get a reputation as someone who thinks and writes in public? Can such a reputation have a detrimental effect – can it mean that you’re less likely to be trusted with classified data and with sensitive research?

It also makes me wonder about the nature of power expressed in these concerns: basically, who gets to research and/or write in public without repercussions? If I were a more senior researcher – had more clout, had the security of a permanent job – how would that change what I felt able to write about here?