we've got to shut down academia until we figure out what the hell is going on
Capitalism is really eating itself. Imagine hollowing out even the bastions of bougie ideology for a quick buck. An ancient institution that's raised generations of leeches and nonces, and you can't be arsed to preserve this little.
i would highly recommend graebers anthropology and the rise of the professional managerial class as a fantastic essay about the neoliberal gutting of universities
I also won the lottery (my stuff just happens to be trendy in my field), but my husband has been having trouble even finding adjunct opportunities. It’s like begging people to exploit him. It sucks so hard, especially since I know just how good a teacher he is and how much he really, really cares. You’d know if you ever see him in a classroom. But of course the system doesn’t care. And of course none of my fancy colleagues could remotely relate to our situation (let alone help lol), in fact the shit they’d casually say in front of us there’s no way to characterize other than major micro-aggression. I like research and teaching and even dealing with student-related bureaucracy (it’s actual lives at stake there) but the social and class aspect of the job is so suffocating.
This is exactly my position. Love teaching, students are great, can't survive on it, and people treat adjuncts or early career scholars as fucking serfs. :not-good:
Yup, it's a goddamn dumpster fire. Congrats making it through, and solidarity!
postdocs have been agitating for the right to work on their own research for some of the time. Academia is so bad that people are asking for feudal rights
i was over in the uk in the mid 2010s and was idiotic enough to do a postdoc, at somewhere supposedly prestigious. the guy at the bank when i was sorting out bankcards literally laughed at me when he saw how little i was making for it. and the guy paying me openly stated that he would pay less if he could.
yeah fuck modern academia
Oxford has an endowment of £1.3bn with another £5.06 bn earmarked for specific colleges.
The college has a total staff and faculty of around 6,000 people.
With 8 hours of contact time...that seems like around half time hours or a bit less. So £20k for half time is still pretty bad.
It's 8 hours of lecturing per week but, of course, preparation for those lectures and the time required to mentor students are never included in pay calculations. And roughly 10% of that goes towards the pension scheme, making the take home wage below £18k. 8 hrs per week is probably 2-4 classes per term depending on how often they meet weekly and for how long, so the lecturer is responsible for somewhere between 6-12 classes I gather. That would be ~£3k per class max which is actually better than what I've gotten for my adjunct work (but still sucks major ass and is unlivable especially in Oxford)
How is Oxford price wise? I mean in regards to Cost of living and the like. 19k seems like it would barely cover rental costs in most parts of the south east.
last I checked (which admittedly has been quite a while) it was one of the most expensive places in the UK to live, especially if you have a family. most of that salary would most certainly be going towards rent as I think even one-bedroom flats are over 1k per month not including utilities, etc nevermind if you want children to have a bedroom. simply unlivable
We've been falling since at least '08. Probably closer to 9/11.
But we are so high up that its going to take some time to reach the ground. In the meantime, freefall is being normalized.
This makes me so glad I dipped out and decided not to pursue that PhD. There's already so much bullshit you'd have to deal with being a communist in higher education, no chance I'd deal with all of that bullshit for poverty wages
