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Hot and strong about Australian Universities’ slide. Mirror image?
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2306/S00027/forget-the-university-gift-cards-professionalism-and-the-australian-academy.htm
…The nature of the rot starts at the top – a conventional wisdom. And that rot features workloads of an unrealistic nature (too many classes; unrecognised grading efforts; questionable budgets), all padding for the bloated managerial class that guiltlessly loots. It helps, as well, that most Australian universities have Human Resources departments larger than most academic departments. They are the stormtroopers for the managerial gauleiters, ensuring that dissenters are kept quiet, and anyone wishing to challenge the status quo kept in straitjacket and check.
Much has already been made of the enormous casualisation of the academic workforce in Australia. (One figure suggests that 70% of university workers in the sector are on casual or fixed term contracts.) They are the precariat, the equivalent of altar children whose bottoms, bodies and minds are passed around from course to course to be used by the relevant coordinator, program manager and associate dean for a finite duration.
The nature of such sessionalisation has seen an interesting twist of late. The hand-to-mouth precariat are not wanted – at least in certain institutions. Universities suddenly claim to have no money in the kitty to pay modest sums to sessional workers they have sadistically abused for years. This is despite huge financial windfalls that arose even as the global pandemic was raging. In the post-COVID landscape, the assumption is that ongoing academics (tenure is not a concept of any worth down under) will take charge, seize the reins, and teach themselves into the ground….
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