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Academics as Workers: From Career Management to Class Analysis and Collective Action

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Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education

Part of the book series: Palgrave Critical University Studies ((PCU))

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Abstract

It is a well-known story: even before the sovereign debt crisis hit the European periphery and austerity was established as the dominant model of handling it, the conservative (fiscal) policies systematically applied across peripheral and core states had already begun treating large portions of state budgets as afflictions—they were there to be cut. With the financial crisis and its global spread, even the systems of tertiary education, despite being hailed earlier as fundamental pillars of development and driving motors of emerging ‘knowledge economies’, quickly became just another uncomfortable figure in state budget tables. Encompassing a shift in public education towards ‘market-based self-sustainability’ (Žitko 2012, p. 19) and the internationalisation of tertiary education systems, the pre-crisis ‘knowledge society bubble’ burst, and a halt was put to (at least nominally) expansive policies prevalent earlier in this sector.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The European University Association report from January 2011 provides an overview of the severe budget cuts to public higher education across Europe, with peripheral countries hit the hardest: in Latvia, the higher education budget was first cut by 48 % in 2009, and then later in 2010 by another 18 % following recommendations by the IMF. In Greece, the government set cuts of 30 % as a target. Substantial budget cuts around or more than 10 % occurred in Romania, Estonia, and Lithuania, cuts of between 5 % and 10 % in Ireland, and up to 5 % in the Central and South Eastern Europe—Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia. Additionally, in countries like Hungary governments have discarded previous commitments to increase funding (see EUA 2011).

  2. 2.

    OECD reports indicate that public spending on tertiary education increased in most OECD countries between 1995 and 2008 (see, e.g., OECD 2011). Simultaneously, however, the increase in the number of students in tertiary education systems has been dramatic and the costs of tertiary education also rose steadily (see Altbach et al. 2009).

  3. 3.

    This has been a long-term trend. The UNESCO report states: ‘It is no longer possible to lure the best minds to academe. A significant part of the problem is financial. Even before the current world financial crisis, academic salaries did not keep up with remuneration for highly trained professionals everywhere. Now, with tremendous financial pressures on higher education generally, the situation will no doubt deteriorate further’ (Altbach et al. 2009, p. 92). In the UK, for example, ‘academic pay has fallen in relative terms. In 1981–2001 non-manual average earnings rose by 57.6 % after inflation. In the same period the salary of academics at the top of the Lecturer B scale in the old universities rose by 6.1 % above inflation, and that of academics on point 6 of the senior lecturer scale in the new universities by 7.6 % after inflation’ (Callinicos 2006, p. 16). In the USA, ‘a recent study by the American Association of University Professors shows that even full professors are underpaid in comparison to non-academic positions in similar fields’ (CFHE 2015).

  4. 4.

    It is often said that such developments affect young academic workers the hardest, but there are many casually employed academic workers who perform low-paid fixed-term contract or even free work well into their thirties, forties, and later, which also suggests that this is not a new development (see Courtois and O’Keefe 2015; Auriol 2010).

  5. 5.

    The above-mentioned Nature report features a graph showing that foreign postdocs outnumber foreign professors in almost all countries included in the GlobSci survey ‘Restless Youth’, thus completely disregarding the changing structural conditions of academic work between generations and naturalising a historical trend (see Van Noorden 2012).

  6. 6.

    I am using ‘antisystemic’ here in Immanuel Wallerstein’s sense of ‘antisystemic movements’: ‘These movements were all antisystemic in one simple sense: They were struggling against the established power structures in an effort to bring into existence a more democratic, more egalitarian historical system than the existing one’ (Wallerstein 2014, p. 160).

  7. 7.

    Bousquet writes about the USA, but the same structural logic can be observed across the world-system.

  8. 8.

    Available research shows that 74 % of young academic workers in the US humanities expect to remain working in the academic field, while ‘43 % of humanities PhD recipients have no commitment for either employment or postdoctoral study at the time of degree completion’ (Rogers 2015, p. 2).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Hrvoje Tutek

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  1. Hrvoje Tutek
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. English Department, London, United Kingdom

    Suman Gupta

  2. Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Jernej Habjan

  3. University of Zagreb, Department of English, Munich, Germany

    Hrvoje Tutek

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Tutek, H. (2016). Academics as Workers: From Career Management to Class Analysis and Collective Action. In: Gupta, S., Habjan, J., Tutek, H. (eds) Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49324-8_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49324-8_14

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