tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28080901.post1851891352345217394..comments2024-03-20T08:37:50.011+00:00Comments on Bullying of Academics in Higher Education: Rotten to the core: How workplace 'bad apples' spoil barrels of good employeesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28080901.post-78707238696948491472007-02-22T13:13:00.000+00:002007-02-22T13:13:00.000+00:00Who is saying this about last year's strike?But if...Who is saying this about last year's strike?<BR/><BR/>But if this strike serves any purpose, it should convince the irritable, apathetic parents of Middle England of the chronic underpayment of British academics. Next to comparator professions such as lawyers, journalists, doctors and, yes, MPs, academic pay has fallen by 40 per cent in the last 30 years. Even if you were unmoved by this statistic; even if you felt it right that we should pay them peanuts; even if you thought that on the whole they were a bunch of lippy, leftie fact-grubbing beardos, you should recognise that the decline in lecturers' pay...<BR/><BR/> is both a symptom and a cause of the decay of the university experience "the experience of your son or daughter at university. <BR/><BR/>The academic pay gap is the direct arithmetical consequence of the British university boom which has seen, in my lifetime, the enrolment of 18- to 30-year-olds rise from 4 per cent to 43 per cent of the cohort. We now have 2.3 million students, and yet the unit of resource "government cash per student "has halved in the last 20 years.<BR/><BR/><BR/>These lecturers are being asked to teach ever more students, in ever larger classes, and to accept the biological inevitability that "with 400,000 graduates as opposed to 40,000 "the average student will be less bright than in the past. <BR/><BR/>They must cope with the catastrophic failures of the secondary system, so that in many universities even the brighter kids must spend the first year doing remedial maths and English. <BR/><BR/>They are blizzarded with paperwork, and they have a draining sense that they never quite have the time to give proper instruction. <BR/><BR/>As for the students, they have a symmetrical feeling that they are not being properly taught. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed....<BR/><BR/>....we have 'mass cultivation on the cheap, with ever more students herded into ever-expanding institutions to graze, untutored, on ever thinner pastures'.<BR/><BR/>*****************************<BR/><BR/>And what are we doing about this situation as academics...<BR/><BR/>supporting university communites where bullying is tolerated... condoned... encouraged,,,.. rewarded....<BR/><BR/>the government must be rubbing their hands with glee...they have nothing to fear from British academics.....Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28080901.post-82978856831648929052007-02-21T17:59:00.000+00:002007-02-21T17:59:00.000+00:00UCU support its members when there are rotton appl...UCU support its members when there are rotton apples......<BR/><BR/>Message from Peter Jones' blog........<BR/><BR/> As an Employment Tribunal member, my experience gives me much more experience than the other candidates in helping you to fight management. <BR/><BR/>A shame we have to fight them Peter - but at times it feels like a fight.....<BR/><BR/><BR/><BR/>Like you, I want to be in a trade union that is not run by the national officers for the national officers. Like you, I want to belong to a trade union that is run by and for the members.<BR/><BR/>Yes Peter and one that is prepared to engage in conversation with its members when they post invited comments on UCU representatives' blogs....<BR/><BR/> I promise you this, that as General Secretary, I will make sure that the University and College Union is YOUR union, is responsive to YOUR needs, and acts on YOUR behalf. <BR/><BR/>A dream ...or reality?<BR/><BR/>Aphra BehnAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com