“I know what I need to do to be successful in my role”: “Devil, soul, sell.”

The following are responses to a survey staff at my university completed in 2022, and excerpts from my letter to my line manager and university VC in a last (unsuccessful) bid for a permanent role, respectively.

First, the survey. You can tell how bitter I have become in this domain.

Prompt: “The University motivates me to go beyond what I would in a similar role elsewhere”
Response: “I work many more hours than I am paid to do. This is because the university has stripped back staff numbers in my School, leaving all teaching staff with much more work than is doable. We are left with a choice: do what you can in the hours you are paid for (and provide low quality material and engagement) or do much more than you are paid for so as to not feel ashamed of what you are providing – that is, to feel you are honouring the work, your colleagues, and students. Further, performance measures (i.e., the paper mill, supervisions, teaching, research, and grants) drive people to work far beyond reasonable levels. Finally, the pressure is on all non-tenured staff to perform at unsustainable levels in the (usually vain) hope that this will result in a permanent job. You are breaking people who care.”

Prompt: “I am proud to work for the University”
Response: “Partly proud and partly mortified at my submission to a cruel, corporate master/mistress. I admit to an egoic attachment to ‘being an academic’, and a sentimental attachment to the ‘idea’ of [MY UNIVERSITY]. It does not evoke pride, in its present form.”

Prompt: “I would recommend the University as a great place to work”
Response: “What are the advantages? Intellectual and community engagement, oh and a nice campus with some distinctive buildings. Disadvantages? Being part of what is an increasingly corporatised, deceitful, and exploitative organisation.”

Prompt: “I see myself still working at the University in two years’ time”
Response: “Ha ha ha. If I am, it will either be because the university had the decency to offer me a real job, in which I feel cared about, and have time to think and live, or because I’ve sold my soul.”

Prompt: “The learning, teaching and research offerings that the University provides are as good as, or better than, other domestic and international universities”
Response: “Again, what does this question mean? There are great teachers and researchers here, but there are also those who are disengaged, lazy, greedy or broken. My experience of two other universities in Australia (as a staff member and student) provides a comparison, and they were both ‘better’ (defined as: high quality teaching, with high standards expected of students; and a nurturing, rigorous research environment in which staff were treated as part of a team, not as slaves).”

Prompt: “The University allows me to make a positive difference to our community”
Response: “”Allows”? I aim to make a positive difference. The university, in putting me into contact with students and communities where I do research, is ‘allowing’ me, I guess. But “supports” would be a more useful term. And it barely does that.”

Prompt: “Our leaders keep people informed about what is happening”
Response: “I do get a lot of lengthy emails full of attempted justifications – not just on the campus move, but on who gets what high-powered role, our COVID response, the weather. We certainly get told. Any consultation is actually coercion, as far as I can tell. “Our leaders” does smack of North Korea, darlings. Leaders who have to coerce followers even more so.”

Prompt: “We are encouraged to be innovative even though some of our initiatives may not succeed”
Response: “”We”? Do you mean staff? I aim to be effective. If that involved innovation, then I’ll do that. Innovation for its own sake is a nonsense.”

Prompt: At the University, there is a culture of positively embracing change
Reply: “Really? Positively embracing change? Is change an automatic good now? Hey, Jewish citizens of Warsaw, there is a change planned – you’re going to be herded into a small part of the city, gradually deprived of more and more of the necessities of life, and then shipped off to be killed. Embrace it! Or hey, let’s embrace climate change. Change – like innovation – needs to have a justifiable and good purpose and likely outcome. Some change should be resisted.”

Prompt: “At the University there is open and honest two-way communication”
Response: “At what level? Between colleagues (academic and professional) in a work unit – mostly. Between people in the College – partially. Between the decision makers and the rest of us – absolutely not: it is strikingly top-down, involves all sorts of surveillance, and unilateral decisions that are then sold to us as having been the product of consultation. Not a good look, guys.”

Prompt: “We hold ourselves and our team members accountable for results”
Response: “I hold myself responsible for what I can be responsible for. I trust my research and teaching colleagues to do the same. Beyond that …

Prompt: “We are genuinely supported if we choose to make use of flexible working arrangements”
Response: “Oh, the hilarity. I am on a contract.”

Prompt: “My physical workspace is pleasant to work in”
Response: “I am glad to have a suitable workspace – an office on my own, tech equipment and support, and space for my tools of trade and to think.”

Prompt: “Processes and procedures in my work environment promote safe working conditions”
Response: “What does this mean? The physical environment is fine and nice. The rest is mostly unsafe”.

Prompt: “I am confident that I would be supported by my Line Manager if I was to report a safety or wellbeing issue”
Response: “I could report to my ‘line manager’ (you know that term comes from manufacturing production lines, don’t you?), but what change could they make? I’m sure fixing a light, or toilet might happen, but psychological safety? Nope. Top-down management (from above them) stymies care.”

Prompt: “I feel like I belong at the University”
Response: “I might feel that this is a place that does something for my identity (as in, I like the idea of being an academic), but treatment of staff like me is absolutely anathema to feelings of belonging.”

Prompt: “The University values diversity”
Response: “I commend the work done to create a safer place for Indigenous people and women (though this is superficial – I’d love to know the proportion of casual and contract staff who are female). Further, I am aware of a lot of middle-aged (or older) women in this institution who have been sidelined, ignored, kept precarious despite very impressive academic and teaching track records. I don’t think this happens to men. The university continues to fail people with disability, despite some wonderful staff in the Access team.”

Prompt: “I know what I need to do to be successful in my role”
Response: “Devil, soul, sell. Oh, and drive myself into the ground. And yes, I do know what is officially required.”

Prompt: “I receive appropriate recognition for good work at the University”
Response: “Job security, pay and conditions recognise good work. Something in that nexus is broken.”

Prompt: “I am provided with helpful feedback on my performance”
Response: “Basically, I receive feedback on my teaching only from the students. I value their responses, but know they are swayed by things that are peripheral to effective learning and teaching. I feel isolated from any sense of whether I am going okay, other than my own judgement. In other roles, I have often had a strong sense that the people who should have provided feedback had no idea what I was actually doing. My research colleagues are brilliant at providing valuable feedback. That is the product of many years of work (by me and my research colleagues) at building trusting relationships.”

Prompt: “I believe there are good career opportunities for me at the University”
Response: “Too old, too female, too high expectations, too passionate.”

And two excerpts from my letter to my line manager and university VC:

“I am, of course, glad to have been employed on the complicated mixture of casual and short term contacts I’ve had over the past eleven+ years. I did think there was a good chance that the recent assessment of my employment history (as part of the university-wide process) would result in permanency. It didn’t. Despite not having been without work for any period since I started here, I was deemed ineligible. My experience does not appear to satisfy the Fair Work Commission’s directions to the sector regarding casualisation. At the same time, I understand the economic constraints argument. But it doesn’t explain why some people (all women) remain in precarity while others have been appointed: none with an AA PhD, none with my publishing record, none with my collaborations with community near and far, none having brought anywhere near the substantial financial resources to the University, none having taught at my level, none having supervised RHDs, and none having made similar contributions as I have to undergraduate teaching.”

And this, again from the letter, which was the last straw:

“A couple of months ago, I was approached by a colleague who has been appointed (permanently) to staff and whose PhD I co-supervised. [A little background. I came to the supervision role with 6 months to go on the candidature. The ‘thesis’ had a methodology section of two paragraphs, and no ‘thesis – that is, there was no coherent question or argument. In consultation, I advised the student of some options and of the need to include a serious methodology section. He did this adequately rather than well, but did adopt the thesis that I proposed to him might make the whole thing hang together – and is now staking a claim for this as his research identity.] He asked me if I’d like to be a CI on a health evaluation project he was tendering for. It involves communities with which I have existing relationships (and which are hard to penetrate), doing work for which I am eminently qualified. He invited me because of that expertise, and because he has no experience of evaluation work, and no knowledge of health sociology or other relevant fields. I am the only person in the School of Social Sciences with a relevant track record and needed relationships with the particular communities involved. He told me that he was hoping I could mentor his development in this work. This sounded like a good idea to me. However, when he subsequently checked with the Associate Dean Research, he was told that I was to be excluded from taking a CI role, because I am neither a permanent employee nor have an ongoing contract. He was unable to find anyone else to help him. Instead, I had the ignominy of him offering me RA work on the evaluation. I declined. This episode was disturbing because of what it revealed about the University’s resistance to employing me properly. It also says something concerning about the standard of work the institution appears happy to endorse.”