[Muanet] Unis suffer as number of casual academic staff rises

[Chris Latham]

Unis suffer as number of casual academic staff rises
Harriet Alexander Higher Education Reporter
July 24, 2006 
Sydney Morning Herald
THE proportion of casual employees working in academia is about to top
50 per cent, threatening the quality of teaching and deterring young
starters from joining the ageing workforce, academics warn. 
The figure is already more than half at some universities, and the
proportion is expected to rise again with the latest round of enterprise
agreements. Anne Junor, the deputy director of the Industrial Relations
Research Centre at the University of NSW, said the market had become
more deregulated since Work Choices legislation took effect and the
Federal Government had introduced regulations last year that threatened
to penalise universities that capped the number of casual employees.
"We've seen it plateau and it will rise again," Dr Junor said.
Although casuals were usually good teachers, their limited time on
campus meant they were not available to see students face-to-face and
had less time to liaise with other academic staff.
"The thing that makes for quality is when a group of people who are
teaching in a course sit down together and touch base," Dr Junor said.
"I'm always in a dilemma. I want the casuals to come to my lectures but
I can't pay them.
"And what are they teaching if they don't come to lectures and don't
know the intricacies of what we're doing?"
Research she conducted four years ago showed that no casual staff liked
the conditions of their employment.
Many of them had PhDs and had been waiting years for permanent full-time
positions, and spent many more hours designing courses and fielding
student emails than they were paid for, Dr Junor said.
Department of Education figures peg the proportion of casuals at 19 per
cent.
But Ken McAlpine, a senior industrial officer at the National Tertiary
Education Union, said that calculation was based on a formula that
overestimates the number of tutorials a full-time staff member would
teach.
Dr Junor's research put the figure at 50 per cent, based on the
combination of a head count and the number of classes taught by casuals
in any given week in a survey of five universities.
Meanwhile good academics were being lost to the private sector because
they were not being given full-time jobs and allowed to research, Mr
McAlpine said.
"What it means is that we don't necessarily have people who are actively
involved in research in the fields they're teaching and that's what
makes a university a university," Mr McAlpine said.
"The Government says that deregulating ... is about providing people
with choice. Our research shows that over half of all academic employees
would prefer a full-time career as an academic."

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.murdoch.edu.au/pipermail/muanet/attachments/20060725/5897114f/attachment.html