Day 50-51

This is a little of the topic, but I thought I'd quickly comment on something from The Australian, Higher Education supplement, from Wednesday. Disclaimer: all personal thoughts...does not reflect my institution or my faculty/discipline etc.

Casual numbers blow out

Jill Rowbotham writes about the explosion in the casual workforce in Australian academia, where currently around 60% of academics are employed on casual or sessional terms. The story is related to the doctoral research of Robyn May from Griffith Uni.

There is a statement that "They are stranded in casual positions and there is no career path" and it is essentially this that I would like to discuss. To make such a statement about such a diverse workforce is surely dangerous. For example, from my own experience as both a casual academic and now a full-time academic who is involved in some small way in employing casual staff, I see this as exactly the opposite of my experience. The casual work I completed while studying my PhD was basically part of my training as an academic - there was the research training in the PhD and the teaching training as a casual tutor/lecturer. Now as a full-time academic, we often talk about the sessional staffing positions in that way also. That is, by employing for example current PhD students in these positions, we are taking part in their academic training and assisting them in one day being an excellent applicant for an academic position. I don't think this is a one-off, at least in the area of mathematics...perhaps I am wrong?

Certainly there are uncertainties around future work - but that is the case with any casual job. At least with academia, there is some certainty around the schedule (ie the weeks of the year) and also to some extent how much work will be on offer - student numbers and therefore tutoring work, are roughly steady from year to year, and so too are the available people to staff these tutorials.

Personally, I would hate to see casualisation disappear (not that I have any reason to believe it will) as it would remove what is an excellent training ground for academics and also a real source of supplementary income for what I think would be a greater number of people than would be the case if all the positions were to become full or part time.