An Australian response to Michael Bérubé

Michael Bérubé makes three key claims in his ‘provocation’, as follows:

One, the humanities are in fine shape, insofar as their intellectual value is concerned.

Two, whilst all this exciting and ambitious work has been going on, the profession of college teaching has been hollowed out as full-time, tenure-track positions have been converted to highly precarious positions (both full-time and part-time) that offer no possibility of tenure.

Three, the deprofessionalization of college teaching has had consequences with which no one has fully come to terms – in academe or out. Most notably, the massive hiring off the tenure track has effectively foregone systems of professional review for college faculty.

Bérubé proposes that many full-time faculty lines off the tenure track be converted to teaching-intensive tenured positions and that public support for this proposal can be secured by making people aware that the current reliance on ‘contingent faculty’ undermines the quality of tertiary education.

Many of the issues he raises have parallels in the Australian higher education setting. There has been considerable soul-searching about the value of the humanities, but also encouraging signs that the contribution of a broad education is increasingly valued by employers. The Business Council of Australia, for example, commissioned a report on how teaching and learning in higher education contribute to productivity. It concluded that when it comes to teaching and learning outcomes, Australia’s higher education sector should contribute to the development of graduates who possess:

a combination of in-depth knowledge and up-to-date technical skills in the discipline that they have studied;

international capabilities, based on the ability to adapt to working in an international environment with people from different cultures as part of multi-national and multidisciplinary teams;

the ability to think independently, to critically analyse issues and problems, and to adapt thinking and analytical capabilities to different contexts and new problems;

generic skills, including teamwork, problem solving, communication, and the ability to utilise technology and to engage in self-directed learning.

The report particularly endorsed the value of a broad liberal arts education in achieving these outcomes (Business Council of Australia, 2011).

Clearly, the generic skills that students acquire in the course of a liberal arts degree are valued in the workplace. There are indications, too, that humanities, social sciences, and performing arts also have an important role to play beyond the essential contribution they make in helping us understand what it means to be human and how we can improve the human condition; increasingly, our disciplines are being valued for what we can contribute to a more wholistic analysis of the many complex challenges facing the world today. So I agree with the assessment that ‘the humanities are in fine shape, insofar as their intellectual value is concerned’.

The second two propositions concern the non-tenured academic workforce – what the authors call ‘contingent faculty’, and here my verdict is less clear cut. Whilst not as extreme as the US situation, casualization of academic work has escalated in recent decades such that half the teaching at Australian universities is now done by such staff. And the pressures are similar: the progressive withdrawal of government funding for higher education over the past 25 years has had an enormous impact on Australia’s universities, almost all of which are public rather than private (only 3 of the 39 universities are private). Government funding now contributes less than half the cost of running public universities. Australia lags behind other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in terms of government investment in higher education, spending only 0.76 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) compared to the OECD average of 1.12 per cent (Universities Australia, 2014–2015).

To fund the teaching of undergraduate domestic students, universities receive a block grant from the federal government composed of direct government funds plus a component (currently around 40 per cent) funded by students through a deferred loan scheme (called the Higher Education Loan Program or HELP). Fee levels are capped (although the current government is trying to change this). The funding received is inadequate to cover the costs of teaching, let alone sufficient to meet the costs of research. Several reviews commissioned by the Federal Government in recent years have recommended major injections of funding to redress this situation, with a 10 per cent increase in base funding being seen as a minimum. This has not been forthcoming, and Universities have attempted to manage the shortfall by increasing the numbers of fee-paying international students (who pay higher fees than domestic students), increasing workloads for academic staff, increasing casualization, increasing class sizes, and reducing class contact hours. That casualization is not even more pronounced in Australia is in part due to the efforts on the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), which has campaigned to have limits placed on the proportion of academics who are casual staff written into Enterprise Agreements at each university. Successful campaigns to improve conditions and rates of pay have also made casualization less attractive as a cost-cutting strategy than it otherwise would be.

But the fact remains that the number of casual academics continues to grow, with a 3.4% increase between 2012 and 2013 alone (Rea, 2015). It is also significant that the nature of these positions and their relationship to an academic career has changed markedly over the last two decades. As Jeannie Rea, National President of the NTEU, observes:

The old career path of completing a PhD, then moving into an entry level lecturer position, and if all went well, tenure after three years is now only for a privileged few. In the old days, casual lecturing and tutoring was shared by graduate students (who were often also on scholarships), professionals providing specialist input, and some dipping their toe into academia. Most teaching was done by tenure or tenurable academics. (Rea, 2015)

Her observations are supported by NTEU surveys of casual academic staff as well as recent academic research (May, 2013).

Ironically, whilst the process of casualization may have been slowed by NTEU campaigns to restrict the use of casual staff and pay them more, other NTEU strategies may have actually increased the incentive for universities to casualize teaching. The NTEU won a landmark case two decades ago that restricted the use of contract staff to categories of genuine fixed-term replacement or grant-funded positions. As Rea notes,

This improved job security for existing academic and general staff, many of whom were converted to ongoing positions. What has changed is that now, despite enormous growth in the university system, new academic jobs are more likely to be casualized, and old jobs when vacated are also replaced with casual staff. (Rea, 2015)

The restrictions on the use of contract staff (i.e. those hired usually for one-three years rather than by the hour over a semester) have thus provided another incentive for universities to employ casuals.

This case highlights the difficulty in coming up with effective strategies to deal with the issue of insecure work from a union perspective: it is always hard to control for the unintended consequences of any particular approach. Which brings me to the question of teaching intensive positions. This discussion must be seen in the light of broader changes occurring in the nature of academic work in Australia over the last 10–15 years, with the standard teaching and research positions (T & R) becoming more differentiated into research-only and professional-practice as well as teaching-intensive or ‘education-focussed’, and variations of these. Universities have encouraged this specialisation in an attempt to get better value out of their academic workforce. They have also been heavily influenced by the pressure to perform better on research in order to improve their institution’s rating on the various university rankings whilst continuing to attract students. There has been a 50 per cent increase in research-only positions in the last ten years, reflecting the increased focus that Australian universities have placed on research excellence and a recognition of the difficulty in combining high research output with the other demands placed on teaching and research academics. Whilst in the past almost all research-only positions were funded by ‘soft’ money – i.e. external grants, fellowships and contracts – it is becoming much more common for universities to employ research-only academics on their operating budgets to attract the best researchers. At the same time, there has been an increase in teaching-intensive positions (both tenured and shorter-term contract in addition to casuals) as universities seek to increase the teaching workloads of academics who do not wish to or are not capable of undertaking research. For most of these positions, there is no defined career path comparable to that of the teaching and research academic.

Some universities have attempted to recognise that there are some research-active academics who are also excellent educators and educational leaders and who would prefer to devote their main energies to the education sphere. My own university, Monash University, is one example. As a highly ranked research-intensive university, it was not only keen to recognise the nexus between teaching and research but also provide opportunities for talented educators to contribute more fully to its educational efforts without jeopardising their careers. In 2011 it introduced the category of Education-focussed Academic. Staff in this category are expected both to model and to lead educational excellence and curriculum development and continue to engage in research, although at a lower volume than the standard T & R academic. They are eligible for promotion in the normal way with promotion committees instructed on how to assess excellence in education sufficient to qualify candidates for promotion to the next level (the Australian system generally has five levels from a Level A Lecturer through to a Level E full professor). There is also scope for staff in these roles to move back into a T & R role. The record of these positions has been mixed, both from the university and the staff perspectives and Monash is currently refining its approach. Other Australian universities have also introduced education-focussed roles in recent years (Flinders University, 2012).

In the meantime, the NTEU has conducted a very successful campaign to have universities make provision for a new category of academic – the Scholarly Teaching Fellow. Such fellows would devote up to 80% of their time to teaching (as opposed to the 40% expected of the T & R academic) and would be employed at Level A only (Monash University, 2014). In the most recent round of collective bargaining, universities agreed to provide around 1000 such new academic teaching positions. The union’s hope is that these positions will start to provide secure jobs to some current casual academics. But as Jeannie Rea points out, there was heated debate within the Union about supporting such teaching-focused positions. Many members were reluctant to cede the integrity of the traditional teaching and research academic position. However, with the reality of half of the teaching already being done by teaching-only casual staff, she says, ‘such a position has become untenable’. So it would seem that the position put by Bérubé has the support of Australia’s only academics’ union, although many members and other academics remain sceptical.

It remains to be seen whether this approach will deliver the hoped-for outcomes. Although universities have committed to providing Scholarly Teaching Fellow positions, the implementation has been slower than expected, with fewer just over 100 in place at the time of writing. And even all the promised positions eventuate, this will only help a small proportion of those currently engaged in casual teaching. I am not convinced this is the answer to the casualization problem.

However, Bérubé’s hope that it might be possible to make the wider community care about the issue of contingent faculty is to some extent vindicated by the Australian case. The Business Council’s report referred to above concluded that high quality university teaching was absolutely essential to the future of Australia’s economy. It recommended measures to support and reward better teaching, including maintaining public investment in education. But whether the Business Council of Australia (BCA) or anyone else would necessarily see casualization of academic work as a threat to quality teaching is unclear: their report appears to assume that the typical university teacher is in ongoing employment. But the increasing focus on the quality of teaching and learning at universities in Australia may in itself put a brake on the use of casual staff, or at least lead to them being better supported and integrated into the academic staff.