Iniquities of HE

[miss_annersley]

Considering starting a higher education blog - I spend so much time thinking about it and reading about it that it might be useful to formulate some stuff more fully. Especially since the standard of HE reporting in UK newspapers is universally poor (basically, churnalism spewed out at a high rate to feed the hungry commenters on the Guardian, and

Comments

[slightlyfoxed]

HE is all a bit daunting. (Sorry I didn't reply to your last post - it was interesting but I wasn't sure what to add.) Would be happy to read your thoughts on it.

The nine-month fellowship was around about eight years ago, in very small numbers, and people generally regarded it as a low move. I am precisely the candidate for that kind of thing - am wondering about one at the moment, in fact, but shying away from it because after a year, what does one have apart from a massively expanded brane? Grr.

[miss_annersley]

A massively expanded brane sounds to me like a good outcome, but it depends whether it is outweighed by bad outcomes... I spose those things have been around for a while, but there just seem to be an awful lot of them on jobs.ac.uk at the mo

[xxxlibris]

Yes, I think Tutorial/Teaching Fellows are the new lecturers: cheaper, can take on a higher teaching load as they have no research time costed in, and can be disposed of if they're not REFable. The post I was offered a few months back was a 24-month tutorial fellowship (very unusual for being that length) and my initial outrage at the teaching load was tempered by many friends in the humanities and social sciences saying that actually this was the type of teaching contract that they were on and that they were lucky to get it. I don't think we're ever going to shift towards a US system of adjuncting, but this might be the nearest thing to it.

More broadly, a UK HE blog would be a really good idea - would you do it under a pseudonym? There seem to be a lot out there about US HE, but little on the specificities of this side of the pond.

[miss_annersley]

Yes, I agree that people are lucky to have those posts (in the sense that there are a lot of other people who want them who don't get them) - though I think they're dreadful in terms of career progression, cos of the difficulty of producing research. Agree completely about why they are in vogue. But I think that there is a sort of move towards - if not a systematic reliance on adjuncts as such - the use of short-term, hourly- or paid-by-the-course lecturers - not even teaching fellows. I'm thinking of several people I've known at St A who take on specific courses while someone is on sabbatical, not on a salary but paid by the course; and an increasing tendency at Oxf colleges to employ GTAs to deliver teaching in return for small money and some living/dining rights

[xxxlibris]

I think it depends what you want out of the blog? For portfolio career brownie points, a really good and thoughtful HE UK blog would be great - I don't *think* you would have to have many IDing stuffs on it, but you would have to be clear that you ran it, if asked. If it's more of a 'dark truth of the academy' thing, going anon is probably the best way, and plenty of the US academic blogs seem to manage that quite well.

[miss_annersley]

I don't think I could do dark truth of the academy (tempting though it is, and useful though it would be) as it would rely on gossip, and if exposed that could lead to all sorts of trouble for other people, not just me! You know what academia is like - two and two would certainly be put together, and since my links are to history (which seems exceptionally gossipy) that might happen quite quickly.