The Australian | 6 March 2013
The number of teaching-only academics is expected to rise markedly as industrial relations in the sector responds to myriad pressures for change in the traditional academic role.
Author of a new report on the topic, Belinda Probert (La Trobe University) points to a shift in attitude by the academic union, the appetite for more teaching academics on the part of university managers and the expiry of many enterprise agreements yet to make provision for these roles.
Jeannie Rea (National Tertiary Education Union) is urging the creation of 2000 “scholarly teaching fellows” as entry-level, continuing jobs “to start to soak up” some of the casual teaching positions common throughout the sector.
Griffith University’s Sue Spence, who chairs the deputy vice-chancellor (academic) group for Universities Australia, said universities in any case were keen to reduce their reliance on casuals in order to guarantee proper supervision and professional development for staff.
… as a consequence of employing more teaching-focused, continuing staff, we will reduce our reliance on sessional staff.
Probert’s discussion paper for the federal Office of Learning & Teaching says teaching-focused positions have been introduced to the sector for contradictory reasons. However, opportunistic reasons to do with research reputation appeared to be more common than strategic reasons related to improving the quality of teaching. This reflected the university culture in which research is prized and more teaching was seen “as a punishment for poor performance in research”.
The extent to which we all take for granted the primacy of research skills becomes apparent when the opposite is imagined: that those with poor teaching results should be targeted for redundancy or transferred to research-only positions where they can do little harm to students..
Confronted by domestic measures of research quality, and international rankings biased towards research, some universities saw teaching-only jobs as a way to hide academics with weak research performance.
The paper says, nevertheless, some Australian universities have made genuine attempts to create well-defined roles and promotion opportunities for teaching specialists.
But most have stopped short of advertising these positions beyond the university (the best way to secure high-calibre candidates) and they have lacked the confidence to offer continuing positions.
Nor have Australian universities been as explicit as University College London about the extra teaching (60 per cent more) expected of teaching-focused academics.
“That is a really curly industrial issue,” Professor Probert said.
“That’s what the deans, that’s what the budget holders really want — to get those staff to do more teaching, not just to be more scholarly in their teaching.”
Probert said she believed research is not necessarily essential to higher education teaching, which relies on a “scholarly approach”.
This is an issue not just for universities but also for private providers and TAFEs offering higher education.
