Why are UK academics striking? A beginner’s guide

“500 Internal Server Error” for those links, at the moment, for the “justice everywhere” links

I imagine the coursework requirement is a university/college requirement rather than a requirement from the lecturer/professor though? The university is still “requiring” everyone to do their work, but the lecturers are refusing to do it.

Thanks Miriam! Great turnout on the picket-line in Bristol this morning. However this turns out, I think the damage to the Universities UK marketization strategy will be enormous. They’ve pushed the idea that we are a major export industry and that they are the buccaneering CEOs thereof whilst building the whole thing on bullying us into giving our labour for free and exploiting our good will and commitment to our students. Without our willing co-operation (which will be much less available in the future) they’ll have a shiny plexiglass Potemkin village.

TBT the egalitarian justice of relatively high-earners striking to maintain their pay was discussed from a somewhat critical perspective here:
https://crookedtimber.org/2010/08/02/do-people-think-of-themselves-as-further-left-than-they-really-are/

engels 7: Your memory is too good for CB ;-)

The OP is short on important facts. What does the “average” salary mean? Average over their entire careers or average over the last x years, where x is a number like 5? The latter is not unusual in defined benefit schemes.

Who does the proposed DC scheme apply to? Existing academics (including those close to retirement), new academics only, or what?

Of course you can always argue that the details don’t matter because it is a downgrading of employment benefits, which should always be resisted. But it is ironic that students suffer disruption to their studies over this issue, because very few of them will get the benefit of a DB pension scheme, not even those who have careers in high paying professions.

People like @Tabasco need to ask themselves why DB schemes are in crisis. The fundamental reason is that institutions and businesses made promises to their staff, but failed to allocate the funds necessary to keep those promises. Why did they do that? Because not funding the pension scheme was a cheap way of getting access to cash that they’d otherwise have had to borrow and pay interest on.

He may be right that those students will not have DB pensions available to them. But if they don’t then we’ll face a generalized problem in a few years of millions of old people with inadequate retirement incomes to fund their needs. And someone will end up paying for that, probably via taxation. So again we have a case of businesses and other institutions dumping risks and costs onto individuals and taxpayers. Perhaps the students have an interest in standing up against that?

(Should those students have ambitions to enter higher education as academics (a path that typically includes long years of debt and precarious pay and employment) they may well find that path less attractive give the cuts to the remuneration package.)

One of the consequences of QE following the GFC was that DB schemes suddenly became almost unfundable. The flattening of yield curves as well as (I believe) government requirements for pension funds to buy long-term gilts lead to the price of the promise of a dollar in 20 years time going up massively. Hence a report last November putting the total deficit in the UK at £460 billion, which is about three years-worth of the NHS. Hence why pensions funds are at the heart of lots of business collapses and why lots of pension funds are collapsing into the Pension Protection fund (see this list). So not only are DB schemes becoming a thing of the past, but people receiving DB pensions as promised are also becoming a thing of the past, as explained to me by my Cambridge Mathematician taxi driver.

I did the following calculation. Average UK professors salary (£75K) x pension terms (pure guess, 70%) x average lump sum draw down (25) and I get to £1.3 million. So that is quite a large final pension pot. You can put your own numbers in, but are you happy with that amount of deferment of your income? Would you trade some of that final sum for a bit more cash earlier?

I’m not going to get involved in the rights and wrongs of your strike, but DB schemes have become financial land-mines exploding all over the place. Good luck sorting this one out.

@Chris Bertram

It is not true that DB schemes guarantee an adequate retirement incone. It depends on the tbe size of tbe B. It is also not true that a DC scheme implies an inadequate retirement income. It depends on tbe size of tbe C, and a reasonable investment strategy, but you dont need the investing smarts of Warren Buffett to make it work.

What is true of course is that in a DC scheme tbe employee takes on the risk. If I were tbe union I’d be demanding compensatory salary increases.

People like @Tabasco need to ask themselves why DB schemes are in crisis. The fundamental reason is that institutions and businesses made promises to their staff, but failed to allocate the funds necessary to keep those promises. Why did they do that? Because not funding the pension scheme was a cheap way of getting access to cash that they’d otherwise have had to borrow and pay interest on.

Pretty much, which is why you don’t get australian-style-superannuation defined-contributions schemes either.

I teach 16 90 minute classes of up to 35 undergraduates each week at four different institutions, lecture once a week, commute hours per day, and handle my own admin, grading, and syllabus design all for less than 60k US take home and organize my own pension. I could increase my income, as I did for 20 years, by teaching six, or seven days a week during the term. A robust constitution helps, but I’m under no illusions about my ‘status’ on the totem pole. When part-timers such as myself leave a job, the only word heard is ‘next!’ I had lunch with my friend and boss last week, during which he described the faculty professional development program designed to improve teaching skills and educational outcomes – an excellent idea with the caveat being no part-time teachers are eligible – meaning that the people who actually teach the vast majority of the classes will be excluded. The luminaries will give themselves a good clap on the back for solving another problem! Lucky students!

Part-time instructors get practically no support from anyone (other than a few enlightened faculty) and do the bulk of the teaching. That’s how the system ‘works.’

Good luck with the strike!

Dipper: “…QE meant that the funds needed to keep those promises soared very quickly to a very large number as a direct consequence of that QE policy.”

Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.

@ Layman. Seriously? in addition to the deficit numbers I provided earlier a quick google will give you loads of articles pointing out the links but to save you some of your valuable time this one has the statement “Lower yields are extremely damaging for companies with Defined Benefit (DB) Pension Schemes.” and lower yields have arisen primarily because of QE.

@Chris Bertram

Thanks for that link. I’ve greatly enjoyed reading the posts. You are all clearly in the wrong job, should give up lecturing and take up fund management because it is obviously just a matter of taking more risks and making more money. In the whole history of finance that strategy has never ever gone wrong. And you are clearly correct in your assertion that had the employers put more money into the fund in the past then ceteris paribusthere would be more money in there now, but again anyone with the ability to have predicted in the noughties that a global financial crash was on its way and would be followed by a completely unprecedented period of QE that would crush yields for a decade should now be retired in The Bahamas.

The obvious thing that strikes an outsider is that your pay package has completely the wrong split between money today and money tomorrow. Consequently for intelligent people you really don’t get paid much money. Apart from not having much money today, you are relying excessively on promises made to you being kept in the future. The whole construction of global finance, the basis of all financial mathematics, is based round the fact that when it comes to money people don’t keep their promises.

So aren’t you trying to solve the wrong problem? Shouldn’t you be working out how to get paid more money today?

academics, contrary to popular belief, are not generally among the well-off

They’re not well-off if judged against a reference group of people they’re likely to know socially (bankers, lawyers, managers, etc) but by any objective standard nationally and globally they are. I don’t have time to dig out figures now but I think there were some mentioned in the old thread I linked. And from Cohen’s and similar perspectives you’d also have to factor in the fact that their work is generally more subjectively rewarding than that of those other professionals. It is true that younger academics are (a) less well-paid than professors, (b) have mortgages to pay (c) fortunate to be where they are rather than trapped in minimum wage temp work like many other academics and non-academics but none of those considerations mean they merit higher pay than the national average on those views as I understand. I don’t think ‘being able to buy a house in Clifton’ is the relevant definition of privilege from the point of view of egalitarian justice, being better-off than average, all things considered is.

@Engels 31

A lower – mid manager at a telephone company is paid 25% more than a full professor. No one says they should be paid by investment bankers but academic salaries are ridiculous.

she would likely have fared better in material terms as a plumber

As I said, I don’t have tune to do this properly but Glassdoor provides the following average salary figures for UK:

Plumber: £26,380
Lecturer: £39,000
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/plumber-salary-SRCH_KO0,7.htm
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/lecturer-salary-SRCH_KO0,8.htm

Leaving aside the better pension, if those figures are correct a lecturer could spend 40% of her life out of the workforce and have the same lifetime earnings.

And note that there are a LOT of people in UK worse off than plumbers (around half the population if that figure is correct.)

Interesting that it’s the ironically named ‘Engels’ who is producing Sun-type right wing propaganda of the ‘Ackademics? They’re doin’ al right int they? Not a real job though is it? Thas never done a real days work in tha life!’

The reality is, if you take a quick look at jobs.ac.uk, there are many academic jobs that are not lecturing jobs. CF here;

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/psychology

There are research assistants, research fellows, and postdocs just for starts, all of whom earn considerably less than lecturers.

There’s also the pernicious ‘pre-sessional’

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/search/?csrf=099aa9018e0ee9f47268f33cea69b348541803c6&category=2000&keywords=&x=21&y=15&category=2003&salary_from=&salary_to=

where teachers do an awful lot of work for 1,2, 3 months and are then thrown on the scrap heap after the ‘course’ is over.

Finally many academic posts nowadays are part-time, job share, mat leave etc.

It should be noted that research assistant ‘jobs’ are dependent on funding, there is no chance of promotion or job security (ever) and involve an extraordinary amount of work. A job as a school teacher is in every way better than a job as an academic researcher (and I’m not attacking teachers!) and yet they are not considered to be fair game on the soi-disant left, as academics are.

Finally as a result of the equally pernicious RAE (soon to be replaced by something worse) academics are forced to write, sometimes large tomes, for free.

According to Total Jobs, incidentally (not a reliable source, I know) the average plumber’s salary is nearly £32000 pa. https://www.totaljobs.com/salary-checker/average-plumber-salary

But the ruling class laugh when we wilfully allow these ‘divide and rule’ conversations to predominate.

Cough …. the universities did get considerably more revenue, and the real pay of academics declined over the same period.

@ Chris Bertram – 39 – where did the money go?

Ackademics? They’re doin’ al right int they? Not a real job though is it? Thas never done a real days work in tha life!’

I see we’ve reached the ‘working class people can’t spell’ stage of the discussion ahead of schedule… If anyone has evidence that lecturers really make less than plumbers I’m all ears.

Something I realised.

Suppose you have two people. They both are… abrupt, say. Lacking social graces and awareness. Average — maybe even slightly advanced — talent, but resistant to the feedback they need to be polished into actual useful skill. Very happy with themselves as they are right now and not eager to change, even if the change is an improvement.

You know, shitty people. These people are not going to have outstanding social success, or anything success really. But they’re also not going to look at themselves

So, what are they going to do? Well, they’re going to lash out, blame things on the actions of others, probably identify discrimination against People Like Them as the root cause of the lifestyle problems they’ve run into.

And, here’s the kicker: one’s a straight white man and the other’s a queer woman of colour.

… and we get the result that even though subjectively the two have identical experiences, the one has — accidentally — stumbled into a real social truth and merely misapplied it in treating it as the cause of her problems, but the other guy, he’s off writing like the protocols of the elders of zion or something.

@36

“Old people don’t make revolutions.”

They can swing a referendum result that young people will take the consequences of.

The background story here explains why working class representation in academia is low. If you’ve got a First Class degree, and don’t have relatives who can pay for the deposit on a house, why the hell would you be a lecturer? Ditto for conservative representation: if you have no ideological objection to working in the City, you bloody well go there. That’s why there’s so many physicists working in financial software.

Thanks Hidari 37. But careful, at least in the US, teachers are considered fair game for right wing attacks, due to the fact that they are one of few remaining unionized workforces (*). It is an old capitalist propaganda trick to claim that public sector unions are just defending privileges. As long as there are people worse off (and of course there are), they have no right to demand better or even to defend the advances won in the past. The left egalitarian answer to that is of course that all those who are worse off should get improvement, not that those workers who are relatively better off should have their pay and benefits slashed.

(*) Of course, public sector unions in the US will soon be a relic of the past, thanks to all the hard working revolutionary socialists who spent the election campaign making Trump look less horrible than he is.

The left egalitarian answer to that is of course that all those who are worse off should get improvement

I too look forward to a brighter future when everybody in the UK to earns 30% more than the median income

I thought of replying to our troll friend’s ‘points’, before I realised: wait a minute. This is insane! The troll’s points would only make some kind of sense (albeit in Daily Mail land) were it the case that lecturers (and only lecturers*) were striking for more money. But of course, they’re not. All kinds of academics are taking action to prevent their pensions being stolen. So whether university employees are ‘rich’ or not is irrelevant. Something far more basic is at stake.

*It has been pointed out by a number of commentators that many academics are not lecturers.

@ Layman

“Repeating the assumption [of lower yields due to QE] doesn’t make it stop being an assumption.

I would have thought the fact that massive being of bonds would force the prices up and hence push yields down would have been obvious, but it turns out it isn’t. There are alternative reasons why bond yields have continued falling.

Nevertheless, during initial discussion of QE “economists from the Worlds Pensions Council warned that artificial low government bond interest rates could compromise the underfunding of pension funds” (here)

If yields go down, then the cost of meeting future liabilities goes up.

Dipper—if you’re asking me to guess—some of it went on academic salaries (esp at the top), some on admin/VC salaries, some on buildings, some on marketing bullshit

@ Hidari

to prevent their pensions being stolen.

There is a certain kind of person on the “left” for whom “left wing” politics is not about producing better lives for ordinary people, about them having more choice, more opportunities, more control over their own lives, it is about the “good guys” finding the “bad guys” and punishing them. So the reason there is underfunding is because bad people have stolen the pensions!”.

No. The reason that private sector pensions in the UK are about £400 billion under water is not because someone out there has stolen £400 billion. The reason is that the funds generated to provide future income were based round certain assumptions about future real returns, and the policies of QE across the west have made those assumptions incorrect by about £400 billion.

I’ve provided links, I’ve provided a list of private sector companies undergoing similar problems. If you want to see everything in political life as a manifestation of some playground “goodies versus baddies” style game, that is up to you.

“The highest-paid executive at the #USS received a 50 per cent pay increase last year, to £900,000”
https://www.ft.com/content/623683fc-ae16-11e4-919e-00144feab7de

In an egalitarian society, everybody should get the average income

Ie no one earns shove the median, which was the only point I was making, your habitual strawmansplaining (and abusiveness) notwithstanding. (The UK mean income in 2016 was £31 900.)

Also some of the points you are raising seem quite similar to some of those I brought up (albeit rather less furiously and condescendingly) on the previous thread I linked. Anyway being called a stalker, a troll and a joker is probably enough intellectual discussion for one day so I’ll leave you guys to your correct opinions on everything.

@ Collins Street 60

Here’s how it works (simplified).

A pension scheme pays a pension of £20,000 per year to a retired academic. Where does the £20,000 come from? The scheme invests in bonds which pay an interest rate of 5% per year. This means it needs to invest £100,000. Where does the £100,000 come from? From payments into the pension scheme during the academic’s working life, plus earnings on the payments in during the working life, minus administrative costs.

But suppose that when the academic retires, the interest rate is not 5%, but 1%. The scheme has to invest £500,000 to yield the same pension. But it doesn’t have £500,000. It only has £100,000. Not realising decades ago that there would be a financial crisis and QE which would see a permanent fall in interest rates, it didn’t put enough money in during the academic’s career. Alas, it cannot go back in time and retrospectively put the right amount of money in.

Not only that, but if these interest rates stay low – no one can predict the future, but so far it’s been 10 years, a third to a quarter of an academic career – then it’s going to have to put five times as much away to fund future pensions of £20,000.

Lower interest rates = higher pension costs.

@68

This is why pemsion providers are reluctant to sell annuities, unless they are priced sky-high. The people who want to buy them have genetics that will let them live until 110.

@70
To get to the size of the impact, you’d need to ask an actuary. You can be sure that the universities have got actuarial advice that says the problem is real and the DB scheme is unsustainable. Has the union got its own actuarial advice that says the opposite?

Tabasco — I’m no actuary, but even I know that pension payments involve drawdown of principal. On average, over large numbers of pensioners and the long term, the (notional) part of the fund associated with an individual pensioner is exhausted when the pensioner dies. Designing the fund so that this works smoothly and safely is a large part of what actuaries do. Low interest rates are bad news, obviously, but it’s not in the stark inverse proportion that you describe.

Colin Street @72 pretty much hits the main point of the pensions argument. “it’s up to the unis to find the money from somewhere, and if they can’t find the money, if they can’t pay their obligations… then they’re insolvent, aren’t they. Have to be wound up.”

This is the problem in organisation after organisation. There are only three groups of people organisations can get the money from; customers, workers, or owners. In commercial organisations in competitive environments customers and workers are out as they can move to other organisations, which leaves the owners, and they generally elect to go bust if the burden becomes too much. £400 billion is quite a burden, hence the Pension Protection Fund.

I had assumed until the issue of University pensions blew up that the government, hence the taxpayer, was on the hook for this. So I am somewhat surprised to find the universities have constructed a thing that means the government can avoid paying the pensions. Far be it from me to give guidance to University lecturers, but instead of spending time trying to prove their pensions have been mismanaged (although it does produce entertaining articles like this) they would do better arguing that the construction of a vehicle for holding pension funds that allows government-run institutions to avoid their financial commitments is not legitimate and they should have the same guarantees on their pensions as civil servants.

rwschnetler: “The reason why they want to change to define contributions is because of life expectancy that increased over the years. ”

Life expectancy in the UK has been increasing for a century. If anything, the increase in life expectancy since 1980 has been slower than the historic rate of increase. Which do you think is the case: That the university pension fund managers are culpable because they were too stupid to take broadly known facts into their calculations, or that the teachers are culpable because they stubbornly refuse to die?

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/nationallifetablesunitedkingdom/2014to2016

‘Insurers need to set aside less cash for pension payments as century-long rise in UK life expectancy stalls due to bad diet, stress and austerity’

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/mar/07/worsening-life-expectancy-drives-legal-general-profit-rise

@ Layman, Tabasco.

I will indeed set you straight. Here and here in The Guardian. Larry Elliott says (in 2012)“Shortfalls in pension funds have increased as a result of QE. When the price of a government gilt goes up, the interest rate (or yield) goes down, and the effect of the Bank’s £325bn asset purchase programme has been to reduce the supply of government bonds, pushing up their price. Gilt yields, which are used as a rule-of-thumb guide to the future income of pension funds and of the likely inflation rate, have crashed, thus widening pension shortfalls”

rwschnetler: “None of the options in your question make any sense.”

Oh, that was just snark. The main point was this: When the pension promises were made, it was a known fact that life expectancy was increasing and had been for decades; and since the pension promises were made, life expectancy increases have actually slowed, meaning that it is a smaller problem than would have been predicted at the time the promises were made; so unless the people making pension promises were unbelievably stupid, it cannot be the case that an increase in life expectancy caused the pension plan to be at risk of failing.

Dipper: “I will indeed set you straight.”

Finding someone else making the claim you made – to which I objected – doesn’t demonstrate the truth of the claim.

@82 You are not living up to the promise you all got us excited about in comment number 65.

Needless to say, the statement that the average pay for non-senior academic staff in a UK university is £40k pa is utterly demented.

Hidari, I suggest you take it up with the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

TM, fair enough it was a cheap shot. I don’t think it’s jmpossjble to imagine a future society in which everyone is paid what a lecturer is now but it seems rather arbitrary. I’m sceptical that the subjective rewards of earning £43K (or £80K, let’s not forget, in the case of professors) in a society where the median wage is £26K derive purely from absolute standard of living it commands rather than say relative status and, dare I say it, domination. I don’t think any of us know what the total product to be distributed in a socialist economy would be but I don’t think we can assume it will be the same as the capitalist product. Given the upheaval involved in such a transformation I’m inclined to be pessimistic, at least in the early years/

engekls 87, it’s a real mystery to my why you keep harping on people making £40K +- as if they were the filthy rich upper class. I don’t know what £40K will buy you nowadays in the UK. My understanding is that the cost of living varies a lot and is above average especially in those areas where academic jobs are found. Of course nobody disputes that some academics have confortable incomes. But your picture of academics moving in circles of highly paid bankers and managers (31), owning houses in prestigious neighborhoods (31), and relishing in the social “domination” of the lower classes (87) seems totally off the mark. Among the professors I know or have known, some of whom with good incomes, I don’t find any specimen of this stereotype. I don’t know a single one living in luxury and showing off wealth. The ones I know tend to work too much and some have too little exposure to the world outside of academica. They are arrogant in the way academics are arrogant and pay too much attention to academic fame (publications and impact factors and so on) but hardly care about materialist status indicators. They are prepared to spend resources on their children’s education because that’s what academics value, which has been criticized on CT as being unfair to other children but that’s a different reproach. By and large, I suspect academics are about as selfish as others and as likely to have a distorted view of society, based on their personal socio-economic situation and social networks. I also get the impression that many older successful academics are oblivious to the plight of the younger generation. As academics, they should strive to do better in this regard. But your stereotype of lecturers and professors running in upper class circles and looking down on everybody else seems far-fetched. Would be interested in other commenters’ views.

A few years ago when the anarchist sociologist LizaMcKenzie and her mates in Class War wanted to one of their protests against gentrifcation in the Aldgate/Wapping area, the Daily Mail ran a smear piece, in which the fact that she was on £40k was supposed to indicate some sort of hypocrisy. It’s not in this one, but this is the only one of their hit-pieces I could find:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3253598/Don-t-worry-hipsters-cereal-cafe-got-vandalised-enjoying-publicity-says-Class-War-academic.html

Incidentally:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/lisa-mckenzie-who-would-be-working-class-woman-academia

McKenzie’s work on estates and attitudes in the “underclass” are some of the more enlightening stuff around the issue of Brexit and “the left behind”. Poor people speaking for themselves, not middle class right-wingers presuming to speak for them.

TM: “But your stereotype of lecturers and professors running in upper class circles and looking down on everybody else seems far-fetched.”

I’m not an academic, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that academics socialize with – and identify with – people with education levels and (dare I say it) class backgrounds comparable to their own.

TM, all you’re really doing at this point (apart from misrepresenting things I’ve said—academics are ‘upper class’ or whatnot) is rehearsing your own subjective impressions and anecdotes. Obviously they’re different from mine or we wouldn’t be arguing. So what makes you think I’m going to give yours precedence?

engels, if my partially anecdotal arguments don’t impress you, fine, but you haven’t offered *any evidence at all* for your claims about academics relishing “social domination”. Please offer some non-anecdotal evidence of your own or leave us alone.

Layman, if you have evidence that academics – not certain academics but academics in general – have an upper class background and run in upper class circles – bankers and managers, as the claim had it which I objected to – please provide it. And please acknowledge the fact that most academic workers are not highly paid professors.
Out of curiosity: do you really consider somebody with a £40k salary part of the British “upper class”?

TM: “Layman, if you have evidence that academics…”

Blah blah blah. If I had such evidence, I wouldn’t have said “…it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose…”, I would have instead provided the evidence. That’s what constructions like “…it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose…” signify, that the supposition isn’t an evidenciary finding. Obviously you think it is unreasonable to so suppose, though also without evidence. What now?

‘The 36 union fat-cats who are each picking up more than £100k’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2176250/The-36-union-fat-cats-picking-100k.html#ixzz59KLzPK4e

‘Commuters vent their fury at ‘greedy’ Tube drivers…Felicity Moor, 32, who works in banking, was less forgiving.

“They earn a fortune for driving a train anyway,”‘

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/commuters-vent-their-fury-at-greedy-tube-drivers-6771375.html

A tube driver’s salary starts at £49,673, incidentally (which an academics’ certainly doesn’t).

‘Binmen in a city hit by a crisis in refuse collection took home £45,000 in pay and overtime in a year, it emerged yesterday’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1346480/Birmingham-binmen-strike-paid-45K-year.html

Isn’t it funny how the right wing media (and their mouthpieces, e.g. on this thread) only ever ‘discover’ how ‘highly paid’ some people are when they go on strike?

‘Petite bourgeoisie, also petty bourgeoisie (literally small bourgeoisie), is a French term (sometimes derogatory) referring to a social class comprising semi-autonomous peasantry and small-scale merchants whose politico-economic ideological stance in times of socioeconomic stability is determined by reflecting that of a haute (high) bourgeoisie, with which the petite bourgeoisie seeks to identify itself, and whose bourgeois morality it strives to imitate.[1]

In the mid-19th century, the German economist Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that comprised small-scale capitalists such as shop-keepers and workers who manage the production, distribution, and/or exchange of commodities and/or services owned by their bourgeois employers.‘

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie

Off the top of my head here are some of my personal demands, very open to supplement/revision

-free education
-reverse commodification, managerialism and marketisation
-free participation in all fields of academic inquiry for all those qualified throughout their lives
-radically reduce educational inequality throughout society and inequality in pay and conditions within academia
-adequate pensions for all regardless of employment history
-end the professionalisation of philosophy and abolish the discipline of political philosophy

Tl;dr universalise the university and in so doing, abolish it

‘Son, we live in a world with lectures. And those lectures have to be delivered by men with PhDs…’

I fully support the strike of UK academics, and would also support such a strike in my country if one were to take place. Opposing academic strikes because most non-academics are worse off is like opposing First World worker strikes because Third World workers are worse off; it means accepting/supporting the bosses’ Divide-et-impera-plus-Race-to-the-bottom strategy. That said, as for the current discussion, the stuff about ‘relishing social domination’, ‘looking down on’ the masses (and on anyone else that one can find a pretext to look down on), and adoration of status indicators of any kind (material, academic or other) – in addition to a readiness to lie, betray and generally do anything that is likely to help one achieve higher status or generally benefit one – perfectly describes the mentality and attitudes that are prevalent the (non-UK) academic circles that I have been able to observe. Not that this is unique to them either.

@Layman: of course, note that gellblazer’s explicit claim relies on it being impossible to understand a person’s situation to any useful degree without actually being in that situation, that acquiring understanding of a person’s situation is a-priori impossible.

I think that’s a nonsense, of course, but I invite you to consider what might cause a person to conclude this.

Also while ‘divide and rule’ is definitely a time-honoured strategy of elites another is suppressing justified grievances with claims that ‘we’re all in this together’. I think Steven’s right that the conditions under which the work is carried out are crucial but I think income is part of the picture. Anyway I’m not sure anyone’s really interested in the specific issue I was so I’ll leave it there.

“Consider what Newton, Darwin, Wallace, and Hume managed to accomplish without the ‘necessary’ machines, shiny buildings, parking lots, and student services. Hard sciences need their tools. The rest of us can make do with cracked desks, if hard choices need to be made. And they clearly do.”

Cracked desks won’t get you very far in saving money. With no shiny buildings, no climbing walls, no flatscreens, slim administration, and minimal student services, you’d still need highly-trained teachers with a life-long commitment to the vocation (even Hume had that much at Edinburgh), and that costs.

Dippersplaining

@Chris Bertram – always happy to help.

‘Open letter rejecting the UCU/UUK agreement at ACAS

We the undersigned, call on the UCU national leadership to reconsider its position reached in ACAS negotiations with UUK on the 12th March 2018.

The current agreement kicks a serious solution to the pension dispute in the long grass, committing to a three year process of re-evaluation. It further does so at the very moment we are strongest and able to force a more decisive victory.

The employers’ valuation has been demonstrated to be bogus, yet the UCU leadership is now accepting to increase our contribution while we re-evaluate. Employers’ contribution however will rise by only 1.3%.

In three years time we will be demobilised and pressured to accept a worse deal. In our opinion we should keep going and throw UUK’s offer out all together.

Furthermore, the UCU is effectively calling on us to both reschedule as well as calling off the action before having put it to the membership, two positions that are absolutely unacceptable.

In solidarity,

–
Over 2,000 people have signed so far! See the list of signatories: https://tinyurl.com/ybajrsz6
–
Link to the UCU/UUK agreement for those who haven’t seen it:
https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/9300/Agreement-reached-between-UCU-and-UUK-under-the-auspices-of-ACAS/pdf/UCU_UUK_agreement_at_ACAS_12_March_Final.pdf‘

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjBYB9uvEU86u0mAu03cl7sXwwWtwjjysV5VbOk7_QnNBmfQ/viewform

@117 Yes, and that’s exactly where the money should go. One Ivy league librarian complained to me that the school spends 2k per chair in that particular library. The good news in that the procurement process is entirely free of graft and kickbacks. Salaries, yes; flat screens – no. And the from the IT folks tell me, by the time an institution decides on a hardware solution pretty much all the tech is ‘outdated.’

Silly spending on expensive cosmetic solutions to real challenges needs to end. Students need to read, watch, listen; do, and talk. Money for libraries as in information, yes. The rest goes. Software updates have as much to do with plugging holes in ‘connectivity’ than anything else. And don’t get me started on textbooks. Higher ed is almost as full of grifters as any other body. Unions started off being about safety, work-standards, and wages. Surely the teaching and learning body should have a (the primary) say in how funds are allocated.

The managers are there to serve us, not rule.

I have never heard of any strike in which the strikers offered to cease strike action if the Council fired the Vice-Chancellor (or if the board fired the CEO, or any other equivalent). Now that the idea has been put in my mind, it intrigues me.

True story: there was a strike in the US once to get the director of a company re-instated after he was removed by the board. Sadly can’t remember the company but think itmat have been some kind of ethical supermarket (Erik Olin Wright talks about it somewhere)

That’s also an intriguing story, but it’s roughly the opposite kind of story. Reinstatement of dismissed staff as a strike demand seems less unusual.

@130 Well, I studied Darwin under the direction of an extremely reliable Darwin authority. Then, there’s you with your questionable knowledge and odd fixations.

I ask my students: what is the most important lesson Darwin teaches us?

Darwin teaches us the importance of changing our minds.

That’s what separates Darwin from his peers, that, correspondence with Wallace and a host of other experts, and an excellent pr campaign. The stability of species was the accepted wisdom of the day – that and phrenology. Lamarck was regarded as a crank.

Darwin needed to be willing to read Malthus and Lamarck with an open mind, allow impressions to form while boxing up all those samples, and let his training and expertise in geology carry him forward. His personal wealth was more likely an impediment than a boon. He could afford to invest years soaking seeds in salt water, for example, when clues to plant migration abounded in the pigeon coops he almost certainly never cleaned, or examined.

There are lots of great Darwin stories. Right time, right place probably fits best. If a different naturalist had been on board the Beagle, and that almost happened, we’d be stuck with Mendel, who managed to actually get to DNA while studying as monk, and without all the fuss and expense of Darwin. Wallace would have still needed to have written somebody, perhaps Hooker, or Lyle. And then he might have gotten the full measure of respect he actually deserves.

I wonder what Mendel’s research budget was – eight years studying peas? Oh yes, what role did the lightning rod and all those clocks play in Darwin’s thinking?

We need communities of scholarship broad enough to include all experts – the monk Mendel and the entrepreneur Wallace. Another interesting figure, btw, is William Bullock who managed to combine a career as a first-rate anthropologist and entrepreneur. The 19th century was a dynamic time – had women been ‘allowed’ to play a larger role, we’d probably have gotten farther faster.

the most important – think about that phrase for a moment.

And as for the substance, actually being able to change your mind – I’d never ask such a thing of you – you’re the very definition of a mind made up.

Lucky you!

@132 and 130 You are aware, I hope, that as far as the folks footing the bill for the voyage were concerned – you know the folks paying for all those clocks – Darwin’s presence was, at best, entertainment for the Captain.

Darwin gathered data, as much as he interpreted for the Geological society. We’re into the weeds a bit now, but Darwin’s work post Beagle was principally as a geologist. He went on the Beagle – a voyage dedicated to cartography not natural history – in his capacity as a connected pair of hands, capable of boxing up the right specimens and shipping them to experts.

Anyway, we happily have a great deal of very detailed information on Darwin. In reviewing some I learned a bit more about the editing of the Beagle books and Darwin’s collaborative role in these.

https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/commentary/geology

http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Ciao!

Why the Global 1% and the Asian Middle Class Have Gained the Most from Globalization
https://hbr.org/2016/05/why-the-global-1-and-the-asian-middle-class-have-gained-the-most-from-globalization

“At market exchange rates we find the threshold for the global top 1% by annual income is US$51,400 per capita household income…” [=£36 700]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X17300396

Darwin’s chief weapon was the ability to change his mind.

…and correspondence with experts. Darwin’s two chief weapons were the ability to change his mind and correspondence with experts.

…and an excellent PR campaign. His THREE chief weapons were the ability to change his mind, correspondence with experts and an excellent PR campaign.

What he really needed was a secure, well-endowed position at a university – some sort of Comfy Chair.

Historical examples aside, (which overwhelmingly confirm that, open-mindedness, quality of thought, and forums open to all (the last staunchly opposed by TM and F on ‘moral’ grounds) are far more critical to intellectual progress than bright shiny toys.

Hard science requires funding. The rest of us need simply to do the hard thinking, liberating ourselves to the best degree of our intellectual and partisan blinders.

Not for everyone, of course.

@139 Very droll. As one tenured colleague used to observe – ‘I no longer publish, or attend conferences. Why should I?’

@138 It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest you know so little about the history of ideas.

@136 The British Navy paid for a map-making expedition. Darwin was a passenger.

Btw, given that you live in Japan you seem remarkably indifferent to Anglo-Japanese connections, case in point – the role Japanese culture played in creating the Darwin family fortune during the bakafu. You should read more, you might like it!

ph: “…are far more critical to intellectual progress than bright shiny toys.”

But you aren’t arguing that Darwin didn’t have (and need) bright shiny toys and a cushy posting. You’re just saying he was accidentally provided with them. So what? Without them, what happens with Darwin?

“The [leisure] class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.”

Well said (the corollary for the tenured professoriate is left as an exercise for the reader).

The last paragraph of kidneystones’s latest is quintessential arsehole. How can you possibly know whether I am indifferent to a topic that hasn’t been raised by anyone and wasn’t under discussion?

You really are a piece of work.

It has been pointed out to me that the pension changes exacerbate inequality within academia, so that should be noted (and apologies for overdoing the snark a bit at some points above).

I thought you might appreciate my pointing out the flaws and contradictions in your arguments

Not really, no.

@144 There are better (free) studies of Mendel easily available via Google Books.

I don’t see anything controversial in observing that research in the hard sciences often involves large amounts of capital. Nor, do I see anything controversial in arguing that allocating limited public funds requires an eye on outcomes rather than comfort and cosmetics.

Re: intellectual development and motivations. Profit, efficiency, and power are probably the most reliable drivers I’d say at a guess. The virtue signalling on the other thread over ‘military scientists’ fits this discussion nicely because military forces invest enormous amounts on communication, educational, and industrial research. Military scientists such as Da Vinci designed killing technologies, a fact perhaps overlooked by our moral and intellectual superiors.

The Birmingham Lunar Society produced as much, and probably much more, solid research for profit than did the Royal Academy at the time, although there’s some overlap of individuals involved there. The first application for Mendel’s science, as I recall, was to manipulate genes in silk worms, one of many state-sponsored research projects in Meiji Japan.

Greed works, as does desire for fame and fortune. There enough third-generation dunces frittering away family fortunes to confirm that money alone means little.

Could I use more for my own research? Absolutely, but I’ve no objection to waiting my turn as long as available funds are not going to vendors of shiny, new, toys designed to make our campuses more ‘appealing’ to prospective ‘customers.’

Duh – what comes from looking at the trees.

All the European explorations of the Atlantic and Pacific were driven by profit – the crown normally took a healthy chunk off the top for the awarding of the charter. That’s 5 centuries of cash and power-driven exploration. More, if we count the Scandinavian explorations – which we must! That’s plants being ‘discovered’ and imported for exploitation – tobacco being just one. France, btw, resisted consuming ‘pommes de terre’ to the point of starvation – oranges, of course, spices and peppers earlier.

This 2015 article from the New Yorker on the impact of Japanese and Chinese ceramics on European consumption and manufacturing is highly readable and well researched.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-european-obsession-with-porcelain

If you don’t understand the word, you can’t use it, and if you can’t spell bakufu — the word is a fairly transparent compound of two reasonably common words — the chances that you understand it such that you can be confident that it’s the best word to use are basically zero.

But the thing about being a narcissist is that your ability to learn from your mistakes is close to zero, and that means you can’t learn at all. No matter how smart they are all narcissists are stupid… which builds to and justifies the core insecurity. If you’re a narcissist then that hidden fear that you’re useless and everybody is laughing at you is basically true… so what are you going to do about it?

My last was a bit too severe. I’m sorry, Collin.

I sincerely wish you ever success in your pursuits. I’m sure there’s an audience who would be interested in your theories.

Haha kidneystones, thoroughly owned by Collin and made to look like a genuine narcissistic poser, and what a spiteful little comeback. Please please just go away! And take your knowledge of “the bakafu” with you!

The other interesting point is that baka and baku only sound alike in english: in japanese the u is devoiced, virtually silent.

(Bakufu, of course, means government by dream-eating tapirs)

Thank you for the great OP. I support the strike. I do think the issues I raised about the priorities of spending fit well with the topic and apologize for meandering.

166@ I take part of my earlier back. You clearly are familiar with some features of Japanese, and with linguistic phenomena. That said, your description of language behaviors, short though it is, still manages to be unclear, inaccurate and incomplete.

‘Devoiced finally’ Good grief!

‘Finally’ is an adverb of time, you may be interested to learn, not place. What you may mean to say is: ‘u’ in the terminal position is sometimes elided or changes to a short mid-vowel. What you quaintly call the ‘whole thing’ is known in linguistics as an ‘utterance.’

This terminal ‘u’ behavior, in the case where the sound is not elided, is often one of vowel change. Hard u – a long, front vowel – is replaced by a weak schwa or similar short mid-vowel – difficult to discern, but present.

This little exercise – which demonstrates that you do know something about language terminology, but rather less about linguistic behavior and description, and even English! – has nothing at all to do with the OP. Except under the tortured reasoning of Dr. Collin Street and his magical mind-revealing powers, in which a typo, error, or omission is evidence of (I really love this part) an inability to learn, and even narcissism.

So, that’s your contribution to the thread – a loopy claim – supported entirely by your belly-button lint and totally devoid of any connection to the OP.

But it did give you the opportunity to be insulting and offensive, which doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but is almost certainly deathly boring to practically everyone else.

So, if you’d like discuss any topic related to the OP, I’ll consider it. If not, feel free to waste the time of others. I’ve nothing further to add.

Really, please unvoiced labio-dental fricative followed by a rounded, long mid vowel.

This is cruel. I am sorry.

I have to say if ‘pre-moderation’ doesn’t prevent discussions like this I don’t really understand what the point of it is.

Top degree fees ‘to hit £40,000’
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/top-degree-fees-to-hit-40-000-nt7bdq03n