At the end of April 2020, the Faculty of Arts announced that it was cutting all postgraduate teaching opportunities from its 2020/21 budget, and since then the Faculty of Social Sciences has followed suit. In some departments, it is standard for teaching posts to only be offered to final year PhDs; colleagues who have gone through a year-long unpaid training programme and interview process, only now to be facing no chance of getting this essential career experience. We are clear that these cuts are a choice; the UCU has recently learned that the combined cost of cutting PGR teaching in both Faculties could be recovered with money to spare, if the University simply stopped running one of its managerial training programmes for a year.
It has been two months since this announcement, and the situation is still unclear. PGRs have been told since the cuts were announced that the only alternative was to be (unpaid) teaching training via the Graduate School (now Researcher Academy), though we were never given details about what this would look like, how it could possibly compensate for classroom experience and how it would be accredited. We have since learned that these questions have no answers, because the Researcher Academy does not currently have the provisions to provide such training. Following collective action from PGRs and pressure from both the UCU and the UoN Anti-Casualisation Campaign, some headway is starting to be made in discussions, but the genuine alternatives we are suggesting are still in competition with unpaid, unaccredited, unsatisfactory ones (e.g. shadowing contracted staff teaching, attending one-off teaching conferences).
PGRs should be teaching in classrooms in the 2020/21 academic year. In addition to helping reduce the workload on contract staff, who have already taken part in strike action twice in the past year because of overwork and underpay, postgraduate teachers bring enthusiasm and excellence to teaching at Nottingham. Two of the five recipients of the Tri-Campus Postgraduate Teaching Awards 2020 were from the Faculty of Arts, including myself, as were two of the five postgraduate teachers who were highly commended in the category. Despite this, our contracts are casualised and outsourced to a temp work agency, and we have been among the first to be placed under the axe.
I have been fortunate enough to have taught for two years, and it’s a genuine pleasure that I want all of my colleagues to be able to experience. But it’s not just enjoyable, it’s necessary. On June 17th, required training for current final year PhDs in the Faculty of Arts repeatedly stressed the necessity of teaching experience in applying for academic careers, while making some small mention of how this will not be possible for those coming to the end of their studies next year. Schools and Faculties know this, which is why we’re still hearing talk about PhDs ‘volunteering’ their teaching next year to gain experience, despite insistence from Faculty management that this will not be allowed. It must not be; it would be asking us to set a dangerous precedent by agreeing to do unpaid work. Such ideas are particularly troubling, as teaching is not just career development; for some PGRs (particularly those who are marginalised in academia and/or who self-fund) it can be an indispensable means of generating additional income.
Daniel, PGR Teacher / Teaching Affiliate