HACkers blog

Having just celebrated my penultimate payday, I thought it apposite to dwell a while on recent reports in the UK that Higher Education staff have the best pay deal in the public sector.

The basis for this assertion - recent pay increases of around 30%, as well as working conditions which include flexible work hours - look at first glance not too dissimilar from those here, if one makes the same mistake the reports do and blurs "academic" and "non-academic" staff as it suits, to present a picture of the best of both categories with none of the drawbacks of either.

What does hold true in both cases (there and here) is that the rapid pay rise was off a low base - even 100% of next to nothing is still next to nothing - and that in absolute terms, salaries are in many cases still not attractive enough to draw teh brightest and the best who succumb to the lure of private sector offerings instead. Which may be as well - someone who is merely doing the job for the money is perhaps lacking in some of the crucial requirements of the job: the academic enterprise still relies largely on notions of collegiality, the quid pro quo involved in externalling here or referreeing there not for the honorarium (if there is one) or even necessarily for the networking, but out of some sense of a greater good that is served through such acts of service to one's discipline.

Working hours for those who have fixed ones are between 35 and 37, compared with our notional 37.5 - though, like ours, the hours required (ie, remunerated) are not necessarily the hours worked, as mentioned in the Grauniad's report.

The most striking difference, however, is in the leave entitlement. There, academics receive a median 35 days per annum, compared to 25 in the general populace. Here January is academic leave month - 22 working days in 2008 - while non-academics get 26 days leave per year.

With salary negotiations looming, one wonders how - if at all - things are likely to change...

To answer a few questions, and correct a few misunderstandings:

• I'm leaving because my post is being restructured in a way I can't live with. This is legal; it was also procedural; I was also offered the new, dumbed down version - I declined it because I consider myself prejudiced by being asked to leave my brain at home each day.
  
• I was not dismissed - neither summarily nor unfairly nor unprocedurally. Retrenchment is a "dismissal based on operational requirements" but it is not the same as a dismissal based on capacity, performance, misconduct or dislike. Operational requirements have changed - the Faculty chooses to spend the money with a more operational service delivery and administrative focus than previously - this being a somewhat belated alignment with global  neoliberal trends towards managerialism. I'm "old guard" - I fit obliquely and with difficulty into the new order, so it is best all round that I find a better fit elsewhere.
• I am not moving to the Wits (despite the trend - both ways) and nor am I moving to the private sector (skypixie forbid!). Nor will I be consulting, in a private capacity, to UCT. I have no immediate career plans - 16 years and 8 months at the Knowledge Factory on the Hill has bought me some time off before I need join the UIF queue, which I intend using for those neglected, outstanding matters (handing in my dissertation, completing the half-written papers on my HDD and writing up the soap opera.... )
• I am not rushing off to breed frantically before my biological clock autodestructs. Whoever started that malicious rumour has been reading too much science fiction!
• I am not looking to emigrate because I think the country is going down the toilet. I don't. Nor am I fleeing the Knowledge Factory because I believe it has gone down the toilet. I am not an Afro-pessimist and I do believe that black people are capable of running the country - despite whatever lessons in corruption they learned from the white people who preceded them.   

Right: back to the topic in hand....

Things I will miss about UCT:

4) Walking up the hill from a meeting at Bremner, and watching the light embrace Devil's Peak in a halo. The location is a blessing, whether looking up towards the honeyed heavens, or out towards the hazy horizon from the vantage point of gluteus-freezing Jammie steps.

Things I won't miss about UCT:

4) The petty politics. Particularly how everything ultimately comes down to which Martin's flag you fly.  Can we move on to issues for their own sake, please?

37 days to go, and counting.... 

As I was reminded, once more:

Things I will miss about UCT:

3.) The Redwings. Beautiful, musical, intelligent, cheeky, brave, persistent, friendly. Come to think of it, everything we hope for in our students...

Things I will not miss about UCT:

3.) Incoming emails while watching movies, informing me that an exam got scuppered because someone fiddled on the network over the weekend, rendering a lab which is an exam venue, which was tested and working perfectly well on Friday, inoperable for the exam. (And, not telling anyone they'd fiddled, until the problem was reported. At which stage they'd all gone home...) 

All the more so as I was also a parent of one of the students affected