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Philosophy, sociology and religion

Philosophy, sociology and religion

Web life: Precarious Physicist

27 Oct 2016
Taken from the October 2016 issue of Physics World
Precarious Physicist blog page

So what is this site about?

If teaching physics to undergraduate students strikes you as a secure, well-respected and at least somewhat highly paid job, the Precarious Physicist blog will challenge your assumptions. Its author, Andrew Robinson, is one of a large and growing number of university lecturers who work on short-term contracts with relatively poor pay, high teaching loads and little prospect of permanent employment. Or, as Robinson puts it: “Hello. My name is Andrew. I am 54 years old, have a PhD and I have a crap job in academia.”

That’s…blunt.

Indeed. But it’s also hard to disagree. As Robinson explains, his job as a contract instructor in physics at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, is “completely casualized labour. I have to reapply for my own job every four months; I have very poor benefits compared to tenured staff; I have no promotion or career development prospects at all”. By his calculation, Robinson also teaches “twice as many courses as tenured staff for around a third of their salary”, and although he has won awards for his teaching, he feels that his opinions on pedagogy “do not matter” to the university.

If it’s that terrible, why doesn’t he quit?

In part, it’s the students, who Robinson describes on his blog as “wonderful…the only reason I still do this job”. But there are personal factors, too. Robinson is originally from the UK, but he moved to Canada after his Canadian wife got a tenure-track job in physics at the University of Saskatchewan. “We had the classic two-body problem,” Robinson told Physics World. “I got into teaching by accident.” Asked to cover his wife’s physics course when she went on maternity leave, he discovered that he liked teaching and was good at it. Later, Saskatchewan gave him annual contracts to teach large lecture courses for first-year students – a job he describes as “a good match”. After a few years, however, their second child’s health problems forced them to move to be near family in Ottawa. Once there, Robinson found that conditions for contract teaching staff were much less favourable than those he’d experienced previously, but “there aren’t really any other jobs for a 50-something PhD scientist in Ottawa”, he says. In Canada, he adds, “a PhD is regarded much more as training to be a professor than it is in the UK or Europe”.

What topics does it cover?

In addition to the “crap job in academia” post quoted above, Robinson has analysed how his stipend and benefits stack up against those of his tenured or tenure-track colleagues (badly); skewered an essay that advised faculty to step away from the “frantic pace” of modern academia (“I don’t have this luxury”); and discussed the financial disincentives of trying new things in his classroom (“a huge uncompensated task”). But he also regularly writes about physics teaching, and his posts on this topic are as kind and patient as his diatribes against his employer are pointed and sarcastic.

Why should I visit?

Numbers of “contingent” (that is, neither permanent nor potentially permanent) faculty have been rising for years in many parts of the world. According to the American Association of University Professors, more than 70% of university-level instructors in the US are now in non-tenure-track jobs. Looking at it from the university’s point of view, this trend makes perfect sense: contract or adjunct faculty are cheap, well qualified and often very good at what they do, so why would they hire anyone else? Economic arguments aside, though, Precarious Physicist makes a powerful case that the current system is both unfair and unsustainable, and Robinson is taking a risk by writing it. As he repeatedly points out, his employer could decide at any moment not to renew his contract. Under the circumstances, paying attention seems like the very least the rest of us can do.

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