By Terry Bartholomew
Despite widespread public funding stringency, the reduction of university operating grants and increases in the amounts that students are expected to pay for higher education, enrolments in most university undergraduate and postgraduate programs are not expected to decline in the near future. The types of students who undertake such study, however, are expected to alter drastically.
Following new education policies, opportunities to study (in particular at better universities and in vocational courses such as medicine, science, law and engineering) are expected to be even further limited to the economically advantaged. Although a more subtle selection and training bias towards students from exclusive schools has always been reflected in the university population, increased fee structures make such discriminatory practices more overt.
Any lack of significant fluctuation in enrolment numbers following slashed funding and increased student fees is best attributed to the extremely limited employment prospects of those who do not have a university qualification (or who hold only a single degree), rather than to some form of tacit approval of the new fee structure and funding cuts.
Given our employment market, students are not free to register their protest against fee increases and resource rationing by not attending university. The government is aware that such policies will not greatly affect enrolment numbers, and therefore promotes this stability as approval of the pseudo-libertarian "user pays" doctrine that its policies reflect.
As university departments are forced to cope with reductions in government operating grants, they will increasingly require academic staff to undertake more activities. The effects of such financial stringency will be felt by undergraduate students (those who can actually afford the university and HECS fees, that is) via increased class sizes, fewer resources, decreased access to staff members and limited choice of subjects.
The ramifications for the other significant student population, postgraduates, will be less quantifiable but no less significant.
Postgraduate students generate much of the innovative and radical research that emanates from universities. Postgraduate research goals are not largely determined by the agendas of funding bodies, while those of academics increasingly are. Within many disciplines, the research of academics is directed by what "sells", as they compete for "outcome-oriented" grants from organisations which distribute research money according to their own limited objectives.
There is a natural trend for economic pressures to be displaced wherever possible to the lowest group in an organisation's infrastructure. Postgraduates are that group in universities. Although undergraduate students are the most commonly acknowledged consumers of university services, postgraduate students, through their widespread employment as casual teachers, are often in the ambiguous dual role of being both consumer and provider. This ambivalent status, in combination with the fact that there is no less powerful staff member in any organisation than the casual worker, makes the situation of postgraduates unique and problematic.
As the employment climate for academics moves more towards a corporate model of increased accountability, and staff are required to meet ever expanding performance criteria, the changes will impinge greatly on postgraduates, particularly at bigger universities. Much of the brunt of funding reductions at universities will continue to be borne by postgraduate casual workers — a tendency reflective of recent US experience. This trend enables the effects of cuts to be subsumed into less visible areas, thus creating the illusion that the system has not been significantly affected.
Teaching and research
In past years, the quality of education at many universities suffered because of the tenure system, which guaranteed academics their position regardless of their performance on teaching or research. To increase accountability and overt productivity, the availability of tenure has been minimised, and the use of a limited contract system has become prevalent.
This system also has many inherent problems however, both for students and for academics (as detailed in the 1995 Hoare Management Report into Higher Education). Contracts are reviewable every one to five years and dictate that academic staff perform primarily on a research level (which means the acquisition of grants and publication of articles and books). Although teaching requirements also exist, they are secondary. Beyond the obligation to conduct a number of subjects per year, they are much less defined and quantifiable.
Some undergraduate subjects have more than 500 students in them, and continue to grow every year as departments compete for bigger allocations of each university's shrinking budget. In large units, the lecturer in charge is not able to conduct many of the tutorials. In fact, lecturers rarely undertake more than a small number of tutorials.
Because lecturing staff would much rather be involved with fulfilling the research requirements of their contract, undergraduates at major universities receive most of their instruction from a largely unrecognised contingent of university teachers, that sizeable population known as "sessional" or casual tutors. In almost all cases, tutors are postgraduate students.
Sessional tutors are paid casual rates for their teaching and marking hours. They are rarely remunerated for student contact hours, meetings, or discussing (i.e. "standardising") their assessment practices. Tutors are paid like novices but are required to appear as experts. A postgraduate student who conducts three one-hour tutorials (of up to 30 students each) is likely to be taking home less than $120 a week.
This "wage" also supposedly covers time taken for course-related reading, tutorial preparation and some marking. Similarly, payment for attendance at the lectures for the subject being taught is the exception rather than the norm.
The role of such workers continues to expand, but payment and job descriptions fail to reflect this. Quality of teaching is clearly suffering under an arrangement which weights economic considerations over the needs of undergraduate students. This situation also fails to provide adequate preparation, support mechanisms and remuneration for the postgraduate students who are increasingly being relied on as the stopgap in an education system being squeezed from above.
Most sessional tutors put in significant hours of unpaid and unacknowledged work, an outcome typical of exploitative casual labour arrangements. In this situation, much of a tutor's future pivots on his/her preparedness to "play the game" and not to challenge the tradition of exploitation that is the academic "apprenticeship".
Recently at Yale University, teaching assistants (the US equivalent of casual tutors), increasingly frustrated at the expanding expectations placed upon them, struck for better work conditions and wages. Although little was resolved, the resulting sit-ins, community involvement and withholding of grades mean that relations between that establishment and its postgraduate students may never be the same. Perhaps it is time for such collective action?
The time is ripe for a close examination of the priority that teaching is being given in our universities, and the way that it is remunerated and measured. It is an issue that affects all students, and is exacerbated by the Liberal government's attacks on education.
Intellectual property
Another offshoot of the trend towards corporatisation in universities is the increasing opportunities for postgraduates to become "research assistants". Departments receive a percentage of any research funds which are obtained by staff members from outside organisations, so such activities are keenly encouraged.
Once research funds have been obtained, it is not uncommon for the staff member who received the grant to employ postgraduate students to work on the projects that emerge. Often the academic does not have the time or the expertise to undertake many of the necessary tasks. Like tutoring positions, such roles also have as their major attraction the possibility to gain valuable experience.
These roles also hold their own problems, not the least of which is the issue of intellectual property. Research jobs by nature require a significant intellectual contribution. It is not unusual for research assistants to undertake such activities as locating and critically reviewing the relevant literature, devising relevant theoretical frameworks, designing instruments which enable data collection, collecting and analysing data and writing the reports that are eventually published.
However, it is unusual for postgraduates who play any combination of such roles to be given the status of co-authors on the publications which emerge from such projects. It is far more common for them to receive some brief mention in the "acknowledgments" section of the study.
Regulations and codes of conduct which govern such issues at universities are hopelessly general and place excessive reliance on such illusory notions as "collegial spirit" and "professional ethics".
The "publish or perish" creed generated by the corporate accountability model of university management has created great potential for postgraduate research assistants to be exploited. The question is whether attainment of the initial research grant is sufficient justification for the academic staff member to hold sole authorship of publications, when the contributions of research assistants are often so significant. When is the contribution of a research assistant deemed sufficient to warrant co-authorship, and who should make such determinations?
Codes of conduct often utilise such terms as "substantial input" when describing the contribution required by co-researchers before acknowledgment is due, but make no effort to quantify such terms. Omissions such as these are indicative of the archaic informality of many university employment practices. Although this informality is often seen as a desirable and/or necessary aspect of higher education, in an environment increasingly pervaded by governmental and economic imperatives, such grey areas hold most potential to exploit those who are at the low end of the chain.
If the tasks that many research assistants complete for university studies were contracted out to independent consultants, departments would have to spend up to 10 times what they pay "in-house" research assistants for the same service.
Who takes the blame?
Although such practices are common and have been for some time, it is the poorly conceived economic rationalist doctrines of contemporary government which promote such events. However, university departments and academic staff are not without blame.
When pressed on such issues, these parties often fall back on the "if you don't like the conditions, there are many others who would like to have the teaching/research position" argument. It is interesting to see the supposedly "informed" use of such unsound and historically exploitative arguments. When an employers' market dictates the boundaries of worker rights, and is able to prescribe conditions, the divide and rule philosophy will always be prevalent.
The need for postgraduate qualifications and relevant work experience only grows in an increasingly competitive employment market. Although students in higher education these days are often more grateful than their predecessors for the opportunity to be there, it is no less important that they undertake the experience with an informed and critical outlook. Likewise it is vital that the general population be made aware of the many hidden ramifications of the near-sighted education policies of current government, and of the adjustments that occur within organisations to cope with them.