Like a masochistic cannibal, the great institution that is University College London is slowly starting to eat itself. With less money coming in despite frantic applications for research funding, College has been forced to cut staff and replace wizened professors with fresh-faced youngsters. But can UCL really expect to maintain standards whilst haemorrhaging experienced staff? And just how much of the workload can they expect to foist upon underpaid Postgraduate Teaching Assistants?
Most of you will have been taught by a PGTA at some stage – postgraduates who provide undergraduate teaching whilst working on their PhD. The casual basis of their work means they are technically self-employed, so College has few obligations towards them. PGTAs can be fired at will, and holiday pay, sick pay and pension are certainly not included. But PGTAs often have the same supervisor both for their PhD and their teaching, and this makes it difficult for them to refuse extra work despite the ‘casual’ basis of their employment.
More vitally, any complaints they may have about the workload are often stifled by the need for a good reference, and with few Teaching Assistants unionised they have little or no collective voice. PGTAs are only really obliged to prepare for and give a couple of seminars per week, but some supervisors have managed to get postgrads to write lectures, provide pastoral support to students and even run courses in the their absence. This extra work is greatly out of proportion with a PGTA’s measly salary. In some departments there is little difference between PGTAs and junior lecturers – except the £6 an hour pay gap.
Teaching Assistant is a training grade and has a matching salary; however, the workload of a PGTA is decided not by the pay grade but by the requirements of the department they work for. The cluster of PGTAs in the language departments are particularly susceptible to this. With unpredictable student numbers some postgrads are left with hardly any work and others with far too much. Meanwhile, some PGTAs are asked to hold seminars on subjects outside of their research area. While a break from the usual field of study may be appreciated, lecturing on an unfamiliar topic leads to extra, unpaid time in preparation and can make it difficult to provide effective teaching.
One Teaching Assistant at UCL noted that, while they were happy with their own workload, many departments were “more concerned with meeting their staffing needs than with any potential impact on the research work of graduates”. While a variation in workload may be inevitable, the fact that some PGTAs are taking legal action through the University and College Union is rather telling.
The role of Teaching Assistant is supposed to be a short-term one but at UCL, it is not unknown for PGTAs to continue teaching on a temporary basis long after they finish their PhD, when they should have been provided with a proper contract and proper rate of pay. This is all part of a university culture of providing casual work with little job stability or career progression, something that the UCU would like to see stamped out at institutions across the country.
Of course, it would be suicidal for UCL to get rid of PGTAs – teaching looks impressive on a postgrad’s CV, and removing the opportunity would be a huge disincentive to study at UCL. On the whole, postgrads are willing to teach and find it can be a confidence boost and a welcome distraction from their research. The real question is why UCL cannot improve their pay and provide them with proper contracts, and the answer leads us on to a much deeper issue.
Not so long ago, UCL’s senior management went on a campaign to cut 15% of UCL’s staff. Requests for voluntary redundancies were made, and several august professors took early retirements – as one senior UCU member puts it, “they shook the tree to see who would fall out”. This ‘regeneration’ left the College chronically short on staff, and so PGTAs and other juniors have been taking up the slack. Many PGTAs were employed as cheap labour, saving College some precious pennies on teaching.
But why was it necessary for College to cut costs? The majority of College’s funding comes from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, a body on which UCL Provost Professor Malcolm Grant happens to sit. But Grant has done little to fight UCL’s corner when it comes to funding for teaching (see CG issue 12). As detailed in UCL’s Green Paper of 2007, Grant intended to increase the takings from students and private companies to reduce College’s reliance on government money. However, recession struck and corporations are cutting the money they are willing to pay for research. This current lack of cash is just one of the reasons that Grant is so keen to lift the cap on top-up fees.
UCL currently relies heavily on government funding determined largely by College’s level of ‘research excellence’. Academics spend ages writing research applications to make up for the shortfall in funding for teaching that Grant helped create, while all the time expensive professorships are being replaced by cheaper posts for lecturers, and work that should be done by lecturers is being shovelled onto postgrads. Without PGTAs, student numbers would have to be cut or academics would have to spend less time on research – either way, College’s bank balance would suffer. But will students still be willing to pay for a UCL degree if it doesn’t make good on the promises of excellence in the shiny prospectus?