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Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

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Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#61

Post by udp »

anonymousDan wrote: post #6

In the UK at least there is huge discontent about the recent pension cuts. The salaries already suck (especially in a technical field such as CS), but a 40% cut to pensions as a reward for the efforts put in to handle COVID is just too much.

The salaries suck but this is the UK. If you’re in the correct social class to be an academic you should have your own independent means, and use your academic salary as nothing more than rent for the townhouse you’re staying in while away from your country estate. /s

(Somehow this is both sarcasm and the literal situation of people I know.)

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#62

Post by abcc8 »

muaytimbo wrote: post #16

I'm surprised it took them so long to get fed up, reaching the mid-career level. I realized doing my PhD that all of academia is a toxic house of cards built on cheap grad student labor, foreign student tuition and grant beggary, and the false promise to students of at least an interesting (if not particularly well-paid) career. If it took you until mid-career to realize this . . . you weren't observant and I don't r…

That, or you were fortunate enough to matriculate into a program at a world-class research university with adequate support and funding, where your peers have graduated and gotten their desired next positions, and where you felt you were learning and gaining valuable skills? Sure, not everything is great all of the time, but not all PhD experiences are like you describe either.

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#63

Post by pmyteh »

kd913 wrote: post #59
pmyteh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW on your (5) there's nothing unsustainable about the most recent iteration of the pension scheme. The problems are an interesting (if infuriating) combination of the employers wanting to kill the defined benefit scheme to save money, the government's regulatory framework being designed to protect pensionholders in closed defined benefit schemes and not to run functional private DB schemes (which are nearly all go…

I am not particularly talking about the most recent iteration of the pension scheme which I can imagine being a lot more cut down and closer to traditional private pension schemes. Largely talking about my experience seeing my parents'(30 year professors) pension who are in the Teacher's pension scheme along with other pension schemes. From my perspective, I was blown away by the figures they were being given. With m…

Yeah, those days were ended years ago. The present generation of senior management are doing very nicely though: their historically-acquired final salary entitlements with a generous accrual rate coupled with recent insane inflation in senior management salaries mean they're going to make out like bandits.

My own projected pension is £13,180 a year, based on about 30 years' worth of (mostly future) combined employer/employee contributions of 30% of a salary of a little less than £40k/yr. Big bucks it is not.

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#64

Post by icelancer »

anonymousDan wrote: post #6

In the UK at least there is huge discontent about the recent pension cuts. The salaries already suck (especially in a technical field such as CS), but a 40% cut to pensions as a reward for the efforts put in to handle COVID is just too much.

> huge discontent about the recent pension cuts

I get this, but these are almost all ponzi schemes when "guaranteed" by the government or some form of bureaucracy. We deal with it in the US. Chicago and Philadelphia public pensions are underwater with no way to solve the problem, so elected officials kick the can down the road until it blows up.

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#65

Post by bee_rider »

Espressosaurus wrote: post #27
kd913 wrote: post #22

At some point, this nonsense has to stop. Both in the UK and the US. 1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna cripple the economy and are vastly unsustainable. Especially given the ridiculous payback terms that change on a whim every year, and vastly unsustainable interest rates. People aren't earning enough to pay them back either. 2) Grants are being used as a negotiation tactic, with EU horizon fundi…

> 7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point does the value of this come into question? Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university degree. Two years of home lecturing that by all accounts has resulted in close to two years of lost progress if my observation of teachers complaining about ill-prepared students is anything to go by.

I think I noticed more divergence in the level of preparation (although, didn't try to quantify it -- grad student here, limited responsibility/scope/ability to make change, so just informal observations). It makes sense -- with at-home instruction there's less of an opportunity to just passively check in with students, remote lectures are easier to ignore, and it is easier to cheat on tests when they are remote (so, unprepared students can get through more easily).

In particular -- it was a real struggle to get my first year college students to do any group work (an opportunity they'd usually jump at, because 50% responsibility, right?).

If this actually is the case, it is a really unfortunate outcome. I'm opposed to getting kids sick/exposing them to "mystery long-term health consequences." But setting them up for academic regression is also no good.

All in all, 0/10 pandemic, would not pandemic again. Not sure there could have been a positive outcome. Not sure what the least-bad option could have been. I wish we'd done more, though. I think we may have failed.

I wish we'd tried some really out there strategies. A pet idea I wanted to suggest was having the students on campus and organizing them by major into units -- so, your dorm/floor (depending on the size of the building) is all your-major students and it forms a unit. Call it the Harry Potter strategy. You can socialize normally with each other, maybe classrooms are assigned to a given unit. Maybe a grad student is assigned to (live with?) the unit (hard, though, grad students have their own lives going on and I guess they wouldn't want to restrict themselves enough to safely interact in person with the students -- I don't think I could). Lectures could be broadcast to the unit, with some local representative for the instructor. No interactions between units, but at least the students would have some peers to interact with. But I don't anyone would have been brave enough take responsibility for this sort of thing safety-wise (I certainly wouldn't), and I don't know that I'd trust the average school to work out all the details. But if it worked out, it could have been really something!

Actually, I guess we're far along enough to see if anywhere tried that out, and if so, if it worked out.

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#66

Post by icelancer »

I am going the other way, humorously enough. I know a few people who are, too - people who made their mark in the "private" sector, made enough money via their own small business / startup / MANGA job, and are pursuing a graduate-level degree lazily over a half-decade with ideas of teaching part-time for fun.

Surely doesn't help people who want to make actual money doing the job, but it doesn't seem like that's realistic for 90% of people anyway.

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#67

Post by themitigating »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #47
joshgroban wrote: post #21

This is actually really scary. As American universities become less powerful I shudder to think of what kind of radical politics and cultural narratives will sweep the nation.

Isn't this exactly the opposite of the current state? That the overwhelming power of Universities in the US is what spreads cultural and political movements? I think you could argue that the entire Woke enterprise is centered on Universities particularly elite ones.

Can you argue that is the source and/or the majority of the people? Maybe the views of a small number of academics have been amplified by those who have opposite political views and a dedicated audience

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#68

Post by JoeAltmaier »

My niece left academia for Draper Labs, where she has had a very productive career. Done far more for society than she would have, at a school. Instead of struggling for grants for her basic and applied research, often finding herself unfunded for a term or year unexpectedly, she's funded liberally and makes quick progress on important issues. Never looked back.

Something is broken in Academia.

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#69

Post by ajsnigrutin »

Years ago i had an option to start an academic carreer (after finishing my studies), and the basic situation back then was publish-or-parish for titles and etting your own EU/locally funded projects/grants and doing most of the stuff yourself, while being limited a lot by paycheck (you're still a public employee) and promotions to tenured positions, because basically, the person there had to die, since it was impossible to remove them, and almost none of them retired voulontarily...

So I said "nope".

Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?

#70

Post by pmyteh »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #53
pmyteh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you based?

Institutions? I'm actually really lucky in that I teach internationally at multiple institutions, university and non-university. What's useful and interesting is it gives me a broad taste of politics (as well as a way to stay out of the melee). That's why I'm quite confident in saying generally "universities are in trouble". I've seen it over time and geography. Not all places of higher learning are. Some private and…

Ah, interesting. Yes, our current position is deeply unhelpful. State enough that VCs will jump to follow some arbitrary after-dinner speech by the Minister, but private enough that we're competing in a 'market' with each other and carry a bunch of financial risks directly.

Colleagues in other countries have suggested that "each unhappy university system is unhappy in its own way". Hugely constrained funding in some countries, direct government interference in others, rampant casualisation in a third, a collapse in scholarship in a fourth...

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