When Black Holes Collide Precariously, They Make Waves
As a scientist, this morning’s big scientific announcement of the detection of gravity waves ought to be making me very happy. It’s a big deal, a very tricky experiment, a massive international collaboration, and confirmation of Einstein’s hypothesis made a century ago. The gravity waves could be described as ripples in the space-time continuum. In this case the event causing the ripples was the collision of two black holes, around 1.3 billion years ago. It opens the possibility of all sorts of new ways to probe the universe, and is one of the major scientific discoveries of the decade (we’re having a pretty good decade in scientific research).
But then, as a contract instructor of Physics in Ontario, I read an article by Simon Chiosi in the Globe and Mail Newspaper:
Ontario voters not concerned about increase in contract professors: poll
Gee thanks folks. I teach several hundred students a year. Our future scientists and engineers. I am on 4 month contracts. It is precarious work. If a full-time, tenured, Professor wants to teach my courses, then I’m out. Actually, if a retired former faculty member wants to to teach my course, to supplement their pension, then I’m out. No appeal, nothing. My livelihood just vanishes. Just writing this article could get me removed from my job. That’s my level of academic freedom (much beloved by tenured Professors).
And it gets worse:
Ontario voters are not willing to consider paying higher taxes to support post-secondary education and don’t believe the issue of professors increasingly teaching on contract is a high priority
Teaching on contract means that I cannot spend time developing long term educational strategies, and it means that I cannot mentor students through University. I see them for one or two terms, at the start of their University career, and that’s it. For many of my colleagues, it also means no office space to meet students. Our teaching and working conditions directly impact the of the students.
The public probably thinks that all Professors are in comfortable, permanent jobs, and certainly for those with a tenured job, life is pretty comfortable. In a 2012 survey, Canadian academics (the ones with permanent jobs) were easily the best paid in the OECD. In Ontario, this means that most Professors earn over $100,000 a year, and are on the “Sunshine List” of high paid public employees. I, on the other hand, teach 66% more courses than a tenured Professor, and often the largest classes, and would be lucky to make a third of that kind of money. The magic differentiator in the salary game is the research done by tenured Professors. If you do current research, can bring in external grants to fund it, then you get superstar status. Everyone else gets serf status. And the proportion of serfs is increasing. Universities are curiously coy about admitting how much of their teaching is done by contract instructors, but Union estimates suggest that between 15–50% of all teaching is done by the precariously employed. It is even possible to complete a degree without ever being taught by a permanent faculty member in some places. That should be a cause for concern.
When the “Middle Class” is defined by government, tenured professors earn more and qualify as high earners and are “The Upper Classes”. Most of us doing contract teaching work, don’t even make it into the middle class. This despite being one of the best educated, and possibly most indebted groups of people in the Province.
So the people of the province don’t care, the government of the province is disinclined to invest in education, and university administrators just love to use a cheap option to do the teaching. Remember: teaching is one of the two central reasons for having higher education. But research (and the external dollars that go with it) is so clearly ascendant, that the institutions and the province have actually forgotten about it. So that’s the biggest black hole, I can see at the moment, notwithstanding the discovery of gravity waves coming from black holes.
It would be really nice if the faculty associations of Ontario Universities, the organisations that represent the permanent faculty, would actually step up to the plate, recognise that they are in an immensely privileged position, and try to help their struggling academic colleagues in precarious employment. So to make a few waves of my own:
Permanent faculty, the work we do means that you have more time to concentrate on your research. Your work is built on our exploitation. That’s the bottom line.
