A fascinating article in The Chronicle last week highlights the changes taking place in the academic working environment in the US. Seven eminent scholars and managers explain what they believe the future holds for the academic job market on that side of the pond. To read the full article click here. I am going to use this week’s blog posting to see whether similar things could happen here in the UK.
Permanent staff:
The most common comment was that increasingly tenured (i.e. permanent) teaching staff would be replaced by temporary staff. At the moment in the US less than 25% of academic staff are tenured or tenure-track, and the trend will probably continue downwards.
Even where tenured staff protect their jobs, they are likely to be doing more teaching and administration and less research, unless they are in the elite few who attract significant external funding. They may also see their salaries frozen.
The question was posed by Joseph Hermanowicz that if we have barely any tenured staff, fewer ways of progressing through the ranks, will academia be truly considered a profession in the future?
Diversity in the workplace:
Some commentators think that this will get worse as financial strains cause universities to divert attention from their attempts to create a diverse workforce. Others believe that the trends will continue so that, for example, equal numbers of men and women will soon be employed in academic jobs.
Technology:
The use of technology will continue to change the way we teach and do research but also how we find jobs too. It might even cause the death of the lecture as an outmoded and largely ineffective way of conveying information. The frightening thing is: could it also cause the death of the lecturer too?
I think that many of the changes listed above are not only inevitable in the UK as well as the US, but have in fact already started happening. So far from being a piece about the distant future, this has turned into a comment on the state of the discipline today.
