Abstract

The aim of this roundtable is to discuss the emergent disjuncture between pedagogy and research at universities in European region, as well as the growing importance of temporary positions for scholars, notably within the increasingly separated domain of research, in the frame of state expenditure trajectories that sometimes correspond to an increasing state investment in Higher Education (HE) systems, as in Portugal.

HE systems in the European region emerged from diverse national histories, and are shaped by different national and local governmental practices in relation to political and economic circumstances. As observed by the European University Association Public Funding Observatory, trends in state funding for HE since the beginning of the North Atlantic financial crisis in 2008 to 2014 have been largely divergent, with some countries increasing their expenditure—this is the case in Portugal, at least in nominal terms. Other countries are reducing expenditure, and yet others maintaining it at a stable level.

The academic profession in each national system is also diversely shaped and structured according to situated traditions, as well as contrasting trajectories of state expenditure. If we can hardly speak of “an European academic profession” (Teichler & Höhle, 2013), a convergent trend is the deepening segmentation of the academic labour market (Mullens, 2001), producing a division between tenured faculty and non-tenured staff (Castree, 2000: 966), or between permanent staff and fixed-term contracts (Shelton, et al., 2001), following a trend marked by the “casualization of academic labour” (ibid.: 434). As reported by the recent EUROAC research project at the University of Kassel (Teichler & Höhle, 2013), in the countries analyzed full employment of senior academics seems to be a general pattern, while junior academics tend to receive only temporary employment for a relatively long time in their careers. Short-term employment of junior academics in universities ranges from about a quarter in Ireland and the UK, to more than two-thirds in half of the European countries for which information is available—Portugal’s figure is 69% (ibid.: 255). Short-term contracts are not limited to research positions and tied to specific, time-limited projects, as these were in the past, but they also are deployed for teaching positions, frequently offered on a one-year temporary basis, or even contracted on an hourly paid basis. In addition, a rise in the prevalence of fixed-term contracts in research, with salaries only guaranteed until the end of a project, means researchers spend much of their time searching and trying to secure the next funding opportunities instead of working on the actual project.

According to Gill (2009), academia represents an excellent example of the neo-liberalisation of the workplace, with academic work increasingly showing the features that an extensive body of literature has been documenting for cultural industries, such as web design, television, film, or fashion: a preponderance of temporary, intermittent and precarious jobs; long hours and bulimic patterns of working; the collapse or erasure of boundaries between work and play; poor pay; high levels of mobility; passionate attachment to the work; as well as experiences of insecurity and anxiety about finding work, earning enough money, and ‘keeping up’ in rapidly changing fields (ibid.: 232).

Nevertheless, inspired by the “critical ethnography” proposed by Hart (2006), we are suspicious of disabling teleological narratives regarding neo-liberalisation and the HE system. Indeed, national and local governmental practices shaping HE systems are arguably linked to a focus on global academic hierarchies, entailing normative models of how universities everywhere inevitably have to be structurally adjusted in order to compete. However, the emerging features of academic work described above are not mere “‘local’ variations or instances of a ‘global’ process” (ibid.: 981), as they are constituted contingently and through situated practices. We suggest collectively discussing to what extent a deceiving spectre of the preeminent North American research university haunts European university systems, as the growing policy-oriented European literature on “university entrepreneurship” shows (O'Shea et al., 2005), in ways that are paradoxically inimical to the fostering of productive relations between education—both undergraduate and graduate—and research, and to the tenure-track system that is crucial for such productive relations. In addition, we also propose discussing if in order for governmental practices to foster sustainable scholarly landscapes in the European region, it is crucial to disarticulate expenditure logics from accounts of competition and development, focusing instead on situated potentialities of “ordinary universities”, to paraphrase Robinson’s work on cities (2006).

Discussants: ChiaraCarrozza, Tiago Castela, Hermes Augusto Costa, Tiago Santos Pereira, and Ana Cordeiro Santos

Chairs: Chiara Carrozza   and Tiago Castela

This roundtable will be held in Portuguese and in English.