Free Labour and Quiet Doubts

(Originally posted on 1.viii.16 at the other place.)

Those of us on the academic side of things will almost certainly recognise the situation: you're sitting in your school's Teaching & Learning committee, or a staff/student committee meeting, or something like that, and you hear the complaint from students that they should get more contact time.  Academics should spend more time teaching rather than simply doing their own research.  After all, they're paying however-many thousand pounds for their education.

And you'll've heard the standard rebuttals - and maybe even trotted them out yourself: that course fees cover not just teaching costs, but libraries, labs, buildings and so on; that university learning isn't about hours in a classroom; that teaching and research are intertwined; that students benefit from being taught by the people who're writing the papers they're reading.  But I wonder if these standard responses miss something important.

Back in April, I was getting companionably smashed with some of my final-year students, and we were talking about what they were going to do when they'd graduated, and about possible careers.   One or two were interested in academia, and so a part of the conversation concerned what life's like from my side of the fence.  Predictably, pay was one thing that interested them.  I mentioned that I'd made about £80 in total from the books I've written, spread over 10 years.
"And what do you get paid for a paper?"
I held back my bitter laughter, and explained how much you get paid for papers, and how much you get for peer-reviewing, and all the rest of it.  The students had had no idea that this stuff was expected of us, but not remunerated.  Why would they?  Indeed, isn't it insane that we're not paid?

I think that one gets an insight here into students' complaints about academics' priorities being wrong.   If they think that we get paid for publishing papers, then of course they're going to think that we have an incentive to resist extra contact hours - and everything we tell them about extra contact hours being at best academically unnecessary, and likely as not counterproductive, will sound like so much bad faith.  After all, of course we'd tell them that a course only needs 30 hours of lectures rather than 60 if we could be earning extra money with those spare 30 hours.

What prompts all this is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   It's from 2012, but it's started popping up in my social media timelines this morning, and Carl posted it on Fear and Loathing in Bioethics last night.  It makes a proposal:

I Got a Letter!

About six weeks ago, just after the EU referendum, I wrote to Jean-Claude Juncker and others to ask whether there'd be any way I could retain my European citizenship in the event that the UK actually does leave the Union.  (Whether or not it ever will leave is another question entirely; everyone who knows anything seems to be saying that even if it weren't a disaster waiting to happen, it'd be implausibly and pointlessly complicated, and the government does seem to be dragging its feet - wisely.  I leave that to one side.)

The version of the letter that I posted here has been far and away the most-read thing I've ever written in any format anywhere, and when I put the link on social media, it was one of the most liked and shared things I've ever posted as well.

Annnnnnnyway... I GOT A RESPONSE!*  OK, the chance that it was penned by Juncker himself rather than a PA writing in his name is vanishingly small - but, still.  It's still more than I got from anyone else.

So what does it say?  Does it admit that I raised an good legal, moral, and political point?  Does it promise to ensure that I, and people like me, might be able to claim dual UK/ EU citizenship?  Oh, boy: this could be really something!

Thank you for sharing your views with me following the result of the United Kingdom's Referendum. 

I am sad about the choice of the British people.  The European Commission worked hard to keep the United Kingdom in the European Union. 

European leaders offered the United Kingdom a fair deal that reflected their hope that the United Kingdom remained part of the European Union. 

This is an unprecedented situation but the European Union will stand strong and uphold its core values of promoting peace and the well-being of its peoples. 

I truly hope that the United Kingdom will be a close partner of the European Union in the future. 

I wish you well. 

Jean-Claude Juncker
European Commission
200, rue de la Loi,
1049 Bruxelles

Oh.



*For clarity, I should add that I got the response almost a fortnight ago; I'm just too disorganised to have written about it before now.  Ooops.