We don't need your stinkin' employment data rules, either!

Wow!  People suspect that it goes on, but when the disgruntled lecturer(s) actually get things like this 'confirmed', it still shocks us.  What shocks us you ask?   The fact that the degree farm has an extremely high success rate regarding students finding employment or going on to further education?  That's good, right?  Depends on what you mean by 'further education'.  Because that isn't it.  It's the fact that the degree farm apparently helps it's employment stats by paying graduated students who haven't found work or have gone into further education £200 to sign up for a 'course' at the degree farm (what 'course' pays YOU £200 to join, we wonder), so that they can be counted as 'successes' for the degree farm's statistics.  Meaning, that a high percentage of graduates have either found work or are continuing education within 6 months of graduation.  So parents, you, too, can pay up to £9,000/year on your child's education in return for a £200 return for your now-educated, unemployed progeny.  We'll have to ask a finance lecturer to figure out those returns, but it seems that the only positive benefit we see is would be for the degree farm.

When a 'teaching' Uni, isn't.

Some universities extol the virtues of their being 'teaching' universities, and how that is far superior to the evil 'research university' where they tell you that your child will have somewhat limited contact with a real 'professor'. Ok, outside of the fact that most teaching universities don't actually have readers (associate professors), much less professors teaching your kids (so your kids won't have ANY contact with esteemed and established academics, not limited).  But lest you don't really see a problem with this, allow me to explain. An MSc student came to visit a lecturer at the degree farm a few weeks ago. They were concerned because they had learned regression analysis (let's call it calculus for the sake of ease) in their degree, but didn't want to go to their module leader because they were still a little insecure about their ability.  However, they really wanted to try and  use what they had learned for their MSc dissertation. So, they came to me, and I agreed to help. Well, they told their dissertation supervisor what they wanted to do, and this person 'strongly discouraged' the student from using regression analysis because 'they didn't understand it and wouldn't be able to mark their work appropriately' (read: you'll get a crap grade because I, your supervisor, don't know what you've done). HUH?!?!? THIS IS SOMETHING THAT THEY TEACH IN THE MSc DEGREE!  But the supervisor doesn't understand it?  Now, here is the ironic thing...this supervisor/lecturer's qualifications are that they passed the same degree that the student is getting, from the same university.  So they took the same module, but clearly didn't understand it. And, as a paid lecturer/supervisors, do they take the time to try and learn?  Do they expand their knowledge so that your kids can grow?  Er, no. They tell them to do ratio analysis. So basically, they're telling your kids to do fractions when they're trying to do calculus. Calculus...because your kids WANT to...and the people being paid to educate them are stopping them. By the way, the student in question was upset because, though it was more difficult, they wanted to attempt to apply what they'd actually learned and test themselves. Instead, those who are supposed to educate them actually tell them that in doing so, they'd be attempting something that they don't understand and will make no attempt to understand. I don't know about you, but is this worth your tuition? People teaching your kids who know less than your kids?  Not exactly value for money, is it.

Like pawns in a game of chess

Your disgruntled lecturer thought (s)he couldn't be surprised by Degree Farm anymore. Naive and wishful thinking. They always find a way to take it to another level.

Imagine you have worked somewhere for several years which you've spent in your office and your chair. "Your" is the keyword here. We all know that the place is not our property but we grow accustomed to it, fill it with personal belongings and eventually create our comfort zone. This makes sense - feeling safe and comfortable in your office is vital for your productivity (plus emotional and mental health).

Now imagine that one day you come to work and find out it's not your office anymore. Your line manager has decided to move you into another office, another floor, with complete strangers and they never informed you about that! Yes, after your years of service, it didn't occur to them to ask how you'd feel about the move, let alone inform you that it was decided, although they see you on a regular basis and the whole thing had been planned well in advance! Instead you find out from your office mate who tells you that something is up because the estate people are checking your desk and brought boxes to "pack you up".

Well, at this point you definetely feel like a valued member of staff (sarcasm alert!).
The sad point is that to our managers we are nothing more than pawns in a game of chess. They think that they can tell us to do whatever they want and move us to wherever and whenever they wish. They don't care about our opinions or wellbeing, or for that matter our job satisfaction. You'd think that one of manager's duties is to create an atmosphere conducive to productive work - not at the Degree Farm. Here the thinking goes: the more the staff are fragmented and the less informed, the easier it is to manipulate them. But most importantly, they are less likely to question the managements' decisions and incompetence.

It's Away Day!

You probably have heard of away days - days when firms take their staff away from the workplace to clear their heads, do something different, interesting, have nice time, but overall it's a team-building activity. Sounds good, doesn't it?

The Degree Farm has its own take on away days. Going away from the workplace means going to just another university building (literally, sometimes it's just across the street, a building in which many of us teach on daily basis...). Doing something different? Getting involved in team building activities? Positive experiences to remember and increase creativity? Rather not!

Our management's approach to away days can be summarised in the following way: make staff go to another university building which is no further than 5 minutes walk away. Remember to ensure that everyone acts as if they were in some far-away leafy place. Keep them busy for 5 hours - seat them down in a room and have 5 hours of presentations and training.

In each open day there's a good dose of propaganda so we don't forget how great the Degree Farm is and that it's all thank to our amazing deanery. The highlight is when one of the deans comes forward and points out that we are lucky to have our jobs and should be grateful. Good times!

Then we are briefed on changes and suggested changes. Obviously our feedback is appreciated and taken into account by the managers when making their decisions (sarcasm). The typical scenario looks like this: the head of department informs us of a change dreamt up by one of the deanery gurus. Then we are asked what we think about it, after all it's the lecturers who do the work. We express our concerns and say it won't work, it's impractical, impossible etc. Then the head of department says that there's nothing we can do about it because the dean is passionate about his idea. Within two days we all receive an email from the dean informing us that feedback was overwhelmingly positive and he has decided to implement the changes. As you can see the lecturers' input is very valued at Degree Farm!

Then there is some technical training - how to do things online, use virtual learning environment, fill in forms, write up exam papers and all that stuff.

Then we need to think how to improve the student satisfaction to get a good NSS score. How could we do that? Let's brain storm for ideas how to bribe or scare our students into giving us the highest marks. To one of the away days the managers invited a person from another department who told us how to perfect the NSS score. How do they do it at their department? They take third year students away to a resort for 5 days and make them fill in the online survey out there! Unethical? Immoral? Simply wrong? You'd think! Well our line managers don't see such a problem. The only reason why our department didn't do the same are its size and the student numbers. It's simply logistically too difficult to send hundreds of students away for 5 days along with necessary staff. This may still change because Degree Farm decided to create new posts whose holders will be responsible for organising such trips. More happy times ahead!

At the end of the time all staff are energised, motivated, their creativity is overfilling the place - that's what a normal person would expect after a normal away day. At Degree Farm the overwhelming feelings are tiredness, powerlessness and frustration. But nobody will say a word out loud because they have been reminded how lucky their are to have their jobs. The brave ones who tried ended up without pay increments, were denied promotions and mistreated terribly by the management. Critical thinking and honesty are an enemy at Degree Farm (and it's supposed to be a university...).

Student / staff ratio and incentive to cheat

The game is on: the game to manipulate statistics and climb up in the league tables. One of the factors taken into account by the ranking makers is the student / staff ratio. This is supposed to reflect the amount of attention individual students should expect to get from lecturers. The Degree Farm used to do well in this category by counting all possible members of staff, including admin and estate personnel (maintenance, cleaners, etc.). For example our student / lecturer ratio is somewhere around 30/1 but the tables give a figure in mid teens. The ranking makers realised that universities played dirty and decided to tighten the rules: in order to count a member of staff in, that person must have a teaching qualification or appropriate teaching experience. What to do? How to keep our place in the rankings? Should we hire more lecturers? Wait, the rules say that a person must have a teaching qualification but they don't say that the person must actually teach. EUREKA! Let's make our admin staff take a PG certificate in teaching in higher education! We run it in house anyway so it won't cost much and we'll save our sweet spot in the league tables. Pure Degree Farm genius!

Not everything is bad at the Degree Farm

The posts in this blog are overwhelmingly negative, yet there are some positive experiences and good people at Degree Farm. In spite of the ridiculous and disconnected management, many lecturers are able to put their frustration aside and deliver outstanding experience to students. The same lecturers are very friendly and make an effort to create as positive atmosphere to work in as possible. On many occasions people go to extra lengths to help and support their colleagues. They will go out for drinks together and enjoy each other's company. Some really good friendships are established. In short, there's a proper "community" spirit. Paradoxically, the terrible management may help some of us to come together - having the same complaints and ridiculousness to fight against each and every day brings people closer. Your Disgruntled Lecturer knows that whenever (s)he needs some help, someone to cover teaching,  invigilate, moderate, feedback on research, etc., it's enough to ask and there will be a number of colleagues ready to help.
To add to that, working with students can be very rewarding. Yes, there are far too many "passengers", lazy students and those who's attitude can be summed up by "l pay, l demand to pass". But there are also bright sparks who are thirsty for knowledge and work hard and they go to succeed in life after the Degree Farm.

'Research' Allocations

Just in case you're sitting there reading some of these posts, and you're also an academic, you might be saying to yourself 'I don't know what these people are complaining about; research is difficult, time-consuming, and will often require work in one's free time.'  We hear you!  We completely agree with you in fact.  But we're also guessing that a good part of your week at work is spent doing said research; maybe 8 hours a week at worst and 24-36 at best.  A WEEK.  And it was even better when you first graduated with your PhD.  So lest you think that we're just whiny ingrates that didn't know what we were getting into when we entered this field, allow us to explain both what we were promised in our interviews and what we actually get.  In our interviews, we were promised a 60/40 teaching/research allocation. which was completely acceptable to us.  But not only was that promise not realized, we had no idea of all of different things that "research" means to the degree farm (more on that in a minute).  So what *is* our allocation, you ask?  Well...the basic research tariff is 50 hours a year.  A YEAR.  And we're on 12 month contracts, not 9, so many of us are teaching 3 semesters a year for the same pay as those who teach just 2.  To be clear, 50 hours a year is about 1 hour a week allocated for research.  Anyone who has published a 3 or 4* paper knows how easy THAT is to do on an hour a week (though our Deanery could put out a 4* every week if they wanted...they just don't seem to want to).  So that's the tariff is you haven't published.  You're already coming from behind because how are you to publish ANYTHING on an hour a week?  If the powers that be deem that you have the possibility of publishing, the next tariff up is 100 hours a year, or roughly 2 hours a week.  If you HAVE published, then you'd likely be given 150 hours, or 3 hours a week.  For those who are REF-able (4 papers at an average 3.5* ranking in 6 years), you get a whopping 200 HOURS A YEAR!  Yup...that's 4 hours a week.  To be a world-class researcher.  But it gets worse.  Remember above where I mentioned that no 'research' is created equally?  Well, the Degree Farm has decided that we should spend our oh-so-precious research hours doing things that make the Degree Farm money, such as moderating exams and dissertations for foreign universities, or whatever other tasks they deem as 'research'.  But we're publishing, surely we shouldn't have to do those things?  Can't other people who don't have any desire to publish can do them?  No.  Again, everything is fair at the Degree Farm, some things are just more fair than others.

Advice of the week

So the advice of the week comes from the boss. Although we are required to do research and publish under the afiliation to the Degree Farm, we are supposed to do it purely out of our love for research.
How should it work in practice? We should work on research during weekends and Christmas. By the way, Christmas counts as our annual leave - we are forced to use our annual leave allowance during those days (fair enough but don't tell me to work during that time!). So sorry family, l can't join you for the Christmas dinner because I need to work on that paper...!
Weekends? Hello Boss! Have you forgotten that you're already forcing us to work about five Saturdays a year as open days plus clearing without any compensation, whatsoever? Oh wait, forgive us, we've forgotten that we still have 52 Sundays in a year...

This is just an icing on the cake: out of that love for research we are required to publish a 3* or 4* paper a year. But then again silly us, our (now) Dean kindly informed us that this should be dead easy and they could write a 4* publishable paper in two nights! That awesome Dean has a master's  degree from the Degree Farm as their highest degree and has never experienced real research. Yet, (s)he's got a vital say on how we should do research and how it is resourced...

Greetings from the Degree Farm!

We don't need your stinkin' NSS rules!

Now, I don't actually know if there ARE official NSS rules.  For those of you who don't know, the NSS is the national student satisfaction survey.  The scores are highly weighted in the UK university rankings.  You can see that some of the post-1992 universities owe their increased rankings to increased NSS scores.  Not research, not student spending, not student to teacher ratios...student satisfaction.  So, have we improved our teaching to such a huge degree that we've moved up so much in  the rankings?  Have we hired SO many new, super-qualified people that students are so much more satisfied than they were just 3 years ago?  Maybe, but I'm going to guess that's a pretty big ask.  So, it appears that we help it along a little bit.  You know, by having highly exclusive holiday lunches that are ONLY for only the 3rd year, non-foreign students (the target of the NSS) where we tell students how great our NSS scores have been and how they anticipate that the students will give us even BETTER scores this year!  This is the soft-sell.  The harder sell will come closer to NSS itself where we tell them that if the good scores don't continue, the value of their degree will decrease as our rankings decrease.  No pressure, eh?  I've even heard about departments taking their NSS students for week long field trips to fun places to fill out the surveys.  Noooo, not trying to bias the outcome at all.  But hey, if there are rules, they don't apply to us, at least they don't as long as we move up in the rankings.

Degree Farm's Deanery Genius Du Jour: Open Plan

Yup.  Open Plan  One of the deanery has the design bug, so we're doing away with our semi-private offices (two or three to a space) and joining the ranks of the call centre worker.  Don't get me wrong, open plan has its place...in a call centre, for instance.  But not only is it not overly productive to producing great research (oh, sorry...forgot that wasn't a priority), it's just not overly productive full stop.  Now, I know a lot of you reading this may be in open plan.  You might have a lovely cubicle, decorated with pictures or memos...a nice safe place which keeps out pretty much everything except the noise.  Is this what is planned?  Er, no.  When we say open plan, we mean OPEN plan.  We'll be facing either a window or our co-workers.  No dividers.  No walls or dividers to put ANYTHING.  But hey, maybe this means more space for everyone?  No.  We'll get one shelf in a bookcase and one lockable drawer in a file cabinet.  Books?  Resources?  Pah, who needs 'em!  PAPERLESS is the way to go in academia.  And, I bet the studen...er, 'clients' will LOVE it!  Remember how it felt when your boss called you into the office in front of all of your open plan co-workers?  Like 'oooooh, you're in TROUBLE!'  Yeah, that's how your kids are going to feel.  Because if they have anything they want/need to say to us, we're going to have to leave the open plan and try to find a private place to talk.  For those already in open plan, this often means the stairwell.  TOP NOTCH!  Do you really think that your child is going to come to me in front of everyone and say 'I'm failing, I need help', or 'I'm really feeling a bit depressed, can I talk to you?'  I sincerely doubt it.  So not only is management treating us like call centre workers, they seem to be working really hard to dis-assemble the already tenuous relationship between student and lecturer.  Ah, you say...but if everyone is open plan, it must be great!  But not everyone IS going to be open plan.  The deanery certainly isn't, and right now the current idea is to not have management in open plan.  Because, you know...they need their privacy.  At the degree farm, everyone is equal.  Some are just a little more equal than others...