As Chris Trotter wrote for Insight, many moons ago, universities were long part of an unspoken compact:
“The workaday world paid for the universities and accorded them a large measure of autonomy, and in return, the universities supplied the expertise and advice that kept the workaday world ticking over”.
For decades, the universities have openly disdained their side of the deal. They’ve come to regard a steady river of taxpayers’ money as theirs by right while doing little but sneering at the people whose pockets they’re picking.
But even the guaranteed taxpayer largesse wasn’t enough. Universities, carried away by avarice, discovered another cash cow: foreign students. Students, mostly from India and China, paid exorbitant full fees. Universities greedily pocketed the cash, paid vice-chancellors million-dollar salaries and, in return, sold their souls to the Chinese Communist Party and sold students a dumbed-down, second-rate university experience.
And ripped off their own staff.
Some of Australia’s most prestigious and cashed-up universities are being accused of hypocrisy, as data reveals almost 70 per cent of staff are employed insecurely while “thousands” have been laid off as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic […]
The rush towards insecure work has been led by the University of Melbourne, Australia’s richest tertiary institution, which listed reserves of $4.43 billion while employing 72.9 per cent of staff on insecure terms.
ABC Australia
To be sure, Covid has sent gluttonous universities on a crash-diet, but these problems have been long-running. Certainly, even when I was a student in the early 2010s, tutors would complain of insecure, underpaid work. That trickled down to students, who waited longer and longer for work to be returned, with more and more cursory assessments from harried, overworked and underpaid markers.
The situation for online students – who pay exactly the same fees as on-campus students – even before Covid, was even more dire: often, first assignments would only be returned on the eve of the exams. So students were nearing the end of their semester with no idea of how well or badly they were doing.
It’s unfair to blame tutors doing the actual marking, though.
Students at the prestigious University of Melbourne only receive the support they need during remote learning because their tutors work unpaid, says a staff member who is risking his job to blow the whistle.
That’s despite a year of scrutiny after the ABC revealed widespread underpayment, and after millions of dollars was paid as part of an ongoing Fair Work Ombudsman investigation.
The “diabolical” marking piece rate the ABC exposed in the Arts faculty is still being paid to tutors in the Faculty of Science, according to a current tutor Bernd Bartl, who has taught at the university for a decade.
If the marking situation for online students was dire enough before Covid, now, when all students are online whether they want to be or not, it’s become diabolical.
However, Mr Bartl’s impression of his first-year students was that they need more support than ever due to remote learning both at university and in their final year of high school.
“They’re feeling weary, fragile, they need additional support,” he said.
“Instead of the university helping us staff members to give that additional support, they’re actually putting pressure on academic departments to cut back.”
ABC Australia
Last year, the University of Melbourne was forced to repay at least 1,500 academics in a “wage theft” case before the Fair Work Commission. The repayments amounted to millions of dollars.
But who is going to repay ripped-off students, paying full fees for a second-rate university education?
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