Yesterday, my housemate had her last day at work. Her colleagues organised goodbye drinks. Speeches were made. She came home carrying, in one hand, a large bouquet of native flowers and a card filled with well wishes. In the other hand, a full-scale replica street sign bearing her name. She’s a transport planner at local council. She had been working there for two years.
Yesterday, I too, had my last day at work. This was the same day I was told it would be my last day. I was sitting in my supervisor’s office at *** University. She told me I would not be brought back to continue teaching. Shellshocked, I watched my supervisor’s mouth move as conciliatory words tumbled out. I responded on autopilot, as unaware of my words as I was of hers — simply trying to hold it together as anxiety clamped my chest and tears threatened unbidden. It felt as if a ten-year dream had dissipated in ten minutes.
I had been working at this particular university for the past two years. At the end of August last year, the federal Closing Loopholes No 2 Act came into effect, bringing with it a redefinition of causal employment designed to promote the conversion of casuals into permanent roles. These changes state that a worker is casual only if there is “an absence of a firm advance commitment to continuing and indefinite work” and that this is determined “on the basis of the real substance, practical reality and true nature of the employment relationship.” In other words, the facts of my work, ongoing and with the expectation of teaching every semester, would prevail over the flimsy contract that designated me as casual. As a result, I would have grounds to apply for conversion to a permanent position. The Act was introduced too late to impact last semester. It is only as the new semester approaches that the fallout from these changes is becoming visible.
As I sat on the sofa’s edge, my supervisor sympathetically explained that the administration are fearful of the legislation. Word had come down that faculty were to hire existing casual staff only if no other eligible candidate could be identified, thereby avoiding the possibility of conversion to permanent roles. This is a serious shift in a sector that, over the last two decades, has become reliant on an endless stream of cheap casual labour. During this period, workers on these contracts were underpaid and overworked, with slim prospects of career progression, and employed for only twenty-six weeks a year. Still, once you had your foot in the door, you tended to be offered the same teaching gig each semester.
Across the board, universities have responded to legislation aimed at rectifying this already grim situation by halting casual hiring, cutting courses, expanding class sizes, and increasing the workloads of permanent staff. This is an unintended consequence of the legislation, yes, but given the nefarious history of the university, from systemic wage theft to bad-faith bargaining, hardly a surprising one. Yet there I was, reeling with the realisation that — instead of finally addressing our precarious employment — the university was abandoning us.
My supervisor suggested I reach out to other universities or contemplate leaving academia. What about the GLAM industries? I had to search this afterwards: galleries, libraries, archives, museums. Not quite the economic might of the FIRE industries that dominate in today’s economy — an unfortunate acronym for sectors (finance, insurance, real estate) that devastate communities. As an acronym, GLAM is little better, and denotes a cultural sphere hollowed out by years of underfunding, with dwindling employment opportunities and deteriorating work conditions.
As our conversation wound up, my supervisor thanked me for my work. I left the office and schlepped down the narrow corridor, only now noticing the missing name plaque on my door. In the fluorescent space, all office doors were closed, each person allotted their private plot. I went down a floor and into a communal space outside the elevator, taking a seat on another fraying sofa chair. I emailed other universities and received immediate responses from Monash and Deakin. Neither was hiring due to their own decasualisation. A staff member walked past me, asking if I was ok or waiting for anybody. I said yes, no.
Perhaps I should have noticed the signs. Earlier that month, possessed of the understanding that I would be back for the upcoming semester, I received an email from administrative staff: “we have been advised you will no longer be using Room 513 in HU2 Building. We would appreciate it if you could please arrange to return the key.” This was news to me, and had sent me into a spiral. Knowing the university as I do, this seemed a wild yet altogether plausible way to find out I no longer had a job. I responded: “I am not aware that I will not be returning next semester. I believe I am likely to return to tutor for ‘****’.” A response from my head of department, cc’d in by the other staff, read as follows:
I’m very sorry, but we might have to move you to an alternative office space if that is the case as I need the office for new staff members who are starting this month.
I breathed a sigh of relief, simply bad communication in a shuffle impelled by the bureaucratic jittering of the university. But there remained a nagging doubt, a knot of dread that settled somewhere between the top of my belly and bottom of my sternum.
Still sitting on the threadbare sofa, I closed my eyes. My head of department’s email rose up, its spectral markings emblazoned on my eyelids. It dawned on me that, when sending the email, they knew I would not be back to teach, hence the conditional “if that is the case,” and the excessive “I’m very sorry.” Even the double negative of my email, “not aware that I will not be returning,” perhaps expressed the unconscious fear produced by my precarity.
Confirming this suspicion, my supervisor had just told me that faculty had been informed about the decasualisation plan a month ago and were instructed not to say anything while the administration coordinated its response to the legislation. Despite this directive, the cogs in the bureaucracy move at different speeds, with the request for office space eclipsing the hiring of causal staff. This was callous, yes, but like most cruelties in the university, one produced by a structural fracture for which no individual can be held responsible.
*
This might come as a shock to those who see the university as a beacon of learning but, within the institution, teaching is invisible and devalued. With little to no pedagogical training, oversight, or professional development, you are left to your own devices. Like a schoolteacher, you pour your heart and soul into the job. You stay up until midnight completing a lesson plan for the following morning, eyes stinging as you sit in front of your computer. You read in every little moment just to finish the texts — with your morning coffee, on the tram on the way to work, while eating lunch, on the tram on the way home, in bed before going to sleep. You respond to frantic student emails on a Saturday night, taking temporary leave of a dinner party to assuage a student’s fear about an essay due the following day. You mark papers and take double the time stipulated by university guidelines — the only way to provide substantive feedback. You wake in the night, plagued by a classroom comment or the fairness of a student’s grade. The boundaries between labour and leisure, workplace and home, public and private dissolve. Or, more precisely, the former subsumes the latter. You are paid for almost none of this.
This is a small piece of a larger puzzle, however. The more time you spend teaching, the less time you have for research and, in the academy, research is the primary path to permanency. This begets the pernicious incentive whereby the less you care for students and the less effort you put into teaching, the more time you have for scholarship and the more likely you are to get a permanent job.
Teaching is self-defeating. As the saying goes, you can love your job but it won’t love you back. The university pushes this beyond unrequited love and into ruthless exploitation, turning against you, in perverse fashion, the responsibility you feel towards students. The university knows this.
Student learning, already diminished by excessive staff workloads and a shift to vapid online modules, will be further undermined if the university sector responds in this way to the Closing Loopholes Act. Having a rotating cast of casual tutors or, if you are lucky, an overworked permanent staff member, is bad for everyone. It feels ridiculous to write, but teaching is a skill, and experience matters. The university also knows this.
*
To return my key, I descended another floor to the administration offices. In contrast to the utilitarian space above, this floor was open and spacious. At its centre was a vast service desk, the countertop a glossy white glass. As for the offices, rather than an off-white drywall, they were a two-tone glass, the bottom frosted, the top transparent. I provided my name to a staff member, who checked against a list. I was not on it. I was asked to put the key in an envelope, which they sealed, writing the room number and my name on the front.
It so happened that a colleague whose office was two doors down from mine also had an office on this floor. She had, I believed, overheard this interaction, which took place right outside her open door. As I turned to leave, I looked at her. She averted her eyes, fixing them on her monitor.
Faculty being unable to look you in the eye is not an uncommon occurrence at the university. It happens every time the spectre of permanent work is raised. This time, it struck me that this averting of eyes had nothing to do with me but rather everything to do with her, or, more precisely, to do with the formal relationship between our two positions. It wasn’t me she couldn’t face but her own powerlessness in a system she knows better than anyone to be broken. Meeting my eyes would have compelled a confrontation with her own futility, a coming to grips with her inability to transform my precarity into security and, in this way, care for me.
It cuts deep, the impossibility of meaningfully caring for another. Sometimes, it’s easier to just look away. Leaving the building, it felt as if I had been disappeared by the secret police. As if meeting my eyes or acknowledging my existence turned co-workers into collaborators, placing them on the wrong side of a shadowy power. As if mentioning my name, insisting that I was once in an office in this very corridor, would make them more likely to be disappeared next.
The term colleague mystifies the attendant power relations. As a casual, you don’t receive departmental emails, you don’t attend faculty meetings, and you are the last to hear any information — even if it relates directly to your future. In these small, everyday ways, you are reminded of your lowly and provisional status within the professional hierarchy, no matter how qualified and experienced you may be.
I am thirty-six. A decade ago, I moved to the US to undertake a PhD at a prestigious institution, completed the PhD, returned to Australia, and have been teaching and researching at multiple Australian universities ever since. This was an arduous and exhausting path. Yet, a permanent position feels further away than ever. I have spent semester after semester scratching for work, sending cold emails into the institutional ether. Waiting for replies that never come. Feeling the spike of aspiration when a permanent position is advertised. Investing time and hope in the application. Experiencing the inevitable disappointment of the rejection. Unceasing lateral movement coupled with vertical inertia. The toll inflicted by this trajectory was hidden to all but my ex-partner (our nine-year relationship fell apart under the demands of academia).
I write this not to say that woe is me, that I am extraordinary, that I deserve a job. No, I write this because I am ordinary, and my experience is a paradigmatic illumination of the logic governing our universities. Learning, teaching, and even research, as it turns out, are incidental to this logic, byproducts of the institutional jostling for position in a competitive marketplace. The contentious university rankings are the indirect and distorted mechanism through which learning, teaching, and research are mediated. These rankings, in turn, facilitate the university’s bottom line. What reigns supreme in our universities is, ultimately, a financial logic. To this logic, all else is subordinated. This may be a banal point to make but given the ideological mystifications veiling our institutions, it is nevertheless necessary.
The modalities of invisibility, isolation, and silence underwrite this financial logic, foreclosing the bonds that could be forged in the fire of common experience. Nonetheless, I hope this proves to be a transition between two regimes of university labour, from the casualised workforce of the recent past to a future where permanency is once again the norm. There are always sacrifices in transitions and if I am one so be it, as long as this leads to job security for others like me. Given the sector’s duplicitous approach to the Closing Loopholes Act so far, I am not optimistic.
Anyway, this transition is not a question of law but of power — a question of whether such legislation can be turned into something more than its letter by the collective strength of those who toil away in the university’s halls. As I left campus and headed towards the tram stop, my hands unburdened by flowers or cards, I couldn’t help but think that to wield such power, we will have to look into each other’s eyes, deeply.
*as of writing, I don’t know whether another university will offer me work. Not getting such an offer might be a blessing in disguise. An end to the hustling without advancement, to surviving on the meagre crumbs of work, to the insidious dreams of an illusory future. If the Sword of Damocles hangs over you long enough, you start to pray for it to fall, fast and clean.
