I’ve mentioned before how time in Academia doesn’t really flow the way it does in the rest of the world. And not just for students in the middle of a death-defyingly boring lecture either.
It gets worse …
At a recent meeting of the profs in my department, it was revealed to us that, on average, we engage in about 30% more teaching than we officially have to do. This, of course, was seen as problematic, but not for the reason that most sensible people would logically come to. The real problem, it seems, is not that we’re overworked, but rather that we’re giving the impression by offering so much teaching that we have too much time on our hands, which could lead to job cuts in the future.
I just don’t understand the maths on this one. Overtime normally means too much work for too few people. Getting rid of even more people would mean even more overtime. Which, by their logic, would mean more cuts and more overtime until only one poor sod is left to work a 40-hour day. And weekends …
So what to do? We could do less teaching, of course, but this would mean cutting into our Bachelor and Master teaching programmes (which combined are already shorter than their North American equivalents, another gripe of mine). Instead, the solution was mindblowingly straightforward: if the University of Not-Bielefeld is not going to give us any gold stars for doing more than our share of teaching then we’ll only claim the amount that we ought to be doing. Yep, that’s right. We reinvented the concept of overtime to not only make it unpaid, but invisible as well.
Once again, the maths elude me …
A big part of the reason why we’re working overtime is because the university has been increasing student (and admin) numbers steadily over the past decade without adding much teaching staff. As such, we have to teach many of the entry-level courses in parallel to shuffle everyone on through. Having the university see that we’re no longer doing too much teaching but now only just enough can only strengthen their resolve to open the floodgates just that little bit more. Which, of course, means even more unpaid overtime and so even more students and, just like in Groundhog Day (which has an amazingly long Wikipedia page, BTW), we start all over from the beginning again, only without the chance for any personal development and so winning over the love interest in the end.
On top of that, there’s going to be a 30% disconnect in the number of teaching hours that we offer and the amount that we actually do. Forget invisible overtime. Now we’re also making normal time vanish out of existence! Would be a really neat trick, but some eagle-eyed, number-crunching admin type is going to notice the fabric of space-time slowly unravelling eventually. And hell hath no fury like an admin type when the sums of two columns don’t add up.
So …
To avoid falling afoul of any of those admin blackholes, we would have to reduce the official number of hours each course has to match the number of hours that we are claiming for it. However, this would mean that the teaching programme no longer offers enough hours for the students to graduate in time, meaning that we would have to offer more courses for us to not claim fully and the entire wibbly wobbly, timey wimey nonsense starts all over again. For the third time.
So much for perpetual motion machines being impossible …
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