Just before Christmas last year, some well meaning, unionized elves (so, not Santa’s) wanted to put a little something extra in the stockings of the students that we hire to help with all our teaching. Instead of being able to hire them purely on a course-for-course basis as before, the new framework dictates that we have to provide them with a bit more security insofar as we have to hire them for an entire year from now on.
(And, as an added bonus, they also got a new, completely unnecessary designation in the form of studentische Hilfskraft (student helpforce, soon to become part of the MCU) from the old Hilfswissenschaftler (helpresearcher). Although the change removes the male gender-specificity of the latter term (and/or avoids the just plain ugly ungender-unspecificity of its neutered derivative, Hilfswissenschaftler*in), it does nothing for phonetics or efficient communication. Hilfswissenschaftler was always shortened to the rather pleasant-sounding, and gender-neutral, HiWi (HEE-wee), whereas studentische Hilfskraft becomes the 50% syllabically enhanced and, even for German, much harsher sounding SHK (ESS-ha-ka).)
Unfortunately, well meaning is not necessarily the same thing as well thought out …
German universities largely use a semester system where the bulk of the teaching is done in two 14-week blocks. Do the (not very complicated) math and it’s clear that the new, year-long contracts, when intended solely for teaching purposes, involve just about as much paid vacation time as they do actual, working time. (Ok, we can do teaching outside of those 14-week blocks but it really only happens between the winter and summer semesters and altogether this possibility is much more of a bookkeeping tool on the part of admin to fake the workloads of the students to under a legal 40 hours per week. In any case, it still amounts to a whole lot of sitting around doing nothing, something that students, unlike civil servants like me, lack the proper, highly technical training for.)
Some more math, this time combined with a bit of economics …
To teach our comparative anatomy labs in the winter semester, we need eight teaching assistants for seven weeks. Or 56 weeks in total. (That’s the math.) So whereas before our teaching budget allowed us to give a bit of money to help eight different HiWis, we now have to spend it all on one SHK. And, even more stupidly, we now also have to hire a second SHK for a full year to ensure that there are still two teaching assistants per lab to meet the demand. Or, in other words, our budget costs just doubled for the same amount of work. (That’s the economics.) Both of these people then get to spend the remaining 45 weeks of the year getting paid to do nothing because SHKs cannot be hired by the department (say to serve as a pool of shared teaching assistants) but only by the individual working groups and we really don’t have any more teaching duties for them until the next autumn. (That’s the admin.)
Fortunately, however, the new agreement does have a general escape clause insofar as the length of the contract can be shorter than the prescribed one-year minimum in “justified instances”. And, a mere seven brief but sleepless months after the agreement was published (and three months after it went into effect), probably together with more than a couple of important memos unusually not dealing with cats and cucumbers, central admin at the University of Not-Bielefeld finally managed to codify what those instances are:
- appointment as a teaching assistant,
- appointment as a replacement for another SHK,
- appointment to a one-time event,
- appointment to an externally-funded or other project,
- appointment to a lab practical,
- by request of the candidate, and
- other (please specify).
Two of those exceptions are worth highlighting. The first, of course, is “other”, that most well known and most specific of justifiable instances. (This same specificity also refers to the exception relating to project work, where “externally-funded or other project” is really just the same as, well, “project”.) More importantly, who gets to decide exactly how justified your other is? Or can they? So long as “other” is listed by the University as a justified exception, then that should be enough, right?
The second is the one above “other”, which I suspect to possibly be illegal. Rumour has it that Germany has a law that prevents you from signing any contract that is to your own detriment. (ChatGPT helpfully localized this rumour to sections 305 to 310 of the German Civil Code (AKA Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB) along with some other laws with some other acronyms.) For instance, and I’ve actually run into this rumoured situation myself when trying to hire someone for my working group, if you have a position that pays out according to someone having a Master degree, it is actually illegal for someone with a PhD to hold it, even by their own request, because they would be underpaid according to their qualifications. Now given that the new agreement was made for the benefit of the students, it stands to reason that agreeing to a shorter timeframe, even if it was by their own request, would be to their detriment and therefore similarly illegal. So, instead of adding to the red tape with this latter exception, why not just request those candidates use that tried-and-true method known as quitting?
Or just enjoy their 45-week paid holiday without complaining?
In any case, all these changes and changes to the changes have brought us right back to exactly where we were before, begging the question of why anything had to be changed in the first place. Ostensibly it was all to help the students out. But, as I pointed out above, the new law in practice means that it’s qualitatively better only for quantitatively fewer students in some sort sort of weird application of the motto of the Three Musketeers: all (the money) for one and one for all (the teaching).
And, although many of my students will disagree, I’m not sure if they really needed to be helped out all that much in the first place. At least not compared to those in many other countries. After the vocal outcry following the brief fling that the public universities in Germany had with real tuition fees in the late 2000s (instituting fees that were comparable in magnitude to those that I paid in Canada over two decades earlier), undergrad students have since gone back to paying semester fees only. Sounds suspiciously similar to tuition fees but the only thing that they have in common are last four letters. And the preceding space. For starters, the current semester fees here at the University of Not-Bielefeld are just over over 400 EUR per semester,
<slight pause to allow any North-American students reading this blog to regain consciousness again>
with over half of that money going to provide the students with a semester ticket that allows them to use most public transport in the province (including regional trains) free of charge.
<again, a second, slight pause for similar reasons>
Never mind the trains. Just considering how expensive the busses here in Not-Bielefeld are, that’s one sweetheart of a deal that I’d love to have as well. And if all that still isn’t enough to help cover the bills, German students can apply for interest-free student loans from the government via programs like BAföG (not short for Blög Aböut föG, but for Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz and thank God for that).
Oh and BAföG? If you’re willing to fight through all the associated admin, only half of the loan, up to a maximum of 10010 EUR, has to be repaid (interest-free). The rest is provided as a grant.
And we’ll just stop right there before any North-American students start hemorrhaging from their eyeballs. Even a third pause wouldn’t help there anymore …
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