How much do lecturers get paid??

€54,116.00 - €87,724.00

http://www.ucd.ie/hr/html/info_for_staff/salary_scales/scales.htm

Librarian is where its at!

Librarians - didn't know there was such good money in that field of work. :eek:

Surley they mean THIS librarian.

a-ha wrote: »

The rate for hourly paid lecturers is now €63.04

Actual class hours is only about 1/3 of the workload. Each hour of lecturing takes about 1-3 hours of preparation. The there is setting exams, grading assignments, administration and meeting with students etc.

The end result was that teaching two undergraduate classes and one postgraduate class for the year (essentially a full-time job/the same hours as full-time salaried staff members) netted me an income of approximately 8,000 for the year.

This is the hidden scandal of higher education, not just in Ireland but elsewhere - 1/3 or more of the teaching at third level is done by hourly paid 'adjunct lecturers' who earn less than a living wage and are employed (usually at the last minute, ie. Friday before class) semester to semester with no job security, pension, or paid holidays.

One of the hardest parts of the job is working alongside people who get paid 60-80K a year for doing essentially the same job and who don't seem to give a damn about us. Last year, I was not paid regularly, it wasn't monthly in areas (that's just for salaried staff), pay claims went missing or were delayed. Payroll expected me to work for months without payment. I was running out of money with which to buy food and putting my mortgage repayments on the credit card.

It will take me years to recover from the experience. Hopefully, I can emigrate.

I can assure you that a great many permanent and tenured lecturers care a great deal about the combined rise in highly-paid administrators, the government-imposed hiring freeze and the exploitation of adjuncts. Unfortunately, the influence of lecturers on government policy is on about the same level as that of asylum seekers.

Students, in my experience, don't care at all. Fees is the only issue that gets them exercised.

That is disgusting and I as a current UCD student do care. I may be in the minority student wise but I do care. Firstly the hourly rate has decreased significantly from this threads opening, and yet I can bet that due to the uptick of incoming undergraduates and continuing postgraduates the workload will only have increased for lectures. Then there is the slapdash way the administration seems to have handled paying the hourly lecturers, with no regard to their welfare re food/bills etc. It is a nasty situation and I am not surprised you decided to leave.

a-ha wrote: »

Thanks for expressing concern. I had some lovely colleagues but I had to leave because I couldn't afford to keep working there, and dealing with payroll etc and senior staff to beg for my claims to be paid on time was killing me.

To avoid confusion - I should point out that although this thread happens to be on UCD. I have never been employed at UCD as an hourly paid lecturer and my original post described my experiences at an unnamed third level organization.

Well I do work at UCD and I can assure you those exact conditions obtain here too. And they obtain inn ucc and maynooth as well. I venture to guess they obtain everywhere else as well. It's a scandal, but it's not in the interests of the universities to fix it.

Sam the Sham wrote: »

That depends who you mean by "the universities." It used to be (for about the first 900 or so years of the 926-year history of the university) that "the university" was synonymous with "the professors of the university." That was what the university was.

In the past 20 years or so, there has been a concerted takeover of universities worldwide by professional administrators who may or may not have any particular knowledge of or affection for what makes universities distinctive from other institutions. During the Hugh Brady years, there was an orgy of central administrative hiring with multiple new Vice-Presidential offices created, some of whom were on remuneration packages of over €400,000 per annum. That exploding administration siphoned off resources (while your student union was completely oblivious, having more important things like who was going to play at this or that ball to worry about) that would otherwise have gone to the traditional educational mission of the university. As Krusty the Klown once put it: "hey, those limos out back ain't free."

And when the sh*t hit the fan, those administrative posts were too well entrenched to be cut back on. Result: departments and Schools on starvation budgets while the administration continues to live high on the hog. When the government says "cut back by X% this year," the people doing the cutting are not lecturers and professors (or are so in name only) who have the university's interests to heart: they are the very sorts of administrators whose purpose is entirely unclear. And they aren't going to vote to cut themselves.

Where, in the past, the point of university administration was to serve the primary missions of teaching, learning, and research, now the relationship is the other way around. Lecturers and professors no longer incarnate the university: they are mere employees with the same sorts of Key Performance Indicators to meet that one finds in any corporate sweatshop. And as in a corporate sweatshop, management has decided that if budgets are down (somebody else's) costs must be cut. And the name of that somebody else is the professoriate. As tenured, permanent staff retire, they are replaced as cheaply as possible with adjunct staff whose pay is lousy and who have little in the way of benefits.

Is this in the interest of "the university" or, more importantly, its students? Not at all. In whose interest is it, then? Answer that question and you're on your way.

I agree with all of that. As I say, I've worked in UCD for years (it wasn't my student's union looking the other way, as it happens). I'm subject to the same stupid performance indicators and cookie-cutter "learning outcome" goals that pass for teaching philosophy, and I've watched the gleeful casualisation and impoverishment of the teaching staff even as student fees skyrocket. And I've seen them get away with it while peddling the misdirection that lecturers are all earning 60,000 for doing four hours work a week. It isn't just a few tutors or seminar leaders getting casual pay. It is people who are module coordinators for massive first year courses. I wonder how many students actually are aware of these things. I doubt many of them realise that their tutors are now paid so little for correcting essays that they would have to complete about ten of them per hour to reach minimum wage. And how much work can you really expect those tutors (who are also carrying out their own research and usually paying their own exorbitant fees) to put into that correcting? And what kind of effect do you expect that to have on the quality of the feedback the students get? As an aside, tutor feedback sessions are so utterly cut back now that the average student can expect less than five minutes feedback time with their tutor per semester. I do like the new lake over by the Dedalus building though.

There are feedback loops that encourage this situation, and they are directly related to the obsession with the global ranking tables. Those tables, depending on their metrics, emphasise research massively. But they also measure departments on how many grad students they bring in. So, more PhD students=better department. So you have way more people doing PhDs than used to be the case, all of whom have been fed a dream of being a lecturer earning 60,000 a year and gaining massive adulation. Those jobs are rare, and getting rarer, of course. But in the meantime, you get a massive excess pool of labour, all of whom need experience and all of whom will put up with virtually any conditions because they have no choice and are chasing their dream. That drives down costs, and pretty soon the university can see that this massive pool of labour can more or less infinitely push down costs. So you get more and more casual positions, more and more PhD students (most of whom will spend their twenties earning nothing only to have to give up academia by the age of 30, their usefulness to the system expended), and no particular incentive for the administration to actually stop this. On the contrary, there seems in fact (and this is something that is not replicated in the other universities I've worked at) to be a concerted effort to MAKE casual workers FEEL casual, to emphasise at every possible opportunity that their position in the university is temporary, that they have no rights and that they are expendable. Whether this is necessary or not is neither here nor there, a deliberate administrative effort to demoralise people is something I can point to enough anecdotes of to feel confident that it is a part of their policy. All of these things have effects on people's lives, and on the quality of the teaching at the college.

All of the bellyaching about our global ranking and how we might recover it is deeply offensive when teachers and students are being utterly ripped off in this way, and nobody seems especially angry about it. The students protest their fees (rightly so), but the tutors and adjuncts are much more limited in protesting their situation (because they are in too precarious a position, which is also very convenient for the administrators). A little more unity between students, adjuncts, and permanent staff (who are by and large also effected by cuts, certainly don't like the casualisation of the university and don't want to see their departments fall apart) in terms of organising and opposing these trends will be absolutely necessary. The first step will have to be unionising the adjuncts, which they're currently afraid to do because they think they'll get no hours the following semester.

As a slave for Maynooth University, I just wan't to say that I suffer the same plight as all of you in UCD. I believe it to be the same in every university.

redappple wrote: »

Great thread. If you really want to see examples of amazing talented people being funnelled out of academia in their 30s look no further than the Sciences where there is no hope for permanent or tenured lecturing posts for at least 10 years post doctoral stage, yet there is a limit on the amount of time spent as a post doc? The end result is people leaving for industry 6-7 years into the post doctoral phase. Complete and utter waste.

At least they have industries to go into, which is not the case for humanities researchers. But yeah, it's pretty terrible.

Puddleduck wrote: »

First year mature student here but just out of curiosity why not raise the issue with the colleges SU? If real change cant be driven by students and lecturers uniting against it why not highlight the issue?

Because it seems to be a country-wide issue due to cuts...and democracy only works on paper :P

I don't think SIPTU and the SU have anything to do with each other. I'd be especially surprised if they did given the calls in 2012 by the USI for lecturer pay to be cut (a third time) because in their warped little minds they thought that might stop them from having to pay fees. All solidarity kind of went out the window at that point. Which is a shame, because students and lecturers both have every interest in stopping casualisation.