DEBATE
Do universities need more part-time professors?
Is part-time professor Indiana Jones a model for the academics of the future? Or should we be aiming to create job-sharing professors who can spend half their time with their family? Two historians offer contradictory opinions.
Image: zVg
Image: zVg
Part-time work, e.g., in a job-share, is seen by some colleagues as a “degraded way of doing the job of a teacher”. One does not have to share this opinion, which also reflects a peculiar self-image. Part-time professorships seem to me to be an asset for universities.
For those who practice job-sharing, it offers the prospect of having a life outside of university: sharing household chores, raising children, enabling a career for a partner, engaging in political, social, sporting or artistic activities. Not everyone has the ambition to have the words “Lived only for the university” engraved on their tombstones.
For the student body, the advantages seem obvious: two professors in job-sharing represent two sensitivities, two temperaments, two ways of approaching problems, two address books, twice as much time for the accompaniment of a thesis, twice as many projects at the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Job-sharing is also useful for ensuring continuity. The opportunity to work part-time is not intended to become a generalised model, but it does allow for different career plans and increases the number of stable places at university. This is not insignificant in the face of incoming generations who are well-trained, but too often sacrificed. Universities would do well not to fixate on a single standard model: scientists who think only of their careers, and frantically pursue grants, trips abroad and publications.
Job-sharing is one way, among others, to respond to the current crisis in the university, the seriousness of which has been demonstrated by several recent petitions. It would be a shame to be deprived of it. It’s also a winner in terms of staff diversity, and consequently of research. The career of the part-time professor Indiana Jones is a case in point.
Alain Clavien is an emeritus professor of contemporary history at the University of Fribourg. He is an expert on media, labour movements, intellectuals and cultural life.
Three structural problems lie behind the current demand for more part-time professorships at universities: a lack of junior staff positions (coupled with precarious working conditions among mid-level staff), the underrepresentation of women, and the high workload of permanent professorial positions. These problems are real and solutions are needed. But all the same, part-time professorships are not the appropriate answer to them.
In individual cases, a part-time professorship might well meet the needs of a researcher at a certain stage of their life. But they cannot be used as a catch-all solution to the structural problems of academia. This is especially true when a position is advertised as a job-share with 50 percent each, as is often proposed today, with each incumbent earning half a normal salary and sharing the same facilities.
It’s true that such a solution gives two people a job instead of just one. But the way people think at universities is highly status-driven. Two part-time professors in a job-share are unlikely to be considered ‘full’ professors, especially if they each have only half a vote on university committees – as would be appropriate, given their workload.
But what are they supposed to do with the ‘other’, unpaid 50 percent? Is this supposed to help people make scholarship compatible with family life? Or is it to allow them more time for research, which is usually neglected on account of their administrative burden? In the first case, there is a high risk that most applicants will be women. That would merely help to reinforce the patriarchal model of the family, even though such an outcome would be completely unintentional. In the second case, something that is supposed to be one of the main tasks of a professor would simply be shifted to the incumbent’s unpaid leisure time.
Politicians would be grateful, and they wouldn’t miss the opportunity to make employment conditions more flexible and to bring Swiss wage levels into line with Germany or France. But we don’t need individual solutions. We need fundamental reforms, including streamlined hierarchies and a redistribution of resources to create new jobs and generally reduce workloads. That would be more appropriate.
Brigitte Studer is an emeritus professor of contemporary history at the University of Bern. Her research interests include the welfare state, women’s movements and international communism.
Image: zVg
Part-time work, e.g., in a job-share, is seen by some colleagues as a “degraded way of doing the job of a teacher”. One does not have to share this opinion, which also reflects a peculiar self-image. Part-time professorships seem to me to be an asset for universities.
For those who practice job-sharing, it offers the prospect of having a life outside of university: sharing household chores, raising children, enabling a career for a partner, engaging in political, social, sporting or artistic activities. Not everyone has the ambition to have the words “Lived only for the university” engraved on their tombstones.
For the student body, the advantages seem obvious: two professors in job-sharing represent two sensitivities, two temperaments, two ways of approaching problems, two address books, twice as much time for the accompaniment of a thesis, twice as many projects at the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Job-sharing is also useful for ensuring continuity. The opportunity to work part-time is not intended to become a generalised model, but it does allow for different career plans and increases the number of stable places at university. This is not insignificant in the face of incoming generations who are well-trained, but too often sacrificed. Universities would do well not to fixate on a single standard model: scientists who think only of their careers, and frantically pursue grants, trips abroad and publications.
Job-sharing is one way, among others, to respond to the current crisis in the university, the seriousness of which has been demonstrated by several recent petitions. It would be a shame to be deprived of it. It’s also a winner in terms of staff diversity, and consequently of research. The career of the part-time professor Indiana Jones is a case in point.
Alain Clavien is an emeritus professor of contemporary history at the University of Fribourg. He is an expert on media, labour movements, intellectuals and cultural life.
Image: zVg
Three structural problems lie behind the current demand for more part-time professorships at universities: a lack of junior staff positions (coupled with precarious working conditions among mid-level staff), the underrepresentation of women, and the high workload of permanent professorial positions. These problems are real and solutions are needed. But all the same, part-time professorships are not the appropriate answer to them.
In individual cases, a part-time professorship might well meet the needs of a researcher at a certain stage of their life. But they cannot be used as a catch-all solution to the structural problems of academia. This is especially true when a position is advertised as a job-share with 50 percent each, as is often proposed today, with each incumbent earning half a normal salary and sharing the same facilities.
It’s true that such a solution gives two people a job instead of just one. But the way people think at universities is highly status-driven. Two part-time professors in a job-share are unlikely to be considered ‘full’ professors, especially if they each have only half a vote on university committees – as would be appropriate, given their workload.
But what are they supposed to do with the ‘other’, unpaid 50 percent? Is this supposed to help people make scholarship compatible with family life? Or is it to allow them more time for research, which is usually neglected on account of their administrative burden? In the first case, there is a high risk that most applicants will be women. That would merely help to reinforce the patriarchal model of the family, even though such an outcome would be completely unintentional. In the second case, something that is supposed to be one of the main tasks of a professor would simply be shifted to the incumbent’s unpaid leisure time.
Politicians would be grateful, and they wouldn’t miss the opportunity to make employment conditions more flexible and to bring Swiss wage levels into line with Germany or France. But we don’t need individual solutions. We need fundamental reforms, including streamlined hierarchies and a redistribution of resources to create new jobs and generally reduce workloads. That would be more appropriate.
Brigitte Studer is an emeritus professor of contemporary history. Her research interests include the welfare state, women’s movements and international communism.
