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Author Topic: Young whiners  (Read 12405 times)
i_heart_bulldogs
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« Reply #60 on: March 08, 2010, 01:00:56 PM »

True, but let's face it: ebbing loyalty between faculty and institution is very much a mutual affair.
What does this mean? What is meant by institutional loyalty to faculty members? Truly, I don't know what this means, or how it's changed, if it has.
Point taken, but there's been a wider change in the relationship between (middle-class) employee and employer in the past 50 or 60 years, and academia's been a part of it--the move away from job security in exchange for employee loyalty as part of the (usually implicit) contract. Corporate interests discovered that treating employees as contingent was useful for flexibility, and so they did so--and employees have followed suit by being less and less devoted to their employers.

Academia was, I think, late to the game in this, but the increasing use of adjunct and term faculty is pretty decent evidence that flexibility is winning out over loyalty.

I wouldn't necessarily frame this is a loyalty issue though. I don't know if the order of causality is correct, but I suspect it is. Anyhow, I would frame this as a cost of employment issue. The value of any employee is, by nature, uncertain, but the cost is certain. To manage growing costs and equivalent uncertainty, a company's best response is to transition away from long-term employment and towards more contingent appointments, especially when it becomes near-impossible to terminate employment.
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educator1
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« Reply #61 on: March 08, 2010, 04:14:16 PM »

I'd like to think that if I got an offer to go elsewhere, my employer would tempt me with more salary and plead with me to remain, but I know that's not the case.  I don't believe that institutional loyalty to faculty members has eroded because I don't think it ever existed except in some professor's minds.

If this is what is meant by "institutional loyalty", then it has existed and still exists for those faculty who, by dint of reputation or grant drawing power, are valuable enough to the institution to draw such an offer. For the rest, it tis a myth.
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totoro
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« Reply #62 on: April 28, 2010, 12:19:46 AM »

All the boasting about working long hours definitely seems to be an American thing. In some European countries (e.g. Sweden) faculty seem to take long summer vacations and not to work too hard the rest of the time and still be productive. Personally, I find it is cyclical. Sometimes I need to do a lot more work and some less and sometimes I am more productive than other times. When I am less productive on research it doesn't make sense to try to work longer hours as it really isn't very efficient. And I'm definitely one of the vocation type academics rather than professional type academics. Right now I'm unemployed officially, but it doesn't stop me working.
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